There's an old saying: "If five people tell you you're drunk, go lie down."

Probably good advice. But I'm not sure it's always good investment advice.

I find a deal I like. The contractor doesn't like it. The broker thinks I'm paying too much. The lender doesn't love it. My partner thinks the rehab will run over. Somebody else thinks I'm crazy.

Five people. Time to lie down? Maybe. But then I think about chess. A computer like Deep Blue could examine an enormous number of possibilities. Fischer couldn't. A great chess player doesn't win by consciously calculating every possible move. He sees something. One position. One weakness. One move that other people don't see. That's part of what we call genius.

And investing has its version of that. Sometimes everybody sees an ugly building and one person sees what it could become. Everybody thinks a neighborhood is dead and one person understands what's about to change. Everybody walks away from a problem and one investor realizes he knows exactly how to solve it. If I always need consensus, I'll never do anything that requires seeing something before everybody else sees it.

But there's one slight problem with this theory: am I Bobby Fischer? More specifically: am I a genius.... or am I just the sixth drunk guy?

That's a much harder question. Because “everybody else is wrong” feels wonderful when I'm right. It also happens to be exactly what an idiot says while he's losing money. So maybe counting opinions isn't enough. Five people who spent ten minutes looking at my deal shouldn't necessarily outweigh twenty years of experience.

But suppose the contractor hates my rehab number. The broker hates my ARV. The lender hates my exit. The property manager hates my rent assumptions. Now four different people aren't repeating the same objection. They're finding four different holes in my boat. That's harder to explain away. And maybe that's the distinction I need.

Genius isn't ignoring everybody else. Genius is seeing something they don't, and being able to explain what it is. If my entire argument is “Trust me. I see something,” I should probably be careful. What do I know that they don't? What experience am I relying on? What fact makes their conclusion wrong? And most importantly: what would somebody have to show me for me to change my mind? Because if the answer is nothing, I'm not analyzing the deal anymore. I'm defending it.

Sometimes five people tell me I'm drunk and they're wrong. Sometimes I really am Kasparov looking at the winning move. But before I bet my money on that explanation, I should probably ask myself one more question: "Drago, what makes you so damn sure you're the genius in this story?"