March 9, 2007 –
This week, in Kaeho’s Corner, my blog entry is going to focus on a particularly zen topic. O’ Sensei, the founder of Aikido scripted many lessons cumulatively that were thought to embody the art of peace. Here is one of those lessons: “The key to good technique is to keep your hands, feet, and hips straight and centered. If you are centered, you can move freely. The physical center is your belly; if your mind is set there as well, you are assured of victory in any endeavor.”
For an investor to be centered is just as important as it is for a martial artist. Yet, I’ve encountered an incredibly large number of extremely pessimistic investors in my lifetime. All they talk about is how money managers have lost them money in the past or they always dwell on every negative aspect of the market they can find even when there are positive aspects to discuss about their portfolios. I’m sure that most of you have heard that a common trait among every successful entrepreneur besides unparalleled determination is unbridled optimism. Successful entrepreneurs always see the glass as half full, not half empty and it is precisely this attitude that eventually fills the rest of their glass.
On the contrary, eternally pessimistic investors unwittingly bring more financial disaster into their lives by focusing on only the negative and continually speaking about the negative. By focusing on the negative, they actually attract more negative financial events into their lives. Just as an un-centered martial artist can never win a duel, an un-centered investor will never grow wealthy through investing.
Mind you, this is very different than having something negative happen to you such as suffering huge losses through an incompetent manager and not taking action. Of course, if you are still in your prime-earning years and building a nest egg for retirement, the only person you should entrust with the management of your investments is yourself. Every investor needs to assume responsibility for his or her fiscal life rather than take the lazy way out and hand it over to someone at an investment firm. This way, you can truly use the concept of being “centered” to build wealth. If you hand your money over to another person at a firm, you have no idea or not if that person is centered or is capable of building great returns in your portfolio.
If this blog seems a little esoteric to you, think about this. Numerous studies have shown that terminally ill cancer patients with positive outlooks live much much longer than those patients that have negative outlooks. Successful entrepreneurs all have perpetually positive outlooks on life even during hardships in their business cycles. And think about the drastic difference between the negative people and the positive people you know. The positive people always seem to draw abundance into their lives while the negative people always seem to have more negative things happen to them.
Being centered is not only crucial for martial artists, it is important for investors as well.
Maholo,
Kaeho
[tags]wealth literacy,martial arts, O’ sensei[/tags]
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J.S. Kim is the founder and Managing Director of maalamalama, a comprehensive online investment course that uses novel, proprietary advanced wealth planning techniques and the long tail of investing to identify low-risk, high-reward investment opportunities that seek to yield 25% or greater annual returns.
