Q&A: From Imposter Syndrome to Authenticity

Where do you find the courage to write the way you do, and how did you develop your unique style?

 A short answer would be that it came from writing for a long time. I let myself be me when I write. People who know me personally will tell you the person you see on paper is the person you get in real life. Okay, almost. I am more polished, “edited,” on paper.

I just made it sound easy. It is not. It comes down to confidence. It took me a long time – years, to get comfortable with being me on paper.

One of my favorite frameworks is “fake it till you make it.” I think it’s usually misunderstood. It’s not about deceiving others but about deceiving yourself into being the person you might not be yet.

In my case, the “faking” part is writing as if I have the right to write about topics outside of investing. This framework forces you to reach further, helping you to grow. You constantly feel at least some minor discomfort as you are reaching, as your knowledge and experience may not be quite up to the task. But this is how you grow.

I think there is another name for this framework – imposter syndrome. If you don’t have this feeling in many parts of your life, you are not growing.

What helped me gain confidence is my readers. If I wrote into the ether and never got feedback from readers, my writing probably would have remained in its original form – proper and boring. Whenever I let the real me show up on paper readers responded favorably. This, little by little, gave me the confidence to be me. I’ve been told I am breaking different writing conventions with my writing. I wouldn’t know. One of my favorite comedians is Victor Borge, who immigrated to the US from Denmark and said, “This is your language; I am just trying to use it.”

There are probably certain rules of writing I am breaking without knowing I am breaking them. As I’m typing this, I’m listening to Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Berlioz was largely self-taught as a composer. This symphony broke all the traditional rules; it was a “program” symphony (it had a story line); it revolutionized orchestral music. I am not at risk of changing the world forever; I just want to point out that it is a lot easier to break the rules when you don’t fully know them. Berlioz and I have this advantage.

Outside of studying English in college and failing at it – that is the only class I had to retake – I never took formal classes in composition or writing. Today if I took these classes, they would probably ruin me. This joke comes to mind: A grandson asks his grandfather, “Grandpa, when you sleep do you put your beard above or below the blankets?” Grandpa lost sleep for a month.

You write about ‘Soul in the Game’ – I see it as a game you can’t lose. How do you think about that?

What is interesting about this is that originally it was just a chapter in a book that didn’t have a name. That book got started as a collection of my essays. “Soul in the Game” was just one of my essays. But once it was elevated to being the name of the book, it became the book’s central theme. As it should be: It’s a central theme of my life. Having soul in the game is having an alignment with what you are doing – an alignment with your life.

Let me give you an example. The investment industry is vast. I run an investment firm; I am a value investor. But I really cannot stand financial or tax planning. Doing financial planning is like going to the dentist for me. We have folks at IMA who have financial planning backgrounds and can answer occasional questions from clients on this subject.

If I took a wrong turn somewhere and had to become a financial planner, it would require some retraining. I could do it. But I would have a miserable life. Not because there is anything wrong with financial planning, but because I’d be misaligned with what I was doing.

It would be very difficult for me to have soul in the game and – this is a very important “and” – I would have no passion for what I was doing. It would be a 9 to 5 job (sentence) for me. I’d be mediocre and miserable. I’d be competing against folks who dream about tax codes and required minimum distributions.

This would be a game I’d be destined to lose. It is difficult, though not impossible, to be good at something where you don’t have soul in the game. But even if you are good at something you are not aligned with, one thing is certain: You are going to have a life that has a giant hole in it.

“What’s your definition of success?”

There are many ways to answer this question. You have successes in many dimensions of your life. I give a different answer to this question every time it’s asked.

I recently took my kids to a Nuggets (basketball) game. I had all three of them with me. I felt successful as a parent (of course, my wife deserves huge credit here too) and truly happy at that moment, because I saw how much they really love and care for each other. This is rare. They have a truly special relationship.

I told them from a very young age that their siblings are the important people in their lives, more important even than their (future) spouses. Their job is to protect and take care of each other.

I look at success as the ability to control my calendar. Spending time on doing things that are meaningful to me and being surrounded with people I love, and respect are important, too.