The Climb

“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits.

I consider myself a high achiever. I don’t say this to brag, I simply mean that I’m a moonshot dreamer and I desire big things in life. I set high goals for myself that I genuinely expect myself to accomplish. The goals come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from fitness to relationships, to intellectual milestones and of course, most obviously, financial. But suffice it to say that I set a very high bar for myself and that also means I get disappointed (at myself) when I don’t hit my goals on schedule.

High achievers share a number of shortcomings. We set huge audacious goals for ourselves and once we set them we become impatient as to why we can’t achieve said goals fast enough. We also battle with shiny object syndrome or “monkey mind” as some like to call it.  We constantly stumble upon new and exciting ideas that lead us down rabbit holes of furious research and exploration — only to lose interest after a short period of time as we quickly move onto the next big idea.

High achievers are stubborn too. We’ve somehow brainwashed ourselves into actually believing the “failure is necessary” motivational Instagram posts that you see everywhere now and this conveniently becomes the perfect excuse when our shiny object syndrome addiction gets challenged by our spouses (but to be fair, it’s a delicate balance…).

When it comes to investing in particular, the minefield is littered with shiny objects. You hear about them all the time, from mainstream media all the way down to the cab driver that drove you to work this morning. It doesn’t help that within finance and investing exist some of the biggest egos and loudmouths of any industry out there.  It’s a character flaw that some fall prey to, that rears its ugly head when one makes money. Plus, deep down inside everyone wants to talk up their own book or the latest 10 bagger trade they just slew.

But the market humbles the best of us.

One of the most important things I’ve learned over my years of investing comes back to self-awareness. You have to really understand yourself and your limitations, and be able to acknowledge them in order to truly be successful.  

I’m a horrible day trader. I’ll admit that straight up. I don’t like to constantly be looking at the screens, and making buy and sell decisions on a whim without taking the time to do deep research. If I get put on the spot I usually get too emotional and end up making rash decisions and lose money. Day trading is not for everyone. In fact, it is not for MOST people. Don’t be fooled by what you read or hear. Only around 1% of day traders are actually successful at what they do and make money consistently over a long period of time.

Your investment approach has to match your personality. I prefer to slow the investment process down by doing deep research, building conviction and coming around to it on my own terms as opposed to chasing a fad. I’m far more suited to bet on longer-term trends and I embrace the research process patiently.  

This is ironic because it puts pressure against the high achiever in me wanting to hit my goals and targets.  I’ve agonized over wealth creation for most of my professional life and it’s forced me into adopting the get rich slowly mentality that we all know is true but don’t want to believe. I’ve never really had a “windfall” or “huge exit” in my career…it’s just been a slow, steady grind of hard work and a gradual upward trajectory of wealth creation.  

Every time I’ve tried to “hack” the investment process and piggyback off someone else’s trade, I’ve generally lost money.  Without actually doing the deep work and research and diligence myself all I was doing was gambling away my hard earned money. You can get lucky once or twice but over the long term, it just doesn’t work. Trust me on this one.

Building conviction takes a long time. It takes a lot of deep work and a lot of due diligence. After the diligence, it takes a lot of deep independent thinking to come up with an investment thesis. And after that, it involves more research. And it takes a lot of tormenting and going back and forth in your mind. A lot of agony and sleepless nights. In fact, the process of building conviction to eventually make a concentrated bet never stops. You constantly have to be reviewing your assumptions, the changes at the margin and any potential newsflow that could affect your outlook. You constantly have to be running scenario analyses and stress tests and poke holes at your assumptions.  But it’s all part of the process — the climb which I’ve grown to love and embrace.

The sooner you start embracing the climb and switch out of the get rich quick mentality, the sooner things will start happening for you. Put in the deep work and you’ll be surprised at how quickly the returns come back to you.

P.S. Next weekend I’ll be in Sydney, Australia for less than 48 hours to attend the largest startup and growth conference in the region called StartCon,  My company Explorer Equity Group will be meeting with companies and looking for potential investment from our fund and my partner Kyle Ellicott will be keynoting on stage. If you are in the area or are flying in for the conference we’ll be hosting a VIP dinner on Friday night with a small group of investors, entrepreneurs, and VCs. If you’d like to join us you can find all the details here.