Words that Hurt

Warren Buffet once said; “You will continue to suffer if you have an emotional reaction to everything that is said to you. True power is sitting back and observing things with magic. True power is restraint. If words control you that means everyone else can control you. Breathe and allow things to pass”

Words have power

They always can extract an emotional reaction. But not all words hurt equally.

Words in the grey area between the truth and lie hurt more than those that are either. Outright lies will not affect and there is a certain sense of resignation with unalienable truths. But those things that you would like to be untrue but could very likely be true are the ones that result in an emotional response.

Take any investor in any space. If you called them illiterate, it would probably not even make a difference but if you said they were “glorified gamblers” throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks; oh boy! It would deliver a reaction.

Researchers at Cass Business School have found that equity indices constructed randomly by ‘monkeys’ would have produced higher risk-adjusted returns than an equivalent market capitalisation-weighted index over the last 40 years.

A study based on monthly US share data from 1968 to 2011 found nearly all 10 million indices weighted by chance delivered vastly superior returns to the market cap approach – a discovery likely to come as a blow to investors that have billions of dollars worldwide invested on a market cap-weighted basis.

Source: Cass Business School

The fact is that being able to make people park their money in their funds is the greatest talent that most investors have.

The words that are on the fringes of being true enrage.

The point is not to take a dump on investors. I am just using investors as an example here. You could call lawyers glorified English literature majors and so on.

The point is that when you find that grey area, those words hurt the most.