A survival strategy for shocks and setbacks
People “go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
On a quiet Monday morning, you pour your coffee and check your phone only to be hit with headlines of another global market plunge. More than $5 trillion wiped out over the week. Another crisis. Another wave of uncertainty.
In his 2017 letter to shareholders, Warren Buffett wrote: “There is simply no telling how far stocks can fall in a short period.” But should a major decline occur, he continued, “heed these lines” from Rudyard Kipling’s classic poem “If,” circa 1895.
“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs ... If you can wait and not be tired by waiting ... If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim ... If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you ... Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”
Essentially, Kipling is telling us to avoid panic, slow things down, and figure out a way to survive.
A simple question can be helpful: What can I do to make things slightly better? Shocks are not the time to come up with a new long-term plan. Instead, look for small wins and avoid doing something just because everyone around you seems to. As Charles MacKay observed in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), people “go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
The same set of shocks may reach us all but how we respond must remain personal. Collective panic is broadcast everywhere, yet recovery is a solitary act. We all have to reclaim our footing in our own way, with our own tools.
Your circumstances, resources, and responsibilities are not identical to anyone else’s, so why should your strategy be? In moments of upheaval, it's tempting to default to borrowed reactions, but it often backfires. You need to craft a response that fits your reality, not the crowd’s.
This brings to bear a two-pronged chaos strategy: Take comfort in the fact that you are not alone in the suffering but remember that your path to recovery is uniquely yours. You don't have to overcome the crisis in one sweeping effort; instead, focus on making incremental improvements each day. Small, consistent actions compound over time.
Yes, compounding is more exciting when things are going well, but it's when the chips are down that we truly need to trust in it. In hard times, slow progress can feel invisible, even pointless. But that’s exactly when steady, consistent effort matters most.
Rosy dreams for the future may not seem feasible at the moment so let me end with Mike Ehrmantraut’s advise in Better Call Saul, "One day, you're gonna wake up, eat your breakfast, brush your teeth, go about your business. Then, sooner or later, you're gonna realize you haven't thought about it. None of it. And that's the moment you realize you can forget. When you know that's possible, it all gets easier." Ehrmantraut is referring to a far more grim situation in the show, but the broader lesson still holds.
Don’t forget to tune into our episode with historian Manu Pillai