I’m generally a risk-averse person. I don’t drive motorcycles. I don’t own individual stocks. I don’t deadlift anything heavier than my bodyweight. When analyzing a new situation I tend to focus on what can go wrong before thinking about what could go right.
As former Intel CEO Andy Grove once said, “Only the paranoid survive.” This has been my operating manual for most of my life. I’ve been paranoid of failure. I’ve been afraid of uncertainty.
However, as I’ve gotten older I’ve started to appreciate the other side of uncertainty. The side where things go right. Where they go more right than you could ever expect. These are known as “upside surprises” and they can be absolutely delightful.
The most recent upside surprise I’ve had came last week at FutureProof, the financial conference my firm co-hosts in Huntington Beach, California.
When I first heard the idea for FutureProof many years ago, I was a bit skeptical. It’s going to be outside? What about the weather? People will be wearing casual attire? Who will take it seriously? I had more questions than answers.
But after my first time attending it in 2022, I got it. It turned the traditional conference experience completely on its head. No more stuffy ballrooms with suits and boring catering. It was shorts, sunshine, and food trucks. Now that I’ve attended for the last three years, it’s hard to imagine doing a conference any other way.
But a cool conference is just the beginning of the upside surprise. The growth of that conference has been even better. Don’t quote me on these numbers, but in the first year FutureProof had 1,300 attendees, something like 2,200 in its second year, and over 4,200 this year.
Yes, FutureProof doubled in a year after basically doubling the year before that. And it felt that way. Everything was bigger and a bit more polished in 2024 than in prior years. Just look at the scale of this thing:
And, as much as I want to take credit for it, it’s really the work of Matt Middleton and his team alongside my firm’s founding partners. If you had told me that FutureProof would’ve gotten this big this fast, I wouldn’t have believed you.
But the growth of the conference still pales in comparison to the connections I’ve made there. That’s been the biggest upside surprise of all. I’ve been able to meet fellow content creators, advisors, and readers face-to-face that I probably would have never met otherwise.
I got to give away 150 signed copies of my first book in 2022. And then I gave away some more in 2023 and even more this year:
Of course, I didn’t know this was going to happen at the onset. I had no clue how great this would be for building my network in the financial community, but it’s the best kind of networking I’ve ever seen. As a result, the uncertainty that I used to fear I’ve come to embrace.
Embracing uncertainty can work wonders for your career, your investments, and your life. I can tell you from personal experience how much my career has benefited from the positive side of uncertainty. For example, Just Keep Buying sold more copies in Japan than it has sold in the United States! And I don’t know any Japanese (besides konnichiwa). That’s been the biggest surprise of my career because I never could’ve predicted it beforehand.
But that’s how this works. It’s hard to see how well things can go when you are always afraid of uncertainty. On the investment side, it reminds me of this incredible piece Drew Dickson wrote on Amazon that contained the following thought experiment which I paraphrased:
Imagine it’s 2007 and a bunch of research analysts are debating what Amazon’s revenues will be like in 2020. One group of these analysts (let’s call them the “value” group) believes that Amazon will have $27 billion in revenue in 2020. But another group (let’s call them the “growth” group) thinks Amazon will have $37 billion in revenue by this time.
The two groups disagree on almost everything. They have different assumptions about expected GDP growth rates, Amazon’s margins, and what Amazon’s earnings will look like in 2020. Yet, despite their differences, both groups turned out to be astronomically wrong. Because Amazon’s revenues weren’t $27 billion or $37 billion in 2020, they were $386 billion!
Even the best and brightest couldn’t have known just how well Amazon would do over the coming decade. Of course, Amazon is a serious outlier, but you can get a similar upside surprise through index funds. After all, who in 2023 believed that the S&P 500 would be up over 20% in 2024? Few, if any.
The same logic holds for your personal life as well. If you meet new people you might be surprised by how much they can change your life. Research shows that those who will be most helpful in your career aren’t necessarily those closest to you, but those just a bit further away. These “weak ties” as researchers call them are more likely to give you that career boost than someone in your inner circle.
For example, when analyzing LinkedIn data, researchers found that, among job hunters, the best connections were those who shared 10 mutual connections with you. As they stated:
If you share more than [10 connections] with someone on LinkedIn, the usefulness of your connection to the other person, in job-hunting terms, diminishes.
The bigger question is: how do you take advantage of upside surprises? Well, you have to allow them to happen in the first place. You have to put yourself out there and take risks. Those risks can come in the form of creating content, investing capital, or meeting people. Whatever you decide to do, ultimately you have to risk getting embarrassed.
After all, what’s more embarrassing than creating a piece of art that no one wants or meeting someone that doesn’t like you? These are deep forms of rejection. They hurt. I’ve been there. You have too.
But that’s the only way you can ever experience an upside surprise. Because no great reward comes without great risk. So embrace the risk. Embrace the uncertainty of what the future holds. You may just find that it’s more than you imagined.
Thank you for reading!
If you liked this post, consider signing up for my newsletter.
This is post 417. Any code I have related to this post can be found here with the same numbering: https://github.com/nmaggiulli/of-dollars-and-data
