My excitement about investing led me to pursue a role as a stockbroker in Philadelphia right after I completed my MBA. Back in the late 1960s, almost no one bought mutual funds. As a broker, I made recommendations to my clients about which stocks to buy. Then, the trend was to bet big on the next ‘winner’ – not too dissimilar from today’s speculation around cryptocurrency.

As a young broker, I had worked hard to save $3,000. I was ready to invest my money the same way I invested my client’s money. I looked over the recommended stocks list, researched, and narrowed my options down to two companies. One was a mobile home company, and the other was an airline that delivered oil drilling equipment to Alaska’s north slope.

Both stocks were selling at $30 a share. With my $3,000, I could buy a full lot (100 shares) of either one. The airline stock had a more exciting story, so I bought that one.

I watched both stocks closely over the next several months. Unfortunately, the airline stock took a severe nosedive, falling to $3 a share, a whopping 90% loss, while the mobile home stock doubled to $60 a share. After many agonizing days, weeks, and months, I sold my airline investment for $300, suffering a loss of $2,700.

With my annual salary of $9,000, my finances took a significant hit. I just blew up my nest egg! I kicked myself for not buying the mobile home stock and earning $6,000 – a net difference of $5,700! That much money could have changed my life. I could have bought a nice car, taken a European vacation, or used the money for other exciting adventures. Regret reigned supreme. Mainly I questioned why I didn’t split my investment by buying 50 shares of each company – at least then I would have spread out my risk.

Lesson Learned: Diversification can help you get better results with less stress.

Diversification is a way to spread your risk, increasing the chances of your exposure to potential winners; a way to own the haystack rather than searching for the needles. Also, different countries and sectors perform differently at different times – it’s almost impossible to predict when each will have its day in the sun. If you are deeply diversified, you increase your chance of owning the winners, and at the right time.

Back then, I would have told you I was investing. With the wisdom that comes with age, I now know that I was gambling. Why? I put all my eggs in one basket by betting on one company. Also, even though the insight helped me learn my lesson, I would never call buying two stocks proper diversification. Today, our clients have access to expertly-designed mutual funds that make it easy to own around 13,000 stocks from around the globe. A strategy that is much better than betting on one airline!

I was lucky to learn early on that – both financially and emotionally – diversification deserves a key place in any long-term investment strategy. No one can accurately predict which investments will win and which will lose, and take it from me, you can drive yourself crazy watching to see whether your bets are going to pay off.

Don’t want to wait for the next lesson, set up a time to talk here.

Name a writer who consistently makes you laugh. Hard to do? Listen to this episode to hear from one of Matt Hall’s favorite writers, Jason Gay. Jason is the sports columnist for the WSJ. To us, Jason is so much more than a sportswriter – remarkable for skillfully being humorous, candid, and poignant, often at the same time. Click here to listen to the episode on Apple.

News outlets keep us informed which, in turn, gives us an intellectual edge over everybody else—so the theory goes. But what if the key to making better decisions was tuning out, rather than tuning in?

Maybe you’ve noticed this paradox: the more news you consume, the less informed you feel. That’s because news is, by definition, temporary. As soon as you form an opinion, a new headline comes along to cast doubt, and the cycle repeats.

This is especially true with financial news which plays on our fear of losing money, whether that’s missing the latest crypto trend or failing to hedge against inflation.

There’s a reason sensationalism goes viral. As Jason Gay noted in The Wall Street Journal, “Nobody gets clicks and famous for taking a long view; hell has to be served in a handbasket, preferably with a clever baiting headline.”

We’re not here to pick on financial writers; we’re here to point out how alarmist financial news chips away at our sanity. Finding and buying the latest hot stock offers an intoxicating thrill, like a lucky roll of the dice at a casino. But as a strategy to achieve long-term peace of mind, it’s doomed to fail.

Frantically refreshing your newsfeed to inform your investing strategy isn’t just inefficient, it’s exhausting. Human beings have a finite supply of mental energy, and trying to time the market day after day quickly zaps it. But once you get fed up with paying the biological (and monetary) price of attempting to outwit global capitalism, something clicks. At least it does for our clients who can take solace in the fact that they no longer have to pray that they uncover the needle in the haystack—they simply own the haystack…which already includes those needles!

In our world, we call this a “Long View Moment,” or as the writer, Oliver Burkeman says, “surrendering to the speed of reality.” It’s the sense of freedom when you realize that you don’t need to watch Squawk Box or jerk your head when you see a stock ticker.

When we let fantasies crumble (like the idea that you can “outsmart” the market), it clears the path for a new way of thinking where we embrace our limits instead of fighting them. Psychotherapists call this a “second-order change,” meaning it’s not just a behavioral tweak, but a change in perspective that reframes everything.

A change in perspective: that’s been the purpose of our newsletters, my podcast, and Hill Investment Group as a whole for years. We want to spread the word that building wealth doesn’t require tons of tiny decisions, but rather one big decision: to let go.

Once you abandon your attempt to manage the unmanageable, you can get to work on what really matters in life: spending time with loved ones, cultivating meaningful experiences, doing deep work.

Burkeman sums up this idea nicely in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

“When you finally face the truth that you can’t dictate how fast things go…you breathe a sigh of relief and begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential superpower: patience.”