These are quotes that I have come across that confirm the value of the contrarian approach to various fields. I advocate it both in football coaching (See my book The Contrarian Edge for Football Offense) and in active investment strategies. My explanations and comments are in [red].

Game theory in Logic of Life book
I discuss a branch of mathematics called game theory in the Play Calling chapter of Contrarian Edge on pages 170 and 171. Author Tim Harford also discusses game theory at some length in the Las Vegas chapter of his 2008 book The Logic of Life.

A [poker] player who never bluffs never wins a big pot, because on the rare occasion that he raises the betting, everyone else will fold before committing much money.

Optimal success comes when you combine bluffing (pretending to be strong when you are weak) or reverse bluffing (pretending to be weak when you are strong) with some non-bluffing (acting strong when you are strong). Always bluffing or never bluffing simply reveals your secrets to the enemy. In football, you bluff or reverse bluff with formations, statements to the press, personnel packages, and going against your tendencies with regard to play calling.

Harford says game theory dictates that you should bet when you have good cards or awful ones, but not when you have mediocre cards. Over the long run, the strategy that works best is occasionally bluffing when you have awful cards. It is the only way you can win if you have awful cards. Similarly, if you have bad football players, a heavy dose of every coaching trick in the book, including application of game theory, is the only way your going to win.

The worse the opponent is, the less useful the strategy is. For example, I often comment that subtle fakes rarely work in youth football because the linebackers are too blind to see them. Similarly, when you are against a dumb coach, you need to just capitalize on his stupidity. Game theory assumes the opponent is smart. If he’s not, it won’t work or it will take a much longer time to work. But generally, the coaches of your toughest opponents are smart.

Steve Jobs’ advice
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Steve Jobs, Apple CEO in 2008 commencement address at Staford University

Most confident when everyone else thinks I’m nuts
‘[Ken] Heebner is a true contrarian who says he’s most confident as an investor “when everyone else thinks I’m nuts’.” Fortune Magazine 6/9/08 [Ken Heebner is the most successful investor in recent history. He beat the market by 20% over the last ten years.]

Beaten path
The beaten path is the safest but the traffic’s terrible.
Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor

Innovation: the Attacker’s Advantage book
From the 1986 book Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage by Richard Foster: [my words to show how the statement applies equally to football offense]

most companies [football coaches] hold on to current technologies [fashionable offenses] far too long and abandon new ones far too quickly because they do not understand the deceptive curve on which new technology [offensive schemes, techniquest, and tactics] develops—slowly at first, then rapidly, then slowly again as it approaches inevitable limits.

No amount of marketing [say conditioning in football] or “back-to-basics” or fine-tuning of corporate culture [football practice] can save a company [team] if the wrong technology [scheme, technique, tactic] decision is made.

...they must be close to ruthless in cannibalizing their current products and processes [football offense] just when they are most lucrative [successful], and begin the search [for the optimal offensive scheme, techniques, and tactics] again over and over.

...one competitor [opponent defenses] must be nearing its limits, while other [offensive coache]s, perhaps less experienced, are exploring alternative technologies [contrarian football offenses] with higher limits.

[New offenses] are technological discontinuities [abrupt, dramatic changes in the way things are done]. The results of discontinuity are almost always brutal for the defenders.

The defender, lulled by the security of strong economic [past defensive success] for a long time and by conventional management [coaching] wisdom that encourages him to stay his course, finds it’s too late to respond. The final battle is swift and the leader loses. [He is] doomed by doing too little, too late.

In short, when it comes to technology [football offense] the best strategy may be to do the unfamiliar...A frightening prospect personnaly and professionally.

He need not be a scientist, but he must be somebody who understands how science and innovation develop, someone with the the conviction to insist that the compay [team] abandon its technology [old scheme] and skill base when everything in classic economic [conventional coaching wisdom] terms is going well, someone with a thick skin to endure the criticism that will come when the first steps toward new products and processes inevitably go astray or prove disappointing.

The process [of improving your current offense] can also work the other way as technological [player] limits are approached. Rather than showing more and more progress with less and less effort, each new step makes less and less progress. [In other words, the longer everyone has been using a particular approach to offense, the harder it is to improve the effectiveness of that offense within your team. At that point, it’s easier to make great progress improving your team only with a new offense that others have not mastedered.]

Moving into a new technology [approach to offense] almost always appears to be less efficient than staying with present technology [approaches to offense] because of the need to bring the new technology up to speed. [But in the long run, the new approach, when perfected, will be more effective than the old one that everyone has been defending for decades.]

The actions necessary to cross technological discontinuities [perfect a contrarian offense] frequently attract criticism, sometimes rightly so because they are often questionable and risky.

There are always people who resist change, even resent it, especially old-timers who have been working under a familiar system for many years.

Google founder
From Google founder Larry Page in the 5/12/08 Fortune article “Larry Page on How to Change the World.”

Breakthgrough ideas are around the corner but most of us are failing to take a chance on them....a world of timidity; not enough people are willing to place the big bets that could make a difference...

Almost everyone who has an idea that’s somewhat revolutionary or wildly successful was first told they’re insane.

Origin of the Species
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Tiger Woods changed his swing—knowing it would make him worse first but later, better

Page 153 of the book More Than You Know by Michael J. Mauboussin says Tiger Woods got his coach Butch Harmon to help him revamp his swing. He got worse in the short term, but better in the long term. Same is true of making significant contrarian changes to a football team.

From 7/97 to 2/99, he only won one PGA Tour event. In the spring of 1999, he said,

Winning is not always the barometer of getting better.

He then won 10 of the next 14 events in 1999. He subsequently became the first golfer to be reigning champ in all four majors simultaneously.

David F. Swensen, Chief Investment Officer, Yale university in his book Pioneering Portfolio Management
“...investment success requires sticking with positions made uncomfortable by their variance with popular opinion.”

“Playing follow the leader exposes institutional assets to substantial risk.”

“Over time, managers in efficient markets gravitate toward closet indexing, structuring portfolios with only modest deviations from the market, ensuring both mediocrity and survival.”

[“Closet indexing” means pretending to be innovative and unique while really buying almost every stock in the stock market so that your results will never deviate too much below the market in general. It is analogous to a football coach who uses the same offense as everyone else, not because he thinks it gives his team the greatest chance for success, but because he thinks it minimizes the chances that he will get criticized and/or fired. He should be fired for failure to use a unique offense.]

“Managers searching among unloved opportunities face greater chances of success, along with almost certain tirades of criticism in the event of failure.”

“Analyst earnings estimates tend to hug the consensus. Going out on a limb, while occasionally rewarding, places the analyst’s reputation at risk.”

[No guts, no glory.]

“In efforts to innovate, entrepreneurs encourage experimentation, accepting occasional shortfalls as the price paid for potential gains. Repeated failure precedes success in most entrepreneurial endeavors, requiring an organizational culture that encourages experimentation and accepts mistakes. By explicitly permitting failure but holding down its costs, investment organizations create an environment allowing managers to construct truly novel investment portfolios.”

“Bureaucrats employ conventional wisdom and seek consensus, punishing failure quickly and ruthlessly.”

“The courage to pursue nonconventional paths proves essential to building a successful investment program.”

“Long-term success requires individualistic contrarian behavior based on a foundation of sound investment principles.”

Quotes from the Mind of Bill James by Scott Gray
Author Bill James has partly revolutionized baseball by studying it in a scientific way. At first, he was ignored by the baseball establishment. More recently, his ideas have been heralded in the book Moneyball and by the fact that he was hired by the Red Sox not long before they won their first two World Series in a very long time. The book about James has a number of quotes that are good for explaining why this Website is needed.

Take nothing on looks; take everything on evidence. There is no better rule.
Charles Dickens in Great Expectations

Teams despised what they saw as outsiders, troublemakers. It was a real culture battle—tough guys against analytical guys. Career baseball people saw us as unworthy. Like in any society, there was a fear of change, a loss of control.
Randy Hendricks, Major League Baseball agent and Bill James fan

To uderstand baseball without reference to its statistics is an absurdity, like understanding American politics without reference to elections. The only choices are—use statistics carefully, or use them loosely.
Given an option, all men prefer to reject information.
Bill James

Misguided faith leads to stubborn repetition of foolish decisions.
Scott Gray

In God we trust; all others bring data.
W. Edwards Deming, renowned quality control expert who gets much credit for the quality of modern Japanese products

…it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it continues standing, “with a ghastly affectation of life,” after all life and truth has fled out of it: so loathe are men to quit the old ways, and conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new.
Thomas Carlyle in The French Revolution

…most people want to believe rather than to know, to take for granted rather than to find out
James Thurber