Memo - Progress Is Never Smooth

By: Wilson

In the past few weeks, I’ve been driving with absolutely nothing playing in the car. No radio, no Apple Music, no Audible, no podcasts, nothing, just total silence.

I wanted to spend the time to think, allow myself to let my mind wander. And when I do that, I have the tendency to dwell on my past mistakes. What I could’ve done, what I should’ve done differently, and how I can learn from those mistakes.

Perhaps it’s a genetic defect. I rarely spend time on the things I do well. Perhaps it’s just being too critical of myself. I rarely let myself celebrate any success. The way I look at it: if you aren’t trying to get better, then you will never get better. So spending time thinking about what you did well won’t actually make any difference. I guess that’s why I focus on the mistakes. So the more I let my mind wander, the more frustrated I get.

How many more “lessons” do I need before I actually get good at this game?

If I were to evaluate myself, I know for a fact that I’m not that smart. Jon Costello, HFIR’s head of research, is 10x smarter than I am. Despite having over 13 years of experience under my belt, I have made many investing mistakes more than once, which already puts me in the category of the dumbest people on Earth.

P.S. The three categories:

• Smartest - People who learn from other people’s mistakes.

• 2nd Smartest - People who learn from their own mistakes.

• Stupidest - People who never learn from any mistakes.

So yes, progress is never smooth, especially for me.

Progress

There is hope for even people like me at the end of the day. How do I know that for certain? Well, I will have to go off on a tangent: golf.

I’m not athletically gifted at all. I played tennis in high school and thought I could become a tennis pro. When I tried out for my university tennis team, I lost 6-0, 6-0. I think I won a total of 20 points. Thankfully, I’m not that dumb anymore, but you get the point.

I’ve always dabbled on and off in golf because my dad was a professional golfer on the Asian tour (back in the days). I played during my summer breaks where I would spend time in Shanghai mingling with my dad’s successful business students. I learned a lot of valuable business lessons back then that I still use today.

When I first started, I was terrible. It started with the slice problem. The driver swing was so bad that caddies (yes, they have them in Asia) would have to bring sand bottles to the tee boxes because I would make a divot. And then I had the chunks, the shanks, and every imaginable golf problem you can imagine.

But slowly, with enough practice, you start to get the hang of it. By year 2, I started to shoot in the 70s, but with the occasional blowups that followed any good round, as all golfers know.

After I started HFI Research in 2015, I put golf on hold and focused entirely on building the business. It wasn’t until COVID (2020) that I picked the sport back up, but with a different mindset. I was tired of having volatile rounds. One day, it could be in the 70s, and the next day, it could be in the 90s. That had to stop, so I figured, why don’t I use a checklist approach to playing golf, similar to that of investing?

I mean, we all have some level of mental checklist when we invest. Some of us write it down, some of us keep it in our heads, but we all use it to some degree.

Could it work for golf?

Yes, it did, and it worked wonders. The handicap dropped from 7 to a +2. I knew I was not athletically gifted at all, so I focused my attention (during practice) on making the preshot routine idiot proof. If I made a mistake, I would go back to the routine and refine it. Slowly but surely, progress was made, but it was slow.

Again, for people with zero talent like me, the progress is never smooth. There are months or even years where it feels like you are stuck, constantly refining the approach hoping that one day you can break through.

Fast forwarding to today, it’s as if all of the progress unfolded in the blink of an eye. I shot two back-to-back rounds of 63 (-9) and 68 (-4). The 63 was shot from a course rating of 71 and the 68 was shot from a course rating of 76.4. This produced an average handicap index of -6.9, which was the lowest I’ve ever averaged.

So yes, even for people like me with no talent, progress can be made.

Just Keep Going

I was reluctant to post this memo at first. I twiddled with the conclusion section for hours. I thought I would write a reflection section talking about my mistakes, then I thought, what’s the point?

Then I pivoted to writing something about how I’m going to get better, but then I thought, what’s the point?

And it wasn’t until a subscriber of mine posted the beautiful three words, “Just keep going.” That really nailed it on the head.

Just keep going. It reminds me of my favorite book, Shoe Dog, where Phil Knight gave himself this advice:

Let everyone else call your idea crazy... just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where “there” is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.

~ Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

I guess during times of trials and tribulations, all we can do is keep going. Survive to fight another day, learn the countless lessons that you thought you would learn the first time but don’t, and just keep going. If we aren’t moving forward, then we are dying, and that’s all there is to it.

So instead of promising myself that I will get better or that I will learn from my mistakes, I guess the inevitable choice we all can make at the end of the day is to move forward.

Just keep going and know that progress is never smooth.