How to Make Decisions About Wealth Quickly and Accurately

What does decision making have to do with the Laws of Money or Lessons of Life for that matter?  Everything.  Effective decision making is a skill. Some people have honed this skill, most have not.  As people age, they become more ensconced in their own particular cognitive biases.  What is a cognitive bias, you ask? 

A cognitive bias is a systemic pattern of deviation from rational thinking.  Mr. Wikipedia lists over one-hundred biases.  Google that.  It is fascinating that there are so many identifiable ways the human brain will fight you in the struggle to make the correct decision. 

I recorded this episode the day after I sent an email to my email list.  The email brought attention to Episode 2 and the story of my father, our relationship and his death.  The next morning, my inbox was flooded with messages of similar stories and expressions of support.   

These stories only confirmed what I had observed in my professional life countless times.  When the family leader fails to lead then dies, emotional and financial carnage results.  

If deep, deep injury is foreseeable with well-nigh mathematical certainty but is avoidable, is not the person who failed to avoid the injury acting intentionally?  In criminal cases, there is a fine distinction between negligence, recklessness and intentional action. Unlike civil law, criminal law requires the prosecution to prove “mens rea”, that the accused acted with a “culpable mind.”  Yet, the prosecution need not prove that the defendant intended or even imagined the crime of which he or she was later convicted.  For example, if a defendant acts with such flagrant disregard as to his or her duty to others is he off the hook because he did not actually plot or even foresee that he would ram his car into a school bus filled with cute kindergartners after drinking a gallon of brown liquor? While he may not have intended to run the red light, he did intend to put a thief in his mouth that would rob him of his wits. Recklessness is intent because the degree of disregard for others is so great. Conviction will result. 

Most people would agree with that.  Yet, within the same group of family leaders who would agree, there are some who will decide NOT to take the action that would avoid the injury to their own family.  Does the family leader have a culpable mind?  They would say “no” as fervently as the now-convicted criminal.  My Inbox is flooded with the children of these family leaders.  These messages tell me stories of great pain directly resulting from a cognitive bias, a hiccup in a mental process. The criminal was sure to hurt someone because his decision making was impaired by alcohol and the family leader was impaired by a bias. 

In this episode, I reveal one such cognitive bias and an exercise I developed to help those who are plagued by this mental hiccup overcome it. 

Wealth is made up.  It is an idea and does not exist in the physical universe.  As long as there are homo sapiens on the planet who value a piece of paper with Benjamin Franklin depicted one hundred times more than a piece of paper that is identical in size, color and dimension but for the depiction of George Washington, wealth will survive you.  

Now, the bias and my solution? Listen to the episode and find out.