From our first cry to our last breath, we have targets on our backs.

New parents are given baby product samples at the hospital. Their 18-year spending spree has just begun. Our birth is not just recorded by the Bureau of Vital Records and Statistics but also cheered by the marketing databases, for a new consumer has been born.

There is no escape.

Unless it’s lying in vomit or dog poop, I will always pick up loose change.

The only other exception to that “if, then” rule (if I see a coin, I pick it up) was during rush hour at Grand Central Terminal in NYC. As I headed towards the corner exit at 42nd street and Vanderbilt, I spotted a suspiciously large number of coins strewn on the ground. A bunch of people with clipboards loitered nearby, trying to look nonchalant and failing.

I smelled a trap.

I grew up with a lot of stories about work.

I hung out in garages, airports, and hotels while my parents ran their rent-a-car business and learned how to deal with irate customers, flat tires, and accidents.

I listened to stories about my 8th-grade educated grandfather, a hayseed from Tennessee, who worked his way up from Wall Street messenger boy to owning a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

I posed a not-so-innocent question on social media:

“What's the one thing you hate most about financial advisors/financial educators/financial services?

Don't be shy. Let it rip.”

And boy, did you ever.

I count my blessings.

Among them, my grandparents paid for my Princeton degree, my dad having predeceased them when I was 15. They had the means to do so, and thankfully they valued education. And because I graduated in 1983, before college cost more than a small country’s GDP, money was leftover.

But at the age of 25, I treated that windfall like a hot potato.

I wasn’t ungrateful.

I was afraid.

I toggle between hurtling through life and stuckness.

The hurtling resulted in building a $2.5B institutional money management firm from scratch. The stuckness strikes when I feel conflicted between what I want and someone else’s often unspoken desires. I find myself paralyzed, afraid to create disappointment, disapproval, and abandonment.

Here’s what being a successful stockpicker for decades taught me about taking action rather than wallowing in paralysis: