The Big Payoff of Paying Attention

Despite these external and self-imposed hurdles we still have a fighting chance if we can reserve enough of our own attention to apply to the task at hand.

I made a quick inventory of the various things that vie for my attention during an average working day: telephone calls, texts, emails, faxes, What’s App postings, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Economist, dozens of blogs, dozens of financial posts on Twitter, various research reports, daily portfolio management tasks, business management tasks, research for my latest column, writing and thinking.

Ironically, it was taking on writing this column each month that forced me to reprioritize my day and set aside a block of quiet uninterrupted time to think and to write. Sometimes it’s just 10 minutes—every once in a while I can put aside a few hours. But the cumulative benefit of this practice is the reclaiming of enough of my own attention so I can feel confident in my choices, which while never perfect are built on a firm foundation of critical thinking and silence.

Crawford writes: “Just as clean air makes respiration possible, silence, in this broader sense, is what makes it possible to think.” He notes that silence has become a luxury item, for sale to the select few who can afford it: “In the business-class lounge at Charles De Gaulle airport, what you hear is the occasional tinkling of a spoon against china. There are no advertisements on the walls, and no TVs. This silence, more than any other feature of the space is what makes it feel genuinely luxurious.”

Crawford has a fascinating insight into a subject that is particularly relevant for investors today. The issue on his mind is: How do we make judgments about something where we don’t possess expertise? He writes: “We are not competent to judge everything for ourselves. We know this; we feel it. We cannot look to custom or established authority, so we look around to see what everyone else thinks. The demand to be an individual makes us feel anxious, and the remedy for this, ironically enough, is conformity. We become more deferential to public opinion.”

The paradoxical source of this kind of behavior is our otherwise healthy and beneficial Western philosophical, political and scientific tradition. As a result of our collective knowledge we can understand and manipulate our physical world in ways that were inconceivable even 50 years ago. But Crawford points out that the same world view that has allowed us so much collective mastery over our world has also disengaged us from it, resulting in a fragility and insecurity that leaves us more individually vulnerable to exploitation.

Get Engaged

Some who read Crawford’s book might conclude that his solution to our modern-day problems is for all of us to become 16th century artisans. My take is different: He wants to reintroduce traditional learning-by-doing as a counterweight to the direction of modern life.

The experience of engaging the world through the building of a skill—any skill—results in a more balanced perspective of the world and ourselves. This process doesn’t translate into the kind of collective power that we have become accustomed to—but because we are more engaged with the world and more secure in ourselves, we are far less vulnerable to having our identity or attention exploited.

Investing is like any other human activity; the balanced perspective and wisdom gained from engaging the world in order to develop our skills will be available when we need them most. Today’s accepted wisdom is that active investing in securities is too hard, too complex and too difficult for even experts to try. This is the message to disengage. And while disengaging may continue to be a profitable choice, the long-term cost is likely to be a continuing decline in the health of our decision-making, our individual judgment, and whatever is left of our precious attention.