Practicing Wisdom - Issue #3
1. What I Learned This Week
Theme: “Facts Fuel Narrative, But Narrative Wins”
As someone who built their career in the analytics vertical I understand that, as much as we may want to believe that facts drive outcomes, it is narrative that matters most. The content I covered this week hit on this topic: facts are just the raw inputs to narrative and that this narrative - the human framing of facts - is what actually changes minds, raises capital, elects leaders and moves markets.
Today we are living in an era where tangible production matters less than narrative construction. As the world becomes more intangible, the returns to storytelling are compounding in ways that feel exponential.
Morgan Housel’s piece, Different Kinds of Smart, touches this nerve quietly. He notes that a great storyteller with a decent idea will out-influence someone with a brilliant idea and no story. Why? Because stories are how humans metabolize meaning. Ken Burns beats the textbook not because he has better facts, but because he delivers emotional coherence.
Now take this to its logical extreme: Trumpcoin. In Kyla Scanlon’s writeup for Scott Galloway’s No Mercy / No Malice, she captures how narrative has detached from the traditional mechanics of value creation. Trump launches a memecoin and creates $60 billion in narrative wealth overnight. There was no product. No distribution. Just attention — condensed into value. A closed loop of story > value > power > story again.
This is not just some aberration. It's the logical outcome of a world where what people believe increasingly matters more than what is. As Scanlon writes, we’ve entered an “Attention Singularity,” where attention itself is the asset class, and story is its vehicle. When was the last time you thought about the value of the S&P 500 in relation to the tangible asset value of the underlying companies? 100 years ago almost all the value of a company would be tied to the physical assets either produced or used within the company. Increasingly the world’s most valuable companies are measured in relation to the value of their intangible assets, particularly around AI. What is the value of being the default AI operating system? When valuation is tied to ideas, shaping ideas is your key leverage point. Is there a better way to shape ideas than with story?
Benn Stancil’s Enough explores the tension coming from this societal transition. He runs the numbers, and they’re ungraspable—$265 billion added to Microsoft in a day; engineers with $200 million comp packages; OpenAI’s 0.01% being worth $50 million. And yet, nobody really knows what to say. “That’s a lot of money” becomes the limit of discourse.
Even in the hard-nosed world of finance, Secret CFO shows how capital structure isn’t just about spreadsheets. It’s about story—what lenders believe about your future. Their terms reflect not the past, but the narrative of risk you emit. When your story breaks, your cost of capital skyrockets.
Meanwhile, Eric Cinnamond’s humble minivan metaphor in I Used to Be Cool reminds us that narrative doesn’t always mean hype. Sometimes, the contrarian story is the one that’s boring. Dividends may not be sexy, but their narrative—durability, predictability, tangible cash—still matters. Especially in a market where most assets have divorced from fundamentals entirely.
So this week’s synthesis comes down to this: Facts are raw material. Narrative is leverage. In an intangible world, the compound returns to narrative are no longer just a marketing function—they’re an existential function of how value gets created.
Sources Referenced
“Different Kinds of Smart” — Morgan Housel, Collaborative Fund (link)
“Enough” — Benn Stancil, Substack (link)
“The Attention Economy and Young People” - Scott Galloway (link)
“Capital Structure Design Part 1: The Buffet of Funding Options” — CFO Secrets (link)
“I Used to Be Cool” — Eric Cinnamond, Palm Valley Capital (link)
2. Key Distillations
"The main use of facts is their ability to give stories credibility. But the stories are always what persuade."
"Tangible value still matters—but intangible belief captures the upside."
"The market doesn’t reward truth. It rewards coherence, velocity, and vibe."
"A startup’s story is now more valuable than its product— but stories are fragile."
"Capital is allocated based on perception. Popular perception is just story with distribution."
3. One Contrarian Viewpoint
Hard assets won’t save you if your narrative is soft.
In an era of intangible dominance, owning factories or cash flow doesn’t guarantee power. If your narrative is off—boring, outdated, incoherent—you can get outbid, out valued, and outpaced by a meme and a microphone.
4. One Investable Idea
Narrative arbitrage can be a form of value investing.
Look for companies or assets that are quietly productive but narratively mispriced. The barbell is real: at one end, meme stocks and digital hype; at the other, small-cap dividend payers ignored by passive flows. The opportunity lies in re-narrating boring assets before the market catches up.
5. From the Archives: A Recall Highlight
“The longer something has survived, the more likely it is to survive.”
Narrative moves fast. But don’t ignore the slow compounders. Durability is its own story.
