Everything is Great …Until it’s Not

Yesterday Alan Greenspan told congress `That is precisely the reason I was shocked because I’d been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.” This is a great example of how we are blindly influenced by the way our brains make meaning in the world.   What we consider to be evidence is just our mental filter looking for agreements to prevailing ways of thinking.

In the best selling book Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, a similar example of this is given.  Every day that goes by with a turkey being fed and taken care of is another piece of evidence that life is good and will only get better.  But in reality, every day that goes by is bringing that turkey closer to it’s death. Every day is great up until the day before Thanksgiving when all that evidence seems to have been false evidence appearing real.

The same can be said in reverse.  How many times has your life not seemed like it was going in a very good direction, but over time it got much better?  Haven’t we all worked dead end jobs, been in bad relationships or had money trouble?  For most of us these circumstances shifted for the better as time passed.

A friend of mine is a fan of the British childrens book series about Tin Tin.  I’m told that he has a saying about how things are a certain way …until they’re not.  That’s the truth in a nutshell.  Our relationships, health, emotions, world views, beliefs and finances can turn on a dime for better or worse.  And that’s a reality that we deny in a massive consumer culture where we are told that anything can be had for the right price.

The Alan Greenspan example is interesting because in hindsight regular people like us can tell that allowing people to have mortgages they can’t afford, allowing banks to charge 30% interest that can’t be repaid, allowing investors to gamble by buying short sale stocks betting on which companies will fail, and many other practices that led to the current financial crisis are pretty insane.  Somehow though, Greenspan and the other expert economists couldn’t see this train coming down the track because everything looked like it was going great…until suddenly it wasn’t.

A great lesson we can learn from this is that everything we believe to be true and lasting may change overnight.  Another friend of mine was in the first September 11 crisis. Yep, the coup d’etat in Chile in 1973. The one that put the dictator Pinochet in power, who is now being mentioned again because John McCain met with him.

My friend was working for the government that was overthrown and within 2 weeks most of his friends were dead and he barely made it out of the country alive because neighbors were all turning each other in out of fear that the military would come after them.  Chilean’s never thought that could ever happen to them just like we never thought tax payer money would ever bailout hugely successful investment banks.

That friend’s name is Julio Ollala and today he is known as one of the grandfathers of the coaching profession, the founder of Newfield Network and is known internationally as a master at helping people transform their lives.  Great things can come out of the ashes of perceived crises.

It’s good to remember that we blindly influence ourselves when we believe that we know how the world is or how the future will play out.  We don’t, and it’s dangerously arrogant and naive when we play that game, as we’re all prone to do at one time or another.  This is one way we practice marketing on ourselves.

In acknowledging that we really don’t know a lot, and what we think we know is liable to change without notice, we move towards the peace that comes from acceptance and gratitude for how today is …until it isn’t.