Some of the best people I have ever backed were people almost everyone else had passed over. Not because they were hard to spot, but because most of us are trained to look for the wrong things.
Why Polish Is a Poor Predictor
We are taught to look for polish, the right resume, the confident handshake, the pedigree that signals a safe bet. Polish is fine. But over the years I have learned that polish is often just a head start someone else was lucky enough to get, and it tells you surprisingly little about what a person will actually do when the work gets hard.
So I taught myself to look for other things instead.
The First Signal: Hunger
I look for hunger. Not the performed kind, the real kind. The person who wants it badly enough to do the unglamorous work when no one is watching. Hunger is hard to fake and impossible to teach, and it outperforms natural talent far more often than anyone likes to admit.
The Second Signal: Coachability
I look for coachability. Give someone honest feedback and watch what they do with it. The ones who get defensive have just shown you their ceiling. The ones who lean in, who actually change, who come back with a sharper question those are the people who keep growing long after the polished candidates have quietly plateaued.
The Third Signal: How Someone Handles a Setback
I look for how someone handles a setback. Anyone can look impressive when things are going their way. I am far more interested in what a person does the morning after something falls apart. Resilience is the truest signal of potential I know, and you can usually find it by asking someone about the hardest moment of their career and listening closely to how they tell the story.
Why the Best People Get Overlooked
None of these things show up on a resume. That is exactly why the people who have them in abundance get overlooked so often. They do not fit the template. They came up the hard way, or from the wrong place, or without the connections that make a candidate look like a sure thing. The market underprices them, and that is precisely what makes them the best bets available.
Why Betting on Overlooked Potential Works
I will not pretend I get it right every time. I have been wrong about people in both directions. But betting on overlooked potential has been one of the most rewarding habits of my career, and not only because it works. There is something deeply satisfying about being the person who saw it first, who looked at someone the world had written off and said, I think you have got it, before they were even sure themselves.
The Challenge I Leave With You
If you are ever in a position to open a door, here is my challenge to you: stop screening only for polish. Look for the hunger, the coachability, the way a person rises after a fall. The best people are often standing exactly where no one else is bothering to look.