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What if you could be as good an investor as Warren Buffett, but you didn’t believe in yourself?

What if you could be as good an actress as Helen Mirren, but you didn’t believe in yourself?

What if you could be as innovative as Steve Jobs, but you didn’t believe in yourself?

What if you could be a leader like Abraham Lincoln, but you didn’t believe in yourself?

What if you could be as good a chess player as Magnus Carlsen, but you didn’t believe in yourself?

What if you could be as good a writer as Stephen King, but you didn’t believe in yourself?

What if you could be 10x better than you are now, but you didn’t believe in yourself?

What if you believed in yourself?

 

We crave certainty. Like an addict who needs a fix, we need to know what’s going to happen before we take the leap.

Our certainty addiction started early. “Do you think she’ll go to the dance with me?” we ask our middle school classmate. We want to know before putting ourselves out there. Allowing ourselves to become vulnerable is not something that comes naturally.

Our craving for certainty costs us dearly.

It explains the market for fixed indexed annuities. Last quarter the fixed indexed annuity market hit $17.6 billion. These complex, expensive financial products are a bad deal for the vast majority of people who buy them. While they promise you’ll never suffer a big decline in any one year, they also limit your upside. The result is an expensive financial product that will make you poorer.

Yet they fly off the shelves faster than the latest iPhone. Why? Because they make us feel safe, comfortable, certain.

Our losses are limited. We have a more certain view of the future. So what if that future is worse than if we’d just invest in index funds. The cost is worth the certainty. Or is it?

What if we embrace the uncertainty? What if we arrange our finances and our lives in such a way that the uncertainty no longer looks so scary. What if we had no debt and lived a reasonable but not excessive lifestyle? Then we could handle the uncertainty of the stock market with aplomb.

Just maybe what is scary to most could become our greatest asset.

The other day I found an old notebook of mine on a bottom shelf in my shop.

I flipped through the mostly blank pages, but did find a couple of journal entries. I learned from these entries, among other things, that it cost us $1,400 to move our stuff 4 miles in 2004 when we bought the home we live in today.

I was also reminded that I had started a daily journal in 2004 that lasted 5 days.

I have many daily journals like this one. Some were started in physical notebooks. Some in Evernote. Some in The Brain. Some in Google Docs. Some in Word. Some on lined paper. Some on grid paper. One in a journal workbook I learned about from Tim Ferriss.

Today I start one here. The final resting place for my daily musings. But why here and why now?

Why not?