Category: SpreZZaturian

The best thing that’s ever happened to me

-Vi Reser Alltid

When I was 8 years old my family moved to a fancy part of a mid-sized Swedish city, Västerås, not very far from the capital, Stockholm. There I became bullied for my northern accent, cheap clothes and mental state (my big brother drowned before my eyes the same summer we moved, my parents got divorced [toxically], and I had a slight autism spectrum issue).

It took some time, but being bullied was the best thing that ever happened to me. It didn’t kill me, it made me stronger. With time I became impervious to just about everything, extremely resilient and calm, which helped forge a successful career in finance.

As the 40 ensuing years passed by, I often reflected over my luck in life. Everything seemed to go my way. Sure, I had a few minor setbacks, but I always quickly bounced back up a lot higher than before. Every single year was better than the year before – and they were pretty good from the start.

For example, when I was 18, I dated an incredibly pretty girl, and I received something akin to a small Nobel Prize in mathematics and physics for being the best performing student in middle Sweden over three years, and I was admitted to Sweden’s most prestigious University. From there, everything improved each year in an accelerated fashion: materially, relationship-wise, my subjective experience and so on.

I have very good reasons to assume my particular life configuration, including physical health, brain chemistry, cultural and socio-economic starting point etc., makes me perceive every year as better than the preceding years.

So, whenever I encounter a setback of any kind, I kind of expect a reward in due time. Everything that happens to me is simply regarded as a harbinger of bliss. Which brings us up to date.

Retiring in 2014 definitely was a genius move, the best thing that ever happened to me up till then. Now that retirement is drawing to a close. As fed up as I was with finance in 2014, just as excited I am today about both sharing my knowledge (through the Swedish course in fundamental equity valuation: Finanskursen) and practicing it again as a professional hedge fund manager. You’ll get the details about my getting back to work during the first quarter of 2020.

Per Ardua Ad Astra

However, that wasn’t what I set out to share today, but the following. By midsummer of 2019 by life kept setting new all time highs at a frantic pace. I almost expected to be diagnosed with a brain tumour, like John Travolta in “Phenomenon” (1996). In June I went as far as to say, the last five years, and in particular the last 5 months, have been so good to me, life could throw anything my way, including death, and I still would consider the total package a great deal.

And, boy, did I get what I asked for! Considering my gruelling experiences the last 5 months after that, i.e., since the day after midsummer, which started with my dog passing away, I’m expecting some major breakthroughs coming my way in due course.

Everything I’ve gone through in my life has ultimately proven to be the best thing that’s ever happened to me – perhaps not causally, but with uncanny synchronicity. So, why should my experiences with pain, loneliness and hearthache this fall be any different? Given what I know to be true about my history and my constitution, these experiences are bound to morph from hellish torture into the best things that’s ever happened to me. 

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and I’m still kicking.

Here’s to looking forward immensely to getting to know in which way the twists and turns of summer and fall of 2019 were the best things that ever happened to me, objectively, materially, relationship-wise, perceptionally etc.

Remember, we’re always travelling (Vi Reser Alltid — my motto in Swedish), and that’s a good thing. Being static is being dead.

A giant leap for happiness

My book is almost finished. Actually it is finished, and I’m just touching it up, pruning and clarifying certain ideas. Here’s a short excerpt, just one single sentence from the book, to get a taste:

Small, consistent steps, taken with awareness, celebration, feedback, analysis and course correcting, will always get you further than occasional and mindless spurts, not to mention being more enjoyable than a single marathon for some pie in the sky moonshot you might never complete, and might not even want if you ever get there.

That’s the excerpt. Here’s the interpretation:

Today I was interviewed on the topic of saving for retirement: when to start, how much to put away, when to start reducing risk, what to forego in terms of consumption, what to plan for etc. Saving and investing money is much like investing in your own life. It comes down to getting the small things right – and the earlier the better.

But small and early, the wu wei concept, isn’t enough. What you do small and early is utterly crucial. Hence you need to pay close attention to who you are, what you truly like, and what effect your chosen small steps actually have, as opposed to what you meant them to cause. That’s what I mean by taking your steps with awareness.

Celebrate your successes. Better yet, celebrate your learning experiences, good or bad. Then reinforce your habits or course correct. Every completed small step is reason to reflect about what you did, why you did it, what effect it had. It’s an opportunity to celebrate the fact that you did something, that you had an experience, that you learned something, and that you’re still around to improve on your decision making process. Analyze what happened, and feed your conclusions back into your habits, targets and life direction.

Do it continuously. Acknowledge that the process is a success in and of itself. Sticking to a good habit is more of a success than actually reaching a long term goal. Sure, keep tweaking and updating your desired direction, and possibly ultimate endgame, with the outcome of your taken small steps. But avoid staking years of toil and effort on long term goals and potentially empty hopes of grand celebrations at the finish line. You’re most likely somebody else when you get there. In addition, with the goal behind you, you have nothing, not even a process. In effect when you reach your long term goal you have nothing to celebrate. The risk is you establish another, equally arbitrary and long term goal just to fill the void.

Striving for a million dollars or a 200 lbs bench press are such useless goals, with nothing but emptiness waiting for you. Using your body every day, or managing your savings a little better every day, are processes you can be happy about every day.

Life and finances work much the same way, and should be considered in context of each other. You can’t predict, but you can prepare. Establish good habits that resonance with your personality and every day will be reason to celebrate sticking to and improving on your habits and best practices. The inevitable setbacks will be nothing more than temporary and largely inconsequential stumbles.

You don’t need to finish the marathon under 3 hours, there’s no defeat in falling and missing the magic number. The joy lies in every step along the way. If marathon runners were only in it for winning or beating a certain time, there would be very few marathon runners around. No, it’s the small steps, the habits, the joy of the process that drive them. The same idea applies to your life and your finances.

Trying to spurt will only make you miserable. Aiming for the moon might or might not get you there; and maybe, just maybe you’ll get to celebrate once. And then what?

Becoming strong, fast, rich, accomplished or successful isn’t about reaching a final goal, it’s about the becoming in itself, i.e., enjoying and celebrating the process. If you save, invest, socialize and exercise in a way that’s sound, ever improving, and not least enjoyable – taking small steps in full awareness and with an effective feedback process – chances are you’ll appreciate your life so much more, than even if you did succeed in a one in a billion moonshot effort to become rich, famous or achieve some other form of externally validated status.

Robert Sapolsky says that your subjective status is at least as important as your objective status, and after a certain threshold level of living standards, what group you choose to compare yourself to is the main deciding factor of how good you feel about yourself. I choose to rank myself in the serenity and happiness group, and there I come out on top, which also means I actually come out on top in therms of how I feel. Win-win-win.

More excerpts are coming up. The question, however, is whether I should include these long winded clarifications in the book or not. What do you think?

The Future Skills Program

The most important thing in life is your health. Health starts with sleeping well. Actually, without it you’ll die (Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker).

Sleep, like food, is one of very few things evolution just can’t get rid of. Despite the huge downsides to lying unconscious and defenseless in nature among predators and parasites, humans on average do it one third of their lives.

The Health And Financial Freedom loop

In order to control your time enough to sleep the way you’re intended to, you need financial freedom, lest there will always be a boss or a client making demands on your time when optimally you’d be sleeping or playing.

Further, attaining economic independence through a specialist, entrepreneurial, leadership or investment career in a world of accelerating technological development means you need as agile a mind as possible.

Enter sleep and play:

Research done during mainly the last two decades (c.f. the amazing books “The Real Happy Pill” and “Why We Sleep”) increasingly show the importance of regular exercise and sleeping well for strenghtening our cognitive capabilities (coping with stress, anxiety and depression, increasing your focus, memory, creativity, and happiness; and combating and postponing dementia). Proper nutrition, not least for promoting a healthy and diverse microbiome, is also an important part of shaping a future proof and capable mind-body machine.

So you can see how you need sleep and exercise to boost your financial standing; and economic independence to optimize your sleeping habits and general health.

Creating the Future Skills Program

Since I left the finance industry (I was a portfolio manager at a very successful hedge fund for 15 years: Futuris – The European Hedge Fund Of The Decade), I’ve spent a considerable amount of time thinking about what made Futuris not just great, but the greatest money manager in Europe for a full decade.

From the Future Skills Program (Finance Module)

Over the last year, I’ve finally come around to distilling my investment insights into a series of videos, with accompanying detailed course notes and exercises.

Three decades of investing lessons and best practices distilled

In the Future Skills Program, I explain the investment methodology and practices I’ve honed during the last 30 years.

They include what I’ve picked up from business school (M.Sc. in Finance at SSE 1990-1994), as a financial analyst specializing in IT and investment companies (1994-2000), as a portfolio manager (2000-2015) with focus on software, services and finance, and finally as a private equity investor 2015-2019.

From the Future Skills Program (Finance Module)

A robust health, sound decision management practices and career planning are as integral to designing a good life as investing prowess. Therefore, I and my partners have put together a complete Future Skills Program, including chapters about networking and career advice, value investing and personal development. I’m in charge of the Advanced Career (6) and Finance videos (16).

Please note that I’ve hesitated to participate in creating this course. All the topics discussed are complex matters without simple answers. The course details what you need to work on and in what direction to focus your energy, but you’re still the one having to put in the dedication and work.

We can only show you the door, but it is you who have to walk through it.

If you’re ready to take real responsibility for your life, career, risk management and finances, check out the course program in detail here: