What I try to do in my life, I try to figure out what things bring me meaning. What are the good problems? It’s very difficult to have a meaningful life and not be solving good problems. When you’re doing things that give you meaning investing, it’s a good problem for me. As any investor, you’re going to go through ups and downs and you go through downs. Okay? It’s it’s impossible not to. When you go through the down times, you’re going to be experiencing pain and everything. But I would not trade it for anything.
I read this quote by Karan that really made me think. I’ve been thinking about this quote for a long time. Karan said the first 40 years of life is just an experiment. You know, it’s just an experiment. Something like this, I’m probably muring the quote a bit.
I think what happens is this: in the first 40 years of your life, our understanding of time is completely screwed up. When you are 10 years old, those 10 years seem like they’ve been infinite, and you still have another seven or ten times more ahead of you. When you get to 40, suddenly you realize, “Oh, this is what 40 years feels like. And I only have maybe another 40 if I’m lucky.”
Suddenly you start valuing time so much more. Suddenly you start thinking: Am I spending my time wisely? Speaking for myself, I started to think, “How can I buy time?”
What I mean by this is not living longer but spending my days more wisely, doing things that are meaningful to me. And by the way, we buy time all the time. Money buys time. Everyone who is listening to this podcast or viewing it is doing it every day. Every time you go out to a restaurant, you’re buying time. You’re not just buying food, because you could go to the grocery store, buy the food, and cook it yourself. But you’re actually buying time, the time you save from not cooking.
So we’re doing it all the time. What I try to do in my life is figure out: What things bring me meaning? What are the good problems?
Let me talk about good problems for a second. It’s very difficult to have a meaningful life and not be solving good problems. They are problems, but they’re also good, because when you’re doing things that give you meaning, like investing, for me, that’s a good problem.
As any investor, you’re going to go through ups and downs. And you will go through downs. It’s impossible not to. And when you go through the down times, you’re going to be experiencing pain and everything, but I would not trade it for anything.
Being a parent is a good problem for me. Kids bring you a lot of joy and a lot of pain. Writing, I love writing, but I cannot tell you how many times I would go for weeks staring at the computer and have nothing. I told myself that something would show up at some point, because I had a history of going through that before, but it was still painful.
The point I’m trying to make is: those are good problems. And those are the good problems I want to be solving.
I could also be mowing the lawn or cooking. None of those things bring me joy or give me any meaning. So I use money to buy time so I don’t have to do them, someone else is doing that. That also means I have to make other adjustments.
I don’t want to get too personal, but in my case that meant we lived in the same house for 20 years. We would buy used cars. The money we saved from mortgage payments or interest payments on cars was the money I was able to use to buy time. That’s my relationship with money.
The way I look at money, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to deemphasize the importance of money in my life. By the way, this is the “money guy” talking, so people might discount it. But really, the way I look at money is like this: if you have an unlimited amount of water, it’s not going to make you any happier. If you are dying of thirst, it’s going to be miserable.
So it’s not symmetrical. Having not enough, so you’re thirsty, that’s one thing. But having a lot is not going to make me happier. Money, and this probably I have to thank my parents for, has never been very important to me.
Again, I’m a value investor, analyzing stocks all the time, trying to uncover undervalued investments. But to me, it’s a puzzle. I love it. If you are a sculptor, you work with rock. You don’t have to fall in love with the rock. You may love the process, but not the rock itself.
It’s the same thing. Just because the medium you and I use is money doesn’t mean the love is money.
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