My peers and teachers have always known me as a good writer. In school, my grades displayed this to all around me. But I had no idea what I was doing.
Ever since I can remember I hated school even though I was an excellent student. I found school to be absent of individual freedom and creativity. School held me back from pursuing my passions to their fullest extent.
Excelling in school, I was simply a master at playing the educational game of achieving highly with little to no effort. And for this reason, I had no incentive to improve. My good enough was excellent. I was able to barf words into an essay in less than an hour and receive the highest grade possible. I was awarded for being complacent.
I was great at following a rubric, but didn’t understand how to write.
Now, I have always loved ideas. Especially, when I began to see the influence they had on my life. Tim Ferriss eloquently states that “philosophy (ideas) is an operating system for making better decisions in life.” As a teenager, the more I thought about myself and the world around me, the more my life improved. My self-esteem increased in proportion to my self-awareness.
This stemmed from thinking critically about my life in the form of writing. The benefits that came from this grew my desire to write and understand the world. I had a burning desire to learn and improve; no one was telling me to write for a grade and I loved it. Because I wanted to write, I quickly improved and retained the knowledge I gained versus losing it after the test.
And, I improved my writing by writing. I like to funnily say that I learned to write by writing a book, but seriously I did. It was the desire to share my understanding with others in order to improve their lives that pushed me to write. This is my goal for what I’m writing now.
Putting my education into my own hands has granted me an education full of learning. Again, something I can’t say about school. It took me nineteen years of being a “good” writer to understand when to start a new paragraph, why to cut the fat off of my writing, or the difference between effect and affect or there, their, and they’re.
Moreso, I had to learn how to write for an audience. Ideas must be explained thoroughly and of interest to the audience to be of any value. Through writing, I am learning to sell, not by majoring in marketing, but by having something that I want people to know.
And finally, learning to actually write has improved my cognitive ability more than school ever had. Writing is thinking! Today, I am comfortable in new, cognitively difficult situations. My cognitive ability is the best it has ever been, and as my cognitive competence increases so does my confidence. Once I put my education into my own hands, my world expanded beyond what I could have imagined prior.
I have always been intrigued by attempting to predict the future and create something from nothing. This is found, not to the full extent, in investing.
Investing is a fundamentally creative, ever-changing game that can fit different styles and appetites for risk. It is also an occupation that anyone can begin but still challenges those who have been doing it for decades on Wall Street. With this, investing is fun!
Competing against market averages, other investors, and most often, your past returns, investing is a game. This game is defined with the common goal of assessing the financial markets to grow wealth. But what makes investing exciting is that there are infinite ways to both achieve this goal and lose all of your money. Moreso, investing is not limited to trading securities, but can be broadened to owning real estate properties, collecting stamps, trading currency pairs, and much else.
Now, to analyze the market value and conditions of assets, investors use three methods or more often than not, a combination of them. These are fundamental, technical, and quantitative analysis. Briefly, fundamental analysis is concerned with why the price is what it is while technical and quantitative analysis are concerned with what the price is. To accomplish this, the fundementalist needs to have a broad understanding of business, history, environmental, social, and political factors. While on the other hand, the technicians and “quants” utilize a combination of mathematics, psychology, economics, and computer science to predict the price action of an asset.
Investing, requiring a broad, up-to-date knowledge base, creates a game that is never the same. Each day, there is more knowledge for the individual investor to digest and understand. A successful investor must have a broad knowledge base themself or be a member of a team with an extensive cumulative knowledge base. This is related to the “T” theory of knowledge that I first heard from author and entrepreneur, Tim Ferriss (YouTube). To explain, one should have a broad, general knowledge (that is the upper horizontal line of the T) and a deep understanding of a specific field (the vertical line of the T). This general knowledge allows the individual to create new insights into a specific field, in this case investing.
But, circling back to investing never being the same, experienced investors actually understand that history tends to repeat itself. The challenge then is to decipher the current state of the market and apply it to a past event. Still, this requires an extensive knowledge base of historical events.
Now, because investing is a constantly evolving game with financial rewards, it is fun! Also, it is easy to begin investing today but nearly impossible to master. Investors who have worked on Wall Street for decades are still challenged and faced with new situations.
Investing is a dynamic culmination of many intricate fields. There is always more to know and more money to be made. Have fun and build yourself a better financial future!
Beep… Beep… Beep Beep… I throw my sheets to my left, climbing out of bed. Stumbling to my alarm clock, I bend over and press snooze.
Drawing every last second of sleep I can get, I snuggle in the leftover warmth yet wrestle in my mind.
Why should I get out of bed?
It’s so warm and soft.
You should get more work done on the book.
Relax, you don’t have anywhere to be.
You should go to the gym later.
But that’s hard.
Want to call a friend later?
I just want to sleep.
Beep Beep Beep… Beep Beep Beep. Climbing out of bed, I slide the clock to the off position, and retreat back to comfort.
My eyes slowly crack as the high sun creeps through blinds. I take a moment to find my bearings. Scanning to my right I see 9:52am.
“So, today is happening.” It will be a day of yesterday and the day before. I will do the same work. I will listen to the same intermittent burst of the heating system. And, I will be with the same people: me, myself, and I, because is there anyone else to see?
I don’t have anywhere to be. No one is telling me what to do. I am accountable to no one. I must motivate myself.
For the better part of January, my life could often be described as isolated and monotonous. Without variety in my routine and a close community, I would go through the philosophical struggle of questioning why I’m doing what I’m doing on a daily basis. No one was telling me what to do. I didn’t have to be anywhere. I was completely free. Free to do whatever I want, and also as I learned, free to do whatever I want. This was bad. The absolute freedom I had allowed me to optimize my life for myself and forget about anything else. The isolation and monotony that characterized January easily led to loneliness and boredom on a bad day, which in turn slipped into depression. I don’t mean to scare anyone, but that is simply how it was.
Still, I have always enjoyed being alone. But as Edward Abbey says in Desert Solitaire, “There are times when solitaire becomes solitary, an entirely different game, a prison term, and the inside of the skull as confining and unbearable as the interior of the house-trailer on a hot day.” Sometimes I want to be alone, sometimes I want to be with other people, and sometimes I am alone yet want to be with others. An overdue, unfulfilled desire for community is challenging to bear.
Despite the hardship of this time, I would not change a thing. This is how I’ve wanted my life to be ever since I can remember: free. I am doing work that I love that will eventually help other people. I am challenged intellectually on a daily basis. I can’t say this about school. I am growing, even if that means suffering a little.
And to update today, I am working a job that I enjoy and challenges me; I continue to grow personally through all of the projects I am working on and love; and I am integrated in a community that I cannot say enough good things about. Also I’m a shred bum at a ski resort! I needed to find something to fill my time other than myself and a strong, present community. I’ve found it.
Everyday I come across new ideas, quotes, overheard conversations, and unexpected experiences that I want to tell to others. I may find the solution to a problem I’m working on while at the gym or hear a woman yell something hilarious in the grocery store. Ideas and experiences go as quickly as they come. I can’t predict when something is going to happen that I want to remember.
Out of the necessity of wanting to remember the things that happen in my life for future use, I have developed a system. This system splits the ideas and experiences I have into the processes of capture and reference.
Pocketbook
To capture information in the moment, I carry a pocketbook and pencil with me at all times. In this small book, I jot down anything and everything that I want to when it occurs to me. Writing things down when they occur is critical to my memory because ideas can slip away in an instant, especially in the age of information. For this reason, it is key to have the pocketbook readily available.
Prior to the pocketbook, I used to text myself to accomplish the same goal. I evolved, however, because I don’t want to use my phone for what I don’t have to. In addition, writing is known to boost memory retention and understanding. A physical bond with the ethereal realm of ideas is established when I write versus type. I have noticed that my memory has improved from physical writing.
Commonplace box
Next, writing ideas and experiences in the moment has no value if I cannot efficiently reference them in the future. So, inspired by prolific author Ryan Holiday, I began to keep a commonplace book.
A commonplace box is a collection of note cards on which singular ideas, quotes, stories, etc., are written. Everything I write from my pocketbook, along with marginalia from books, gets a notecard. These notecards are then organized by their labeled theme. For example, if I want to write about nature I can peruse all of the note cards I have about nature. The ability to organize all of the information I collect by theme has increased my efficiency tenfold.
The notecard system evolved from my disorganized collection of loose paper and notebooks. I was overwhelmed when I wanted to find a vaguely remembered nugget of information in the mess of paper and notebooks. Specifically, the research for my upcoming book is in two notebooks, organized only by time. To illustrate, I must flip through pages and pages, guessing when I wrote it down in proportion to other information, to find a quote. This old system is incredibly inefficient. For my next book, I will use the notecard system to organize my research and planning.
The combination of a pocketbook and commonplace box has dramatically increased my creative output. It also has allowed me to learn more in a faster time. Due to the system, I have an integrated web of information that continually branches. As I know more, I can learn more.
But this system or any system for capturing and referencing ideas and experiences will benefit anyone, not just writers. We all talk to people, solve problems, have new experiences, give advice, and maybe, tell funny jokes. All of these daily endeavors can be improved by having a personal catalog of past ideas and experiences to reference. And, if we can improve the things we do everyday, we will undoubtedly improve our life.
My life has improved exponentially from this system, and I’m sure yours will too, whatever you do. Give it a try!
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