On Empathy, Money, Fame, Creativity, and Patience

Empathy appears to be a lost art...

I was thinking about this the other day when I read a social media posting by former Twitter exec Esther Crawford about her experience at the company and working for Elon Musk. It's a great read, but one line in particular caught my attention...

His boldness, passion, and storytelling is inspiring, but his lack of process and empathy is painful.

Musk obviously doesn't care... and he doesn't have to, because on any given day he's either the richest or one of the richest people in the world. And as that world famous philosopher Tevye from the legendary Broadway hit Fiddler on the Roof put it so well...

When you're rich, they think you really know!

Musk is hardly the only rich guy missing the empathy gene...

It may, in fact, be more the rule than the exception in in Silicon Valley, where empathy might even be viewed as a character flaw.

Journalist Dan Lyons summed this up best in his book, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us, when he wrote (emphasis added)...

The second Internet boom has created a new caste of American oligarchs, a bunch of socially awkward, empathy-impaired Sun Kings whose influence extends beyond business into politics and the culture at large.

Are these folks brilliant? Absolutely. Are they doing things that are changing the world? Uh-huh. Are they rich? So they tell me.

The fact is that none of that makes it any better – especially the money part.

And on that score, Crawford said something else...

Money and fame can create psychological prisons which may worsen mental health conditions.

"Psychological prisons"... Let that one sink in.

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Moving on, I sometimes talk about something I call 'the curse of creativity'...

You don't create new things by sitting in a cubicle and punching a 9-to-5 timeclock. Creativity often comes from a very deep – sometimes horribly dark – place.

Creativity doesn't come from thinking or acting like everybody else.

But here's the thing...

There's creativity, as in creating a masterpiece... and creativity that separates you from the pack in everyday things you do – like investing.

Or as Chris Mayer put it in his most recent blog for Woodlock House Family Capital...

It is simply bringing something into existence that didn't exist before. That could be a conversation, a meal, a new route to get somewhere, an e-mail, lots of things. It doesn't have to be recorded, stretched on canvas, encased in glass, or sold. With this broad view, Rubin sets the stage for wide applicability of what he has to say.

The "Rubin" he is referring to is music producer Rick Rubin, who wrote the book The Creative Act: A Way of Being.

Chris, a brilliant writer in his own right, calls it "one of the best books I've read this year."

If you don't know Chris, he runs Woodlock, which he co-founded with Bill Bonner... whose Agora Financial was at one time synonymous with investment newsletters. Chris is perhaps best known for his book, 100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-to-1 and How to Find Them.

No surprise, then, that he applies the lessons of the book to investing. "While not aimed at investors," he wrote, "you can think of investing as a creative act." And as Chris went on to write...

The creative process seems to begin with simple awareness, which is not so simple to practice, partly because it's easy to get swamped with noise.

In this thing of ours (investing), there is a seemingly endless flood of news and analysis. "Because there's an endless amount of data available to us and we have limited bandwidth," Rubin writes, "we might consider carefully curating the quality of what we allow in."

I think this is such an important and overlooked step for most (nearly all?) investors who simply allow too much garbage to grab their attention. They read too much macro, too much economic analysis, too many forecasts, too much news and think too much about politics.

This gets to another focus of Rubin's and a key ingredient for potential 100-baggers...

Patience.

According to Chris, patience is something that "almost all investors could use more of." As he explains...

For Rubin patience "begins with acceptance of natural rhythms." For us investors, that means accepting that bear markets happen, that stocks go down and can go down or nowhere for long stretches of time, that compounding takes time, and that many things are out of our control.

That's easier said than done, especially in an algorithmic market that hangs on every headline... and in a world dominated by hedge funds that are judged by their quarterly performance.

It also happens to make common sense... which is something else that appears to be short supply these days.

DISCLAIMER: This is solely my opinion based on my observations and interpretations of events, based on published facts, and should not be construed as investment advice.

(I write two investment newsletters for Empire Financial Research, Empire Real Wealth and Herb Greenberg’s Quant-X System. For more information, click here and here.)

Feel free to contact me at herbgreenberg@substack.com. You can follow me on Twitter @herbgreenberg.