When the weather report says there’s a 40% chance of rain, and it rains, do you lose faith in its predictions?

No — you recognize that the weather is inherently uncertain and that a definitive statement of whether it will or won’t rain tomorrow is usually the wrong thing to offer.

And that’s where most new investors go wrong. They want a precise answer to the question — which stock should I buy?

Investing, like running a business, requires one to be on his toes all the time. And just like a business operation can’t be reduced to a template, the art of investing can’t be boiled down to a static step-by-step process.

Sachin Tendulkar, in his 22-year long career, never opted for a runner. He was the first batsman to score a double century in one-day cricket history. During the tail end of this special inning, it looked like he badly needed a runner but he continued to run on his own.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the Titanic of cloud hosting. It provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to both individuals, companies, and governments, on a paid subscription basis. The platform is designed as a backup to the backups’ backups that prevents hosted websites – including some of the largest in the world – and applications from failing.

Yet, like the Titanic, AWS crashed in April 2011, taking with it popular websites like Reddit, Quora, FourSquare, HootSuite, and New York Times, among many others, for four days.

My friend Ravi was home for lunch on weekend. After food, as we went out for a stroll, he told me a story of a famous motivational speaker.

At a huge gathering once, the speaker proclaimed, “The best years of my life were spent in the arms of a woman, who wasn’t my wife.”

The audience was in a state of shock and silence at thus revelation, especially because it was coming from someone they looked up to.

The speaker than added, “She was my mother.”

What followed then was a huge round of applause and laughter.

Ravi then told me the story of a male participant at this event who was his friend from school. This gentleman tried to trick his wife with a similar joke.

When a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, our mind tends to imagine a related question that is easier and constructs an answer for it. This processes, answering one question in place of another, is mostly involuntary and known as substitution principle. It’s better to stay mired in a genuine confusion than to bask in the comfort of a false conclusion.

Let me ask you a simple question – How happy are you these days?