1Q 2023 - Learning to Unlearn
Was recently on a work trip to the United States (for the 1st time). This was taken on the famous Lombard street in San Francisco.
📣 Some housekeeping in my newsletters going forward
As my attentive readers will know, back in 2022, I was operating my newsletter at a monthly frequency, but given changing priorities at the end of the year, I have shifted to a quarterly cadence.
A few things I would like to say about that. Frankly I realised by the end of the year, that I was stretched for capacity in devoting time to the newsletters. I have a tendency to ramble, and admittedly I wasn't approaching my newsletters with the same enthusiasm as I started with at the beginning of the year. It became a "chore". That's never a place you want to be. Now whilst there are always times in our lives where we have to do things we don't like, I think the majority of the time should be spent on doing things you like.
Don't think anybody would disagree with that blanket statement. I started asking myself why the newsletters felt like a "chore" though. I quickly realised upon reflecting that whilst I had a pipeline (in my OneNote) of great topics to talk about, I was asking myself "why am I doing this" a lot. I wasn't feeling a "hell yes" about this anymore.
To be frank, I think the "length" of my newsletters were said to be "too long". In hindsight, I agree with this. So I think I've consciously now tried to cut the length of these articles, and I think going forward, this has at least mentally helped with me being able to approach these newsletters as not "too demanding" a task again. You will notice versus my prior newsletters, there will be usual sections missing like recapping what I did in the month, and special shout outs. That's not to say they're less important to me, but I am experimentally tweaking the structure of my newsletters to be more digestible to my readers, and for myself too.
My "why" in starting these newsletters remains the same. It's to share the common idea that has been "bugging" or "occupying" my mind during the time period I am recapping.
📆 Back to my monthly newsletter...
Welcome to my 12th email, in this segment called “Michael’s Musings”. If you missed my earlier monthly newsletters, please refer here.
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📖 Unlearning a bad habit
Something that has been a recurring theme throughout the first quarter of this calendar year (i.e. 1Q23) has been learning to unlearn. This is not a new idea. People do this all the time. I just didn't spare much thought into this until now. I think the hardest part of learning new things, is unlearning what we already know in the first place. I've touched upon this a while back in my July 2022 newsletter here.
For me, a bad habit that has actually been communicated by a lot of loving friends/families/colleagues is that I often interrupt people when talking, and don't actually listen first before speaking.
It has probably taken 6-12 months of deep reflecting, and a lot of honest feedback by people around who care about me, to realise this was an issue.
I used to justify my behaviour by saying that my line of work in a hedge fund was natural to have "robust debates" and this was natural in all our stock meetings. Frankly that wasn't largely true. As I have observed my colleagues more and more closely over, I noticed many of them do a good job at listening before responding. They also ask a lot of questions first to understand before sharing their views.
Actually, it was at work, we recently discussed the idea of thinking like a scientist, but with a high emotional quotient (EQ). That was a rude awakening, but an awakening I needed. This bad habit of mine was because I often felt the urge to interrupt and make a quick one-liner to sound smart in a meeting (like I "got" it), or force my view of an investment even though I was not the expert, or defend my own positions so blatantly when people questioned my investment thesis on a stock. It's not just the EQ part, but actually the idea of "thinking like a scientist" that stuck with me more. I began to realise that a lot of this bad habit of mine, was believing that I needed to share my opinion about something without actually understanding the full context or learning more before said speaking or not updating my views when constructive feedback was being given to me.
In my personal life, I admit I am a difficult person to get along with. Ask any of my friends, and I am sure they will tell you I have this bad habit of forcing topics that I want to talk about, into people's throats. I think during 2018-2022 especially, that whole period was me justifying my need to talk about stocks with the fact that it was just a burning passion of mine. I probably filtered out a lot of potential friends in this way. I'm starting to think it had nothing to do with my time spent at work and focusing on my career. It was more about myself as a person that can be so exhausting/frustrating to deal with. For those friends who don't think this point I am making is true, I worry it might just be because I have been very good at hiding this flaw of mine for years or making justifications that temporarily explain my bad habit.
🦉 Listening more and speaking less
This has been hard to admit but I think it needs to be said.
Maybe it's my bad habits, but when people talk to me, I admit I still have a strong urge to speak my mind before they finish their points still. I've had to consciously fight off that urge. Typically, the way I do that is by telling myself I am not allowed to speak until there is at least a 3 second pause.
By no means is this easy. I empathise with all the people who love talking like myself. I struggle every day to find that "perfect balance" of how much listening more and speaking less I should be doing. I think my mum tells me it should be 2/3 listening and 1/3 talking as a principle (and of course not a strict prescription). But I do find I reflect a lot more on the conversations I am having with people and constantly iterate on how I could have done the interaction better.
Some of the important questions I will ask myself are:
Did I make the person feel like they were valued?
Did I learn something from this conversation?
What could I do better next time?
There's probably a better checklist of questions but bear with me as I continue to learn. For people who speak with me, please know I am trying my best to fix this bad habit and please be patient with me, but don't hesitate to be constructive if I am stumbling back in my old habits.
Not to make this into a Bible message, but in reflecting on this bad habit of mine, I realised this was as I had said, nothing I didn't already know. I just needed a lot of people to get their message across, but the Bible had always been warning me of this.
“Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God." - 1 James 19-20 (ESV).
Maybe one step further from this simple principle I am trying to integrate into my life daily, is observing more, and reacting less.
Over time, as I begin to think about past discussions I've had with my mentors, one of my mentors in particular is a big believer and executor of this principle. I will probably share more about this in my next newsletter or as a blog post.
👍 To conclude for now…
Thanks for reading my ramble if you got this far for my 1Q23 musings. Please do hit <reply> to this email if you have anything to add / any questions. I quite enjoy replying to comments/emails as a source of procrastination. Please share this email with others if you found it value-adding.
To learning to unlearn,
Michael
