One moment I love in The Simpsons is a casual quip by Homer. Marge is frustrated with him not spending enough time with their kids, “one day Lisa and Bart will be out of the house and you’ll regret not spending more time with them”. Homer replies, “That’s a problem for future Homer… Man, I don’t envy that guy!” He proceeds to pour an entire bottle of vodka into a jar of mayonnaise and then downs the concoction before promptly passing out on the floor.
Hopefully we don’t take it to Homer’s level, but short-term decision-making happens to all of us. While it can be inspiring that a lot of success comes from simply showing up, it can be equally disheartening too, showing up day after day is hard, and it’s one of the reasons we fall back to behavior that only serves us in the short-term.
Fortunately, we can overcome this, by forming habits.
Say we set a goal for running five days a week, a fairly common goal. Yet why do we choose five days a week and not four, or six? The number doesn’t matter, what we want is to become a runner, the number is just a proxy for this. We set a schedule, we train rain or shine, we put in the miles; and in the process, something magical happens. Every step we take rewires our brain, imprinting our actions into our minds, and telling us a new story about who we are. Each run forms our new identity, showing us who we’re becoming. And before we know it, we’re not someone who runs five days a week, we’re a runner.
Successfully shifting our behavior shifts our identity. We don’t read twelve books a year, we’re a bookworm. We don’t wake up early, we’re a morning person. This also applies to the stories we tell ourselves about the behaviors we’re not proud of. We don’t respond to texts slowly, we’re a bad texter. We don’t eat unhealthy desserts, we have a sweet tooth.
Once you understand this mechanism where repeated behaviors form a habit, which in turn changes our identity. Achievements suddenly look less magical and more achievable. When I first ran a 50k trail race, it shattered the illusion in my head of the image of an ultra-runner. I had embodied this image I once put on a pedestal, and I had seen how it was just about getting out of the door four days a week, week over week for five months, running just a bit further each week. The more you accomplish, the more you shift your perspective from “Is it possible?”, to “Is it worth it?”. This is simultaneously exciting and depressing. The narrative shifts from “can I?” to “will I?” and the harsh realities of time set in. You can stack habits, form routines and build identities all you like, but there are still only 24 hours in a day. You can’t be a CEO, parent, athlete, musician, volunteer, friend, sibling, author, race car driver, and chef all at once. You can achieve anything, but you can’t achieve everything.
Imagine your life is a stove, and your stove has four burners. You have four burners to work with, and each can power one aspect of your life. You could put career, friends, fitness, and creative pursuits on the heat. But a romantic partner and traveling might be sat cold to the side on the counter. The time that you invest in one domain takes away from another.
But there’s one exception to this; investing.
While your career, relationships, and hobbies need you to invest time and effort to maintain them, investing is the opposite. People believe being an investor is adding another pot to your stove, tracking the stock market price daily, knowing which stocks are hot or not, actively stiring the pot to stop the volatility of the stock marketing from bubbling over into your life. You look to the side and see your pot of hobbies has been taken off the burner, being sacrificed for the promise of higher investment returns and future security. But this vision of investing as a complex, time-consuming endeavor is the vision sold by trading platforms that earn a commission off each trade you make, it’s the vision sold by CNBC pushing the latest hot stocks that need your eyeballs to maintain their viewership. This isn’t the reality of investing. Investing is incredibly simple and making one timeless investment will put you on the right path.
“Buy an index fund and leave it alone, don’t touch it, don’t even check your balance until you retire. Then when you retire, make sure you have a doctor on hand, because you’ll likely have a heart attack when you check the balance.”
Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard. The only investment company that’s operated to align with customer interests, not Wall Street’s.
Not only will setting and forgetting your investments give you peace of mind, it will give you the best returns too. The investors with the best investment returns are investors who have passed away (link). Investors who have forgotten their accounts exist come a close second.
It turns out that your stove doesn’t just come with four burners. Hidden away, down at your feet is a proving drawer. A little drawer to pull out and place your timeless investment in. And as you leave it there, unwatched and untouched, it slowly rises.
One of my favorite short stories, The Last Question by Isaac Asimov, examines a deep truth about the universe, that everything tends to chaos and we must expend energy to bring about order. Counter surfaces will become dirty if we don’t dust them, our bodies will atrophy if we don’t exercise them, and the earth will become uninhabitable when the sun eventually burns out. Even our solar system will become incapable of sustaining life as the universe continues to expand, growing colder and colder. At each step, humanity can survive through expending energy to escape and enduring, but the end is coming. We don’t have an answer to the last question.
But we’ve got five billion years left on our sun, the rest of our lifetimes to spend as we see fit. We answer the question of how we’ll spend our lives by how we spend our days, what’s on our burner shows us our priorities. We’ll continue to battle with the reality of the universe, trying to cook up more than our burners can hold, as is the human condition.
But when life gets overwhelming, we can think of our timeless investment hidden away in the proving drawer, growing untouched for when we need it. And in that, we can find a moment of solace.
