Rules, Guidelines, and What the Olympics Quietly Reveal

Late -  not unreasonably late, but late enough that I know better. The closing ceremony sits just days away and somewhere between the hoped-for quadruple Axel and the perils of downhill skiing, I've been negotiating with myself most nights this past week.

"It only happens every four years."

Sound familiar? Maybe the bedtime hour of Olympic nights causes you no internal struggle whatsoever -  and that's perfectly valid. Maybe instead, a playoff game that went into overtime did it for you, or a season finale, or a market move you felt convinced you couldn't miss. The details change but the path to negotiating probably doesn't.

Here's what makes my current bedtime "adjustment" worth examining more closely: the issue goes much deeper than sleep. Something smaller and more revealing lurks underneath a gap – the gap between a standard and what actually holds when pressure shows up. We all carry that gap somewhere. Most of us just don't notice it. I didn't notice the other night until 11 p.m. during the final run for the half-pipe.

Rules and Guidelines Aren't the Same Thing

Rules remove the conversation. Guidelines start one.

"Lights out by 9:30" and "I should probably get more sleep" carry the same surface-level intention but they don't function the same way. One closes the door on negotiation; the other leaves it cracked open. And when excitement or stress or a once-in-four-years moment arrives, guidelines bend. Rules hold.

Now, the difference has nothing to do with willpower. Call it architecture. Most of us likely carry more guidelines than we realize - we tend to call them rules because they work on ordinary days (or nights) when nothing pushes back. The standard feels solid because most of life happens in the ordinary range and guidelines function just fine, right up until something extraordinary stress-tests them.

So what does it actually take to build a real rule? One that might hold up even under extraordinary circumstances? Three things - and they matter considerably more for our portfolios than for our bedtime routines.

What a Real Rule Actually Requires

Clarity comes first. The standard needs to be specific enough to test. "I need seven and a half hours of sleep" gives you something measurable by tomorrow morning. Saying "I value sleep" carries no weight at 10:45 p.m. when the women's biathlon 4x6 relay gets interesting. Vague standards don't hold - they just feel like they might.

Commitment - made ahead of time - comes second. The decision needs to land before emotion arrives, not during it. Deciding during a curling match (I’m watching this? Seriously?) whether the Olympics "truly counts" as an exception? That probably doesn't qualify as discipline. That passes as discretion masquerading as discipline.

Consequence comes third. You follow the standard even when it feels uncomfortable. If breaking it costs you nothing - no recognition, no honest accounting, no real adjustment - it likely lived as a preference all along. We just dressed it up.

Here's the thing - none of this demands rigid, non-thinking obedience. A planned exception, consciously chosen before the moment arrives, still reflects discipline. Go for it, if that's what you decided in advance. The trouble comes when emotions show up and an unplanned exception starts to look a lot like a subtle surrender.

Where This Gets Real

So, a negotiation similar to the one that creeps in near 10:50 p.m. during the pairs figure skating could hook investors too - but the stakes run considerably higher.

"The market's down, but it always comes back."

"This time feels different."

"I'll wait until things stabilize."

Have you ever caught yourself saying any version of these rationalizations? I have - and most of us probably have at some point.

These don't qualify as strategies. They represent improvisation under emotion - and the costliest investing mistakes almost never trace back to poor analysis. They likely originated as a guideline that masqueraded as a rule until a hard moment arrived and a negotiation took place.

So the question becomes: what might change if we approached our portfolios the way disciplined athletes approach their training? Investors who have navigated stressful market situations well didn’t achieve that through nature or superior intelligence. Rather, they pre-committed to a defined process that told them when to act and when to sit still - long before volatility showed up, before the talking heads became excited, and before any feeling arrived about this time being different.

A systematic investing approach doesn't eliminate feelings - that’s neither the point nor even possible. Instead, the system's rules limit emotion’s authority. That clear-cut shift would likely matter much more to short-term and long-term results than any single buy/sell decision. It moves you from "I'll decide when the moment comes" to "I already decided. The system handles my decisions for me."

Here's a question worth sitting with: In your portfolio right now, how many of your "rules" would actually hold up during a really hard week – say after the market already had several really hard weeks? How many “rules” might imperceptibly become guidelines after downward price pressure intensifies? Market history points to the answer.

Back to the Olympics

So - did you stay up? Maybe you did. Maybe that was exactly the right thing to do - no judgment here.

Here's what I'd suggest: build the exception into the rule before you need it. "Olympics nights get pre-planned. I decide in advance, not during the broadcast." That's not weakness - that's precision. It closes the negotiation before emotion takes over.

And while you watch, consider what you're actually seeing.

We tend to think of Olympic athletes as people who perform well under pressure. That undersells the feat by a decade or two. The figure skater landing a quadruple Axel in front of a global audience has likely attempted that jump hundreds or thousands of times - in empty rinks, at six in the morning, on days when the body ached, the motivation evaporated, and the ice came up hard. No medals for those falls. Nobody even watched in the quiet, empty cavern.

Source: pixabay.com

What made those sessions possible wasn't talent; it was clarity, commitment, and consequences. Standards clear enough to follow on the worst days, decided long before emotion could interfere, honored for years in those same empty rinks and early mornings. Day after day, for a decade or more before the world ever learned their name.

That's why we watch. Not for the spectacle - for the recognition. We understand, instinctively, how hard and rare that kind of daily consistency really is - because somewhere in us, we want it too. For lives well-lived, for freedom earned rather than borrowed, for financial security that holds. For many of us, a systematic investing process followed consistently through ordinary markets and extraordinary ones may represent the closest financial equivalent to what those athletes build across a decade of empty rinks and early mornings. The arena differs. The daily discipline doesn't.

Maybe discipline has nothing to do with never staying up late.

Maybe it comes down to knowing - clearly, honestly - exactly why you did. And then showing up tomorrow, and all the days after that.

That's what we're really watching.

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