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“The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting.”
Charlie Munger
My worst weeks start right after I improve something. For years I couldn’t see the pattern. Then I noticed each dip followed a habit I added or dropped.
Move a tree to better soil each season and it never grows. Its energy goes into new roots instead of new height. The tree is healthy. The soil is good. The moving is what costs it.
An investor who trades constantly pays a fee on each trade. Sell a winner within the year and the tax bill jumps too: short-term gains get taxed at a higher rate than gains you wait for.
And each sale ends whatever compounding that pick started. The picks can be fine. The constant trading drains the account anyway.
I’ve stacked up habits over years.
Left alone, my habits settle. My mornings run smooth.
Then I get the urge to tinker, so I add a habit or swap one out.
One swap and the mornings turn hard again. The new routine needs full attention, the way anything new does before it sinks in. I lose track of what to work on next.
I recently added one habit: at least thirteen minutes of morning sun before 10 a.m. One habit on paper.
But my caffeine cutoff is also 10 a.m., so the tea now gets drunk earlier or carried outside. The walk out and the walk back bend the hour around them. One added habit and the whole morning re-adapted.
For decades I thought the cost stayed inside the one habit I touched. But habits interact: two of mine already ban lattes from my day by accident. Change one habit and the whole system shifts around it, whether you can see the shifts or not.
“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you.”
Octavia Butler
Each swap sends the whole system back through the learning phase and the settling starts over. Let it settle and the system gets cheap to run again.
Some settling cost is worth paying: skipping experiments carries its own risk. Changing things constantly is the trap, because nothing sits still long enough to compound.
Risk of ruin is a loss you can’t come back from. You blow up, you lose it all, the game ends. Some people guard against it. Position sizing, insurance, savings, the seatbelt.
Risk of reset is quieter. Far fewer see it coming. Nothing blows up. The habits stay. You just reset them before they settle enough to pay off.
Ruin ends the game. Reset keeps you starting the same game from scratch.
Before each change, I check the reason for it. A change worth making aims to fix something that’s actually wrong. The rest come from the urge to tinker. Most of mine did.
So now I make my changes in the first five days of each month. I add a habit, drop one or rework a routine, then lock it all for the rest of the month. My daily experiments keep running, twenty-one a day, but they run inside the locked system instead of remaking it.
Guard against ruin. Then guard against reset, because a system that never settles never pays.
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What system could you stop tweaking and let run?
