Weekend Reads for Finance Pros: Our Brains and “The Disease” of Busyness

I don’t know about you, but I have a very hard time sitting still and just “being” instead of “doing.” My idea of “relaxing” usually involves something physical: running, swimming, cooking, spring cleaning, doing whatever, so long as I’m on the move. It takes a lot of discipline to just “be” instead of “do.” Which is why a passage from a recent post on the On Being blog, “The Disease of Being Busy,” really struck me.

Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, writes: “This disease of being ‘busy’ (and let’s call it what it is, the dis-ease of being busy, when we are never at ease) is spiritually destructive to our health and well-being. It saps our ability to be fully present with those we love the most in our families, and keeps us from forming the kind of community that we all so desperately crave.” Stopping myself from being busy, in a sense, is about simplifying. As American author Henry D. Thoreau once said, “Our life is frittered away by detail . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! . . .  Simplify, simplify.” I can’t help but wonder how much of my life I fritter away with my obsession with detail. Busyness, it seems, is how I try to manage detail. Here are some other interesting reads, in case you missed them:

The Financial Industry

• What would you do if you could wipe the slate clean and restart your career in the investment business? “If You Could Start from Scratch” (WealthManagement.com)
• No surprise here, but still disconcerting: A new study finds investors are misled by overconfidence, an inability to focus on long-term goals amid distractions, and distrust of professional advisers. “The Folklore of Finance: Beliefs That Contribute to Investors’ Failure” (The New York Times)
• “If Other Industries Were Like Wall Street” (The Motley Fool)
• The problem with “due diligence.” (The Research Puzzle)

An asset manager's narrative is critical. But all too often it's simply cut and pasted, says @researchpuzzler http://t.co/IREBs5qfx7

— Barnett Ravenscroft Wealth Management (@brwealthmgment) November 15, 2014

Robo-Advisors

• “What Robo-Advisors Really Bring to the Table“: “more hype than substance for now.” (Morningstar)
• “The Starting Is the Hardest Part: The Case for Robo-Advisors” (Abnormal Returns)
• “Financial Advisers Need to Get ‘On the Right Side’ of the Robo-Adviser Trend“
• Man versus Machine. (ThinkAdvisor)

“If you ever hope to compete with robo-advisors, you must be committed to a relentless end-user focus.” http://t.co/Veak02EpLL

— Lauren Foster (@laurenfosternyc) November 14, 2014

Our Brains

• “Learning How Little We Know about the Brain” (The New York Times)
• “Brain Pathway Rediscovered after 100 Years” (IFLScience)
• On the importance of telling, and listening to, stories: “Your Brain on Stories” (The Brain Lady Blog)
• “Irrational Decisions and the Biology of Behavioral Finance” (CFA Institute Annual Conference)
• Left brained or right brained? In this short animated film, Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, discusses the left and right halves of our brains. “It’s not true,” he says, “that one part of the brain does reason, and the other does emotion. Both are profoundly involved in both. It’s not true that language resides only in the left hemisphere . . . that visual imagery is only in the right hemisphere.” The reality is far more complex and interesting. “This organ, which is all about making connection, is profoundly divided.” (RSA Animate)

clever and very engaging short video debunking left- vs right-brained: "The Divided Brain" http://t.co/iA4MhKyZjN pic.twitter.com/Xj46uNc45c

— Lauren Foster (@laurenfosternyc) November 18, 2014

Women and Their Careers

• Harvard Business School study: It’s not kids but husbands that hold women’s careers back. (Slate)
• And the study on which the Slate article was based: “Rethink What You ‘Know’ about High-Achieving Women” (Harvard Business Review)
• Managing your career. Interesting research on how women get to the C-Suite. (Harvard Business Review)
• “Why Women Should Do Less and Network More” (Fortune)
• “Executive Women Finding (and Owning) Their Voice” (The New York Times)
• Career-wise, “Is It More Important to Be Smart or Confident?” Sallie Krawcheck answers. (Fortune)

And Now for Something Completely Different

• “Elon Musk Recommends 12 Books” (Farnam Street)
• “How Leaders Mistake Execution for Strategy (and Why That Damages Both)” (strategy+business)
• Great 3-minute film documenting three urban running crews: “The Common Ground” (Q)

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All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.

Image Credit: ©iStockPhoto.com/temmuzcan