Hope and Optimism are Highly Profitable Investments

I believe in miracles. You should, too.

Last week we saw a Fed Ex truck pulling out of a manufacturing facility in Portage, Mich., in the early morning. In it were thousands of doses of a vaccine that promises to end a year of intense suffering from a disease that nearly overnight brought illness, loneliness and economic loss to so many. The first person I knew to get vaccinated was Dr. Sofie Morgan. She pulled her kids out of school in April to reduce exposure to keep her patients and family safe. The photo of that needle going into her arm brought tears to my eyes because it was the beginning of their end of constant fear and anxiety, of all our fear and anxiety.

We were doomed when covid hit. It was too easily transmissible. On top of that, our experience taught us that a vaccine takes five years to make. But someone somewhere believed we could do it in less than one year. I still will probably never fully understand the mRNA technology, but my sort of understanding is that mRNA is a transport vehicle for a teacher to enter a cell and then instruct the cell to create proteins to generate an immune response to the disease. My better understanding is that it is a miracle.

Hindsight is 2020, and let's start seeing this year for what it was -- a chance to see that hope and optimism are necessary ingredients to build the life of freedom that we want to live. Pessimism and cynicism are the greatest threats.

Let's look at how the disease of pessimism and cynicism affects our money. I can look no further than someone trying to argue against investing their money. The stated pessimistic reason they don't want to invest might be the chance that their hard-earned money could go away in a flash. But let's unpack that argument. If we really believed that we could invest in all the companies in the stock market and those companies would all collectively go away, go bankrupt, then we believe in the bleakest of worlds. If that girds our belief, then let's buy guns and gold and go secure remote land, preferably with a cave on it.

But what is often the real reason for the cynicism? Is it a careful and thorough research and understanding of the stock market? Probably not. Deep down it's the fear of coming up short. It's often a person who hasn't saved enough and is scared of their own failure. The best antidote? Hope and optimism in the future and a new belief they can create the ability to retire one day and not self-sabotage that dream.

But hope and optimism need a boost to ward off pessimism -- a vaccine similar to the mRNA. It's that first dose that teaches us to save and invest for a month. Maybe a second boost the next month to be sure our recovery wasn't a fluke -- the virus of undersaving really is gone. Then automated savings like those offered in a 401(k) or 403(b) retirement plan that will take it from there. For a person with a lifetime of not being able to save or going into credit card debt, that mRNA is a miracle.

One day taking the covid vaccine will be routine, and we will only occasionally remember the time we were not free to live our lives the way we wanted. In the same way we will occasionally revisit that retirement account to remember the freedom of choice it will allow our future selves to enjoy and that it might not have been that way.

The lesson I want to take out of 2020 is that we have to dare to dream of our future and build our own mRNA transport vehicle to achieve that dream: to start that small business, to one day buy that house, to one day walk into the boss's office, hand in a retirement letter and live a new retired life on our own terms. And the chances of it working have never been better. 2020 upended our habits to live a life of comparison. To spend what we had (or didn't have) a little more and little more, to keep running on the hamster wheel in order to buy empty things just because our neighbors bought them. Imagine if next year we stop depositing money into our neighbors' dreams and let our new dose of optimism give us the resolve to invest that money into our future free lives.

I circled back with Dr. Morgan and asked her how it felt to get the covid vaccine. She said, "The shot filled me with hope. After a year of uncertainty and grief, the end is coming into focus." For those celebrating Christmas or those who are just enjoying the pause in work and school obligation, let's give ourselves time to focus and reflect on a brighter near-term and longer-term future. Let's dare to dream of a future filled with miracles from our hope and optimism, a future without covid, and a future worth investing in.

This content originally appeared in my “Save Yourself” column in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/dec/22/hope-and-optimism-are-highly-profitable/

Photo by Ivan Dostál on Unsplash