WALL STREET: ACADEMY OF HUMILITY

By: Ben Miller

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you hear “Wall Street”, chances are the word “humility” isn’t near the top of the list of words that come to mind. Frankly it’s probably not even on the list. However, my 8 years there taught me humility in a way no other experience in my life could.

Flip-Flopper

When I was younger, I prided myself on my consistency. People who changed their minds were flip-floppers, and were not to be trusted. Politics teaches this approach, as the term “flip-flopper” is tossed around as an indication that someone is untrustworthy.

It took me a long time to understand that changing my mind was a virtue rather than a vice. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Aging In Dog-Years

One of the things that was so alluring and also so exhausting about my role trading derivatives at the big bank where I used to work was the fast pace of work, inundated with torrents of data and an ever-shifting shroud of uncertainty.

What that all boiled down to was the fact that I had to make decisions quickly. A lot of decisions. So many decisions that it felt like I packed 5 years of decision making into each year that went by.

However, one of the best parts of the options market was that the feedback was very often virtually immediate. If the security was illiquid, it might take a while to figure out if the trade I had done was a good one, but by and large it was apparent in very short order whether it was a good trade or not.

That deluge of decisions was harrowing. For those of you haven’t met me, I’m bald. Very bald. I didn’t start my time on Wall Street bald, but soon after I resigned, I shaved off what was left of my hair, opting for the ambiguous age that accompanies a bald man in his early thirties over the prematurely aged lethal combo of thinning and receding hair I had before.

In fact, a friend who has only ever known me bald once saw a picture of the old me on the wall and asked my wife if it was my dad. I prefer to think it was the glasses I was wearing in that picture… but I digress.

Enough About Your (Lack of) Hair, Ben

The reason I brought up outward appearance of aging is that it matched the inward experience of aging it accompanied. All the decisions I was forced to make each day compounded with their own feedback to give me a very high number of reps of that all-important human experience of making decisions.

It was easy for the adolescent version of me to stick to his guns, because the background information was relatively constant, or its changes were at least deniable.

In the markets, the facts are the facts. Yes, when you buy a stock and the price goes lower, it could just be an opportunity to accumulate a bigger position at a lower price. But, if the reasons you bought the stock have changed, the?conclusion?that it is the right thing to own may change with it.

In the markets, a flexible approach is not just beneficial, it is?essential. If you stubbornly hold an opinion because you held that opinion yesterday and in spite of the fact that the opinion is no longer merited by the conditions, you’re likely to get your clock cleaned.

Emerson Again

“But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict some what you have stated in this or that public place?” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Learning that changing my mind often was the mark of a good trader slowly bled over into the other realms of my life. I proceeded from understanding that changing my mind was not shameful, to understand that changing my mind when the facts demanded it was laudable.

I had spent the first two decades of my conscious life trying desperately to cling to the illusion that the world was a simple place that wouldn’t outgrow static opinions so long as the opinions were right in the first place.

Being Wrong Again and Again

There’s nothing quite like being wrong over and over within a short span of time to teach you that changing your mind is not only a part of enlightenment, but of intellectual survival. I had to have the sense beat into me.

Even now, it takes guts to embrace this idea fully. While it did take me a long time to come to terms with the fact that it was okay for my 25-year-old self to admit that in some ways, my 20-year-old self was an idiot, that made it progressively easier for my 30-year-old Ben to admit the same about 25-year-old Ben.

Once I was accustomed to thinking like that, I could shorten the window. It was okay to think I was an idiot a year ago, enough time had passed, right? However, extrapolating forward gets a lot more personal. It’s so easy to get so identified with myself that I assume that I’m a pretty good dude right now.

But if I peek behind the curtain of where this logic leads, I can’t ignore the fact staring me in my 33-year-old face:?38-year old Ben is going to think that in some ways, I was an idiot. Ouch. This should be obvious (and I’m sure it is to my wife), but to me somehow it strikes me as unexpected that I could indeed currently be an idiot.

Not only that, but looking back, if I had arrested my development at any age prior to now, the rest of my life would have been impoverished.

What I’m Rooting For

Not many people get excited about going to the doctor. Best case, steady as she goes. Worst case, you find out you’re diseased. But that doesn’t mean we should avoid doctors.

While it hurts in a sense to apply enough introspection to?know?that in certain ways, I’m an idiot?right now, once I get past that sting I can take a new approach.

Yes, I am compelled by this thought to root out the ways in which I’m currently an idiot and resolve them. But the insight here is that I am positively rooting for a future in which I look back on my current self as an idiot.

If I don’t, I’ve stopped growing. In fact, if I get to a year from now and I can’t think of any way in which I was being an idiot today, I’m not doing my job.

What Does This Mean?

So should we be disgusted with our past selves? No, of course not. We should forgive them and understand that they were doing the best they could with the tools and ideas they had in hand at the time. But our present selves (hopefully) have better tools, and they will in turn be superseded by better tools still to come.

The upshot? Be gentle with yourself, and don’t take your past self too seriously. Or your current self, for that matter. If you’re doing it right, then according to your future self, you’re both idiots anyway. Just keep failing forward, learning, growing, and changing. Don’t be afraid to outgrow yourself, and be humble enough to know that if you’re lucky, you too will someday be outgrown.

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