While I will cop to a mildly obnoxious habit of introducing references that almost always require an internet search, I also will start this year off on the right foot by sharing an upcoming reference from our strategy letter—Oblique Strategy Cards by musician/producer Brian Eno and his artist collaborator, the late Peter Schmidt. Whether or not they would be amused or aghast that their creative game process is directly applicable to the financial world today is uncertain.

From an interview with Brian Eno sometime in 1975:

“These cards evolved from our separate working procedures. It was one of the many cases during the friendship that he [Peter Schmidt] and I where we arrived at a working position at almost exactly the same time and almost in exactly the same words. There were times when we hadn’t seen each other for a few months at a time sometimes, and upon remeeting or exchanging letters, we would find that we were in the same intellectual position – which was quite different from the one we’d been in prior to that. The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios – tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn’t the case – it’s just the most obvious and – apparently – reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.” The first Oblique Strategy said “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” [sic]