For most of my life I assumed it was a lesson about labor. Get up early, start before everyone else, stay disciplined and success will eventually come. Lately, nonetheless, I’ve been wondering if I’ve misunderstood it entirely. Maybe it was never about getting up early in any respect. Maybe it was about being able to act before you knew exactly how things would prove.
This thought got here to mind recently after I was talking to a younger colleague about investing when Bitcoin got here up. Like hundreds of thousands of individuals, I even have a Bitcoin story. Around 2013, I had just began my first business and was still learning what it meant to be an entrepreneur. Every invoice was vital, every customer was vital, every dollar was vital. One of my clients mentioned Bitcoin almost in passing because he believed it represented a unprecedented opportunity. If I remember accurately, the value was trading somewhere around $300 on the time. I listened politely after which did absolutely nothing.
Looking back, it’s tempting to inform this story as if I simply neglected a golden opportunity. Hindsight makes this narrative almost irresistible. But the reality is much more interesting. I wasn’t unconvinced, I used to be scared. Not about Bitcoin and never even about losing the cash; I used to be afraid of constructing a mistake, and that difference is essential.
Over the years I even have amassed a surprising variety of stories like this. When Facebook was still in its early years as a listed company, I could have invested. Ironically, on the time I used to be constructing a digital marketing agency and spending hundreds of hours helping firms benefit from Facebook promoting. I firmly believed in the longer term of the platform and my livelihood increasingly trusted it. I just didn’t consider in my very own judgment enough to take a position in it. It looks as if an odd contradiction to me now. I used to be willing to bet my profession on Facebook; I just wasn’t willing to bet my money on it.
The fear behind financial inaction
The more I thought of these moments, the more I spotted that each opportunity I turned down had one thing in common. The prevailing feeling was not greed or fear of missing out, but fear of constructing the flawed decision. I think that fear has cost me way more over the course of my life than any financial mistakes I’ve made – and consider me, I’ve done my fair proportion.
At the time, my mistakes felt devastating. Today they seem to be tuition fees, painful but one of the vital beneficial lessons I even have ever received. The opportunities I never pursued feel different. There’s something special about wondering what could have happened if you happen to’d just been willing to try.
My colleague laughed after which told me his own version of the identical story. He’s continually watching the markets, reading the news, following trends, researching firms, listening to podcasts, and continually telling himself that he’s going to begin investing. He just didn’t do it. Every time he gets closer, the market feels a bit too wealthy, so he waits for the subsequent pullback, or possibly the one after that. Different generation, different investment, but the identical emotion.
I thought of this conversation for days because I wondered if we were each even talking about investing or something much greater. How many financial decisions can we postpone because we’re afraid we’ll be flawed? We’re waiting to purchase a house because prices might drop sooner or later. We compare bank cards endlessly, postpone making our wills and stick with the identical bank because switching is an unnecessary risk. Any delay feels reasonable – even responsible. Sometimes it’s, but often it’s just procrastination under a really convincing disguise.
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Too much information, not enough certainty
This feels very true today. Previous generations often hesitated because information was difficult to search out. Now the other is the case. Between YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, Reddit, and AI, you may ask 10 experts if now’s a great time to take a position and get 11 different answers. We are drowning in information and at the identical time becoming ever thirstier for certainty.
Just a few weeks ago, I confessed something to a gaggle of monetary professionals that might never make it into an investing textbook. Every 12 months I quietly avoid the marketplace for 30 to 60 days. Not because I can predict anything, but because sometimes the world seems like it’s falling apart and I value just a few good nights of sleep. Then a retired financial planner that I respect explained to me a a lot better solution to do the identical thing. His advice was thoughtful and doubtless superior. It went right over my head too, since it immediately became one other alternative, one other opportunity to do something flawed. A superbly reasonable option didn’t increase the likelihood that I might act. It made me less likely.
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At some point, personal finance seems to turn out to be less about making good decisions and more about making perfect decisions. Most of the time, there is no such thing as a single correct answer waiting to be discovered. There are several reasonable solutions, and the difference between them is much less vital than whether we elect one and move on.
Why Our Brains Refuse to Take Action
There’s a reason why that is so hard. One of probably the most famous ideas in behavioral economics comes from psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work on Perspective theory suggests that losses are greater than gains: the pain of losing $100 feels about twice as strong as the enjoyment of winning it. Our brains are simply wired to avoid mistakes moderately than pursue opportunities, which explains why doing nothing so often seems like the secure alternative, even when it’s not. The decision not to take a position continues to be an investment decision, and you may tell by the numbers.
A TD Survey 2025 found that almost 4 in 10 Canadians who held money in a TFSA didn’t actually invest it. The money was just there. The hard part was never opening the account but deciding what to do next.
After motion comes trust
And that results in self-confidence. We tend to think about it as a prerequisite for motion, although I think we’re going about it the flawed way. Nobody learns to ride a motorbike by reading about bikes. Experience comes first and trust follows. You gain confidence by making enough imperfect decisions to appreciate that only a few of them will permanently determine your future. The mistakes I made rarely haunt me because they taught me something. The opportunities I missed still do, not because I wish I were richer, but because I’m wondering who I might have turn out to be if I had trusted myself a bit sooner.
None of that is an argument for recklessness. Some decisions require months of thought, and lots of have consequences that you simply cannot undo. However, for many this isn’t the case, and way more of them are reversible than we predict.
This brings me back to the bird. For years I assumed the lesson was that success belongs to whoever gets there first, but I’m not convinced of that. The bird doesn’t leave the nest since it knows exactly where the worms are. It still works. Sometimes the most important financial mistake is not the flawed decision, however the one you waited too long to make.
