Nicolai Tangen highlights a paradoxical challenge of long-term strategy: the immense difficulty of sitting still and taking no action for extended periods. Resisting the daily pressure to "do something" is a critical, yet underestimated, psychological skill required for successful long-term investing.

Technology enabling investors to check their retirement portfolio's value instantly is counterproductive. Seeing short-term volatility, like a 1.5% daily drop, triggers an emotional bias for action, leading to panic selling. This behavior is anathema to the patient, long-term approach required for successful retirement investing.

True investment prowess isn't complex strategies; it's emotional discipline. Citing Napoleon, the ability to simply do the average thing—like not panic selling—when everyone else is losing their mind is what defines top-tier performance. Behavioral fortitude during a crisis is the ultimate financial advantage.

Contrary to the industry's bias for action, Howard Marks advocates for strategic inaction, flipping the common saying to 'don't just do something, sit there.' True long-term success comes from owning good assets and letting ideas work, not from constant trading and reacting to short-term market noise.

Instead of fighting or fearing market downturns, a superior strategy is to consciously "surrender" to their inevitability. This philosophical acceptance frees you from the draining, low-value work of predicting the unpredictable (recessions, crashes) and allows you to focus on owning resilient businesses for the long term.

Compounding is a fragile process. Every portfolio adjustment, like trimming or panic selling, is like opening a door and letting heat escape. Treating your portfolio as a contained machine that works best when untouched reframes "doing nothing" as a strategic, structural advantage.

During a severe market downturn like 2008, being an index investor can be oddly reassuring. The feeling of alignment—rising and falling with the entire market—can reduce the panic and second-guessing that often accompanies holding concentrated positions, leading to better long-term behavior.

Most investing environments encourage constant, often harmful, action. The speaker actively engineers an environment for inaction by eliminating visual stimuli like financial TV and filtering social media noise. This counteracts behavioral biases and promotes the patience required for long-term compounding.

To combat the urge for constant activity, which often harms returns, investor Stig Brodersen intentionally reviews his portfolio's performance only once a year. This forces a long-term perspective and prevents emotional, short-sighted trading based on market fluctuations.