{"id":84,"date":"2022-06-06T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/diversify-energy-and-money\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T16:46:41","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T16:46:41","slug":"diversify-energy-and-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moneywithkatie.com\/diversify-energy-and-money\/","title":{"rendered":"Invest Your Energy Like You Do Your Money: Diversify and Don’t Always Expect Success"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In 2021, Vanguard\u2014the second-largest investment firm in the world, trailing only behind BlackRock\u2014saw inflows of roughly $1B per day<\/em>. Overall, they\u2019ve got $7.5 trillion<\/em><\/span><\/a> under management.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a fancy way of saying that a shit ton of people stick their money in Vanguard. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When we see major firms like this, it\u2019s easy to forget that they were once\u2026not major. Today, Vanguard\u2019s market share is larger than their next-three-largest competitors combined, but it took them 20 years<\/em> to reach 10% market share. 20 years! <\/p>\n

20 years of toiling. 20 years of Jack Bogle going toe-to-toe with Wall Street clowns and being told his idea was stupid and that his business model would never work and fighting for every single dollar<\/em> under management. <\/p>\n

Bogle\u2019s story is interesting in the way that Steve Jobs\u2019s story is interesting\u2014Bogle was booted from his own company and (creatively) came back with a vengeance to change the investing world forever. These are the small plot points in the retellings of their stories: They last for a single sentence, and then are quickly replaced with details of ingenious strategy. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n \u201c<\/span>It\u2019s easy to keep going when you know you\u2019re going to win\u2014but when you\u2019re not sure if what you\u2019re doing is going to work, investing thousands of hours over many years is decidedly less easy.\u201d<\/span>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
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We forget that the single throwaway sentence of \u201cgetting booted from their own company\u201d was not over in a few seconds (as our reading of its retelling is). They didn\u2019t know what was going to happen on the other side of it, and it\u2019s often not a quick, obvious move. (It took Jobs 13 years<\/em><\/span><\/a> to make his way back! 13 years ago, I was 14. That seems like an eternity.) It\u2019s easy to keep going when you know you\u2019re going to win\u2014but when you\u2019re not sure if what you\u2019re doing is going to work, investing thousands of hours over many years is decidedly less easy.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s impressive to me about Bogle\u2019s story, though, is not that he built the second-largest investment firm in the world and didn\u2019t even seize the opportunity to become disgustingly rich himself (a move that some deem \u201canti-capitalist\u201d), but that he stuck with it for a grueling decade of net cash outflows every year (meaning\u2026more money was exiting stage right than entering stage left). <\/p>\n

When we study these larger-than-life figures, we tend to remember the high points: Dude reads an academic paper<\/span><\/a> about the validity of a fund that tracks an index (instead of actively picking stocks, as was par for the course back then), dude decides to invent said-product and bring it to market, dude becomes legend. End of story. <\/p>\n

Or is it? <\/p>\n

We often don\u2019t <\/em>pay much attention to the weeks, months, and years of toiling away and being told \u201cno.\u201d I\u2019m not even talking about the daily work of building Vanguard: I\u2019m talking about all the other false starts Bogle undoubtedly had. The weeks he probably wanted to peace out and do something else. The parts of the story where he expended energy and capital on things that were totally inconsequential <\/em>to Vanguard\u2019s success. <\/p>\n

But that\u2019s the thing: When Bogle was undoubtedly having those human moments, he didn\u2019t know what was going to move things forward and what wasn\u2019t. He didn\u2019t know what was going to provide the return. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s because the plot points that don\u2019t drive the narrative forward are usually omitted as the legend becomes streamlined and crystallized in the collective memory\u2014it serves to create a world wherein we have this myopic, predictable understanding of how our renegade idols darted about the world, saw the clear path forward and did what nobody else dared to do. We oversimplify\u2014and in the process, we forget that the mundane consistency of our<\/em> day-to-day lives is often slowly weaving together our own<\/em> narrative that we\u2019ll someday reflect on and realize, \u201cOh, that\u2019s<\/em> how I got here.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n \u201c<\/span>The plot points that don\u2019t drive the narrative forward are usually omitted as the legend becomes streamlined and crystallized in the collective memory.\u201d<\/span>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n
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And we, too, will omit and gloss over the parts that don\u2019t drive our personal narrative forward.<\/p>\n

I noticed recently as I did a string of \u201cMoney with Katie\u201d interviews that I was\u2014unintentionally\u2014creating this very sensible tale about how I got to where I am now. It\u2019s the more exciting, edited version of the story, wherein I realized one random Tuesday that I wanted to change my life, and\u2014in no short order\u2014started a personal finance blog, grew that blog, and sold that blog to a larger organization, cashing in on a dream job and riches I never imagined when I graduated from college five years earlier with a degree in PR.<\/p>\n

If only it were that simple, right?<\/p>\n

If only it were that clear <\/em>while we\u2019re in it. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s the \u201cpodcast version\u201d of the Money with Katie story. The Guy Raz \u201cHow I Built This\u201d narrative. <\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what that story does not include:<\/p>\n