Winners vs. Losers: The Only Filter That Matters
Level 1 - NGMI
Welcome Avatar! If you’re new here, this is likely a gut check. The future is *heavily* skewed between winners and losers. The middle class is sinking faster than the titanic and the real winners are getting wealthier by the minute. That’s the reality.
Intuitively, we’ve known this since childhood. All those participation trophies and medals were meaningless. The spoils go to the top. You don’t “win” second, third or fourth place. You *receive* second third or fourth place.
This is becoming more and more true in the stock market. The category leader gets the vast majority of the profits/value (Apple, NVDA, META etc.)
Once you accept that this is the future, you need to be careful about who you associated with. Over the long-term the world gets divided into life’s winners and life’s losers. Sounds harsh because it is.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a nerd, a jock, a combo of the two, a real estate developer, a software developer etc. The world eventually just gets shaken down into two people: 1) improving over time and 2) falling further behind. The nuances are hard to spot but we’ll try to do exactly that in this post.
Once you’ve trained your 6th sense of finding winners/losers in life? It’s time to ruthlessly cut the fat and aggressively hang out more with the winners. The cliche saying is true. You are the average of the 5 people you speak to most.
Winners vs. Losers in Life
Most people just look at the finish line. Someone who is flexing and loud is successful. Couldn’t be further from the truth. A large chunk of the people who are flexing and loud are either on their way to poverty (already broke) or worse… burning through a trust fund.
Similarly, if someone is currently broke it doesn’t mean much. Hit the rewind button on someone like Vitalik Buterin and it was painfully clear he would be rich based on all his accomplishments by the time he was a teenager. He just so happened to go down the route of cryptographically secured digital assets.
Instead, you need to come up with a better filter. What trajectory and life path is the person on? That’ll determine if the person is a future winner, current winner or a random person to be ignored. Coasting in legacy is not an accomplishment.
How Winners Operate
Self Awareness: This is most commonly explained as “looking at what I could have done better”. This isn’t good enough. Self awareness is also learning your own limits. Don’t fall into the trap of “you can do anything”. If you’re 5’6” with a 10” vertical and 15 second 100M dash… you’re never playing in the NBA. While you can get better at anything, that doesn’t mean you should.
Consistency: The vast majority of gains are non-linear. You don’t go out and do a new task correctly on day one. Does not work like that. After several attempts you finally get it to work *seemingly over night*. People love to ignore all the effort and skill development in the background. Consistent people see the biggest gains because they know what they are doing is going to pay off. This is called conviction. If you have conviction + consistency it is hard to lose.
Long-term Focus: Smart businesses focus on LTV (Long-term Value of Customer). It is incredibly easy to go for the near-term win. Basically the marshmallow test for adults. If you have a long-term focus it means you’ll never really get addicted to short term pleasures. While going out to party here and there is fine, the people with long-term vision keep all the cheap dopamine hits in check
Constantly Iterating: One of the easiest traps? Doing the same thing. If you do the same thing all the time, you’ll never receive new information. This is much more common than you think. People learn one item only… then that item goes out of favor and they are broke. Much more common than you think
High Energy - Always Researching: You know it when you see it. They are constantly solving new problems. At a young age this typically show up in reading. In our 20s we read a ton of books, hundreds. By the time you’re in middle age, you’re constantly testing new tools and products. The concept is the same though, you’re learning something new either by reading or by doing. Over time your specific niche will require more testing (doing) than research (reading) since you’ll know the basics already (forced to look at the edge of tech in your specific industry).
How Losers Operate
Always Excuses: Can be anything. Their boss. Their parents. Their friends. Their current financial situation. They assume any successful person inherited their money. They assume that anyone who made it (without nepotism) got “lucky”. “Must be nice”. So on and so forth. If the person already believes they have no shot, it is a self fulfilling prophecy. Now you know why we really hate politics for the most part. Vast majority are just looking for someone else to save them. Hint, no one in office cares about the average American
Lazy: The vast majority of people do not lack time, they lack priorities. They claim they are working 50-60 hours a week (realistically half that time is office gossip, shopping on amazon, watching youtube clips etc). Then they have no time on the weekends because there is always a Big Game or Holiday to justify blacking out from Friday until Sunday afternoon
Short Term Results Needed: This is why the crypto casino will always be around. People need to run up their numbers *NOW*. If they don’t they’ll just give up. If you look at the wealthiest investors? None of them do it like that. They buy a ton of a stock/coin and simply never sell. “You can argue that if you're not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of 50% two or three times a century, you're not fit to be a common shareholder, and you deserve the mediocre result you're going to get," Charlie Munger
Never Learn: Despite knowing that they are making a mistake, they do it again and again and again. We’ve lost count of the number of people that do this. Making a mistake is fine. Making the same one over and over again is grounds for a slow fade… They won’t figure it out.
Energy Drained: The vast majority of people spend their time complaining. It’s one of the biggest tells. If someone doesn’t complain much about life? This is a green flag. They don’t care about politicians, the latest thing on CNBC etc. This is a quiet announcement “I’m confident in my future”
Winners find winners to connect the dots. Losers stack excuses and repeated mistakes.
How to Spot People With the Correct Trajectory
You can probably figure it out in a week. The vast majority of people have a general personality and direction that won’t change. One of the best tests is this: “Is this person willing to get worse to get better”. This is the marshmallow test of adulthood.
If someone was swinging a golf club incorrectly for 1 year and learns the correct form, does he change it? If the answer is no, time to move on. This means the guy would rather do things his way than the right way. Unwilling to get worse (for a couple months) for long-term benefits (better results).
If you think this is trivial it isn’t. We have a GRAVEYARD of people who refuse to run Ads that convert. It looks “ugly”. It’s not their “personality”. It isn’t the ideal “customer”. All excuses (see prior section). When your future is at stake, you don’t do what feels good. You do what works. If they happen to overlap? Amazing. If they don’t overlap? Do what works. Period. No debate.
The trajectory also shows up in their daily life.
Singular Focus: Winners have a clear structure. Tackle item 1, then 2, then 3. Multi-tasking is another psyop by Corporate America. If you can’t even prioritize how can you get good results? Simply ask them what they are doing tomorrow and it should be “working on X”. A clear singular main task
Fitness: Being a winner in life definitely includes your personal health. Money isn’t everything. It’s also one of the main reasons why luxury gyms are amazing connection centers. If someone is in shape + has money to spend, that’s a great combination. How they treat their own bodies is a reflection of their self esteem outside of work
Opportunistic: When something happens (good or bad), winners constantly look for solutions and potential opportunities. Losers? They complain about it, explain how life is unfair and focus on all the negatives. For example, someone would say “middle being hollowed out is a negative”. That’s not how it works. A winner would say “okay how do i get to the winners side since i have no choice”. This mental difference is clear as day based on how someone interprets our own content here on BowTiedBull
Social Circles: Misery loves company. Similarly, winners ghost losers. This is seen socially as well. In the dating world ghosting is common. In the business world it is also quite similar “We’ll call you if we’re interested”. Which is translation for “never going to call”. You can be amicable with someone you meet down the road, but no need to burn your time or theirs
Build or Die Belief: Losers think “How can i get rich to do nothing on the beach in Thailand”. If the goal was to live on table scraps and chill in Thailand, you could do this as an english teacher or with some basic low paid position. Winners don’t enjoy this. Winners want to learn, grow and build. They know they will be working for the rest of their lives so it’s a build or die motto. Some years suck, some years are outstanding. They simply enjoy building and improving.
If you cannot tell, it is usually due to bias. Part of the reason to avoid doing business with friends some 99% of the time. Has nothing to do with your friend being a bad person. You simply overestimate his capabilities and he overestimates your capabilities since you’re friends. You’ll find out if he truly liked you if you make it anyway (IYKYK!)
Cutting Losers = Highest ROI Skill
Add up all the time you spend listening to someone complain. Now that we’ve spelled it out like that you’ll realize that the vast vast majority of conversations = listening to someone complain. Now put that into an excel sheet, you’re losing days/weeks/months and will never get the time back.
Not only are you losing time but you’re also learning nothing useful: drama, gossip, celebrity stuff, political stuff and getting you to focus on the latest shiny item on CNBC
Winners are the opposite. They give you space and try to maximize your time in every interaction. No need to have 4 hour long conversations with no action steps. In the corporate world, everyone knows the weekly team meeting is useless.
Rules for Cutting and *Gasps* Being Cut
Veer on being more ruthless. Lost time is more valuable than lost money. If someone is a net negative, simply move on. In the rare chance they turn it around, you might have been part of the reason for the light bulb going off. In both cases it is a win to simply cut and move
On the other side of the coin if someone gives up on you, don’t take it personally. There are 8 billion people out there. Similar to how your guess of winners and losers won’t be 100% neither will theirs. Have some pride and continue betting on yourself. Don’t bother trying to fix the past. It’s done and you have both moved on
Keep track of your own analysis. This helps you retain self awareness. If all the “losers” end up being winners… you have a huge problem. If you cut out 10 people and 1-2 of them end up being winners? You’re fine. You know you’re doing well when people have to go out of their way and highlight the 10-20% errors (since they are so rare!)
At this point you’re well on your way. There is no free pass here. Friends, toxic family etc. None of them have the right to burn your time. If you feel immense guilt (typically family) remember that you winning = the family name winning long-term. Again. No one has the right to actively destroy your future.
Winners vs. Losers in Investing
Winning mentality also applies to investing. Your portfolio is another “circle” of winners/losers. The only difference here is conviction. Conviction is sticking to something through a 50%+ draw down. Tech stocks and crypto have done that an ungodly number of times. It’s also why the same winners from 2017 are the same winners today in 2025.
Winning Investments
Will grow over time and are directionally moving to a future which is: 1) more degenerate, 2) more online, 3) more dispersion between rich and poor and 4) faster/cheaper/more secure
For individual stocks, they need to have infinite scale or an extreme niche position. One of the two. A special secret sauce or operating leverage. Easiest tells as of 2025. Scale over time.
Managed by winners. This is another form of black magic. If someone isn’t particularly salesy, that’s actually a positive, not a negative. Charisma is the main ingredient for con-men. You want to find people who are winning and the reaction is “That dude is the head of the company? wtf”
Losing Assets
Rely on moving to the past. Any product that expects us to roll back to 2000 is not a good product. A Wall St example is hoping for de-regulation again (allowing PnD type business models)
Stuck in brick and mortar. The digital world is constantly taking more market share. These days, young adults don’t even go grocery shopping at the super market.
Focus on valuation instead of value. If the company is cheap, that doesn’t mean anything if the product won’t be around in 10 years. We’re pretty confident that the P/E of Tower Records looked “cheap”. It was cheap for a reason (the E was wrong).
Winners Build Conviction
If you’ve been through a lot of cycles (investing) both in stocks and crypto, you know that the vast majority of your money is made in the HODL. The only people with diamond hands = deep tech knowledge and conviction.
Once you’ve built that, there is limited need to become a trader. You adjust your portfolio a couple times a year in a typical 12 month period. In the rare volatile years (like this year) maybe 4 adjustments. That’s it. No need to click refresh on Bloomberg every single day. Probably makes you lose money.
How to See It In the Real World
The guy at the gym who never looks out of shape. Could be December could be June. He’s in shape for the period of the year.
The guy at work who is well liked but is somehow always avoiding all the extra heavy work. He’s getting promoted but he’s not the shining star employee. Chances are he’s working on something else. 3x this probability if he’s known as being “strange/different”. That is code for, creative thinker
The guy who is always on unemployment hours. Seems to have no schedule and is never interested in telling you what he does for work. That means he makes a ton doing something important. He has nothing to prove so avoids the topic entirely
Patterns rarely lie.
Think of Your Social Circle As a Portfolio
While life isn’t one large transaction, it is certainly a difficult game to win if you’re surrounded by parasites. Now that the internet is available there are no excuses. Somewhere out there? Millions of winners looking to meet someone just like yourself.
When you look through your phone, do a quick tally of who you’re talking to most frequently. Once you move the interactions in the right direction? Your luck and fate will also change.
This is how the simulation works and will always work.
Summary
Life is brutally competitive. There is no reason to get in your own way. You will get multiple battles with Mike Tyson by default. No reason to increase the chances of being knocked out.
On that note, get to filtering and remember. It is always the best time in history to get rich.
If someone can’t make it in America, they can’t make it anywhere.
Don’t spoil it!
Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.
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