(2018-06-18) Guinn Mental Toughness

Rusty Guinn (Epsilon Theory) on Mental Toughness! Fashion must be the most mentally exhausting white-collar job in the world. Its very name tells you why. The industry is change, and as much as its practitioners will talk about timeless design and bucking trends, there is an incessance to the demands it places on designers and creatives. There is always a new season. Always a new thing. And it’s always better to decide what that new thing will be than to be the one responding to it. There’s another job that looks a lot like this: The life of a professional chef. I don’t know why Kate Spade committed suicide this week. I don’t know why Anthony Bourdain did the same.

We know more about Kate. But we don’t know how — even if — the unique pressures of fashion directly influenced or triggered the depression that it seems plagued her for years. When I read her sister’s account of the failed attempts to get help for Kate, it hit me pretty hard. She confessed to her sister how concerned she was that people would react badly if they discovered she had sought professional help for mental illness. More tellingly, she expressed her concern that it would damage the brand that was Kate Spade, which for those of you unfamiliar with the brand, is fresh, bright, young, colorful and, as she put it to her sister, happy-go-lucky.

Like those who choose to be a fashion designer or chef, the people who choose finance and investing as a profession are a motley crew. But they also have some things in common. Most are very smart. Most want to make a lot of money. Nearly all are very driven to succeed

Intelligence and drive are found in abundance. But success in finance requires something else that is in somewhat shorter supply: mental toughness. Resilience.

Because we require mental toughness of the people we hire and promote within our organizations, we have allowed the emergence of a meme of mental toughness! Friends, there is a vast gulf between mental toughness and mental toughness! (Theater)

Mental toughness! looks like never showing weakness to anyone.

The importance of the traits that cause investment professionals to feel like they must signal mental toughness! is real. Those traits are not a meme.

The only way to destigmatize it in our industry, I think, is for people who have reached senior positions and meaningful success in our industry to talk about it. Openly. Bluntly.

Compounding is the most powerful force in the universe, to be sure, and nothing compounds like shame. And God, was I ashamed. I was ashamed about the marriage ending, and the way it ended, of course. I was more ashamed at being stupid enough to get myself into that situation, and not being able to salvage it. I was ashamed at what people would say and think about me. He was married for what, two years? He got married right out of college? I thought he was smart? I was most ashamed that I’d become so petty and superficial that I felt worse about what people would say rather than the thing itself. It’s a recursive, ugly cycle of shame, all the way down.

If you’re running an investment firm, it’s important that your staff know that signaling their toughness isn’t necessary. Real mental toughness is.

“And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

“Oh, blow it out your ass!” It doesn’t always pass.