Do the right things—even if it means walking alone.
There's a certain kind of person who always seems busy. You see them early in the office, tapping on a keyboard like it owes them money. They read headlines, mutter about the Fed, click between three screens. They're working hard. But working hard at what?
In finance, this is often called "activity." In life, it's just noise. Some of these people make decisions faster than the sun rises. They change strategies on a Monday and question them by Wednesday. You get tired just watching. But the funny thing about being very busy in the wrong direction is that you don't get anywhere slower. You just get somewhere wrong, faster.
A canoe going in circles still looks productive—until you zoom out. Sometimes, the bravest thing is to pause. Maybe even do nothing. Especially when everyone else is doing something.
There's a man I once met in a train station, who told me he'd been to ten cities in one month. I asked why. He said he wasn't sure anymore. Just that the first trip made sense, and the rest followed like falling dominoes.
Investing is like that too. People make one decision. Then another. Then a third, to justify the second. Before they know it, they're ten years deep in a strategy they never liked, chasing returns they never needed.
It's not always the big mistakes that trap us. Often it's the small, convenient ones, made in a hurry, deeply embedded in our busyness. And left unexamined for too long.
So maybe the real question is not "What should I do next?" but: "Why am I doing this at all?" A map is only useful if you stop now and then to check you're still on it.
If you offered someone long-term health or a greasy bag of junk food right now, most would nod at the health—then open the bag anyway. Not because they don't care about their long-term health. Just that the fries are hot. The smell is good. And the pleasure is immediate.
This is the tragedy of the short term: its benefits always seem to arrive early, easy to reach, while its regrets only show up late and stay longer than guests who didn't bring wine. Day trading feels fun—until it doesn't. Junk food tastes good—until it doesn't. Skipping the hard thing is easy—until it's not.
The cost of reacting quickly is that you often react badly. And then spend twice the energy cleaning it up. But the world doesn't reward patience loudly. You don't get medals for sitting still and not buying a meme stock. There's no applause for going to sleep early.
Yet, over time, the quiet ones tend to do better. Their graphs look boring. Their lives, even more so. But the compounding is real. Invisible. Powerful. Like moss growing on a stone—slow, but relentless.
People like to ask what the "right thing" is. It is a fair question. A practical one, even. As if the world might pause for a moment, hand you a clean list titled: Things That Work, and you could get on with it.
But the right thing doesn't come like that. It's not noisy. It doesn't push itself forward. Often, it hides behind things that look too dull to notice. A bit like the man who always orders the same plain noodles and somehow lives to ninety.
Doing the right thing, in investing or in life, is rarely dramatic. It doesn't feel urgent. But it works, slowly and stubbornly—like water wearing down stone. The right thing tends to have certain qualities. It works over time. Not always, not immediately, but in the kind of way that builds something beneath the surface.
It doesn't need brilliance—just steadiness. It makes sense when explained in a few sentences. It doesn't wobble when markets do. It's simple enough to repeat. And it fits with the grain of human nature, not against it.
In investing, this means treating stocks as real business ownership. Thinking in decades. Stay away from leverage. Buying into businesses that serve people well and endure through time. Focusing on what value they create, what they keep, and how wisely they use it. It means understanding what you're doing, and why you're doing it—and being okay with silence for long stretches of time.
If you're tempted to change paths just because someone else got rich quickly, that's a sign—not that your strategy is wrong, but that your conviction is shallow. The real difficulty isn't in finding the right thing. It's in continuing to do it. Especially when it's not exciting. Especially when no one is watching.
And just as important as doing the right thing is knowing what to avoid. In practice, it's often easier to ask the question backwards: What might quietly destroy me? And then just… don't go there.
Charlie Munger put it this way: "All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I never go there."
He wasn't being dramatic. Just practical. A sharp way to make the same question easier to carry.
Because most damage in investing doesn't come from ignorance. It comes from doing things we already knew weren't right. Chasing what's popular. Buying what you don't understand but may go up in next month or next year. Borrowing to go faster. Selling in fear. Imitating others just because they look successful for a moment.
Avoiding the wrong things is a kind of discipline that makes space for the right things to work. In the end, doing the right thing—and refusing the wrong one—isn't about cleverness. It's about clarity, calm, and choosing not to be pulled off course by noise. And maybe that's what makes it so rare.
There's something liberating about thinking long term. It's not that it makes you smarter. It just makes your life simpler and quieter. Suddenly, you stop caring about what happens this quarter. You care about what endures across decades. You don't need to be right now. You just need to be less wrong later.
When you think in years instead of days, you ask calmer questions: Is this thing built to last? Are these people trustworthy? Can this grow without collapsing? Am I paying a foolish price?
You stop trying to outguess the crowd. You start trying to outlast it. And funny enough, that's often enough.
Some of the best decisions feel deeply unsatisfying in the moment. They don't come with adrenaline. There's no ta-da. They feel boring. But boring is underrated. It's the field where time does its work. Where compounding lives. Where steady wins because steady doesn't burn out.
Holding Berkshire Hathaway for 50 years doesn't make you look exceptionally clever, nor make for a thrilling dinner story—but it's probably one of the simplest, smartest things an investor could've done. No drama. No hustle. Just quiet accumulation of compounded wealth. A lot of it.
In a world full of noise, boredom may be the clearest signal.
Lastly, just a quiet nudge: What is one small thing you could do today that won't matter at all right now—but might matter a lot in 10 or 20 years? And what would it look like to keep doing it?
If the answer is unremarkable, you might be onto something. Because the things that build the strongest lives—and portfolios—tend to start that way: small, quiet, nearly invisible, less attractive, less exciting.
Then one day, someone looks up and says: "How did they get there?" No secret. Just doing the right thing, and not getting in time's way—the grace to let time do its work.