Two Lessons

Recently Iveve taken up two hobbies: running and investing in stocks. They teach me surprising and contrasting lessons about life.

Running is about determination, planning and controlling your life. The stock market is all about unpredictability and not being able to control the wider world.

There's a saying that life's a marathon – I can definitely see how this is true. Running is like a simplified version of life where you can see your self doubt, self sabotage and sheer laziness at work. It's not the running that's hard, it's self management.

At the heart of self management is planning and persistence. Planning gives you a picture of the light at the end of the tunnel so that you don't lose hope. Persistence is simply tolerating immediate frustration to get to the end of the tunnel. Doing something well repeatedly is the key as it forms habit.

Without all the above, which makes up discipline, I realised I wouldn't be able to keep something good in life even if it came along and slapped me.

Actually it's not hard to understand, or even do. But most people trip up at the ‘repeatedly’ part – which is also the most important. I found it almost magical that profound changes in life are made through mundane habits like these.

I guess running is a lesson in how to order our own lives and the space within our control. By contrast the stock market is about complexity and chance.

It's unpredictable because there are so many inputs of information, forming so many combinations of outcomes – just like life itself.

Yet bafflingly it's also highly rational. Every number is based on certain criteria. In the long term there are even patterns, prompting money managers to think they can outperform the market. Of course they consistently fail.

This is also true of life. There seem to be patterns, and yet we can't predict much about the future. Chaos theory and determinists battle it out over whether things happen for a reason, and whether we can control or change fate.

The way to deal with the market is to go with the flow. Obviously it's futile to insist on it doing what I expect it to do. Yet this is what many people expect from life. You can only try to time the market and ride the waves up and down, hoping the millions of other conditions will come together fortuitously to a high. Then you sell your stock and get out quickly before those conditions dissolve again, which it will inevitably.

In life we also need to learn how to shift gears – between hard headed determination, and learning to let go, waiting for the time to be ripe.