Quiet Art

 The Quiet Art of Leaving it Alone

Most of us start by trading time for money. We work, earn, save, and hope one day to spend what we’ve built. But the real purpose of capital isn’t to be spent. It’s to create a dependable, resilient stream of income that supports you, and ideally, outlives you.

Capital is the goose, not the egg.
It’s money you don’t harass.

The shift from earning to investing requires a psychological unhooking. You have to detach your sense of income and identity from your salary. Capital doesn’t get a monthly paycheque. It doesn’t clock in at 8 and leave at 5. It breathes (sometimes strong, sometimes shallow). That breathing is the rhythm of markets, and learning to live with it is the foundation of long-term wealth.

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Liquidity and the Problem of Forced Selling

When your capital breathes out (when markets fall) the real danger isn’t volatility. It’s being a forced seller.

Forced sales turn temporary paper losses into permanent impairment of capital. If you have to sell assets in a deep drawdown to meet expenses, you lock in losses and shrink your future compounding base. A 50 % drop requires a 100 % recovery just to break even. You’ve broken the flywheel.

Liquidity is the antidote. It’s the availability of cash when you need it, without having to sell long-term assets at the wrong time. Life doesn’t happen in a straight line. Some months cost more than others. Liquidity buys you time. It lets value reassert itself.

That’s why good planning builds buffers (cash and near-cash reserves) that cover short-term needs so that long-term capital can be left alone when it’s under stress.

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Smoothing: Turning Chaos Into Continuity

Markets and life are noisy. The challenge is not to eliminate the bumps, but to smooth them enough that they don’t throw you off course.

Smoothing is about reducing short-term volatility to create the experience of dependability. In investing, that means setting aside reserves in good years to supplement income in bad years. In personal finance, it might mean using cash buffers or conservative drawdown rates so that your lifestyle doesn’t depend directly on market swings.

The idea isn’t new. The earliest insurance contracts were designed to smooth risk across merchants whose ships faced uncertain fates. One ship might sink, another might return laden with treasure, but by pooling together they turned catastrophe into inconvenience.

Smoothing acknowledges that when we live through the same storm, we don’t all have the same boats. The boat matters. It’s what turns capital into a more reliable partner.

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Asset Allocation as Planning, Not Prediction

Most people approach investing as if it’s a race to pick winners (which asset will outperform next year?, which market will surge?). But asset allocation shouldn’t be a guessing game. It’s a planning decision, not a timing decision.

Each asset behaves differently, and understanding those behaviours helps you design around your needs.

• Cash is the most liquid. It earns little, but it’s stable. Perfect for near-term expenses and psychological comfort.
• Fixed income gives your money a salary. You lend capital to others and earn predictable returns in exchange for giving up flexibility.
• Equities represent ownership. They can provide dividends (which is a management smoothed payment for allowing your capital to be put to work) but most of the reward comes from long-term capital growth. That growth depends on what buyers and sellers agree in the future, which can be volatile.

Your personal rhythm (your spending patterns, beliefs, risk tolerance, and emotional capacity for uncertainty) should drive the mix between these assets. Get as much money a job as you, honestly and responsibly, can.

A good plan doesn’t rely on guessing when markets will turn. It ensures you can survive and even thrive through all the turns they take.

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Drawdowns and the Emotional Cost of Compounding

Every long-term investor experiences drawdowns. Those periods when the value of your portfolio falls from its peak. They are the emotional tuition fee you pay for compounding.

A 10 % drawdown feels uncomfortable. A 30 % one can feel existential. But it’s the same underlying truth: prices fluctuate more than values do.

Drawdowns only become dangerous when they trigger emotional or financial panic. When there is nothing to hold on to, and a bias to do something. The investor who sells at the bottom cements the loss and often misses the recovery. The professional who must liquidate because of leverage or margin calls loses not only capital, but the right to compound from a stronger base.

The antidote is preparation. Holding enough liquidity, diversification, and humility to withstand the cycles. Managing your expectations and knowing what you have bought. You can’t control the markets, but you can control your exposure to being forced out of them.

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Risk Cover and the Cost of Being Mortal

There’s another kind of forced sale we rarely acknowledge… the one life forces on us through illness, death, or disability.

Risk cover exists to prevent those events from derailing your capital plan. Insurance, in its truest form, is collective smoothing. You pay a small amount so that, if disaster strikes, you don’t have to liquidate assets or burden others.

For a household, life cover, income protection, and medical insurance are the equivalents of liquidity buffers. They protect your compounding engine from being interrupted. They ensure your capital isn’t sold off in distress, or that your dependants aren’t forced to.

It’s tempting to see insurance as a drag. Money spent on something you hope never to use. But it’s really just another expression of stewardship: sharing risk so that no single event wipes out years of progress.

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Mental Accounting and the Psychology of Stewardship

Money isn’t neutral. We give it stories. We separate it into mental accounts. The “holiday fund,” the “retirement pot,” the “emergency stash.” Behavioural economists call this mental accounting.

It’s not all bad. These stories help us manage complexity. A “do-not-touch” capital account can protect us from ourselves. A “spending bucket” helps us live without guilt. But unchecked, mental accounting can lead to contradictions. Hoarding cash while carrying expensive debt or chasing performance in one bucket while ignoring risk in another.

The goal is not to erase mental accounting but to align it with reality.
Think of your money in layers of time and purpose:

• Liquidity layer — cash for now.
• Income layer — investments that pay dependable returns.
• Growth layer — ownership that compounds for the future.

Each serves a role. Together, they create a structure that supports both peace of mind and progress.

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From Survival to Stewardship

Wealth creation starts with survival… earning, saving, and building buffers. But it matures into stewardship. The responsibility to protect and sustain capital so it can keep serving others.

That means learning to live with uncertainty without being ruled by it. It means having liquidity for life’s bumps, smoothing for stability, insurance for the unexpected, and an allocation plan that reflects your real world, not just your return targets.

It also means accepting that markets are noisy, drawdowns are inevitable, and value creation takes time. You don’t get paid for taking risk. You get paid for bearing uncertainty while continuing to add value.

The best investors aren’t fortune tellers. They’re patient architects building futures and designing systems that survive volatility and thrive on patience.

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The Quiet Art of Leaving It Alone

The hardest part of investing isn’t finding ideas or calculating returns. It’s doing nothing when the world demands action.

Capital grows in silence. It needs space to breathe, to compound, to recover. It doesn’t like being harassed.

So build buffers. Plan your allocations around your life, not market cycles. Smooth where you can, insure what you must, and let time do its quiet work.

Because capital that is cared for (not chased, not panicked, not forced) becomes something extraordinary.

It becomes something that releases those with it to think differently.

Three Frictions to Wealth Creation

Wealth creation is hard. Not just because it takes time, patience, and discipline... but because life itself seems set up to encourage us to spend rather than save.

Living hand-to-mouth is normal. When income arrives, the natural incentive is to use it to make life more comfortable. My wife likes to tease me about this when she notices (correctly) that I too genuinely like nice things. We met when I had chosen to dramatically cut back. Not because I’ve stopped enjoying the finer things. Restraint is not about becoming a monk; it’s about choosing sustainability, within chosen contraints, over short-term gratification. You can have the nice things, there are just different choices you then have to make.

When I left corporate life, this hit home in a surprising way. Walking into shopping centres made me almost panicky. Without the cushion of a salary, every purchase looked different. My wife has coeliac disease, so when she looks at a menu, she often sees “non-food” where others see choice. I began to feel the same in shops. The shelves no longer offered me freedom, but a reminder of limits. Living off capital is not the same as living off income. Salary feels renewable. Capital feels finite. The shift in mindset is profound. Spending Capital is firing it. Permanently. Spending a salary has options.

And yet, those frictions are not moral failings. They are natural. Just like in business, where barriers to entry and exit, or the need for scarce skills, create value, personal wealth requires overcoming obstacles. If anyone could copy a good idea instantly and for free, there would be no profit in it. The obstacles are what make the rewards possible.

In my view, three main frictions hold people back from building wealth: countries, currencies, and generations.

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Friction One: Countries

It’s tempting to only invest where you spend. It feels safer to back your home team. There have even been long stretches where staying local has paid off.

In the 2000s, investing offshore often felt painful for South Africans. Those who stayed at home were rewarded. But the last decade has told a very different story. Global diversification has been the winner.

The problem is what statisticians call the “small sample problem.” Just because a small group has a certain outcome doesn’t mean they’ve discovered the secret formula. Take the “Blue Zones”... regions where people live unusually long lives. The differences often come down to small populations, not universal truths.

South Africa is just a tiny slice of the global market. Limiting all your money to one geography magnifies risks unnecessarily. It’s not about “South Africa versus the world.” It’s about recognising scale.

I see this often with clients. They’re proud to live, work, and build here, but they don’t want all their savings tied to the fate of one economy. Investing offshore gives them an engine on the outside, a second stream of security. It doesn’t mean they aren’t contributing at home. It means they are building resilience.

Here’s the way I picture it: people must pick one job. You train, study, commit. If you choose IT in the late 1990s, you might ride the dotcom wave, or graduate into the wreckage after the bubble burst. If you spend a decade training as a doctor, only to realise you dislike the work, it’s very difficult to change. Ministers who lose their faith have the same challenge. People commit their lives to a path, and changing direction can be devastating.

Money is different. It can take multiple jobs at once. It can switch industries without retraining. It doesn’t need a job interview. That flexibility is a gift we should use. Money should not be tied to one “career path” in a single country. It should be free to pursue opportunities across the world.

It’s not about abandoning your home team. It’s about not confusing investing with sport. Loyalty is admirable in rugby; dangerous in wealth creation.

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Friction Two: Currencies

Currencies add a second layer of noise.

Every week I meet people convinced the rand is about to surge to R13 to the dollar… or collapse to R25. Both can’t be right. Yet both are said with absolute confidence. The noise is relentless.

I remember it vividly myself. Back in 1999, at Kingsmead, the Barmy Army were singing their way through the exchange rate: “six rand to the pound, seven rand to the pound…” By the time they got to ten, they had to use both hands. Today, it’s around twenty-four. They need their toes, and their child's limbs. The dollar sits stubbornly between seventeen and twenty. The swings are massive.

The temptation is to treat this like a game. Guess right, and you feel clever. Guess wrong, and it stings. But those moves are so wild, it becomes more like betting than investing.

The fundamentals are clearer: strong “hard” currencies tend to hold their value. Emerging markets need to attract capital, which means offering cheaper costs (think the Big Mac Index) and higher yields. It’s not a criticism of South Africa. It’s simply how markets work.

The problem is mistaking short-term noise for signal. Watching currencies daily is like staring at the waves instead of understanding the tide. You’ll get soaked and miss the bigger picture.

This is where the idea of price versus value matters. Currency movements put a price on something. But price isn’t the same as value. A salary isn’t worth. A headline exchange rate doesn’t tell you whether your money is truly working. Obsessing over the number misses the substance.

That’s why I always come back to my mantra: get your money a job. Don’t obsess about whether today’s rate is the best. Focus on making sure your capital is consistently at work in productive assets. Currencies will fluctuate. The discipline of putting money to work matters more.

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Friction Three: Generations

The third friction is the deepest: how we think about money across time.

Too often, we live hand-to-mouth. Every decision is filtered through this month’s income and expenses. That mindset is limiting. It keeps us locked in short cycles of survival, never building the buffers that create freedom.

Sometimes, we even make hardship into a badge of honour. The “Malibu Surfer Problem” comes up in debates about universal basic income: if people are given too much support, won’t they just “check out”? Or we say, “I had it hard, so the next generation should too.”

But why? Do we really need to punish the next generation to build resilience? Surely the point is not to make life easy, but to give them enough breathing space to build skills, pursue passions, and make better choices.

Of course, capital carries its own risks. Rassie Erasmus often reminds the Springboks that no one is bigger than the team. Wealth can fool you into thinking it’s all about you. Capital needs humility and grounding.

Becoming a parent sharpened this for me. Life narrows when kids arrive. It’s no longer about your personal ambitions; you’re on the bus now, and the bus is carrying family. Wealth creation becomes less abstract, more existential. I find myself not only trying to make good decisions, but wanting to change the filter through which my children will one day make theirs.

There’s always a touch of resentment in this... not in a bitter sense, but in the deep human wish for your children to have better options than you had. More choice. Less constraint. A bigger horizon.

I’ve seen this in my own family history. My grandfather was a farmer until the weather wiped him out. Then he built a toy factory, only to lose it in a fire. Finally, he became a financial adviser. Reinvention wasn’t a luxury; it was survival.

Most people work not because it’s inspirational, but because it provides. That’s real. But capital changes the horizon. It allows future generations to choose paths not defined by immediate survival.

Sometimes you do what you want. Sometimes you do what you must. The point of wealth is to increase the proportion of the former.

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Overcoming the Frictions

Unlike us, our money doesn’t need to stick to one job. It can take on multiple roles, across borders, industries, and generations. Where people are constrained, capital is free.

That freedom allows us to be choosy. Not all good ideas are good business ideas. But your money can be directed towards the ones that are.

The practice and mindset are simple, though not easy:

• Get out of debt.

• Get a job.

• Save consistently.

• Build a buffer.

• Start getting your money a job.

Over time, your capital shifts roles. At first, it supports you. Then it begins to match you. Eventually, it surpasses you, to the point where your spending becomes a rounding error, and the engine keeps compounding for the next generation.

That’s how you chip away at the three frictions: countries, currencies, generations. You can’t eliminate them. But you can turn them from barriers into opportunities.

Wealth creation will always involve frictions. The challenge is to put your money in motion. To get it jobs that you can’t do yourself. And in doing so, give yourself and those who follow you choices that survival alone can never provide.

Get your money a job.

Pollocks

Stages, not Hacks

 

The First Stage is a Scrum

Wealth creation is not about hacks. Hacks imply shortcuts, quick fixes, a secret lever that lets you skip the hard parts.

In truth, the only real shortcuts are two very blunt tools. And those blunt tools are the same ones you’d use if you wanted to take a hammer to wealth rather than build it: concentration and leverage.

Concentration means betting everything on one thing. That’s the classic “overnight success” story we all admire. The tech founder who picked the right idea. The entrepreneur who built the outlier. The investor who picked the one stock that ran a hundred-fold.

Leverage means using borrowed money to amplify outcomes. It’s paying someone else’s money a salary in exchange for growth. If your returns are higher than the salary, you win. If they’re not, you lose... and you still owe. Imagine leading an army of a million mercenaries. If they win the battle, you look like a genius. If they lose, they turn on you, because they still want to be paid.

Both concentration and leverage can create spectacular wealth. They can also destroy it. These are not refined chisels. They’re blunt instruments. Anyone can swing them, but few survive the recoil.

The more sustainable path to wealth comes in stages, not hacks. And the first stage is a scrum.

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Stage One: The Scrum

Stage one is the hardest.

At this point, it’s all on you. You are the last line of defence against noise, accidents, and life’s randomness. Death, illness, disability, family responsibilities, redundancy, pandemics, bad luck... all of these can knock you flat.

Worse, they can push you backwards into the shadow world of wealth: the debt trap. That’s when you’re working hard just to pay the salary of the money you already spent.

In the first stage, you have to be pragmatic. Ruthless, even. You look at the menu of options and pick something difficult. Something not everyone can or wants to do. If it were easy, it wouldn’t pay.

This is where many people underestimate the grind. Stage one requires doing hard, unglamorous things, often under pressure, often alone. Your job is to turn labour into surplus. That surplus is fragile. It must be protected and reinvested.

So, what helps you survive the scrum?

• Risk cover: insurance against the catastrophic blows (death, disability, illness) that would reset the game.

• An emergency fund: liquid reserves to absorb shocks without selling your future.

• Social capital: networks, mentors, colleagues. You may feel alone, but you don’t have to be. Borrow wisdom and opportunity where you can.

Stage one is about survival and surplus. Without surplus, there is no engine. And without an engine, there are no later stages.

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Stage Two: When Your Money Has a Job

Stage two begins when your money earns as much, or nearly as much, as you do.

This is the point where compounding becomes visible. Your capital is no longer just savings. It is a worker. A co-earner.

At this stage, you face a choice:

• You can let capital shrink while supporting you in retirement. The aim is to outlive your money.

• Or you can keep working while drawing on your capital’s earnings, letting the engine continue to grow.

Stage two is fragile in its own way. Market volatility can give and take. Inflation can eat away. Overspending can undo years of progress. But for many, stage two is enough. It’s financial independence, even if not absolute. It allows flexibility, optionality, and support in tough times.

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Stage Three: Stewardship

Stage three is rare.

It’s the stage where your spending is comfortably less than what your capital earns, and the capital can still grow.

Here, your framework changes completely. Time is no longer forced through the filter of “what pays.” You can spend your days on things driven by curiosity, care, or legacy. You become a steward of capital rather than just its worker or consumer.

At this stage, your decisions aren’t about survival. They’re about purpose. You are no longer asking “How do I earn?” but rather “What do I enable?”

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Stages, Not Hacks

Too often, we mistake outlier stories for the norm. The billionaire who made one big bet. The trader who caught the cycle. The founder who built the unicorn.

Yes, those stories happen. But they are concentration and leverage. The blunt tools. For every one of those, there are thousands who swung the hammer and shattered everything.

For most of us, wealth creation is slower. It’s about progression through stages. First the scrum. Then the engine. Then, if fortune allows, stewardship.

The key is knowing where you are and what matters most at that stage.

• In stage one, survive and build surplus.

• In stage two, let capital work and protect its job.

• In stage three, steward with wisdom.

There are no hacks. Just stages. And the first stage is a scrum.

Money Gets Treated Better Than People

Money often gets treated better than people. A company can rebrand, pivot, acquire, or spin off new divisions. Its capital is fluid. We, by contrast, are much more constrained. To earn, we must pass narrow filters: someone must demand what we do, be willing to pay for it, and others must not be able to do it better or more cheaply.

And one day, our salary will stop. Whether through retirement, illness, job loss, or age, we can no longer rely on being the “active” earner indefinitely. Most of us build our lives around that expectation. Yet the more interesting question is whether we can build capital instead. Capital that pays us rather than the other way around.

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The Dividend Analogy

This is where the salary and dividend comparison becomes powerful. A company's dividend is a flow of cash, intended to be smooth, predictable, and ideally growing. It is a commitment management makes to shareholders. Share prices themselves are volatile, but dividends tend to be steadier.

Warren Buffett once noted that, on average, a stock’s 52-week high and low differ by around 80 percent. He referenced historical data from Value Line, which tracked about 1,700 companies, to illustrate how wildly prices can swing. These swings often happen without much connection to the underlying cash flows. He intentionally frames volatility as opportunity rather than fear.

Robert Shiller’s work reinforces this point with rigor. He showed that stock prices move far more than the discounted value of their underlying dividends would warrant. In other words, market noise, sentiment, and narrative drive swings beyond fundamentals. This is called the excess volatility puzzle. Shiller’s CAPE ratio, which averages inflation-adjusted earnings over 10 years, helps smooth out that noise and show a more grounded valuation metric.

The lesson for individuals is similar. Smoothing matters. Dividends are smoother, salaries (until they stop) are steady, and capital that pays dividends can bridge from one to the other.

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Retirement as a Dividend Machine

Once you stop earning, your capital must transform into your income. In South Africa, many retirees use living annuities, which legally allow you to draw between 2.5 percent and 17.5 percent of your capital each year.

• At 2.5 percent you may preserve or even grow the capital over time.
• At 17.5 percent you run a high risk of depletion unless your life is short or returns are stellar.
• The risk of outliving your money, called longevity risk, becomes very real.

In the United States, the often-cited 4 percent rule suggests that a 4 percent initial withdrawal, adjusted for inflation, gives you a better than even chance of lasting 30 years. That implies having around 25 times your intended annual withdrawal as capital. But many retirees, constrained by their actual savings, end up needing to draw more.

So a practical sustainable drawdown zone for many is roughly 2.5 to 4 percent. Above that line, you begin entering the decumulation phase and accepting trade-offs. Below it, you might preserve capital, but balancing lifestyle and security becomes a delicate art.

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First, Second, Third Generation Wealth

There are three stages of wealth. Capital can transition from active earning to quiet income.

1. First generation: building from scratch, working for every rand.
2. Second generation: capital begins to earn alongside you, and you balance salary and capital income.
3. Third generation: money earns enough that you may draw without exhausting principal, while still allowing growth.

In that third stage, drawing capital feels more like a dividend, a small fraction of a large, compounding base. You can live, grow the base, and detach more fully from the necessity of employment.

That is the destiny many financial plans aim toward: your capital supporting your life, not the other way around.

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Compulsory and Discretionary Savings

Another piece of this puzzle is how you save.

• Compulsory money, for example retirement funds and pension contributions, is often pre-tax, sheltered growth, and restricted access. It is the “forced engine” the system incentivises you to build.
• Discretionary money is after-tax, flexible, and liquid, but taxed on growth and exposed to volatility.

Compulsory savings encourage a long-term mentality because you cannot touch it too early. They act as guardrails against short-termism. Discretionary money gives you optionality but also temptation.

Part of aligning your money to be salary-like is balancing these two. Use the system’s incentives where possible, but make sure your discretionary capital also works hard, fills gaps, and gives breathing room.

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The Emotional Landscape: Identity, Fear, and Over-Frugality

One of the trickiest parts of the decumulation phase is the emotional shift. Most of our identity is tied to doing, producing, being paid. When salary stops, that scaffolding dissolves.

Thinking of money as a dividend machine helps detach identity from income. The Norway sovereign wealth fund offers a metaphor. Originally built on oil revenue, its identity is no longer just oil. It diversified globally and broke free from its original source of wealth. People, in their financial lives, can similarly detach: from “my job is who I am” to “my capital supports my purpose.”

Another emotional risk is under-consumption. People become so scared of running out that they live too tightly. They never enjoy retirement, even though the money is there. The fear that capital will be eaten away becomes a prison.

Thus, planning is not only about avoiding ruin. It is about calibrating ambition, security, and enjoyment. It is about allowing your money to feel like salary, predictable and generative, while still giving you permission to live.

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What You Can Do (Rule of Thumb)

• Aim for 2.5 to 4 percent drawdowns in your planning horizon.
• Use capital multiplied by 25 to 40 as a working target, recognising it is not a guarantee but a frame.
• Treat every bit of cash you do not need as a worker: get your money a job.
• Balance compulsory savings, which provide guardrail capital, with discretionary investments, which provide flexibility, growth, and optionality.
• Think of your identity beyond income. Allow the possibility that your life can outgrow the filters of paid work.
• Accept noise. Let the market fluctuate. Use smoothing, through dividends and stable allocations, to moderate how much of that noise hits your daily life.

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Provocative Question

How salary-like do you need your money to be?

That question is not just for the ultra-wealthy or future retirees. It is for anyone with capital or ambition. It shapes what type of assets you lean into, how much risk you accept, and how you define purpose beyond your paycheck.

It's Not About You

I’ve always been a “try hard.” At school that meant signing up for everything: sport, debating, drama, chasing every chance to prove myself or die trying (for example losing 111-0 to Martizburg College - Thanks Murray). The world rewards that. Activity is visible. Effort is measurable. Roles are sorted by who tries the hardest and delivers fastest. But the danger of living like that is you start to believe the story: that everything depends on you, that outcomes are always cause and effect, that meritocracy is fair and final. It is flattering, and it is exhausting. Over time I learned that life does not bend to our trying. It bends to context, to randomness, to relationships. The real practice is to see things as they are, and then nudge.

That wiring carried me into university and then into my early career. I raced through my studies, eager to qualify as fast as possible, and landed in an industry built for competitors. Benchmarks, performance tables, stock-picking contests; finance is structured like an endless exam. Every meeting, every appraisal, was another chance to prove whether you were winning. I told myself I could “leave my ego at the door,” but the system was designed to poke it. I would walk in calm, and by the time someone pressed the right button, I would walk out rattled.

Meritocracy is seductive like that. If you are doing well, you must be smart. If you are doing badly, you must be stupid. That story is empowering because you believe your actions matter. But it also creates a gnawing anxiety. Every setback feels like a personal failure, and every success is only temporary. When you look around and see others doing better, it whispers that you are falling behind.

That is when I started to notice the trap of being seduced by success. When you are good at something, the world nudges you to double down. You narrow yourself into the lanes that reward you most quickly. Soon you become defined by that success. But you also start neglecting the parts of yourself that are not as visible or easy to measure. The scoreboard becomes your compass, and you can lose sight of what you actually value.

The irony is that when you make it all about you, your performance, your reputation, your edge, you end up hollow. Success becomes a treadmill, and you never arrive. For me, that realisation came in the frustration of constantly defending underperformance, trying to act like a stock-picking god, or sitting through appraisals that felt more like battles of ego than constructive conversations. It was draining, and I began to ask whether this was really what life was about.

Stepping back, I began to think differently. At the time, the median income in the UK was about £2,000 a month. Globally, $11,000 a year placed you at the 50th percentile. That perspective mattered. If I could live below the median, if I could focus on what I later came to call democratic goods, the shared infrastructure of society, I did not need to constantly prove myself by chasing the next rung of status. I could choose to consume less, compete less, and buy myself freedom.

Of course, that freedom came with its own anxieties. Not everyone has the option to step away. For many, life is hand to mouth, and talk of “leaving ego behind” can sound tone deaf. But for me, it was a philosophical decision: to stop letting money be a mirror of my self-worth. Financial Yoga, as I have come to describe it, is the practice of staying motivated while detaching from the negative aspects of identifying with wealth. It is about designing a life where capital has a job, but you are not that job.

Eastern philosophy helped me make sense of this. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, is a story about war. It sounds strange for a yogic text to focus on battle, but its teaching is about dharma, or duty. Life is not about your ego, but it is about showing up for your responsibilities. You engage in the fight because your family, your dependents, your community need you. Yet you detach your identity from the outcome. You do your duty, but you do not let the result define who you are.

That is a powerful shift for financial decision-making. If you make it all about your ego, you will chase returns, overtrade, and panic when things go wrong. If you detach completely, you risk apathy. But if you anchor yourself in dharma, you find balance. You accept that randomness plays a role, that outcomes are not perfectly fair, and you focus instead on process. Saving consistently, building trust, playing the long game. It is and it is not about you.

The difference between one-off contests and repeated games is crucial here. In a one-off contest, like a school exam or a quarterly appraisal, everything is about proving yourself in the moment. In a repeated game, like a long-term advisor-client relationship, trust compounds over time. You do not need to “win” every round. You need to keep showing up, keep the conversation alive, and keep learning together. Over the long run, consistency beats theatre.

This is where “the juice” comes in, the joy of practice itself. Early on, progress is slow. Learning a skill takes at least 100 hours before you are even competent. You may feel clumsy, exposed, even embarrassed. But stick with it, and you start to embody the skill. Just as a musician no longer thinks about each note, or an athlete no longer thinks about each stride, your financial habits can become second nature. You move from “numbers to leave numbers, form to leave form.” You build a rhythm that frees you from overthinking.

The best part? You do not need to keep your craft secret. World-class performers like Josh Waitzkin talk about practicing in public, letting others see your process. The competitive advantage is not in hiding; it is in embodying. Advisors can take the same approach. Instead of trying to be the smartest person in the room, show your work. Share your process openly with clients. Build trust through transparency. Over time, that trust becomes your edge.

So what does this mean in practice? It means channeling competitiveness into system design rather than self-performance. Set spending floors and saving rails. Agree on rebalancing rules. Document beneficiary intentions and next-generation plans. These are things you can own and improve without making them part of your identity. They are repeatable, transparent, and trustworthy.

And it means remembering, always, that financial advice is about relationships. It is about listening to the client’s story, not just projecting your own. It is about creating safe spaces where people can explore anxieties without judgment. It is about helping them build habits that compound over time. None of that requires you to be the hero. In fact, the less it is about you, the more it is about them, and the stronger the results.

In the end, “It’s not about you” is not a criticism. It is an invitation. When you let go of the need to prove yourself, you gain freedom. When you stop making money your mirror, you stop chasing illusions. When you focus on dharma, on responsibilities, relationships, and trust, you find peace.

The paradox is that what you do still matters deeply. Your actions, your habits, your conversations compound into real outcomes for you and for others. But they matter most when they are not about ego. They matter when they are about stewardship, connection, and long-term growth.

So here is my challenge: make one financial decision this week that is not about you. Ask a client what “enough” feels like this year. Set one simple constraint, like a savings rail or a review cadence. Do something small, transparent, and repeatable.

It is not about you. And that is exactly why it matters.

How Much is Enough?

"How much is enough?”

It’s one of the most common questions in finance. But underneath the spreadsheets and calculators, it’s a deeper human question: When can I stop? When do I have enough to live, to breathe, to be free?

I’ve wrestled with this question myself. I once tried to stop working altogether. I hit a number I thought was “enough,” and I checked out. It didn’t quite work. Coming back to work, I realised enough isn’t just about capital. It’s about meaning, conversation, comparison, ambition, patience, and practice. It’s a wrestle, and one that doesn’t end.

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Buffers vs. Enough

A buffer is not enough.

A buffer is what gets you off the treadmill of hand-to-mouth living. It’s the first breath. The early noise absorber. A one-month cushion, then three to six months of expenses tucked away. That’s not financial freedom, but it gives you space to look up, to stop panicking every time something goes wrong.

But “enough” goes beyond the buffer. Enough comes when capital itself starts carrying the load. My friend Richard Fleuriot talks about “chocolate transitions”: the moment when your money shifts from being a silent passenger to becoming part of the household. At first, you’re the only breadwinner. Then gradually, capital chips in. One times annual spending. Ten times. At some point, the money becomes the primary caregiver, and you can start asking different questions. Questions about meaning, not survival.

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Comparison: Tool and Trap

We can’t escape comparison. Our minds work through frameworks. Benchmarks, scoreboards, neighbours. They all give us orientation. Even investing is a team sport.

Comparison has value. It motivates, keeps us honest, and holds us accountable. That’s why we measure against benchmarks. But it’s also dangerous. We see only thin slices of other people’s stories. The car, the promotion, the holiday snaps. Rarely the anxiety, trade-offs, or debts that came with them. Even our own stories are incomplete, stitched together from selective memory.

So the task isn’t to kill comparison. It’s to use it lightly. Like price: a blunt signal, not a definition of value. Benchmarks are conversational tools, not existential truths.

I often think of the story of Alexander the Great and the yogi on a rock. Alexander represents drive, ambition, competitiveness. The yogi represents pause, detachment, perspective. Both are true. Both are necessary. Enough lives in the wrestle between them.

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Ambition vs. Contentment

Ambition pulls us forward. It’s the heartbeat of progress, the engine of meritocracy. Without it, nothing compounds. But ambition without awareness becomes a whip, not a compass.

That’s where Wu-Wei comes in. The Taoist idea of “action through inaction.” To Western ears, it sounds like giving up. But it’s not. It’s starting from where you are, acting out of reality rather than illusion. It’s detachment not from life, but from ego.

Enough sits right here, in the tension between striving and letting go. It isn’t contentment without ambition. It’s ambition with awareness. It’s recognising the drive matters, but so does the breath. Enough isn’t a number or a destination. It’s a conversation, an evolving relationship with yourself and your money.

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The Danger of Binary Thinking

One of the biggest mistakes is to see “enough” as binary: working vs. retired, striving vs. done. Life isn’t that neat.

A salary is more than a paycheck. It’s structure, rhythm, culture. It’s the scaffolding of life. Walking away from that can feel liberating, but it also starts the clock. Suddenly you’re counting sustainability. Will this last? What happens if something big comes along?

I’ve lived that anxiety. Fertility treatments, living abroad, unexpected costs, weddings. They don’t check whether your spreadsheet says “enough.” They just arrive. And you rarely want to say no.

On the other side, too much creates its own unease. Universal basic income debates often raise the “Malibu surfer problem”: will people just give up? I don’t think so. Work is more than money. It’s purpose, contribution, connection. Capital doesn’t remove the need to act; it just changes the filter.

The truth is, there is no upper bound. You’ll never dig your five holes and be told you’re done. There will always be another hole, another benchmark, another sense of falling short. That’s not failure. It’s being human.

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Practice, Not Perfection

All advice is autobiographical. I don’t have this sorted. I wrestle with it daily. And that’s the point. Enough is not a finish line. It’s a practice.

Tim Minchin talks about “micro-ambitions”. Small, achievable goals that add up. That’s how enough works. Milestones, not miracles. Patience, not shortcuts. Patience is undervalued. You won’t settle this in a year. You’ll wrestle with it for life. And that’s okay.

That’s why conversation matters. Even if you’re technically skilled, you need someone else in the room. Another set of eyes. Another perspective. Life is like theatre: the play is never the same twice, and every seat shows a different angle. We’re built in conversation, and money is no exception.

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Get Your Money a Job

If I have one mantra, it’s this: get your money a job.

The moment you separate yourself from your money, it stops controlling you and starts working for you. Your money becomes a colleague, a partner, a caregiver. That’s when the filter shifts. That’s when the questions you can ask yourself change. From survival to meaning.

Enough is not an answer. It’s a conversation. It’s practice. It’s a daily wrestle with ambition and contentment, comparison and detachment, scarcity and abundance.

And the fact that you’re asking the question at all is proof that you’re already on the path.

Magic Time

Most things worth doing are hard. Wealth creation is no exception. It often feels unfair, painfully slow, and full of noise. When you hear about people who seem to have made it quickly, it looks magical. But the truth is, what feels like magic is usually time, discipline, and persistence working quietly in the background.

The challenge is that most of us don’t notice when the magic is happening. Wealth whispers. Outliers shout. We see the flashy stories of quick wins, not the quiet stories of compounding. And when you’re just starting out, especially in South Africa where inequality is visceral, the distance between where you are and where you want to be can feel overwhelming.

The Myth of 15-5-50

I once gave the “50-15-5” idea a real crack. The theory is simple:

• Save 50% of your income

• Do it for 15 years

• Invest it to earn 5% above inflation

The promise? Financial freedom in less than two decades.

But each of those numbers hides brutal realities.

• 15 years is a very short runway. Most people work 30, 40, even 50 years and still struggle to retire comfortably. To do it in 15, you either need very high earnings or very low expenses. That’s not most people.

• 5% above inflation sounds modest, but it’s aggressive. Equity markets can deliver it, but not consistently. You’ll get flat years, sometimes negative years. Over the long haul, the averages hold up. Over 15 years, luck and timing matter more.

• 50% savings is perhaps the hardest of all. It’s possible if you’re single, with no dependents, but once you add a family, extended family, or community obligations, the maths gets tougher.

The point isn’t that 50-15-5 is impossible. It’s aspirational. It’s a reminder that compounding can create magic if you’re in the game long enough. But it’s not the only path, and trying to sprint can burn you out.

Context Matters

In South Africa, this conversation is layered with complexity. Ours is the most unequal country in the world by Gini coefficient. Unemployment rates are comparable to the Great Depression, but structural. A small tax base supports a large population. Many households are living hand-to-mouth.

At the same time, we benchmark ourselves against wealthier countries. Through sport, social media, and global culture, we’re connected to lifestyles that feel impossibly distant. It’s like being pulled in two directions: face-to-face with poverty at home, while aspiring to compete on a global stage.

In that environment, dreaming about wealth can feel tone-deaf. You’re torn between wanting to lift others up and needing to secure your own future. But here’s the truth: if you never make space to build capital, you remain stuck. South Africa will only thrive if enough individuals build stability, buffers, and engines that free them to contribute more. As Rassie Erasmus once said: “Stop talking k* about South Africa. Make a plan.”

Noise, Neighbours, and False Control

One of the hardest parts of investing is separating what’s in your control from what isn’t.

People think investing is about picking the right stock. Timing the market. Outthinking the crowd. But that’s mostly noise. Returns are influenced by randomness, variance, and luck. Even bad decisions can look smart for a while. Neighbours who take reckless risks can seem like geniuses until the tide turns.

Here’s what you can control:

• How much you spend

• How much you save and invest

• The skills you build and the work you do

• Your exposure to risk (asset allocation, diversification)

• Staying in the game — not blowing yourself up with debt or speculation

And here’s what you can’t:

• Market returns in the short term

• When volatility arrives

• What your neighbours are bragging about

Salary feels safe because it’s smooth and predictable. Investing feels discouraging because it’s noisy and volatile. The trick is building a separate mental model. Money invested is not a salary. It grows unevenly, sometimes invisibly, but it grows.

Stillness helps. If you treat setbacks as random, not personal, you avoid the trap of thinking the world is judging you. Bad things happen. Good things happen. Your job is to be resilient enough to handle the bad and ready enough to capture the good.

The Roadmap to Magic Time

So what does the path actually look like? It’s not one magic formula, but a series of milestones that are worth celebrating along the way.

Stage 1: Net Worth Day (Debt Freedom)
The first big milestone is when Assets – Liabilities = Positive. That’s huge. Getting out of bad debt is step one. Use debt counsellors if needed. Swap credit cards for debit cards. Stop spending money you don’t have.

Stage 2: The Shock Absorber (Buffer)
Save 3–6 months’ worth of expenses. This is your financial shock absorber. At the same time, if you have dependents, get risk cover — life, disability, income protection. It’s a grudge purchase, but it buys peace of mind.

Stage 3: Micro-Wins (Early Capital Building)
Celebrate when your invested capital equals one year of your salary. At that point, your money is starting to “get a job,” even if you’re still the bigger engine.

Stage 4: The Magic Number (Capital x25)
The long-term aspiration is capital worth 20–50x your annual spending. At a 4% withdrawal rate, that makes you financially independent. 2.5% is a more aspirational number, because then you aren't harassing your capital and it can still grow even though it is supporting you. Either way, that’s the freedom point.

Stage 5: The Compounding Kick
The hard work is in the scrum up front. Early progress feels painfully slow. But once your money earns as much as you do, the flywheel spins faster. That’s when the magic feels real, but by then, it’s no longer magic. It’s compounding.

Wealth Whispers

The danger is thinking this happens fast. It doesn’t. The loudest stories are often the outliers: the person who “retired” at 35, the neighbour who doubled their money overnight. But most of those stories don’t end well. When things fall apart, the shouting stops.

The stories worth emulating are quiet. The teacher who invested diligently. The janitor who left millions to charity. The client who worked with an advisor for decades and quietly compounded. These are the ones that don’t make headlines, but they’re real. Wealth whispers.

Actionable Steps

The punchline is simple: get your money a job.

For most people, that means getting help. A good financial planner isn’t just a salesperson. They’re more like a therapist: someone who listens, learns your context, and helps you navigate trade-offs. Your job, your income stability, your dependents, your goals — these all shape the plan.

Here’s where to start:

1. Get out of debt. Celebrate Net Worth Day.

2. Build a buffer. 3–6 months’ expenses.

3. Buy peace of mind. Risk cover: life, disability, income.

4. Find a planner. Someone who can listen and partner with you.

5. Start investing. Pension funds, employer schemes, and your own investments.

6. Adapt as you grow. Individual → family → community.

It’s not about doing everything perfectly. It’s about chipping away, building slowly, and giving time the space to work.

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Conclusion

Magic time isn’t about quick wins or outlier stories. It’s about patience, buffers, and engines. It’s about celebrating small milestones while ignoring the noise. It’s about getting your money a job, and then letting time do what looks magical, but is actually just compounding doing its quiet work.

Wealth whispers. And that’s fine.