In the October 2021 edition of the Journal of Financial Planning, community feedback was sought for the question of how do you grow in professional development.

My contribution was about understanding how humans react under stress and disruption. That by looking back at these times in the past, we can learn how individuals thought and reacted, along with how whole cultures reacted. The furthest back we have really good and readable books on, for all three of these aspects, is the Great Depression. Which since it happens to also be specifically a financial stress event of epic proportions, is extra great for a recommendation to the Journal of Financial Planning 😉 These types of evolutionarily deep responses don’t change just because of the addition of 100 years to the calendar, so while the details may change in the next major disruption, the major themes in responses will stay the same.

And specifically, understanding that what you have encountered in your lifetime is only what you have encountered. Life has changed dramatically, one only needs to look at the basic scientific calculators we used in high school that had more computing power than what we used to send man to the moon with originally. And it’s going to keep changing.

I’m currently reading Michelle Obama’s book “Becoming”. Along those same lines, the author talks about how she realized when she was little that the diverse individuals in her family were all the product of their experiences. From Uncle Terry whose job as a Pullman porter turned into him wearing a three-piece suit every day at home in a state of numbed formality, to Southside growing up in Alabama in the era of Jim Crow resulted in him later lecturing his kids about avoiding the police.

“Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”

Becoming, by Michelle Obama

To paraphrase that, the history is there, even if you can’t see it. Just like we can’t ignore the evolutionarily developed processes that cause us to react in consistent and predictable sets of ways to stressors, we are also formed by the negative events in our lives. And that since our negative events aren’t ever going to be exactly the same, in experience or perception, as what others have had, we all turn out differently.

We ignore these human truths at our own peril.

Have you thought about the history that you carry with you, and how it’s shaped you? Have you thought about what needs you have, that are based on your unique shaping? And have you thought about how to best meet those needs? Only by studying the past do we have a chance to help inform our responses to the next challenge that comes our way. And it is coming, sooner or later. As we say on the river, it’s not if you’ll go for a swim, it’s when.