For billionaire David Booth, the secret to long term financial success isn’t about having a crystal ball or finding the next hot stock. Instead, it is about mastering one’s own emotions. In his upcoming book, Stay Calm: Learn to Embrace Uncertainty in Investing and Life, the co founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors argues that the greatest obstacle for most investors is not market volatility, but the anxiety that leads them to make impulsive decisions. With a firm managing roughly 1 trillion dollars, Booth believes that staying steady and remaining invested is far more valuable than trying to outsmart the system.

Booth’s philosophy is rooted in his early days at the University of Chicago, where he studied under Nobel laureate Eugene Fama. Together with other academics, they analyzed decades of New York Stock Exchange data and discovered a humbling truth: most professional active managers failed to beat the overall market once fees were factored in. This realization helped spark the rise of index investing in the 1970s. By shifting away from risky individual stock picking toward diversified portfolios with low costs, Booth helped democratize wealth building, allowing ordinary outsiders to achieve results similar to those of Wall Street insiders.

Addressing current economic anxieties and fears surrounding artificial intelligence, Booth suggests that humans often underestimate their own capacity for resilience. He notes that whether during the Great Depression or recent pandemics, there has always been significant stress accompanying market fluctuations, yet stocks have historically returned an average of ten percent annually over a century. To Booth, these returns are essentially a reward for enduring uncertainty and a testament to human ingenuity and our ability to innovate through crises.

The biggest tragedy in finance, according to Booth, is when panicked individuals exit the market during a downturn only to miss the inevitable recovery. Because the market does not offer do overs, missing a single major surge can permanently derail someone’s retirement goals. His primary plea, especially for young people starting their careers, is to embrace the magic of compounding by getting started early and refusing to let short term noise dictate their long term strategy. For Booth, managing uncertainty is not just a financial tactic but a blueprint for living a stable life.