In The A-Player Phenomenon, I explored the magnetic force of exceptional people—the rare individuals whose competence seems to bend probability. The kind who raise everyone’s game simply by refusing to accept mediocrity as the baseline.
But a question lingered: once you recognize what an A-Player looks like, how do you actually find one? Or more provocatively, how do you keep yourself from sliding into the middle of the pack you once swore you’d escape?
Two recent essays—Tyler Cowen’s The Five Rules of Finding Talent for The Free Press and BowTied Bull’s Winners vs. Losers: The Only Filter That Matters—offer strikingly different but complementary answers. One speaks with the calm curiosity of an economist studying genius; the other, with the combat-hardened bluntness of an operator who’s learned to survive by pruning his environment.
Together, they form the next filter: who you allow near your orbit and how fiercely you protect your own trajectory.
The 5-Person Average and the ROI of Subtraction
BowTied Bull doesn’t waste syllables in quoting Jim Rohn. “You are the average of the five people you speak to most,”—a cliché until you realize it’s both an equation and a mirror .
We like to imagine our character as self-contained, but the truth is closer to osmosis. Spend your days with cynics and you’ll slowly breathe their second-hand despair. Spend them with builders and you’ll begin to metabolize ambition.
BTB sharpens this insight into something harder: “Cutting losers = the highest ROI skill.” It’s savage but true. Your most valuable investment isn’t where you put your money—it’s where you withdraw your attention.
Think about it: if the people around you drain your energy, question every experiment, or fill the air with excuses, you’re compounding in reverse. The subtraction has yield. The freed bandwidth becomes the seedbed for the kind of deep work only quiet confidence allows.
And perhaps the most quietly devastating line in the entire piece: “There is no reason to get in your own way.” A perfect Stoic aphorism smuggled into internet slang. The universe throws enough chaos our way—why volunteer as your own obstacle?
The Weird and the Young
Cowen approaches from the opposite direction: rather than filtering out mediocrity, he’s hunting for outliers. His essay The Five Rules of Finding Talent distills years of experience through his Emergent Ventures program, which has funded hundreds of global prodigies before the world noticed them.
Rule #1: “Amazing talents are younger than ever before.” Cowen argues that brilliance is appearing earlier, catalyzed by global networks, open data, and an unprecedented feedback loop between curiosity and capability. The chess grandmasters, coders, and entrepreneurs rewriting history are often teenagers. The challenge for us older “A-Player spotters” is to resist the condescension of experience—to remember that genius rarely waits for permission.
Rule #2: “Amazing talents often are weird.” I’d go further: they’re almost always weird. They’re amazing precisely because they refuse to play by the collective script. Their interests are too specific, their intensity too high, their timing off just enough to look misplaced—until the world catches up.
Weirdness, properly understood, isn’t a personality quirk; it’s a pattern of thinking that refuses the defaults. If “how you do one thing is how you do everything,” then the weird kid building a nuclear-fusion reactor in his garage is practicing the same mindset he’ll later use to reimagine AI, or art, or governance.
And if you’re lucky enough to find that kind of weirdness early, nurture it. As Cowen notes, encouragement often outweighs funding. A small nod of belief can alter a lifetime of trajectory.
The Hardest Cut: Yourself
Here’s where both philosophies converge. Whether you lean Bull or Cowen, subtraction precedes multiplication. You must first remove the excuses, the energy leaks, and—most painfully—the parts of yourself that cling to mediocrity.
It’s easy to talk about “cutting losers” until you realize that sometimes the biggest loser in your circle lives rent-free in your own head. That version of you that stalls, rationalizes, and waits for a perfect moment that never comes.
The A-Player life is not a recruitment strategy—it’s a discipline. It’s pruning, refining, and constantly checking whether the five voices you hear most often—including the one in your skull—are moving you toward mastery or away from it.
As BowTied Bull reminds us, “There is no reason to get in your own way.” And as Cowen shows, the ones who don’t are already out there—young, weird, and accelerating faster than the rest of us dare to imagine.
✨ Seed Thought: To find A-Players—or to become one—you have to master two arts: filtering and faith. Filter relentlessly for direction, discipline, and slope. And have faith that the truly weird, the uncategorizable, are not anomalies but prototypes of the future.
Cut the losers, protect your bandwidth, and when you meet someone whose curiosity makes you slightly uncomfortable—lean in. That discomfort is often the first sign you’ve found an A-Player before the world has caught on.
