I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
I’ve been watching Season 2 of America’s Test Kitchen: Next Generation, a competition in which cooks compete for a chance to become a cast member on ATK’s television shows and social media. I don’t know who won yet so if you do, don’t mention it!
One of my favorite competitors is Lauren. She is always overreacting to what happens. She cried when her focaccia and fruit crostada’s weren’t fully baked. She moaned, “I hope I don’t lose my finger!” when she cut it (to be fair, she did need stitches and maybe lost a nail?) She is a perfectionist, which generally isn’t a good thing. But she is absolutely brilliant in her cooking and her conceptualization. When she had a basket of different kinds of expensive mushrooms and truffles to create an entree with, she used every different kind and produced a dish that one of the judges said could easily be served at a Michelin three-star restaurant.
I’m overreactive like that too, and I can be a perfectionist. I hold myself to high standards partly because I know what excellence is. Also, though, I’m just lacking in perspective and equanimity a lot of the time.
Polish psychologist, psychiatrist, and physician Kazimierz Dąbrowski didn’t just develop the theory of positive disintegration I’ve been writing about lately. He also proposed that some people possess certain overexcitabilities that challenge them towards personal growth. The five he identified are:
- Emotional — having a deep, complex, nuanced emotional response to life. People with this overexcitability have intense feelings, strong empathy and a tendency towards guilt and self-criticism.
- Intellectual — having a deep thirst for learning and ideas with a need to analyze everything. These people have a love of theory and ask probing questions of any situation that they find themselves interested in.
- Imaginational — having the capacity for vivid visualization and use of metaphor which results in a rich internal world. Engaging in “what if” thinking.
- Psychomotor — having a surplus of physical and mental energy. Taking immediate physical action when triggered.
- Sensual — having a heightened awareness of sensory inputs (sights, sounds, tastes, and textures). Experiencing a deep appreciation for beauty but also overreacting to unpleasant sensory stimuli like loud noises or physical pain.
Lauren clearly has emotional overexcitability but this is probably combined with intellectual and sensual overexcitabilities that mean she thinks in deep ways about how to conceptualize, cook, and present a dish (intellectual) and how to create flavor profiles and textural experiences that produce pleasure in the eater (sensual).
Going from unorganized to organized overexcitabilities
Dabrowski didn’t believe that overexcitabilities (OEs) go away and he didn’t think that they should. He considered OEs to be a permanent part of the nervous system. But he believed they could manifest differently as a person develops.
In his theory of positive disintegration, the goal is to shift OEs from unorganized to organized rather than dampening or eliminating them. At lower levels of development, OEs may feel like a burden. They manifest as nervousness, emotional volatility, impulsive reactions, and, sometimes, paralyzing ansiety. During positive disintegration, the OEs fuel the conflict between what is and what ought to be. This creates energy for reinvention and personal transformation. At higher leves, when a person reaches a new level of integration not based on societal demands but based on their vision of who they might be, the OEs are channeled towards contribution and meaningful activities via conscious, autonomous choices.
Overexcitability and investing
Perhaps one reason I find buy-and-hold passive investing so unsatisfying is because of my intellectual overexcitability. I love to stay on top of what’s happening macroeconomically and geopolitically and filter that into my investment decisions. I love to learn about new trading and investing ideas, and put them into practice. I love the math and probability involved in options trading. Passive investing doesn’t tap into any of that.
I can see how my intellectual OE has driven my personal development in this particular domain. I started out trying to follow conventional advice around managing my money. I tried a variety of things — an asset manager (still use one for my retirement portfolio), Schwab’s robo-portfolio, dollar-cost averaging myself into a diversified set of ETFs, trading based on instinct. None of them worked well.
My intellectual overexcitability around money management provided fuel for change. I saw a gap between “what is” — how I’m doing with conventional money management and how I see other people doing and how I know you can lose a ton of money in a bear market — and “what ought to be” — a style of money management that suits my temperament, protects my nest egg, generates income, and keeps me happily engaged with daily trading and investing decisions.
I don’t feel like I’ve gotten to the point of organized overexcitability yet in trading, but I’m closing in on it.