In the summer of 2004, I was snorkeling at the Dry Tortugas off the Florida Keys.
The sand at the Dry Tortugas is white.
The water is warm, blue, and perfectly clear. It’s also shallow, so there are many coral reefs, full of colorful tropical fish.
So there I was, mask clamped to my face, salty snorkel in my mouth, swimming along in the sun and having a nice time.
Every so often, I’d see a school of hand-sized green fish. Cute.
Then I saw a single striped blue fish, the size of a football, with yellow markings near its fins. Interesting.
And then for a while, I saw nothing of note.
So I swam further away from the shore and into the ocean. All around was the blue-green water. Below me, there was white sand which stretched out as far as I could see.
And then a cold wave of fear washed over me.
My heart jumped into my throat. My body froze.
Because right in front, maybe about 10 feet away, was a giant, silver, slithering sea monster.
Its head looked like a boxing glove.
The scales on its back glittered in the sun.
And it wasn’t alone. Behind it, there was another monster. And another. And another. Dozens of them.
I had unwittingly snorkeled my way into a large school of tarpon, one of the biggest game fish you can catch in Florida. They grow up to 8 feet long — about 2 meters. I’m not sure how large the tarpon that I saw were, but out there in the water, each of them looked the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.
Fortunately, the school of tarpon didn’t care about me. They just leisurely continued on their route, off into the ocean, past where I could see them.
Once they were gone, I slowly recovered control over my arms and legs, turned around, and swam back to shore.
Now, there’s a little lesson in this story about how to stop worrying and start making better decisions. Here’s what I mean:
Most humans, me included, react much more strongly to negative events than to positive ones.
The thing is, we often willingly expose ourselves to feedback, which can be positive as well as negative.
Imagine checking how your Bitcoin investment is doing in the last hour… or how many visitors your website had yesterday.
If the outcome is positive — Bitcoin is up 2%, or you had the usual number of website visitors — it’s like snorkeling and seeing those little green and blue fish. Cute. Interesting.
But if the outcome is negative, the feeling can be much stronger. It’s like being punched in the gut by a giant, boxing-glove-headed tarpon.
But hold on, you might say. Shouldn’t you always know how things stand — and if you’re swimming into dangerous waters — so you can take corrective action if needed?
Maybe. But maybe checking too often will just cause you stress. And if you get a few negative results in a row, it might also cause you to make a bad decision — to turn around, swim to shore, and get out of the water. And this might be a tragedy.
Here’s a formal way to illustrate why, which I got from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow:
Let’s say I offer you a bet. 50% chance you win $200. 50% chance you lose $100.
Many people won’t take this bet. The possible loss of $100 (with a 50% chance) seems too big compared to the possible winnings of $200. The fear of the tarpon is too strong.
But what if the same bet happens 100 times in a row?
In that case, it would almost certainly make sense to take this “aggregate” bet. Your expected winnings would be $5,000 — and your chance of losing any money would be just 1 in 2,300.
And yet, if you don’t look at the aggregate view — but you only consider each 50%-50% bet in isolation — chances are you will never get this large, almost guaranteed outcome.
In other words, it can pay to take the long view. And to have a system. And to stop worrying about short-term results.
Granted, of course, that you’re not exposing yourself to catastrophe in the form of a hammerhead shark or a loss of money that will land you in jail or at the bottom of the sea.
Anyways, that’s my motivational sermon for today.
One last thing: If you need a system and a long-term view to help with marketing your business, then daily emails might be the answer. And if you want some proven advice on how to write such emails, you might like the following: