A line from Morgan Housel’s Psychology of Money:
If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense
Morgan talks about this in the context of an investment company who’s brokers were millionaires, made from their earlier decisions and yet put everything on line (to become billionaires) and went broke because of one bad decision.
So much of the book to me not only talks about the way humans handle money but the way they handle their life. The quote is true as much for human relationships with one another as with money, career, nature, you name it.
More often than not we forget to weigh in what we actually have and are capable of in the present moment when we set our eyes on the greener side. Our desires take us away from enjoying the present and if and once we are in the future which we wanted someday, that too will be ruined by looking forward
If expectations rise with results there is no logic in striving for more because you’ll feel the same after putting in extra effort.
In the creative professions, as beginners we would love to have some skills in the things we pursue and we work our asses off, but when we do get the things we worked so hard for the joy of it gets pushed off some more into the future. We don’t look at the tools in our bag that have grown tremendously and start utilizing them, but look at someone else who has honed their craft much better. We forget plainly that we didn’t start out wanting to become JK Rowling or Herge (or even the legions of instagrammers who are better than us in varying degrees). We started this because we wanted to simply be able to create, to express.
For both the stock broker and the creative the greed to pocket big gains, either creatively or financially become the focus and makes them risk something precious. For the creative his time and the broker his money.