The patterns repeat itself
The patterns repeat itself
again, again and yet again
Daily musings #600 - Tuesday, 13 September 2022
What history teaches us is that patterns repeat themselves. Good and bad cycles. Ups and downs. An example is the interest rate cycles that we are currently experiencing. And the housing downturn. We have forgotten about these in the last 14-year cycle of growth, low-interest rates, and housing pricing increases and consider them as norms. Surprise people. You have been fooled.
One of my May book reads was Ray Dalio’s Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail a book on patterns of change over about the last 1500 years. I am a pattern thinker and it was an interesting read. And I realize what potential future patterns could be. The timeline might vary but it is just the “when” not the “if” of it happening. I continue to follow the data point publications on the sister site to the book at the EconomicPrinciples.org website.
One of the things that I do is to apply similar patterns to organizations as well. If one considers an organization as a country, one could easily see how a country’s culture and the place that this particular organization has in that ecosystem are impacted by patterns of change happening in such similar cycles. FAANG stocks as they are called - Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google are individually larger than several countries’ GDP and have higher growth capabilities than most countries by a wide margin.
Humans have short memories for patterns. We are stuck in generational patterns of our own generation. I can see my in-laws stuck in the past from 50 years ago even though they live in the “today”. There is an expectation of the good yesterday that is never coming back. My wife and I are similarly stuck in the generational gap of 25 years between our parents and our children on both sides. And we therefore see and expect different things.
We are not able to see beyond our immediate past. We have no memories of the past like World War II or the recession in 1917 post-world War I as we didn’t exist at that time. We have not experienced any previous pain, nor can we understand human growth in war and peace cycles in the 1700s and 1800s or the previous 1,000 years. In fact, we hardly even remember the COVID pandemic of the last two-three years but just badly. We empathize but in reality, do not feel the pain of the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the exodus from the middle east war into Europe. We neither understand past patterns nor current patterns that we see but don’t experience. But we indeed are surprised when our expectations of yesterday don’t continue to hold and things change.
Net off it is that we could be better off if we step back a little and look at things as patterns. Accept that things change. Both up and down. For good and bad. With happiness and pain. Everything is fleeting. And sometimes it persists for generations for real change to come. If one lives long enough.
Overall in spite of the challenges that I have gone through, I have lived some lucky times. So thankful for what I have had so far. And trust that I will be okay with the variety of patterns that I will be exposed to.