During a late-night random chat, a wise person in our group raised an important point, which I thought is applicable not only to the situation it is describing but also generally in our lives, and in investing.
“Good warlords win most battles he fight. Great warlords fight the battles he is certain to win”
It a simple sentence, almost sounds like a riddle but it has deep or even almost profound meaning.
In our lives, battles are almost certain, we are not talking about fights, it could be competition, it could be an important meeting, it could be an interview.
“Seize every opportunity” – they say
Most of us these days are taught to take all the opportunities that are presented, no matter how big of the chance we can seize it. Inevitably and by definition, this leads to, sometimes, failure. This also stretches our physical and mental resources on opportunities, that might not even be worth taking, despite the success chance being high (or low) – at this point doesn’t matter anymore as the outcome is not worth fighting for.
In other words, when presented with opportunity, we forget to ask two important questions:
- How good is the positive outcome?
- How likely I can achieve the positive outcome?
Instead, we march on when we see an enemy coming. In today’s society, people are crazy about seizing every opportunities that they are presented with, that they get into stress, constant grinding, regular drug prescriptions, some even lose their lives because of it. The society rewards and glamorize hard work, being the hardest worker in the room, that often translates to “OT” instagram stories and “plz fix” pictures from clubs or motorbikes. Advances in medicine translates to drugs that can make people endure grueling work hours, stress, overcome depression (temporarily), in pursuit of machine-like endurance to physical and mental limitation
This sentence, also have very stark resemblance with what Warren Buffett says on the game of baseball or the punch card.
“The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don’t have to swing at everything–you can wait for your pitch. The problem when you are a money manager is that your fans keep yelling, ‘Swing, you bum!’“
“You only have an opinion on a few things. In fact, I’ve told students if when they got out of school, they got a punch card with 20 punches on it, and that’s all the investment decisions they got to make in their entire life, they would get very rich because they would think very hard about each one.”
In investing, just like picking our battles in life, learning from the great warlords, we don’t have to seize every opportunity. We only “fight” when we know we are going to win.
Turns out, while human civilization have greatly improved from the time back in the day where people would be fighting with swords and traitors get beheaded, (and you can also get beheaded for just being innocent peasants), to iPhone, and satelite internet, space exploration, robo taxis and genome editing, the general rule of seizing opportunities have been the same. It’s the society that have changed, for the worse.
Be great warlords.