Have you ever had that experience where you finally decide on the make and model of car you intend to buy and suddenly, as if by magic you see those particular cars absolutely everywhere? You’ve never really noticed them before but now they are everywhere you look.
Obviously, there is still the same statistical incidence of whatever the car is, but it really is uncanny the extent to which you now notice them on every street corner as opposed to how essentially invisible they were to you previously.
The reason this happens was discussed in a relatively recent episode of the habitually irreverent and enjoyable Radio 4 programme, the Infinite Monkey Cage - What is reality?
The basic point here, now well established by scientists in the space, is that our day-to-day experience of existence is the tiny fraction of reality that our brain constructs on our behalf to make sense of everything. There are literally millions of potential data points available to your senses at any given moment in time and, even with the awesome computational power of our grey matter, our brain is programmed to very heavily edit and triage these data points to avoid our conscious selves experiencing madness-inducing overwhelm.
What many of us fail to realise is that you can hugely help this largely unconscious process by what you do with your conscious focus. That is to say that you can help your brain in its never-ending editing and triaging of what is going on around you by simply making the effort to do so. The result is that you can exert a significant influence on what you experience as “reality”, odd though that sounds.
Our brains are designed to keep us alive and not very well designed for the modern era, as a result. They are especially attuned to the negative, because this is what maximised our chance of survival historically. Our brains have a tendency to focus on dwindling resources and threats from other human beings or animals, or the environment generally. In the modern era, where we are seldom actually at risk, you have to make a concerted effort to counteract this innate imbalance.
Doing so can variously be described as ‘being present’ or ‘mindfulness’. Taken to the next level, it is the idea that underpins what is (un)fashionably called ‘the law of attraction’ – an idea which has sold literally millions of self-help books and is generally rather unpalatable and silly-sounding (for us cynical Brits).
…but this isn’t about ‘energy vibration’ or the ‘secrets of the ancients’ or any other such hocus pocus. It is actually about simple neuroscience. You quite literally “get what you focus on” because that is how our brain works.
“How on earth is all this relevant to my finances, Andy - you’re right off-piste today, are you not?”
...I hear you ask. The answer is that this subject is actually incredibly relevant to your financial success and, more generally, success in pretty much every other area of life.
Every day you have the chance to choose to focus on that subset of reality that is most helpful to your health, happiness and wealth. As Abraham Lincoln said:
“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be…”
The problem is that most of us don’t do this. Most of us allow what Buddhists call the “scampering monkey” of our brain to dash around all over the place absorbing vast amounts of entirely unhelpful noise. This is particularly problematic in an era of 24/7 news blaring at you everywhere you go and your ever present smart phone with its various social media feeds and emails chuntering away every minute of every day.
I wrote back in January that 99.99% of the things that will happen across the whole world today will not be violent murders, terrorist bombs or someone contracting the latest tropical disease but 99.99% of our headlines will be about those things because our media is stuck in that old paradigm of our old brains.
In terms of finance specifically, many people suffer from essentially the same problem: People who have taken no time to study it or really understand it, think that the stock market is horribly risky. This is perhaps unsurprising given that the media goes bananas every time there is a ‘massive crash’ and that is most people’s ‘reality’ when it comes to investment. The 99% of the time that a sensible, diversified portfolio will gradually, sensibly and entirely effectively build your wealth doesn’t make front page news, isn’t what most people consciously put in their brain and isn’t most people’s “reality” as a result – which is one of the reasons so many people fail with investment.
The antidote to this unfortunate reality is to be very consciously selective about where you put your focus and to think very carefully about where your beliefs come from and how well they serve you.
If you truly get what you focus on, then it serves to focus on the exciting possibilities that result from becoming truly financially literate and from investment generally…