Blessed by the Potato

I’m a big advocate of keeping your portfolio simple and easy to manage. As I was doing laundry and found, yet again, that I’d left a Kleenex in the pocket of a pair of pants and had to pick out little bits of fluff, it got me thinking of this.

It’s so easy to over-estimate our ability to handle a little more complexity, to think that even when you’re busy it’s not big deal. Then you find that Kleenex in the wash. Again. This isn’t even an unforseeable or unavoidable error. It’s happened before, and yet it’ll probably happen again. Probably before the year is out, even.

It’s another reminder to me that we have to arrange things in a way that accounts for the fact that we all have periods of inattention or sleep deprivation, and even at the best of times human error happens. If the plan is to ignore things for a year or to at a time, there’s less room for execution risk.

A simple portfolio is more robust to negligence and human error.