Breadth Thrusts & Bread Crusts: Compounding Your Small Decisions

JC Parets
October 28, 2021

From the desk of Willie Delwiche.

"We make our decisions, and then our decisions make us."

I came across that quote in a book I was reading this week (no apologies here -- I read books -- that's what I do).

That prompted me to think about how it was this time last year that I had some decisions to make about what was next in my professional journey. JC and I talked about my joining the All Star Charts team. I (we) made the decision to do just that -- and while the impacts of that decision continue to unfold, I've not regretted it for a moment. And knowing what I know now, that decision seems more obvious than it did when I made it a year ago.

It's not just the active decisions that form us. Where we pay attention matters as well. The 18th century poet William Blake was ahead of his time when he observed how "we become what we behold."

More recently, Donald Hebb approached this idea from a brain activity perspective, noting how "cells that fire together wire together." 

The idea is that every time we do something or think about something, it becomes easier to do so again. It's easier for me to think about being part of the All Star Charts team now because I have spent most of the past year being a part of that team.

Some of this just gets to the idea of opportunity costs and the practical reality that if you choose one option or one path, you are necessarily not on the others. The path that you are on, along with the company that you keep, influences what decisions you will encounter. 

But there can be an aspirational element as well. Choosing to repeatedly engage in one activity or another influences not only what we see and how we see it, but who we are now and who we are becoming. There is power in a repeated process. There is also a tension between being stubborn enough to trust that process and being flexible enough to adapt when the process does not work (knowing when we might need to board a new train).

I think about this often when it comes to the market. We can develop a process that helps us see what is going on and what at the margin is changing. We can be aware of the inter-market relationships and can understand tendencies that have been experienced over time. We can make sense from what we see on a chart or within an indicator of what the future might hold and what we might need to do about it. While knowing what an asset could do is a useful starting point, knowing what it is doing is vital. Paying attention to price is a great way to stay on top of this situation.

These ideas go beyond just the market. If we want better understanding, we need to start thinking and doing. We need to get after it. If we don't like what we are becoming, we need to consider what it is we are beholding.

Often it begins with small changes now, tomorrow and the next day and trusting that the compounding effects that are present in the world of finance are also at work in other areas of our lives.

It takes time, but what begins with a choice eventually becomes a character. 

 

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