Benjamin Beck, CFP®A rip current doesn’t care that you know how to swim. The job is to build the resilience before the current grabs hold.
Recently, I’ve spent some time in Maine, Aruba, and most recently in South Carolina. I was down there with my son, Griffin. He had a baseball tournament in Myrtle Beach that lasted for most of last week. And the first thing that caught me off guard about Myrtle Beach wasn’t the hotels or the crowds. It wasn’t even the beach itself. It was the Carolina shoreline.
You stand on the dunes where we were, and you look north, you look south, and it feels like somebody forgot to put an ending to the beach. It just keeps going. And then there was the water itself. We’d just gotten back from Aruba a little while earlier, and Aruba is so deep in the Caribbean that it’s about as warm and inviting as anywhere I’ve ever been.
Yet the ocean water in Myrtle Beach was warmer, at least this time of year. You see this gigantic Atlantic Ocean, waves crashing everywhere, and the water literally feels like somebody filled the whole thing with warm bathwater.
It’s beautiful. Completely inviting. The kind of place that makes you want to sprint straight in without giving a lot of thought to what might be happening underneath the surface.
Unseen dangers
And as Griffin and I were walking the first day over the dunes toward the beach, the first thing I noticed were the red flags.
If you spend any time around the ocean, you know what those mean. Dangerous surf. Rip currents.
And I had a 13-year-old boy standing next to me, which by definition means Dad doesn’t know anything. That’s just his age. So before we even got in the water, I stopped him and explained a bit about what rip currents were, and I pointed out something most people probably wouldn’t even notice.
The waves weren’t just breaking toward shore. The water had almost this sideways movement to it. It looked uneven.
So I explained to him, or tried to at least, that if you ever get caught in a rip current, the very worst thing you can do is exactly what every instinct in your body tells you to do. Don’t fight it. Don’t try to overpower the ocean. Swim sideways. Get out of that narrow channel first, and then head back to shore. It’s one of the most counterintuitive things you’ll ever hear, because every fiber of your body is going to scream, swim back to safety. But that’s exactly how folks find themselves in trouble. They exhaust themselves fighting against something that doesn’t need to be fought.
And I figured maybe he should hear it from somebody besides Dad, who again, doesn’t know anything. So before we got in, I wandered over with him to the lifeguard.
"Same message. Stay close by. The lifeguard says, the surf’s a little rough today. If you get caught, don’t fight it. Swim parallel to the shore."
And I remember thinking, perfect. Dad says it. Lifeguard says it. Surely that’ll be enough.
Well, wouldn’t you know it. For a while, everything was great. We laughed, we jumped in the waves, we got knocked around a bit. I stayed close to him the whole time. I’ve been in rip currents before. We weren’t in deep water. I wasn’t overly concerned.
But then one wave came up that was just a little bigger than the others. And as close as I was to Griffin, it knocked him completely off balance. As the water rushed back out, you could immediately feel the pull. It was not the most violent I’ve ever faced, but it was definitely different, and it was strong enough that you instantly knew this wasn’t the same as what we’d been playing in five minutes before.
Fear Overtaking Knowledge
And it was fascinating to watch, because as I watched Griffin try to get up, I could literally see his face change. He didn’t scream. It wasn’t panic. But I watched the confidence quietly give way to a level of seriousness. It was almost as if you could see the thought cross his mind that maybe there actually is something to this.
And then something happened that’s been stuck in my head ever since.
Everything we talked about, everything the lifeguard had told him, everything he technically knew at that point, it all disappeared. He didn’t swim sideways. He swam straight toward the shore. He fought it. He was thrashing around a bit trying to regain his balance, and every instinct took over. Fear overtook knowledge.
Now, I was standing only a few feet away. I wasn’t upset or scared, because I understood what was happening, and because we were in pretty shallow water. This wasn’t a dangerous situation. But Griffin didn’t know that.
From where he was, and he’s a lot lighter than I am, the current felt so much stronger than it did a moment ago, and all of a sudden the waves were bigger than a minute ago, and the confidence he walked into the water with had disappeared.
I just told him to stop fighting, roll on your back, move sideways, and I will float out to you. And within moments, the current let go. As fast as it started, it was over.
As we were making our way back to the hotel a little while after that, we stopped at the outdoor showers, rinsed off, and started talking about what we wanted to do for dinner. Now, my son didn’t stop me and say, Dad, you were right. That’s just not how 13-year-old boys work. But I didn’t need him to. I could tell something had changed a little.
Swimcoach or lifeguard
And the whole thing reminded me of a phrase I had actually written on the wall in our office a few years ago.
"Swim coach or lifeguard? I took that idea from Greg Glassman, the founder of CrossFit. His point was simple. If you ignore your health long enough, eventually you’re no longer looking for a coach. You’re looking for someone to save you."
The swim coach teaches you how to move through the water when you’re not in danger. The lifeguard shows up after everything has already gone wrong.
I’ve thought about that phrase over my career thousands of times, I’m sure. And standing on the beach that day, I realized that’s exactly what we do as financial advisors.
People think they panic because markets go down. I don’t think that’s true. Markets have always gone down. Markets always will go down. I think people panic because they’re shocked that things are happening counter to what they expected, and they’re intellectually and emotionally unprepared in the moment for what they’re experiencing.
Those are two completely different things.
I’ve talked to clients over the years about statistics. The average. How often corrections happen. Bear markets, recessions, recoveries.
All of that matters, and it’s incredibly important, but I’ve become convinced that statistics alone don’t panic-proof anyone. Knowing that the average intra-year decline is about fourteen percent is one thing. Living through it while CNBC blasts banners about financial catastrophe, and at the same time your smarter-than-everyone brother-in-law tells you he sold everything last week before all this happened, those are two different experiences.
And where I think our profession misses the assignment is that we think our job is merely delivering information. It isn’t. That’s just the introduction.
building confidence
The other ninety-plus percent of the job is continually building resilience in our clients before resilience is even required. It’s having the same conversations over and over again.
"It’s reminding people that fear will eventually arrive. It’s preparing them for the fact that when it does, every instinct they have will tell them to do exactly the wrong thing, just like in the rip current."
What I’ve come to believe is that it almost never comes down to what actually happens. It comes down to how prepared you were when it did.
"A rip current doesn’t care that you know how to swim. A bear market doesn’t care if you’ve been investing for thirty years."
Reality doesn’t negotiate. That’s why we coach. That’s why we repeat ourselves. That’s why we talk through the bear markets when everything is going great.
We’re not trying to predict or project the next crisis. We’re trying to prepare people over and over again for the inevitability that one will eventually arrive.
The goal has never been to eliminate volatility. That’s impossible. The goal is to build enough confidence, enough resilience, and enough belief in the process that when the current grabs hold of you, as it inevitably will, you don’t abandon everything you’ve spent years learning just because fear suddenly got louder than the knowledge.
Because in the end, that’s what happened to Griffin. In the moment, fear beat knowledge. My job wasn’t to rescue him. My job is to keep reminding him of what he already knows until knowledge wins. And that’s what real financial advisors do.
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Ben Beck is Managing Partner & Chief Investment Officer at Beck Bode, a deliberately different wealth management firm with a unique view on investing, business and life. Subscribe to his newsletter Relentless Abandon on LinkedIn