If You Can Speak It, It is Finished.
Part II(a): When Tools Become the World
Before You Read:
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Understanding Part II(a):
Dear Practitioners,
This is Part II(a) of When Tools Become the World, continuing the first of this year’s publication cycles.
If Part I named the category error, this section moves upstream. It examines something more implicit and more difficult: how language itself—long before method or execution—shapes what a trader is able to perceive, imagine, and act upon.
As part of the Asymmetrist 2.0 structure, these Features are being serialised deliberately. The aim is not speed, but space: time for ideas to be absorbed, resisted, and tested against experience before the argument continues.
This instalment is intentionally cerebral. It belongs to learning time, not performance time. The distinction matters. First principles are hardest to examine when markets are pressing hardest, which is precisely why they must be examined earlier.
As with Part I, you’ll find a short coda and a set of reflective questions at the end. Sit with them. If a passage irritates you or feels uncomfortably familiar, pause there. There is no need to resolve anything yet.
Part II(b) follows next week.
If you’d like to catch up on Part I—or re-read it—use the link here:
Good reading and good trading to you all,
Bogdan
Positions:
Every label is a burial of possibility.
To articulate too early is to foreclose the future.
What the trader calls clarity is often the exhaustion of imagination.
One trusts systems most when one least understands their limits.
To mistake convenience for knowledge is the commonest of errors.
Part II(a): If You Can Speak It, It is Finished.
A certain well-moustachioed German philosopher wrote that “whatever we have words for is already dead in our hearts.” What then? And what of our trading?
We take the infinities of experience and reduce them into a word. We take the infinite and funnel and pour it into something that can be handled. One word. One concept. One delineation. In that act, something is gained: speed, portability, communication. Perhaps everything else is lost.
And so this is reflected in another philosopher’s remark: “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.” What are you blind to when attempting to see? To name is to select; to articulate is already to exclude, and what falls outside the available vocabulary becomes difficult to perceive; harder yet to act upon. Language is one of the primary ways to make sense of the world; yet it should not govern sense-making.
Language appears to offer multitudes. It gives us reach yet establishes the perimeter of our world. Once something has been rendered into a word, a model, or a category, it is no longer infinite. The further one presses against these limits—the more carefully one explores the edges of what can be named, reasoned about, and acted upon—the more one becomes aware of what remains beyond them: the vastness of what is still incomprehensible. Sense-making is also knowing when sense is unmade.
Therefore, language is both the condition of possibility for trading and the source of its deepest error. Without it, no judgement could be formed, no risk articulated, no action taken. Yet the very act that makes decision possible also draws a boundary around perception itself. Thus we commit the trader’s original sin: making an infinite process finite. The sin itself is unavoidable. The question is not whether we commit it, but what then becomes finite in us—and how profoundly that narrowing shapes our ability to navigate markets and build a career that endures.