Why I Like The Stock Market – Reason #2
I like the stock market because it defies our wiring. It trumps learned experience, divorces our inherited instruction set and introduces new paths to old goals. All that from stocks?
When we drink a glass of water, there is a certain and necessary route we’re just going to have to take. We have to take a sip. And then another. And we have to keep doing this until we’re done. Or when we read a book; we start with page one. Then move on to the next. If we set aside a portion of our income for savings, a similar pattern emerges. In other words, there’s a particular linearity to the world around us. (Hold on, I have to take a sip).
That linearity seems most obvious when we conceive time. In fact, I can’t think of anything any more thoroughly linear than that. The world and us in it would be rather different were we, after taking that first sip, at the time we would be ready for the second sip, able to take two instead. Then four the next time and so on. Or instead of reading pages as we are accustomed to, how different it would be to read them in the same fashion, one then two then four. In the current state of things, the only way we could accomplish such strange feats, would be if we could defeat the linearity that stretches them all out. One remarkable thing about investing is the general ability to do precisely this. The linearity that pervades our lives and our thinking now has an out. One dollar, later on, might make you five. (Gulp).
By the time you thoroughly endorse and ultimately adopt this mentality, having learned it from investing, you start seeing that it influences the way you think about all the other linear things around you. You grab the line and bend it. Instead of always eating elephants, you just decide one day to blow them up. Problem solved. You start thinking about how one action now can impact or introduce additional actions later, without needing to have to add those actions later. You think of ways to get the page you just read to read a page later without you having to read that page later, so strange as that might sound. (Ah…)
In the end, besides being the most useful tool I know to expedite otherwise necessary monetary paths, I think this process of thinking can be used to introduce tremendous creativity into a great many things we otherwise thought were strictly linear. I better run, I seem to have run out of water in my glass; sadly though, I merely drank it the old fashioned way.