The Mountain and the Ticker Tape: Why the Best Leaders Learn to See What Others Can’t
Great leadership isn’t about reacting faster — it’s about seeing further.
We celebrate speed. In boardrooms, in startups, in the breathless rhythm of modern business, the fastest decision-maker is supposed to be the best decision-maker. Move fast and break things. First mover advantage. The bias toward action is so deeply embedded in our culture that we treat hesitation like a character flaw and patience like a synonym for weakness.
That idea is a trap.
In his book The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene tells the story of John Blunt — a pragmatic, self-made English businessman who, in 1719, engineered one of the most spectacular financial disasters in history. Blunt wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t reckless by temperament. He was a shrewd operator who had clawed his way from the son of a shoemaker to the inner circles of King George I. But in the summer of 1719, watching the French get rich off the Mississippi Company, Blunt caught a fever — not of the body, but of the mind. He became so consumed by the drama of the present moment that he lost the ability to see six months into the future. And that blindness didn’t just destroy him. It nearly took an entire nation down with him.
Here’s the shift most people miss: Blunt’s failure wasn’t a failure of intelligence or ambition. It was a failure of perspective. And it’s
the same failure that quietly undermines leaders, entrepreneurs, and organizations every single day.
The View from the Base of the Mountain
Greene offers a metaphor I keep coming back to. Imagine you’re standing at the base of a mountain, deep in a thick forest. You can see only what’s directly in front of you — the nearest trees, the path at your feet. Everything feels urgent because everything is close. You react to the branch in your face, the sound behind you, the terrain right under your boots. You have no sense of the broader landscape, no understanding of how the forest connects to the valley, the river, the road beyond.
Now imagine climbing. With every hundred feet of elevation, the picture changes. What seemed like a dead end from below reveals itself as a bend in a trail. What looked like the whole forest turns out to be a small stand of trees at the edge of something much larger. The higher you go, the more you realize that what you thought was true at the base — the conclusions you drew, the decisions you were about to make — was based on an incomplete picture.
This is what Greene calls the farsighted perspective, and it’s the central insight of his chapter on the Law of Shortsightedness. Most of us spend our professional lives at the base of the mountain. We react to the latest email, the newest crisis, the most dramatic piece of news. We make decisions based on what we can see and feel right now, and we mistake that narrow view for the full picture.
Marcus Aurelius understood this two thousand years ago. In his Meditations, he repeatedly urged himself to observe events from above — to imagine looking down on the affairs of men from a great height, seeing the patterns and cycles that are invisible to those caught in the churn. For the Stoics, this wasn’t escapism. It was the foundation of sound judgment. You cannot lead well if you cannot see clearly, and you cannot see clearly if you’re standing in the middle of the storm.
The Anatomy of Shortsightedness
Greene identifies four patterns of short-term thinking that plague leaders. I want to focus on the two I see most often in my own work — because they’re the ones most likely to be silently eroding your effectiveness right now.
The first is what Greene calls tactical hell. You know the feeling. You’re embroiled in multiple battles — a difficult employee, a stalled project, a competitor making noise, a board member pushing back. Each fight feels critical. You’ve invested so much time and energy that walking away seems like a waste. So you keep going, reacting to each new development, matching move for move, argument for argument.
But here’s the truth: the moment you lose sight of why you’re fighting, you’ve already lost. Tactical hell isn’t about the external battles. It’s about the internal collapse of strategic thinking. Your ego takes over. The fight becomes about being right, not about reaching your goals. Your energy drains. Your spirit contracts. And the longer you stay in it, the harder it becomes to climb back out.
I’ve been there. In my earlier years running BodeTree, there were stretches where I was so deep in the weeds of day-to-day firefighting that I couldn’t have told you what our three-year vision looked like. I was busy every single hour, making decisions constantly, and none of it was moving us forward in any meaningful way. Activity had replaced strategy, and I’d confused the two. It took stepping back — physically removing myself from the daily rhythm for a few days — to recognize that half the battles I was fighting didn’t matter at all, and the ones that did required a completely different approach than the reactive posture I’d adopted.
The Stoics had a word for this kind of discipline: apatheia — not apathy in the modern sense, but freedom from being controlled by your passions and reactions. Seneca wrote that the wise person doesn’t avoid the arena but refuses to be yanked around by every provocation within it. The goal isn’t disengagement. It’s elevated engagement — fighting the battles that matter, from a position of clarity rather than compulsion.
Ticker Tape Fever
The second pattern Greene identifies hits even closer to home in 2026: what he calls ticker tape fever. During the run-up to the 1929 crash, investors became addicted to the clicking sound of the ticker tape machine — the physical sensation of being connected to the market in real time. Every click meant something was happening. Every fluctuation demanded attention. The sound itself became a narcotic.
We don’t have ticker tapes anymore. We have something far more powerful and far more insidious — the infinite scroll, the push notification, the 24-hour news cycle, the real-time dashboard. I see this constantly in the world of small business lending and finance. A Fed announcement drops and suddenly every business owner I talk to wants to rethink their entire strategy. A jobs report comes in hot and the mood shifts overnight from cautious optimism to panic. A single quarter of data reshapes plans that were built on years of careful analysis.
Think about it: the trends that actually determine whether a business succeeds or fails play out over months and years, not hours and days. The fundamentals of a strong small business — solid unit economics, a clear value proposition, a healthy culture, disciplined cash management — don’t change because the ten-year Treasury yield moved twenty basis points on a Tuesday. But when you’re glued to the ticker tape — or its modern equivalent — every fluctuation feels like a seismic shift. Your time frame shrinks until you can barely see past the end of the week. And that’s when bad decisions get made.
Greene holds up Abraham Lincoln as the antidote, and it’s a portrait worth studying. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln made a clear-eyed assessment: the North had more men and more resources, so time was on his side — but only if he could withstand the enormous pressure to either give up or rush the effort. For the next four years, that’s exactly what he did. After the disaster at Bull Run, when almost everyone — including prominent allies — urged him to negotiate peace, Lincoln held. When Grant got bogged down and casualties mounted, Lincoln held. He nearly broke in August of 1864, drafting a letter of surrender terms — and then stuffing it in a drawer because his strategic mind overruled his emotional exhaustion. A week later, Sherman marched into Atlanta and the war turned for good.
What Lincoln had that most leaders lack wasn’t superior intelligence. It was superior time orientation. He could see the larger arc that everyone else’s short-term reactions were obscuring. He didn’t ignore the present — he endured it, because his eyes were fixed on something beyond it.
The Cobra Effect
There’s a third pattern from Greene that deserves attention, if only because it’s so devastatingly common: unintended consequences, or what economists sometimes call the cobra effect. The name comes from a story out of colonial India. British authorities, bothered by the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra brought in. Enterprising locals responded by breeding cobras for the reward money. When the government caught on and cancelled the program, the breeders — now resentful and stuck with inventory — released their snakes into the streets. The cobra population tripled.
The pattern is everywhere once you start looking for it. A well-intentioned policy creates the very problem it was designed to solve. A leader tries to control a rebellious team by tightening restrictions, only to make the rebellion worse. A company rushes a product to market to beat a competitor, creates a quality disaster, and hands that competitor a gift-wrapped advantage.
The root cause is always the same: a refusal to think beyond the first-order effect. Action A leads to Result B — that’s as far as the thinking goes. But Result B creates Condition C, which triggers Response D from people whose motivations you never bothered to consider. Greene is right that this isn’t just a theory — it’s a pattern repeated throughout history, from the assassination of Julius Caesar to the invasion of Iraq. And the antidote is always the same: slow down, widen the frame, game out the second and third-order consequences before you act. Not every time — sometimes speed genuinely matters. But far more often than we think, the wisest move is the patient one.
I think about this often when I’m teaching at ASU. I’ll ask a room of very bright students what they would do in a particular business scenario, and almost invariably the first answers are reactive and narrow. Fire the underperformer. Cut the product line. Raise prices. These aren’t wrong instincts, necessarily. But they’re base-of-the-mountain instincts. They address the symptom without examining the system. The best answers — the ones that reveal real strategic thinking — always come from the students who pause, who ask a question before proposing a solution, who consider what the second and third moves might look like. Those students are climbing the mountain.
The Discipline of Elevation
So what does all of this mean in practice? Greene’s prescription is deceptively simple, and it aligns with something I’ve believed for a long time: the most important leadership skill is the ability to detach from the heat of the moment and see the wider pattern.
This doesn’t mean being passive. It doesn’t mean avoiding hard decisions. Lincoln wasn’t passive — he was waging a war. Marcus Aurelius wasn’t passive — he was governing an empire from a military camp on the Danube frontier. The farsighted perspective isn’t about retreating from the arena. It’s about refusing to let the arena dictate your thinking.
In practical terms, this means building habits that force elevation. It means blocking time to think strategically, not just operationally — and treating that time as non-negotiable. It means cultivating relationships with people who see the world differently than you do, because their perspective compensates for your blind spots. It means studying history — not as an academic exercise, but as a way of recognizing the patterns that repeat themselves in every era. The South Sea Bubble of 1720 and the housing crisis of 2008 are separated by nearly three centuries, but the underlying human dynamics are identical. The leaders who know their history are less likely to be surprised by it.
Most importantly, it means developing a different relationship with time itself. Greene argues that most of us live within an anxiously narrow time frame — focused on the immediate, uncomfortable with both the past and the future, seeking distraction from the passage of time rather than learning to work with it. The farsighted leader does the opposite. She treats time as an ally, not an enemy. She knows that today’s crisis will look different in a month, that patience compounds, and that the clearest view of any situation is the one you get after you’ve given yourself the space to think.
Climb the Mountain
We live in a world that rewards the loudest reaction, the fastest take, the most dramatic pivot. Social media has turned the ticker tape into a firehose. The pressure to respond — to everything, immediately, with conviction — has never been greater. And the leaders who give in to that pressure are the ones standing at the base of the mountain, swinging at branches and calling it progress.
The leaders who actually build something lasting are the ones who do the quiet, unglamorous work of climbing. They resist the pull of the moment. They think in years, not quarters. They study the patterns of history and the rhythms of human nature, and they use that knowledge to see what others can’t — not because they’re smarter, but because they’ve earned a higher vantage point.
The view from the top of the mountain doesn’t make leadership easy. It doesn’t eliminate uncertainty or guarantee success. But it does something more valuable: it makes you less susceptible to the madness that consumes everyone else. And in a world drowning in noise and short-term thinking, that clarity is the rarest and most powerful advantage a leader can possess.