Student Question
Hello, Master. Recently I’ve been reflecting on investment, and on something deeper — we want to live authentically, to leave no regrets. We want to live freely. We want people who can support each other when loneliness comes. We want to live with greater meaning.
But we’re also bound to face certain hard truths of life:
- Each of us becomes, to a far greater degree than we realize, the designer of our own life and the creator of the reality we inhabit.
- We are born as meaning-seeking creatures, yet thrown into a world that contains no inherent meaning. So we must set about constructing the meaning of our own lives — a meaning powerful enough to carry us through.
These questions bleed into various layers of our daily lives.
Which brings me to my question for Master Chi. When it comes to personal investment — what is the true meaning of investing?
Master Chi’s Response
Making money is not the ultimate purpose of investing. If you treat it as the goal, the market will eventually defeat you — because human nature will create all manner of difficulties for us, pulling us around by the nose with short-term gains and losses.
One path leads to a life sunken in the pursuit of fame and profit, ending in regret.
Only when we find within investing that eternal, ultimate meaning — that Dao (the Way) — can we settle into it, walk the path with unwavering resolve, and find the courage to face whatever difficulties lie ahead.
Consider how we judge the quality of a relationship. It comes down to how much of ourselves we’re willing to bring into it.
What distinguishes an investment relationship from the relationships within a psychological or interpersonal group is this: investment relationships carry an additional layer — the layer of investment itself — making it a kind of indirect human connection.
An investment community can fulfill three of our core needs: transforming suffering, personal growth, and improving relationships.
Many investors in the market are content only with the thrill of making money and the gratification of ego — and never see what lies in the opposite direction: the joy of turning inward and exploring the self.
One of investment’s most important meanings, as I see it, is not simply the opportunity to build significant wealth. It is that investing can create, for our self-knowledge and personal growth, a kind of catalyst that no other pursuit can match.
If you carry this sense of meaning with you when you look at investing again — the pain of a stop-loss, the failure to execute rules with discipline, the loneliness of being misunderstood by others — do you find yourself understanding and feeling these things differently?
Has something shifted in your relationship with them?