Financial Yoga - Stilling the Waves of Money Anxiety
Chapter 3 - Choosing a Path
You have to choose a path. We are exposed to a number of lotteries that determine our starting point. That is something we have no choice but to accept. It is a strength. It doesn't feel like it because it feels like there should be a level of fairness. We should all have the same options.
I like the idea of alternate histories. We keep having to make choices. That is part of autonomy. The reality is that every choice you make, opens a new set of options, and closes down a different set of options. Whenever things go badly, one of the philosophies I have tried to develop to do something awesome that would not have been possible if that thing had not gone wrong. To change the story around that event.
The idea of “Fortunate Misfortune” (See 10 Moral Paradoxes by Saul Smilansky). It is not that you start looking on the horrible moment with affection, but you stop wishing it away. It becomes a part of a positive arch in your story.
“The Man in the High Castle” looks at what how the world would have been like if the Second World War turned out differently. If Germany and Japan had conquered America and the rest of Europe. Even that kind of scenario (where we have a clear historical story of good winning out over evil), there were still moments of joy that happened in that alternate universe, that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Part of autonomy and consent is that decisions have consequences. Choices and events open up, and close down, histories and futures. Making peace with this idea that we have different options is a challenge. With an intricate web of ripple effects. What we do matters. To us and to others.
I do not believe in pure equality. That is not autonomy. It would strip the world of its complexity, ambiguity, and randomness. If everyone had exactly the same experience, we would be controlled. It feels like that would be fair. But it would restrict us. Pure equality would restrict us. Like the monoculture of a Palm Oil Plantation versus the rich biodiversity of a Rain Forest. One may be green, but the life disappears.
Daniel Dennett’s book “Darwin's Dangerous Idea” reframed the concept of evolution in a way that I had not understood before. I always had the sense that it was important to have some driving sense of progress. We want some knowledge of how things are going to play out. That is why we love this idea of cause and effect. Then we can control what is going to happen. Letting go of that control is very difficult. That is Darwin's dangerous idea.
It talks about the Red Queen, in Alice in Wonderland. Where she has to run as fast as she can just to stay in the same place. We have to step back and start looking at our idea of progress. You still want to be progressing. You do not want to be giving up. But at the same time, you want to change what that looks like. The story of evolution and survival of the fittest gets added afterwards. It seems like it makes much more sense than it really did. The fittest are only the fittest because the world played out in that particular way. If something else had happened, everything would be different.
We think if only we could go back in time and give ourselves advice, how things would change? But the whole world would change. The Butterfly Effect would mean that everything would be different. If I could go back in time, I probably would not do anything but observe. Acceptance of our decisions. They do not matter, and yet they are the only thing that matters. Free will. We make decisions.
We want to have the sense that we are the one making the decisions. That we want to be where we are. It is less about control and more about it consent. Within autonomy, you are moving willingly. With strength, flexibility and control that feels right. To do that, you need to not feel like you have been thrown around by the waves. You need to feel that you are conscious of the options.
Even if you know that going down one path means you can not go down another path. Even if sometimes there is no choice. There is only one path to take, because of other decisions that you have made. Because you made a previous decision, there is no choice on this point. Getting a feeling of those decisions in the context of the other decisions that you make.
Daniel Kahneman talks about broad framing in “Thinking Fast and Slow”. Not making any one decision so important that it feels like it is going to define your life. You want to reduce the size of the decisions.
Tim Minchin talks about micro-ambition. You want these tiny bits of ambition to connect. What you've been done before holding hands with what you are doing next. So there is a sense of building. Even without knowledge of the future, perhaps because of its absence, you can build deep complexity. Insisting on a completely controlled environment and future is limiting.
Rewilding and sustainability both require the release of control. Deep acceptance. How do you reconcile growth and growing money and profits with the natural environment? When we get to a point where we need to live within constraints? I do not buy into abundance philosophy. We do live in a world with constraints. If we do not recognise the constraints, there are real consequences.
David Attenborough points out that we live in a world where a species only thrives, if everything around it thrives. That does not mean there isn’t death and pain. Nature can harsh in ways we don’t understand. But biodiversity copes with this harshness far better than control. When there are multiple responses. When we are not doing all the same thing. One of the ways that money is made is scaling up by doing the same tasks repeatedly. What that can result in is this is mono-culture. Which is dangerous.
David Attenborough's witness statement shows aerial pictures of oil palm plantations where it looks green, but there is no life. It is just one decision laid out. That is dangerous. When you come to free will, there are levels of consciousness. Not everyone wants to be making decisions all the time. It feels good to nail a process so well that you are flowing. Complex decision-making is often far from flowing.
Some people are more than happy just to do what they are told. That is okay. I have a friend who loves being micromanaged. It means he can just he can be super productive because he knows what to do. And if he doesn't know what to do, someone will tell him. He just gets on with it.
I hate being micromanaged. I hate someone telling me what to do. I don't like hierarchy at all. I have always had a chip on my shoulder about hierarchy. To the point where it has resulted in me being arrogant/childish. Whether it is growing up in Apartheid, or being the youngest of three brothers, I have the common South African trait of a healthy disrespect for authority. I don't, by default, necessarily respect presumed authority. I don’t, by default, do what I am told. Sometimes in quite childish ways.
Like if someone tells me that it is my decision, then I will make a decision. And if they suggest that I do something else, and I don't agree with them, I still want to do it my way. Unless they want to say it is not my decision. If they say that, I'll do it their way. Most people can read between the lines and go, “Well, actually, they want to tell me that it is my decision, but it is not really my decision. I just need to suck it up and play the game.” I'm not very good at that. I like clarity of decision-making processes. I like honesty about where the accountability and authority lie. I object to the delegation of responsibility without authority. I like it when decision makers have dirt under their fingertips from sharing the load.
But everyone is different. A lot of people don’t have the baggage I do. Doing as you are told often makes life simpler. You need to choose the level of consciousness that you want to live at. There is simplicity in just accepting the rules and doing what you're told. Like plugging in your destination on GPS versus studying the map in advance. There are definitely places I have driven multiple times that I would not be able to get to without help, because I have chosen to switch that bit of thinking off. There is simplicity in accepting your role and the pre-laid path from the menu you were given.
That is fine if you enjoy what you have been given on the menu. It is less confusing. There are less options. You don’t have to think about it. You can focus on something else. When we decide that something is important, that is us projecting that it is important to us. For me, autonomy and consent are important. That makes it difficult, because you have to unpack everything and that is messy. That mess is a choice, and choices have consequences.
The series Westworld explores how others might have a better understanding of you than yourself. In snippits. There is a chance, if we aren’t paying attention, that other people might see what we can’t see if they are detached and observant. In “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus”, Yuval Harari questions how much we are going to be willing to work with artificial intelligence and things that watch us. Virginia Postrel talks about tacit knowledge in “The Future and Its Enemies”. Stuff we understand without knowing we understand.
That knowledge is the driving force behind Adam Smith’s invisible hand. You don't need central decision-makers making complex decisions. You want to drive choice down to where the knowledge lies. We don't necessarily understand ourselves, but we are still the best place to make our decisions. Because attention doesn’t scale. The chance that someone understands us better than we understand ourselves relies on deep listening and care. If you have local markets with ultra-local decision-making, you empower people to make the decisions.
Information feeds up through the paths that people choose. Through the impact of their actions. The rippling consequences of their meaning creation. And it doesn't necessarily matter if we don't understand this in watered down averages and stereotypes. It does matter to the intimate relationships that wrestle with understanding.
What do you do if autonomy is really important to you, but you find something or someone else makes better decisions than you do?
Imagine you had an app on your phone that was similar to GPS and Google Maps, but for life choices. In the beginning, I certainly didn’t trust GPS. When it first came out, it wasn’t great. I was working in a job where I had to visit various financial advisors in Joburg. I was a Durban boy, not a Joburger, so I had to use maps. GPS would tell me “you have reached your destination”, and I would be in the middle of the highway. I knew enough to know my destination, even if the path was cloudy. I had enough of a sense of my direction to know, “I am pretty sure this isn’t the right turnoff”. I would start by saying, “trust the GPS”, but I would end up in the wrong place.
But gradually it got better, and gradually I started feeling comfortable letting it make decisions for me. Letting me focus on other things. Autonomy suggests individual decision-making. If it is abstract (controlled and theoretical), it works very well. In reality, our decisions impact each other in complex, ambiguous, and random ways. How do you handle joint decisions when a path is shared?
Tom-Toms are one form of GPS. My wife’s name is Gemma John. We were once driving through an area in Fulham across the river from where I lived in Putney. The GPS was telling us to go one way but Gem was pretty sure we should go another way. So I turned off the Tom-Tom and listened to the Gemma John. Even in an area I knew reasonably well, I had got to the point where I had to decide whether the GPS was doing a better job than me (when in doubt), and whether to trust it or not. At what point do you delegate your decision-making when you are in an area you do not understand? Or when someone (or something) can make better decisions than you, even if you believe you have a decent understanding? To outsource your decision-making, you need to develop trust.
I like to believe in a world where we can have open conversations. The reality is that you can’t just decide to be honest, and vomit truth on someone. Truth needs unpacking. Trust is built. Both need time. It is dangerous to outsource decision-making, in part because we attach responsibility to the decision-maker. We attach identity to the decision-maker. We attach respect and blame. To outsource decisions, you need trust and confidence. Trust that the other decision-maker has your best interests at heart. Confidence that they have the competence to do what it is that they claim they will do.
The decision about who to hand over responsibility to, is as important as the actual skill and knowledge required to make the relevant choice. Evaluating decision-makers is a skill in and of itself. Badly evaluating decision-makers allows you to pass on responsibility, and have a target to pin blame on should things go wrong. It does not solve the problem.
Developing cars that can drive autonomously requires multiple sources of awareness. When we drive, we somehow manage with one set of eyes and ears. We have a brutal internal system of awareness, triage, focus, and context switching. Yogis would argue it is only possible to focus on one thing at a time.
The challenge is just that we are wired to take on an incredibly complex world. This means once a habit is engrained, we embody the knowledge. We let it go and move on. This means we are not always aware of ourselves. We often make decisions in isolation. Even when something is important to us, it isn’t necessarily present in our head. We might forget what we enjoy. We might forget what is important to us. We focus on what is in front of us and how we feel at that moment. When we are making decisions, it is not always in the context of everything that is important to us. This is both a strength and a weakness.
We can “handle” the chaos that autonomous vehicles are still trying to conquer... plus more. But that handling can sacrifice awareness. Even if we could make purely rational decisions, what would that even mean? Not everything can be counted and quantified. This is the challenge. With pure rationality, there are rules of logic. Rules like prioritising and comparing. Creating relative preference. If I prefer apples to oranges, and I prefer oranges to pears, then I can infer that I prefer apples to pears. If you remember your preferences and they are consistent.
Our memory is glitchy. Which is useful. It is useful to be able to forget things. To change the story. It is one of the ways we cope. If something is not working for us, we get to rewrite the story. If we could never forget and things were purely factual, that would be a debilitating glitch. So somehow we need to establish how well we want to understand ourselves.
Do you want to do the work? It is hard to be honest. It is emotionally challenging. You need to build up the necessary skills to self-reflect. It is not simply allowing harsh internal voices. You need to feel that you are on your own team, in the same way as when we work with other people.
It is worth reading the book, “How to win friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie. The name sounds terrible. I put off reading it for years because the title seemed repulsively insecure and insincere. I was wrong. There are very valuable principles clearly articulated. One of those key ideas is building on what people say. We want feedback. But we want feedback in a way that we actually believe that the person giving it wants us to move forward. We want to feel like they are being constructive.
If you are constantly niggling at someone, and tearing them down, what you are not doing, is allowing a Bull Quota. A Bull Quota is when you suspend your disbelief. Allowing a buffer for things that can distract you from the important stuff. That quota can eventually be full, but not allowing it prevents deep listening. Like when you are watching a movie. If you are intent on critiquing each word and pointing out the holes, you won’t be able to enjoy the story. Are you looking for the truth in the story? Are you even looking for something that contributes? Because everything has gaps and holes, as we clumsily try to communicate from one grasp at reality to another.
Don’t live in the holes. Everything has gaps and holes. That is the key idea behind biodiversity and wilding. We are wild. We are rough on the edges. We don’t know, and we don’t have full insight, and we try, and we make mistakes. It is that imperfection that allows us to drive forward as an active participant in the chaotic change.
If you want to be someone who decides, you need to build the skill to do the emotional work required for self-reflection. You also need to know yourself and the level that you want to go to. You need resources. You need guides and you need to guide yourself. You need commitment, because if you are going to do the work, you are going to need to do the repair work. No risks or actions can be taken without regular maintenance, repair work, and downtime.
The five core points of yoga are proper exercise, proper breathing, proper diet, proper relaxation, and proper mental health. We focus on our actions/choices, but the support/foundation that allows you to make choices is just as important.
I believe we all experience the world as a controlled hallucination. We take in information based on what we already know. Gradually building trust based on an elaborate story we build up to explain the responses we experience to the decisions we make. You can’t live without a story. Your story acts as the framework for what you want to do, and how you want to make decisions. You need to internalise and embody the disciplines you want to use to frame your decisions.
The way a lot of people discipline themselves with money decisions is running out of money. When there is no money there, you can’t spend it. Which means most of us live hand-to-mouth. You cannot build space for autonomy and consent within your decision-making that way. You will get stuck in a monthly cycle, or a weekly cycle, or whenever the money comes in. You get income dependence, where you get a job, and get paid, and that determines your standard of living. And there is no space. No extra.
If you want something, you save specifically for it, buy it, and go back to zero. Never actually freeing yourself from the constraint of having nothing in the bank. That becomes your framework. “No decision” can be “the decision”.
Building wealth is capital allocation. Getting money a job. If everything there is, is spent, there is nothing to put to work. If you are going to build capital, you first need to build buffers that control for the waves that knock you off course. To do that, instead of “nothing left” being the enforcer of discipline, you need to internalise self-discipline so extra is allowed to exist.
Not extra in the sense of a Scrooge McDuck pool of hoarded coins. Extra in the sense of reinvestment. Extra in the sense of circle of life rain-cycles, where energy is neither consumed nor destroyed, but just changes shape and form.
It is the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper and Aesop's Fables. The Ant works hard during the Summer and builds up a lot of reserves. And when it gets to Winter where there is nothing to eat, Ant has extra. Grasshopper plays during the Summer, when it is beautiful, and there is plenty, and there is enough to eat. But then when it gets to Winter doesn't have enough.
If you are going to build capital and buffers... the money is there, but it is not there. Which is quite abstract. The money is working at a job. It is not there to be spent. If you are able to build Capital, you have to internalise discipline. Because you *can* spend Capital. If you stop it working. If you turn it into cash. Then consume it.
It depends on the story you tell yourself. You can look at money as trees and fruit. You can live off the fruit, but if you start cutting down trees, there is going to come a tipping point where sustainability comes into question. “No Money” will again be the enforcer of discipline. It is analogous to the planet and our natural resources. While we were growing, and while we were living hand-to-mouth, we have not adequately considered the sustainability of our environment.
You have to think in a long-term fashion. Normal panic is, “I am not going to be okay at the end of the month.” It is a different type of worry you have when you change the way you look at money. You have to realise when “this is not sustainable”. You might have to change your habits even if you are okay for the next three to five years. Because you are not okay... for ever. And that worries you. That is an important worry to have. One that requires a change in the way you act.
Yoga is stilling the waves of the mind. I think of Financial Yoga as stilling the waves of money anxiety. I don’t see the point of meditation as getting rid of thought/money waves. You aren’t getting rid of the challenges. They are still there. There are important problems we need to grapple with. Which makes it important to worry, in the sense that it is important to think. What you are trying to avoid is those thoughts being given more attention than they should be.
Being aware of them rather than pretending that they are not there. Acceptance of the waves, without giving them the power to dominate you. You want to think of the future. You want to think of the past. You want to consciously, and selectively, connect the two in the present. To compound what is important to you, and to make different mistakes that cancel each other out. Stillness is not absence. The waves are part of your path, and the aim is to create behaviours that draw energy from them.
I don’t like being the bad guy. I don’t think most people like that, but I don’t subscribe to the “it doesn’t matter what other people think” philosophy. You can only make purely independent decisions if you are a hermit. If relationships matter to you, then connections and consequences matter.
Yet there is a balance. Your interests matter too. One behaviour that creates capital is delayed gratification. If you are living purely in the now, then every decision is about the now. You are not building space. You are not building time. You are not building capacity. Because everything is about now.
There is a story (controversial in its scientific rigour) about putting Marshmallows in front of children. If they can wait for the researcher to return, they get two. The test was meant to evaluate the ability to take charge of your emotions. A powerful life skill. The controversy is over whether this an innate or learnable skill.
Imposing delayed gratification on others isn’t fun, and building capital is a team sport. We make many of our financial decisions together. Our joint decisions are the key to whether we consume what is created or whether we act as custodians and reinvest. Building space, time, and capacity. The original Marshmallow experiment looked at whether you could predict future success based on the ability to wait for a sugary treat. The skill of delayed gratification.
More recently, a study controlled for socio-economic factors like parent’s education and early childhood development support. Once that was taken into account, waiting for the marshmallow had almost no predictive power about future success in school or life. Waiting is a core part of wealth creation.
I do believe it is something you can learn. Something you can build into your habits. Spending has rhythm. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. You can pay attention to the things you consume regularly. You can pay attention to unsurprising surprises you can plan for, so they don’t regularly force you to start from scratch. Then, if you have fundamental faith in the future, and your place in it... you can allow the space and time for reinvestment. Where wealth isn’t what you consume or display. Wealth is the systemic structure that supports creativity.
Part of the story I tell myself about money comes from the micro-world I grew up in. The bubble within a bubble where my parents were the decision-makers. One of the ways I was taught saving was that my parents used to match what I saved. How do you instill the concept of compound interest, and delaying getting something now, so that it can build for later?
Saving and Investing are worth thinking of as different things. You save *for* something. Investing puts money to work (reinvesting rather than consumption). You can then spend some of what the investment earns, and reinvest some. But it is hard enough learning delayed gratification by saving, so... baby steps.
Compound interest also takes time to kick in. 5% real return would double your money in roughly “rule of 70” 14 years (70 divided by return equals roughly the doubling time). No kid is still a kid if they have to wait that long. The big thing I wanted was a music system. I saved half by starting a sweet business, and my Mom matched what I saved. Where she got the magic “compound interest”, I don’t know. But she managed. She was a bit of a hero.
One of the joys of being human is we are in it together. When you're mapping out a path, you can look at what other people are doing. This is where social capital kicks in. Being surrounded by people that you share enough in common with to believe their paths are paths open to you. You can see the skills that they need to do what they do. If you know them well enough, you can ask questions.
Ideally, you want a holistic sense of the person. To know beyond the stories you attach to the job, or what you have seen on television. What is their actual day-to-day? In practical terms, what does the person do? Every week? On TV, you might see the exciting bits of law, with time-lapses of them spending all night for months in a room with a box of files. If you know someone, you see the journey, and the consequences of the job beyond the conspicuous. Subtle things like knowing their circle of friends and family. Their capacity for interests beyond work. Their health.
Do they spend lots of time on spreadsheets? Do they write a lot? Do they read a lot? Are they mainly in meetings? What are their frustrations? How is their relationship with colleagues and bosses? What is the politics like? What are the barriers to entry and development?
There are formal skills that are easy to quantify/articulate and are specific to the jobs that require technical knowledge. For those, you just need to know what they are and do the work. There are other less obvious barriers to entry. It is not just about skills and knowledge (“Merit”).
It is also about supply and demand. How many people have that ability? Why choose you? If there is an oversupply of people in the area that you are interested in, it is going to be difficult to get those jobs. Not because of you. Because of your choice. Qualitative and subjective filtering processes give lots of wiggle room to those selecting who gets the job. In a world where demand for jobs outweighs the number of jobs on offer, employers become guardians of opportunity.
The German word for employer is arbeitgeber – work giver. The employer will be faced with similar supply and demand questions one level up. What is the problem they are solving, and how many other employers are solving it? Do they have the Capital needed to solve the problems? Can they solve the problem in a container with barriers to entry? It is not just about you. It is not just about merit. When building wealth, capital and containers matter.
When the supply of candidates massively outweighs the number of jobs available, work givers have the option of being picky. There is a lot of wiggle room to impose their preferences. In “Thinking Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman talks of how hard it is to convince people that interview processes regularly don’t add value. One tool in the Hubris Factory is to be very selective in hires, and regularly fire people. This gives the illusion of meritocracy.
It is very difficult to evaluate this process objectively because you have no long-term, objective, information on the people you didn’t pick, or the people you let go. The people doing the selecting/letting go are also normally not subjected to their own criteria.
One of my favourite German words is Geschmacksfrage – a question of taste. You need to detach from job interviews/opportunities. It is hard, because you know you. The interviewer does not (cannot), but will superficially form an opinion to think they do, and to reinforce their belief in their process. You are not your job. You are also not the jobs you did not get.
It is horrible not getting the job you want. It is worth remembering you are likely not the only one who did not get it. With so few great jobs, there are normally plenty of candidates for those roles. It would not pay well if we create work-for-work-sake. Just because we want people to have those jobs. There are limits and there are constraints to what is required.
Beyond a specific role’s requirements, understanding some generic business skills is important. These are the kind of skills that that are going to be with you throughout your life whatever your “source of wealth” is. However you build your wealth, you need financial literacy. Capital helps you make money. Through financing and risk management. Supporting your skills and knowledge.
Developing an understanding of the containers in which all that happens is equally important. The accounting/law/product that creates the shape and form for what you are doing. Detaching a little to understand the things that are not specifically about you and what you do. You need some awareness around that to have a plan for how you are going to build your freedom, your autonomy, and your ability to make decisions. So that one fragile job/opportunity does not become your defining container.
Building wealth is not purely about skills and knowledge. There is not a pure-play meritocracy with a completely level playing field. The reality is we all have to eat, and that requires a degree of protection to be able to incentivize investing in skills and knowledge. With 7.7 Billion people on the planet, a pure meritocracy with no barriers would mean almost all of us would have to point out that someone is better than us at what we do. That means building wealth does require some friction.
Some boundaries. Something to allow you to build an engine and vehicle completely detached from you. That can support you, and your community, without judgement of their merit. To still the waves of financial anxiety, you cannot constantly be weighing and measuring everyone. There has to be some independent commitment.
That requires a level of self-awareness, seeing what your strengths and weaknesses are, what your community is, who your clients are, and understanding the market you are in. Developing skills that do not define you, but are transferable between different problems.
I don’t like the question we ask kids, “what are you going to be when you grow up?”. It would be fine if the underlying question wasn’t “how are you going to earn money?”. They are fundamentally different questions. One is existential and the other is a financing problem. Not all ideas are good business ideas. Not all good business ideas are good ideas. Money is made by solving quantifiable problems in containers.
Who we “are” shouldn’t be confined by such pragmatic constraints. Solving problems relies on flexible skills. Being able to clearly articulate problems. To collect and analyse information, and be able to present solutions. To read and write... both words and numbers. These skills are required whatever the problem is. They do not define you.
The price of solving problems changes with supply and demand, and is not connected to your value and identity. Price is not value. Salary is not worth. You are not your job. Financing the things that really matter requires capital, skills & knowledge, and containers. But it is what matters to us, that makes us who we are.
One of the ways we develop conspicuous skills is through exams. Exams are not real life, but they are a blunt way to communicate your skills, so in most cases you just suck it up and write them. I prefer to think of exams as sport, where you practice writing “for the exam”. Knowing the content is a different task to showing up for the demonstration. Think from the perspective of the examiner. What are they looking for?
I think of my mother as a teacher. Sitting on her bed with piles of marking, tired and keen to get to the end of the slog. As the person writing, you need to make their life easy. Think of the marking schedule. How are you going to be assessed? Unfortunately, exams are not purely about creativity. They are about signals. They are about containers. You are building a box to give the examiner what they want.
You need to still your inner purist’s romance around the love of creativity and learning. That is a small part of what you are doing when you write exams. Study techniques are important. Summarising information. Identifying the main point and getting to it quickly without filler words and fluff. Practice answering questions in a way that gives the examiner the ability to mark you, so that you are match fit.
Doing well in exams is not just about knowing the information in a I-can-google-it way. The first time I wrote open-book exams (when you can take the answers in with you!) was when I did a diploma in financial planning. The exams were spread over four days, and while I had prepared, I was not as bullet-proof as I liked to be because I assumed I could look up answers. I got through day one with very little “margin for safety” and a heightened sense of respect.
Having the books is not sufficient. Knowing you can look, knowing where to look, and knowing, are three very different levels of knowledge. Beyond exams, making money is often about taking complexity and being able to articulate a very clear, instantly recognisable, ask and offer. Delivering a punchy two-mark answer in the 30 seconds allocated. Not spending 5 minutes finding the answer. That is embodied knowledge.
That demonstrates having engaged with the body of work, so deeply that you know the path to the stuff that matters. Real competitive advantages are open-books. Those with mastery have engaged so deeply they don’t need to hide. The answers are simple, and available, but require you to do the work.
Until you are the decision-maker, there are lots of people who will be in positions to choose the options that are available to you. Good ideas are not sufficient without financing and a container. Someone must have the money. Someone must own the money vehicle. Until that person is you, you will have to convince people.
Skills and knowledge will need to be conspicuous. A clear offer. Although there are other paths, one of the tools for conspicuous skill is formal education. Arguably, you are not paying for the education/information (that is largely free now), you are paying for (1) exclusivity (for them to reject other candidates), (2) network (for them to accept other candidates who will become colleagues/friends), and (3) the signal to the person with money who gets to impact your fate.
You are buying privilege. Beyond the knowledge, exam and study technique become essential. Establishing a habit of breaking down barriers. The process of absorbing information in a limited time, and then performing in an artificially constructed signal factory.
Tim Urban (waitbutwhy.com) talks of time optimism. It is a euphemism/kind way of referring to being late. Busyness is a form of laziness. If you are time pessimistic, you leave space. You don’t start new tasks if you don’t have the time to give them the necessary container (focused attention). You allow space, to be on time. On time *for* people. As a matter of respect. If you are constantly making people wait for you, you are not going to get many chances. But that does mean, as the time pessimist, you are regularly going to be the one waiting. Because you have created space. That space is partly an acknowledgment that other people’s time is as important as yours. We all get 24 hours a day, rich and poor, powerful and powerless.
Busyness is often used as a conspicuous signal of importance. We can’t know what people are doing that matters, but being late implies that thing is more important than the person you keep waiting. When you're doing a presentation, “sorry, I put this presentation together at the last moment” is not good enough. It means in a room full of 10-100 people, that you think that your time is worth more than all their time combined. Because it is the one true point of equality, we should not waste other people's time.
A core skill is being on time, being reliable, and doing what you say you are going to do. With allowance for imperfections. Things come up. Things change. But do not plan to be busy. If you plan to arrive exactly on time without leaving any gaps, you are going to regularly be late. By design. That will carry through to how people working with you view working with you.
Find others whose paths resonate with yours. There are lots of people who are generous and willing to talk about the challenges that they have had. Listen to their stories. They are not going to be the same as yours. They are going to be giving younger versions of themselves advice. No one can know your context as well as you. But the more stories you listen to, the more capable you are going to be in various new situations. The more able to avoid mistakes other people have made.
That is where the real juice is. Where we learn the most. Through mistakes. Trial and error. Success is less interesting, because success just means there weren't strong enough obstacles in the way. But we don't know why. Admitting that we don't know why is important.
Our learning is path-dependent. We know what we know, because of the information that has come up on our path. There is too much complexity for anyone to wrap their head around. Particularly if you do it alone. We live in a controlled hallucination.
As things are repeated, patterns start making sense. We ignore almost everything, but gradually the stuff that means something to us sticks. It sticks as we add, meaning. Which makes unlearning as important, if not more important, than learning. When new information comes in that challenges embodied knowledge. The kind of stuff that requires proper, messy, patient, unpacking. Impacting your own hallucination requires constantly reevaluating your path. With breaks. Unpacking can be draining, so you need capacity to do the work.
I call the “adult view” taking another look at what and how you were thinking when you were younger, and being your own mentor. Mentorship works in both directions. We have this idea that adults are higher up the chain, but we are all just big kids. By listening, questioning, and articulating their framework of thinking, the mentor will be refining and developing the story of their own path. Their own way of seeing. Being a good mentor to yourself will help you see more clearly. Listening to younger versions of yourself will help you make better decisions now.
Seek out mentors. Read stories. See what mistakes others have made. Be curious. Add a pinch of salt. Recognise that you cannot avoid constraints. You can only become more aware of them, dismantle some, and choose others consciously. You are not going to understand everything. That is fine. Every decision you make will close doors and open doors. That is fine. There is a balance between acceptance and constant learning. Returning to your purpose, your values, and self-reflection. Working on your feedback loop.
Be micro-ambitious. Do stuff. Accept the world, deeply. That does not mean you are not trying to tweak and influence reality. But you need to be able to hold on to what your values are. What are your cornerstones? What is your story? What are your drivers? What are your self-imposed constraints? What are the rules you put in place for yourself to guide your decision-making. Come back to those anchors.
Have people you trust that can tell you things that are hard to hear. Make sure you support their ability to tell you those things. Construct an environment in which you can thrive. Choosing your path consciously requires regular self-reflection.
In Yoga, there is a practice called Neti Neti which means “Not this, Not that”. It is an analytical meditation on what you are not. It allows you to create some space between what you are and the tools you use. In the world of money, we use price as a tool. Price is not value. You need to determine what your values are, and what you value.
You can use price as a communication tool, but it does not have permanence. Similarly, Salary is not Worth. Salary is simply the price of someone’s labour. Supply and demand determine that price. Not some intrinsic respect-commanding, life-defining, ranking of merit. Quite often when people are making good money, they think it means they are valuable.
It is dangerous to base your self-worth on pay, because supply and demand get disrupted. The barriers to entry command that price fall. The market changes. We create through destruction. You can do something incredibly valuable, but if lots of people can do that too... the price will be low.
Price is not value. Salary is not worth. You are not your job. The thing you are (currently) doing does not define you. Knowing who you are, is the heart of choosing a path. The practice of Neti Neti (Not this, Not that), is realising that you can’t be something temporary.
Problems should not be valued in and of themselves, or you are not really trying to solve them. You are making yourself a permanent part of the problem and extracting rent. You only genuinely try solve a problem if you feel a sense of ownership. Then it is worth your while to make your role in the problem redundant. Redundancy becomes something worth celebrating. If you make yourself redundant and there is no commitment to you as a person, then you are let go. They’ll say, “I paid you. It’s fair”, and lose no sleep.
But that is not the point. Value is created over very long periods of time. Real meritocracy starts with the grunt work of building foundations. If you are building something long-term, there needs to be a deeper commitment. Participation, while you are involved, becomes all about ego and identity. Real wealth is created when you have a significantly more stable self-definition to reinvest in. When you have a path that learns, builds, and creates in a way that is connected to what really matters to you.
Financial Yoga - Stilling the Waves of Money Anxiety
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