Emergency Podcast - I Just Lost $500k This Morning: Here's a Framework for Dealing With a Crisis

good morning sean here i woke up this morning and i check my portfolio as i do in the mornings first thing one i open swipe see how the stock market's is do and see how crypto doing see how sales are going and i woke up today and i was down over half a million dollars and you know that's the you know the phrase everybody wants you wanna make money while you sleep well this was you lose money while you sleep stock market is bleeding crypto is crashing and i had a moment in the morning where i had to decide how's today gonna go how am i going to interpret this i'm gonna put a meeting on this so i wanna share with you something i've learned that really helps me and it's about crises so it is very easy to to get information panic and make a move so in the stock market you might panic sell panic trade and and even if you're not gonna take an action like panic selling you it is very easy for me i'll speak for me it's very easy for me to get some news and email pops into my inbox from my boss or a you know stock price goes crashing where i have a big position and it's easy to not just lose the money but also lose the day meaning i get the information and it can tank my day if i'm not careful and you know a while back i i had this teacher i did an audio series so like you would listen to one of these little five minute audio clips a day and he's kinda like a life philosophy mindset guy i'm into that kind of thing so he had the section called grandpa wisdom and i loved it and there was a grandpa wisdom about crises that i wanna share with you and he says when a crisis happens to ask the question is this a crisis or is this a crisis or is this an event and the grandpa paul wisdom was a crisis is nothing more than an event that reveals the state of crisis within i'll say that again a crisis is nothing more than an event that reveals the state of crisis within okay so let's apply that to today i'm a i'm some of you know i have a big crypto position i'm a big believer in bitcoin in ethereum today bitcoin is down you know or twenty percent or something like that you know same with the ethereum and if i was to panic today it would have nothing to do with bitcoin and ethereum and being down twenty percent just like i should not be overjoyed when they're up twenty percent the grandpa paul wisdom is that if i feel a crisis when i look at that number it reveals the state of crisis within which is that i don't believe i don't have full conviction in my investment because when i invested when i buy i don't think about it like this is gonna go i don't you know i need this to go up every day no i know it's gonna go down it's not even that i need it to be up this month just it have to be up in the month of may no may twenty twenty one doesn't even matter i'm buying this for the long term i believe that in the long term the prices are gonna be much much higher i believe bitcoin is gonna be over half million dollars per coin and so if i was to panic today what that would reveal would be that there's a state of crisis within there is a conflict within me that says i don't know is this gonna happen or is this not and if the doesn't happen you know then what then then what happens to me then to am i am i wrong am i dumb am i poor you know your brain i should say my my brain can go to some crazy places if i let it and so so you know that's where you have to ask is this the slice or the pie right if this was a pizza a slice is just an event it's just part of a whole a whole story and you would never over react to a slice versus a pie if the pie is wrong that's the whole pizza and so i try to be very very careful what i allow to be a crisis in my life and this is not just about money right this gonna be anything you you're really excited about a date and you get to the bar and you're waiting you're sipping your drink awkward and you're sort of checking your phone compulsive and let you get that text they're not coming right they flake out on you this is a christ or event right did this does that ruin the rest of your night or do you identify it as just an event that happened in the moment do you take this to me that she doesn't like you and that you're you know you're never you're always gonna be single well now you've made it a crisis you've had a personal crisis you have revealed the state of crisis within it could be that your teachers send you you know your the teacher of your children sends you a note an email saying your kid is falling behind in class or not paying attention they're acting up when that email hits your inbox you might be driving you just see the subject line you just see the first line in the preview and you know something's up is this a crisis or is this an event you know i in college i've told the story before but one of the major turning points of my life was in college i took a class called getting rich it was my senior year i was i was a prem med student i planning to go to med school took the am mca had finished all my medical requirements and so i wanted to take the easiest class available on duke campus so i went to this website where it would give ratings for classes and i saw that the highest rated class of the highest ea the the nicest teacher was a class called getting rich so i enrolled i enrolled with my two best buddies we had never taken a class before together at school and this teacher was a ex student and what she told us was i'm back here teaching you know i'm thirty i think she was probably you know early thirties thirty one thirty two thirty three something like that she said i'm back teaching i graduated from college i didn't know what i was gonna do i had a degree in mandarin because that that's what was interesting to me and all my friends joked like good luck with that chinese degree what are you gonna do with that good luck where you're gonna get a job and she said well i could probably get a job in china so she goes to china uses her mandarin skills to actually make a killing what she does as she partners with chinese companies that wanna do business with the west and she's a translator she's the the middle man because she understands business she understands both languages and she was good with people so she makes money she invested in the stock market during the dot com boom because she's very interested in in in the internet and technology stocks starts investing and here comes the the stock market crash the you know the the bubble burst so it's two thousand or whatever stock market crashes technology stocks are plunging stocks are plunging amazon is plunging to i think the stock goes down to less than a dollar or something like that and she had to decide in that moment some of the money she had saved about thirty percent forty percent of the money she saved was now worth almost nothing and maybe she was wrong about this technology thing maybe she was wrong about this internet thing so not only is she losing money now she's losing confidence but she decided and she said the meaning i give this is gonna be what it is to me right if i say this is if i panic if i give this the meaning that this is the end that i messed up well then that's the experience i'm gonna have so instead she saw it differently she saw it as an event she saw it as better than an event she saw it as an opportunity she said hey everything's half off everything's eighty percent off this black friday and she started buying up as much as she could so the reason she was able to be a teacher by you know early thirties was because she made killing and the stock market went the stocks recovered because she had bought everything at such a premium discount when everybody else was fearful she was greedy the old warren buffett quote and and so that's kind of what i'm reminded of today you gotta ask yourself is this a crisis or an event and when you ask yourself that question it's a powerful question it's the first question you should ask before you react before you react you wanna respond respond to the question you wanna let the blood pressure go down you wanna stop checking your phone compulsive you wanna keep calm and carry on because the worst consequence you could have is you see an event you label it as a crisis and then you throw away today and that sounds like nothing right throw away today what's the big deal well it's just a tuesday right this is just a wednesday well it's no big deal until you realize that today is all you got and throwing away times throwing away your most precious asset and ruining your mood is ruining your fortune right your mood is your fortune and so that's all i got for you today remember ask is this a crisis or is this an event and even better is this a crisis or is this an opportunity if you like this think about sharing this with somebody else in your life who might benefit from hearing this today there a lot of people might need to hear this feel free to forward this share it with a friend and if you like these little mini episodes these little nuggets let me know i'm at sean vp on twitter tell me if this is if these are good and we've may do some more of these in the future alright time to make breakfast