There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet.

有些工作要求你必须有与众不同的思维方式才能做好。例如，要成为一名成功的科学家，仅仅是做对还不够，你的想法还需要新颖。你不能发表一些其他人已经知道的内容，你需要提出那些尚未被他人发现的见解。

The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable insights are the ones most other investors don't share.

投资者也是如此。对于公开市场的投资者来说，仅仅正确预测一家公司的表现是不够的。如果有很多人也做出了相同的预测，股价就已经反映了这个信息，便没有赚取利润的空间。只有那些大多数其他投资者没有的独特见解才有价值。

You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't — like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers' floors.

创业者中也常见这样一种模式：你不应该去做一个所有人都认为是好主意的创业项目，因为已经会有其他公司在做了。你需要去做一些听起来大多数人觉得是坏主意的事情，但你知道它其实并不糟糕，比如为几千个爱好者用的小型计算机编写软件，或者创建一个网站让人们可以租用陌生人家的气垫床。

Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new.

对于散文作家来说也是如此。一篇告诉读者他们已经知道的事情的文章会很无聊。你需要告诉读者一些新的东西。