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02 · Journey

Parallel Architectures

I started my career as a CPA, working as a tax accountant at Deloitte before moving into the world of investment. I spent three decades in financial markets, solving problems in high-stakes environments. For the last ten years of that career I was a partner at Infinity Capital, where I helped grow the business and managed day-to-day operations.

At the end of 2023, I set off on a new adventure, thinking, reading, and training for the 2024 Ironman World Championship in Kona, a race I had been working toward in one form or another since I started triathlon at fourteen.

The realization that my training and the investment framework I had developed since leaving Infinity were underpinned by the same architecture changed everything. The same types of constraints held both systems together. The same kinds of failure happened when you removed the wrong ones. Once I saw that pattern I started applying it elsewhere – companies, institutions, geopolitics. I found the same underlying structure, over and over again.

Steve Barth Steve Barth riding with the Kyle Pease Foundation
Kona Training Hawaii
The Discipline of Constraints — Staying Oriented in an Uncertain World, by Steve Barth
03 · The Book

The Discipline of Constraints

Staying Oriented in an Uncertain World

I wrote The Discipline of Constraints: Staying Oriented in an Uncertain World (Amplify Publishing, January 2027) to explore these ideas further, reading the disorienting world around us through the lens of constrained systems thinking.

Writing & newsletter
“In my writing across platforms, and in my newsletter Wondering Aloud, I search for what’s true beneath the stories, systems, incentives, and outputs we are handed. I iterate, question, and write as a practitioner, not an academic.”

I don’t have all the answers; I have a framework I think is honest and useful, and that I’m willing to test in public. The book is one expression of this work. The writing, research, workshops, and advisory engagements are others.

The deeper subject of all my work is complexity, uncertainty and staying oriented when facing both. I’m still figuring it out. That’s the whole point.