NFA Finance

Today’s prompt stopped me for a minute:

If you could erase one event from history, what would it be?

At first, it seems easy.

History is full of terrible things. Wars. Terrorist attacks. Genocide. Slavery. Assassinations. Economic collapses. Millions of innocent people suffering because of decisions they never made.

Surely there’s something we should erase.

But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized my answer.

Nothing.

I wouldn’t erase a damn thing.

Not because those things were good. Not because suffering is somehow necessary or justified.

Because once you start pulling threads out of history, you have absolutely no idea what comes unraveled with them.

History Is a Chain Reaction

We like to imagine history as a collection of individual events.

It isn’t.

It’s one enormous chain reaction.

One event causes another. That creates a reaction. Someone makes a decision because of that reaction. Somebody invents something. Somebody moves across the country. Somebody meets somebody they otherwise never would have met.

Governments change.

Technology changes.

Families are created.

Businesses are built.

Entire generations take different paths.

Change one major event 100 years ago and there’s a very real possibility that millions of people alive today simply wouldn’t exist.

Including maybe you.

That’s the part people forget.

We know what happened.

We have absolutely no idea what would have happened instead.

And that makes erasing history a much bigger gamble than it sounds.

Then I Started Thinking About My Own Life

This question gets even more interesting when you stop talking about world history.

What if you could erase something from your own history?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Everybody has something.

A relationship that destroyed them.

A business that failed.

Money they lost.

A decision they wish they could take back.

Someone who betrayed them.

An opportunity they missed.

A period of their life they’d rather forget completely.

I’ve got mine.

Plenty of them.

There are things in my life that, while I was living through them, I would’ve gladly erased.

But today?

I’m not so sure.

Because some of the things I hated the most taught me the most.

Some of the biggest mistakes changed the way I make decisions.

Some of the biggest losses changed the way I look at money.

Some of the hardest situations showed me exactly who I could trust.

Some doors closing forced me through doors I never would’ve opened otherwise.

That’s life.

The Thing You Want to Erase Might Be the Thing That Built You

That’s the uncomfortable part.

We want the lesson without the pain.

We want the wisdom without making the mistake.

We want the strength without ever having to struggle.

It doesn’t usually work that way.

You touch the stove.

You get burned.

And suddenly you understand fire differently.

That’s not motivational bullshit. That’s experience.

Experience has a price.

Sometimes it’s cheap.

Sometimes the tuition is fucking brutal.

But once you’ve paid it, you might as well learn something from it.

Because otherwise you paid for nothing.

I Don’t Want a Different Past

There was a time when I probably would’ve answered this question differently.

Today, I don’t think I would change it.

The good.

The bad.

The wins.

The disasters.

The people who stayed.

The people who left.

The money made.

The money lost.

The smart decisions and the unbelievably stupid ones.

It’s all part of the same road.

And I’m standing where I’m standing today because I traveled that exact road.

Erase one piece and maybe everything changes.

Maybe it’s better.

Maybe it’s worse.

Nobody knows.

So I’ll take the scars.

I’ll take the lessons.

I’ll take the entire messy fucking story exactly the way it happened.

Because there’s something incredibly freeing about realizing you don’t need to rewrite yesterday.

You only need to decide what you’re doing today.

Flip the Switch

You can’t erase history.

And maybe that’s a good thing.

You can’t undo the bad investment.

You can’t unsay the words.

You can’t get the years back.

You can’t change what somebody did to you.

You can’t climb into a time machine and make the perfect decision knowing everything you know now.

But you can use it.

That’s the difference.

Your past can become baggage you drag around for the rest of your life.

Or it can become information.

Lessons.

Fuel.

Perspective.

Maybe the goal was never to erase the bad chapters.

Maybe the goal is to make sure the next chapters are so damn good that you finally understand why you needed them.

I wouldn’t erase a damn thing.

I’d just keep writing.

Flip the Switch.

— Modern Day Dealer