The last and possibly most important of the “Next” Ten commandments is to look at the BIG picture. What this means to us as investors is that we need the ability to step back from the daily fluctuations, hassles, and difficulties to think about our long-term goals and vision.
The first component of the big picture is a knowledge of what we are investing for in the first place. The simple answer “to make money” is nowhere near sufficient. Every person invests to achieve some future goal. Keeping this goal in focus is how we weather the difficulties of any particular day of our investing life.
Another key factor to keep in mind is that small problems are in fact small. They can seem significant in the moment, but their importance fades as our perspective broadens. What ultimately matters is that we continually toward our long-term goals. Any particular day, week, month, or year may be good, bad, or ugly. However, by fixing our gaze on where we are going in the long-run, it will provide much needed perspective during our times of difficulty.
Another key advantage of a big picture focus is that it creates a lens for evaluating our decisions. Specifically, we should only be making decisions that move us closer to our long-term goals. We should also keep in mind that the long-term goals will likely take a long time to achieve. Patience becomes an item of high importance in this endeavor.
As you go throughout your investing life, keep these “next” ten commandments in mind to guide your decisions. By coming back to the core components of successful investing on a regular basis, it will assist each of us in consistently moving toward our goals. To many people, this focus will seem to be “boring” since it does not involve hair raising excitement. However, true success is born of discipline, which frequently takes the form of continuing to do what is necessary long after it has ceased to be novel.
