Michael Lewis (the author of Moneyball) says:

Where I have encountered greatness, there is an ability to go a different direction from everyone else while behaving with confidence and assurance as if you’re just doing it the way things should be done. It’s now very fashionable to be an innovator and to be a change maker. You get lots of people throwing the terms around. People think they are more unusual than they are. Whenever you see someone say, “I like to think outside the box,” you know that they are so deeply in the box that they’ll never get out.

He has a real ability, like a really gifted trader, to act on his own judgments. This is painful for most people to do, because they face ridicule and ostracism. I think intelligence is overrated as a quality central to this kind of innovation. It’s a kind of nerve. It’s the ability to take a risk.

On Wall Street everybody says he’s a contrarian, and nobody is. It is so hard to recognize the moment when you are caving to conventional behavior. I’ve seen over and again in my subjects – and there is greatness in this – a trigger that goes off in their mind, a switch that flips when they sense that everyone is going one way, and it’s stupid. And they take pleasure in taking a bloody-minded stance against it.