Some Thoughts on Interests Outside Investing

It’s been two weeks since I had the privilege of handling my girlfriend at Canadian Powerlifting Nationals in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. She has been training consistently and it shows. She went 9/9 and hit personal bests on all her lifts and, even, extended her provincial deadlift record. She tied for 3rd place, but the other lifter weighed in lighter meaning she placed higher. At the end of the day, she placed 4th for her age and weight class.

For those who are curious, in a powerlifting competition you get 3 attempts at each lift - Squat, Bench and Deadlift. Once your attempts are completed, they add up the best of each lift to get your total. The role of the handler is crucial. The more obvious things are loading weights in the warm-up room, attempt selection and ensuring that they are submitted within the required time. As well, you need to be plugged into the meet so your athlete can warm up with the proper cadence. You need to watch the judges to see if they are scrutinizing a specific part of the lift (like locking knees at the end of your squat). A good handler will take as much thinking away from the athlete as possible, so the athlete only focuses on executing the lifts. It’s up to you as the handler to decide how hard to push things. You can shoot for the moon or be conservative. A failed lift doesn’t count towards your total and you can only go up in weight for each lift so it’s important to pick realistic openers. I can confidently say that the attempt selections were pretty spot on.

Here I am before the meet begins mapping out attempt selections and doing some scenario planning.

What does this have to do with investing?

I was listening to the Business Brew podcast and the guest, Devin Anderson, was talking about performance in sports. He comes from finance, but has a passion for shooting. I thought it was a great episode and would recommend it.

All this got me thinking about how important it has been for me to have goals and interests outside of finance. My experience has been that a large threat to my success is going overboard with the public markets. For instance, over-thinking, over-transacting, over-meme making and over-analyzing macro data points. In order to prevent myself from doing such things, I balance out my investing/work with side interests that are challenging and engaging.

What I am trying to convey is that I think it’s important to create distance from our day to day careers/professions and our hobbies/interests. In fact, I think the further away from finance (or however you earn money) the better. For instance, something that I appreciate is that the peer group from your interest is different from your peer group from work. For me, my lifting peers are nothing like the peer group in finance. This can be advantageous in many ways, such as it gets me to interact with people I normally wouldn’t. The different perspectives can be both enlightening and disappointing. Either way, it provides the opportunity for you to get out of your own head.

So few of us will be in the top 1% of anything, so these interests/hobbies need to be for you, personally. To normies you may seem like an expert in your passion but to the people inside the community, you are just another member. Think about it. When you see an amateur artist, chess player, cyclist, etc it can feel as though they are almost speaking another language. As I reflected more on interests and hobbies, I think the ratio of working behind the scenes vs what you show people needs to be very high. Meaning you have to put in a ton of work without anyone knowing. I mean you aren’t really interested in something unless you can do it and not tell anyone about it. That’s my opinion anyways.

It also helps when the interest is engaging in a way that makes us put more than just time into the hobby. We need to do more than just “show up”. We need to put some time or energy into the hobby even when we aren’t doing it. My example would be ensuring that I know when I am going to train and make it a priority rather than just trying to fit it in somewhere in the week. It should be scheduled, and be part of your identity. If you miss a session, your body should somehow react or you should feel some sort of guilt or accountability. To me, that’s how you know it is something meaningful. Much like the discipline that comes with being an investor, our interests and hobbies should also command some similar commitment from us if we truly are passionate about it.

Additionally, something I find helpful is that my interests need to be tangible. To me, this means we have something to show for it after we put in several hours. This doesn’t have to be something physical like a car or motorcycle. It can be something like a video you edited or a mix you DJ’d. For me, having something to show for my time and energy helps make it “real” and not abstract. So much of what I do for work has no demonstrable output. I can research 10 companies and buy 0. Maintenance due diligence builds conviction in a company that you already own, so you spend a lot of time convincing yourself to do nothing other than continue to hold your position. There have literally been months where I have made zero moves but spent hundreds of hours and all my brain cells “working”. Having something that I can touch or feel from my energy is a nice change.

Here is a pic in front of the big moose in Moose Jaw

How about you? Do you have any interests? I would love to hear about them.

Thanks for reading my work.

Dean