Episode Details

Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines practiced every day, while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

If you think about it, it's the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.

So how can you become more successful in life, investing, or in your business or profession and have a lower chance of failure?

One of the best ways I know is to study successful people, or even better is to study failures, and then have a mentor by your side to make sure you keep doing the right thing.

In today's show Mark Creedon, founder of Business Accelerator Mastermind and one of my coaches and mentors, and I are going to share with you a list of things we believe you need to understand about investing, the economy, and business.

This is really a follow-on from the last chat we had together a few weeks ago where we discussed 24 things we felt you should know and these were based on the musings of Morgan Housell, my favorite finance writer.

Judging by the number of downloads that podcast got it was very popular and I'm sure you'll gain some insights from my chat with Mark today whether you're a beginning or an experienced investor or a businessperson.

Economic and Business Success Lessons

1. Investment banker Dresdner Kleinwort looked at analysts' predictions of interest rates and compared that with what interest rates actually did in hindsight. It found an almost perfect lag. "Analysts are terribly good at telling us what has just happened but of little use in telling us what is going to happen in the future," the banker said. It's common to confuse the rear-view mirror for the windshield.
2. Study successful investors, and you'll notice a common denominator: they are Masters of Psychology. They can't control the market, but they have complete control over the grey matter between their ears. Try to learn as many investing mistakes as possible vicariously through others. Other people have made every mistake in the book. You can learn more from studying the investing failures than the investing greats. "Investor Dean Williams once wrote, "Confidence in a forecast rises with the amount of information that goes into it. But the accuracy of the forecast stays the same."
3. No one on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans can be described as a "perma-bear." A natural sense of optimism is not only healthy but vital.
4. How long you stay invested for will likely be the single most important factor determining how well you do at investing.
5. When you think you have a great idea, go out of your way to talk with someone who disagrees with it. At worst, you continue to disagree with them. More often, you'll gain valuable perspective. Fight confirmation bias like the plague.

Links and Resources:

Why not join Metropole's Business Accelerator Mastermind

Learn more about Mark Creedon – Business Coach to some of Australia's leading entrepreneurs

Get a copy of Mark's new book here – Have a business not a job

Get the team at Metropole to help build your personal Strategic Property Plan Click here and have a chat with us

Morgan Housell's article mentioned in the show:

122 Things Everyone Should Know About Investing and the Economy by Morgan Housel

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