headlines and history books

Morgan Housel’s recent post on The Collaborative Fund’s blog, The Three Sides of Risk, is a wonderful, if heart wrenching, read.

In his conclusion, Morgan writes:

In investing, the average consequences of risk make up most of the daily news headlines. But the tail-end consequences of risk – like pandemics, and depressions – are what make the pages of history books. They’re all that matter. They’re all you should focus on.

As someone interested in both history and economics, this caused me to pause.

Life, like investing, is a matter of making decisions with limited resources. (Coincidentally, this is one of my favorite definitions for economics.) Where we allocate our time and attention (resources more valuable than money) will ultimately determine our outcome (making some healthy, albeit large, assumptions about fairness in the system). While there’s a burden of responsibility, resource allocation is within an individual’s purview.

The question then is: how are we allocating our resources to ensure our history book is filled with stories of success - even at the expense of headlines?