The Biggest Lesson I Learned in 2020

2020 was the year I learned that there are no short cuts. I’m glad to have learnt' this young but wish I learned it earlier.

Things net out as they should...Sure sometimes luck tips the scale in your favor or to the downside, but that’s random.

Mostly it's a grind. You’re no good until you are, well, just a little bit better.

See, life is step by step, and there’s no other way. Even if it appears fast, it comes from one step after another; you’re just taking less relative missteps in a better pool that is growing, lifting your boat up with it.

This is what the early adopters have right. You find a pool that is growing without your input, and you jump in.

Then you look like a genius when really you just picked a better spot to swim.

So you can be early and right, but then you need to be patient. And that takes work. I started investing in Tesla in.. 2013? I sold too early. Crypto 17’...and I give that 5 more years before it’s truly significant.

So timing is everything, but you need to be prepared. And that’s what takes time; the preparation.

You’d think it’d all feel like a slow uphill climb, but the truth is most things feel stagnant or like they’re moving backward. People at all levels of success can feel this way; you'd be surprised, especially if you’re on your own track in life.

I never cared about grades and wasn’t much good at achieving them. But they were a benchmark, you knew where you stood. In life, you're on your own to make up a grade, and if you choose Money...

And to be honest, now that I think about it, I don’t know what grades were ever worth, nothing at all? So even the initial system for understanding your growth is broken; what does it really, in fact measure? I can't understand it. Maybe I sensed that deep down at the time, hence the slack and lack of care.

Everything worthwhile comes from building something of substance.

But it’s the appearances people chase.

Happy to be a thing later of shine without the weight behind it. But as I said...Life is a balancing scale - all things net out over time.

As Benjamin Graham says, the market is a weighing machine, but people think it’s a voting machine.

And all of us vote every day. We vote on what we buy. We vote in what we invest. We vote on where we put our attention.

But when we truly care about something and do it the right way (which is making mistakes and correcting them) we build the weight of substance.

So, there's a shortcut. You can take it. Everyone’s selling it. You can give others, maybe yourself, the feeling like you’ve made it out ahead. Like you outsmarted the rest. But give it enough time, and you’ll be back where you were, wondering where you went wrong.

And then life will ask you to take the first step.

The same first step you could have taken years back.

But you didn’t listen then. Will you listen now?