During this interview with The Young Investors Podcast, Guy Spier discusses the difficulty of investing and how it’s comparable to other challenging pursuits, such as cycling. He also shares a personal experience of asking Warren Buffett if investing gets easier over time. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Spier: I love all of these sort of like very good questions that are really difficult to answer is with great difficulty.
How do you invest with great difficulty?
I think it was a cyclist, maybe it was Eddy Merckx, maybe it was somebody else, maybe it was Lance Armstrong.
He said, it doesn’t get easier you just get faster. When he was talking about cycling. So you know this idea you see somebody who’s a great cyclist and who cycles really fast and you think oh they cycle really fast, and it must feel really easy for them.
The answer is it feels about as shitty as it feels for you when you’re climbing up that hill it’s just that they got faster you know.
So I think that… what’s my point.
If you’re looking at… Brandon’s shining the light on me but if I’m looking at Seth Klarman or Warren Buffett or you know we were talking a little bit about about Mike Burry.
So they certainly make it look easy in the same way that Eddy Merckx or Lance Armstrong made cycling look easy, but it’s not easy, it’s the same difficulty.
The same struggle, it’s the same difficulty, so the first thing is get used to it.
So a question that… you brought up Warren, so a question that I asked Warren pretty early on at the lunch was, I told Warren I found it really really hard to do the right thing for example to convert my fund to zero fee structure.
I asked him, in a certain way the same question, I said does it get any easier? And he paused a little bit and he kind of said, well a little!
You can watch the entire discussion here:
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