The Noble Art of Self-Deception

I have been running Investment newsletters for 19 years , Currently over 33,  prior to this I was an Investment Banker @ one of the most prestigious Investment Banks on Wall Street moving on to own my own Investestment Bank a year later doing at least 3-5 Deals a year. I am not saying this to impress you but rather to impress upon you I know the True reasons Stocks go up and down. After I ran out of passion for doing deals I started my first Hedge Fund/ Private Equity ./ Merger Acquisition firm. Then in 2008 by accident, I discovered the Investment Newsletter Business I figured we are doing the work any way why not market and sell the ideas to the world in 15 years I have made over $1.2 BB selling Investment newsletters and have spoken with countless of thousands of newsletter clients and what I can tell you with beautiful certainty is you lot are the most delusional egotistical over-confident scared to death cowards who have a better shot at starting quarterback and winning the next Super Bowl then you have at making money in the markets.

But because of my never quit attitude, I keep trying to help you wannabees.

Only 1% of our clients make real money with us Want to know what they do that you don't? They Fuck#$ Listen

I have learned the smaller the account the more delusional the person I guess it's the same for the small penis new Corvette group.

or the Napoleon complex I guess by now you get the idea.

I tell clients all the time and I am a very respectful man however I believe the only way you can ever become something that you are not is to first accept your reality. Once you accept the truth of your reality then and only then is it possible for you to become this thing you desire whatever that thing may be.

 I will give you a recent example. I brought in a new account over the phone my initial read on this client was he for lack of a better way of saying it was going to be a complete waste of my time and no amount of time lessons spent with this person would make a difference my instincts like 99.9% of the time were dead on.

He told me @ the age of mid 60's only had $10k to invest and ask me what I thought he should do 

What I do is try my best to understand the wants and needs of my clients and give an honest answer with the truth 

The truth as I see it another words what I would do

So I went on to explain that in my 19 years of running investment newsletters, one of the biggest mistakes I see is clients putting down way to many trades they never have the type of money behind a trade that can make a difference They believe they do this because it's smart and call it diversification but the truth is they are just cowards who are afraid of losing the money on a single trade. This mindset never makes money.

Never If you doubt what I am saying get honest with yourself has this strategy ever made you money?

Fu$k no.

small losses small gains small wins you are never going to put a couple of $1,000 behind a trade and wake up one day a millionaire

You have a good of chance of that happening as me waking up tomorrow a big fat Japanese Woman.

The solution to your problem just put the trades in we give you the way we tell remove your thoughts, ideas opinions from the equation and we will stuff more money in your pockets than you have ever dreamed of

And don't be an asshole who goes on yahoo finance to do what you think is research on our ideas the shit you read out there is written by some kid who can't even pay his students loans let alone make money 

KEY POINTS

• Psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning revealed people seriously overestimate their abilities.

• Kruger and Dunning explain incompetent individuals have poorer metacognition compared to competent ones.

• Metacognition is the ability to reflect on and assess one's own thought processes.

This is a fictional story but it gets the point across.

Where I grew up, there was a lumberjack who was an oddball. He was stingy, surviving on coarse bread, grease, and salted herring. The remaining money was spent on vodka.

It is said that during his evening meal, he would spread grease on a slice of bread and place a piece of herring from a jar at one end of the bread. As he ate, he moved the herring farther away from the bread. Finally, when he finished the last piece of bread, he would return the herring to the jar and exclaim aloud to himself: "I fooled you again, you stupid bastard."

Who was fooling whom? The lumberjack was not schizophrenic, but like everyone else, he sometimes had a dialog with himself: Should he eat the herring now or save it for his future self? The herring became increasingly rancid, the more he favored the future.

Life Lies

How is it possible to deceive oneself? Wouldn't one immediately recognize the trickery if attempted? In reality, we are surprisingly adept at deceiving ourselves, often unconsciously. Psychologists have long understood that people live with various kinds of life lies, but self-deception manifests in many more contexts.

Self-deception operates because the self is not an indivisible entity: The unconscious side of the self can deceive the conscious one. One form of self-deception involves expressing a desire to achieve a particular goal while unconsciously working towards another. This strategy is succinctly summarized by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal's aphorism: "The heart has its reasons which reason does not know at all."

We overestimate ourselves to prioritize ourselves over others and thus survive. If we were to perceive our objectively true selves, we would likely become despondent.

Deception does not always involve outright lies; it can also involve an exaggerating of certain characteristics. Literal self-embellishment—makeup, hairstyling, clothing choices—is an everyday form of self-deception that most people engage in. Rarely do we desire to reveal our authentic selves.

Most individuals harbor illusions about themselves and believe that they possess above-average positive qualities. We tend to think we are more intelligent, honest, friendly, original, and reliable than average. We also believe that we will live longer than average and drive better than average (even those who have been hospitalized for traffic accidents hold this belief). Moreover, these illusions extend to self-reflection: Most people perceive themselves as less influenced by such illusions than the average person.

Overestimating Our Abilities

Naturalist Charles Darwin long ago observed that self-confidence more often stems from ignorance than knowledge. For example, drivers who have been involved in accidents or people who have failed a driving test are worse at judging their performance on a reaction test than experienced drivers are.

Social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning conducted a series of tests revealing that people who are among the worst in terms of reasoning logically, writing grammatically, or understanding humor, for example, seriously overestimate their abilities. On average, the lowest-performing quarter of the participants rated themselves as being in the top 40 percent.

Metacognition

Kruger and Dunning explain this self-assessment by asserting that incompetent individuals possess poorer metacognition compared to competent ones. Metacognition is the ability to reflect on and assess one's own thought processes.

For example, the ability to write a grammatically correct sentence is akin to the ability to recognize that there is a grammatical error in a sentence. Hence, if they fail to recognize their mistakes, they will grossly overestimate their ability to write grammatically correct.

Incompetent individuals, therefore, bear a two-fold burden: Not only do they draw the wrong conclusions and make the wrong decisions, but their incompetence also robs them of the metacognitive ability to recognize their shortcomings.

On the other hand, the top quarter of the subjects in the experiment slightly underestimated their competence on average. This aligns with research demonstrating that experts in a field have much more developed metacognition when it comes to problem-solving than novices.

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Positives

A beneficial effect of overestimating oneself is that positive illusions lead to better health and longer life. Studies conducted on HIV-positive people revealed that those with excessively positive perceptions of themselves exhibited a significantly slower progression of the disease.

Similarly, patients who perceived no risk in an upcoming operation tended to recover more quickly after surgery compared to those who were concerned about the procedure. Furthermore, women who denied problems associated with a breast cancer diagnosis had fewer disease recurrences of the disease compared to others.

I travel extensively, both for work and vacations. Most of the time I carry a camera to capture people, places, and moments that I want to remember. Often, I find myself attempting to embellish the pictures, for example, only capturing people when they appear happy or deliberately excluding an ugly house in a beach photograph. I believe many amateur photographers can relate to this behavior.

Why do I really want to embellish the images? My perception has been that I want to present others with more appealing depictions of my experiences than they actually were, much like dressing up to look good. However, I rarely show the pictures to others; instead, I mostly deceive myself.

In fact, what happens when I embellish a photo is that I design a memory. My memory of the trip will be largely colored by the images I choose to preserve. I deceive myself into thinking that the trip was more golden than it really was.

Apart from everyday self-aggrandizement, one of the most prevalent forms of self-deception involves selectively choosing which information to acknowledge. “What I don't know can't hurt me" is a prime example of self-deception.

The common understanding of self-deception posits the existence of hidden urges and other unconscious forces that drive our actions, while conscious motives guide our actions, or so we believe. In fraudulent cases, the unconscious does not align with the conscious.

Hence, the paradox of self-deception lies in the question of how we can avoid discovering that the interpretations we make of our actions are, in the long run, so poorly aligned with our actual behavior. Our consciousness never encourages us to be honest with ourselves. A life free from self-deception can only be attained through an unadulterated understanding of our actions.

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