I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
In her book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, philosopher Agnes Callard defines aspiration as the process of acquiring new values and becoming a different person. This is similar to the transformative experiences described by L.A. Paul that I wrote about yesterday. Callard, like Paul, argues that in advance of developing new values you can’t know what it is like to actually hold those values, so you must take a leap of faith to pursue that transformation.
Callard writes that when you aspire towards changed values you will often confront resistance:
The work of the aspirant is often marked by some resistance to doing that work. We are much less likely to find such resistance among those engaged in work not geared toward value-change. Someone who is, for instance, building a birdhouse, is unlikely to take apart what he has built, throw away his tool, run away from his project, and then return to working. That’s because his values are fixed throughout the process. If we are to get aspirational work into view, we must be prepared to encounter its characteristically tortured and disoriented presentation. At the same time, what it is a tortured presentation of is something that bears a crucial resemblance to building a birdhouse. Both aspiring and building are forms of work, activities to be engaged in and not (merely) experiences to be undergone. [emphasis mine]
I feel somewhat tortured and disoriented right now as I figure out who I am becoming. I’ve realized in pursuing a career and not just hobby as a trader that I have to evolve into someone different, someone with different values, different preferences, and, most importantly, a different emotional structure. My current psychology doesn’t serve me. I feel resistance, not about actually sitting down at the computer and researching stocks from both a fundamental and technical perspective or about actually entering trades. I feel resistance about changing my emotional stance towards money. And yet this is where I have the most possible gain.
These are the shifts I imagine would benefit me:
- From chasing maximum returns to orienting around a realistic objective
- From focusing on the past with regret to looking towards the future with hope
- From reactivity based on swings in the market to equanimity about short-, medium-, and long-term volatility
- From comparing my results to what other people share they have achieved to benchmarking my results against my own personal objective
- From making trading decisions impulsively to doing it within a framework of trading plans, flexible rules, and timing that suits me and the reality of the market
How do you change your values, your preferences, your emotional setup?
This brings up the question of how one goes about changing their psychology? I suspect an outside in approach will work most effectively. I mean I should change my behavior and then the structure of my self will follow.
This is essentially what Callard argues in Aspiration: in order to change your values you first have to first do the things that you would do if you already had the new values. This is likely to feel inauthentic and uncomfortable:
We aspire by doing things, and the things we do change us so that we are able to do the same things, or things of that kind, better and better. In the beginning we sometimes feel as though we are pretending, play-acting, or otherwise alienated from our own activity. We may see the new value as something we are trying out or trying on rather than something we are fully engaged with and committed to.
Is this a kind of imposter syndrome, where you have the aspiration to become a certain kind of person who acts in a certain way, and achieves certain things, but when you first start you feel like a fraud?
I feel a little that way now, with the changes I’m making to my trading and investing approach.
I’ve felt that way with past directions I took during this reinvention: when I drafted a book, when I showed my abstract art in juried shows, when I took professional photography courses and had to complete assignments showing whether I had the skills and talent to do that sort of thing.
Starting with imitation
Sometimes, in becoming someone new, you start with imitation, says Callard:
We may rely heavily on mentors whom we are trying to imitate or competitors whom we are trying to best. As time goes on, however, the fact (if it is a fact) that we are still at it is usually a sign that we find ourselfes progressively more able to see, on our own, the value that we could barely apprehend at first.
As an artist, I started first with imitation. I bought books about acrylic painting and worked through the lessons. I followed YouTube abstract art tutorials. I imitated artwork that I liked. But at some point I broke out of that and I developed my own personal point of view and style as an artist, something that was uniquely my own even if it grew out of many artistic influences.
As a trader, I’ve read various books, watched videos, and learned from other traders who are using trading approaches similar to what I might like to develop. But I already feel myself breaking away and following my own money muse. This is a welcome development. And it is based in values: values like the benefits of being immersed in world events as a way of making better monetary decisions, taking a very active role in money management rather than buying and holding index funds, like choosing sometimes contrarian approaches because they suit me and because they help me achieve my goals of capital preservation with income generation and reasonable, compounding returns over time.
Seeking a conceptual revolution
In her essay Who Will I Become? L.A. Paul suggests that transformative experiences can be thought of as akin to Kuhnian scientific revolutions:
What we have here is a first-personal version of a Kuhnian revolution. In transformation, we replace our old point of view, our self-understanding of who we are with a new, incommensurable point of view, a new self-understanding of who we are. Instead of a conceptual revolution writ large, like that brought on by the discovery that the earth revolves around the sun (which replaced the old idea that the sun and other planets revolve around the earth), we experience a conceptual revolution writ small.
In such a revolution, the ways of thinking and interpreting the world before and after are incommensurable. In a scientific revolution, though, there are people working in the before paradigm and people working in the after and rarely are they ever the same people, just with changed views. In a personal revolution, it’s one person who has become so different she can barely remember what it was like before.
Looking back over my almost two years of reinvention blogging, I don’t see that I’ve experienced a personal Kuhnian-style revolution yet. I feel on the cusp of one though. I am tortured and disoriented but I am hopeful as well.