‘You’re only as good as your last performance’… not strictly true. Even if you fluffed whatever you do for a living on your last outing, that’s no reason to use it as a yardstick for your ability. Equally, if you smashed it, but had a run of average performances before that, your latest experience isn’t necessarily the best predictor of future performance.
Munster
There’s a pattern here… if you’ve been following our series on behavioural biases and how to combat them, you’ll know that for the last 15 weeks, we’ve published the latest update regular as clockwork. If you’ve opted to subscribe to emails, then once a week, every week, there’s the next instalment sitting in your inbox.
So far in our series on behavioural biases, we’ve looked at many of the ways our brains keep us on the right track in life, but derail us when it comes to our investments. It’s our brain’s job to get us from the cradle to the grave with as little damage as possible, so we’re all subject to certain instinctive behaviours that have evolved to keep us on the straight and narrow.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with feeling upbeat about your prospects. You might win the lottery. You might get that job that seems like a bit of a stretch. You might get the crisp packet that’s hiding a tenner inside, and as long as you understand that your ‘luck’ is exactly that, no problem.
Human beings like to sort things – we like to create order, we like to know where things are. We have a built-in need to spot patterns, which is why we like to sort music into genres, pore over the season record of our favourite football team or, for those of us old enough, arrange our CDs and DVDs in alphabetical order.
Our brains are strange. They can take something as predictably consistent and harmonious as numbers and turn them into a matter of subjectivity. The way that information is communicated to us can have significant effects on the conclusions we draw.
We often say hindsight is 20/20 – looking back, it was perfectly clear all along. It’s often an expression of regret – we should have done X when in fact we did Y and now look what’s happened.
As Monty Python’s eponymous hero of ‘The Life of Brian’ once famously declared ‘You are all individuals’. We’d certainly like to think we are – from our choice of clothes, our holiday destinations or the cars we drive, right through to whether we’re a flat white person or more of the macchiato type.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mary Schmich famously said, “Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.”
Seeing the whole picture is something we’re frequently advised to do, in finance and other walks of life. It’s important to step back and look at the full picture – the problem is that our advanced human brains are often doing just the opposite of that.