Episode 960: Investing Is About How You Behave NOT What You Know

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 960 of the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:06] Winston Clements: With St. Clement's motivational speaker and limitation breaker, I challenge you to invest yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world using your time, the talent and your treasures to live out your calling.

[00:00:20] Having the ability to recognize your limitations are an illusion and develop resilience is key. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this inspired stewardships called podcast.

[00:00:33] Scott Maderer: recognizing that sometimes we need to get out of our own heads and have other people speak into our situation to help us break free from being trapped by our own biases of behavior, to overcome our psychology of money. And that is the most powerful investing lessons.

[00:00:53] Welcome and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly [00:01:00] desire to become the person who God wants you to. Then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:20] And today's episode about investing in yourself through stewarding your treasures. I talk with you about why it's less about what you know, and more about what you do when it comes to investing. I talk about several reasons. Our behavior matters that our knowledge and I also talk about what you can do about it.

[00:01:38] If you are trapped in a behavior, that's not. As we talk about stewarding your treasures. Wouldn't it be great. If you could support this podcast and do it without costing yourself an extra dime. It turns out you can. All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make a purchase via [00:02:00] Amazon and a small commission, we'll come back to support the show.

[00:02:03] If you enjoy the show, when you're ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. Let's talk about investing a little bit. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not going to talk about recommendations about what you should invest in or how you should invest or anything else. Instead, I want to talk about why it's a lot less about what you know, and more about what you do in a really big way that leads to the value of investing.

[00:02:33] I think we've all heard the stories of people that make a relatively. Decent income, but not what anyone would consider a super high income, maybe a janitor in a school or a secretary or somebody that works in a regular, $60,000 a year or less kind of job who then passes away and leaves a million or more dollars to charity.

[00:02:57] I know of one case where a woman [00:03:00] left over $7 million. To charity at the age of 100. And she'd been basically a secretary, her whole life making a good income, but never making, 250,000 or a million dollars a year or anything like that. And then you hear stories of sports stars and people that work in banking and stock market folks, and other folks who are.

[00:03:24] Very aggressive, maybe have two or three homes, multiple thousands of square feet, large mansions, fancy cars who are then facing bankruptcy or dealing with large financial debt. And. Being a news story about how they go bankrupt. And it seems bizarre that on the one case somebody who didn't do quote all that well can end up with millions.

[00:03:51] Why someone who made millions can end up with nothing. But the truth is that's because investing is not really about finances, at least not [00:04:00] all about finances. It's a lot more about how people behave with. Behavior is really hard to teach, even for smart people, because it's not about formulas, it's not about tools.

[00:04:15] Behavior is what you do instead of what you know. And what's interesting is when you talk to people about investing a lot of the books and a lot of the studies and a lot of the experts will talk to you about what you know, and they won't talk to you about. What you do in terms of behavior, they talk about what to do, but they don't talk enough about what happens in your head and in your heart that causes you to not do so well when you actually try to.

[00:04:49] And I wanted to talk about a few different things that kind of highlight how this works. One tendency that we have is called the earned success or deserved [00:05:00] failure fallacy. It's the idea that we tend to overestimate. The role that we have and underestimate the role of luck and risk. And we failed to recognize that luck and risks can actually be two different sides of the same coin.

[00:05:16] We often think about people in terms of they deserved where they got people that don't have anything didn't try hard enough, or they failed when some time. In some ways. It also has to do with just the luck of the draw of the timing. Did they open the business right before a pandemic? And how did that affect them?

[00:05:38] Oftentimes failure is caused by mistakes, but sometimes it's also co caused by just bad luck. And success is often caused by doing the right things, but sometimes it's just caused by good. And any time there's risk and chance involved. There's also luck involved and that's pretty much [00:06:00] everything at some level.

[00:06:02] Another one, what we would call cost avoidance. This is a failure to identify the true cost of a situation. And we tend to emphasize the financial cost and ignore the emotional prices. Ignore the emotional factors. If you want a new car. And it costs $30,000. You could pay 30,000, you can buy a used one and maybe save some money.

[00:06:26] You can steal it. There's all sorts of ways you could finance it. There's all sorts of ways you can get it. And some of them are obviously bad stealing it, outweighing the upside. There is the downside, so we wouldn't do it. And yet we often look at things and think we shouldn't have to pay a price for returning.

[00:06:44] We, we don't accept volatility and uncertainty and that emotion that comes along with it in investing. And yet that's the price you pay. You have to pay for some of that uncertainty and every single money decision [00:07:00] has prices beyond just the financial price that actually counts. That has emotional things as well.

[00:07:08] If you want success, figure out the price, then pay. And that's one of the pieces of advice that Scott Adams gave. And the truth is that has a lot to do with money success. To the fourth, we have a tendency to adjust our current circumstances and we just adjust to them. We, they become normal and therefore we don't really think about the future and our desires and our actions very well.

[00:07:35] And so we don't plan for the longterm. When you're five, you want to be an astronaut and then maybe you recognize that's not really a great career. And then you want to be a lawyer. And then you realize that lawyers work a lot and don't ever see their family. And so you want to be something else.

[00:07:52] And usually when you look up at age 70, you suddenly decide I should have saved more for retirement things change as [00:08:00] you go. And yet we have a tendency to think whatever is true today is going to be. Forever. And so we aren't really good at long term planning. And as part of that, we tend to be anchored into our own history.

[00:08:15] We look at our personal experience as the truth when in reality is just a small segment of possible experiences in the world. And so depending on when you were born and where you were born and what you grew up in can form your law. Opinions about the world, how the people that grew up in the great depression behave is very different than people that grew up before or after that, because of that is just an example of our history, creating biases about the future that can affect our.

[00:08:52] And as part of that, we look at how history plays out and we think the way history played out is the way the future's going to play out. And [00:09:00] obviously that sometimes is the only thing you can use to kind of plan with. And yet the truth is it's not as predictable as all of that. And so a lot of the options that we have today are very young and we don't even know how they're going to play out into the far future.

[00:09:18] When you find yourself trapped in these sorts of behaviors where you're stuck in what's going on. The truth is this is one of the values of getting outside help, whether it's a financial advisor, whether it's a financial coach, whether it's your CPA. Whether it's other folks, but recognizing that sometimes we need to get out of our own heads and have other people speak into our situation to help us break free from being trapped by our own biases of behavior, to overcome our psychology of money.

[00:09:51] And that is the most powerful investing lesson of all. Thanks for listening.

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