Finding Resonance

Other people’s stories make more sense to us when they resonate. When we recognize their experience in our own. We can be harsh on historic characters, harsh on our old selves, and harsh on others... distancing ourselves from them... but we can also not see them as essentially bad, but rather take every situation as how we could have found ourselves there. Find the resonance. 

There are learnings to be had in the stories of others. That is the glorious part of being human, we don’t have to wait to make mistakes ourselves... if we recognise there but for, go I. We are all human and we have a common base. Even if that base has shadows and light. “Best Practice” allows us to get quite practical about a menu of approaches to common human experiences, if we are willing to listen. 

One of the ways to take control of your career is to speak to people who already do what it is you are aiming to do. See whether the story you tell yourself matches with their reality. There reality won’t be yours, but it will resonate if you make similar choices. Find out what their days are like beyond the exciting bits that go into the sales pitch. What are their frustrations? What are the tradeoffs they have had to make? What would they tell a younger version of themselves? 

Listening to other people’s stories will help you chart a path for yourself. Not as a stick to beat yourself with, but as a guide for decision making. Being curious about stories, and histories, and lessons in different contexts can help unpack the traps in our own tangled baggage. Increasing awareness of parallel paths or obstacles we didn’t even know about.

Life is Complicated

Life is way more complicated than any story we choose for sense-making. Stories have narrative arcs that resonate. They set the scene, then something happens, then tension builds, then there is a climax, then there is a result, and consequences, and a conclusion. There are heroes, or moments of redemption, or great insights. Within the constraints of pages, picture frames, or flames of the campfire. 

Half the art of presenting is simplifying the point you are trying to convey into three clear things. So when someone is retelling the story later, they know what they were. They know what the presentation was about. They were surprised by something that was clearly articulated and emotionally engaging, and they could remember it because it found a hook into their world. 

In real life, the narrative is hard to see unless we construct it with hindsight. Our stories layer understanding after the action. Planning becomes a tool to reflect. It is a meditation that can help give you focus. Planning allows you to step out of reality, look at reality, and then adjust the story as reality evolves. Building the capacity for change is a fundamental part of good planning. 

Planning is not about knowing the future. It is not about a specific path. It is very dependent on your decisions and ambitions.

Lessons Learned

Looking back far enough, there are lots of examples of extreme events (high impact, low probability). Numbers we use for risk analysis make better questions than answers, because they never include the full picture. A great book to read to give you a little bit of humility is the story of Long-Term Capital Management, titled “When Genius Fails”. It is an important book to read for those who think they have cracked the code. Thinking in “distributions” (a range of possibility) rather than simple numbers is vital. Howard Marks implores that we, “always remember the six-foot man who drowned in a river that was five-foot deep on average”. It is not just the average that matters. The statistical term is moments. You have to think in moments. How the range of possibility is made up. That includes thinking about tail risk, and what isn’t in the numbers (yet). In scenario testing, you need to plan for what could happen, not just a single path. In the same way as looking at what did happen is not enough. What could have happened? You need to plan for your plan not covering everything. With hindsight, we think we understand the world. We think the lessons we learn through mistakes mean, “if I had done it this way, this is how it would have played out.” In reality, if you had the chance again, everything would be completely different. 

Lessons from Rivers Crossed

 

Repeated Choices

Life is a series of choices based on the options we are given. Where we end up depends in part on luck, in part on where we started, and in part on how consciously we play our part. A physical demonstration of this is the Galton Board. It illustrates the idea of the normal distribution. Even though there is a lot of randomness in the world, a step or two back often reveals a pattern. A wide variation for the individual, but a lot more predictability around central points. You get distributions of results. You get extremes. Our news and stories tend to focus on the extremes, and pay less attention to long-term averages and normal people. With a Galton Board, a ball will fall down, and it will go left or right, left or right, left or right. Facing repeated decisions. The situations we are in and the choices we make carry Karma. Choices have consequences. There are sometimes opportunities to correct mistakes but you have to work through historic consequences. What we do matters. History matters. We don’t all have (or want) the same choices, but we can increase the set of tools we have to have a degree of autonomy over what lies in front of us. 

Galton Board

Big Kids

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. 

 

Glitch

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.

Glitches can be useful

Decisions have Consequences

“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.

Intricate Web of Decision Making

Part of your Story

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.  

Alternative Worlds

“Price is not Value” is perhaps the most important lesson to learn in navigating wealth creation, financial planning, and building a career. I constantly find myself wanting to believe price is more than it is. Feeling like the way I see the world is reality. All price is, is a communication tool between different realities. We see the world based on what we have seen. We see the world from within our self and community created containers. That is where value sits. Price is where different value systems briefly and fuzzily meet. Price is a crude tool to artificially, and temporarily, simplify qualitative ideas of what something is worth down to a number. As individuals, we can then rank and compare all the other things that come into our decision making. Then make choices based on bringing things into and out of our world, based on price.

 

Donkey Begins

People will say “Don’t carry your history with you”, “let it go”, “live in the now”. I am not one of those people. I live in my history. I am always curious about why I think the way I do, and what built that up. I know there is path dependence. I know that because of various events, my life could have gone another way. As I get older and new things happen to me, it changes my memory. I like reflecting on memories repeatedly, and saying, “Okay, well now I see things differently.” You are having a conversation with your past self to understand how your values have evolved.

How we see, soaks deep

Tuning Fork

Ruin is the thing that we fear most. Being able to confront waves of anxiety is important. When you make a decision, you know there are a variety of possible outcomes. What is hard to identify is the risk of ruin. That means that there is not going to be a next day. Sometimes that risk is hidden. Lying in the invisible tail of alternative possibilities that have never happened. Unlikely events with significant impacts. The building pressure of bad choices with delayed consequences. We cannot live in paralysed fear, because of these unknowns. We can build buffers to survive the unknown. Reflect. Unpack. Interrogate.

For most of our decisions, we are not unique snowflakes. Other people have made similar choices in resonating forks scattered liberally around the world. You can do the due diligence. You can research how other people have handled reflections of your situation. Their perspective will not be identical, but there can be similar flavour. The same ingredients in infinite combinations. You can put in the work to make better decisions. Reflect, decide, and put into practice.

Listen