Morgan Housel has a great short essay out titled ‘You Better Love This‘.

The investing and career gold is here:

There are few financial variables more correlated to performance than commitment to a strategy during its lean years – both the amount of performance and the odds of capturing it over a given period of time. The historical odds of making money in U.S. markets are 50/50 over one-day periods, 68% in one-year periods, 88% in 10-year periods, and (so far) 100% in 20 year periods. Anything that keeps you in the game has a quantifiable advantage, and time horizon is so powerful in investing that the ill-conceived portfolio you love may be better than the perfect one that bores you and that you’ll abandon the moment it’s out of favor. It’s almost a badge of honor for investors to claim they’re emotionless about their investments. But if lacking emotions about your strategy or holdings increases the odds you’ll walk away from them when they become difficult, what looks like rational thinking becomes a liability. The counterintuitive truth to compounding is that decent growth sustained for the longest period of time is superior to huge growth that can’t or won’t be maintained.

Same in careers. A job that pays $100,000 a year in a field you love will probably be more financially rewarding than one paying $150,000 in a field you don’t, because the job you’re only in for the big paycheck increases the odds you’ll burn out or get bored and need to find a new calling. What is the quit rate among lawyers and investment bankers? I don’t know, but it has to be huge. And both can be great experiences with transferable skills. But if you focus on the money – and many lawyers and investment bankers do – I wonder how many would be better off just starting in a field they love and won’t burn out on, letting their career blossom as contacts and niche skills compound.

I have hit the age where I see many friends getting out of banking and law. Many have waited too long to restart the compounding process.

I am also at the age where a lot of people come to me for investing advice and I can do not better than to explain Morgan’s data above with respect to finding a strategy that puts the time horizon on your side.

For me, it is my 8-80 strategy which is owning public companies/stocks that have timeless products and brands (many are still founder led) that I can get excited about when they drop 25 percent, not emotionless to the point where I flee because I am not sure why I own them when markets get difficult.