Holy and Holey

I work on a sense of union, so I can view everybody's worldview as a part of mine. Even just a part to understand. That means practicing constantly letting go, because the parts I didn’t understand are who I used to be. 

The goal being to build up resilience by unpacking my identity. Unpacking the things that I hold on too tightly to. Constantly coming back to working on the skill to adapt, adjust, and accommodate. “When events change, I change my mind. What do you do?” said Paul Samuelson. 

You will have no choice. You will have to adapt. The world changes and there is nothing you can do about that. Sometimes the harder we hold on to things, the more likely we are to lose them. 

I am the worst version of myself when I am desperate. My sense of humour goes, and I become earnest and intense. Building a capacity to accommodate the views of others, and changing scenarios, is ironically an easier way to hold on to the things you really care about. A way to pick your battles. Building resilience is a way not to put at risk the things that really matter, for the things that ultimately don’t. 

Having a good sense of the few things that are important, which allow you flexibility with awareness of barriers, boundaries, and borders around your core. 

You can keep some things holy, as the base of your story. Allowing you a calm foundation. Keep the rest holey, to let the air in for breath. To feed the flames of creativity.

Connected Energy

Real understanding of what is permanent, and what really matters, is the step you need to go through for true liberation. For the ability to engage effortlessly. 

You can still be doing amazing things, but without the weight of anxiety that sits on you. You build a practice that gets you to that stage over the long term. It takes commitment. A commitment that connects what you do every day. Small goals that add up. 

The productivity that matters is the *compounding* of a productive asset. The real driver is not simply being noisily creative, but whether that creativity is connected. Reinvesting rather than consuming energy and life. 

Where the outcome of what we do is not just something we have now. Where we become custodians, with constant growth through the pulsing cycle of life. 

We can come back into “the system” rather than simply raging against it. Adapting, adjusting, accomodating. Starting from where you are. Connecting to where others are. Compounding rather than consuming. 

Where what you do is not just about you and hand-to-mouth survival. Where what you do is driven by real understanding of why you are doing it.

Where does your energy go?

Bread Winning

It is easy to get caught in the trap of “defending a narrative”. The story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The real world is vastly more complicated than the TV series, movies, and even books we consume. The plot is not nearly as neat. When I stepped away from the corporate world in 2014, I liked the story of saying to myself I had retired at age 34 and had a big enough engine to be a home maker rather than a bread winner. I (still) believe not all good ideas are good business ideas. There are plenty of good ideas that get ruined by being forced through the monetisation filter. Not everything worth doing can pay for itself. In 2015, I resigned from my three professional qualifications. The amount of work that went into being able to say “I *am* an actuary” was simply the tool I had used to build my engine of capital. I reinstated that qualification in 2017, only two years of no-money later, to do engine repairs. I am now thinking of going through the process of brushing off the others. Turns out life is more conversational than story telling. We get to edit our interpretation, and must constantly adapt, adjust, and accommodate.

Adapt

Investment Analysts build models of businesses to help understand complexity. The point of the model is not to be correct or not. You know in advance that you cannot have an accurate map of the future.

Nature does not subscribe to the simple cause and effect story that we use to try control the world. The point of any of the models in our toolbox is simply to help us make sense of things in a human way. To add a story. To add meaning. Like other tools we have made up – countries, words, money, political parties, ideologies, agreements. They sit on top of reality to process our controlled hallucination.

Personal Financial Plans are similar. They are not fixed in stone. They are not correct or wrong. They are an ongoing conversation. The only thing you can truly plan for is things not going according to plan. A good plan starts with a picture of where you are. Then builds towards capacity to adapt, adjust, and accommodate. As you change. As you live. As you add meaning.

adapt for specific uses

The Robots

Price isn’t Value. Without insurmountable barriers, price is supposed to act as a traffic light. A competitive advantage isn’t what you are good at. It is the reason other people can’t do what you do. The obstacle. The privilege. The difficulty. The law of supply is that for a fixed cost of doing something, a higher price will attract a larger supply of people willing to solve that problem. You don’t get paid more for doing something more valuable. Price is a signal of scarcity. Not value. You have to determine how you value things, and then look at the traffic lights (given your values and intended destination) of the things that will help you get where you are going.

Signals to Come and Go

Money is made in Containers. We normally focus on the type of problem when speaking of money making. The “how”. But problems, can and do, change. More important are the Capital and Container that support and give form to the process of money making. Capital stills the waves creating space and time for dynamic problems. Capacity for research and development of the skills and knowledge necessary. It creates the ability to listen to the signals been given about what problems are paying enough to focus on. Containers are given shape by Barriers to Entry, and Barriers to Exit. Price responds to Supply and Demand. How many people can solve the problem? How many people want the problem solved? Barriers to Entry stop you from being the one who solves the problem for an attractive price. Barriers to Exit force you to solve the problem when the price is too low to make it worth your while. Real financial autonomy lies in having the strength, flexibility, and control to navigate your way through the noise with grace and beauty. To move with purpose. To make empowered decisions.

Sending Signals

 

Developing Tastes

Boths the ins and outs matter in building financial security. Because value is personal, it is possible to decouple how much you spend and the value you get. By spending better. Develop your skill at finding pleasure and meaning consciously. Not everything can be counted. Being aware of what you value can improve the quality of your decisions. No one else can do that work for you. Since we are trigger happy, our attention follows our thoughts and our thoughts are triggered by what we give relevance to. Out of sight, out of mind. Lots of pleasure and meaning is available from abundant sources. Be a seller of scarcity, and a buyer of abundance. Develop your senses. Your vocabulary of pleasure. Your taste. Develop wealth capacity by increasing the number of things you enjoy. Cultural Billionaires master the art of being able to adapt, adjust, and accommodate. They see more value because they are looking.

Abundant Rhubarb? Develop a taste.

Drawing Breath

You don’t learn much about whether a process works, when it is working. The most powerful creative forces are time and consistency. But for the long term to be long term, the process needs to be able to adapt, adjust, and accommodate. Strength, flexibility, and control in the face of randomness, complexity, and ambiguity. Like gaps in music, real mastery lies in the ability to draw breath and gain perspective. To step back and gain a broader view of how everything is connected. To use disruption as a learning opportunity. 5Rhythms is a movement meditation developed by Gabrielle Roth in the 1970s. It takes you through Waves to release obstructions and inspire creativity. You move through flow, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. The key is movement, and being still is part of that. This too will pass.

5Rhythms