“Imagine that you had to drive from New York City to Los Angeles. You’re in downtown Manhattan hopelessly stuck in traffic. Bicycle messengers are whizzing past. You jump out of your car, sell your car on the spot (at a ridiculously low price), buy a bicycle, and continue your trip to the West Coast. As absurd as this scenario sounds, investors do it everyday when they make short-term decisions for long-term journeys. Stick with a vehicle that will take you to the end of the road.” – Don Connelly
It looks like there’s a lot of this phenomenon going on these days. We all want to buy low and sell high, but it can be increasingly difficult to stay true to our beliefs when it looks like the sky is falling. We all want to have our investments do well, and the problem is that there’s always someone who has done better than us at investing (as well as someone who’s done worse, assuming you didn’t give any money to Madoff). My good friend Bart always reminded me that “comparison is the thief of joy”. Whatever you are holding in your investment accounts, it is easy to find another investment that is doing better, or whizzing past you in a bicycle to use the analogy.
The challenge is to keep your eyes not on what that hottest stock or fund is doing, but on simply managing God’s resources in a way that is integritable, smart, and pleasing to the Owner. That might mean highering a professional advisor, or doing a little research yourself, figuring out what you believe to be true about investing, and then sticking to your guns even when everyone else is declaring that the sky is falling. It is certainly not a job for the lighthearted.
We don’t know when the Master will be returning; it might be tomorrow or 2,000 years from now. So while we don’t know when the end of our Stewardship Journey will be, all we can do is focus on being faithful, and not getting distracted with comparison.
Filed under: Investing Tagged: | Investing, journey, Stewardship
