When What Is New Is Fools' Gold

You hear about it all the time...

From all sorts of different organizations...

They tell you...

That they have the latest...

The greatest...

That their product or service is going to change the paradigm...

The industry...

The world...

That nothing will ever be the same again.

But how often is this actually true?

From my own fair share of research...

It is rare.

Far more often...

You come to discover that what is new...

Is actually fools' gold.

It might look valuable...

But when you inspect it closely...

You discover it is worth less than you paid...

And it would be fair to call it worthless.

What makes it worse...

Is that often in life...

We end up giving up things of worth...

For things that are valueless.

We forsake wisdom...

For the sake of foolishness.

But why is this?

It has to do with what is known as Novelty Bias.

It is a psychological bias that we have as humans...

To expect that "new" also means "better".

There is some validity to this...

Fresher food is preferable to older and spoiled food, for example.

There are also times when there are real improvements that are made in different technologies...

Making the newer version significantly better than the older version.

So it is not like this bias is without some merit

Yet...

At the same time...

We have all had times and situations where we expected something new to be better...

Except it was not.

In some cases...

It was exceptionally worse.

But here is the thing...

Companies often understand that we have this psychological bias.

More and more, organizations are trained in different aspects of human behavior...

And use that to their advantage.

Now, it may be to "their" advantage...

But it is not always to "your" good.

It may even be worth saying...

That the vast majority of companies are both willing and able...

To act unethically to push you to purchase whatever they provide...

All while knowing the negative impact it will cause you.

So what are we to do?

Lean into wisdom.

What is old sometimes is far more valuable than what is new.

Often...

We completely underestimate what is old.

I was just hearing about how, around 200 years ago, Oxford scholars had believed they had created what we considered a high-level calculus...

Only for archaeologists to discover that it had already been created 3,000 years prior by an ancient Babylonian civilization as they studied astronomy.

What is old is sometimes far more valuable than we realize...

If we take the time to understand it.

This is where so many people go wrong...

They do not really understand the past...

They have never really looked at what wisdom has to offer...

And they have written it off as valueless because it is not "new".

But the problem for them...

Is that when you do not know whether what is old is valuable or not...

You have to take the words of others...

But if the others are willing to be unethical...

And lie to you...

And are willing to continue to lie through messaging many times...

We become victim to a secondary bias...

Repetition bias.

Essentially...

The more frequently we hear something...

The more likely we are to believe it to be true...

Even if it is completely false.

What this means is that...

When we do not know what is valuable from the past...

We have two psychological biases that will be used against us...

To pay for fools' gold.

The only way to overcome this is to study and understand the past...

To discover what provides true wisdom.

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