Just Take It Bird By Bird
In her book on writing, Anne Lamott tells a story I return to whenever I find myself daunted by the sometimes Sisyphean feel of longer term endeavors. Ms. Lamott’s brother has a school project due the next day. It is the sort of project that parents here may be familiar with, the ones requiring the procuring of construction papers or colored markers or bright poster board well in advance, but the crinkled assignment sheet only emerges in the child's hand the night prior to the assignment’s due date, just as the stores are shuttering. (Such projects may also be familiar to non-parents in the shape of the nightmarish remembrance that you have not started a school project that is already overdue, only to awaken, heart racing, and remember that you are well past school-project age.) Ms. Lamott’s brother is crying because he has yet to catalog all the different birds, black birds and blue birds, hummingbirds and songbirds, and the enormity of the effort is too much for him to bear. The father, in an attempt to calm the boy, puts his arms around him, and says, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
I believe in the invisible. I do.
Rod Marinelli, the Detroit Lions head coach the year the team lost every game.
The Detroit Lions had lost thirteen consecutive games when reporters quizzed then head coach Rod Marinelli as to whether he could see any improvement in his football team and he growled the above proclamation in his faith in the unseen. Coach Marinelli was previously a defensive line coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers the year they won the Super Bowl. (Also known as “The Big Game” for those familiar with the National Football League’s intellectual property no-no’s.) Coach M. was credited for urging the team to “pound the rock," and it became the go-to mantra that reminded the players to stay focused on the daily efforts needed to win “The Championship Trophy". (I see you N.F.L.) Pound the rock and it will eventually fissure, not just from the blow of the last fist (I for some reason imagined the players hitting a rock with their fists) but also from all the blows that came before. Sportscasters loved to yell “pound the rock” and sprinkled the phrase throughout their broadcasts. It was the sports world’s metaphoric kin to Ms. Lamott’s bird-by-bird, albeit a little more football-colorful. As for Coach M's pronouncement on seeing improvement when the critics saw none, reporters eviscerated his response. His interview was replayed over and over and submitted as proof that Coach M. was in over his head. It didn’t help that the Lions went on to lose every game that season. Coach Marinelli was dismissed promptly after the season’s merciful end.
When you focus on long-term outcomes, expect to be frequently misunderstood in the short term. This is true not only in business and investing but in life and relationships as well. Gutam Baid
Keeping at long-term over the long-term isn't very easy to do. It requires you to have a belief eerily similar to the one Coach M. espoused (and was derided for), a commitment to the seemingly infinitesimal progress, incremental gains that are drawing you closer to your longer-range intentions. The two-hundred and fifty words written after dinner; the preordained savings contributions; the early morning runs in the thick of both darkness and humidity: Promises to the far off can often be overshadowed by the satisfactions of the immediate, the streaming sitcom, the slick athleisure sneakers, the snooze of the alarm. While it's said that good things come to those who wait, Tom Petty said it best when he sang that the waiting is the hardest part. The waiting gets considerably more challenging when it seems that your connections, across all of the major social media outlets, have already written the international bestseller, taken their company public, finished first in their age group (in fact all age groups) in some triathlon on Kauai. All before Tuesday. While you may not have a battery of reporters questioning your football team's improvement, the inner critic, at least mine, can be quite adept at submitting exhibit after exhibit after exhibit, like a dramatized television lawyer, of all the ways you've fallen short of your peers, friends, and maybe even of your own potential. While some misunderstandings that Mr. Baid cites may come from society at large, the most challenging misunderstandings are often the ones that arise from within.
Over time the trick, I’d discovered, was to measure success through the challenge in front of me, not the one I faced two or twenty years earlier. Twyla Tharp
We all know that comparison misappropriates joy, zeros-out the multiplication of happiness, and that to spend your days benchmarking yourself against someone else's benchmarks is to lose those days to matters outside of your dominion. We've heard countless times that the more productive path, the healthier path, the saner path, is to compete not with the specters that scroll up and down your screens, and not even with your teammates that seem to have the presentation skills of a TEDx speaker, but to compete only with yourself. "Did you get better today?" is the more humanistic measure. The dancer Twyla Tharp takes this advice a step further in her acknowledgement of the dangers of competing against even your own ghosts, the past-lives during which you were younger and limber and more fresh-faced. Appraise yourself on how you respond to your present obstacles: it's how you do today's work that counts.
All of seemingly urgent matters vying for your attention, sometimes even stamped with that scarlet exclamation point, can draw you away from the discipline of contributing to your long-term future. But as Bill James once said, "my experience is what I attend to," and if you're not careful, you'll be attending to other's experiences instead of those of your own, other's expectations in lieu of your own promise. (I'm referring, of course, to William James the psychologist, not Bill James the master of P.E.C.O.T.A.) The best hack I've found thus far, and, regrettably it is only a hack and not a permanent condition, is to just do it, like the iconic advertisement suggests. Rather than waiting for an allotment of inspiration or more ideal conditions, that may or may not (usually not) be coming, I have found that the start generally grants me the motivation to keep on. As they say, motion begets emotion. But it's definitely not easy. Back to Ms. Tharp:
The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab.... Some people might say that simply stumbling out of bed and getting into a taxicab hardly rates the horrific "ritual." It glorifies a mundane act that anyone can perform. I disagree. First steps are hard; it's no one's idea of fun to wake up in the dark every day and haul one's tired body to the gym.
Rituals, habits, routines, a repeatable process: All are helpful to get to the start, anything to automatically pilot you beyond your thinking mind and the inertia that it prefers. And the longer the payoff, the more inertia. Gravitational force fields of it.
And what of the long-term? Why keep an eye on those yet to be visible horizons when our brains are primed for what's immediately within eyeshot? We know the answer of course. In many ways this note is old news, an echo of sentiments said over and over, seemingly throughout time immemorial. There's no salve here and this piece less of a how-to and more of an admission of the foils that I face in keeping up with the long-term. We've heard that the feats that usually evoke the most meaning, have the most outsized return, are often the ones that require patience and a considerable amount of temporal (and other) investments. In this regard, the world of investment may offer up one last way to look at the long-term.
Long-term investing is something that Wall Street can never arbitrage away. Time arbitrage is therefore one of the biggest edges you have as an investor. Don’t take it lightly, as long-term returns are the only ones that matter. Ben Carson
Said another way, as the Rolling Stones suggest, over the long-term, time is actually on your side. With respect to the most important investments, the investments in yourself and your families and the ongoing deposits to the bank of your aspirations, reframing the long-term as, not an disadvantage to be managed with but rather an advantage to be leveraged, may give you that extra boost to keep at it when the short term swings tempt you to do otherwise. Even so, I still find that for me, it helps to just get back to to the big project, to believe a little bit more in the invisible, to pound the rock, and to just take it, bird by bird.
Please note that the opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone and do not represent the opinions of and are definitely not endorsed by my employer Raymond James. At the end of the day, I'm just trying to learn as much as I can and share what I've been lucky enough to learn. Thanks!