Vitaliy Katsenelson was born in Murmansk, Russia and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1991. He is the author of Soul in the Game, The Art of a Meaningful Life. He is the CEO of Denver-based value investment firm IMA. Vitaliy has also written two books on investing. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” He’s written for the Financial Times, Barron’s, Institutional Investor and Foreign Policy. Vitaliy lives in Denver with his wife and three children, where he loves to read, listen to classical music, play chess, and write about life, investing, and music.
"There are four modes of communicating: preacher, prosecutor, politician, and scientist. So those three Ps are very important modes, but if you spend all your time in these modes, you will learn very little because all of them are kind of outward-looking modes. You're trying to convince others, and you don't learn very much when you're in those modes. Now, I would argue that most of us need to spend a good chunk of our time in a scientist mode. If you are in a scientist mode, then you are doing what Seneca said, "time discovers truth."
So in the scientist mode, everything you look at is a hypothesis, and then all you're trying to do is just trying to figure out if your hypothesis is right or wrong. And therefore in the debate, you're trying to understand the other person's side, not necessarily be in prosecutor mode to convince the person to change his or her mind.
We want to be very careful that ideas don't become our identity because once they do, we can't change it. In fact, I would argue, we have to be very mindful and evaluate our identity because a lot of times our identity is formed through completely random experiences."