The Pursuit of Luck

Pursuing luck requires more swings of the bat and the more time you spend at the plate the more swings your can make and the more home runs you can hit.

This is why short-term thinking has no place in the pursuit of luck.   You need to think longer term and hang out in lots of spaces, lots of market, doing lots of different things and over the long term.  A swing and a miss, a swing and a miss, boom a home run!  Then repeat.

The problem is that the modern world is so obsessed with short term reporting and short-term feedback loops that its hard to find the stamina to get into a long term frame of mind and structure actions around being fortuitous over the longer term.

The media is like an annoying pet parrot ranting, “poly wants a cracker” all day long.

The Dow is down 14 points,

…the dollar lost ground against the yen,

…the President has been in power for 100 days but he has not done anything about lowering the temperature of the planet.

Our health is ruined by short-term thinking.

Its just one Big Mac and Coke it won’t hurt

I will quit tomorrow

People on diets who weigh themselves every day are more likely to quit the diet because muscle mass gain and water retention give them fasle readings and cause disappointment.

The share market is not about investing in stocks anymore based on the EBIT fundamentals of the company and its strategy.  The average company’s stock on the listed US exchanges are held for just 2.8 months as high frequency traders like hedge funds set computers in motion to buy and sell high volumes of stocks.  2.8 months!

When the home lending industry forgot that’s it business was taking in a deposit and paying X interest out to deposit holders and then lending that money secured against a home at X+ margin it caused a global financial crisis.   This industry did not rally forget is just stopped thinking long term and replaced it with short term thinking associated with making profits by packaging tens of thousands of garbage mortgages into a derivatives and selling these at a commission to stupid investors who succumb to the short term promises of investment banks.

Everyday millions of people post trivial garbage on Facebook  and are offended when they do received 45 likes or comments over the breathtaking  news that are making spaghetti and meatballs for dinner tonight.

The only way the world will solve its problems of over-population, disease, famine, continual cycles of market bubbles and crashes and finite resources is by thinking long term.  The only way you will share in the wealth and satisfaction of solving these problems with disruptive technology and innovation is if you think long term.

This does not mean that you should not have short term goals, but these goals should be an incremental step toward the long term horizon, a horizon you can see but the detail of which will not be obvious until you have arrived.

What the dollar does tomorrow, where the Tokyo index finishes and whether the Governor apologies or not for visiting a strip club is short term and irrelevant nonsense.

You will be better off if you don’t fill your head with it and leave room for some considered thought about how you can make a difference over the long term and then start hanging out around long term plays.