How to Handle Hindsight

Hindsight is one of those things that will drive you crazy if you don’t learn to control your emotions. As a solopreneur, you’ll deal with this a lot over time, the faster you can control it, the less it will slow you down.

Have you ever seen those videos where someone says “if you invested $100 in Bitcoin back in 2012, you’d have $100 trillion right now.”? Or same thing with companies and stocks like Amazon or Tesla.

This is literally the dumbest way to think. It’s loser mentality.

1. What people fail to account for, especially with investments like stocks or Bitcoin, is, would you have held to the highest point? Would have have been smart enough to sell at the top? Or would you have sold as soon as you 2x or 3x your initial investment?

2. For every Tesla or Bitcoin, there are 100+ that go to zero. You would have to get really lucky to hit that grand slam.

There is a thing called hindsight bias which refers to when we look back on an unpredictable situation and think it was easily predictable. You’ll usually hear a person say “I knew it all along” when they are demonstrating hindsight bias.

It even comes down to things in your own business. You can think about things you could have done differently and made 10x more money, or not failed, or had some different outcome, but this can be extremely toxic.

For example, with my business, I was spending 6 figures a month on Facebook and Instagram ads which ended up having a terrible ROI after a while but if I had taken just 20% of that budget and put it towards SEO and content, I’d have an organic machine that would probably be making twice as much now with a fraction of the ad spend.

Here is how you should look at it, don’t dwell on it and think “oh man, this could have been X” or “I would have made so much money if I did Y.” Instead, learn from it.

Coming back to my example, I look back and learned from the mistake, actually, I learned a few things.

1. Never put that much money into a single channel. Not just that, don’t necessarily double down on it, reinvest in the new channels as one does well.

2. Always include a content and SEO strategy. It’s a long term play and has one of the best ROI’s.

3. Don’t hesitate to cut things that aren’t working. It’s better to quickly cut something not working, reevaluate, and reposition instead of slowly draining all of your money on something that isn’t working.

It’s all about how you look at situations. It always takes time and experience. At first you may struggle to see the lessons or mistakes, you may just see the failure and what could have been.

Even back to the stock or Bitcoin examples, don’t sit there running numbers on your calculator “oh if I invested $10,000 I’d be so rich right now.”, think about how you can take advantage next time.

What were the signs in the beginning that would have made me think about investing? I could have taken a percentage of my portfolio and invested.

The biggest takeaway from this is to learn to control your emotions and thought processes. You’re going to have lots of “if only…” moments in your business and life, you can’t go back but you can learn from it to do it differently next time.