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Should I Stop Teaching To Become A Better Investor? | Deep Questions With Cal Newport


Chapters

0:0 Cal's intro
1:0 Focus on the stocks
2:0 Index funds

Transcript

All right, rapid fire. Got a question here from Kobe. Should I solely focus more on developing my skillset as a stock investor to the point where my skillset cannot be ignored? Or should I build my skillset as a stock investor and at the same time continue to teach live courses on stock investing?

It's getting to a point where I feel like I have to convince people to join my program and that's getting draining. All right, Kobe, my general answer is focus on the stocks. All right, focus on the primary thing you're doing, which sounds like it's stock investing. The course is a side hustle that do it at this point only if it was entertaining or relaxing.

You're finding it draining. Focus on the stocks. Presumably, if you're good enough at the stocks to be able to teach a course on it, you should be making more than enough money from the stocks to not need the course financially. If you need the course financially, then you're not good enough at stocks to teach that course.

So I think we've got a great self-referential solution here. My tough love, specific answer, however, Kobe, is you're not gonna teach yourself to beat the stock market. Let me tell you this as someone who comes out of elite Ivy League schools where I've watched people go off to prop trading desk at Wall Street firms.

The very smartest people in the world are incredibly well compensated to do nothing but spend all day training and executing the best possible plans to make money on the stock market. And even they can't consistently do it. I had a friend in college, I remember talking to him about his job a few years out of college.

All he did was had CEOs, a small number of CEOs of publicly traded companies, and his whole job was to listen to every public announcement or discussion or conversation they ever have and really learn the nuances of this individual person so they could pick up just subtle edges in what's going on with this person's company.

You're not gonna learn some momentum trading technique on the internet that's gonna have you consistently build the market. You are probably the sucker there. And so that's my tough love thing. Invest in index funds, put your time and energy into other ways of making. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)