Jul 2007
Did you know that bungee jumping is more frightening than skydiving?
It's counterintuitive to think that falling 200 feet could be scarier than falling 12,000 feet. And yet, speaking from personal experience, it's true.
I'll never forget my first (and last) bungee experience. They had me step into a specially constructed box hooked to a crane winch; the bungee line was hooked to the bottom of the box.
I had plenty of time to look down as the box was slowly hoisted up. By the time we got to 200 feet, I had a very intimate sense of my relationship to the ground. The flat patch of dirt and scrub grass below brought one word to mind: hard. That ground looked hard.
Once the bungee line was affixed to my ankle -- good and tight -- I edged out to the jump platform. The box operator asked if I was ready in his friendly Australian accent. I nodded.
"Right," he said. "I'll say 1-2-3 Bungee and then you jump."
Gulp.
"Here we go... 1-2-3 Bungee!"
No go. My leg muscles propelled me forward, but my hands clamped down on the rails for dear life. It felt as if I were handcuffed to those rails; I wasn't going anywhere.
The box operator turned away and clicked his walkie-talkie. "Might have to bring ‘er down Johnno... this one looks like a washout."
Wait, I said. Let's try it again. Sure, why not, he shrugs. Probably seen this a thousand times before.
"All right, steady as she goes mate... 1-2-3 BUNGEE!"
This time I gritted my teeth, lunged forward, and tore myself off the platform. In my mind it was like ripping a tree out by the roots.
Next thing I knew, that dusty brown hardpan was rushing up to greet me. Then the bungee line went taught, like a rubber band at max stretch, and I decelerated to a gentle stop ten or fifteen feet above the ground. (Kind of like in the cartoons.)
As I bounced and swayed on the line, waiting for the crane to lower me down, a tidal wave of adrenaline hit my system. I felt like I had just punched out King Kong. Overcoming that initial fear, realizing that I did it, that I did it and survived, was just a huge, epic feeling.The risk was all in my head, of course; I was more likely to die crossing the street than I was from the jump itself.But that didn't take away from the feeling.
Sky diving was a rather different experience. Fast forward to another time and place...
We left the runway at dusk. I remember huddling in the cold metal belly of the plane, knees up, vibrating with the turboprop as we circled up to 12,000 feet.
Sitting on the floor as I was, I had a line of sight between the front seats and out the windshield. There was little to look at but clouds, backlit by the rays of the setting sun; I had the sensation of being a small boy in the backseat of a car, wondering at everything around him.
Shortly before reaching altitude, my diving partner opened the hatch door and double-checked my chute. I scooted over to the edge, legs dangling in thin air. Like sitting on the dock of a lake... except instead of water, looking down into nothing.
The ground didn't scare me this time for a very simple reason. This time, the ground wasn't even there. Where the ground was supposed to be, I saw nothing but a fuzzy patchwork of colors and impossibly tiny shapes. "Ground" had become a figment of my imagination; an abstract and almost mystical concept.
There is a part of your brain that shouts when it senses danger. Picture a hot cup of coffee about to get elbowed, or a car behind you that isn't braking fast enough, or a toddler crawling towards a steep flight of stairs. Hey! Whoa! Don't do that... HALT!
Whatever you want to call it, my internal danger alert / rational self-preservation mechanism had short-circuited by this point. It was as if the sober adult part of my brain had said: Okay, that's it. I've seen you pull some wacky stunts in my time, but this... this is way, waaaay over the top. I'm outta here pal. You're on your own.
A minute later, we were "outta there" too. Bye-bye airplane. When it came time to go, there was no resistance, no rooted feeling. I was too much in awe to feel anything but serene. My hands were relaxed and open; I half-smiled as we fell into the clouds.So what is the point of this comparison (other than putting my sanity into question)?
Basically, the merits of bungee jumping vs. skydiving can be compared to short-term vs. long-term goals. It seems logical to view the short-term goal as an easier / less frightening prospect than the long-term one. But that isn't necessarily the case.
Short-term goals, in which success or failure are immediately at hand, can be like standing on that bungee platform eyeballing the ground. When the prospect of failure is staring you in the face, it's much easier to dwell on it and stress over it.
Long-term goals, in contrast, are more like looking down from 12,000 feet. With a truly long-term goal, the ground is no longer there; it's harder to get stressed over an ethereal destination you can't even see. The fear mechanism loses its natural point of reference.
Another benefit is that long-term goals force us to put things in perspective. It's easier to be cavalier about a short-term goal... to think "piece of cake" or "this looks easy" and commit on a whim. The cavalier attitude is trouble because of the natural human tendency to underestimate the scale of most tasks.
The real trouble comes when the short-term goal is abandoned in frustration... like riding up in the bungee box, getting broad-sided by a last minute rush of fear, and aborting the jump. If it happens multiple times, the resulting sense of failure can spawn a negative feedback loop. Run this loop frequently enough and you "train your brain" to think that short-term goals are bad, because they so often result in frustration; and of course small-term goals are assumed "easier" than long-term goals; therefore all forms of goal-setting must be avoided.
With a long-term goal, it's harder to be cavalier. The sheer magnitude of the challenge creates a buffer against the tendency to underestimate. Big goals are less likely to be compressed into unrealistic time frames, because there is so much that goes into accomplishing them; it's a whole different mindset preparing to spend years in pursuit of something, than it is to think XYZ can be knocked out in no time with a blast of effort.
At the very least, our hurried sense of time gets stretched out by a truly big goal. You have to deliberately cultivate patience when progress is measured in years; that sense of patience comes with many valuable side effects.
Finally, long-term goals offer superior reward to risk. There is potentially a lot more to gain by thinking big, with not that much more to lose.
Risk is like beauty -- it's in the eye of the beholder. Many people who would never skydive in a million years, for example, think nothing of driving-while-drowsy on the interstate. And yet, based on skydiving statistics, the odds of a fatal jump are roughly 75,000 to 1; death by car crash is more than sixteen times more likely!
Isn't it funny how life goals are similarly deceptive. The real risk (in my opinion) is pursuing nothing but short-term goals... the equivalent of pursuing not much at all.
If you set a fulfilling long-term goal for yourself, and you work hard to achieve it, what's the real downside? Unless you put your family or health or sanity at risk, odds are you'll at least get a useful chunk of knowledge and experience from the deal. And that speaks to another benefit of long-term goals; they help you savor the journey as much as the destination.
Ready to set some long-term trading and investing goals for yourself? It feels right to close with a quote from Marty Schwartz, a trader who turned $40,000 into $20 million (after many years of trial and error):
I always try to encourage people who are thinking of going into this business for themselves. I tell them, ‘Think that you might become more successful than you ever dreamt, because that's what happened to me.'
