About the Facebook/Instagram practice of presenting our fabulous, false selves, there is nothing new under the sun. I was plagued by a similar phenomenon in the investment world, and it was one of the great advancements to my well-being to realize just how naïve I’d been.
It was sometime in the early 1990s that people’s personal investments became a subject of conversation for me. I had started in the investment management business in 1989 with a Canadian firm, and Canadians are different in that they are generally honest. (Ask a Canadian, “How are you?” and the most likely answer by far is “Not too bad” vs. the American “good” or “great.”)
When I switched to a New York firm in 1993, I started to hear frequent mentions by people about their personal investments. What they said convinced me that I was possibly the worst investor in the world, because some of my investments had actually lost money. Whereas no one I spoke to ever seemed to have a loser. Moreover, they always seemed to have bought a stock or a piece of real estate at the most opportune time possible. And when they spoke of these investments, they’d often say something like, “Yeah, it’s worked out great; I’ve made four, five, maybe six times my money” the upward sliding scale indicating that the gains were so stupendous as to render precision irrelevant. Or perhaps that upward scale took into account startling recent increases, maybe even during the short time we’d been talking.
So, being naïve about peoples’ propensity to lie, I believed what I’d heard. When I looked at my own record, I wondered how I could be so inept. I remember one conversation with an older business associate who worked at a different firm. We were traveling together to look at an investment for our two firms. It was the first time we’d ever spent significant time together. Out of the blue, he proudly told me his net worth and when I didn’t respond in kind (from shyness and rectitude,) he assumed, correctly, that mine was far lower and said, “We have to find you a ‘ten-bagger’ to buy.” He meant a stock that would go up ten times, and he gave me the impression that with just a little more effort and perspicacity on my part, these “ten-baggers” were just lying around and were mine for the taking.
When I thought about my own investments, I was drawn to my mistakes, sins of both commission and omission. Some still rattle around in my head, the most prominent one being Apple. There was a time where you could buy Apple stock for the cash on its balance sheet, effectively paying nothing for the business. I correctly thought it was a great risk reward, but before I acted, Apple stock went up 10%. I wanted to buy the stock at its low point, perhaps to mimic the great investment successes I was always hearing about. So I waited for it to come back down, and some twenty-five years later, I’m still waiting!
However, It was a great relief to my self-esteem to learn in time how outrageously most people lie about their investment success. And the wealthier the investor and the older too, the more frequently I’ve seen this phenomenon in operation.
Where years before, the braggadocio of investors would throw my soul into turmoil, now I recognize it for what it is, and it amuses me. However, I don’t want to diminish the past pain it caused me before I perceived the bragging for what it was.
Nor do I want to diminish the pain that can be caused when people display only the fabulous side of their lives on Social Media. Certainly, I love seeing pictures of my family and friends enjoying themselves. But I know them well enough to know that, just like everyone, we all have a mix of joy and sorrow in our lives.
Other than a certain rigor of integrity, I’m not sure what the incentives are to encourage people to discuss their failures and sorrows in proportion to their successes and joys. Perhaps there’s an evolutionary reason “to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.1” But there’s also got to be an evolutionary imperative to avoid deception which erodes trust. Trust is at the heart of cooperation, and it is cooperation that has enabled so much of human progress.
A close cousin of trust and truth is authenticity, which is in short supply and something we all crave. We love an unscripted moment in politics or on television when we get to see the real person. We may recoil in horror at what’s revealed, or we may experience great admiration and inspiration. Either way, we are moved.
By nature, I’m a private person so I can be guarded about starting conversations that reveal the very personal. It’s something I’m working on. I’d like to be more authentic in the sense of being more comfortable talking to more of the people I know about what’s going on beneath the surface. I suppose that this sense of authenticity could also be described as vulnerability.
There are of course limits to authenticity and always telling the truth. When I was first dating my future wife in 1984, she made brownies for me. Asked how I liked the brownies, I decided for some stupid reason that, from the very start, our relationship should be marked by brutal honesty applied to all things, big and small.
“There’s room for improvement,” I said. It was twenty years before she made me brownies again.
Obligatory literary reference: a line from Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.”
Great post.
My biggest investment mistake was letting you talk me out of investing in ANR, a stock with a great ticker.
I would have thought that truly wealthier investors would be more comfortable admitting their losses.
You leave us without the key information required and it is a glaring omission. How were the brownies after all those years? Did she ask how they were? If so, how did you answer? Without this information, we're left wondering how long it will be until she makes brownies again for you. Sorry, you get an Incomplete on this one.