Here is a preview of the first section of Singular Links: The Innovator’s Guide to Compounding Connections, my soon-to-be-published book arriving next month.
Introduction — Singular Links
In autumn 2011, Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan was ground zero for the Occupy Wall Street protests. If you were there, you felt chaos, a place twitching and buzzing with raw, angry human expression. Drums pounded, and voices shouted. The air smelled of damp cardboard, street food, and overfilled trash cans. Banners rippled in the wind, urging, “We Are the 99%,” “The System Is Rigged,” “Occupy Everything,” and, curiously, “I Hope You Make It to the Mountain.” It was like that old Marlon Brando scene in The Wild One. Someone asks, “What are you rebelling against?” He shoots back, “Whaddaya got?”
The movement against economic inequality and the influence of corporations on government was chaotic and theatrical, but it was also brimming with a desperate kind of creativity. People were angry and searching for something. Something real, something better, something they hadn’t found in the systems they were protesting.
Ironically, I was one of the people they were protesting against.
My friend Dave and I had wandered into the storm after a finance conference a few blocks away, and we were still dressed in our pressed wool suits. We stood out like Cartier cufflinks in a mosh pit. Dave could calculate risk in a portfolio down to the decimal, but he had no formula for the swirling human energy around us. He worried about headlines, reputational risk, and getting hit by an angry fist. I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking about my job or about what might happen. I was thinking about why part of me felt like I belonged there.
Several years earlier, I had been on the other side of the cultural divide. Before becoming a professional investor, before balance sheets and discounted cash-flow models, I came to New York as a musician. My band played in basements that smelled of old beer and ambition. We rehearsed obsessively, hauling amps through the snow, driven by the thrill of shaping sounds into something that could move people. We weren’t motivated by money. We were motivated by curiosity and by the burning desire to transform a tangle of notes, rhythms, and ideas into something powerful and alive. We saw ourselves as entrepreneurs of music.
Years later, standing in Zuccotti Park, watching the protest swirl around me, I realized that what I had been doing then and what I was doing now were driven by the same instinct: the hunt to find connections.
Although the musician and the investment analyst seem to come from different worlds, one works in sound and intuition and the other in numbers and strategy, both are driven by the same impulse: to combine diverse elements into something new. Both create transformation through combination. The musician assembles notes and rhythms. The investor assembles data and assumptions. What matters is not any single input but how elements are brought together under the right conditions.
Record labels look for bands before they ignite. Venture capitalists search for futures the rest of the world doesn’t yet see. Scouts at college games, book editors searching the slush pile, and AI researchers training quantitative models to find hidden correlations are all in the same pursuit: the hunt for the right combination that creates something great.
Over the past twenty-five years as an investment strategist, portfolio manager, and chief investment officer, I have navigated countless decisions under uncertainty. In that work, I have seen the same principle at play across domains, from spreadsheets to computer code to music: real innovation emerges when distinct elements link to create a catalyst. They produce results greater than the sum of their parts. These moments of transformation, which I call singular links, reveal how connections, sometimes subtle and sometimes striking, can create outcomes that would not exist otherwise.
If you place a rigid bar over a fulcrum, you create a lever, which you can use to lift heavier objects than you could otherwise. Neither the bar nor the fulcrum can multiply force on its own, but together they change proportionality, allowing small inputs to move large loads. This inversion is not additive but transformational, which is why the lever is a singular link.
The same is true with a pulley system, where you can sling a rope over a wheel to redirect tension. The rope alone can only pull, and the wheel alone can only roll, but together they convert direction into lift and make gravity negotiable. In both cases, the act of connection creates a new capacity that did not exist in either part, revealing the essential nature of a singular link.
I began to wonder why some combinations spark transformation while others don’t. What’s so special about those catalytic connections? Are there patterns in their elements or their conditions that allow certain changes to ignite? If so, can we define them? Can patterns from one field be applied to others? Are there universal principles or practices that work across all domains, allowing ideas, actions, or materials to converge in ways that reliably generate change? Can we learn to spot and deliberately create these connections?
Those are the questions that spawned this book. Or rather, they spawned the blog SingularLinks.com, and the excitement of what I uncovered there made me want to share my journey and explore the answers with others.
Part I of this book explores the foundation of singular links, or slinks for short, and along the way we will meet fascinating people who mastered them. I call these people the Sultans of Slink. Claude Shannon, working with abstract Boolean logic and binary code, built the conceptual foundation for modern computing. Chuck Close transformed chaotic paint blotches into large-scale portraits. Geoffrey West extended biological scaling laws to man-made systems like cities and corporations. Bruce Lee connected martial arts with Taoist philosophy to create a physical discipline guided by fluid principles. These pioneers didn’t create typical links. They created singular links, and they transformed their fields.
Part I is the longest section of the book. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, stories compress experience, context, and consequence in a way theory cannot, offering practices you can adapt to your own work.
Part II turns to perception, showing how to train your eye to recognize these links in your surroundings. Subtle patterns hide in plain sight until you learn to notice them. Once you start seeing them, many more come into view.
Part III focuses on application, offering concrete ways to build and test new combinations. Noticing intriguing connections and patterns is rewarding, but the real power comes from putting these links into practice. By acting on them, you can turn insight into results that meaningfully shape your work and play.
This book guides you in recognizing and creating singular links. Along the way, you will explore ways to sharpen perception, cultivate curiosity, and experiment deliberately, practices that help ideas collide and combine in surprising and meaningful ways. The insights draw from music, art, science, finance, and philosophy, but the principles apply wherever you seek innovation and deeper understanding.
By noticing patterns and testing new combinations, you can turn insight into action, amplify creativity, and produce powerful results. Singular links serve as footholds and handholds on your own challenges, helping you navigate your terrain, connect your ideas, and shape your outcomes. The practices in this book give you the tools to move deliberately across the landscape of possibility. As the sign in the park said, “I hope you make it to the mountain.”
So, if you are ready to start the journey, let’s get going.
