You are Colorblind and I Can Prove it.

In the mid-2000s, I lived in a suburb of Atlanta.  It was a terrific place to be for several cultural reasons, not the least of which was the cuisine.  Having grown up in the Northeast, I was deprived of having eaten a “real biscuit” until I was well into my twenties.  That said, it was near impossible to get a “real bagel” in the South (rumor has it there was a decent bagel shop near Emory University, but I never found it).  I tried explaining to a dear friend that all of the proxies she had been eating in Georgia should not even be allowed to be called “bagels”. They didn’t have the right combination of textures.  For goodness sake, I don’t even think they were boiled! Having never been to New York, she didn’t really understand the difference.

One day she took her first trip to New York City.  I received a text message that morning that I will never forget.  It read, “Now I know that for my entire life, I had just been eating toast!”  Her world expanded that day in a New York bagel bakery. It wasn’t her fault that she had never really understood before.  She had been “bagel blind”.

For a long time, it was believed that dogs were colorblind.  Some people still believe it to be so. It turns out that they see more than black, white, and shades of grey.  It is true that they are able to perceive a range of colors that is more limited than what we humans can distinguish.  Their visible spectrum consists mostly of yellows, blues, and violets.  I say that if a dog is “colorblind” because it has a limited range of observation, then maybe we all are.

The visible spectrum of many insects and spiders include ultraviolet light.  Other animals, like snakes, can see infrared. Humans can see neither of these.  They have been around since the beginning of time, humans were just unaware of them.  Thanks to technology, today we use these kinds of “invisible colors” to do things like sterilizing medical equipment and detecting heat patterns in the human body.  The fact that medical science has an expanded spectrum of useful light has given us all the opportunity to live healthier lives.

When I was a young financial advisor in Georgia, I worked for a St. Louis-based investment firm.  It was a traditional brokerage house that moved a few hundred people through their training program each year.  That program consisted of a few days of training at the home office and some self-study in our own locations around the country.  With that many trainees and only a few days to teach us everything from sales techniques to software usage, the scope of the actual investment education was limited.

I was an honest and hardworking individual in my twenties, and I stand by the good work that I did for my clients.  That said, I know now that I was colorblind. It wasn’t until my career path led me to meet hundreds of diverse investment experts, that I began to truly understand all of the things that I wasn’t aware of when I worked for a traditional brokerage firm.  There was a broader universe of investment solutions, styles, and strategies that I would have never learned if I had not made conscious decisions to expand my experience and continue my education beyond what was simply necessary to do a job competently.

There are thousands of “colorblind” professionals in the world today.  These may be honest people who are simply doing the best work that they can with the range of choices that they were taught.  Most of them don’t know that there is a better way out there, just like a doctor from a century ago did not know about ultraviolet light.  Others might be aware of better choices, but for whatever reason have decided not to learn how to use them. In the aging industry of financial advice, it is not uncommon to come across someone who simply stopped learning decades ago, under the assumption that they “know it all”.  This is a dangerous way to think in an ever-expanding universe of knowledge. The simple fact is that no single person knows it all. One needs to either be willing to learn new things from other experts or choose to work with blinders on.