Life design, rules for investing, and the other side of the suck (weekly wrap #012)
“When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.” - George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones“
I don’t know about you, but this past week has whooshed by in a whirlwind for me. I hope you’ve had a more equanimous week than me.
In the meantime, here’s my weekly wrap - a summary of some cool/interesting/fun things I’ve found or have been thinking about over the past week.
Enjoy!
Something I’ve been learning and thinking about
My past several weeks could be perhaps summed up with the word “crossroads”. I have had many times in the past found myself at a crossroads needing to choose between different paths in front of me.
Sometimes the choices were great and there was a sense of abundance in the choosing. Sometimes the choices were very hard, and it felt like a stack of dilemmas that amplified fear, insecurity and overwhelm.
In both cases, there are 2 things that have helped me immensely: thinking about my value action statements (more on this soon in a future post) and life design. Life design is a very general term that is pretty much what it sounds like, and I’ve been revisiting this concept.
This book summary video is something I came across in the past week for the first week and I liked it (more so than the talks online by the authors themselves).
I hope it makes you reflect and think on what you care about and gives you some inspiration to try and life your life more by design too.
Something I’m reading
I’m still working my way through this book but the thing that struck me positively about it is that it’s a great guide for investing in your life in more ways than just financial investing. Yet, it is very grounded and not overly-philosophical or metaphysical in nature either.
For example, the very first rule is “Friends Are Worth More Than Money” and Reed opens with the quote:
“When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.” —George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones“
What follows isn’t saccharine or simplistic, even if it is easy to read and succinct. It’s punchy and just makes a lot of sense about something that is so easy to take for granted in an era that - in my opinion at least - is becoming on the whole more individualistic and gamified.
I also really like rule #4, “Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There“. Here’s an excerpt:
Good investing is less about feeling good and more about being good. Ben Hogan, one of golf’s great players, once said about how to hold a golf club, “If it feels right then you are probably doing something wrong.” Investing isn’t much different.
Constant change in your portfolio creates more fees that have to be overcome in order to earn a profit. When you combine that with a strong tendency to buy things after they have become popular and their price has risen, and sell things after they have had bad news and their price has declined, then you implement a very costly plan: systematically buying high and selling low, instead of the other way around.
There are a lot of ways to make money on your investments. In my experience, the most consistently successful way is to put together a strategy that you can believe in and stick with it for a very long time. The challenge is to have faith in what you are doing and with whom you are doing it because you won’t know if you are successful for a while. But that’s okay, because it’s not how you are doing today that matters, it’s how you are doing when you need the money.
I’ll leave it to your imagination how well this translates to life beyond investments.
Something I’ve been pondering
I was listening to a podcast recently - an episode of The New Man with Tripp Lanier and his wife Alyson. It’s a good conversation overall. Something in it that got me pondering was an anecdote from teaching their young daughter to swim and she was having a hard time with it. Tripp says to her daughter, “Swimming is really fun. Learning to swim sucks.” He apparently also elaborated on it too.
The reason it resonated with me is that I think sometimes we judge something as worth doing or not worth doing based on how comfortable or uncomfortable the learning process is because we conflate even the initial learning stages with the stages that come later when we can enjoy the doing a little more freely.
Perhaps learning to do something doesn’t have to be all easy and fun and sunshine and rainbows for it to be worth it. It helps to notice how much fun, enjoyment and satisfaction might be waiting for you on the other side of the sucky phase.
Hey I’d love it if you would share this with someone you think might find it interesting. Here’s a button for you to make that very easy to do.
Thanks and have a great weekend!
Dev