Richer, Wiser, Happier
Click here to buy the book.🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Richer, Wiser, Happier distills wisdom from interviews with over forty of the world’s greatest investors, revealing how they achieved success in both markets and life.
The book highlights that the principles for building wealth often extend to broader life lessons, offering a deeper understanding of what it means to live well.
Featuring insights from legendary figures like Charlie Munger, Howard Marks, and Sir John Templeton, as well as rising stars like Mohnish Pabrai, Nick Sleep, and Guy Spier, it delivers invaluable strategies and timeless wisdom to enrich you financially, professionally, and personally.
🧠 Key Takeaways
The key to successful investing is mastering the art of doing less. That sounds easy enough, but doing nothing is a lot more difficult than most people realize.
Building wealth isn’t just about getting rich. Sure, it’s nice to be able to buy nice things, but beyond the necessities, material possessions pale in comparison to the real prize: full control over your time.
Sometimes, successful investing requires standing alone in your beliefs, even when the majority sees things the opposite way that you do.
To be a successful investor, it’s not enough to understand accounting and economics—you need to study history, psychology, human behavior, and other subjects to fully grasp how markets move.
Periods of fear, or pessimism, will eventually give way to periods of greed, or optimism — and neither period lasts forever.
There is strength in numbers. When faced with uncertainty, whether in life or in the stock market, sticking with the crowd feels like the less risky choice.
Low-quality investment products will always exist because people will always want answers spoon-fed to them, and they will always be looking for the shortcut to building wealth.
By knowing where you don’t have an edge, you gain a clearer sense of direction on where to focus your investments and, just as importantly, where to steer clear.
The market is in a constant state of flux, always gyrating in response to the collective emotions of its participants. Because it’s based on human behavior, the stock market is inherently unpredictable, which is why you should strive to build a well-balanced portfolio that can weather any storm.
People are naturally drawn to riskier investment strategies because it’s more exciting to talk about winning big on a long-shot bet. But the reality is that luck plays a huge role in these kinds of bets, and more often than not, luck is not on your side.
In the end, the best investors aren’t the ones who chase whatever’s hot. The best investors stay committed to their strategy, even when the market makes them look dumb for a while.
At the end of the day, the ability to delay gratification is what separates the winners from the losers. It’s the difference between those who reach the top of the hill and those who never take the first step.
When you first get into investing, you think you need to keep tabs on every little thing that happens in the market and with your holdings. But soon enough, you realize it’s impossible to keep up with everything—and most of it doesn’t really matter anyway.
It doesn’t take a genius or someone with a super high-level IQ to be successful in life or any specific pursuit. The real key is just making progress—over and over again.
It’s incredible how much better your life can be when you’re able to be honest with yourself and admit when you’re wrong. The inability to do so can be detrimental in so many ways—it can keep you in a bad relationship, prevent you from breaking bad habits, and inflate your ego to the point of self-righteousness, among other things.
✍️ Memorable Quotes
“There are no prizes for frenetic activity. Rather, investing is mostly a matter of waiting for these rare moments when the odds of making money vastly outweigh the odds of losing it.”
One of the counterintuitive truths about investing is that it rewards patience, not activity.
It’s not like most areas of life, where the more effort you put in, the more you get out. When it comes to building wealth, less is often more.
For professional money managers, the pressure to constantly tweak and refine is understandable. After all, how do you justify your fees if you’re not doing something?
But this activity only serves to appease clients rather than to improve returns. In reality, it can even be detrimental to performance.
For the rest of us, the lesson is this: wealth is built with time, not with constant action.
Time is the secret ingredient that allows your investments to grow. It gives the power of compounding a chance to work, but it only does if you let it.
At the end of the day, the key to successful investing is mastering the art of doing less. That sounds easy enough, but doing nothing is a lot more difficult than most people realize.
“In recent years, it’s become almost an article of faith that it’s impossible to beat the market over the long run. But Pabrai, thanks to Buffett and Munger, had found a formula for outperformance. As we’ve seen, the key principles were not that difficult to identify and clone. Be patient and selective, saying no to almost everything. Exploit the market’s bipolar mood swings. Buy stocks at a big discount to their underlying value. Stay within your circle of competence. Avoid anything too hard. Make a small number of mispriced bets with minimal downside and significant upside.”
The statistic that 90-something percent of investors don’t beat the market gets thrown around a lot.
People often use it to justify sticking with ETFs (“If most people can’t do it, why bother trying?”) or to critique those who opt for a different approach, like picking individual stocks (“If most people can’t do it, who do you think you are to try?”).
What’s interesting, though, is that so far, my portfolio is beating the market. That’s not my primary goal as an investor, but it certainly is a nice bonus.
Since October 15th, 2020, my portfolio has delivered an annualized return of 17.15%, compared to the S&P 500’s 15.68%. While this could change over time, it’s a strong start.
I attribute (at least some of) this success to adopting the principles I picked up from studying people like Pabrai, Buffett, and Munger—distant mentors of mine on this investing journey.
I focus on investing in companies I understand, buying them when they appear undervalued, and holding onto them for the long haul. As a dividend investor, holding long-term is really the only option.
Despite the statistic that most professional money managers don’t beat the market, I’m glad I decided to throw my hat in the ring. So far, it’s worked out well and serves as proof that you don’t need a formal finance background to succeed in investing.
If you’re willing to learn and put in the effort, anything is possible.
Admittedly, it’s also satisfying to prove the skeptics wrong. It’s hard dealing with people who give up before they even start.
You’ll come across a lot of those people, especially when you put yourself out there on the Internet, but that kind of defeatist mindset won’t get you far in any area of life.
Applying their logic elsewhere:
If most weightlifters don’t become Mr. Olympia, why bother stepping into the gym?
If most runners don’t win the Boston Marathon, why even go for a jog?
If most YouTubers don’t reach 1,000 subscribers, why start a channel at all?
At the end of the day, you’ll never know what you can achieve unless you try.
Even if there comes a point where my portfolio underperforms the market, this process has already been worth it. I’ve learned so much along the way, and the experience of hand-selecting investments has been deeply rewarding.
Plus, I’ve had a lot of fun throughout the journey—something people often forget when talking about investing.
“Munger says he doesn’t care about being rich. What he really cares about is having independence. I fully endorse that. What the money gives you is the ability to do what you want to do in the way you want to do it…and that’s a tremendous benefit.”
When you get to the root of it, I think this same idea is what drives a lot of investors.
Because we understand the power of compounding and the incredible role that time plays in it, we have an inherent understanding of the value of time itself.
We only have so much of it, and if we want to maximize it and truly make the most of our lives, then we need independence. Freedom matters more than anything.
It’s why building wealth isn’t just about getting rich. Sure, it’s nice to be able to buy nice things, but beyond the necessities, material possessions pale in comparison to the real prize: full control over your time.
What’s interesting is that more freedom tends to lead to more fulfillment. When you have the ability to spend your time on what actually matters to you, the want to spend money on frivolous things fades away.
If you feel an inner fulfillment—or as Warren and Charlie would say, if you rank high on your own inner scorecard—then you don’t need to chase happiness through external, material sources. You just lose interest in it.
Instead, you reach a point where you no longer feel like you’re lacking anything. You shift from feeling like you never have what you want to feeling content with everything you have. What more could you ask for?
“I’ve come to regard Templeton’s wartime bet as one of the boldest and most prescient investments in history—a triumph of both intellect and character. Despite his inexperience, he understood enough about economic history, financial markets, and human nature to recognize that overwhelming pessimism would eventually give way to unbridled optimism. Even in the darkest of times, he never forgot that the sun also rises.”
Templeton’s wartime bet, referenced in the quote, was a series of bold investments he made during World War II.
After Germany’s invasion of Poland, he recognized that the world was plunging into war and that the U.S. would inevitably be drawn in. But instead of only seeing risk, he saw opportunity.
Templeton reasoned that “maybe ninety percent” of American businesses would see higher demand and less competition during wartime. Many of these companies were still struggling in the aftermath of the Great Depression, with their stocks beaten down and trading for less than a dollar.
He believed that because so many of these businesses were on the brink of failure, even a slight improvement in their fortunes could have a big impact on their share prices.
With that in mind, he placed the contrarian bet of all contrarian bets—investing in 104 American companies that had been devastated by the Depression.
It was a move few others had the courage to make, but when all was said and done, he made a profit on 100 out of the 104 stocks and saw returns of around five times his original investment in the span of five years.
According to Templeton, this was just “simple arithmetic.” But what gave him the conviction to make this bet wasn’t just his ability to crunch numbers—it was his deep understanding of history, markets, and human nature.
He knew that extreme pessimism never lasts forever and that when fear is at its peak, opportunity tends to follow.
To me, there are three key lessons to be learned from Templeton’s wartime bet:
Sometimes, successful investing requires standing alone in your beliefs, even when the majority sees things the opposite way that you do.
To be a successful investor, it’s not enough to understand accounting and economics—you need to study history, psychology, human behavior, and other subjects to fully grasp how markets move.
Periods of fear, or pessimism, will eventually give way to periods of greed, or optimism — and neither period lasts forever.
“Most people are naturally drawn to investments that are already successful and popular with the herd, whether it’s a high-flying stock or fund or a rapidly growing country. But if a sunny future is already reflected in the price of the asset, then it’s probably a bet for suckers.”
The question worth asking here is: Why are most people drawn to investments that are already popular and have already seen share price success?
At its core, it’s just human nature. We are hard-wired to follow the herd because, for most of history, survival depended on it.
There is strength in numbers. When faced with uncertainty, whether in life or in the stock market, sticking with the crowd feels like the less risky choice.
Beyond that, we are also hard-wired with the fear of missing out. When we see others—friends, neighbors, even strangers on social media—making money on a high-flying stock, it triggers something inside of us: If they have it, I want it too.
If we don’t join in, we feel like we’re being left behind. It’s the same psychological force that fuels lifestyle inflation—the need to upgrade our spending as those around us do.
If everyone else is buying bigger houses, nicer cars, or the latest iPhone, we feel pressure to do the same. The only difference is that, in investing, FOMO doesn’t just lead to overspending—it can lead to financial ruin.
This creates a dangerously vicious cycle. If a stock gains momentum, more people pile in, which pushes the price higher, which attracts even more buyers. And repeat.
The cycle perpetuates until the stock eventually reaches a point where the valuation is too far gone from reality. And reality always comes home to roost, so the bubble must inevitably pop.
That’s why these kinds of high-flying stocks are often “a bet for suckers.” The higher the share price climbs, the more fragile the investment becomes.
And when the bubble does eventually pop, those who bought in just to feel like they belonged are often the ones left holding the bag, wondering what just happened?
They didn’t invest based on fundamentals. They blindly followed the crowd, believing there was safety in numbers. But in the stock market, the crowd is often the most dangerous place to be.
“The investment world is filled with people who believe (or pretend) that they can see what the future holds. They include smooth-talking “market strategists” from Wall Street brokerage firms who confidently predict the precise percentage of the stock market in the coming year, instead of acknowledging that they have no idea whether the market will go up or down; equity analysts who provide quarterly earnings estimates for the companies they cover, thereby feeding the illusion that profits are consistent and predictable, not lumpy and erratic; managers of macro hedge funds who place aggressive wagers on swings in currencies, interest rates, and anything else that moves; TV pundits and financial journalists who claim with a straight face to know what the latest (and mostly inexplicable) market fluctuations portend for investors.”
As much as I love the stock market, when I think about Wall Street and the people who represent it, there’s an air of distrust—an unmistakable scent of snake oil salesmen.
This is a big reason why I don’t watch financial news shows like Squawk Box. It’s also why I skip any “forward guidance” questions during earnings calls.
What’s the point of asking management if they think they’ll land at the high, mid, or low end of their guidance? It’s not like they can predict the future.
This is also precisely why I avoid almost all investment products—except for simple, straightforward, low-cost ETFs like VOO and SCHD.
With that said, I doubt I’ll ever invest in covered-call ETFs again. Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I tend to think these products are designed more to build wealth for the companies that create them than for the investors who buy them.
Generally speaking, the higher the yield and the more complex the fund’s strategy, the more likely I am to avoid it altogether.
Still, the types of individuals mentioned in the quote will always have a place in the stock market. People will always want answers spoon-fed to them, and they will always be looking for the shortcut to building wealth.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t exist. But often, we have to learn that the hard way.
“Recognizing that we can’t forecast the future might sound like a disheartening admission of weakness. In reality, it’s a tremendous advantage to acknowledge our limitations and operate within the boundaries of what’s possible. Out of weakness comes strength.”
Charlie Munger once said he only liked to play games where he knew he had an advantage. Other investors, like Mohnish Pabrai, have shared similar sentiments.
So how do you figure out where you have an advantage? Well, one of the best ways is to invert the question and ask yourself: Where do I not have an advantage?
In other words, to identify what you do know and where your strengths are, start by crossing off the things you’re certain you don’t know. For example, I don’t understand how to analyze banks, so I don’t invest in them.
In the short term, this exercise can certainly be humbling. But in the long run, it’ll save you from making a lot of mistakes.
By knowing where you don’t have an edge, you gain a clearer sense of direction on where to focus your investments and, just as importantly, where to steer clear.
In a world where the future is uncertain and unknowable, your best odds of success come from playing to your strengths. It’s a lot like poker: you have a much better chance of winning the hand if you go into the flop with strong cards.
Sure, you can get lucky with a weak hand—but relying on luck isn’t a winning long-term strategy. In the long run, stacking the odds in your favor beats relying on luck every time.
“Financially, the inevitability of change has important implications. For a start, we need to acknowledge that the current economic climate and market trajectory are temporary phenomena, just like everything else. So we should avoid positioning ourselves in such a way that we’re dependent on their continuing along the same path.”
During prolonged periods where stocks only seem to go up, it’s easy to forget that things can move in the opposite direction—and in a big way.
The same is true on the downside. When the market seems to be in a relentless decline, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, as an earlier quote tells us, “Even in the darkest of times... the sun also rises.”
The market is in a constant state of flux, always gyrating in response to the collective emotions of its participants. Because it’s based on human behavior, the stock market is inherently unpredictable, which is why I believe in building a well-balanced portfolio that can weather any storm.
For long-term investors—which I think most of us are—an all-weather portfolio is the key to surviving these inevitable and perpetual cycles.
To me, that means holding a wide range of stocks: high-growth companies like Visa and Williams Sonoma, steady stalwarts like Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble, and reliable high-yielders like Blue Owl Capital Corporation and Altria Group.
This balance offers what I consider the best of all worlds—respectable share price performance on the upside, ample defensiveness in downturns, and a healthy mix of current income with long-term dividend growth.
Many people assume the goal of investing is to knock it out of the park every time, and they think that’s the only way you can beat the market.
But I see it differently. For me, building lasting wealth is about survival.
I want to be the last man standing—which means building a portfolio that can withstand anything the market throws at it.
“Investing is about preserving more than anything. That must be your first thought, not looking for large gains. If you achieve only reasonable returns and suffer minimal losses, you will become a wealthy man and will surpass any gambler friends you may have. This is also a good way to cure your sleeping problems.”
I really appreciate this quote, and I think it runs completely opposite to how most investors think these days. Many of them are chasing explosive returns instead of something more sustainable, and I understand why.
Part of it comes down to a lack of patience—people want what they want, and they want it now. But as I’ve written about at length, nothing worthwhile or lasting happens that way.
It’s also just a lot sexier to invest in companies that could 10x or 100x your money in a short period—like the PLTRs and TSLAs of the world have done in recent years.
But the reality is, your win rate with those kinds of gambles will be incredibly low—especially as a newer investor—and they come with a lot of stress and frustration.
Another big factor to consider is that many investors have only experienced a market that goes up—and in a big way. When that’s all you’ve ever known, it’s easy to assume that’s just how things work.
I think it’ll take a big correction to snap a lot of these thrill-seeking investors out of it. When that happens, they’ll develop a deeper appreciation for the importance of preservation.
And they’ll probably get a much-needed reality check on their actual risk tolerance—which, for many, is currently set way higher than it should be.
“When we try to explain investing success, we’re naturally drawn to racier aspects of the game. It’s more fun to tell tales of bold bets that earned billions than to drone on about all of the accidents that never happened. But accident avoidance matters because it’s so hard to recover from disaster. Consider the brutal mathematics of financial loss: if you lose 50 percent on an ill-considered bet, you’ll need a 100 percent gain just to get back to where you started.”
People are naturally drawn to riskier investment strategies because it’s more exciting to talk about winning big on a long-shot bet.
There’s a certain appeal to saying you defied the odds, and (consciously or not) you want people to think you’re smart and talented because of it.
But the reality is that luck plays a huge role in these kinds of bets, and more often than not, luck is not on your side.
For every Tesla (TSLA) or Palantir (PLTR), there are dozens—if not hundreds—of other stocks that went the opposite way, losing people a lot of money in the process.
What many investors tend to forget is that there’s more than one way to outperform the market.
Everyone is so focused on beating it on the upside that they rarely think about how to beat it on the downside. This is just as important, if not more so, when you consider the math: A 50% loss means you need to double your money just to break even.
If you incorporate some defensiveness into your portfolio, you won’t have to claw your way back up when things go south. And not having to make up for huge losses is often what leads to market outperformance in the long run.
Ironically, by focusing less on risk-taking and more on risk management, you might actually end up getting the results you were after—without having to take on unnecessary risk to get there.
“It’s particularly hard to keep the faith when you’re losing money or have lagged the market for several years. You start to wonder if your strategy still works or if something has fundamentally changed. But the truth is no strategy works all of the time. So these periods of financial and psychic suffering are an unavoidable part of the game. Inevitably, weaker players fall by the wayside, creating more opportunity for those with the sturdiest principles and the strongest temperaments.”
Confidence comes easy when your stocks are going up, when your dividends are rolling in, and when everything seems to be clicking. But when your portfolio starts lagging, confidence can disappear just as quickly as it came.
You start wondering: What happened? Am I doing something wrong? What am I missing?
Those are all important questions to ask, but the fact of the matter is that no strategy works all the time. Every investor goes through periods where they underperform—even Warren Buffett. And when that happens, the investors who don’t jump ship are the ones who ultimately come out ahead.
Dividend investors know this feeling all too well. Over the last few years, tech stocks have gone on an absolute tear, pushing the market higher and higher while making everything else—especially dividend stocks—look lame by comparison.
And, of course, when that happens, people start hating on dividend investing. They say it doesn’t work, it’s too slow, and it’s an inefficient way to build wealth.
But here’s the thing: people can be too quick to forget that the market doesn’t go up forever. When it eventually turns—and it will—you can rest assured that many of the same people who talked down on dividend stocks will start flocking to them for their stability.
This cycle repeats over and over. When the market is hot, dividend stocks are too boring. When share prices are heading south, people pile into dividend stocks.
The bottom line is that every strategy has its rough patches. If you want to succeed long-term, you’ve got to be able to sit through them.
In the end, the best investors aren’t the ones who chase whatever’s hot. The best investors stay committed to their strategy, even when the market makes them look dumb for a while.
As the quote says, “These periods of financial and psychic suffering are an unavoidable part of the game”—and the best investors know that staying the course is what truly pays off in the long run.
“For most individuals, the best strategy is not the one that’s going to get you the highest return. Rather, the ideal is a good strategy that you can stick with even in bad times.”
At first glance, this seems like a counterintuitive idea. Isn’t the whole point of investing to get the highest possible return? Isn’t that how you win the game?
In a sense, yes—but only if you can actually stick with it long enough to let those returns play out. It isn’t just about what your returns are. It’s also about how you get them.
Maybe this is getting a little mystical, but your portfolio is, in many ways, an extension of yourself.
Think about the businesses you own. You didn’t just randomly choose them (at least, I hope not).
You picked them based on your worldview, your beliefs about the future, and what makes a company worth owning. In that sense, you’re a collector of assets, and the assets you own reflect your unique perspective on the world.
The thing is, though, if your portfolio doesn’t align with who you are, sticking with it becomes incredibly difficult. And that brings us to one of the biggest problems investors face—adherence.
The turnover rate in today’s portfolios has gotten ridiculously high. A recent SmartAsset article noted that the average holding period for stocks is only 5.5 months, which is an insane decline from decades past. I’d argue that at least part of the inability to adhere comes from a misalignment of strategy.
In other words, a lot of investors are playing the wrong game. Instead of building a portfolio that actually makes sense for them, they’re copying strategies that don’t really fit their personality or temperament.
And social media has only amplified the problem. It’s never been easier to copy someone else’s portfolio, see which stocks are hot, watch what other people are making money on, and just assume that’s the way to go.
But investing isn’t a one-size-fits-all game. What works for someone else won’t necessarily work for you.
You can’t really blame people, though. Many don’t spend enough time thinking deeply about what kind of investor they actually are. They prefer to just follow the crowd—it’s easier.
The problem is that investing without a clear understanding of why you own what you own can be catastrophic when the market inevitably takes a turn for the worse.
At the end of the day, winning in investing comes down to one thing: survival. And survival isn’t about outpacing everyone else’s returns or following someone else’s strategy—it’s about outlasting.
The only way to outlast is to invest in alignment with yourself. Because when the market turns, and it always does, the investors who come out the other side aren’t the ones playing someone else’s game.
They’re the ones who developed a strategy they could actually stick with—through the ups, the downs, and everything in between.
“In a high-speed era dominated by short-term thinking, this capacity to defer rewards is one of the most powerful contributors to success, not only in markets, but in business and life.”
It’s human nature to want what you want—and to want it now—but that’s not how success works.
There are no shortcuts. No magic pill. You have to endure the long, tedious process of building something one step at a time.
Dividend investing is the perfect metaphor for this. You can’t just start investing and suddenly be making $100,000 a year in dividend income.
First, you have to make $1. Then $10. Then $100. Then $1,000. And so on.
Believe me, I wish it worked differently. Not a day goes by that I don’t dream about living off my dividends. And I hate how long it takes to get there.
But that’s precisely what makes it worthwhile! If it were easy—as they say—everyone would do it.
And if success were just handed to you on a silver platter, it wouldn’t feel nearly as meaningful. The truth is, without the struggle, you wouldn’t appreciate the reward.
At the end of the day, the ability to delay gratification is what separates the winners from the losers. It’s the difference between those who reach the top of the hill and those who never take the first step—and you can’t delay gratification without three things:
Vision – Knowing where you’re going and why it matters.
Patience – Believing that it’s not a question of if, but when.
Discipline – Taking small, consistent steps forward, even when progress feels nonexistent.
This timeless principle doesn’t just apply to investing. It applies to everything worth having—getting in shape, building a business, learning Italian, you name it.
The unfortunate truth is that delaying gratification is never easy. It will always be hard.
But one of the secrets to a happy and successful life is that the right things are usually the hard things. The right thing to do is rarely the thing you want to do in the moment. But in the long run, you’ll always be better off for it.
“Sleep notes that information, like food, has a ‘sell-by’ date. But some of it is especially perishable, while some has ‘a long shelf life.’”
When you first get into investing, you think you need to keep tabs on every little thing that happens in the market and with your holdings. But soon enough, you realize it’s impossible to keep up with everything—and most of it doesn’t really matter anyway.
News outlets, YouTube channels, Twitter pages, and financial media sites exist to publish content—that’s how they make money. But that doesn’t mean you need to consume it all, and it certainly doesn’t mean all of it is valuable.
As a YouTube creator myself, I can say firsthand that a lot of it is just noise. My own videos are no exception.
Most of what you consume on a daily basis has a short shelf life. Why the market went up today, which earnings reports are coming after the bell, why Crocs rallied this afternoon—none of it really matters.
By the way, these are actual headlines I pulled from Seeking Alpha’s Trending News section. And as much as I love Seeking Alpha, most of the news and analysis on there has a short shelf life too.
So if most daily financial news is just noise, where should you focus your attention?
In my opinion: books, quarterly and annual reports, investor presentations, Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters, and any video from Aswath Damodaran’s YouTube channel—just to name a few things. The common thread is that these actually make a difference in your understanding of investing and specific companies.
You don’t need to know that a hotter-than-expected PPI report caused the Nasdaq to “inch up.” You can save yourself a lot of time—and a lot of headspace—by tuning out that kind of noise and focusing on content that makes a lasting difference.
“When they analyzed companies and interviewed CEOs, Sleep and Zakaria probed for insights with a long shelf life. They sought to answer such questions as: What is the intended destination for this business in ten or twenty years? What must management be doing today to raise the probability of arriving at that destination? They referred to this way of thinking as ‘destination analysis.’”
Such simple questions, yet incredibly powerful when analyzing a business. Honestly, there’s not much more I can add—these questions just stood out to me.
Put differently: Where is this business ultimately headed? And just as importantly, is management making the right moves today to get there?
“Resounding victories tend to be the result of small, incremental advances and improvements sustained over long stretches of time.”
I’ve always gravitated toward these “infinite games”—the ones with no finish line, where the whole point of playing is what the Japanese call Kaizen, or continuous improvement.
Investing, lifting weights, running, reading books, writing—these are all infinite games. Little by little, I chip away at them every day, making small, incremental progress.
It doesn’t always feel like much is happening in the moment, but over time, that sliver of progress compounds into something meaningful.
And that’s really the secret to anything. The secret is that there is no secret.
Just start something, keep going, and work at it consistently. Every day, you’ll be farther along than you were the day before.
It doesn’t take a genius or someone with a super high-level IQ to be successful in life or any specific pursuit. The real key is just making progress—over and over again.
“Gayner’s portfolio is built to last. It would have been much more lucrative if he’d loaded up on Amazon, Google, and Facebook. But his investment decisions—much like his approach to food and exercise—are not intended to be optimal. Rather, he’s attempting to be consistently and sustainably sensible. The cumulative effect of operating this way over three decades has been extraordinary because he has harnessed the power of long-term compounding without ever galloping ‘at such a pace’ that he would heighten ‘the odds of some catastrophic falloff.’”
One of the most common critiques I get about my portfolio is that it doesn’t have enough exposure to growth—or more specifically, to tech stocks.
People see that I own companies like Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Realty Income (O), and Procter & Gamble (PG) instead of high-flying names like Nvidia (NVDA) or Meta (META), and they assume my portfolio must be dramatically underperforming the market.
In hindsight, my returns would likely be higher if I had gone all in on something like NVDA or Bitcoin. But that’s just not how I want to invest.
I’m not interested in chasing returns or swinging for the fences. My focus is on building an all-weather portfolio—one that can hold up in any market environment.
Historically, my portfolio has delivered solid gains when the market is doing well, but more importantly, it’s been incredibly resilient during downturns. I’d much rather have that type of balance than concern myself solely with maximizing upside during bull markets.
To me, investing for maximum short-term gains feels a lot like sprinting. You can do it for a short period of time, but it’s not sustainable. And if you push it too hard, you risk burning out and blowing up your portfolio entirely.
Instead, my all-weather approach feels more like jogging in Zone 2. It’s not as fast as a full-on sprint, but it’s steady and sustainable, and it’s much easier to maintain for a long time.
Plus, I don’t have to worry about crashing and burning or making a mistake that could take me out of the game completely.
“The reluctance to reexamine our views and change our minds is one of the greatest impediments to rational thinking. Instead of keeping an open mind, we tend consciously and unconsciously to prioritize information that reinforces what we believe.”
I’m really glad I stumbled across this quote when I did. Just last night, coincidentally enough, I was talking to some friends about this exact thing.
It’s incredible how much better your life can be when you’re able to be honest with yourself and admit when you’re wrong. The inability to do so can be detrimental in so many ways—it can keep you in a bad relationship, prevent you from breaking bad habits, and inflate your ego to the point of self-righteousness, among other things.
When you think about it, there’s really no good that comes from refusing to keep an open mind. It locks your view of the world in place, unable to change—which is an odd way to live when you consider that the world itself is constantly changing.
None of us are perfect, and it seems obvious that we can be wrong from time to time, so why pretend otherwise? The sooner you acknowledge your misjudgments and mistakes, the sooner you can learn and grow from them.
Repeating that process over time is what ultimately leads to a better life. Protecting your ego in the short term isn’t worth it if it comes at the expense of your long-term betterment.
Alchemy is Rory Sutherland’s deep dive into the weird ways people make decisions, and how out-of-the-box thinking can solve problems that reason alone can’t.