As I've been combing through posts here, I've been reading a lot of regret and "if I had only done x on (insert perfect timing), things would have worked out a lot better". People wish they had bought houses just before the boom, etc.
This, my friends, while true in a sense, is a pretty common -and not very helpful- error in reasoning.
It's the classic counterfactual - you can't know what the future holds, and while you might learn something from thinking about the past, you can't be 100% certain that your preferred change in it would result in what you wanted. The housing market could've crashed, we could've entered a 20-year depression, x dictator could have won the war, whatever - it's easy to go back and say if a particular condition or situation changed or was carried out a particular way, things would have gone differently. You might be right, but really, you can't know this.
I kick myself all the time about not getting apple and then google stock, which my fricking tech teacher in high school told us to do basically every day at the end of class - ipod hadn't even come out yet (the ipod had by the time she was saying google too, a couple years later or something). I told my parents, they never looked into it...
But these companies might have fizzled out. What if she had told us to buy netscape?
Then I kicked myself because I didn't get a house in the other province I went to school in - could've saved on all that rent etc., at the time, nevermind the sale price. It would have been a handsome sum...
But that province is known for huge swings in economy, and I wasn't really ready to be a landlord anyways.
Lately, and this is a good one I kick myself because a buddy of mine worked on the core team for Ethereum, and even gave me a slip for ~2 ETH (unit of ethereum) on the house and told me to buy in early (I think it was about 80 cents a piece at that time, in 2015). I lost that slip, didn't think anything of it. At one point that stupid slip was worth 2k and had I dropped even 1K into ETH back then.. well.. things would have been different..
But ETH could have crashed right out, and I'd of felt stupid for throwing a 1000 bucks on internet chucky cheese tokens.
The opposite can be true too.. I went ahead and bought pot stocks a few years ago, and tried to sell mine at literally 10 cents above the peak that my stock achieved (would have made 6X).... and now it's borderline worthless. If only I had made it 10 cents less.. lol..
We can all list our huge failures, and tell ourselves this and that.. and likewise, for those of us who happened to make the right call at the right time, we tend to over emphasize our skill vs our luck, by a large margin.
What I'd like to suggest, for all these mountain of posts, is that we take a minute and appreciate how much luck has to do with these decisions. It's still worth it to pay attention, and it's still worth it to try new things and try to grow (because otherwise, you don't create a whole lot of opportunity for luck!), but I'm not sure how much the continual collective kicking ourselves is going to do us any good.
There's a balance between being grateful for what you have, being proud of how hard you worked, and striving to do better. It's a tricky one!
Submitted February 08, 2020 at 10:21PM by Extra_Negotiation https://ift.tt/31DzAcH
