As a little aside to yesterday's blog about counting cards and the lessons I learned from Morgan Housel's book 'The Psychology of Money', it might be wise if you just read the blog again here before you start it just for context.
The important thing about counting cards and building happiness, and all the things I talked about yesterday, is that you need to have some contingency in place to play the counting cards game.
What I'm saying here is that if you only win counting cards 51% of the time, you have to be prepared to lose (at least something) 49% of the time.
The key here is you can't lose what you don't have (unless you do some daft thing where you borrow money in order to gamble).
With that in mind, you have to have a pot, a reserve, a contingency and then you can use a bit of your contingency to try and build by picking a system (counting cards) which lets you win a little bit day by day.
Some days you will lose, but other days you will win, and on balance, you will win 2 days more out of 100 than you lose, and then over time, the pot that you have will get bigger while always still protecting the fundamental part of the pot, which is your security and your safety.
And so the metaphor here is this.
If you're trying to build happiness, a better life, and more stability, then what you need to do is keep a bit of your stability that you have at the moment, keep a bit of your pot that you have at the moment, and only gamble or invest another little bit of that knowing that if you did lose, you've still got some happiness or some life or contentment over here.
If you go sh*t or bust into 'This holiday is going to save my happiness' or 'this relationship is going to make me happy for the rest of my life' or 'it doesn't matter that we don't get on, we will when we move to the next house, or after it's Christmas', if you go all or nothing, the real risk is you end up with nothing.
Blog Post Number - 4116
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