Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
You’ve seen the ads for the financial products. The flow charts show how the company’s stock has out performed its competitors for the last twenty years. The words which are said give, for all intents and purposes, an ironclad guarantee that it will never be different. You should call your broker now and buy as much of the product as you can afford! Then you get to the fine print. If you are listening to the ad on the radio, the next words you hear will be spoken as quickly as humanly possible.
Listen closely.
Performancedataquotedaboveishistorical.Pastperformanceisnoguaranteeoffutureresults.Currentperformancemaybehigherorlowerthantheperformancedataquoted.Theprincipalvalueandinvestmentreturnofaninvestmentwillfluctuatesothatyourshares,whenredeemed,maybeworthmoreorlessthantheiroriginalcost.(Big breath!)
Did you get all that?
Well, they really didn’t want you to have time to think about it.
It’s difficult to sell you the future, unless you swallow the hype that the past is a guarantee of what is to come.
I sit at my computer, awaiting the inevitable words that will come. They must come; they always have. I start out with an idea, a concept, and as I begin to write the rest of the thoughts are fleshed out around it. Tonight though, all I see is that I am at an impasse. There are either too many words to come, or too few. I have numerous thoughts about the past and its relationship to the future. Not many are worth putting into print.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results. It applies to writers, too.
Will you allow me the liberty of stopping where we are? Your mind will, no doubt, have leapt to applications of the concept that I could not imagine anyway. My explanations would only seem trite and tired, by comparison.
I only ask one thing: In your consideration of the idea, will you think a minute (or perhaps more) about how grace figures into the concept?
I would be distressed if the only response I encouraged was for you to reflect on the potential for negative and disappointing events to come. And, unlike the profit-hungry dream-merchant we discussed above, grace requests–no–demands–that you consider the negative events of the past and then expect the opposite for the future.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
I think I may want to invest in that. What about you?
“A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.”
(Frederick Buechner ~ American writer/theologian)
“‘For I know what I have planned for you,’ says the Lord. ‘I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope.'”
(Jeremiah 29:11 ~ NET)
© Paul Phillips. He’s Taken Leave. 2014. All Rights Reserved.
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