For years, my workouts, commutes, and dog walks came with a constant stream of podcasts about whatever was happening that week in business and international affairs. I wanted more depth than the newspapers offered, and I felt I was becoming better informed. But that information came with undesirable side effects. I was becoming more anxious and reactive. The calm I got from exercise was being undone by what I was listening to.
Around four years ago, I quit podcasts altogether and, somewhat by accident, replaced them with audiobooks. The trigger was guilt. I couldn’t find the time or energy for the One Wealth book club selections. I’d try reading at night, get a few pages in before falling asleep, and the book would join the pile of “must reads” collecting dust on my nightstand.
I was a voracious reader of novels as a teenager, but long-form reading lost its pleasure in college, when it became required. So, on a whim, I tried the audio version of a book club pick, Bill Browder’s Red Notice. I was doing chores at the time, and before long I was inventing more tasks to keep listening. The next day I took it on a mountain bike ride and started flying through chapters. It quieted my internal chatter and my breaking-news anxiety. Home projects, longer workouts, dog walks, and even longer drives all became chances to get lost in complex masterpieces.
Over time, I started taking on books I would never have dreamed of picking up. In the last 18 months, I’ve listened to Blood Meridian, The Odyssey, East of Eden, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and I’m now deep into The Brothers Karamazov. What they share is a focus on human nature across decades and lifetimes. They pulled me out of the news cycle and lengthened the timeline of my thinking.
That is the same discipline behind the financial planning we obsess over at One Wealth Advisors. Most good financial outcomes are built from often boring, repeated decisions made over decades, and a plan is supposed to be sturdier than a mood.
A plan exists for the moments when the headlines get loud. We build it when everyone is calm, around your goals, your timeline, and how much risk you can actually live with, so you don’t have to improvise when you’re not. Then the headline arrives, your pulse quickens, and the urge to do something kicks in. That urge is real, and it is rarely a good advisor. The better first move is to pause.
Pausing is not the same as ignoring. It means asking a few questions before acting. Have my goals changed? My timeline? My need for cash? If the answer is yes, we adjust the plan, deliberately. If the answer is no, then what changed is the noise level, not the plan. The point isn’t to never act. It’s to make sure that when you do, you’re responding to your life and not to a news cycle built to hold your attention.
Don’t get me wrong, I still read the news every day and am susceptible to the same cortisol spikes, but I am practicing treating my attention like capital. Where I spend it compounds, for better or worse. The more time I can spend thinking about the long game, the better.
