The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

3. Ticker tape fever.
During the run-up to the 1929 crash on Wall
Street, many people had become addicted to playing the stock market,
and this addiction had a physical component—the sound of the ticker
tape that electronically registered each change in a stock’s price.
Hearing that clicking noise indicated something was happening,
somebody was trading and making a fortune. Many felt drawn to the
sound itself, which felt like the heartbeat of Wall Street. We no longer
have the ticker tape. Instead many of us have become addicted to the
minute-by-minute news cycle, to “what’s trending,” to the Twitter feed,
which is often accompanied by a ping that has its own narcotic effects.
We feel like we are connected to the very flow of life itself, to events as
they change in real time, and to other people who are following the
same instant reports.
This need to know instantly has a built-in momentum. Once we
expect to have some bit of news quickly, we can never go back to the
slower pace of just a year ago. In fact, we feel the need for more
information more quickly. Such impatience tends to spill over into
other aspects of life—driving, reading a book, following a film. Our
attention span decreases, as well as our tolerance for any obstacles in
our path.
We can all recognize signs of this nervous impatience in our own
lives, but what we don’t recognize is the distorting effect it has on our
thinking. The trends of the moment—in business or politics—are
embedded in larger trends that play out over the course of weeks and
months. Such larger spans of time tend to reveal the relative
weaknesses and strengths of an investment, a strategic idea, a sports
team, or a political candidate, which are often the opposite of what we
see in the microtrends of the moment. In isolation, a poll or stock price
do not tell us much about these strengths and weaknesses. They give
us the deceptive impression that what is revealed in the present will
only become more pronounced with time. It is normal to want to keep
up with the latest news, but to base any kind of decision on these
snapshots of the moment is to run the risk of misreading the larger
picture.

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Furthermore, people tend to react and overreact to any negative or
positive change in the present, and it becomes doubly hard to resist
getting caught up in their panic or exuberance.
Look at what Abraham Lincoln had to face in a much less
technological age. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he looked at the
larger picture—as he estimated it, the North should prevail because it
had more men and more resources to draw on. The only danger was
time. Lincoln would need time for the Union Army to develop itself as
a fighting force; he also needed time to find the right generals who
would prosecute the war as he desired. But if too much time passed
and there were no big victories, public opinion might turn against the
effort, and once the North became divided within itself, Lincoln’s job
would become impossible. He needed patience but also victories on the
battlefield.
In the first year of the war the North suffered a great defeat at Bull
Run, and suddenly almost everyone questioned the president’s
competency. Now even levelheaded Northerners such as the famous
editor Horace Greeley urged the president to negotiate peace. Others
urged him to throw everything the North had into an immediate blow
to crush the South, even though the army was not ready for this.
On and on this went, the pressure continually mounting as the
North failed to deliver a single solid victory until finally General
Ulysses S. Grant finished off the siege at Vicksburg in 1863, followed
soon by the victory at Gettysburg under General George Meade. Now
suddenly Lincoln was hailed as a genius. But some six months later, as
Grant got bogged down in his pursuit of the Confederate Army under
General Robert E. Lee and the casualties mounted, the sense of panic
returned. Once again Greeley urged negotiation with the South.
Lincoln’s reelection that year seemed doomed. He had become
immensely unpopular. The war was taking too long. Feeling the weight
of all this, in late August of 1864 Lincoln finally drafted a letter spelling
out the terms of peace he would offer the South, but that very night he
felt ashamed for losing his resolve and hid the letter in a drawer. The
tide had to turn, he felt, and the South would be crushed. Only a week
later, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched into Atlanta and
all the doubts about Lincoln suddenly vanished for good.
Through long-term thinking Lincoln had correctly gauged the
relative strengths and weaknesses of the two sides and how the war

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would eventually trend. Everyone else got caught up in the day-by-day
reports of the progress of the war. Some wanted to negotiate, others to
suddenly speed up the effort, but all of this was based on momentary
swings of fortune. A weaker man would have given in to such pressures
and the war would have ended very differently. The writer Harriet
Beecher Stowe, who visited Lincoln in 1864, later wrote of him:
“Surrounded by all sorts of conflicting claims, by traitors, by half-
hearted, timid men, by Border States men and Free States men, by
radical Abolitionists and Conservatives, he has listened to all, weighed
the words of all, waited, observed, yielded now here and now there, but
in the main kept one inflexible, honest purpose, and drawn the
national ship through.”
Lincoln provides the model for us all and the antidote to the fever.
First and foremost we must develop patience, which is like a muscle
that requires training and repetition to make it strong. Lincoln was a
supremely patient man. When we face any kind of problem or obstacle,
we must follow his example and make an effort to slow things down
and step back, wait a day or two before taking action. Second, when
faced with issues that are important, we must have a clear sense of our
long-term goals and how to attain them. Part of this involves assessing
the relative strengths and weaknesses of the parties involved. Such
clarity will allow us to withstand the constant emotional overreactions
of those around us. Finally, it is important to have faith that time will
eventually prove us right and to maintain our resolve.