Dr. Daniel Crosby

Now, what's interesting about education is you don't need to be educated up to the point where you can necessarily do this yourself, but you need to be educated enough that you know what to look for in a partner.

You know, one of the most powerful forms of education is called meta knowledge, which is basically knowing what you don't know.

So like, I don't know anything about how to fix my car.

But I know that I don't know.

Right.

So I know I know that if something happens to my car, I'll just take it.

I'll take it to an expert.

I don't have any I don't suffer from any delusions of knowing how to fix my car.

So I know when to go get help.

So education is the first E. The second E is environment.

So the environment is so critical.

When you really become a student of behavior, you start to understand, sometimes disconcertingly, that we don't have as much free will as we thought.

And usually most of us are as good or as bad as the situation we find ourselves in.

So what does environment look like for an investor?

Well, first of all, it looks like your portfolio.

It looks like having a portfolio that is diversified enough and measured enough that you can live with its ups and downs.

If you're in a highly volatile portfolio, that's the wrong kind of environment for most people to be making sensible investment decisions.

And then the second piece of environment is making sure you're surrounding yourself with the right voices.

Through the popular media, through the news, through the financial news, there's often a steady drumbeat of negativity.

And so if that's the environment in which we're immersed, if we're immersed in this steady drumbeat of negativity, that's going to start to erode our thinking, that's going to start to erode our willpower, and then we'll sort of make the wrong decision at the wrong time.