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- #163 – Sustainable Victories & Exchange Operators
#163 – Sustainable Victories & Exchange Operators
Quote, Podcast, Mental Model, Observation, X.
Dimitri Gremos
July 08, 2026
Good morning everyone,
Hope you’re having a great week!
Slightly longer one today as I try to articulate an idea I’ve been reflecting on for a few weeks now.
Very excited to share with you all and I hope it resonates.
Let’s jump in.
read online on my website
read time 6 minutes
#163 – The Rundown:
Quote: All progress relies on the unreasonable man.
Podcast: How Roger Federer became a billionaire.
Mental Model: Sustainable victories.
Observation: Exchange operators often beat the market they’re creating.
X: Reset time.
Quote:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
{h/t Shane Parrish}
Podcast:
How Roger Federer Became A Billionaire
Roger Federer isn’t just one of the greatest tennis players of all time, he’s also one of the richest.
BBC business editor Simon Jack and journalist Zing Tsjeng follow his journey from a fiery, racket-smashing junior in Switzerland to the calm, composed global icon who conquered Wimbledon, and the world of endorsements.
With over 20 Grand Slam titles and more than $100 million in prize money, Federer’s sporting success was extraordinary, but it wasn’t enough to make him a billionaire.
What ultimately elevated him to billionaire status appears to be a common thread amongst athletes who manage to achieve outsized levels of financial success: equity & ownership.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
[Duration: 38 minutes]
P.S. I made a Spotify playlist with every podcast I’ve ever recommended. Hope they bring you as much value as they’ve brought me.
Mental Model:
Sustainable Victories
Nico Rosberg vs Lewis Hamilton
I’ve been thinking a lot about winning lately and the ingredients that go into victories.
Is there a formula for ‘winning’, or is it some sort of idiosyncratic alignment of preparation, performance, and a little bit of luck?
Is it better to win at all costs, or should we aspire to win a certain way?
Is there more than one way to win?
If so, is there a better way to win?
Is it better to win in a way that achieves success once, or in a way that provides a platform for repeatable victories over time?
In reflecting on some of these questions, I’ve come to realise that there is a belief I have long held yet not been able to fully recognise or appreciate until now:
In life, it’s not just ‘winning’ that is important, but how you win.
Let me explain by way of example.
Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton are two highly regarded Formula One World Champions.
What most people don’t know about the former Mercedes team mates is that they were actually best friends during their childhood. Having each been born in 1985, they grew up together racing go-karts around Europe’s junior circuits with the hopes of one day reaching the pinnacle of the sport in Formula One.
As they developed as drivers, they eventually made it to the storied stage of motorsport in their early twenties and were reunited as team mates at Mercedes in 2013.
Rosberg had already been at the team since 2010 and when Hamilton joined with a World Championship already under his belt from his time at McLaren, the pressure was on Rosberg to perform.
Unfortunately for Nico, Hamilton went on to dominate the sport with resounding Drivers’ Championship victories in 2014 and 2015 – untouchable by Rosberg and the rest of the field.
But Rosberg had seen this story before.
You see, although they were best friends when they were kids, their rivalry was fierce, with Lewis always seeming to get the upper hand and Nico usually coming in number two.
This implanted within Nico a huge amount of self-doubt which was compounded by the pressure of having his father, Keke Rosberg, an F1 World Champion himself in 1982.
So, it’s the end of the 2015 Formula One season and after Hamilton’s third World Championship to Rosberg’s zero, he had had enough.
He enlisted a sports mental coach, psychologist, and philosopher to help redesign his entire life and ‘guarantee’ success the following year. He spent months away from his wife and children to optimise performance during the season in the hopes it would give him the elusive edge he had long been searching for.
He even stripped off all of the paint from his helmet, having calculated that the 80 grams it weighed would save him 0.00024 seconds per lap over the course of a race.
Safe to say, he well and truly covered all bases.
Fortunately for him, in a nail-biting final race in Abu Dhabi, Rosberg became the 2016 Formula One World Champion by a margin of just one second…
And then announced his retirement from the sport five days later at just 31 years of age.
In his own words reflecting on that decision on the High Performance podcast recently (which I recommended the other week):
“Crossing the line, first of all, there was just relief. There was no joy, no happiness or anything. Relief and me saying, ‘that’s it, I’m done.’
So it’s really scary, especially because it’s the non-obvious choice because the obvious choice, I mean, I had a contract for more years, could have earned $100 million more easily, very quickly, continued to be in the best race car, win more races, so it’s not the obvious choice.
I believed that for me, I achieved my goal, so that’s clear, that’s a tick, and I believed that for me it would be critical to leave at the peak of Mount Everest. I really did not want to end up in a situation where my career spirals downward and I’m going from worse to worse, I get fired from one team, the young guy destroys me in another, and finally I end up getting sent home. That is not something I ever wanted to experience because that’s horrible.
…
I threw more than 100% into it, so I felt I couldn’t do another year like that, that was so damn extreme. Every minute of breathing was around being the 110% best that I could be in every sense of the word to win the World Championship, and that’s not sustainable to live life like that. That’s pretty extreme, so I didn’t really want to keep going like that either.”
Hamilton, by contrast, went on to win the World Championship 4 more times consecutively in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, taking his total tally to 7 and equalling Michael Schumacher’s record in the sport.
Not only that, but Hamilton is still racing in Formula One today at 41 years of age for Ferrari – 10 years on from that dramatic finale to Rosberg’s career in Abu Dhabi.
So, what do I take away from Rosberg vs Hamilton?
It’s not just important that you win, but how you win.
You don’t want to win every possible way, or the hardest way, but in a way that is repeatable over time.
You want sustainable victories.
Whatever Hamilton was able to tap into, whatever that flow state was in the way that he has managed to design his life, his training, his relationships, whatever his recipe for success is, it has allowed him to enter a rhythm that is conducive to repeatable success over time.
Sure, Rosberg ‘did the thing’ and got the upper hand on one occasion, but Hamilton is still performing at the very top today – something that Rosberg, self-admittedly, would not be able to do.
It may be argued that it is better that Rosberg won ‘by force’ as opposed to not winning at all.
Sure.
But I think what I’m getting at is the possibility that he didn’t necessarily have to do all of those things in order to win.
There is more than one way to go up the mountain.
For me, it ultimately boils down to this: in every day life with long-dated games of success and failure, you don’t want to win like Rosberg, you want to win like Hamilton.
Because life, perhaps unlike motorsport, is a marathon, not a sprint.
“Just because something is hard, doesn’t mean it needs to be difficult.”
As I approach my final and most challenging university semester before stepping into full-time work, I am actively reflecting on not only what ‘winning’ is to me, but also how I want to win.
On my way up to Hamilton Island the other week, I also had the chance to revisit my favourite podcast from 2025 between Chris Williamson and Wyoming’s Dry Creek Dewayne, with something Dewayne said still playing around in my head:
“I don’t like the trend in these men’s motivation circles. I don’t like the ‘hustle culture’ as is being brought out and taught today.
I don’t agree with it because I think it’s out of balance.
I think young men need to know that, hey, it’s okay for you to sit down, and to read, and have a cigar, and to chill, and to think.
Because I guarantee if you’re in the weight room pumping out all these reps and running on the machine, and then you’re going into the cubicle and you flip open a computer… you’re not thinking. You’re learning, you’re taking in, but you’re not meditating on stuff and you’re not thinking.
But that can be taken so far that young men are made to feel guilty for just sitting down and thinking, and relaxing.
And I understand that there was a tendency in this country, we had a lot of young men that were not raised with dads, they weren’t raised to work, and so it’s sitting on the couch playing the stupid Xbox, not growing up learning to work, so that pendulum went too far this way.
So now you’ve got guys who, in order to counteract that, they’ve swung the pendulum too far this way, and a balanced man needs to be somewhere in the middle.
He needs to be able to work, to do what needs to be done, to improve himself, and he also needs to sit around by the fire in the backyard and have a cigar, and read some Kipling, and just stay balanced.
There needs to be balance.”
So, how am I working through this?
Forcing myself to sit down and reflect on some tougher and bigger questions, like:
What is my why?
What is actually important to me?
What do sustainable victories look like to me? (Not to others, but to me)
What is my optimal version of balance?
What are the buckets of time and attention that I need to fill?
Do I need to simply redistribute water, or start removing some of the buckets?
What tends to be the major culprit(s) when life starts to look out of balance?
And for those culprit(s), is it a problem I need to solve or a tension I need to learn to live with?
What does my ideal week look like?
Am I creating room for spontaneity and wonder?
Will let you know how I go…
Observation:
Exchange Operators Often Beat The Market They’re Creating
Pretty wild finding from Trader Ferg on the power of the exchange operator model.
Think of an exchange operator like a stock market maker such as the ASX or Nasdaq.
Often these are public companies that you can actively invest in and, as it turns out, they tend to actually outperform the market they’re creating.
“Exchange operators sit in the same tier as payment networks and dominant software platforms, characterised by network effects, high switching costs, and structural barriers.
The securities exchange model is so powerful that nearly every exchange with a 20-year public track record has outperformed its respective regional stock index, in most cases by a wide margin.”
Check out the performance of various exchange operators versus the markets they create below:
So interesting.
{h/t Trader Ferg}
X:
Reset Time
I’ve noticed this especially when watching players at the World Cup.
It’s amazing how quickly they reset after missing a shot or failing a pass.
Their reset time is so quick, and probably one of many traits separating them from players at lower levels.
Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.
In case you missed it, last week’s newsletter covered buying businesses in European towns, why founders often make bad investors, what makes New York ‘different’ & more.
If you enjoyed this edition, it would mean the world if you could forward it to a friend or send them my website.
This goes a long way to helping me reach more people :)
See you in the next one,
Dimi