Many people delay taking action because they hope to avoid suffering. They keep searching for a path that won’t involve pain or sacrifice or tradeoffs.
But some form of suffering is always inevitable. The process of taking action is the process of choosing your pain.
Working on a problem reduces the fear of it.
It’s hard to fear a problem when you are making progress on it—even if progress is imperfect and slow.
Action relieves anxiety.
Many people work hard, but few people work on the highest and best thing.
Usually, it takes no more effort to work on high leverage tasks than it does to work on low leverage ones.
It's just a matter of directing your energy.
I always keep in the back of my mind two ideas while trading:
1. Nothing has to happen (just follow price)
2. Anything could happen (don't get stubborn)
Those two things keep me afloat.
I have a suspicion that most adults (75%+) could pick any skill—excluding sports—and work their way into the top 10% in the world simply by working exclusively on it every day for two years.
But almost nobody displays that degree of focus, so we will never know.
In 2004 I got the opportunity to work with Jeff Bezos to develop the original Kindle. It was Amazon’s first foray into hardware and I learned a ton from my interactions with Jeff. Here’s some of the stories and lessons that I took away from that experience: