Diving to Understand

Merit is only one factor in wealth creation. Like risk and return, it is also not something you can simply reduce to a number for comparison and ranking. Like risk and return, it should come with the standard regulatory disclosure, “past performance is no guarantee of future success”. To “see Merit”, you need to look. What we see, unfortunately, depends on what we have seen. We understand by deep soaking. Through repetition, context, and recognition. Through networks of connecting dots that build a picture we can make sense of. To see Merit, you need to do more than just superficial due diligence. You need to repeatedly ask questions about people, process, performance, philosophy, and what it means for you. Merit means nothing without a win-win relationship between the one that has merit, and those they interact with. To see merit, you need to do a deep dive due diligence, and we only have limited capacity to do that. Which means what we see is path dependent, and we often see what we want to see. Looking to confirm that we are on the right path. What we see is not all there is.

"My Octopus Teacher"

Diving to Understand

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

Firm Grounding

 “sat u dirgha kala nairantarya satkara sevito drdhabhumih” Yoga Sutras

“Practice becomes firmly grounded on being continued over a long period of time without interruption and with sincere devotion”

I am not a great believer in Saturday Night epiphanies. I worry about Monday. There is no big secret. A lot of what we need to know is freely available. The challenge is embodying the right behaviours and building a daily practice. Not what you do today. What you do day after day. Firm grounding requires time. A long time. The key isn’t whether you can maintain your practice if the conditions are perfect. The key is whether you are able to sustain your practice through the chaos. In the real world. With all its distractions and challenges. Practice and Non-attachment. Solving problems without becoming overwhelmed by them. Epiphanies are more useful when they are the realisation of something that is already there. Has been built up over a long time. Is there to stay. Sustainably.

"Dynamism of a Cyclist" Boccioni (1913)

Trying to capture complexity in a single moment

Over Muddy Waters

“Abhyasa vairagyabhyam tan nirodhah” Yoga Sutras

Control of thought waves is brought about by practice and non-attachment.

Abhyasa means practice. You can develop a practice to gradually separate your financial decision making from the constraints of supply and demand. Not all good ideas are good business ideas. Money anxiety is all about barriers to entry and barriers to exit. About containers that can control the solving of problems. Developing a practice recognising “I am not this. I am not that”, gets closer to what is worth identifying with. You are not your job. Vairagya is non-attachment. We can get caught in the web of being what we do. Being attached to how we earn money. It is possible to gradually reduce our reliance on our earning ability. To move beyond being a productive asset. To move beyond hand-to-mouth living where the action of our hands becomes our complete focus. To still the power of waves of money anxiety.

The Lotus soaring above the water

Product Development

Product Development is a process that is never finished. It is a constant dance between users and the people tweaking the solution. The product/service offered can be a slight change or a completely new way of getting the desired result. It can even be a new result that hadn’t been thought of. Or simply rolling out best practice. Seeing how a problem is solved elsewhere and introducing it to a new community in a way they recognise. This requires a deep understanding of the community being served and an ability to observe and listen. It requires awareness of the alternative solutions being offered. What are the challenges a community is facing? Who are the decision makers in that community? How can you help them? What resources would you need to do that. Product Development also involves identifying the skills, knowledge, and resource gaps you might have. That isn’t the end. Once you know the gaps, you can fill them. Product Development isn’t about you, it is about the people being served.

Weaver - Van Gogh (1884)

Frogs Who Pay Attention

Leap-frogging is when you skip a step. Following Best Practice is when you look around the world, see who is doing well and who is doing badly, and pick the best way. When there are 7.8 Billion people on the planet, being obsessed with uniqueness is going to severely limit your options. If you are building a bridge, you don’t want a Contrarian Engineer. When you are stuck with a problem in a particular context, the world now offers natural experiments of every shape and size if you pay attention. What happens if you change the story? Micro-ambition is small, achievable goals. A Daily Practice is the habit of connecting incremental progress. Pay attention to other people’s stories. Listen. See. Not as a form of comparison. Instead as Bruce Lee said, to “Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own.” Wealth and knowledge compound. But much of that knowledge is freely available to frogs who pay attention. Then jump.

Pay attention to leaping frogs

Click Song

Best Practice is the method that is generally accepted as better than the alternatives, because it produces better results. Due Diligence is a comprehensive study with reasonable steps taken before making a decision. With 7.8 Billion people on the planet, we have collectively had a lot of practice. Many (most) of the conversations we have, have been had before. The paths we are considering have been walked before. Not in exactly the same way. That path is yours alone. Lots of the information that is freely available is only accessible to those who learn the skill of deep soaking in other people’s stories. Delaying forming opinions till you can tell the differences between words. Till you can share words. Training your ear. Training your tongue. Delaying criticism till you can see the intelligence in a grammar that is not yours. Like driving on the other side of the road, you can not learn from the mistakes and successes of others if you insist on reapplying everything you know to every other lesson.

It's the "Click Song" till you 

train your tongue to say

Qongqothwane

Best Practice

One of my favourite essays to regularly reread is Scott Alexander’s “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup”. It reminds me of how some of our biggest fights are with the people we most agree with. Because we care so much about the same issues. We understand the same nuance that other people don’t even see. An advantage of being a Global Citizen is the natural social experiment that goes on. We get to see Best Practice at play in a variety of contexts. Our issues, but not our issues. What if we changed this aspect? What if we keep that aspect the same? A strong temptation in any research is to provide Public Relations and Legal Arguments for pre-existing beliefs. Numbers and words to pad our gut feel. Looking far from home is often an easier way to unpack issues that are too close to see. Then, like Bruce Lee, we can take what is useful, discard what is not, and add what is uniquely our own.

Too Close