for a long time i have
made the occasional video on the occasional comment and the occasional blog post about a
phenomenon that i've noticed in the last 10 12 years or so that is when a person
faces or has experienced some real setback in their life they have a choice to have a choice
about accepting it no matter how bad it is and trying to move on and pick themselves up or
feeling sorry for themselves feeling victimized harboring their grievance harboring a grudge and
searching around essentially for somebody to blame for the difficulty that they have experienced
the most obvious example that i can see is that it happened to me
when the property market crashed in 2008 or there abouts 2006 seven or eight or whatever year it was
that wiped me out financially because i had invested everything that i'd made in my life up to
that point over about 20 years of relative success in business in property and the property market
crashed and you quickly discover if you're ever in your unfortunate position of putting all their
eggs into one basket that when the tide goes out in a particular market there's really no fighting
it's virtually impossible and it's just tough but there's not a whole pile you can do about it
so when the market goes against you it goes against you and it may well leave you stranded
and that's it john quinn and anthony dr anthony a.j o'reilly were two of the wealthiest
if not the most wealthy men in ireland around about that time were up to that time and yet
both of them was a consequence of the property crash both of them declared bankruptcy
but to get back to the personal situation where i lost everything at the time
i had a choice i could blame economists i could blame the banks i could blame the government i
could blame for in the fall i could play in phoenix i could blame anybody that i chose
but it wasn't going to change anything and i was facing a choice of looking for somebody to blame
or looking to see what exactly i was going to do then and what i did then was i changed careers
completely i ended up going back to college to study law
at the wrong side of 40 years of age i eventually then relatively quickly qualified as a solicitor
i set up my own practice i'm doing pretty well and things have looked or worked out
pretty well over the succeeding 10 or 12 years 14 years now probably the crash the biggest part of
the crash or how it affected me was probably 2008 this is 2022 14 years ago but i had a choice then
pick myself up and have a go at something else or the same thing again or go back to retail
or as i say i could feel sorry for myself and blame other individuals other institutions
other people feel sorry for myself and do nothing and a lot of people took that route unfortunately
and regrettably a lot of people took that route and spent the succeeding years looking
for somebody to blame and finding plenty of people to blame quite frankly nobody really cares because
people are so busy with getting on with their own life and getting on with their
own day-to-day difficulties that you dragging around these grievances these grudges like a
clanking chain for the next 10 15 years going into the courts and so on and trying to fight debt
debt to the bank on some technical ground none of those technical grounds worked
none of those fights really worked the bottom line is
the persons who engaged in trying to fight the banks with some sort of a defense generally of a
technical nature didn't succeed but the people who picked themselves up and went on and did something
else accepted that they had made a catastrophic mistake or found themselves in a catastrophic
mess which they couldn't fix but they decided to go on and do something else those people
made a different decision and recently i watched a video there and there's an old guy charlie munger
he's one of the most successful investors of all time he's 92 years of age of their bills
he's warren buffett's sidekick he's shareholder along with warren buffett in berkshire hathaway
and i saw a brief clip of him on youtube and he says he's no time for victims
but he has a lot of time for survivors and it clicked with me then that the blog posts that
i've written and the videos that i've made about people making this choice of having a choice and
making what i view as the wrong choice and having the wrong attitude charlie munger
succinctly summed it up in saying that you can be a victim or you can be a survivor
and you can you have a choice so with the benefit of hindsight and with the benefit of charlie
munger's 92 years of wisdom and with the benefit of the short little youtube clip i happened to see
accidentally earlier this week i recognized that i'm a survivor not a victim even though
what happened at the time was catastrophic and very very difficult to deal with but it propelled
me in a different direction it forced my back to the wall he forced me actually into that garage
there behind me to hit the law books and ending up embarking on a career that has led me to set up my
own solicitors practice and have done pretty well since then it's certainly not a decision that i've
regretted but i had a choice then i had a choice to be a victim and spend the next 12 14 years
blaming people and dragging my grievances around like clanking chains or i could be
a survivor and i chose to be a survivor and i think there's a lot to be learned there from
never mind what i have to say but look at what charlie munger has to say
but what he said so simply you have a choice when things go really badly wrong
when there's a catastrophic incident some seminal some really disruptive incident in your life
you can choose to be a victim or you can choose to be a survivor hope you find this video useful and
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