On a recent episode of We Study Billionaires, host Stig Brodersen framed the investor’s most quiet failure mode in a single sentence: drifting feels like working.
The full thought is worth sitting with. “We rarely notice whenever we are drifting off course
I think one of the reasons is that it doesn’t feel like we’re getting lost. It rather feels like we’re just staying busy.” That is the mistake at the center of most underperforming portfolios. Reading more headlines, swapping funds, trimming winners, tax-loss harvesting into a slightly different basket of the same exposure, all of it carries the texture of work.
The brokerage statement looks active. The brain registers effort. The compounding curve registers nothing.