When Did This Become Normal?

Pop the Hood

Work with me on this.

Imagine for a moment that you were a financial instrument.

Take your pick. An ETF, a stock, an FX pair, a commodity, a treasury, a future, an option.

Got it?  Assign yourself a ticker.

Now imagine you've just come into being.

Born afresh and new.

What is your value?

How did you arrive at that valuation?

Was it assigned to you? Earned? Discovered?

Now move forward in time to where you are today.

Plot the chart. 

Has the journey been stable and predictable? Or have there been oscillations of your own?

Periods of expansion. Contraction. Volatility. Reinvention.

If we were analysing you in the same way we might analyse a company or a market, what would we see?

How is the underlying functioning?

This month we’re going to pop the hood and go about things in a slightly different way.

If you're with me, let's begin.

What's Really Going On?

Before we get stuck in, let me share with you the inspiration for this article.  

A few months ago, I met a former floor trader.

We got on well immediately.  He was warm, engaging and had the kind of presence that comes from having spent years operating in high-pressure environments.

At some point the conversation turned towards my work.

He smiled. Mindset wasn't really his thing. Fair enough.

He'd built a successful career. Seen and experienced things in the markets that most people never will. He'd done well.

As we continued talking though, another picture began to emerge.

Health challenges. A marriage breakdown. A difficult relationship with his children.  Trouble sleeping at night.  The conversation moved on and we spoke about other things.

A few weeks later, I found myself having a similar discussion with somebody else.

"Mindset stuff isn't for me."  His systems and trading were automated, running smoothly as it should.  A little later in the conversation he mentioned he was on anxiety medication but had it all handled.

Then another conversation.  A different person, different circumstances - yet a similar theme underlying with a body carrying the marks of success. 

None of these conversations were out of the ordinary.  They’re almost expected.  Normalised.  "It is what it is…"

“If you can’t stand the heat, keep out of the kitchen”.

Perhaps as you're reading this you’re thinking, “Well, this is normal”.  

That may be true,

In fact, it’s precisely because these experiences are so commonplace that they interest me.

Few people seem surprised by any of the conversations described above, least of all the people living them.

Which brings me to the question I've been sitting with for some time.

When did this become normal?  

Perhaps a better question is… Why is this normal ?

Why have we become so accepting of carrying more than is sustainable as the price of success? 

Hidden Expenses

These experiences are not unique to trading and investing.  I hear versions of them from founders, executives, lawyers, doctors and people operating across all sorts of industries.  There is a common denominator.  

Mindset and emotional wellbeing are still viewed as secondary concerns. Interesting perhaps. Nice to have. A little "woo". Something to think about later.  An afterthought.

Yet somewhere along the way, for each and every one of us, there’s a risk of dislocation between the external scorecard and the personal lived experience, with markers showing up in the areas of: health, relationships, quality of life experience and emotional well being. 

As you read this, you may actually know of someone in your world who, on the face of it, has it all together:

Career - check.

Reputation - check

Lifestyle markers - check

…but something's off, and you can’t put your finger on it.

Perhaps you've experienced this yourself.  A period where everything looked fine from the outside, yet privately you knew something wasn't sitting right. A relationship. Your health. Your energy. Your sense of purpose.  Something difficult to explain, yet impossible to ignore.

I find myself wondering whether we consciously chose this.  Or whether we were simply carried along by a set of societal assumptions and made them our own.

Success is visible.  Can we say the same about the costs incurred to get us there? 

Adaptation

As I’ve been thinking about this I’ve been drawn to some of the works of Peter Attia, Terrence Real and Gabor Maté. 

Each, in their own way addressing this topic and coming to the conclusion that we’ve become extraordinarily adept at avoiding emotional pain and developing strategies that at one time may have helped us survive, belong, succeed or gain approval but have since morphed into behaviours that have taken over and may well be a trap of their own kind: 

• The need to prove oneself.. 

• The need to be right, leading to… 

• Relentless drive…

• Relentless self reliance…

• Difficulty switching off… and still 

• Never feeling that achievements are enough.

Real argues that this affects a lot of men.  I’d submit that this principle applies to all those who strive for success.  ‘High performers’ (what a phrase!) - ‘high achievers’ (yet another one) are attributes that we aspire to, standards once achieved have to be maintained.  And I ask - at what cost?  Each individual has stories and pressures that sit in the background of otherwise successful lives. 

Perhaps you've done some version of this yourself.

Pushed something to one side because there were more pressing things to deal with.

• Worked longer.

• Focused on the next goal.

• Promised yourself you'd come back to it later.  Later, of course, has a habit of never arriving.

Many of the qualities we admire in successful people sit somewhere in this territory.

Determination. Resilience. The ability to stay standing when things get difficult. The willingness to carry responsibility when others won't.

These qualities matter.  They build careers. They create opportunities. They help people achieve extraordinary things.

Again, I ask…at what cost?  

Examining the Bill

So let me bring this back to you.

If you were conducting a review of your own life in the same way you might review a trade, a business or an investment, what would you find?  What would you conclude about the underlying?

What has worked?

What has compounded?

What has generated a return?

And what has quietly accumulated on the liability side of the balance sheet?

What have been the costs?

Not the financial ones.

The personal ones.

The relationships that received less attention than they deserved.

The health issue that was manageable until it wasn't.

The conversation you keep meaning to have.

The thing you've been carrying that nobody else knows about.

Now project forward.

Assume nothing changes.

What does that trajectory look like?

Truthfully. Not the version you tell other people. The version you know intimately.

What, if anything, requires your attention that you're still hoping will resolve itself?

Perhaps some people would make exactly the same choices again.

Perhaps the cost was worth paying.  Perhaps this is rationalised to be an ‘investment’.

That's not really for me to judge.

What interests me more is whether we ever stop to examine the bill.

The longer I spend around ‘high performers’ the less interested I become in success by itself.

Perhaps that's age. Perhaps it's the work I do. Perhaps it's seeing the same pattern often enough that it becomes difficult to ignore.

What interests me now is the whole picture.  How did they get there?  What did they have to carry?. What did they have to give up?. And whether, if given the chance, they would do it exactly the same way again. 

It makes a person wonder… What is success afterall?  

Attia makes a compelling case for getting ahead of the curve with a concept of ‘Medicine 3.0’.  He argues convincingly that the trajectory of our mental, emotional and physical health is largely predictable.  In common parlance, ‘it’s not rocket science’.  So…  if we can see what's probable, why do we wait for the break to fix things? 

Ought we not consider getting ahead of the curve for ourselves? 

If we're only measuring one side of the equation, we may be missing the most important part of the story.

Maybe this is the conversation we really need to be having.

Inspired as always by Gabor Mate’s provocative thinking, I end this month's article with this question:

Is it time to set a new normal?

Notes

• Outlive, Peter Attia
  Writes as a physician focused on longevity, biomarkers, exercise, nutrition and disease prevention.  No spoilers from me.  This is an excellent book.  Suffice to say, Chapter 17, is  arguably the most personal and impactful chapter in the book.  Whereas much of the thesis has been written as a physician, this chapter, he is the subject.  He comes to the conclusion that emotional  health is not a ‘nice to have’.  It is as fundamental to longevity and quality of life as physical health.  What is the point of having it all, if you are unable to enjoy it?.  It's Attia that highly recommends Reals book (below) as a must read.

• I Don't Want To Talk About It, Terrence Real
  Touching a topic that so many avoid, covert depression.  Which shows up as anger, irritability, emotional numbness, workaholism, perfectionism, addiction, risk taking, withdrawal from relationships.  A key observation being that many successful men are not necessarily driven by ambition alone.  There are feelings that underpin much of these drivers that they’re trying to escape.   The problem isn’t that they have pain - it’s that they learn to hide, suppress or outrun them.  I’d argue that ‘high performing’ women have their own version of this too.  

• The Myth of Normal, Gabor Mate
  Challenges the idea that "normal" is necessarily healthy. He argues that many forms of stress, disconnection, exhaustion and emotional suppression have become so commonplace in modern society that we rarely question them. The real question is not whether something is normal, but whether it is serving us.