AUTHOR: JACOB MURAD

Similar to everything else in life, most of the hurdles we face in pursuing a successful investment strategy come from within. This anecdote from Emmet Fox’s “The Mental Equivalent” illustrates this point quite well:

There is an old legend of the Middle Ages that is very instructive. It seems that a citizen was arrested by one of the Barons and shut up in a dungeon in his castle. He was taken down dark stairs, down, down, down, by a ferocious-looking jailer who carried a great key a foot long. The cell door was opened, and he was thrust into a dark hole. The door shut with a bang, and there he was.

He lay in that dark dungeon for twenty years. Each day the jailer would come, the big door would be opened with a great creaking and groaning, a pitcher of water and a loaf of bread would be thrust in, and the door closed again.

After twenty years, the prisoner decided that he could no longer stand it. He wanted to die, but he did not want to commit suicide, so he decided that the next day when the jailer came, he would attack him. The jailer would then kill him in self-defence, and thus his misery would end. He thought he would examine the door carefully to be ready for tomorrow, and, going over, he caught the handle and turned it. To his amazement, the door opened, and upon investigation, he found that there was no lock upon it and never had been and that he had not been locked in for all those twenty years, except in belief.

He could have opened the door at any time in that period if only he had known it. He thought it was locked, but it was not. He groped along the corridor and felt his way upstairs. Two soldiers were chatting at the top of the stairs, and they made no attempt to stop him. He crossed the great yard without attracting attention. There was an armed guard on the drawbridge at the great gate, but they paid no attention to him, and he walked out a free man.

He went home unmolested and lived happily ever after. He could have done this any time through those long years since his arrest if he had known enough, but he did not. He was a captive, not of stone and iron but of false belief. He was not locked in; he only thought he was. Of course, this is only a legend, but it is a highly instructive one.

We are all living in some kind of prison, some of us in one kind, some in another; some in a prison of lack, some in a prison of remorse and resentment, some in a prison of blind, unintelligent fear, some in a prison of sickness. But always, the prison is in our thought and not in the nature of things.