Strong Opinions: Lessons From My Daughter

A conversation with my daughter today made me think.  She can be wise at times.

We were driving home from school at 10am this morning.  I had picked her up because there was a positive COVID case in her brother’s class.  The current protocol is that the entire class AND their siblings need to be picked up from school and the child that is in the affected class needs a PCR test.  The whole family needs to isolate at home until the negative PCR result is confirmed.

Seems sort of simple, I suppose.  Except getting a PCR test on an island that it completely unprepared is not easy.  And naturally you want to get that test done fast so that you get the results somewhat fast and you can get back to life.*

You have to book an appointment; you don’t have to book an appointment.  You can turn up but the news is the queue goes all the way to Timbuktu.  You can turn up and queue and then find out they have run out of supplies.  Come back at 4pm; come back on Monday – depends whom you ask.

What to do, where to go?  Nobody knows.

My view is the whole thing is totally bonkers – we have an adult population that is almost fully vaccinated, children are not vulnerable, and going to these lengths to get people tested seems to defy all common sense and logic. 

In the car, with my daughter, whilst ranting about the whole thing, she says “Mum, you have really strong opinions.  Sometimes you need to take a deep breath and let them go.”

Yikes, that hit the spot.  My opinions are strong (and probably annoying sometimes).

But it made me think of something my friend Carl Richard’s always says: strong opinions loosely held. 

The work that I do requires strong opinions.  I have to give advice.  You don’t go to a doctor to get a handful of options and to take the options home and analyse the best path.  You go to a trusted doctor with a problem and you hope to walk out with a solution.  It’s the same with financial advice.  You go to a real financial adviser because you want someone to understand your unique situation and tell you what to do.

That requires opinions.  And mostly, I am not afraid to share them. 

BUT, strong opinions in my profession have to be loosely held. That’s because planning is fluid.  We work in a complex adaptive system and we can never know how all the variables we are working with are going to interact.  Things change, life changes.  If I am not open to those changes, I am not going to be very good at my job.

There is an old quote attributed to John Maynard Keynes (although he probably never said it): When the facts change, I change my mind.  What do you do?

I am not afraid to share my opinions but also not afraid to change them.  I get things wrong – I have got many things wrong in the past.  I will get many more things wrong in the future.  But relax, that’s part of the process.  We can’t get it all right at the start, how ever hard we try.  The value in the relationship is knowing that you have someone by your side who is always reassessing, rethinking and reanalysing – guiding you through the ever-changing landscape.

Georgie

georgie@libertywealth.ky

*A day later, we have the negative result and so life continues on, for now.