The moment you think you've finally figured something out is often the moment you stop seeing clearly. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called this 'the fixation of belief' — the psychological pull toward settling into a conclusion not because the evidence demands it, but because uncertainty is uncomfortable. He noticed that people often mistake the relief of having an answer for the quality of the answer itself. In finance and in life, the most dangerous insights aren't the wrong ones — they're the ones that feel so right that you stop questioning them. The practical move isn't doubt for its own sake; it's building a small habit of asking, after any strong conviction lands, 'What would have to be true for this to be wrong?'

What is the opposite of the insight you're currently most confident about — and have you actually stress-tested it, or just assumed it holds?

Drawing from Pragmatism — Charles Sanders Peirce