ATTENTION!!

From Abnormal Returns...this applies to trading and to life at large. Be stingy with your attention...

"Attention is a zero-sum game
How you spend your time (and attention) as a trader is a key driver in your eventual performance. We all have a limited amount of time we can devote to the markets, therefore maximizing the impact of that time is crucial. This point was driven home in reading Margaret Heffernan’s interesting newish book Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril in which she writes:

After a decade of experiments by himself and others [Dr. Daniel] Simons, concludes that we see what we expect to see and are blind to the unexpected. And there are absolute hard limits to how much we can take in at any given time.

“For the human brain,” say Simons, “attention is a zero-sum game: If we pay more attention to one place, object or event, we necessarily pay less attention to others.”

Our attention is a limited resource worth shepherding. The question is for traders whether their time is well-spent watching financial television? The problem is that the way television is designed disrupts our ability to think. Heffernan writes:

The bottleneck that characterizes our ability to receive information explains why we cannot intelligently absorb all the information presented to us on TV screens like those displayed by CNN, Fox and CNBC. The scrolling text, sidebars and stock prices don’t make us smarter or better informed; they make us stupid. While we are watching such a busy array, we can’t efficiently think, discriminate or make critical judgments.

Trading is hard enough under the best of circumstances. If you continuously expose yourself to inputs that don’t make you “smarter or better informed” you are doing yourself a disservice."

Better Than Bigger

I recently learned the difference in terms that affects anyone who's a parent, mentor or leader of any kind.

In the effort to raise our kids combined with being responsible for their learning through homeschool, we talk all the time about their development. I'm sure most parents do, and we definitely do especially because it all falls on us we have a bit of extra "fear" that we want to get it right as possible. The difference in terms I read recently was the difference between teaching and training.

Teaching is when you show someone something,

Training is when you've passed along "the will" for them to do it right without your involvement.

So, for example, you can show your kids how to make their bed, but you haven't trained them in it until they can do it consistently well without your input. That is a startling contrast to how most of us take our responsibilities in training. Now bring the idea of training to developing the spiritual foundation of our kids. A question we wrestle with all the time is how to establish a strong spiritual connection between themselves and God so that they seek him, talk to him and know him deeply.

Given the ages of our kids, one of the things we've attempted to do is to keep the basics basic - even while they increase their learning. We thought, if they can just know that God is bigger than anything AND know that he is good...really really good, then they will want to seek him. So, we've spent time just showing them daily or weekly examples of how much bigger and better he is than things they can relate to.

On this journey and knowing enough about how life goes something emerged...most people who don't chase after God, probably don't because they struggle with his goodness. They question his way over their own, their not sure that he has their best interest in mind. In a sense, they question his goodness and his goodness for them.

So know that we've spent ample time conveying the God is Big and God is Good message, we feel convicted to harp on the fact that while he's Big AND Good, God is Better....Than he is Bigger. He's worth trusting and he's worth trusting completely. Hold all of life with an open hand and just listen to him, then act. He has your and mine best interest at heart.

I hope we can not just teach them this, but may we train them as well so that they seek him no matter what.