11/20/2015
The following Blog was posted on November 19, 2015 at GFRC's Daily Blog link. http://www.seateddimevarieties.com/DailyBlog.htm
Please note the excellent article by Greg Johnson.
Gerry's Daily Blog
Welcome to another Blog edition and thank you for visiting today. It seems like I've been suffering jet lag for a full week as the China trip was long enough to partially convert to Asia time only to restart the conversion yesterday. By the weekend, my sleep pattern should be close to normal again.
Guest Commentary
Once again, Greg Johnson provides another article and shares numismatic wisdom that should be useful to all collectors. Coin collecting is not an exact science, rather a life long learning experience. There will be great purchases balancing the unavoidable mistakes. Read on....
Good judgment comes from experience; Experience comes from bad judgment - Greg Johnson
During the course of my collecting, I have purchased coins I shouldn’t have, not purchased coins that I should have, paid too much for some coins, sold some coins too cheap, been too focused, not been focused enough, bought cleaned coins, bought a coin with a filed rim, bought crappy coins based on photos, bid in auction without representation and hated the coin I got, bid in auction with poor representation and hated the coin I got, done business with dealers who treated me poorly, treated a respected dealer poorly, and eaten way too much at coin shows. This is but a partial list. Mistakes? Lapses in judgment? Learning experiences? All of the above?
Ultimately I think many important aspects of life in general, and collecting in particular, are summarized by the saying, “Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.” What does this say about collecting coins? There are, I think, two fundamentally different approaches to collecting which I call the “Driver’s License” approach and the “Soccer Player” approach.
The Driver’s License
A person learns to drive using methods carefully calculated to avoid mistakes, because driving mistakes can be very costly and very dangerous. One result of this is that most people aren’t really very good drivers. Their skills are developed only enough to get them safely from point A to point B. Once this minimum level needed to obtain a license is achieved, few continue to expand their abilities or push themselves to learn more and improve. They simply keep going from point A to point B. Training a minimally competent driver takes a few months.
The Soccer Player
A person learns to play soccer by making hundreds of thousands of mistakes and correcting those mistakes in order to continuously improve skills, techniques, and decision-making. Soccer is a better analogy for this process of refining individual decision-making than almost any other sport because there are no time outs and very few set plays that start from a known position on the field and progress in a predictable way. A soccer coach begins training players as young as 6 and 7 how to recognized situations and make their own decisions. Players progress by improving their skills, by improving their ability to use those skills in new and different situations, and by increasing the speed and effectiveness of their decisions. The best youth coaches remove the fear of mistakes from their players and constantly encourage them to try things they’ve not done before. Training a minimally competent college-level soccer player takes 10 years.
I do not propose to tell any individual collector whether mistake-free driver training or mistake-filled soccer training is best. I do want to point out that a collector can be like the Sunday afternoon driver who can only get from point A to point B safely when the sun is up, or like Pele, whose skill, versatility, and speed-of-play puts his team in the World Cup, or anywhere in between these two extremes. Keeping in mind that soccer players risk losing ball possession or a game, not their lives, the key distinction between the two numismatic outlooks I have discussed is in how an individual approaches risk and how they view their numismatic mistakes. I would also suggest that many collectors could, and probably should, look at their mistakes in a more positive light. Decisions that don’t work out as planned are truly valuable, integral parts of a collecting journey. Try owning your mistakes, embracing them, learning from them, and realize that when placed in perspective and used properly they can be one of the best parts of the numismatic experience.
