Return On Attention
Or how to get the most bang for your buck.
I’m going to assume that you have never heard of a video game called “Glitch”. Not many have.
Glitch was an online multiplayer game, created in 2011, and by any sensible measure it was a complete commercial disaster.
It was buggy, there were loads of problems and it gained very little traction. A year after release it was shelved. Despite a couple of attempts from the few fans that the game had to resuscitate it, it never saw the light of day again.
99% of companies and founders would have chalked the whole debacle up to experience and moved onto the next thing. However, what followed in this case has become one of the great corporate pivots of all time.
Tiny Speck, the company that created Glitch, decided to repurpose the “chatroom style” communications tool that they had built during the development of the game into a standalone product.
That product was Slack.
Launched in 2013 from a standing start, Slack became a smash hit. By 2019, the company reported more than 10 million users located in more than 150 countries.
This explosive growth led to a listing on the New York Stock Exchange and an eventual acquisition by Salesforce at a valuation of $27.7 billion. Which, one would imagine, probably represented a fairly decent payday for Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello and Cal Henderson who had founded Tiny Speck.
I’m not recounting this tale as a lesson on the value of persistence or flexibility. But instead to demonstrate the value of devoting attention to the “right” things.
If we think about our attention as a finite resource, we can understand just how important it is to allocate it well. Of course, in a relentlessly noisy and demanding world it can be incredibly tough to focus on what truly matters.
When we are young, it can be tempting to devote too much focus on our investment strategy - looking for the latest “hot stock” in order to accumulate wealth quickly. Skip the tough stuff by finding a lottery ticket.
But doing this when one has not yet accumulated a significant asset base is just illogical.
Below the age of 40, your absolute laser focus should be on maximising your future earnings potential.
Developing yourself so that you can earn £10,000 a year more over the rest of your career is going to move the dial a heck of a lot more than eeking out extra return on your £10,000/£20,000/£30,000 ISA by being clever (or getting lucky).
Trying to grow wealth by taking an active, high touch approach to managing your investments is both incredibly difficult and incredibly high maintenance. Gaining qualifications and building skill to improve earning potential is not only easier, but less open to outside circumstances - once you have those skills, no one can take them away from you.
At this stage of life1 it is enough to find a simple, low cost and hyper diversified investment strategy. Once this box has been ticked, you have two jobs - buy, and keep buying.
We often see a mis-allocation of attention when it comes to the concept of risk too.
The young investor may throw her hands up and shout at the sky when her ISA falls by 10% in value, while at the same time refusing to protect and insure what is in fact her largest asset - her future earnings potential.
Similarly, for those later in life, it can be easy to pay too much regard towards the day to day, perfectly normal, gyrations of the stock market. Along with the concurrent media shrieking.
This too, would be to miss the wood for the trees. If we are retiring at, say, the age of 60 we may need our money to last for another 30 or 40 years. Longer still if we want to lay the foundations of multi-generational wealth for our family.
Over such time frames, the cost of purchasing the goods and services that we (and our loved ones) want to buy will rise massively. Inflation is the real threat - but rather than shrieking, it whispers from the shadows.
Picking through the wreckage of the Glitch project, Tiny Speck were able to find gold. Pulling on that thread and devoting their full attention to it made them rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Likewise, by understanding where to focus our attention when it comes to our finances the returns can be huge, and not just financially.
In life, and our finances, we can only control what we can control.
Maximising (and protecting) our earnings potential, maintaining a sensible savings rate, exhibiting the correct behaviours as investors, looking after our health, getting enough sleep, picking the right people to spend our lives with and nurturing these relationships.
Not only will getting these “controllables” right surely give us the best chance of a great financial outcome, but of living a great life too.
Have a lovely weekend.
And throughout life frankly.