Hello I’m Jayson Coomer
Author
Humans are wired to tolerate change, survive complexity, and eventually find it boring. It’s a great evolutionary advantage.
Who is Jayson Coomer?
For just over a decade, I was the voice behind RollingAlpha.com.
The site began as my attempt to tell the story of the 2007/2008 subprime mortgage crisis: about how a series of very ordinary and human decisions could interlock together into a string of cascading outcomes that would eventually break the global financial system.
That led me to other stories of thinking and misthinking in the worlds of finance and economics.
I was also working on real world problems
I led multiple finance teams through Zimbabwe’s second round of hyperinflation.
A group of us have been building a fish farm (and a brand new aquaculture industry) in rural Mozambique. I’ve had to crisis manage cyclones, coups and Covid.
Within that, I’ve had to learn new ways to maintain a good life.
These are lessons that should be shared.
Multipliers; compound interest; faith like a mustard seed; the gratitude attitude. These are all expressions of the same principle: abundance. We need more abundant thinking and less scarcity of thought.
My Writing...
Clarity is not simple thinking. Clarity means having understood the complex well enough to express it in simple terms. You get there through multidimensional thinking.
The most helpful principle that I’ve learned for human connection is learning to see the relationship itself as the third party in the room. Doing that builds in purpose, which is a pretty good tool for balancing self-interest with self-sacrifice.
It probably makes more sense to find your purpose than follow your passion. Unfulfilling work is usually the work that no one wants to do, that still needs to be done, and that will actually be paid for. It can all still be worth it if you know why you’re doing it.
We need to stop thinking of economic definitions as fixed. They are a reflection of how we trade and interact. As we change those rules, the economic definitions must change as well.
We conflate scientific progress with human progress. In doing that, we tend to dismiss the lessons of history. And repeat the mistakes that taught those lessons in the first place.
Impact faces an extraordinary language barrier: good measurability. Finance still speaks the language of accounting, and we haven’t bridged the translation gap.