Mental Toughness Day

"It's Mental Toughness Day" - Mr. Libro

Deep Lessons from Middle School on Life's Absurd Nature

Ryan Floyd April 30, 2025

My sixth-grade social studies teacher, Mr. Libro (name changed) taught the best lesson, which I hated: the world just isn’t fair, and sometimes it’s completely absurd. And you just have to deal with it, even if you are just in a middle school classroom.

For the entire sixth-grade year in social studies, we had three teams in class for the great game called “Battle.” Yes, that’s what it was called. We had to learn all of the world’s capitals, countries, and rivers from maps without their names to prepare for a year-end test he called the “World Cruise.” We picked names from NBA teams, and my team was the Warriors. From an old-school projector, he placed the map of the day on the board. One person from each of the three teams stepped forward for the turn. The teacher hit one of the countries, capitals, or rivers with something that looked like a cane. And the first person to yell out the name got a point for the team. He kept track of the points on a blackboard both for that day and cumulatively for the entire year.

Gosh, I loved those days. I was a competitive middle school boy who liked to stand up a lot. We had great fun before and after class scheming about who should be in what order of the line to go against the other teams’ better players. World Series baseball players took their lives less seriously than this. You may think that the rambunctious boys perhaps shouted down the rest of the people in the class. But you would be wrong. Many of the quieter students were the very best at this game (shout-out to Christine—you were incredible at this). Volume and physical energy didn’t win. Practice at home in the evenings over a map with borders but no names helped.

Usually, if you were first to name the country, you got the point. That’s fair. It worked well. Everyone agreed on the terms. But things were different on Mental Toughness Day when Mr. Libro’s scoring was completely absurd. Teams would get a point even if they lost the round. Some teams would get three points rather than one. The team that disliked his ridiculous scoring practice would lose five point. We raged at Mr. Libro as he told us, “It’s Mental Toughness Day.” I hated those days. But I learned I had to practice learning these countries and capitals extra during typical evenings at home in preparation for the eventual days when the rules temporarily changed.

For years, we complained about those days. We still do as grown men! But we all look back on them fondly too.

As you can imagine, this lesson is learned over and over by every single adult who has ever lived on the face of the earth. The world is completely absurd. Strange, terrible things happen that are much worse than anything in a middle school classroom. The scoring changes. The judge is capricious. Things aren’t fair. You can’t predict everything even if the lesson was made in a classroom game with a map of Central Asia or North Africa.

I still think the lessons from “Mental Toughness Day” still ring true, particularly recently. I tell my kids about it when they complain about the ref at a sports game or this or that thing isn’t operating exactly the way they would want. I tell them it’s Mental Toughness Day when they want to listen to their own music in the car, and I want to listen to Dad Rock (which is most days).

But I think about “Mental Toughness Day” a lot, honestly, in work too. Even the very best fund manager produces outperformance on only 60% of his or her trades, which means that even the very best is basically wrong 40% of the time (my analysis from data from the consulting firm Inalytics). That’s a lot! In this field, one has to get used to things going badly.

More broadly, we have a world that is pretty different from the 1990s in which many of us grew up. AI is moving at an incredibly rapid pace and changing work patterns. Governments don’t always behave as one would have expected. And financial markets move in wildly different ways than we would think. The lesson lands more deeply now: you have to prepare, practice, or work just a bit harder to be ready when the rules don’t make sense, and maybe, just maybe you can do something about it.

Today is Mental Toughness Day.

If you have received this in an e-mail, and you have feedback for me, you can actually Reply to this newsletter to write me, even though the e-mail is coming from a Substack email with a bunch of numbers in it.

This document is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities or investment advisory services. I am the Portfolio Manager of Barca Capital, LLC, but the views I express are my own not necessarily those of my firm.