I had this idea the other day connected to improv that we’re perpetual beginners, but it can connect to everything. We live our lives one day at a time and every morning we reassess everything as if we just woke to it with no prior knowledge of how we got there.
This might not be such a good idea in some parts of life, but in others it would work wonderfully. Mostly in investment. Each day we ask ourselves is this worth owning, holding on to, or selling today? It would work mainly as a way to defeat the sunk cost fallacy and we should make sure to only ask ourselves once a day.
That also exposes the problem with it. It could defeat sunk cost fallacy but it could also defeat a good theory too soon. This is why I keep coming back to the idea of investing as a stopped clock. It is either right or wrong and we have no idea which and limited information to go off of. In other words the same idea that works in one situation could be disastrous in another and we rarely know which one we’re in.
Sometimes I wonder if I am getting better each day or slowly moving backwards. We should treat life as if we are perpetual beginners. There are always new lessons, new things to learn, and new ideas that can wonderfully replace our old. We should hold onto nothing that we prove false and we should be open to proving our ideas false.
Even hard lessons have value. That is an important thing to keep in mind. As losses mount up in life, as they sometimes do, we should look for the lesson in them, but not too hard. We don’t want to turn every bad outcome into a post-mortem.
Life is full of contradictions, and I do think waking up each morning and asking what if I had no prior knowledge of anything in my life would help examine parts of it. Find out what is worth keeping, tossing, or doing more of. Same implies to investing, business, and nearly anything else in life.
And the best part of life is I would get to wake up to a beautiful redhead every morning and get to ask myself is waking up next to a beautiful redhead worth it.
David Huzzard Writes 