The Water’s Fine
The sun was shining, birds were chirping, the sky a cloudless blue backdrop against the budding trees. It was the kind of day that makes you appreciate the warmth of the sun on your skin for the first time after months of cold weather. Sitting by the pool with my daughter it felt like a top ten spring afternoon. Feeling adventurous, I got up and dipped my toe into the water sending ripples across the surface. I immediately yanked it out. It felt like ice. Painful, bone chilling cold in stark contrast to the warmth of the sun. The idea of swimming this early in the season was a bit aggressive anyway so I returned to lounging.
A few hours later I opened the door to let the dog out and noticed my husband had put the thermometer in the pool. Curious, I walked over and took a look. Seeing the readout on the floating shark thermometer made me do a double take. 70 degrees. My toe had registered icy cold, I would have guessed 50 degrees, 55 at best. I took that toe reading, quickly rendered the pool 'unswimmable' due to the dangerous cold and didn't give it another thought. But 70?! That's not bad, I'll swim in that! It was like flipping a switch. I immediately changed my opinion despite having been certain just hours earlier that swimming was not an option. Lacking sufficient data, I assumed the frigid worst even though it wasn't even close to accurate.
I’m embarrassed by how quickly I jumped to the conclusion I did, but we all do this, often about things that are far more important. Our brains are overloaded with information, stimuli coming from all angles all the time. For the sake of efficiency, we make decisions before we have all the facts. More and more home buyers and sellers are falling into this trap. They hear a horror story from a friend or well meaning family member, read an article forecasting a market crash or a news story about rising interest rates and they take that one piece of incomplete, unquantified information and assume that buying or selling right now would be disastrous. One data point is not enough to make an informed decision about anything, certainly not something as big as buying or selling a home. Don't be like me and jump to hasty conclusions without first getting all the facts. Once you have all the information, you might find that when you dip your toe in, the water is just fine.