From ‘Skin in The Game’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
Hire the successful trader, conditional on a solid track record, whose details you can understand the least. Not the most; the least. Why so?
What one may need to know in the real world does not necessarily match what one can perceive through intellect: it doesn’t mean that details are not relevant, only that those we tend to believe are important can distract us from more central attributes of the price mechanism.
My friend Terry B, who taught an investment class, invited two speakers. One looked the part of the investment manager, down to a tee: tailored clothes, expensive watch, shiny shoes and clarity of exposition. He also talked big, projecting the type of confidence you would desire in an executive.
The second looked closer to a butcher-surgeon and was totally incomprehensible; he even gave the impression that he was confused. Now, when Terry asked students which of the two they believed was the more successful, they didn’t even get close. The first, not unexpectedly, was in the equivalent of the soup kitchen of that business; the second was at least a centimillionaire.
The late Jimmy Powers, a diehard New York Irishman with whom I worked in an investment bank early in my trading career, was successful in spite of being a college dropout, with the background of a minor Brooklyn gangster. He would discuss trading activities in meetings with such sentences as: "We did this, then we did that, badaboom, badabing and then it was all groovy," to an audience of befuddled executives who didn’t mind not understanding what he was talking about, so long as our Department was profitable.
I learned to effortlessly understand what Jimmy meant. I also learned that the people you understand most easily were necessarily the bull***tters.