Yesterday, our good friend Joe from Stacking Benjamins and The Free Financial Advisor hit a major milestone- 365 days in a row of running. First, I want to congratulate Joe on the accomplishment. Doing any specific activity every day for a year takes dedication and resolve. Joe may go by the moniker “Average Joe”, but average he is not. (I would also like to think I deserve a little credit for inspiring him to do this by my getting up and walking every day at FinCon12, since he started this journey shortly afterwards, but that’s probably not the case. Still- Joe, if you want a walking or jogging partner at FinCon13, let me know.) 

Do you know about Jackalopes?

Every day for an entire year, Joe got off his couch and went for a run. And like any good blogger, he then wrote a post about it. (Though if he’d been a really smart blogger, he would have turned this into a side income project where he documented his runs every day, too, and then sold it as a book.)

But this post isn’t about tenacity or dedication or perseverance. It’s about a small line in Joe’s post about the his best day of running: “Within half a mile a little thing ran across the road in front of me…..a jackrabbit! I’d seen them before, but never up close.”

This line surprised me, and honestly, made me feel a little sad for Joe. You see, unlike most PF bloggers, Joe is actually a little older than me. That means that he went the first 40 years of his life not seeing a jackrabbit, which I find nearly inconceivable and a little sad.

I grew up in eastern Montana. I lived in a neighborhood of a dozen houses, where everyone had at least an acre, situated between a hill and a river. Across the river from us was government land. It wasn’t a wildlife refuge or anything, but people were not allowed to hunt there. I would often wake up to deer and bobcat tracks in our yard. There were snakes and skunks and more jackrabbits than you could count.

Jackrabbits were a fixture of my childhood. So much so that it would never occur to me that someone could make it into adulthood without seeing one up close. And yet, it happens.

Which brings me to the point of this post (I took the scenic route)- You can only know what you know.

Some people grow up with jackrabbits. Others grow up with Sesame Street. (In my hometown, PBS was only available via cable, and we lived too far out of the city limits for the cable company to offer service. We had only 3 channels, and I still probably spent more time watching TV than I should have.) Some people grow up with both but never got on an airplane.

Experiences that we might think are ubiquitous are not. We cannot hold others accountable for knowing what they do not know. And more importantly, we cannot hold ourselves accountable for what we do not know.

Especially as you look at retirement planning, how many times have you thought to yourself “If only I knew then what I know now”? How many times have you made a mistake with your money and learned a harsh lesson from it? So many times, we want to beat ourselves up for not knowing what we didn’t know.

It needs to stop.

Instead of wishing the past were different, we instead need to focus on the present and the future. If you have an idea of what you might not know, then seek out more information. Educate yourself. But, like it or not, humans in general learn by experience, by making mistakes. So make the mistakes and use them to learn for the future.

It may be sad that you did not see your first jackrabbit up close until you were 40, but at least on the day you do see one, you know it’s something special. It makes an impression, and now, you know.