Rain Drops Keep Fallin’ on My Head
by Blake Young
As I alluded to last week, this past weekend I was in Southern Utah and went to Grafton Ghost Town at an extended family reunion. The Grafton Ghost town is not where Butch Cassidy lived but was one of the locations where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was filmed. My younger brother and I even took the chance to recreate the “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” bicycle scene. A good time was had by all.
As fun as it was, I want to talk about a scene in the movie where Butch and Sundance were being tracked and chased to a cliffs edge where they had to decide to fight it out and possibly die or go to prison or jump and swim.
Here’s how it played out…
Butch: [looking into the deep canyon and the river far below] No, we'll jump.
Sundance: Like hell we will.
Butch: No, it'll be OK - if the water's deep enough, we don't get squished to death. They'll never follow us.
Sundance: How do you know?
Butch: Would you jump if you didn't have to?
Sundance: I have to and I'm not gonna.
Butch: I'll jump first.
Sundance: Nope.
Butch: Then you jump first.
Sundance: No, I said!
Butch: What's the matter with you?!
Sundance: I can't swim!
Butch: [laughing] Why, you crazy — the fall'll probably kill ya!
An amazing scene that combined the tension of being pursued and comedy of thedialogue.
Like so many things in life, we have another potential lesson to learn. Butch and Sundance had the choice of two bad choices with four different outcomes. Stay and fight with two outcomes of death and prison. Jumping with two outcomes of death or survival. When we lay it out like that, it becomes, I think, apparent. The two choices are both a loss of some sort but the bigger losses are connected to staying and fighting.
All too often, when we are in trades that are losing propositions, we choose to stay and fight where our accounts suffer death or being locked up (not tradable) when the proper choice is to jump (out of the trade) and hope to live for another day. Sundance was afraid to choose the better choice in this situation because he hadn’t learned to swim. If we are to keep our choices open and be able to choose the smaller losses, it is important for us to do two things.
First learn to swim, make sure you have learned how to manage losses and keep your head above water long before you get to that cliff’s edge and long before you are forced to make a choice between two losing scenarios. The second is when you come to the edge, pause and evaluate. Take the time to determine, what am I exposed to if I stay and fight? How much more am I risking rather than taking a loss and walking away? Is exiting or jumping now, the less painful or less loss even if I am unsure and even scared.
If you have learned to swim and pause and evaluate, even the losses will be tolerable and we can trade for another day when, maybe, we will have a great trading day with no losses as we hum “nothin’s worrying me”.