Start Here: The Payoff for Reading this Substack

Accomplishment (Mastery) vs Achievement

The payoff for taking time to read this Substack can be summarized in four words: more money; less stress.

This will require some of your time—not a lot—but enough to absorb what we’re talking about. Skimming the material probably won’t work. It’s up to you to decide if the payoff is worth your time.

We’re going to explain the process and benefits of investing in a way that is easy to understand. In most cases, we’ll help you discover things for yourself—to experience those “ah-ha” moments where something clicks, and you own the knowledge from that point on.

The Goal: True Understanding

There’s a difference between a surface level knowledge and true understanding.

For example, imagine you're taking a college course and your professor offers you a deal. You could choose to receive an A grade, but class would never meet, there would be no assignments, and you would get no feedback or instruction.

The catch: you would learn nothing.

John Warner, author of the Substack The Biblioracle Recommends, actually posed this to a class of first-year students in his writing course. Warner shares the results and his reaction:

That first time I did it, about 60-65% of students said they'd take that deal.

Disturbing.

The last time I did it, six or seven years later, 85% said they'd take that deal.

Disastrous.

The students were not lazy or entitled. They were responding rationally to the incentives of the system. An A without learning anything was far more valuable than learning anything, and risking a grade lower than an A.

Mastering Investing

What Warner is describing, and what Adam Gopnik explains in his book, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery, is the difference between Achievement and Accomplishment.

We drive our kids typically toward achievement, and yet anyone who is a parent of any sensitivity at all recognizes that what really stirs and moves children, just as it stirs and moves ourselves, isn’t achievement, isn’t the “A” you get on the test or the score you get on the SATs, however instrumental that may be to some larger ambition. No, what really moves and stirs us is accomplishment, that moment of mastery when suddenly we feel that something profoundly difficult, tenaciously thorny, has given way, and we are now the Master of It, instead of us being mastered by it.

When it comes to your money and your real life, learning something useful is far more valuable than getting a grade.

Our goal, through our upcoming book, The Practice of Investing, and this companion Substack, is to get you to the point where you’ve mastered the basics of investing.

We don’t mean that we’ll turn you into the world’s greatest investor, but rather that we can get you to a point where making smart investment decisions is automatic.

Once you achieve that, you can expect to make more money and you’ll learn how to ignore a lot of the stress inducing noise that is inevitable if you think about investing without understanding the process.

It’s Like Driving a Car

If you’ve been driving for a while, you’ve experienced the level of mastery we’re talking about. You can get to where you’re going without really thinking about it. It’s automatic.

When you first learned to drive, however—or if you go to a country where they drive on “the other side of the road” –you likely had to pay more attention and it may have been a stressful experience.

It’s easier to learn to drive than to invest because when you learned to drive, each time you got behind the wheel you increased your level of experience.

In contrast, you’re never forced to learn investing. Often, it’s something done for you by someone else. You may not feel you have the time to learn or the inclination. As a result, investing can seem complicated and confusing.

It’s really not. We can teach the basics to middle school students.

But Don’t Take Our Word for It

Try reading a couple of our Core Posts (which are free) all the way through. If we are doing our job, they will get you thinking. They may surprise you. They may dispel some common myths about investing.

Again, don’t expect to master investing instantly. Give it time, though, and you’ll build a foundation of knowledge—which will lead to increased confidence in making decisions about things that matter. And, ultimately, to our goal of: more money; less stress.

Stuart & Sharon