Investing Isn't Hard

Here are today’s Wonderful Words:

Investing isn’t hard because you need a Ph.D. in financial engineering to understand the stock market. Investing isn’t hard because you need to study the capital structure of hundreds of corporations to make decisions. Investing isn’t hard because you need to actively shift from value to growth to emerging markets to some other sector every few weeks. Investing isn’t hard for any of these reasons.

Investing is hard because the risk-adjusted way to “win” is to index and chill while someone, somewhere, hits the lottery every single day.

Why Investing is Hard, Jack Raines

Background

These lines were from a recent Young Money piece where Jack Raines explains that investing isn’t hard for any technical reasons. It’s hard because human psychology makes it nearly impossible to do a boring thing consistently over decades while simultaneously ignoring a million shiny things.

What makes it wonderful?

I love this paragraph because Jack repeatedly tells us that investing isn’t hard. But we know the title of the piece—Why Investing is Hard—so we know there’s going to be a big reveal at some point, and that keeps us reading.

I also love it because I feel like Jack is pointing his finger directly at me. I’ve wasted years trying to pick the best stocks, buy the dips and sell the peaks, and chase the latest fads, all to no avail.

The whole time I knew the secret to wealth—buy indexes, hold, buy more indexes, keep holding, repeat forever. But I didn’t want to follow the long, simple path to wealth. I wanted to get there now.

And I’m not alone. Anyone who has any interest in investing has followed a similar path. These are the people who comprise Jack’s audience. He’s writing directly to his reader, and that’s what makes the words wonderful.

Let's get technical

It also helps that Jack uses a powerful literary device in this paragraph—anaphora. Anaphora is when you begin consecutive sentences with the same word or phrase.

Tons of famous speeches use this format because it’s memorable. Remember the I Have a Dream speech?

Anaphora is useful because it makes you remember the repeated phrase, and it evokes emotion. In this case, you’ll remember investing isn’t hard, and you’ll feel the familiar pain of following investing folly.

Intuitively there are hundreds of reasons why investing should be hard. Jack lists a few of them and counterintuitively tells us these aren’t the reasons. Anaphora usually makes the reader remember the repeated phrase but forget the rest. Jack wants us to remember “investing isn’t hard…” because it isn’t hard for the million reasons we could list. It’s hard for one reason: our psychology.

This one reason is the whole point of the piece. Repeatedly telling us the myriad reasons why investing isn’t hard helps us remember the one reason why it is.

Two takeaways today:

Most importantly, know your audience. Identify their common experiences and speak to those experiences. You want your readers to shout, “Yes! That was me! I did the same thing!”

Second, sprinkle some anaphora throughout your paragraphs and pages. Not too much. Just enough to make your readers feel your words and remember what you wrote.

Happy writing,

Joe