Mindset – Jaison's Blog

I Never Need to Do That Again! Well Maybe Just Once More . . .

[My views are my own]

By endurance we conquer.
Ernest Shackleton

Five years ago, I discovered the Long Island Greenbelt Trails, and I became obsessed with the idea of running from the North Shore of Long Island to the South Shore.

About 9 months ago, on a whim (and without consulting my loving yet skeptical wife) I signed up for the Shore2Shore 50k Ultramarathon which I ran on Saturday.

Check out this video to understand why the S2S 50k was so challenging.

It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

If you adjust for the difficulty of the trails, it was probably the equivalent of running over 50 miles on paved roads.

My Garmin watch estimates that I burned over 5,000 calories.

My strategy was to target an average heart rate of under 140 BPM.

I knew that aerobically I could go all day long. The question was how long my hips, feet, knees, lower back and nervous system could endure the abuse.

There were three different times I hit a low where I was ready to hike out of the woods and jump in an UBER.

At one of those low points, another runner said to me: “Just keep going, there is a second wind just around the corner.”

Around mile 18, I started to pass other runners that had hit the wall.

I just kept shuffling along, targeting 137 beats per minute.

For inspiration, I was playing Coldplay’s Lovers in Japan over and over again, and as I passed the other runners, I got so emotional that I almost cried.

That was when I knew I was going to finish – even if I had to crawl.

On Sunday, I could barely walk.

I made it outside once to walk two blocks to Tal Bagels.

I spent most of the day on the sofa watching Physical 100 on Netflix with my kids.

I told my wife (who was relieved that I hadn’t dropped dead on the course) that I NEVER EVER need to do that again. “I’m one and done.”

However . . .

. . . now that my batteries are recharged . . . and I can walk again, I believe it is really important to keep doing really hard things, especially as we move through mid-life.

There is a second wind just around the corner.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my free newsletter/blog; and please pass it along to your friends.

Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

Unmasking Myself as a Non-Conformist

[My views are my own]

“When masses of people succumb to an idea, they often run off at a tangent because of their emotions. When people stop to think things through, they are very sane in their decisions.”
Humphrey B. Neill

When I first started on Wall Street, I worked for Peter F. Marcus. He was brutally tough, but also like a father — a real mensch.

In my first weeks on the job, he gave me a book called The Art of Contrary Thinking by Humphrey B. Neill.

He told me that if I wanted to be successful in my career and life, I had to make my own path, and develop my own ideas. And, the first step in doing that is to be a non-conformist when using my mind.

The book changed my mind . . . and my life.

It set me on a path that was uniquely my own.

Let me be clear, I’m not advocating knee-jerk contrarianism. If the train is coming down the tracks, and everyone else is stepping out of the way . . . you don’t remain on the tracks in the name of contrarianism.

However, in emotionally charged and uncertain situations, it is human nature to seek the comfort of the herd — and to look to others for confirmation of our ideas.

The problem is that the crowd does not think, but acts on impulses. For this reason, widely held public opinions are commonly wrong.

To break from the pull of the crowd, requires something that Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital refers to as Second-Level Thinking.

“First-level thinkers look for simple formulas and easy answers. Second-level thinkers know that success in investing is the antithesis of simple.”
Howard Marks – “I Beg to Differ“

Howard Marks provides the following elements for second-level thinking:

What is the range of likely future outcomes?
What outcome do I think will occur?
What’s the probability I’m right?
What does the consensus think?
How does my expectation differ from the consensus?
Is the consensus psychology . . . too [optimistic] or [pessimistic]?
What will happen . . . if the consensus turns out to be right, and what if I’m right?

Over the past nearly 30 years — since Peter Marcus gave me Humphrey B. Neill’s book — I’ve trained myself to be a contrarian thinker.

This doesn’t mean that I go into meetings and habitually take the opposite position.

But it has allowed me to understand that in most situations, there is a sub-conscious (emotionally-charged) force that is influencing the team — and frequently standing in the way of progress.

In my work as a transformation leader, my job is to help the team to see things in an unemotional and more logical way.

To bring them together around a more favorable future state.

In this way, I think of myself as a “Horse Whisperer” in and around emotionally-charged situations.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my free newsletter/blog; and please pass it along to your friends.

Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

We Are All the Comeback Kid

“I’ve lived my life in situations where I’ve come from nonexistent or last and been able to find my way.”
Barry Diller

[My views are my own]

I’ve dedicated the past decade of my life to helping companies pivot, reposition, return to growth . . . and make a comeback.

Given the power of disruptive innovation in the global economy, which I wrote about here and here, there is a nearly endless supply of new and interesting challenges.

For me . . . the comeback is not just a job . . . it’s a deeply ingrained philosophy.

I believe that the key to a life well lived is to strive and reach for more (like a child learning to walk) . . .

. . . to experience painful failures along the way . . .

. . . and to learn from those painful failures.

When I look at everything I’ve learned over the past 50 years, it’s a continuous string of thousands of mini (and some not so mini) comebacks.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my free newsletter/blog. Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

Sorry . . . No Mad Money for Me!

“The trick in investing is just to sit there and watch pitch after pitch go by and wait for the one right in your sweet spot.”
Warren Buffett

[My views are my own]

I’m no longer on Wall Street. I largely ignore the stock market machine’s daily noise. It’s dramatically improved my results.

My approach:

Ride the Big Waves. Ignore the Squiggles. Aggressively deploy capital during recessions. Then sit tight. This is how the BIG money is made.
Cycles of Panic. Like clockwork, every ~18 month, investors lose their minds with fear and panic. I ONLY invest when the VIX is over 30.
Nuclear Winter is Your Best Friend. I love to buy companies, industries and assets that are emerging from the nuclear winter.
Reading is my Edge. While I ignore the daily sound and fury of the stock market, I’m always learning. I average at least 100 pages per day.
Insider Investing is the Best. I work for (and get stock grants from) companies that I’d want to own.

Hanging onto the Bucking Bronco

[My views are my own]

I’ve been a meditator for over 30 years. My father taught me when I was a teenager, and in recent years, I’ve taken up the practice of Transcendental Meditation.

My wife always teases me that it’s just my excuse to escape and take a nap.

Whether it’s just a power nap or something more, I can’t be certain. However, it does have an amazing power to calm the waters of my mind, recharge my batteries, and help me to make better decisions.

Because of meditation, one of my super-powers has been the ability to walk into highly-charged and conflict-filled situations and provide clear-eyed and unemotional objectivity.

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to my FREE newsletter/blog. The link is at the top of the page on a desktop browser and at the bottom of the page on a mobile browser. Also, please follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.

Gamifying the Grind

[My views are my own]

Periods of intense growth and learning are always interrupted by time on the plateau.

“Whether you like it or not, there will be plateaus, which in my experience tend to occur right before a breakthrough. Weight lifting teaches you to embrace them, or at the very least accept them. This is an important outcome, with consequences extending far beyond the gym. ‘In the land of the quick fix it may seem radical,’ writes George Leonard, a pioneer of the human potential movement in the 1960s, ‘but to learn anything significant, to make any lasting change in yourself, you must be willing to spend most of your time on the plateau, to keep practicing even when it seems you are getting nowhere.’”
The Zen of Weight Lifting, The New York Times, Nov. 22, 2019, by Brad Stulberg

The challenge with the plateau is that it’s boring — and you’re getting little to no positive reinforcement to keep you moving forward.

This makes it really easy to head off in another direction after some shiny new object.

What’s been most helpful for me has been the perspective that the plateau has always been a base building period for my next big phase of growth.

To keep pounding the stone, I create daily, measurable practices.

When I was a Wall Street research analyst covering the global media and communications industry, I didn’t want to be an ivory tower egghead. I knew too many brilliant analysts whose decades of great work was largely unknown. It was important to me to be in the arena — not just a world of ideas.

So, I developed a daily practice of making an average of 50 client interactions (emails/calls/meeting). Every single day. This was in addition to a 60-hour per week day job of researching and making investment recommendations across a massive global industry.

I tracked my average calls over weeks and months. And, I became a marketing machine.

During the dips and plateau periods of my life, this type of daily practice has kept me showing up to do the work.

I’ve learned to trick my mind by Gamifying the Grind.

And, I take real pride as my streaks extend to months and years.

Wax on. Wax off.

Finding Meaning in the Valley of Misery

[My views are my own]

“Jaison . . . sometimes in life you just have to eat shit.”
Advice (that I’ll NEVER forget) from my father-in-law during the depths of the Global Financial Crisis

Without a sense of meaning, life can be a senseless grind. Without purpose, there’s just not enough energy to carry you through the periods of stress, uncertainty, failure and burnout.

One source of meaning that’s helped carry me through the hard times is what I call the cult of paying dues.

I have come to believe that there is always growth (like building muscle), new insights, and personal transformation on the other side of the valley of misery.

So, when I’m getting kicked in the teeth, I’ve trained myself to smile (with my newly busted incisors) and say: “This is exactly the challenge that I asked for. Now, what do I need to learn?”

In some super-dorky, Island of the Misfit Toys way, the cycle of a new challenge, suffering, resolution, and growth feels to me like the cycle of a life well lived.

Some of my favorite books which have helped me to find meaning while clawing my way through the valley of misery are:

The Pendulum of Ideas (and Recurring Mass Delusions)

[My views are my own].

I bought my first stock at the age of 23.

It was 1995.
We were in the middle of a raging bull market.
Over the next five years, the Nasdaq 100 index rocketed from 480 to 4,800.

Boy . . . that was fun!

During that first bull market, with every passing month, my opinion of myself grew more and more certain.

Going into 2000, I was a 28-year-old Master of the Universe . . . with a fatal blind spot.

In hindsight, I was just surfing the crest of a tidal wave.

I’ve now been investing for more than 25 years. I’ve survived two massive bear markets and innumerable market crashes.

I’ve analyzed at least 1,000 companies; I’ve worked as a senior analyst on Wall Street; and I’ve made every mistake in the book.

One thing I’ve learned along the way is that the “big ideas” of every market cycle are almost always unmasked as mass delusions.

Let me give you an example.

In 2006, I was at a Value Investors Conference at Lincoln Center. The speakers were the rock-stars of our generation. There were over a thousand attendees.

What had once been an obscure corner of the investment world had gone mainstream. It felt like a golden age for value investing!

The fatal blind spot was that the value-style is all about ignoring the crowd. However, by 2006, it had become the mania.

Over the last fifteen years, the value-fever has broken and been unwound. Value investors have been crushed — with many returning outside money or just leaving the business.

This swinging pendulum of ideas (and recurring mass delusions) doesn’t just happen in the crucible of the stock market.

It can happen any time we turn our trust over to the crowd.

It’s QAnon. It’s Gamestop. It’s the Tech Boom. It’s the Tech Wreck. It’s “Housing Prices Never Go Down.” It’s the Global Financial Crisis. It’s Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. It’s Disco and the Macarena. It’s even frickin’ Beanie Babies and Fidget Spinners.

It’s the human condition.

So, next time you feel absolute certainty about something, and everyone around you is reinforcing how you are all geniuses . . .

Don’t be so quick to buy your own bullshit.

And, if you are going to take the time and energy to buy into a specific mental model, you should spend time really understanding the bear case against it.

Not that there is a bear case against the Macarena . . . but . . . you get it.

PS – My wife and I just watched the movie Our Friend. It’s beautiful. We had a good cry. Highly recommended.

PPS – Tom Brady is the GOAT!

Don’t Let the Shit-Birds Get You Down

[My views are my own].

My father (Big Al) has a favorite saying: “One of the secrets to success is to not let the shit-birds get you down.”

A shit-bird is someone that flutters overhead and drops negativity bombs.

He picked up this little gem at boot camp in the early 1960s; and he passed it along to me in the late 1980s.

I was a junior in high school, working as a bank teller.

This was before ATMs. So, at night, after the branch closed, the kids would work the drive-through windows.

During the holidays it was your worst nightmare. The line of cars would stretch down the street for hours.

By the time the customers arrived at the window, everyone was pissed off — and nasty.

One terrible evening, my drawer was off by $25, and I had to spend three hours tracking down the mistake. I got home at 11 o’clock totally exhausted; and I had school the next day.

I told my father that I was going to quit.

Big Al told me that quitting was not an option.

If I could learn to deal with shit-birds (like he’d learned in boot camp), I’d have a skill worth way more than the $5 an hour I was getting paid by the bank.

Our strategy was that when people got nasty, I’d match their negative energy with equal amounts of positive energy.

They’d get angry. I’d be really happy.

They’d blame. I’d apologize and tell them I totally understood.

They’d yell. I’d by magnanimous.

It became a game. I enlisted my friends at the branch. We started a betting pool to see who landed the worst customer.

And . . . we went from being really unhappy to laughing so hard we would fall to the ground.

It’s been over 30 years since I was a bank teller, and Big Al was right: “One of the secrets to success is to not let the shit-birds get you down.”

Oh . . . and make sure you tip well. People who do service jobs don’t get paid nearly enough to deal with all the assholes.

The Dad Buzz

[My views are my own].

In the days before Jackson (my first child) was born, I was super anxious.

I remember reaching out to my friend, Jim Filkins. I worked for Jim when I was in college. He was a home builder, he paid well (and in cash), and it gave me the opportunity to learn construction.

Jim ended up becoming much more than a boss. He was a mentor and father figure. And, he was an incredible dad to his son Wes.

I reached out to Jim because I needed someone to tell me that I wasn’t going to screw up my kids.

On the call, Jim asked me to remember my first real high school crush.

I did.

He asked to remember how I felt so powerfully in love; and how it was totally out of control.

I did.

He told me that what I’d feel for my children would be 100x more powerful.

It has been.

I still catch rushes of the Dad buzz 14 years and three children later.

Thank you, Jim!