A Year of Surprises
How uncertain decisions can lead to unexpected growth.
At 6:30 PM on a beautiful Spring evening, my son and I were playing “Construction Trucks” in the nearby park. As he dutifully filled each of his dump trucks up with woodchips and mulch, I sat next to him taking in and appreciating everything around me. A healthy kid. A wonderful big park to play in. A gorgeous 70 degree Spring day. And in about a half hour, we would pack up and walk happily together back to our house down the block.
During this introspection, I received a video text from my wife. She had just gotten home and was parked outside. She started to tell me that it was about a year ago, on a beautiful Spring day just like this one, that she was sitting outside our would-be home, looking at listings for it on Zillow and wondering “What If?”. I guess we were both feeling a little introspective.
After the video, I smiled and laughed a little. A year ago I was certain there was no way we could afford or manage a house like the one we were looking at. Renting was cheaper. Buying a house is one thing, but the one we were looking at in particular needed a good amount of help to get back up and running. How could we possibly afford to go from safe and renting, to buying and repairing?
Fortunately, my wife has a perfect track record of presenting me ideas I am at first hesitant to agree too, only for her to be right in the end - much to my benefit.
That’s why this quote from The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel felt especially worth sitting with. The book centers around how we perceive money both personally and to the world around us, but the quote
“It is smart to have a deep appreciation for economic and investing history. History helps us calibrate our expectations, study where people tend to go wrong, and offers a rough guide of what tends to work. But it is not, in any way, a map of the future.”
Housel’s focus here is on how people (investors in this case) mistakenly try to predict the future by over-relying on the past.
“…Investing is not a “hard science” with concrete facts, but rather a massive group of people making imperfect decisions with limited information about things that will have a massive impact on their wellbeing, which can make even smart people nervous, greedy, or paranoid”.
The same could be said for any major decisions we make in life.
We often want certainty before taking action. We need some kind of proof that it will all work out. But real life doesn’t always offer that kind of assurance. It offers glimpses, instincts, and sometimes, nudges from people who see possibility where we see risk. And I saw, risk. I crunched numbers in my head over and over about how we would pay this or pay that. Despite all that - I took a chance.
Buying our home wasn’t a move we made because it was comfortable—it was a leap we took despite not knowing how it would all unfold. And sure enough, the year that followed brought surprises: new appliances were needed, our entire yard was dug up to fix septic pipes over 100 years old, radiators that sounded like a steam engine on some colder nights, needed brand new steam traps. The list goes on.
There were tight budgeting months, and some days spent crossing fingers that nothing else would pop up.
But despite all that, it also brought growth. Lots of tangible, noticeable growth.
It brought us closer to the kind of life we wanted to build, even if the path didn’t look like we imagined.
Morgan’s point sticks: the world is surprising. Not every decision can be modeled from history or past outcomes. Surprises, both the beautiful and the challenging, are part of what shape meaningful progress. They’re what make the journey real.
And I think that’s the point.