200 THE CREATIVE INVESTMENT TEAM
other person is just a sounding board, she can play a crucially
important role.
I believe that this principle of asking for help extends to the
highest level. Call it prayer if you like, or simply a general request
of the universe, but time after time, I have found that when I stop
to put out a “formal” request for help, something magical occurs.
Examples of this are given later in the book, but one that occurs
to me now is a request that I made about money management and
personality types. I wanted to find some fresh material that related
money to personalities. I knew that somewhere, someone was
thinking about these same issues—I just didn’t know where or who.
So one evening, sitting in my office, I made my intention known
by saying it aloud: “I’d like some help with my research. I want
information about money management and personality types, in-
formation that would tie in to the book I’m writing.” (I get a kick
out of our pets’ reactions to my monologues. Our two cats and
dog look around my home office with curious expressions that say,
“Who the hell is he talking to?”) Laugh if you will, but within an
hour of making this “universal request” I received an email from
the Myers-Briggs association in Florida informing me that Ken
Doyle at the University of Minnesota had just published a book
called The Social Meanings of Money and Property. The book not
only examined people’s relationship to money, based on four dif-
ferent temperaments (lions, foxes, owls, and dolphins), which was
exactly my interest, but also viewed individuals and groups not as
“static collections of traits but as dynamic systems of attributes-in-
tension.” Bingo.
Put simply, Doyle agrees with Csikszentmihalyi on the impor-
tance of complexity. Perhaps that’s not put so simply, after all; let
me try it again. Complexity is the ability to balance opposing forces,
like the ability to be decisive and to be flexible. Complexity seems
to explain the extraordinary ability of our master investors. Doyle’s
book addresses precisely this issue. Now, do you see why it was so
weird that I would get this email within an hour of asking for help?14-25 ware 200 1/19/01, 1:16 PM