Zach Irving: Habits, Learning to Learn, & Investing

This week I am excited to share part two of an interview I did with Zach Irving. I met Zach freshman year at LMU. We were assigned as roommates, and we have been great friends ever since. 

You can read part one of the interview here.

Zach is an Economics and Computer Science double-major with a Philosophy minor and a Math minor. Yep, he’s doing it all! He has a multiplicity of interests, and we regularly have wide-ranging conversations and debates. 

This summer Zach has been working as a STEP intern at Google. He was kind enough to share some of his time and insights for this interview. I hope you enjoy it!

Habits

Ian Gray: Like I’ve said before, you're one of the smartest people that I know, and I love having conversations with you and getting to pick your brain. That being said, I think what is even more impressive about you is the way you build habits and develop new skills. You put your mind to something, and you go do it. I want to ask you a little bit about some of that.

I know that since we've been at LMU, you've learned to bake, you're playing guitar, learning Spanish, and a few other things. Can you talk a little bit about what you think the importance of building habits is? Then, following up on that, why do you think you're effective at it? What are some ways that you go about building habits?

Zach Irving: Yeah, well, thanks for saying that I’m one of the smartest people you know. I could talk for like, forever about this, really, so I'm going to try and not ramble on forever.

I'll deal with the importance first, because if it's not important, there's no point in listening to how I do it. I would say that the importance of building habits comes down to, for me, the meaning of life, or the purpose of life, or what makes a good life. Regardless of your philosophical grounding for it, I think it would be hard to say that living a good life doesn't involve doing a lot of things and learning a lot of things.

I think doing a lot of things is the most important thing, and in order to do those things, you have to learn how to do them. As people we have certain needs and certain desires to do certain things in various fields.

I think we have, for example, a creative need. We want to express ourselves creatively. If you live your whole life, and you never do anything creative, that's just not going to be a good life. You have to do creative things. But, what makes it difficult to do things is that they're hard, and you're not good at them. And, importantly, they're not rewarding at the beginning a lot of times. If I know nothing about guitar, which I did not know anything about guitar at the beginning, it's really hard to see any value in it.

I tried to learn guitar when I was in middle school, because I've always liked music, rock music, and I wanted to learn guitar. Back then it was for worse reasons. Like, I want to be able to show off or whatever. Now I'm doing it to … For the sake of the music. (laughs)

When you first start learning, it's really tough, and your fingers hurt, and everything you play sounds terrible, like really bad. Even just picking a single note sounds horrible. You can't do anything, and it's just not rewarding. It's painful, and it's not fun. And you don't enjoy it.

Ian: Even worse than not rewarding, sometimes it's actually like demoralizing. You finish practicing guitar and you say, “I’m so bad.” You feel worse than you did when you started. (laughs)

Zach: Yeah. Sometimes you actually seem to get worse. You learn something one day, and you can't play it the next day. It’s just terrible. But then the important thing, if you're trying to build a habit, is to always look, I think, to the end of the habit, which is being able to play guitar well. If that's something you want to do, then keep at it. So, I have decided this time to keep at it.

Now, I'm able to express myself creatively. If I want to blow off steam, I can go pick up the guitar and play something. If I want to learn a new song, I can play the song. There’s something really cool about being able to play a song that you have heard and listened to for a long time, but you now understand how it actually gets made and where the sound comes from.

That’s just an example, but basically, you should try to be habit-building something creative, something educational, or something social. There are so many parts of our life where we can improve on the way we're currently doing things. The way to do that is to build a habit because it's always going to suck at the beginning.

The only way to make it not suck is to do it often enough that you get good at it. And, the only way to do that is to make it a habit, something that you do without fail. You're not doing it because it's fun, because it's not fun in the beginning, you're doing it because you are doing it. You’re doing it every day. And it's something you’ve decided that you need to do.

Learning to Learn

Zach: I would say the other important thing is to realize that the habits aren't just something you do, but they're actually shaping who you are, and they're actually making you into a better person. Like you said, “I'm one of the smartest people you know.” To some extent that's out of people's control. It's out of my control. I have some genes from my parents, but it's definitely not totally out of your control, and the part of it that is in your control, you want to improve as much as you can on your understanding of the world and your ability to understand things.

Some people say, “You can learn new things, but you can't get smarter.” I think that's so wrong. I think you definitely can get smarter. I feel bad for these people. Are you seriously saying that you're as smart as you were like, as a middle schooler? I was a pretty dumb middle schooler. (laughs) I'm so much smarter than I was in middle school.

One way it happens is the school system, as bad as it is, does try and instill some habits of reading and doing math. So, it does happen to people just from that. But, for me, in high school I was like, “Okay, I'm going to read constantly.” The more you read, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more you make learning a habit and the better you get at learning itself.

Now I can learn all these different things because I know how to actually learn. Some people don't know, if I want to learn a new thing, “What do I do? How do I do it? How do I get started?”

Ian: Yeah, I talk to people all the time who struggle to learn new things. Like you said, there are just habits of knowing how to learn. Sometimes it’s as simple as just knowing how to look it up. Right?

Zach: Exactly. You don't just learn a new thing, but you learn that when you're learning a new thing, the first thing you should do is, you know, Google the thing. Search up how to learn guitar. Seriously, there's so much information now on the internet that you can pretty much learn whatever you want.

Ian: Yeah, and then I think another thing I found, and I think you would totally attest to this, too, is figuring out how to find the right sources, right? Because that's almost the hardest part. There's too much information sometimes. You have to figure out which is the method I'm going to follow? Who’s going to best teach me how to do this? Would you agree with that?

Zach: Yeah, exactly. And being able to evaluate, is this person working for me? Are they teaching me something? Is this a good, trusted source to learn this thing, if it's something that people might want to lie to you about. All that kind of stuff is something that only comes with experience. And you're only going to get that experience if you just go out and start doing the things and trying to learn new things or develop new habits, as opposed to just waiting.

I don't even know what you're what you're waiting for. (laughs) I guess people typically say they don’t have time.

Ian: Yeah. And in danger of oversimplifying it, it seems somewhat similar to what you were talking about earlier with the computer science models. You’re looking to figure out how to solve this one problem. Then, how does that help me solve the next problem, and then just continuing to build bigger and bigger models for learning new skills and building habits and acquiring these models.

Finding Time

Ian: What would you say kind of to go off that last thing you said? What would you say to someone who says that they don't have enough time to learn a new habit? Do you think that's an important consideration? Or are there ways that you found to build good habits even when you're busy?

Zach: I would say a couple of things. The first thing is that absolutely having enough time is a super important factor. And part of my whole life plan is specifically oriented towards making sure that I do have enough time to do all the things that I want to do.

Some people will disagree with me about this, but I just think that it's not possible to live the way you should live and do all the things that are part of a good life while working forty hours a week. That's just my opinion. Some people would say you can, others that you can't. But for me, I don't think you can.

That’s part of another thing to touch on. I think intentionality is important, like we talked about with Dr. Treanor in our class freshman year. Maybe you're right that you don't have enough time to follow your dream to learn to play the guitar because you're working fifty hours a week.

Then, you need to decide, based on that information, what do I do next? What do I do to make it so that I can be in a place where I can learn guitar? Maybe you have to, I don't know, spend less money or something. It gets hard when people are living paycheck to paycheck and stuff like that. So, I definitely think that there's a huge discussion to be had about the way our society prevents people from building these habits and prevents people from having enough time to do them.

But, I think ultimately, most people, at least most of the people who I interact with as someone who's a member of America, the first world, I have so many advantages going to school and anyone reading this and attending LMU, frankly, has more than enough time and more than enough advantages to take control of their own life and do what they want to do.

For most people, I think the time thing is just a function of they don't recognize how much time they're spending on things that are silly or meaningless and they don't actually care about.

There are so many times when I catch myself even now, just on my phone, browsing. Reddit is my social media drug of choice, and you catch yourself spending so much time on it. Like, “Oh my God! I've been browsing and done literally nothing for the past 30 minutes.” (laughs)

I've learned nothing. I remember nothing. And I don't know why I'm on here. I've been able to get rid of most social media. I don't have Instagram. I don't have Facebook. I do have Facebook, actually, but I don't use it. I don't have Instagram, or did I already mention that. (laughs) I deleted Snapchat.

I think if that's something that's taking a lot of your time, you don't necessarily have to delete it. But if it's a problem for you, it's like an addiction that you're having, then maybe you should delete it, or maybe you just need to cut down the amount of time you're spending on that.

Really, you should just wake up one day and track your day. Figure out where all your time is going. Because I think that's the biggest thing. We don't realize where our time is going. Once you do realize where your time is going, you're going to be like, “Oh my gosh! I actually have so much free time. I spend three hours a day watching a movie or watching TV shows.”

That is something I do. I spend too much time watching TV shows. But, I do that because I've managed the rest of my day in such a way that I get all my work done and do all the things I want to do. I have time left over to watch TV shows. But importantly, they're like last on my priorities list. I'm not going to not do my homework and watch a TV show.

I think people do have time. To figure out what time you have, just take one day and plan out the day and figure out what you do every hour of every day. Pick a normal day, not a day where you're super busy and having abnormal meetings. Be honest with yourself. If it's the weekend and you sit around, like for half the day, watching TV, that's a normal day, not the day when you're having to rush around and do all these things once a month or something.

Also, it takes a remarkably small amount of time every day to add up to a large amount of time in the long run. What's crazy to me is the fact that for me, I've only lived for 20 years but I've only like really been in control of myself for the past six years since high school. Before that, I don't even know who I was. But that's like six years. I feel like I've already made like a ton of progress. I've learned so many things. I've made a lot of progress on guitar and it’s only been a year.

And I'm totally at a point I didn't think I would be at in a year. It’s really rewarding. It’s true of all this stuff. With baking I can make all this stuff. Baking is pretty easy, really, if you want to pick a habit, pick baking because baking is such a rewarding habit because you get to eat all the stuff you make. It’s pretty simple because you're just following recipes. There's some basic principles and stuff like that to learn, but baking is pretty easy habit to get.

If you just do these things, like if you practice guitar for thirty minutes a day, that's not very much time. I mean, you could even just go to bed thirty minutes later, really. It's not going to make or break your sleep schedule.

Ian: Given everything that people typically push back their bedtime for, thirty minutes actually doing something productive is not a bad trade off.

Zach: Especially if you're like a young person in college like me, we haven't lived very much and probably we're going to live hopefully. Knock on wood, I'm going to live for like another fifty years or something like that. And that's crazy. I can't even comprehend how long fifty years is because, like I said, I’ve only lived for twenty years, and I don't remember like half of it, and the other half of it I would rather forget. (laughs)

And fifty years from now, it's such a long time. I mean there's going to be so many things I can learn in fifty years. Like, fifty years of playing guitar at the rate I'm doing it now, I will be like a guitar god. (laughs)

Ian: It’s pretty mind-blowing.

Zach: It’s just crazy, like thirty minutes, over fifty years, and you will learn something no matter how bad you are, at whatever it is you're trying to learn. If you do it thirty minutes a day for the next fifty years, then you're going to be amazing at it. You're going to be one of the best people ever. People are going to think you're crazy good at it, and everyone's going to think, “Man, I wish I could play like you.” Or, “I wish I could bake like you.” Or, “I wish I could read like you.”

That’s what a profession is, right? That's what it means to be a professional. People have put forty hours a week in something for fifty years. That's why they're so good at it. That's why athletes are so good at it because of the time that they put into it.

Recognize that you probably have a lot more time in a day than you think you do. But you also have way more time in your life than you think you do. Just be okay with having delayed rewards and delayed satisfaction. When you are trying to learn guitar, don't judge how good you are in three months. Judge how good you are in three years. Because, if you're really trying to learn something, it's going to take you years to learn it. Taking this approach, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the progress you've made in three months as opposed to expecting somehow that you were going to learn the whole thing in three months.

Reading

Ian: That's a really good insight. You mentioned reading, I know that it’s pretty important to you. Both of us do a lot of reading in our dorm room for our classes and just for fun, too. Why is reading so important to you? And what do you think the value is in reading?

Zach: Yeah, reading is another thing that is super valuable. I just think that there is a lot of value in reading.

I'm not talking about a new reader, I'm talking about someone who has the habit of reading and is able to enjoy more than five pages, which is okay when you're first starting, but you're not going to get all the rewards that I'm going to start listing if you are a beginning reader.

The first thing is that it's just fun, like reading a story. It's just fun, like as a kid, you know, I think most people have found a fun book series. Most of the fun reading I did was when I was in elementary school. Everything I read was for fun. I read the Magic Treehouse books. It was just fun, and they had fun stories. Harry Potter is also a fun story, not that it's like equivalent to magic treehouse. (laughs)

Ian: Did you read the Ranger's Apprentice books?

Zach: I did. I read the Ranger's Apprentice books. That was a great series. Percy Jackson was a great series. It's just fun to read. It's fun to have a story. That's how people entertain themselves before computers and all that kind of stuff. People told stories to each other. That was fun, and it is fun.

So, that's the first thing about reading. It's just fun. If you're looking for something fun to do, pick reading because there's also all these other advantages to reading.

One of the major advantages to reading fictional books is you start to really understand people in a way. That's what fictional books do. They provide you with other perspectives, and they allow you to step into the shoes of another person, which is something that you physically cannot do in real life. I mean, you can do it, you literally can do it, actually. (laughs)

Ian: (laughs) We mean, literally, literally.

Zach: Literally, literally, you can't step into someone's shoes. Like, you can never really figure out what's going on in someone's head. But with reading, you can because the author tells you what's going on in their head. If the author is a good author, he's created a character that is not just a caricature of someone, but actually does resemble the way people think. If you've ever had a character that you connect to, it's probably because the character he's created thinks similar to the way that you think.

What reading does is it allows you to understand and to get a window into how other people think. That allows you to understand other people and see where they're coming from. I think that's super important. It’s a good thing to try and understand people and see where they're coming from, but it also will improve your ability to interact with people. I think reading can make you more social instead of less social.

I talked before about how life is about doing things and reading lets you do things in some weird way that you can't do in real life. Like it would be really, really cool if I was able to go on an adventure and stop Sauron and put the one ring in the volcano and experience these big wars and stuff like that. I would never actually do that because I might die, and I only have one life, and also because there's no wizards and stuff like that in the real world. (laughs)

But it's really cool because when you read, I think you actually do in some way, live and participate and do all those things. I think that's really valuable.

Nonfiction is also super valuable because there's so much to learn about the world. One of the best ways, not the only way, but one of the best ways to do it is by reading. When you're reading something, it's something that an author has crafted for you to specifically learn from, as opposed to just trying to piece things together yourself. This is someone who already has an opinion, or already has some knowledge and is giving it to you on a platter and all you have to do is eat it, and I just think you should do it. Like, just eat the food. (laughs)

I think you get it in a much more nuanced way than you're ever going to get by watching a YouTube video or something like that. I learn a lot of things from YouTube videos, but if I had to really learn something, I wouldn't go to a YouTube video to learn it.

Ian: You get the 500-page book.

Zach: Yeah, exactly. If you're trying to like switch careers, and you want to learn how to be a plumber, you shouldn't just watch plumbing videos. Those plumbing videos are for people who want to fix their toilet without calling a plumber. They're not for you to learn how to be a plumber. Reading allows you to do that.

That’s what’s good about reading. It’s something that you can do thirty minutes a day, and in fifty years, you'll have consumed so many books and done so much reading, and you'll have learned so many things, that you'll really understand the world. Importantly, once you understand the world, you understand how you're going to live, and how you're going to navigate the world, and what you're going to do, which you can only do if you understand it.

Ian: That's really good and makes a lot of sense.

Investing

Ian: Let’s talk a bit about your experience in the stock market. I know that you started investing almost two years ago. What pushed you over the edge? What was the impetus for deciding to invest?

Zach: I was sort of thinking about it for a while because I was starting to have some money and I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't want it to just sit there, and I knew that if you put it in the stock market, you could get good and better returns, more money. Who wouldn’t want more money from their money? (laughs)

But I didn't know much about it. I never really thought that I needed to know much about it, and I still don't think I need to know much about it. Maybe that'll bite me later. But the thing that I really didn't know about was Robinhood. You told me that with Robinhood, I can do it for free. I don't have to pay commissions. I always thought that if I had to pay five-dollar commissions on every trade I made, I probably wouldn't do it very often.

Ian: That’s how I used to be. I’d be trying to save up, and I'd have to wait until I saved up enough money where a five-dollar commission didn’t seem too bad, and when I first started, I think it was a nine-dollar commission on Schwab. I had to save up so that each commission wasn’t 20% of my investment.

Zach: Exactly. So, I think that the biggest thing that put me over the edge was Robinhood and also that you were doing it. I never knew anybody that was doing the stock market. So, that put me over the edge, like someone else is doing it who doesn't have a ton of experience. You weren't like a stock advisor or broker.

So, I was like real people do put their money in the stock market. You had been doing pretty well with it, and Robinhood was free. I was like, “Okay, this is both something that is feasible for me timewise, and I'm not going to have to put five-dollars on every trade, which would be kind of annoying. I just don't like paying for things if I don’t have to.

Ian: That makes sense. Have you learned anything since you've been invested? Is there anything that's been different than you thought it would be when you first started

Zach: The biggest thing that I've started to realize is just trying to figure out what people are doing.

Like, if a bunch of people say that the stock is a bad stock, just don't buy it. It’s possible that it is actually a good one and they're all wrong, and you're right, but who cares? It just depends. If you're looking to make a quick buck, like if you're looking to get like a 25% return in a day or something like that, then my advice is not for you. This is just general growth investing advice, from someone who probably is not even doing very well. (laughs)

Ian: But you’re in it for the long term just trying to get long term return on your money, right?

Zach: Exactly. For me, I pick stuff that's a combination of safe and has room to grow. When I say safe, I mean it's not like this company that's on the edge of bankruptcy and every analyst is predicting that their value is going to go down or something like that. That's just a silly, risky trade to make.

I would say also, some stocks like Tesla are risky stocks. I avoid anything that has a debate over it, like if there's a debate over whether this is a good stock, I just don't want to buy it. Like buying Tesla might be good if you're on the winning side of the debate. But if you buy Tesla and you lose, then you're going to be mad. If you buy Tesla and you win, you're going to be happy. But for me, I just want to win, and I don't care about big wins. I'm not trying to make my fortune on the stock market. I'm just trying to make some money on the stock market.

Robinhood has this tool that aggregates analyst reviews, and if it doesn’t have like a 60-70% green rating, then I just don't get it. If I google a stock, and I'm curious about it, and there's like an article from the Motley Fool saying that it’s actually bad stock, I'm just like, okay, and I don't even read their specific P/E ratios. Maybe that's really bad because I'm not checking their work, but like, these people are people that do it for a living, and I don't do it for a living, and I'm perfectly willing to leave it to the experts on whether or not they think this is a good stock because there are plenty of stocks that the experts agree on that are good stocks.

So, if I just pick from those stocks, which ones I think are the best stocks, which ones I think have room to grow, then I'm probably good. The only stocks that I have been losing on really are stocks where I didn't follow that advice. Ones where I said, “No, I know more than these people.” I buy like weed stocks or something and they drop. I still think they're going to come back up, but I've kind of accepted the fact that maybe I was wrong. Maybe they were at the top of their value, and that's why everyone was saying not to buy them. And so I decided, not knowing anything about it, to buy the stock. Well, maybe that was a bad decision. Maybe it won't be. Hopefully, it won't be. But that's just one example of it. When I went against the advice of all the people who are experts on the stock market, it didn't work out.

If you're not someone who's willing to devote a lot of time with it, if you're just someone like me who just wants to put my money in a bank account where I get 8% returns instead of .002% returns. If you're just like me and you just want to do that, you could literally just buy an S&P 500 fund, which a lot of people do. And that's probably fine.

For me, I’m trying to make a little bit more. I try and take emerging industries based on my opinion of where I think the large-scale economy might be headed, as opposed to specific companies. I pick an industry that I like and is going to emerge like solar energy or green energy or something like that. Then, I do two things. I buy an ETF from that industry, which is just a basket of a bunch of companies from that industry. Then, I pick the biggest company in the industry because from my experience, bigger companies are a safer bet.

Ian: The Motley Fool has a saying that “winners win.” That’s from David Gardner. He promotes the idea that if a company is a top dog and it’s won in the past, a lot of times it is going to continue to win. It’s, like you said, a fairly safe choice to make. Is that why you don't just invest in an S&P 500 fund? Because you do think you have a little bit of insight about where the world might be going.

Zach: Right. I think, automation is going to be a big thing. I think clean energy is going to be a big thing. Telehealth is interesting to me. It’s a little bit more specific than the S&P 500, but I don't really get into the nitty gritty of this company's balance sheet is better than that company's balance sheet.

Ian: That's kind of the downside of buying something like the S&P 500. You have to invest in everything. Not everyone may agree with this, but I think that the oil industry, at least as we know it, it is somewhat of a dying industry.

When you invest in the S&P 500, whatever you consider a dying industry, there's likely going to be pieces of that industry in the S&P 500, and they may not be big pieces, but why buy those pieces if you can buy the best companies or the ETFs of the industries you think are going to be taking us throughout the rest of the 21st century. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Plans for the Future

Ian: Finally, to wrap this up, what are your plans for the future and I know we've got a couple more years of college, but do you have any big plans for what you want to accomplish by the end of college or what you're looking to do after college?

Zach: Yeah, by the end of college, I would hope that I get a chance to study abroad. That would be nice. I would hope that I'm going to keep plugging away learning guitar, learning to bake, and learning Spanish. I think by the end of college, then I’ll have put a pretty good amount of time into each of those. I've been doing them for maybe a school year, maybe a year for guitar, maybe a little bit longer. I can't remember when I started Spanish. I probably should do more for Spanish then I'm doing. Duolingo is not great, but whatever.

That's kind of what my plan is on my hobbies. I'm not starting any new ones, but I probably would start something once I feel like I've gotten those a bit under my belt after college. I feel like four years is a good way to break your life up.

Ian: That’s an interesting way of looking at life.

Zach: In college, I’d like to get good grades and take interesting classes. After college, my plan is basically to live by that idea of intentionality that I talked about earlier. My main goal is to eventually get to the point where I don't have to work forty hours a week, and I don't have to be tied down to any one physical location.

I really couldn't spend the rest of my life in one place. I probably wouldn't say that I’d kill myself, but I would not enjoy that life. There are so many things that I want to see. There's so much travel I want to do. I'd like to be able to live the kind of life where I don't have to work in one specific place. I want to be able to work remotely, and I want to build up some money before I do this so that I can travel. Basically, most of the money that I've made since I started working, I've been saving for the future for that sort of travel, nomadic lifestyle or whatever.

Right after college I plan to find something, probably something in the software industry because I'm a computer science major, and I enjoy programming. It's something I can do digitally, and I'm pretty good at it.

I have this internship at Google. It would be really nice if I could get a job at Google. I’d like to get a job somewhere that's good, probably work there for a couple years, actually in one place, and build up some experience and get the hang of the whole thing before I decide that I'm going to make this radical imposition on them. “Hey, I'm leaving to go live in Brussels or something, so I'm going to be like, six hours ahead of you.” It would be better if I wasn't just a fresh college grad demanding such a thing.

I'll figure it out, basically. But as for exactly what I'm doing, because I'm pretty confident that I'll find a way to make money, I'm not like someone who needs a ton of money. But that's basically it. That's my general plan. I mean, I could go like way far into the future, but that's sort of the next five to ten years.

Ian: Yeah, that's awesome. That's exciting. I'm excited to see how it all works out.

Zach: Yeah, me too. (laughs)  I'm excited to have it all work out.

Ian: (laughs) Thanks for doing this interview with me today. It was a lot of fun, and I think you shared a lot of great insights.

Final Thoughts

Thanks for reading if you made it all the way to the end. It was a long conversation, but I decided it was better to post the whole thing and let people decide which parts they found most interesting rather than making that decision in editing. 

As I am sure you have discovered, Zach is an incredible thinker. If you're interested in learning more about him or connecting with him, I'd encourage reaching out to him on LinkedIn. 

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