It is not the absence of doing. It is thinking, with your position still on the table.
I met someone who traded for a bank. Real money, at pace, all day.
Every afternoon she was called in, just like all the others, to the manager’s office.
You sat down and you accounted for every position you held.
Buy. Sell. Or hold.
Her manager was clear about one thing, and this is how she put it.
“Holding is a choice. A conscious choice and often the right one. But it needs to be catalogued and seen as a choice.”
Then she said the part that hit me in the face.
“That has been a huge lesson in my life, because it does not only apply to stocks.”
Here is what she handed me.
There are two modes. Doing, and thinking.
Buying is doing. Selling is doing. Both feel like work, because they are.
Holding is the other one. It is not the absence of doing. It is thinking, with your position still on the table.
My worst decisions came when I tried to run both at once.
When I am moving, I cannot see. Everything goes into the moving.
And here is the part I missed for years.
Nothing stops while you hold.
Prices move. People change jobs. A competitor overreaches. A supplier gets greedy. Somebody who would not take your call in March comes looking for you in October.
You stay where you are, the board keeps turning, and an opening appears that was not there when you were busy.
That is not waiting. That is the trade.
The best investors spend most of their working life holding. Yet almost every story ever told about them is about the buying and the selling.
Nobody tells the story of the year somebody sat still and was right.
And sitting still is the hard part. It takes nerves of steel and patience as deep as the ocean, because the moment it matters most is the moment everyone around you is telling you to move.
That is always when it is hardest. The room is loud, the advice is confident, and doing nothing feels like losing.
I am not naturally good at it.
My instinct is to push, and I have pushed hardest when everyone around me was doubting. I would do it again.
But the calls I am proud of are the other kind.
Holding while everyone else pushed their chips into the middle. Staying patient in a room full of eager people. Getting ready for the next crisis while the boom was still being celebrated. Going one way because the whole trade was going the other.
None of that is sitting still in the lazy sense. It is the harder mode, because nothing you do shows up anywhere that week.
Now the one I got wrong.
Years ago I lost a market that had been promised to me. I have written about that morning before.
What I did next was not a hold.
I spent two or three weeks trying to negotiate a version of the ending in which I had not been wrong. A split. An arrangement. Some shape that let me keep a piece of the promise. Everyone in that room had already decided. I was the last to know.
It looked like work. It was avoidance wearing work’s clothes.
I was moving so that I did not have to stop and look at the thing.
When I finally stopped, the answer showed up in about two days.
A few months earlier I had said no, twice, to Jeremy Burkhardt and Origin Acoustics. An American speaker brand I did not think I needed.
I wrote him a short email. Could we have a call.
That was the move. Stopping is what let me see it.
And I did not stop on purpose. I stopped because the clever route was finally dead.
So how do you tell a real pause from hiding?
Write three things down. If you cannot write them, you are hiding.
Why you are holding. One sentence, in plain words.
What it is costing you to hold. In money, or in time, or in the attention of your best people.
The date you will look at it again. A real date, in the calendar.
No reason, no price, no date, and it is not a pause. It is a drift.
Take the question from that trading floor. Leave their timetable.
Every afternoon is a trading floor’s speed. If I had to defend every hold of mine that often, I would sell good things just to have something to report.
Once a quarter is enough. What matters is that a date exists at all.
A boat at anchor is not doing nothing. The chain is loaded, the wind is on the bow, and the whole thing is working hard to stay in one place. You chose that spot. You know how much chain is out. You get up in the night to check she has not moved.
That is a hold.
From the shore, drifting looks exactly the same.
So pick the thing you have held longest. The customer everyone knows is difficult. The country. The product line. The person.
Say which one it is. Buy, sell, or hold.
Then say why, out loud, to one person who is allowed to tell you that you are wrong.
If you cannot finish that sentence, you are not holding it. You are avoiding it.
I did that for years and called it patience.
One last test, and it is the one I trust most.
If everyone around you agrees, and people compliment you on your patience, you are probably drifting.
If all you get is pressure to move, and you can still answer those three questions, you are holding.
The signals are that clear. They always are.
So which one is it, and who have you told?
w. 🌊
Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. Every issue lives here.