The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [13]
In a nutshell, if something seems wrong, it probably is. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me that they “knew something wasn’t right” as their portfolios shed 40 percent or more in 2008 and 2009. Many did not fully trust the placating explanations offered by their stockbrokers, but they didn’t act on those feelings, and they subsequently lost money. The critical thing about trusting yourself is that it often means acting on incomplete information, relying on what you might call a “gut hunch” or intuition. I have learned that our bodies will often “know” something is up well before our minds can fully process the situation. In the future that I anticipate, where colliding trends in the economy, energy, and the environment are going to deliver extremely large and fast-paced changes, the ability to make rapid decisions will be essential. This is the sort of landscape where trusting yourself becomes a vital skill.
A second aspect of trusting yourself is that quite often your instincts will lead you to do what very few other people seem to be doing. Surprisingly often, your gut sense will tell you to buck the conventional wisdom, ignore your broker, or override a past decision. I am now extremely glad that I have been able to make decisions that run counter to conventional wisdom and sometimes cut across the social grain. I benefited greatly from trusting gut feelings that led to responses such as buying gold when it was generally reviled as an investment back in 2003, selling my house before the housing collapse, and dumping all of my stocks before the big rundown into 2008. I fought my broker and withstood smirks from knowing friends and even some family members who were sure that they were watching me make enormous mistakes. After all, nobody else seemed to be doing these things, so how could they make any sense? Today these look like genius moves, but they were obvious decisions to make. All that was required to make them was taking a good, hard look at the data and then trusting myself.
To be fair, some of the decisions that I made have led to financial gains, and some led to improvements in my quality of life, but not all of them did. The important thing here is that trusting my intuition ensured that I was not paralyzed. There is a time to reflect deeply and accumulate as much information as you can before making a decision, but during less-certain or fast-moving times, you just have to go with what you know to be true on some other level. When events unfold rapidly, the desire to stay ahead of them places a premium on quick decisions. How can you arrive at the best decisions most efficiently? This is the main issue, and it is the primary reason why I promote the idea of trusting yourself. Feeling secure in your intuition is the quickest way to ensure a worthy decision.
I trusted myself enough that when I saw something that didn’t make sense, something that just felt wrong, I took actions accordingly. Here is a short list of things that were concerning me in 2003 when I made what my broker, family, and friends assured me were a set of ill-advised decisions:
It didn’t make sense to me that a nation could consume beyond its means and remain wealthy.
I was stumped by how an economic system predicated on continual expansion of credit could continue on like that forever.
I didn’t understand how people making $50,000 per year could buy $500,000 houses with no money down and have any hope of paying that back.
The concept of Wall Street somehow transforming subprime loans into higher-grade securities, while extracting money every step of the way, puzzled me deeply.
It didn’t seem possible to me that money and debt could continue to expand faster than the economy without some sort of inflationary outcome or eventual financial crisis.
While I readily admit to rooting around in masses of complicated data during this period, this