Maybe it's getting up early. Maybe it's rooting for the right people. Maybe it's remembering that not all trolls are evil, but they're still trolls. In this week's episode of Rule Breaker Investing, today just might be the day to try some new tricks and hack your way to a better life!
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This video was recorded on Oct. 6, 2021.
David Gardner: "When the road looks rough ahead and you're miles and miles from your nice warm bed, you just remember what your old pals said, boy, you've got a friend in me." Now for some of you, you're hearing Randy Newman's tune in your head, it might stick with you for the rest of the day, but for others, you may not recognize those lyrics from the original Toy Story movie and the song "You've Got a Friend in Me." They say something important.
We at The Motley Fool are trying to help. We do five daily or weekly podcasts. All of them free, all trying to be helpful. We've done them for years we love helping people. That's been a purpose statement we use for years here to help the world invest better, to make the world smarter, happier, and richer, to help. Well once or twice a year on this podcast that help takes on a unique form. I think about what are some mental tips, some tricks, simple life hacks that I've used or seen used to great effect, and why wouldn't I take a break from our usual format and share it out? That would be help too. That would certainly make the world smarter, happier, and I hope richer as well, and why not invite your best ideas as well to share? That's what we're here for. We're all here to help each other. What does that mean? It means Mental Tips, Tricks, and Life Hacks Volume 6, only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing, a delight to have you joining with me this week, we're going to have some fun together. We're going to make each other smarter. That's the hope anyway, at least. I'm in Austin, Texas. As you hear this I'm there for the annual Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit, I bet I'll be seeing a few of you there. As a consequence, I prerecorded this week's podcast over this past weekend. It's an easy one to prerecord in the sense that it's an evergreen, timeless, well, at least not time-bound podcast this week. It's the latest number six in our historical running series of Mental Tips, Tricks, and Life Hacks.
The series started with Volume 1 on June 15, 2016. Back then it was just mental tips and tricks. But then I thought when I did Episode 2, "Hey, it's not just about mental tips and tricks. I mean, those are great, but what about life hacks? We all need those too. Ways to do life better, more elegantly. Ways to make things that used to be kludgy, effective." That's how I think about life hacks anyway, and mental tips and tricks. We've done it five times before. The most recent was last October 2020, and if you want to hear earlier episodes of the series, you can certainly always just google Rule Breaker Investing: Mental Tips, Tricks, and Life Hacks and you will find previous episodes in this series, which might be worthwhile since there are no repeats. Every one of these episodes is chock-full of new, original, well, at least to this show, mental tips, tricks, and life hacks. This week we have six new ones. I've got four from me, two from you on the write ins. Thank you for emailing us at [email protected]. We're going to go this time we're going to go yours, mine, mine, yours, mine, mine. Without further ado, I say we get started.
Mental tip, trick or life hack, number one, this one's a trick. Well, I'm going to call it a trick because for most people, it's pretty tricky. This one comes from Roy Stephens. He is at sloth_investor on Twitter, The Sloth Investor and you know I love this stuff Roy, so thank you for sharing this one. Here it is. Mental tip, trick, or life hack number one, it's a trick. Inactivity > activity. Roy writes, inactivity outperforms activity within the realm of investing. When you keep in mind that Roy Stephens has taken on the brand The Sloth Investor, you can easily see why this makes a lot of sense coming from him, but whether it came from him or you or me, this is something I think we've pointed out for years, but it always bears repeating, which is, well, in Roy's words, inactivity outperforms activity within the realm of investing.
He goes on to add, just think about how many other realms of life this is true for. He concludes, not many. Now if you're new to investing, if you're new to thinking about taking some of your own savings and risking it on the stock market, which is what we've talked about every week for seven years, well, actually now that the Motley Fool's in it's 29th year of existence, we've been doing this for a lot more than just seven years. We've been talking about the irony. In most aspects of life when you put in the effort, you get results, which means you exert. I think again, a lot of people who are new to putting their money toward investing don't actually invest. For many of them, they trade. Which means as soon as they've bought something, they immediately start thinking about when they should sell it, and if you listen to last week's podcast and you heard an excerpt from Rich Dad, Poor Dad you'll remember that a lot of people would coach you to sell out sometimes within weeks of having bought in the first place. Now as I think anybody who's listened the show for any real amount of time knows, that is the opposite of what we believe will lead to success for you in life as an investor.
By definition, for us, investing is long term, which means you're going to leave your money there, and when you leave your money there, that means you're being pretty inactive, you're being, this is a word with a negative connotation, but not in this case, you are being slothful. Wasn't sloth one of the seven deadly sins, I think so, but not in this one realm of life and I like that you point out Roy. Just think about how many other realms of life this is true for, inactivity is greater than activity. You're right. Not many. If anybody has any brilliant suggestions, at the end of this month, we will do our mailbag and you can write us in [email protected]. I'd love to hear any areas of life any of us can point out, you get rewarded for doing nothing at all versus exerting yourself. We're also habitually thinking we need to work hard, when, at least in the realm of investing, working smart means the opposite. It means doing very little, sitting on your hands, if you will, or playing the sloth.
In conclusion for this one, the reason I call it a trick is because I think for a lot of people, this is pretty tricky. It takes a while, not just to learn it but actually to behave in line with those learnings. Now, if you're a Fool, if you go against the conventional wisdom, you're probably better suited to realize how tricky this is and how you should prefer inactivity with your stock market money to activity. But again, I think for so many people it's pretty tricky. This is the month of trick or treat, or as I might say, trick and treat because tricks that work are treats, and thank you very much for that submission, Roy Stephens. Inactivity > activity.
Let's move on to number two. This one is for me and yes it's another trick because, well, it's October. This is called the "Are we there yet?" game. When I say are we there yet, I think most of us know what I'm talking about. Maybe it's more of an American idiom or an English language idiom. But I like to think this sentiment is global. Regardless of what your native language is, you might be familiar if you have a car and if you have kids with the phenomenon whereby the kids in the back of the car for any drive, let's say in excess of 45 minutes. Kids are in the back. You and your spouse or partner are in the front, and what do the kids say? They say, "Are we there yet?" If we're trying to be helpful, we're trying to be good parents, we probably feel like we should respond, and so we say something like, "No honey, no we're not there." That might be all you have to do that first time, and then about maybe six or seven minutes later. The question is reasked, "Are we there yet?" I think this is true whether kids are 5, 10, or 15 in some cases, although by the time we have 15 presumably we're using GPS or Waze and you already know how long it takes to get wherever you're going. But are we there yet? It becomes a refrain.
For my wife, Margaret, and me, we realized early on that we had to rechannel our children in the backseat, our children's energy, we had to rechannel that toward something that would be more positive and less annoying for us as parents, so we invented the "Are we there yet?" game, and I'm about to give you the full rules to this game, young parents everywhere. I hope this trick might work for you. Here are the rules of the game. The kids ask, "Are we there yet?" The question back from you is, "Oh, great question. Do you guys want this to be one of your three times that you can ask that question on this trip?" You're hearing from me then that the kids have three times whatever the length of the trip is. It might be a one-hour drive, it might be a three-hour drive, or much longer in some cases, but they find out that they can only punch their ticket three times. Those are the rules of the game and at least for us and we had inquisitive kids, when they were little kids, they remain inquisitive adults. They accepted that. They didn't question why they only got three chances. They actually started to talk among themselves. Our eldest, our daughter Kate, would turn to her bros and go, "I don't know guys, I feel like it's a little too early to ask right now. I don't think we should ask are we there yet right now. Let's save it," and so they learned the benefits of patience, and maybe an hour or so later in our two-hour drive, they might finally use that first one having discussed at some length and decided, they would then ask and we would say one hour and 17 minutes into the drive and answer to their first question, are we there yet? We would say, "No, we've got about another 43 minutes."
Many a time the kids never used their second or third chance. They learned the benefit of holding on and saving these things because they are valuable and the outcome was our kids learned patience and some cooperation techniques, and we as parents only had to answer the question once, sometimes twice, rarely three times whatever the length of our trip. I love the "Are we there yet?" game. Because I've seen it work in real life. It is definitely a mental trick. If I were packaging this one up and trying to sell it on Amazon.com, the tag line for this game would be: Turn your kids from annoying into gamers. Are we there yet?
On to mental tip trick or life hack, Number 3, this one's for me again. This is a life hack, the first one, this show now. Most Sundays, I go to church at about 11 a.m. in the morning in Washington, DC it happens to be a Presbyterian Church in my case. Especially with a lot of the services having been Zoom services for a couple of years now, a lot of other faith communities may be meeting in person or not. But I found how much community matters. This is going to be about church, but it can be true of any gathering or club. I think you can map this to a lot of other contexts as well. We got back to church recently and there was a gentlemen who was an older usher, and when our church closed down two years ago, and over the next 18 months we would all be watching from Zoom for the most part. I started wondering, especially the older members of our congregation, will this be the last time I see them? When our church finally reopened up a couple of months ago again, and everybody is still wearing masks all through the service these days. I recognize that old gentlemen usher and somebody told me something about him. He said he'd been a Vietnam War flyer. I thought, "Wow, I never knew that. That's pretty amazing."
It made me think about the older members of our congregation. "Hey, how about all members of our congregation, young, medium, and old? What are the stories that they could tell and wouldn't that strengthen the community in this case of our church, but perhaps yours or whatever club or social dynamics this might speak to. What if there was more of an opportunity for people to tell their stories?" Now I realize, at least at our church, we have a regular order of worship. You can't really crack that. I was also raised Catholic. That was a very standard liturgy from one week to the next, and I was reminded that once when I suggested to our pastor that we should have people come and tell their story for five minutes, just five minutes with that person each service. I was reminded that doesn't really fit, unfortunately, it makes things too lengthy, it cracks the regular mold that a lot of faith communities have gotten into. Not just for years, but decades in some cases, and so I thought there's got to be a way to feature that old gentleman and his story.
That's when I seized upon this life hack. I started thinking, "Okay, probably it won't work during the service. But what if you did it outside of the service but really near to the service," and I thought probably it doesn't make sense to do it after the service because people want to get to lunch or watch their NFL game that afternoon. I thought what about before the service and what about rather than five minutes if you made it 15 minutes. This is the 15 minutes before church life hack. I think one of the best ways that you can build a real sense of community, especially after a couple of years where a community might have been undermined or subverted in various ways would be 52 weeks out of the year to have 52 members of your faith community stand up beforehand, and for 10 or so minutes, tell their story. Then it wouldn't just be a face, three [inaudible 00:14:14] over to your right, or the usher greeting you that day, you would get to know 52 people in your community a lot better. The key is of course, we're doing this before church, because once you get people in the habit, 15 minutes before, everybody's arriving early, which seems like a wonderful additional benefit, a secondary benefit of the 15 minutes before church life hack.
Now, has my church tried this yet? Nope. We might try it if I can persuade enough of us, enough key people in 2022, but whether or not we ever get there, and maybe for some of you, you're already there doing something like this. But in my experience, a really powerful way to knit a community together is that experience as close as possible to the campfire setting where somebody stands up and tells their story, and I think if you do that outside of the regular order of worship, so you're not messing with that. But beforehand, you're going to start getting increasing numbers of people interested in showing up early and getting to know each other, 15 minutes before church.
I said one of yours, two of mine. If you're doing the math with me we're now at mental tip, trick, or life hack number 4, and this one is a write in, and thank you David Jones Pritchard from Sydney, Australia. We'll call this one win the morning. David says, "This is a life hack," and I agree. "Hi, guys. Greetings from Sydney, Australia," David writes, "I finally made a deliberate effort at getting up even earlier than my early rising four and six-year-olds to plan and prep for the day and hopefully gain some early momentum. In doing so I realize that for me, at least if you win the morning, you really do greatly increase your chance of winning the day. Love the show. Best regards, David Jones Pritchard." Well, like Roy Stephens' trick that led off this week's podcast, this one goes under the rubric of, I've heard this before, but we need to be reminded and rereminded anyway, for me of these things from time to time.
Think of this as a prompt, win the morning, win the day, says David Jones Pritchard. Now as I look over that aphorism, the first thing I think about is the benefits of rising early. This is not very evident to me because I'm a late riser. I go to sleep late. I do the opposite of what Ben Franklin told us all to do early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wiser. I think that's Ben Franklin. Unfortunately, Ben although you are one of my heroes, I've never been able to make my body do that on a regular enough basis. I've always said it does seem like the morning people are the really productive, happiest members of our society. I wish I were one, but I'm not really. David, clearly you are one because if you are rising now before your four and six-year-olds, I know that you're getting up early. Early to bed, early to rise, even though I can't do it very well myself and nobody should feel ashamed or guilty if they can't, I want to say I admire it and I generally like that approach in life.
But the next thing I think about as I look at your aphorism is the word win. What does it mean to win the day, let alone win the morning? It makes me think of a book I once read called Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. It's one of those books about personal productivity. I love these books. Getting Things Done by David Allen being a really seminal work for me. But one of the things that Jake and John in their book Make Time I think they were former Google ventures, engineers, or business people at least and they stepped away and they wrote this book about productivity. But they put forward this idea that you should the day before name your Highlight, capital H, for the next day. I recall them saying that your highlight is probably best something that would be achievable in a 60-90 minute timeframe. If your highlight is six hours of work on some project the next day that's not a great highlight. Well, that might be the most important thing you need to do tomorrow. Think about it as a sports highlight. It's going to be a little bit briefer than that and a little bit more exciting. But if you take the time with intention to name your highlight then the next tip from those authors, and I know David Jones Pritchard, you'll appreciate this. They said generally go after your highlight right away. Make it the first thing that you do that next morning. If you are rising even earlier than even your kids, and you can accomplish that in the first 60-90 minutes, well I really do think you will have won the day.
Win at least for me in this context means that you've named something important each day and you've accomplished that. If you can get that done before lunch, I think you've really set yourself up for good feelings, positive energy for the rest of your day. My brother Tom who is so attentive to health and the health of others, the health of our employees, Tom has always had some great thoughts and ideas here. I'm not that great at following. Unfortunately one of the things he's pointed out is, if you do make breakfast your biggest meal of the day, then throughout your day, you are burning that energy that you took in at the start, which is a lot more logical than what I do, which is I tend to fast a lot during the day and eat a lot at night. There I am again, putting myself out as the example you don't want to follow-up, but I just want to make it clear that I think early to bed, early to rise is great. I think knowing what win means if you're going to try to win the morning or win your day is going to be really helpful. I've added in a couple more thoughts about the most successful ways you might win that morning and win that day. Mental tip, trick or life hack number 4 was a life hack from David Jones Pritchard, win the morning, win the day.
Mental tip, trick or life hack number 5. This one is a mental tip. I haven't really chosen the official name of this one. But let's just go with don't feed the trolls and the trolls are everywhere. Now a lot of us have used the Internet for quite a while probably recognize the phrase don't feed the trolls. I'm sure it pre-existed the Internet. Whenever trolls first appeared on this planet, somebody was probably suggesting we not feed them. But at least in a netiquette context for a few decades now I've seen that in forums, comments below articles, somebody is drawing attention to themselves. They're usually lighting into somebody else or whatever the article is that you're reading the comments down below it. We don't want to feed the trolls. We don't want to react or give attention to what that troll is presenting. Otherwise, you've fed the troll, rewarded him, and made him a little bit more powerful. Don't feed the trolls. Again, I think a lot of us already know this and probably try not to do it. This time of year I see a lot of negative political ads and I feel like they are trolling. I guess they're trolling because it works. But I try to avert my gaze or mute it or count points against anybody who is trolling me about their political opponent.
Trolls are not always nefarious with mal-intent. Sometimes it's just where you put your attention, isn't it? I was looking at this Elon Musk tweet a few months ago. That's when I noted that I wanted to do this for this week's podcast. I saved this, it's a simple tweet, but Elon in June tweeted, "Let's just skip original video games and movies and go straight to the sequel." Now, I appreciate the humor of that. I think he generated hundreds or thousands of comments, but that doesn't add much to the grander conversation. I think a lot of people spend a lot of time. I am arguing too much time reading other people's comments. When I think Elon was just generally trying to get a rise out of people. I mean, all of us can think about video games. If you play video games or movies and realize that often the sequels are better I would say, since I've been trolled and I'm responding here that typically video games sequels get better, whereas movie sequels get worse. That's one of the reasons I've always favored entertainment software and invested more of my money into video game companies than movie and entertainment companies. But it's hard. I think Elon, who is really good at getting people's attention for about 513 different reasons. I think this was just a troll, but again not a nefarious one.
Here's another example. We used to do a radio shows. The Motley Fool Radio Show went from AM radio to NPR. The AM radio years for Tom and for me back in the 1990s, three hours coast to coast on Saturday afternoons. I hope some of you still remember the Motley Fool Radio Show. We sure put a lot of time into it, taking live calls three hours every Saturday afternoon coast to coast. Since we're relatively new to the field, we made some friends with some people in the business. Paul Harris was a radio personality in Washington, DC at the time. I think he later moved to St. Louis. He's been a friend of the Fool over the years. He made a joke. In this joke probably was played out for real on some people's shows. We never did it on ours. But anytime you are having a hard time, he said, "With your radio show getting people to call in all you do is bait them with cat versus dog arguments." All you really have to do is, I came across my neighbor's cats, and man I hate cats. My dog is so much smarter than your cat. Bingo the lines will light up and you will have an hour probably of pretty bad AM radio. But you'll at least have a lot of activity because people care about their cats and their dogs, but that's also trolling too. Baiting and trolling is happening all over the place.
I think The Motley Fool does it too sometimes. In a way I'm sad to admit it, but one of our most popular ads that you may have seen on the Internet has the headlines, something like this: Motley Fool issues rare all-in buy alert. The reason that a lot of people have seen that ad on the Internet before is because a lot of other people click it. They click that add at probably at 3x or 5x, whatever it tested against. That's why Motley Fool issues rare all-in buy alert has been broadly seen over the Internet. Now often if you actually click into that, we explained our terms. We've gotten you to click. We've trolled you but we've gotten you to click and eventually people come through and try the service. I will say that while we are baiting you and I'm sorry that we're doing that, I do feel good that we're at least baiting you into what I think of as life-improving goodness and understanding of investing, getting started perhaps if you like as a rule breaker. There's a little bit of, end justifies that means. But there's a lot of baiting going on all over the place. How many Internet sites? How many traditional media companies have clickbait headlines? In fact, even if your traditional media company doesn't do this, they're probably ads being bought by somebody else just below it that say something like five jaw-dropping facts about Leonardo DiCaprio, or have you seen what Cheryl Tiegs looks like recently? Or 13 unbelievable truths that will make your gynecologists eat more vegetables. I stole that one from medium.com in [laughs] somebody's article about some of the best clickbait titles. I guess as we think through a rather banal but clearly trolling Elon Musk tweet, or that AM radio trick or The Motley Fool issues where all-in buy alert or a jaw-dropping fact about Leonardo DiCaprio, I guess the mental tip for you and for me is don't feed the trolls. Advice to live by, I say whether we're talking about the comments at the bottom of articles and people are trolling you there or the many other ways people are trying to get your and my attention. Again, some of them are not harmful and they might even lead to good things. But I think in this attention-starved world, part of the reason we describe it that way is that we're allowing our attention to get distracted by so many different factors.
Maybe part of winning the day is to not feed the trolls, and the trolls are everywhere. Which brings us to our final one. This one's mine, Number 6, which I'm going to call rooting for people and ideals, not necessarily your home team. This one starts with sports, of course, and I think a lot of us if we are sports fans, I'm going to predict the chances are that whatever your favorite team is, it probably has a geographic tie to where you started and/or where you are today. In fact, if you go to a home team stadium and don't cheer for the home team, you'll usually get razzed by people around you or your friends because you're not cheering for the home team. The default assumption is that your favorite team should be the team from your neighborhood, from the hood, from your town, your city, your state, your area. I think it makes sense for those part of cheer for your country in the Olympics, but it is so geographically based.
That's why rooting for people and ideals, I'm going to call a mental tip because it's next-level thinking. What's next-level thinking? Well, next-level thinking is, when you have your mind opened to something different. A good example, let's think of school kids. You've read a book together. Basic thinking would be something like, "Hey, could you summarize the ending?" You might have your kids with expository writing, summarize the ending as a short answer if you're their English teacher. Next level would be if you asked them, how might they rewrite the ending to that book or story that you all just read? I love when we reframe things and reach the next level of thinking. I think I've done this as a sports fan and since I entitled this rooting for people and ideals, you can probably see where we're headed.
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of interviewing NFL Head Coach Frank Reich, one of my favorite podcasts that I've done in 2021, and indeed when we hit our besties and we award our besties in December of this year as we did last year, I bet that one's going to be on my besties list. But not only did I enjoy learning from Frank and sharing him with all of you, especially his investing life, which I don't think he's asked about very often on ESPN or the NFL Channel but something else happened for me. I started thinking I actually like the Colts since Frank is the Colts' Head Coach than I like my own local team. The Washington Football Team, which while it has some admirable people connected to it, including its head coach, it's been as a franchise, a train wreck, and an embarrassment for the NFL over the last 20 years. It's really undermined a love of football in my home city of Washington, DC.
Now, presumably, I should be going down with the ship with his team and I pretty much have over a couple of decades. I can't root for the owner of the team has had 15 quarterbacks in the last 13 years. There are all kinds of examples of not understanding how to build culture and how to build a winning culture. I think we do that pretty well at The Motley Fool, but more importantly, that's what I look for in the stocks that I recommend. Cultures and winning cultures, those usually outlast products or CEOs, cultures run deep. What I started to realize is why am I cheering for Washington football team just because I happen to have been born in Washington, DC when I have such greater admiration for Frank Reich? I basically became a Colts fan now. It doesn't mean I still don't cheer for my home team, they rarely play each other, they are in different conferences, but my heart has moved away from my town to people, to ideals.
In this case, somebody who I think exhibits great character also happens to be a very capital F Foolish investor, and I want to congratulate Frank on his team winning their first game to season this past weekend. Frank's just one example and you might not even be a football fan, maybe you're a basketball fan. I don't watch a lot of NBA basketball these days, I do enjoy college basketball a lot. But I came across a two-minute clip from my new favorite NBA player on the Internet, a few months ago and I saved that one and queued it up to share with you. Today, we're not going to replay the two-minute clip, but if you just google "focus on the past, that's ego," you're going to see an amazing two-minute statement by Giannis Antetokounmpo. This is one of the hardest names I've ever tried to pronounce. Giannis was born in Greece to Nigerian parents, but this is what he says in a nutshell, so I don't bury the lead. He says, "Focus on the past, that's ego. Focus on the future, that's pride. Focus on the present, that's humility." I love that statement and right away, this foreign-born player in the NBA becomes one of my favorite players to root for because of the person, not the jersey, because of the character or the ideals, not any brash trash talk.
I realized this last point is mostly for sports fans, but it's really about next-level thinking, and for me anyway, next-level thinking has me increasingly at the age of 55 for my next 27 years, cheering on the people and the ideals that I believe deserve to win this world even if it's not the one from my hometown. If it is for my hometown, even better because now I do have a tribal association that I can share with my neighbors around me, but I'm not going to allow that to sway me toward something that is less admirable than whatever you or I might perceive to be the most admirable things or people happening in our society. There it is. Mental tip, trick or life hack number 6, this one I'm going to call a mental tip, start rooting for people and for ideals.
Well, before we close things up, let's quickly summarize. Here are the six from this week's show. First, inactivity > activity. Second, the "Are we there yet?" game. Third, 15 minutes before church. Four, win the morning, win the day. Number five, don't feed the trolls and by the way, they are everywhere, and finally, number 6, maybe start opening your heart to rooting for people and ideals. Not whatever it happens to be a block away. Well, there you have it. That's about all I have for you this week on mental tips, tricks, and life hacks, volume 6.
Next week, I'm going to do something special, something that I only do once every two years on this podcast. I'm looking forward to sharing next week with you, but in the meantime, let me leave you with this bonus. You got six mental tips, tricks, or life hacks, except I'm giving you a bonus one at the end. This one comes from Twitter responding to my invitation to contribute to this week's podcast. This one comes from Marina, she's @4VictoriaBC1 on Twitter. Late last week, I simply put out there, got a mental tip, trick, or life hack. You want to share it with the world to help out others you may never meet? Double awesome. I could help, tap me out an email because we're about to record this week's podcast. The response Marina gave, her mental tip, trick, or life hack is how we're going to end this week show. Here it is. One word, got a mental tip, trick, or life hack? Marina did: chocolate.
