Diderot
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
I picked up a small cough.
So, last night I took an above-average amount of NyQuil and had a strange dream.
I was in a classroom and I had to give a presentation (or debate someone) on psychology.
Specifically, the teacher (professor?) expected me to compare and contrast Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
Carl Jung’s quote is the one above, which I did not mention in my dream, but heard today in the audiobook: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones:
The author James Clear starts the book discussing a near-death experience from a freakish sports accident as a kid.
From that point, after recuperating, James took baby steps (not literally) toward improving his personally, scholastic, and professional life bit by little bit.
One example that James points out early on is that if you take off from a Los Angeles airport only a few degrees off course you will end up in D.C. rather than New York.
Even if we re-construct the world from scratch, none of us will have the same process and idea of what a utopia should look like.
We all have our own processes: when we like to wake up, when and what we like to eat, what we like to talk about, and where we want to live, etc.
Coincidentally, today, director Francis Ford Coppola said he is planning to make one of his dream projects: “Megalopolis,” which may up end being more dystopia than utopia:
On the Collaborative Fund blog, Morgan Housel discussed how history has a different impact on each of us depending on what financial era we witnessed as children.
Now, as adults, those growing pains (for some) have long-lasting effects that need adjustments or at least a fresh perspective every once in a while.
Otherwise, we may be doomed to be prisoners of what our parents and original hometowns taught us to expect to be normal:
“Going out of your way to speak with people whose backgrounds are different than yours, knowing that their view of the world may look nothing like your own, though they are just as sure of their views as you are of yours, is a humbling thing. But it’s so important to expand your mind to the range of possibilities you may come across as an investor. I think it’s probably the most important kind of learning an investor can accomplish — going out of their way to figure out what kind of worldview and experience they haven’t had that others who have just as much influence over market outcomes have had. As Jim Grant says, ‘Successful investing is getting others to agree with you… later.’ If those other people will never agree with me because their personal history blinds them to my view, then my view and my forecasts may never become a reality. A practical side of this is having room for error in your decisions and forecasts, knowing that your view of the world is a tiny fraction of all the other views that can influence the economy.
Another takeaway is remembering that people whose views and decisions look crazy to you may be less crazy than you think because they’re being made by people whose views on risk and reward were shaped in a different world than you’ve experienced. I don’t understand why someone would want to put all their money into gold after the financial crisis, or crypto in recent years. But my financial experience is probably different than people who have done those things. I don’t get why anyone would want to become a lawyer, or a zoologist, or a pilot; those things don’t appeal to me at all. But maybe all lawyers and zoologists and pilots experienced something in their life that made those jobs appealing. And maybe they’d be appealing to me if I had those same experiences. When you realize that other people can make decisions that look crazy to you but make perfect sense to them because they’ve experienced something you haven’t, you become less cynical about the investing industry and more focused on whatever works for you. We should always try to make people better informed, but with the idea that people with the same information will often come to different conclusions.”
