By Nicholas Hamner
Investment Advisor Representative
[email protected]
We’ve written before about the specialized training Kyle & I receive to enable us to work with Federal employees. And we’ve written about the workshops we hold specifically for Federal employees. (By the way, we have one coming up next week. If you’re a Federal employee and want to learn more about your benefits and retirement, let me know!). What we haven’t written about—at all—is what happens in those trainings.
The head of the organization is ex-Marine intelligence. Their military experience carries through the lessons. Every bit of information we get is deliberately organized and delivered bluntly and stiffly. One of her favorite questions is, “If you have a problem, and you don’t like the answer to the problem, does the problem go away?”
That is a fantastic question.
If you have a problem, and you don’t like the solution, does the problem go away? If your doctor tells you to lay off the saturated fats and you defiantly slam your hands over your ears and go heavy on the bacon cheeseburgers, does your liver sense your resistance and lower your cholesterol? If your advisor says you don’t have the savings to keep spending like you are, but you don’t want to change your ways, does your dislike of the problem fix your budget issues?
The answer there is, “No.” The longer answer is, “Absolutely not, are you crazy?!”
So you have a problem and you don’t like the solution you’re being given. What do you do? Two options.
Option one, you make the changes to fix the problem. You sell the boat and order water with dinner instead of wine or swap out the cheeseburgers for quinoa and kale. That’s accepting that you didn’t want to hear the solution, but you needed to hear it and are making changes as a result. That’s the honorable thing to do. That’s the “right” thing to do.
Option two? Swap out your problem solvers until you get a solution you like. Better yet, keep swapping them out until solutions don’t matter because you no longer have a problem!
You’re going to run out of money in five years? Keep swapping finance folks until someone asks why you’re borrowing trouble—live your life and deal with it five years from now.
Breaking into a sweat and pulse racing just from unwrapping a candy bar? Keep changing doctors until one of them tells you to quit worrying about cholesterol. Your grandparents ate lard and fatback and made it to their 80s; it’ll probably be the same for you. Shake their hand for their trouble, if you can lift your arm long enough.
It’s human nature to want the comfortable lies, but we need the painful truths. In the short term, we all prefer what we get from comfortable ignorance. For the long term, we know we’re better off listening to the competent people. Even if we don’t want to.