Up and down. That’s how you can describe real life in three words. But instead of accepting that life is cyclical, and that bad times are normal, we expect that we should always be on an upward cycle.

Almost everything we do involves other people. And because we’re emotional and inconsistent beings, outcomes are not consistent. Value investor and author of The Most Important Thing, Howard Marks explains this concept as follows:

“Mechanical things can go in a straight line. Time moves ahead continuously. So can a machine when it’s adequately powered. But processes in fields like history and economics involve people, and when people are involved, the results are variable and cyclical.”