The Hot Air Balloon
Recently I was on a group Zoom call with about one hundred advisors from around the world, hosted by an amazing speaker. Half way through the talk the speaker was distracted by a hot air balloon visible from his window.
“Every time I see a hot air balloon I think of my father-in-law, who passed away last year. He always wanted to go on a hot air balloon ride. Always wanted to take the whole family. But it was $300 a person, so he didn’t do it. My father-in-law had enough money – he could have taken all the grandkids, because there aren’t very many of them. We could have all gone – it wouldn’t have even registered. Every time my wife and I see a hot air balloon, we’re like, damn we should have gone on the hot air balloon ride. And I think it’s super clear to me that the things we will regret will be the things we didn’t do, not the things we did and failed. We are taking the whole family on a hot air balloon ride, but I really wish we would have done that 14 months ago.”
The hot air balloon seems very symbolic to me, particularly in the strange world we live in today.
We travelled this summer because I was fearful of having my own “hot air balloon” moment.
I kept thinking about the story and why he didn’t take the hot air balloon trip. The only thing I could come up with was fear. Fear to spend which is actually the fear of running out of money (this is a huge fear).
I have come to realise that our whole lives are driven by fear. It’s hard to escape it – evolution has programmed it into us. Our brains really only have one job, and that’s to keep us alive – survival. We evolved from those that feared the most and feared the most often.
Fear comes in many forms but mostly it is the fear of unknown outcomes that holds us back. We particularly hate uncertainty that we think could result in us losing whatever success or money or status we might have, or could lead to us looking foolish (imagine I do that thing and fail – how foolish will I look!). It leads to inertia. Dreams are left unfulfilled at the end of life because of fear.
My job is to help people live the best life possible with the money they have. Often that means helping people not only prepare but also overcome their fears.
I recently came across an amazing tool, thanks to Tim Ferriss’. He has a process that he calls ‘Fear Setting’. It originates in Stoic philosophy, which is something I have come to love. (It contains some of the greatest wisdom in the history of the world. Stoicism teaches resilience, self-awareness, acceptance, morality – but mostly, it teaches how to live. And no one ever teaches us that.)
“We suffer more in imagination than in reality”
Tim is no stranger to fear – severe childhood trauma led to struggles with mental health later in life, and he has written and spoken about his experience with suicide.
This is how Tim describes his process of fear-setting (it’s sort of the opposite of goal-setting).
Make a list of what you are afraid to do* and for each, start by defining your nightmare – that is, the absolute worst thing that could happen if you did it. Go into detail. Would it be the end of your life? Would the impacts be permanent? How bad are the impacts on a scale of 1-10? How likely is it that those things would actually happen?
Next step – ask yourself how you could prevent the worst things happening and what steps you could take to repair the damage and get things back under control if the worst did happen?
That’s the first part of the process - Define, Prevent, Repair.
Then move onto thinking through the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of the more probable scenario. How likely is it that you could produce at least a moderately good outcome? And ask yourself (I LOVE this question) – have less intelligent people done this before and pulled it off?
(When I launched my own business, the answer to that last question was my driving force. I looked around at other people in my profession and thought, ‘if they can do it, surely I can do it.’)
Lastly, you need to consider what costs there are to inaction. If you don’t do it, what will it cost you – financially, emotionally and physically? If you don’t pursue this thing, where will you be in one year, five years and ten years? How will you feel having allowed circumstance to impose itself upon you and having allowed ten more years of your finite life to pass doing what you know will not fulfil you?
Sometimes waiting to do something makes sense – you need to prepare. But if you can’t answer the question; ‘what are you waiting for?’, then the answer is; you’re afraid, just like everyone else.
I did a version of this fear-setting before launching my own business. I did a version of it before getting on a plane this summer. You can do it for big things and small things.
Think about it – what’s your “hot air balloon” – what will you regret having not done? What are you waiting for**?
Georgie
georgie@libertywealth.ky
*Any of these sound familiar?
Quit a job you hate
Ask for a raise
Start your own business
Take a sabbatical and travel the world
Start a family
Start a relationship/end a relationship/repair a relationship
Invest
**If it’s ‘more money’ – come and see me. We can work it through. There is always a way, there is always a trade-off.