Uncertainty is
Omnipresent, but noticed
More when things go wrong

This is a true story.

I woke up at 5am, grabbed my surfboard and wetsuit, and drove to a rocky point break just off the Pacific Coast Highway.

The wave there is famously soft and gentle and forgiving. It is also fickle. If the tide and the swell direction aren’t just so, the wave can vanish or turn into unrideable mush. It can also be overwhelming crowded.

When the swell and tides line up in the right way, the wave is incredibly fun. And this morning, the swell and tides were perfect.

I had been out the morning before and could barely catch anything because of the density of the crowd. I spoke to someone just getting out of the water as I was getting in. He told me he been surfing in the dark, before anyone was out in the water. He had the ocean to himself for a while and caught as many waves as he wanted. He encouraged me to try the same thing the next day.

And that is how I found myself floating in the dark, about 200 yards away from the rocky berm where I had stumbled in near blindness into the ocean.

I paddled to where I thought I had been sitting the day before, where I thought the waves should be breaking. The ocean was as black as tar. Orange sodium streetlights along the highway lit the mist from the waves crashing on the rocks. It made the air a murky orange and ruined any chance my eyes had to adjust to the dark.

I waited for a wave, and without warning, I got one. I heard gently splashing water above me. Before I had time to process that information, I was knocked backwards off my board by the wave and driven underwater. I frantically scrambled back on my board and paddled farther out to where the waves couldn’t break on me again.

This sequence repeated itself until I was farther out than I had ever been. I still couldn’t see out to sea at all. Looking behind me I could see the waves crashing on the boulders along the berm. There was no way to safely get out of the water.

I checked my watch. I had 20 minutes til sunrise. I looked back out to sea, thought I waited about five minutes, then checked my watch again. Less than a minute had passed. This was a nightmare.

I will never forget the dim line of the horizon popping into view as the Western sky slowly lit up from the sun in the East. It wasn’t there one minute. The next it was.

Lit by the dawn, waves came into focus and all of the fear that I had been roiling in my guts a few minutes before completely vanished.

I caught a wave I still remember vividly almost 20 years later.

The funniest thing about this situation to me is how much of my experience was driven by my perception. The ocean was just as opaque and wild after the sunrise as it had been before. The waves hadn’t gotten smaller. The rocks were still sharp and shallow.

The riskiness of the situation had barely changed. But I wasn’t paying attention to it anymore because I had visual information to distract me from the dangerous stuff and let me focus on the fun stuff.

Sometimes, it isn’t until we find ourselves in a perilous situation that we’re suddenly aware of how delicate the line is between safety and danger. The more things go well, the more we stop paying attention to the choices that make us cross the line. I think of this every time I see videos of vacationing urbanites - whose greatest daily struggles might involve slogging through traffic and finding parking - taking selfies near wild bears.

Financial risks are no different. The longer the economy sustains a run of growth, the more we forget how precious those good days really are.

When financial professionals refer to economic cycles, what we’re really saying is that every good day in a run of growth brings us closer to a peak and the next contraction. Every bad day in a recession brings us closer to the trough and the start of the next expansion cycle. This process is always happening, regardless of fiscal and monetary policies trying desperately to wrangle it into submission.

The ever-changing mass of input and outputs that we call the global economy is a lot like the ocean in this way. Different things – weather, pollution, earthquakes, the moon – push the ocean around the way politics and technology and other factors push the economy around. But there is no one thing that can be said to control it. Despite our best attempts, it remains wild and unpredictable.

Which brings us back to surfing.

Sunlight wasn’t the only thing that changed my experience of the Pacific Ocean that morning 20 years ago.

I saw other surfers getting into the water. I had put myself in harm’s way trying to get away from crowds. Now I was overjoyed to see them arrive.

It turns out one of the best ways to reduce uncertainty – in the ocean and anywhere else – is to have a team with you. You don’t have to think of everything all of the time because someone else can help with that.

Among the best things a financial advisor can add to someone’s financial life is being present with them in their financial journey. When things are going well, an advisor can make sure outperformance gets allocated to defensive positions. When things are going badly, an advisor can help navigate a person through cost and tax efficient strategies available to help minimize the damage. An advisor is an extra brain helping someone solve hard problems that refuse to stand still.

Whether it’s uncertainty about investing, taxes, retirement, social security, risk management, or your legacy, you don’t have to be floating alone in those waters.