Nonlinear

The age-old rollercoaster of progress reveals one obvious commonality to the individual on the journey: progress is not linear.

The start of a journey tends to be interwoven with excitement, ambition, aspirations above the clouds and a get-it-done attitude that is hopeful to tackle anything and everything along the path to “success” (whatever that might mean for whatever journey that might be… weight-loss, career growth, building wealth through investing).

Our modern brain (specifically our frontal cortex) does well to assess a lot as it comes at us, from the logistics and time-planning, to costs and potential hurdles. It’s the reason why we are able to move between vastly different environments over the course of our lives (if we so chose).

The primal part of our brain (our medulla) keeps us alive, and does the basics very well. It’s also what causes us to want to pull chocks and cut our loses usually too early, usually aligning with the time in which the journey we are on gets tough, seems impossible to navigate further, or is maybe too dauntingly complex to have the want to push through.

Ironically, though, chasing progress is usually catalyzed by the desire of satisfaction. It’s the attaining of something that you do not have by progressing from your current position in life to some other position in life, with the presumption that the other position in life is superior, or grants you the reward of satisfaction. The journey to get there, though, is often riddled with impediments, forks in the road, and long, lonely, boring sections.

Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis is one of my favorite reads from recent years, where he writes at lengths of the value of doing hard things, and he pulls out a tremendous argument for the satisfaction that hard work can bring to one’s own life. One of the hard things in the book that is not as magnified as the others (like an arduous multi-day hike, sleep deprivation, or fasting) is the act of doing nothing. Just waiting. Patience. Letting things play out around you while you are still.

When it comes to building wealth, the actions of increasing income, fine-tuning one’s cash flow picture, and acquiring assets are big and impactful. Those are the types of things that do indeed put you in a better spot later in life, by delaying gratification and paying your future self with healthy financial choices. But there is also a piece to wealth-building that isn’t glorified enough: leaving things alone. This is specifically talking about one’s assets: real estate, stocks, even CDs in the bank.

And specific to today, April 2025, this is such a valuable lesson for a stock investor to take to heart. Your portfolio might be 5-20% down right now, and it probably feels like the stock market will never cooperate with your wealth-building goals ever again. The primal brain may quickly assert that we must take some sort of action to rid ourselves of the perceived problem, but the problem is further exacerbated by excess trading activity. A Journal of Finance article, “Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth” (Barber and Odean, 2000), highlights that investors that trade the most had an annual return of 11.4%, while the market returned 17.9% (that’s a 36% difference).

All that to say that today’s market is uncomfortable, and you might find that declines like this feel worse when you’re living in them than how they feel once they’re past and behind you. As I wrote in October of 2022, every storm runs out of rain. I know you’re currently getting wet, and the rain doesn’t seem to be stopping, but it will. While you might presume big, bold actions to safeguard your portfolio, the data doesn’t like: too much trading and too much activity will cut your own legs out from under you.

My advice if you’re still more than a few years from beginning to cash-out your investments (like one would begin to do post-retirement from their IRA or 401k): keep contributing your money not needed for today, and keep growing those investments inside that portfolio. You’re buying at clearance prices that will look unfairly cheap in just a few years. This is a time to consider investing more!