Investing in the stock (shock) market can be likened to how Thomas Edison viewed life:
How do you feel about mistakes you have made in your life? How are you responding to disastrous events that have happened to you? Have you allowed yourself to learn from them and move on, or are they still dragging you down into the muck of feeling like a failure?
Let me tell you a story that may help you put these kinds of events in perspective. On the evening of December 9, 1914, fire blazed through the concrete building of Edison Industries, gutting the work place of famous inventor Thomas Edison. At the age of sixty-seven, one of the world’s great geniuses lost his lifetime of work in that fire!
Talk about tragedy, a disaster—and Edison had contributed to it by making a mistake and only insuring his building for a small sum. The morning after the fire, as Edison stood among the ashes of his life’s work, he said, “There is a great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew.”
What a positive perspective in the face of profound loss! It takes great hope to survey the ashes around you and see value in them. If you’re like most people, as you think back to your divorce, your unexpected pregnancy, or the death of your spouse, your first thought probably isn’t, “There is great value there. Look at everything I am going to learn!”
Think back over the seasons of your life when you really changed as a person—those moments of “great value” that altered your perspective. Did those times follow great success or great failure? If you are like most people, those significant moments probably followed great grief, failure, mistakes or disasters.
We tend to see problems as negatives rather than as challenges—even opportunities to make something new out of the stuff of our lives. But as we choose to head down that road, taking one step at a time in the dark, and then beginning to walk, then run as you start to see the light, you will build a track record of success. Your present crisis slips into the past then becomes a memory, while the hopeful future you once thought seem so distant becomes your present.
Edison was right. Valuable lessons do come from the ashes of challenging experiences. He didn’t just say that to sound good. Edison lived it. Once when an assistants commented on the inventor’s lack of results—fifty thousand failures as he endeavored to design a storage battery, for example—Edison had a great comeback. “Results? Why, man I have gotten a lot of results. I know fifty thousand things that won’t work.”
Thomas Edison could have given up after the fire, but three weeks after the blaze, he completed the first phonograph, one of his greatest inventions."
So ... one of the wisest statements I ever heard when it comes to investing, WAS:
"After you make the same common mistakes that other investors have made (and you WILL make them!) ... and LEARN from those mistakes ... you will then begin to consistently make MORE money in the stock market than what you lose."
I'm still in the process of learning ...
Lucky
