The number I am not looking at

There is a number on a screen somewhere that would tell me, to the cent, what a thing I own is worth this morning, and I have made a quiet practice, over many years, of not looking at it before breakfast, or indeed before I have any particular reason to. People find this strange in a man who writes about money. They assume that caring about the long game means watching it closely, the way you might watch a kettle you were anxious about. It is the opposite. The watching is the enemy. The number changes every few seconds, and almost none of those changes mean anything, and the human mind is not built to be shown a thousand meaningless changes and feel nothing. It feels all of them. It feels the small green ones as cleverness and the small red ones as danger, and by the end of a morning of honest watching you have lived through a dozen tiny victories and defeats that never happened and will never matter, and you are tired, and a tired mind reaches for action the way a tired body reaches for sugar.

That is where the real harm is done. Not by the market, which is indifferent to you and always has been, but by the small tug in the chest that says do something, anything, so that this awful sitting still can end. Sitting still is the whole discipline. I grew up in a part of the world that understands seasons in its bones, and I think often about durian, which cannot be hurried, which arrives when the tree decides and not one week before, and which no amount of standing under the branch and worrying will bring down sooner. You wait. You do other things while you wait. You do not mistake the waiting for laziness, because the waiting is the work, and the fruit at the end of it is the whole reason you planted anything at all.

A great deal of what looks like sophistication in this business is really just a very expensive form of impatience wearing a suit. The person checking prices at midnight is not more serious than the person asleep. They are more frightened, and fright is a poor advisor, and it charges a fee every single time you take its advice. The screen is designed, by clever and well paid people, to be checked. It rewards the checking with a little jolt each time, and the jolt is real even when the news is nothing. I do not blame anyone for feeling the pull. I feel it too. I have simply decided, on most mornings, that the pull can go unanswered, that the day is better spent, and that the number will still be there when there is an actual reason to look at it.

Temperament, in the end, is most of the game. Not cleverness, which is common, and not information, which is now free and endless and mostly useless. The rare thing is the ability to be shown the flashing number and to look away, to let a good decision sit and become a good outcome in its own slow time, and to trust that the tree knows when the fruit is ready. That is all I have really learned. It took an embarrassingly long time to learn it, and it fits, as you see, on the back of an envelope.