Friends,
No basketball team has ever been more dominant than the Boston Celtics.
Starting in the late 1950s, the team went to 10 consecutive NBA championships, winning nine of them. The team was anchored by Hall of Famer Bill Russell.
With that track record, you'd imagine Russell as cool, calm, and collected.
You would be wrong.
Russell suffered from such extreme pre-game anxiety that he would vomit before almost every game. In fact, he once didn't vomit, and the team played so poorly, his coach told him to "get sick" during halftime to turn things around.
What the Russell story highlights is a psychological principle called Anxiety Appraisal: your body has a set of signals -- sweaty palms, racing heart rate, butterflies in the stomach -- that can be interpreted in many ways.
Oftentimes, these are interpreted ("appraised") as signs of anxiety. And anxiety is an uncomfortable state. To counteract that, we try to "calm ourselves." That, according to many professionals, is a mistake.
Instead of trying to reason with your body to calm down, changing the story you're telling yourself turns out to be much more powerful. Instead of anxiety, you can reframe what you're experiencing as excitement.
Why bring this up?
Because the world is changing at a pace that -- quite honestly -- can feel pretty scary. This month, details of Anthropic's new model -- Mythos -- were released (here's a great primer). It looks insanely powerful in ways that might remind you of the doomsday scenarios we first saw in the Terminator series of movies.
And if you don't believe us, just have a look at how software stocks plummeted (again) following the release of details about Mythos.
But instead of anxiety, we encourage you to lean into excitement. It's true that this technology could cause major disruption in software. But it could also make smaller businesses more competitive via lower costs, or accelerate the development of life-saving drugs.
The key to this all is a trait we've long pointed out as the most antifragile of them all: curiosity. If you have a choice between doomsday anxiety and curious excitement, we encourage you to choose the latter. It's an approach with a nearly perfect track record of creating long-term value.
Wishing you investing luck in the months ahead,
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Brian Feroldi, Brian Stoffel, & Brian Withers
Long-Term Mindset
PS - If you are interested in getting on the waitlist for the new AI-Powered Stock Simplifier, click here.
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