Below is a picture of my family’s garden taken July 5th this year. Hopefully the deer have not eaten all our green beans by the time you are reading this. It appears to be a battle we are losing at the present. My wife and I love gardening and we involve our children in the process despite their mild protests. You can lose yourself in its simplicity, yet remain awe inspired at the miracle and complexity of life. Even my children aren’t immune to this nature induced state of flow. I highly recommended it.
We’re no experts, as you can clearly see from the picture, but we improve every season by applying lessons learned from the prior year. Truth is we never saw ourselves as garden people, falling into the hobby accidentally when we couldn’t figure out what to do with a flower bed in our back yard that seemed to be growing everything but flowers. Coming from our common world of instant gratification, the first lesson gardening taught us is patience.
Nothing grows in an instant. The temptation is to plant and check and recheck frequently expecting results. The consequences of impatience manifest themselves in things like overwatering, as if forcing water into the soil would inflate plant growth like a water balloon. When it comes to gardening, most of the time nothing seems to be happening which can be frustrating. However, let nature run its course and the results are extremely rewarding.
Psychologists suggest that the average human attention span is 7 – 12 seconds, which tracks with our compressed perception of time. Our default mode is to see the fruit and eat the fruit. Rarely do we stop and think, “what if I were to plant this?”. Could we be better off applying our assets for our future rather than satiating the demands of our high time-preference selves?
Obviously, yes. But a thing is much easier to suggest than to do. Not only do we need to reject the logic of our primitive impulses, we must also see through an opaque future with enough clarity to formulate productive strategy. Not an easy task but no one said successful living is easy work. In a world where ailments are treated rather than prevented, where the perceived pathway to riches is through instantaneous serendipity, and cheap entertainment floods our consciousness with the click of a button, is it any wonder why so many live paycheck to paycheck? It’s difficult enough to overcome our basic instincts let alone cultivate a future of abundance through investment.
Yet, I and many other financial educators like me, stand as testament to the life altering abundance provided by disciplined saving and investing. If there were no truth in its potential, we would be nothing more than starved idealistic philosophers, competing for attention on GoFundMe. Like gardening, appropriate application requires patience and a benign negligence of sorts. Proper stewardship of wealth also requires us to know the reasons behind it.
As much as I love nature, I do not grow gardens for the sake of the plants. I grow them for the people that benefit from them. My friends and family who can be fed from them, and the people I can share my knowledge with. Our investments are not for their sake alone but for our most valuable of assets, the people around us.
I am grateful to have the opportunity help others cultivate for their future and I am grateful for you, who give me purpose through readership. Next week I will write about a less lofty topic, getting into how the bond market seems to be on the move and what this could mean for intermediate term investing.
The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
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