Do Your Own Research (DYOR)

It’s generally true that you shouldn’t take advice from anyone willing to give it to you for free.

If you lived through 2021 in any social media or tech spaces, you may have noticed the rash (yes, a rash) of crypto influencers who suddenly prefaced their tweets, etc with “Not financial Advice / Do your own research” or NFA/DYOR. Most of these people had no business being misconstrued with financial advisors in the first place but it serves as at least a flimsy disclaimer for people who are probably about to dispense their financial advice.

But I don’t give medical advice for the same reason that I don’t give financial advice: I don’t have a license, just a non-civilian body of knowledge, and I’m not getting sued (again). Nothing on this blog or anywhere else I write can be considered “advice.” If you take advice from me blind in any context where you have not paid dearly for it, I regret to inform you that you’ve failed the first rule of survival: Do your own research.

Mental models, like physical bodies, are refined over time.

DYOR

This really isn’t a financial term. It’s a lifestyle recommendation. Consider that until you develop the ability to parse information and integrate it into whatever framework is applicable to your life, all information is essentially worth the same to you: Nothing.

Sounds exhausting and time consuming.

Mental models, like physical bodies are refined over time. In fact, they must be. Without force, entropy reigns. Your way of thinking about things is a reflection, whether you care or not, of the information you’ve been exposed to over time and which parts you have integrated into everything else that was there before it.

If you don’t have your own model, you will just seek isolated facts and replace one with another. Spinning your wheels, wasting time and probably money. People do this with diet a lot, which is why there’s always a new fad diet to follow, and why people who maintain high levels of health and fitness over their lifetime are never on them, but I digress.

There are a million version of the saying “You need to learn the rules in order to break them.” So there’s nothing wrong with acquiring new information from other people, especially people with more experience than you have. But there’s a difference between learning things rote from other people and being able to apply the information to a context in your own life. No matter someone’s level of expertise in any given subject, they aren’t you and therefore could never know what’s best for you in the present moment of your own life.

It’s nice that you’re reading this. I’ve been at it for a while.

That said: Do your own research. Probably the greatest advantage of age is the cycles over time you’ve had to refine your own models. If you’re paying attention, you become more efficient, with exposure and experience, in distilling external sources down to what is essential for you, saving you the pain of mistakes and, paradoxically, time.

Time is non renewable, making it our most precious resource. What you exchange it for matters more than most other things in your life (second to snacks, imo). Good luck out there.