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The habit of fumbling for your smartphone and checking the screen filled with red and blue numbers as soon as you open your eyes is the surest way to reserve abject poverty . That impatience, which makes you feel satisfied only after checking what happened on the other side of the world overnight, is slowly and very surely melting away your account .
We have usually lived firmly believing that we must be diligent to earn money . People mistakenly believe that waking up early in the morning to read economic news, checking the closing conditions of the U.S. market, and striving to obtain information before others is the attitude of an excellent and diligent investor.
However, in the world of investment, that useless diligence actually becomes a fatal poison. The stock market is absolutely not a place that rewards those who take action. Rather, it is closer to a massive and ruthless system that snatches money from the pockets of impatient people constantly trying to do something, and hands it over to those who sit idly by.
Your brain, which turns on the stock app every morning, is actually not contemplating investments . I am just looking for a thrilling dopamine . It is a state where the structural response of the brain is not significantly different from that of someone who waits every morning for the casino doors to open and pulls the slot machine lever .
I have become completely addicted to that fleeting stimulation of checking how much my assets have increased or decreased today while watching the numbers fluctuate up and down behind the mask . The convenient smartphone apps created by financial companies are very cleverly designed to make you look at them more often and buy and sell more frequently .
The more frequently transactions occur, the more massive fees they rake in, but your principal slowly bleeds away. Please try to imagine this quietly. Let's assume you are a partner who owns half of a very successful bakery in the neighborhood. Would you run breathlessly to the bakery every morning before the doors even open to ask your partner how much your share is worth today ?
Would you ask yesterday if the value of your share had dropped because the price of flour had risen slightly, and then cause a commotion today by threatening to sell your entire share immediately because it is raining and there are expected to be few customers ? You will probably be told you are out of your mind or have the partnership agreement terminated immediately.
If you are a truly good bakery, you just need to quietly bake delicious bread, build up your regular customer base, and focus solely on generating a steady profit every month . The value of a partner's stake is bound to grow very naturally over time, depending on the bakery's ability to make money .
But why do people repeat the foolish behavior of asking about the price of that bakery every morning just because they bought stocks ? This is because people too easily forget the most fundamental fact that stocks are not merely electronic symbols or numbers blinking on a smartphone screen, but the ownership of a company in which countless people work closely in the real world .
That terrible convenience of being able to sell it off immediately with just the push of a button constantly tempts and ruins us. The true value of a company never changes overnight. Just as a great company representing Korea does not become a great company in one day and then suddenly degenerate into a terrible third-rate company the next .
However, stock market prices dance wildly every day, swept up by people's greed, fear, and all sorts of nonsense rumors. The moment you turn on the app and check those wildly dancing prices, you lose the ability to make rational judgments . When the price rises slightly, you are tormented by the temptation to sell immediately and pocket a meager profit, and when the price falls, you are seized by the primal fear that you must run away before suffering greater losses .
Ultimately, you will be unable to focus on your main job and daily life all day long . You will find yourself secretly looking under your desk at your smartphone every time you go to the restroom or during an important meeting . You face the terrible consequence of having your entire day and your precious emotions completely tossed about by the fickle moods of the huge crowd that is the stock market .
Is such a frantic life truly the life of a proper investor? True investment should be a process where I let my capital work silently on my behalf, while I remain faithful to my main job, have a peaceful dinner with my loved ones, and go to bed comfortably. If you are anxiously clutching your smartphone the entire time the market is open, you are working like a slave for money, not money working for you.
Furthermore, the more you check market prices every day and repeat frequent trading out of anxiety, the more the massive friction costs of fees and taxes silently erode your principal . You are essentially chipping away at that precious capital every day with the blade of your own impatience, which would have grown massively like a snowball over time if you had left it alone .
One of the biggest and most fatal causes of ordinary people losing money in the stock market is rising jealousy. When I wake up in the morning and open my smartphone, I inevitably hear news from all directions about someone making money easily. In a group chat with friends, posts appear boasting that someone made a profit of several tens of percent in just one day with a theme stock with an unfamiliar name.
Online communities and social media, which were quiet until yesterday, are now overflowing with unbelievable posts from people who say they hit the jackpot with cryptocurrency or trendy stocks they invested in by borrowing money and immediately quit their jobs. When you encounter such sensational stories every morning, no matter how hard you try to maintain your composure, anxiety and a sense of deprivation begin to well up from deep within your heart.
I have been holding onto blue-chip stocks steadfastly for months, feeling frustrated as I stand at a standstill, while others seem to get rich so easily without any effort. It makes me feel unbearably wronged. This emotion called jealousy is the most terrifying poison that completely paralyzes human reason and rationality .
After enduring for a few days, you eventually lose the will to bear it and commit the depression of selling the stock of an excellent company that you had bought after much deliberation at the bottom, and switching to that trendy stock that is currently rising like crazy, spewing flames . Unfortunately, the very moment you finally can't wait any longer and buy that stock is usually the peak of that hot trend and just before the bubble bursts.
They act smart, claiming they have jumped on the bandwagon of the market, but in reality, they are committing the most foolish act of paying the highest price to get rid of the trash others left behind after the party . The habit of checking market prices every morning and peeking at others' returns is like a trap that drives you into a death trap, leading you to commit such fatal and irreversible mistakes.
The masters who have built a truly great fire and kept it burning for a long time are, without exception, people who know how to completely shut their ears to the loud noise of the market . They have the tremendous guts and patience to not check the price of the stock for five or ten years if, after careful consideration, they believe in the fundamental value of the company in which they hold the stake.
This is because they invest their hard-earned money only in solid and excellent companies that would not make them anxious at all, even if the stock market were to close for five years tomorrow for unknown reasons and they were unable to sell their stocks. To them, the stock prices pouring out every morning are nothing more than meaningless numbers chanted by a severe bipolar patient named the market while spouting nonsense .
If that bipolar patient loses their reason because they are in such a good mood and demands a price absurdly higher than the value of my company, I just pretend to give in and sell a little; conversely, if they fall into severe depression, cry out as if the world is ending, and dump good stocks at ridiculously low prices, I just quietly smile and pick them up—that is all .
Our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to survive on the African savanna, avoiding the threat of starving wild beasts . If even the slightest rustling sound occurred right in front of my eyes, I had to react immediately and run away before I could even think whether it was the wind or a tiger in order to survive.
In that way, we are designed to constantly move and react. However, in the modern, highly complex capitalist market, this primitive survival instinct is the worst enemy that leads you to bankruptcy. If you cannot control your brain's instinct to react immediately to the red and blue buy and sell lights flashing before your eyes, you will never be able to enjoy the great magic of compound interest.
Compound interest is a tremendous reward from the universe given only to those who have silently endured those painful years of patience, which are very tedious and long, during which nothing seems to happen on the surface. If you plant a sturdy oak tree and try to dig up the soil every morning to check how much the roots have grown, the tree will not only fail to grow into a giant, but its fine roots will be damaged and it will wither and die within a few days .
In the world of investing as well, the act of checking your account every day is exactly the same as the job of digging up these roots. We mistakenly believe that investment is a battle of intelligence and information . So, to become smarter, I watch all kinds of economic broadcasts, memorize difficult technical terms, and analyze the complex forecasts of economists.
However, investment is actually not a matter of intelligence, but strictly a matter of temperament and attitude. There are far too many cases in the world where brilliant doctors, lawyers, or outstanding engineers with exceptional wealth and intelligence enter the stock market and lose their entire fortunes due to absurd mistakes .
This is because they arrogantly believe that with their superior intelligence and clever minds, they can predict the short-term direction of the market before others . I intend to buy and sell stocks one step ahead of others by predicting how the U.S. employment figures to be released tomorrow will turn out, whether the central bank will raise or lower interest rates next month, and what the inflation figures will be.
However, no one in the world can accurately predict short-term market trends and macroeconomic variables every time . Even God cannot know tomorrow's stock price . In the world of investment, the person who truly becomes the ultimate winner is not the one who is smarter than others and accurately predicts the future, but the one who keeps their distance from the crowd and acts less foolishly when others are doing foolish things.
And the most foolish concentration an investor can commit is throwing their precious emotions and capital onto the roller coaster of market volatility day after day . Blocking the temptation when the market constantly speaks to you requires more willpower than you might think. The sensational news headlines pouring out every day create fear, making it seem like something terrible will happen if you don't sell your stocks immediately and secure cash, or fuel your greed, making it seem like you will become a beggar if you don't buy stocks right now.
Economic media and YouTube algorithms do not allow you to maintain a peaceful mind. This is because they can increase viewership and earn money only if you are anxious and excited . Turning on a stock app every morning amidst that flood of noise is no different from an act of self-inflicted harm, walking right into the middle of that chaos.
If you truly want financial freedom that will keep you from struggling for the rest of your life and want to become a true winner in capitalism, you must thoroughly stop even the seemingly trivial actions starting tomorrow morning . Completely remove that damn stock app icon from your smartphone's home screen .
It is best to delete the app itself entirely, but if that is not possible, hide it deep in a secluded folder and change the password to a very long and complex one so that logging in even once requires enduring tremendous annoyance and hassle . It means you should not trust your willpower, but change your environment.
When you wake up tomorrow morning, instead of looking up whether the New York stock market went up or down overnight or what happened to Tesla's stock price, take a slow sip of water and savor the weather outside the window. And today, quietly reflect on how you can provide more value to others and improve your skills in your main job .
The true source of wealth comes not from gambling-like numbers flashing on a ticker symbol, but from your genuine skills and deep insight into the world that you diligently build day by day in your daily life. Increasing the value of your labor to continuously generate cash flow and setting aside a portion of that money to buy shares in great companies.
And just sitting on it for decades until it swells to a massive size . This is the only and most certain truth about becoming rich . With stocks, all key investment decisions are already completed the moment you buy a great company at a low price . After an accident, the wisest attitude is to completely forget about it .
Unless the management of the company I have invested in issues foolish instructions or commits serious crimes that could shake the company to its core, or unless the fundamental ecosystem or business model of the industry to which the company belongs is completely destroyed, just leave them alone. Even if despairing news that the market has been cut in half plasters the front pages of every media outlet, rain or shine, you must cultivate a strong stomach capable of calmly and indifferently observing the chaos while simply drinking a cup of coffee .
If your stomach is not strong, no matter how brilliant your mind is, you cannot survive until the end in the jungle called the stock market . To be able to calmly and rationally pick up good companies at bargain prices when the market is in complete despair and everyone is selling stocks like trash, you must make it a daily habit to thoroughly distance yourself from the red and blue colors on the stock market board .
If we honestly look at the bottom of that mind that compulsively checks prices every morning, there is actually a very shallow and thieving greed hidden there: the desire to earn money faster and more easily than others without doing rough labor . However, cold-heartedly, there is no such thing as a free lunch in this world, and great results are never obtained for free .
In order to become a reliable shareholder of a great company and share in the fruits of the immense wealth it generates, you, as an owner, must silently endure together the all manner of economic turmoil and hardships, as well as the whims and misunderstandings of the market that the company inevitably faces.
That tedious and painful time of endurance is the only and most legitimate reward for labor that the investment world demands of you . Instead of constantly buying and selling things to try and beat the market, sitting still and avoiding the foolish impatience that others commit every day. That alone can make you a great and outstanding investor in the top few percent .
Our lives are too short and precious to waste time staring at stock market prices. I sincerely hope that you do not go out of your way to engage in the unfortunate act of fumbling around for your smartphone as soon as you wake up tomorrow morning. Stop the foolish act of breaking the peaceful time on that quiet morning and jumping into a turbulent and greedy sea of speculation .
Please take to heart the fact that the path to building a great fire—slowly but surely, without being shaken by the chaotic noise of the world—paradoxically begins only with simply sitting still and doing nothing . Do not forget that true wealth and financial freedom do not come from ceaseless finger- clicking and checking accounts, but are the most beautiful results born of deep insight into the world and the long wait of believing in it and enduring .
In fact, the energy given to us each day is limited. If you become a slave to numbers and exhaust your mental energy from the moment you wake up, you become terribly incompetent when it comes to making important decisions that could actually change your life. The best investors make decisions very rarely.
They do nothing all year round, and then decide the fire of a lifetime with just one or two decisions . To maintain that precious judgment, they keep their brains away from the noisy market. When your eyes are fixed on red numbers, opportunities to become truly rich may be silently passing you by . Please lift your head now .
Look at the real reality lying at your feet, not the virtual numbers inside your smartphone . Controlling your base and regaining peace. That is indeed the most certain investment that will bring any kind of sublime return . The physiognomy of becoming wealthy is not something you are born with, but rather a medal earned through your calm attitude of overcoming the noise of the market .
If you delete your stock app every morning and use that time to read one more page of a book or look at your family's faces one more time, your facial features will naturally change to attract fire . Large sums of money are bound to eventually flow to those who have a generous vessel to hold them. The only way to expand that vessel is to distance yourself from the noise of the market and solidly fill your inner self.
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