...yes, focus on what you can control rather than complaining about the state of affairs
...a key part is knowing how to navigate in the midst of it all, which is the part that we CAN control.
...an example is if it is revealed that your company has disclosed something bad, what would you do to navigate that? Sell everything or sell down or do nothing?
...a message from Luke Gromen
Hi Ronnie,
I am an Eagle Scout.
For many years, I participated in a February survival camp called Polar Bear Camp.
You bring your own food, you cook your own food, you build your own shelter to survive for 24-48 hours in the middle of February in Ohio.
The coldest Polar Camp I attended was -7 degrees Fahrenheit. It was one of the coldest in the history of my Boy Scout Troop.
It was very cold, cold enough to kill you if you don't know what you're doing.
There were parents pulling their kids out from attending the camp.
I was 13 years old, and my dad said, "You're going."
He had conviction in my ability to survive probably more than even I did at that point.
It really is a mindset of not being overly optimistic and overconfident, but being a realist. I thought to myself: “the weather outside is cold enough to kill me and if I'm not careful it will kill me, or at least send me to the hospital with hypothermia or frostbite. I need to respect it. I need to take the appropriate preparations, and I need to take the appropriate actions while I'm out there.”
The campsite was in a valley.There were two ways to get warm: to sit by a fire (which provided temporary, superficial warmth on the front side of your body) or start running up the hill that was the side of the valley.
The EASIEST way to get the illusion of warmth was to sit by the fire, but the BEST way to get warm (and stay warm) was to run the hill.
I would run up the hill and then walk back down and then I would run the hill again and I would get warm.
I didn’t want to overrun the hill because if I did that, then I would have gotten my inside layers of clothes soaked with sweat, which could ALSO lead to frostbite or hypothermia.
It was a question of the balance borne out of a simple choice: Do I want to freeze or do I not want to freeze?
It required me to focus my mind. It did not matter if I should or shouldn’t have been there, if I regretted going or if it was too cold to go, etc. - what mattered was my reality and HOW I was going to navigate it.
Did I want to freeze or didn’t I want to freeze? That was the question.
I didn’t want to freeze, so I had to take action NOT to freeze.
This is a great metaphor because we can complain about what the government is doing, about what the politicians are doing, about what Wall Street is doing and about what the central banks are doing.
But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter because we can't control any of that. What matters is your reality and HOW you will navigate it.
The metaphorical question is “Do you want to freeze or do you not want to freeze?” And if you don't want to freeze, then you need to understand the signposts - the context of what's happening and give yourself the ability to know what to look for and navigate your decision-making process from there.
That is where FFTT Tree Rings comes in - with our information, we help you "stay warm"; helping you "run the hills" by providing signposts and context of what is happening through our unique perspective. Subscribe here.
Thanks for being here.
LG
