Scientist & Investor
Tim Fergestad, Ph.D.
Attention · Action · Attitude
See clearly. Act deliberately. Live gratefully.
A scientist and investor sharing lessons from the lab, and what I am noticing, testing, and learning in deals, at home, and in the occasional experiment on myself.
How I approach everything
ATTENTION
What is true?
See reality clearly. Separate what happened from what you wish had happened.
ACTION
What is mine to do?
Take responsibility for what you can influence, and act on it. Let go of what you cannot.
ATTITUDE
How will I face it?
Choose how you carry what happens. Separate what happens to you from what you let it make of you.
A loop, not a list: how you carry what happens shapes what you notice next. I call it AAA, and the full idea is in Attention. Action. Attitude. Everything else I write here applies it somewhere: investing, science and health, family and legacy.
Writing
Attention. Action. Attitude.
Three questions I keep coming back to for living deliberately.
What Are You Actually Building Wealth For?
Net worth is an output. Whether a family’s wealth lasts is decided by the inputs.
The Eagle Kept Showing Up
How a family motto went from a sentence to three words, and why a family symbol has to belong to everyone in it.
Was It Skill, or Was It the Decade?
A track record is an outcome. Borrowing the lab’s vehicle control to ask what actually caused it.
Every Investment Is a Hypothesis
Five questions I ask before I commit to anything, and the control experiment that taught me to ask them.
Field Notes from Tim
Occasional, high-signal ideas, experiments, books, quotes, and things worth thinking about. I send it when I have something worth opening.
Your address is used for Field Notes and nothing else. Unsubscribe any time.
Background
The short version
I earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of Utah School of Medicine and spent my research years studying the molecular machinery that lets one nerve cell communicate with the next, later continuing that work in the Genetics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
While I was in the lab, I was also building something outside it: renovating properties, owning rentals in several states, and working in land and residential real estate. That grew into entrepreneurship and private-market investing, and eventually into Oak Street Assets, the firm through which I invest alongside accredited investors. I also host the Phoenix Prosperity Podcast.
What carried over from science was not the subject matter. It was a set of habits: stay curious, test the assumption, measure instead of guessing, and hold conclusions loosely enough to change them. I now apply those habits well beyond investing, to action, health, family, and what a well-lived life actually requires.
I try to be clear about which of three voices I am writing in. Where I have real training or experience, I write as an expert. Where I am reporting what I have tried, I write as a practitioner. And where I am still working something out, I write as a learner, in public.
Elsewhere
Oak Street Assets
My private real estate investment platform, for accredited investors.
Phoenix Prosperity Podcast
Conversations with entrepreneurs, physicians, investors, scientists, and builders.
Contact
Get in touch
For podcast and speaking invitations, the media kit has bios, conversation topics, and an intro you can read on air. For anything else, email is best.