In the fast-paced world of tech investing, distraction is the enemy of sound, long-term decision-making. At this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas, Amy Webb — the founder and CEO of Future Today Strategy Group — delivered her highly anticipated annual trends report with an unconventional twist: She had attendees sit on uncomfortable wooden blocks for the entire session.
This seemingly quirky approach actually demonstrates a profound lesson about maintaining focus amid discomfort, a skill particularly valuable for investors navigating today’s volatile tech landscape.
Webb’s “pebble in the shoe effect” offers a compelling metaphor for modern investing psychology. As she explains in the video below, when your brain fixates on distractions and short-term turmoil, it creates a cognitive impairment that prevents broader awareness.
One example is how investors reacted to DeepSeek AI’s launch, which sent Nvidia‘s stock sharply lower. Watch the full interview with Motley Fool analyst Rex Moore below to discover how developing this “sit with discomfort” mindset might be the missing element in your investment strategy. Webb’s counterintuitive approach could help you maintain focus on long-term trends while others remain distracted by daily market fluctuations.
A full transcript follows the video.
Rex Moore: At your session, you had us sitting on hard wooden blocks rather uncomfortably for an hour. You called it the pebble in the shoe effect. Can you explain how that sort of focuses people in the long term?
Amy Webb: Everybody at some point has had a tiny stone in their shoe. And when that happens, it’s very challenging to zoom out and pay attention to all the other things that are happening, because you’ve become sort of fixated on that small discomfort. That creates a cognitive impairment. And rather than thinking about the future, other things your brain decides that it wants to deal with this immediate irritation.
And so no matter what happens around you, you’re sort of fixated just on this stone in your shoe. So that’s analogous to what we’re seeing right now. The stone in your shoe, that’s, you know, every single new eye announcement that’s happening that explains when Deep Seek came out and investors went bananas thinking that they should dump their Nvidia stock.
The reality is that, there are plenty of stones in our shoes that none of none of us are going to be able to take out. But we have to learn how to do is redirect our attention. And, that’s incredibly important, especially for investors, you know, because. Right now, I know a lot of them are jittery about every single new announcement that that’s happening.
So, and they’re, you know, strategic foresight really is the way it’s the method, the tool, to use to sit with that discomfort so that you can still pay attention to everything else that’s happening. So, this year at South by Southwest, my version of, a stone in your shoe is called sit on a square. And that is why we asked everybody to sit on a tiny piece of slightly uncomfortable wood for about an hour, so that they could learn how to pay attention to something else versus that small discomfort. So they could make better decisions.
Rex Moore has positions in Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
