Every summer evening during my freshman year at Berkeley, I would walk across campus to Hearst Gym. Go up the stairs. Turn on the lights. Bring out the speakers. And play the first Waltz song.
I’d remember the beauty of being the only one in the room and being able to truly dance freely. Feeling the sensation of my weight transfer through my body and gradually collecting my feet together. And with each rise and fall cadence breathing new life into my step, the rest of the world would melt away. For a brief moment during every one of those summer evenings, nothing outside of me, the music, and the room mattered.
That was the moment when I first fell in love with dance. I was a part of a competitive ballroom team throughout college and ended up teaching the class for my last two years. As someone who came in with no athletic and dance ability to speak of, approaching the sport from a beginner’s mind and progressing along the mastery curve was incredibly informative, and the frameworks I’ve applied to other disciplines as well. There’s a laundry list of concepts I’ve learned during those four years, but none more important than the overarching truth: how you do anything is how you do everything.
My freshman year, I’d practice 2-3 hours a day, 5 days a week. And despite all the new technique points and routines we’d learn, at the beginning of every practice I’d spend 30 minutes just doing the Waltz box step. Where I’d stand in front of a mirror, weight on my left foot and visually checking that all my blocks of weight were perfectly stacked up on top of each other. Take a slow step forward, and at the midpoint where my weight would hover over both my feet, gradually rolling through my back foot into my front and slowly collecting my feet while making sure my blocks of weight remained perfectly stacked. Taking a sidestep required the same precision with an added rise in elevation, before collecting my feet together again and slowly lowering down with blocks of weights stacked. Before resetting and doing the same pattern all over again, and again, and again.
Ballroom is a very precise sport, one where if your right shoulder leans too far back, you could throw your dance partner and footwork completely off balance. But once you master the small mechanics and learn to speak the language, the range of motion accessible by the subtlest of weight transfers is deeply profound and the connection you and your partner share becomes truly beautiful. Though despite all the flashy spins, hops, shapes you can form, everything really does come from a strong base of clean weight transfers and collecting your feet. And despite the monotony of those 30 minutes every practice, that was what led to my consistently winning collegiate competitions and eventually heading to nationals.
Beyond ballroom, the same mentality has proven important. Even as an investor, being able to accurately process new data points pre-market for each day’s morning summary is critical. And despite 95%+ of news flow being noise, being able to honestly ask yourself for every data point “is this incremental” versus mechanically writing this off as just a morning chore can lead to a difference in $M of P&L. Of course, people can get away with shooting from the hip and eat these potential losses and write them off as bad luck. But at the end of the day in investing, ballroom and otherwise, the art becomes being able to see the whole picture and driving consistency in your outcomes. And all that starts with doing even the little things right.
Random Musings 
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