Growing up I thought that all you needed to do to get cash was go to the bank and put your magic card into the machine. Thankfully after graduating with a finance degree, I learned there was a little more to this equation.
Imagine for a second that this change never happened. Instead, every opinion you developed as a 5 year old would be stuck with you for the rest of your life. Regardless of your age, you’d be a stubborn old fool. You’d not only believe in the tooth fairy, but also that the sky was blue because Grandpa said it should be that way.
Yet somehow once we aren’t children, this stops. We switch to lauding “consistency” as if it was an unqualified good thing. This is visible everywhere, but is particularly apparent when politicians are called flip floppers whenever they switch their opinion.
Updating
The only way for us to improve is to update our opinions when presented with disproving evidence. This was true when Gaileo claimed the earth wasn’t flat and is true now when physicists today build theories of quantum mechanics instead of Newtonian physics or relativity.
Each time we update our beliefs, we’re not only admitting we were incorrect, but we’re also slowly but surely improving. These little changes help us grow incrementally day after day and the best in their fields are constant disciples of it:
- Warren Buffet’s investing philosophy morphed from “Cigar butt investing” in the 50s-70s to buying “wonderful companies at a fair price”. This helped him become one of the greatest investors of all time.
- Satya Nadella reinvented Microsoft as a company from focusing on Windows to focusing on being cloud first and mobile first. This tripled Microsoft’s stock price
- Nick Saban switched from building defensive first Alabama football teams to one of the highest scoring offenses. In 2021 this lead to another national championship
Remember as Jason Zweig says “a good week…is when I learned something new… a great week, it would be not only did I learn something, but I learned that something I thought I knew was wrong”