Around 155 BC, Athens sent the philosopher Carneades to Rome to plead for a fine to be lifted. He delivered a brilliant speech and swayed the audience. The next day he returned to the same square and delivered an equally impassioned speech making the opposite point, and swayed them all over again. Cato the Elder was in the crowd this time, and Athens paid the price.
This essay is an excerpt from my book Soul in the Game. It’s about building what I call a Sophist filter: the discipline of stripping the emotional coloring off other people’s words, and off your own.
In ancient Greece, Sophists taught oratory as a weapon of persuasion through emotion and reason. Stoics were wary of them. They believed the words you use to persuade others end up shaping how you think, since you don’t have one brain for the world and another for yourself. Marcus Aurelius would describe Basil Honey Glazed Wild Alaskan Salmon as “the dead body of a fish, with herbs and honey.” Epictetus would swap “our ship is lost far at sea” for “we are at sea, and we don’t know where we are.”
I walk through why this matters in my day job. I talk to CEOs and listen to dozens of conference calls a month, and after some of them I want to mortgage my house and hand over the money. I discuss what the filter looks like for executives, for cynics who sound smarter than optimists, for arguments smuggled in through jokes, and for people who advertise their own virtues.
The full essay is at investor.fm.
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_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/
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