In Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, Carlo Rovelli writes, “Genius hesitates.”
That statement is elegant and deceptively simple. Here’s how I interpret it:
The most wise people - think Lincoln, Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Laozi, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, etc., still their minds and watch what happens. They allow life to get ahead a bit and then react.
If we allow life to get ahead, in addition to reacting more effectively we’ll also see that life rhymes with itself.
In the 1720s, a guy named John Blunt of the South Sea Company (a joint-stock trading company) found a way to increase its profits by trading government debts (which were massive after the 1718 war with Spain) and create a craze around buying shares of debt. The scheme worked’ish - tons of people bought debt (including Sir Isaac Newton). But others started to get ideas and create their own form of debt financing which caused Blunt to influence Parliament to pass the Bubble Act of 1720. Shares starting being sold at £100 and topped out at £1000/share. Then, the bubble burst.
In September of 1720 many people (including Sir Isaac Newton) lost vasts amounts of their wealth realizing that there wasn’t substance behind the scheme. It is written that Newton would lost so much money that he would get visibly ill at the mention of finances later in his life. Why this story?
The real estate bubble of 2008 was not the first time in our history that humans threw their money into bad investments and influenced by short-sighted thinking. Most interesting, John Blunt and company built their idea on what they saw the French do (thanks to the work of the exiled John Law); and if Blunt, the King, and Parliament only allowed life to get ahead of themselves they would have seen the ruin that it brought France.
History rhymes.
It rhymed for the French and the English, and 288 years later it rhymed again for those that lost their wealth in 2008.
If you allow life to get ahead of you, you not only improve your ability to react - you also get to see her rhymes.