Long-Term Values

Mental Accounting is one of the causes of our biased decision making. We distil complexity into jars. Stories and categories we understand. Building up connections through chunky words, sentences, paragraphs and concepts we grasp and buy into. Money can be used for anything. It is “fungible”. Ideally, we would be able to see that everything is connected, and the specific jar you use does not matter. 

In reality, we need to create rules that help us get to our destination. This might mean having multiple bank accounts for different purposes. Having savings deducted automatically so that you don’t see them, forget about them, and don’t even consider firing (spending) them. Specific accounts for holidays. It might mean having individual accounts, and common pools, to separate or pool decision-making as necessary. Mental Accounting can be used in positive and negative ways. 

The Endowment Effect is how we value things we already own more. So if you are offered $5 or a mug, you might take the $5. But if you are given a mug, then offered $5 for the mug... you might refuse. The mug is yours. That is a story. Reflecting on the very human way you make decisions is important to make sure they connect and add up in a way that is consistent with your long-term values.

Distilling Ideas

Uncommonly Connected and Compounding

Goals are not picking the best of every possibility in isolation. That is dreaming. You can close your eyes and visit various places instantaneously. You can explore parallel universes where you made different decisions, and outcomes were completely of your choosing. When you open your eyes, you must go from where you are. 

The more realistic goals are tiny. Small nudges from where you are. Shane Parrish suggests, “Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you are smarter than you are.” 

You can build scripts, and behaviours, and habits, and flexible plans. You can be micro-ambitious with tiny goals that add up. Goals that are connected and compounding. 

Behavioural Finance looks at the idea of biases. Embodied shortcuts that help (or hinder) us in our decision-making. We don’t (and can’t) have full information, but must act anyway. Understanding your biases can help you tweak your micro-goals. Understanding your biases can help you see what you do for uncommonly long periods of time, rather than getting obsessed over things that come and go, and cancel out.

Give it Time

Classe Debutant

If you were incredibly small, and you came up to a little drop of water, it would be a huge bubble. We were about three feet tall when we were two years old. We were surrounded by people bigger than us. I am six feet tall now. I like imagining being surrounded by twelve-foot adults running around protecting us. 

I did my first ski lesson on the holiday my now wife proposed to me. I saw little kids being picked up by the adults as they were about to go into a snowbank. Swooping in to the rescue. When I was about to go into the snowbank, no twelve-foot adult came swooping in. 

Once we become adults, we build in our own protections and ways of making sure consequences are not too grave. We carry on.

We build our own set of congnitive biases that help us relax. Biases help us make decisions quickly so we don’t have to think of every snowbank. We can just ski. That is what mastery is all about. When you trust your capacity to engage with the world and get to a level that is intuitive, the anxiety falls away.

Soutie learns to Ski

 

Heads or Tails

You can’t tell if a coin is biased with one spin. A coin biased to Heads can still fall on Tails. That is pretty compelling evidence that the coin is not anti-Tails. Even though it is. Spin a biased coin 7.8 Billion times and you will be able to tell very clearly that it is biased. 60 million times. Still clear. As the group gets bigger the compelling evidence in the defence of the coin will get weaker. The same is true of racism. An individual can try being “colour blind” and letting people “put the past behind them”, in order to treat people equally *from this point forward* “based on merit”. The first problem is treating people equally, who haven’t been treated equally, isn’t treating people equally. The second problem is we only see the strengths we are looking for. The words we don’t understand are just noise. The experiences we haven’t had don’t stretch us if they don’t connect, in some way, to the experience we have had. “I don’t see colour” is a form of racism. Racism with a compelling defence. Spin the coin a few more times and perhaps you’ll see the problem.

Which is Heads, and which is Tails?

Damage Shows Strength

Survivorship Bias is our tendency to see the people who made it through some selection process, without seeing those that did not (even if the reason was luck). We study the stories of success like people studying that the roulette ball landed on black rather than red. It is too hard to get a good picture of each important fork in the road, and what could have happened. You can’t study what ifs without a solid imagination. I am a bigger believer in focusing on the foundations. Creativity isn’t a path, it is a process. For that process to work, you need endurance and resilience. Creativity isn’t picturing a world you want and building it. It is building the strength, flexibility and control to make your way through a world that is complex, ambiguous, and random. Those foundations include kindness and respect. Not earned by being a story of success. Earned by a commitment to show up. Today, and every day.

The damaged planes were the ones that returned safely

The others didn't survive.

Meritocracy is Privilege

Meritocracy is a step forward from Hereditary Entitlement, but it is a little like salt, fat, and sugar. An easy short term solution that dominates rather than releasing flavour. There are lots of corporate zombie leeches who get paid way more than they deserve with no external markets to squeeze them out. Money makes money. Success breeds success. So it is hard to separate true Meritocracy from Hereditary Privilege. Individuals in big companies take way too much credit for their personal current impact. It takes years to institutionalise the firepower to amplify their marginal action. “Meritocracy” often boils down to spurious KPIs on a spreadsheet and someone making a biased and qualitative judgement that (perhaps subconsciously) will protect their job and authority. Reverse Darwinism. Promote people slightly less competent than you. The real flavour lies in being able to genuinely see people. That requires time, empowerment, and the space for a base opportunity to develop skills and knowledge.

Pick the Fat Mouse?

Alternate History

Stale

'Bernie would've won'. 'Hillary would've won'. It is comforting to think in alternate histories, 'if things had happened differently'. They didn't. Hindsight Bias is the tendency to think where we are now was more predictable than it was. There will always be someone who got it right, particularly if they make lots of predictions, and don't keep fantastic records (especially of their mistakes). To see if someone is good at making decisions, they need a track record. The problem is... a long enough track record requires lots of decisions, and lots of time, to build confidence. There is a trade-off between sufficient evidence, and the evidence being stale. A better starting point is accepting that the world is uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Build resilience, and do the best you can.

"The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained."

Daniel Kahneman

Confidence

Confidence is rewarded. If someone else seems to understand the world that we don't, there is a natural appeal. As you get older, you realise more and more of the people you thought knew what was going on, don't. Some people just take better stabs in the dark. Sometimes it is luck. Sometimes it is the work of others. A little bit of delusion is a good thing. If we constantly thought about how dangerous roads were, we would probably never cross them, or get into a car. Confidence is delusion. If we are good at something, it doesn't necessarily mean we will be good at something else. It doesn't mean we know why we were good at that thing. Or if we will be going forward. What it does do, is give as the ability to pretend. Pretending gives us the back bone to take the next step.

The Dark

Self-Reflection

The temptation is to take everything that happens as evidence to support whatever we believe. Confirmation Bias. 'I told you so'. When unexpected things happen there are always lessons. Mistakes are how we learn. They are the engine of how we improve. The answers aren't normally immediately obvious. If they were, we probably would have been prepared.

'Whenever we are surprised by something, even if we admit that we made a mistake, we say, ‘Oh I’ll never make that mistake again.’ But, in fact, what you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something is that the world is difficult to anticipate. That’s the correct lesson to learn from surprises: that the world is surprising.'

Daniel Kahneman

Take any 'I predicted this' with a pinch of salt. There will always be someone who got it right. Rather than looking for people who get predictions correct, I think the best approach is self-reflection. How unprepared was I for what happened? How can I be more resilient in the future? What lessons can I learn before venturing to teach others? What can I learn from them first, before I share insights I think I have?

The problem with the 'I told you so' approach is that it leads to doubling down on answers rather than finding more beautiful questions.

A pinch of salt, self-reflection and more beautiful questions.

Pinch of Salt

We are only able to see a fraction of the light spectrum. Gamma rays, x-rays, ultra-violet, infra-red, microwaves, radio, TV, long-waves - we don't see them. If you haven't learnt the different flavours and subtleties of wine - one glass is virtually the same as the next. If you haven't learnt to speak a language, it is just sound. We are all born into a certain culture, with a certain gender, and a certain set of genetically defined tricks up our sleeves. Then we tick along gathering experiences. That determines the world we experience. 

There are bucket loads of things going on we are completely unaware of. As 'unaware of' as ants going on with their business while humans build skyscrapers all around them. The more we attempt to learn about everything that is going on, the more we should realise that it is absolutely impossible to understand or experience much more than tweaks. We are biologically not capable of more than that. Our super power is that we are able to depend on, and trust others. We have to straddle the fine line between not destroying things that we have built up over time (protection) and improving the things that don't seem to be working (progress). 

A common thread in a lot of our more challenging problems seems to be confident people believing they have cracked the code. They have seen the matrix. The thing is, it is not possible for anyone to have done that. The truth is, no one knows the answer. We like confidence. Charismatic people typically have a lot more answers than questions. Work environments typically reward the people who are best at faking confidence till they believe in themselves and their answers.

You slowly realise that adults don't have all the answers. Then you realise even idiots can run for President. Even idiots can be President. Even idiots can run companies. Intellectual idiots. Emotional idiots. Social idiots. Anywhere in the world. You realise that winning a Nobel Prize doesn't mean you are an expert on anything outside your field. You realise that you can win a Nobel Prize for something that later gets proved wrong. No one has the answers. We are all just giving it our best shot, based on the random set of stuff that we have been exposed to.

All you can do is add a pinch of salt to your opinions, try be constructive and get on with it.

Pet Peeves and Projects

We can't concentrate on everything. The world is a complicated place. So what we see depends on what we've seen and what we care about. It depends on who we care about, how well we slept, whether we have eaten and how much space we have to listen. 

The easiest way to decide what to do is to fight fires. You look for whatever is screaming the loudest for your attention and you do that. It is the way most office workers start the day. You check your inbox and start working your way through. Between that and meetings, there is normally not much time left to proactively think or plan. There isn't enough time to take everything into account. Unless you make space for time, and time for space.

Some things really irritate us. Our Pet Peeves. My friend Stuart talks of issuing summary executions any time one of his arise. One of our shared peeves is the answer 'I don't have time'. Of course you have time, it is just a case of how you choose to use it. Other Pet Peeves may be spitting gum on the floor, leaving plates in the sink, sidewalk texting, grammar mistakes or someone asking you to 'think like an owner' when they 'pay you like an employee'. We can't issue executions for things that irritate us or there wouldn't be anyone left. The things that irritate us may also be innocent crimes. The criminals genuinely aren't being malicious and may not even be aware that their crime is at all significant. It is our pet, not theirs.

Some things are really important to us. Our Pet Projects. For whatever reason, we have connected emotionally to some particular goal. We know the people involved. Their story resonates with ours. Maybe it is something we have always wanted to do and now is the chance. Perhaps there is a secondary goal that has nothing to do with the stated aim, but would benefit us in a way we don't really need to tell anyone. If the meeting happens to be on Friday in Cape Town, I can go to the wedding in Stellenbosch on Saturday without doing two trips. No one needs to know that. Perhaps it is less strategic than that. A goal just strikes a chord with you. You connect with it beyond the pros and cons of all the alternatives. 

Passion and emotions are wonderful things. They add flavour, music, colour and texture to life. Passion and emotion also create blind spots where we care about things disproportionately, or not at all. 'What we see is all there is' says Daniel Kahneman. Taking a step back, looking for other perspectives, being aware of history and listening can help. I don't think it is a case of stripping all emotion out of decisions. That is impossible. Emotions are at the heart of what incentivises us to carry on. If we don't care, why carry on? We need pets. We just need our pets to play nicely.

Apparently if I was a pet, I'd be a Schnauzer

What do you Feel?

It is harder to answer the question 'What do you think?' than the question 'What do you feel?'. It may be harder to put feelings into words, but that may not be necessary. All that may be needed is a Good/Bad or Yes/No response. We can have visceral emotional reactions to issues and questions we have little knowledge about. Intuition is always on. Thought has to be turned on. We may not have the tools required to think about the issue. Thinking may require hard work. Most of our beliefs and opinions are based on how we feel.

I am busy reading 'Thinking Fast & Slow' by Daniel Kahnemann

Bias

We see based on the way we have seen. Based on what we recognise and what we expect. This helps us make incredibly complex decisions every day. It helps ignore infinite alternative possibilities. It gives style. It gives flavour. But... every single connection we make and thing we learn makes it harder for us to see anew. The Curse of Knowledge makes it harder to empathise with what it was like to not understand. Sometimes understanding prevents understanding. The best we can do to recognise and guard against the negative side effects of our bias, is to listen.

Cold Tea

Every now and then I make a cup of tea or coffee and then forget about it because I am doing something else. An hour or two later I see the cold cup sitting there looking forlorn. I wanted the drink which was why I made it. I just got distracted. I think that happens often. There is too much going on for us to remember all the things we want to do. We forget the things that matter to us. Sometimes we need a nudge. 

Books on accepting a little help
'Nudge' & 'The Checklist Manifesto'

There are two books I have been told are base reading for trying to understand the political conflict we find ourselves trying to get out of. 'Anarchy, State and Utopia' by Robert Nozick and 'A Theory of Justice' by John Rawls. It gets quite philosophical and I am not sure there is a right answer of how we can best get along. I have started with Nozick's book. Beyond knowing what the right thing to do is, politics seems to boil down to two questions.

1. What should you be able to force someone to do for their own good? (Paternalism)

2. What should you be able to force people to do for other people's good?

The world is too complex for us to work through all the possible solutions to any choice. Making imperfect decisions when we don't understand is what makes us human. Without any biases or blindspots, we wouldn't do anything. We would always come up with a reason why an action could go wrong. There are always tradeoffs. Irrational tastes, preferences and styles narrow down the huge debilitating world of choices. This is good.

But when our styles clash, we have to come up with new shared illogical biases. For most of our existence we just did our own thing in small groups. Very recently Monarchs, Dictators, Religious Leaders and Governments have been the ones who have got to make those choices for us. Slowly those got replaced with majorities who forgot minorities. Then those got replaced with Constitutions. You don't get to vote on freedom. But freedom without constraints isn't freedom. In our Utopia, it would be our flavour that got to answer those two tough political questions. Autonomy is delicious.

Sometimes outsourcing a little autonomy can make things even better. It doesn't have to a Government. We could create our own 'Council of Elders' from our friends and people we respect? One of the best bits of religion is the ability to go, for free, to someone who has your and your communities best interests at heart for instruction. They will have their own biases and blindspots, but these will help you narrow down your choices and act.

Whether it is a checklist, a phone reminder, a letter to yourself, or people you trust, perhaps it is good to have outside forces who can force you to do things?

I wouldn't mind voting for something that told me my tea was getting cold.

Stories That Move

We are only scratching the surface of how the mind works. We know that being human gives us incredible imaginations and our storytelling ability, along with our ability to believe, gives us magical superpowers. We can hop the gaps between what we know.

This 'fuzzy power' comes with a whole lot of warnings. These 'Cognitive Biases' can be looked at as mistakes, or our brains and emotions not working properly. They can also be used to help us when we understand them. I spoke of the magical properties of stories to help us remember things. Rory Daly responded, 'You have a great point here. But, this same cognitive process that makes stories memorable, is also behind people picking up and repeating stuff that is purely anecdotal... So many unsubstantiated ideas dressed as truth...'

This is known as 'Availability Bias'. It is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of events if we are able to remember them easily. If you struggle to remember something, you think it is unusual. But we remember things that are violent, sexy, funny or memorable in some way. Emotionally charged things are memorable. Stuff that happened recently are memorable. These are the stories that are then 'Available' when we think. Boring facts slip away.

If a story is particularly powerful, it is likely to affect the way we think. Someone who is mugged ,or who knows someone who is mugged, will think the whole country in which they live is more dangerous than someone who isn't able to feel the danger as palpably. Someone who has a racist interaction with one person may be more likely to have a negative emotional response the next time they think of that 'group of people'. This bears limited connection to the whole group. We can respond excessively to the crazies because they make more noise and make us more angry. More broadly the power of stories to help us can also hold us back.

The Dalai Lama sees the role of religion as storytelling of sorts. If science proves his beliefs wrong, he will change his beliefs. His beliefs help push him into experiences that he wouldn't get to if he waited for us to figure things out. In the same way as facts shouldn't get in the way of a good story, ideally, stories shouldn't get in the way of good facts.

Fortunately things like ethics, morals, laws, and facts can be separated from stories. We can enjoy the power of anecdotes, but we can step back and look at the bigger picture to tweak our stories when they need tweaking. Perhaps that is why some of the best stories were part of aural tradition where they were never written but rather told, or sung.

When shared over meals and fireplaces, stories can adjust themselves. They can introduce new characters. Characters can evolve. Each telling is important. The storyteller, where the story is told and who it is told to all matter. The best stories move with us, not against us.

Campfire stories

Beyond Bubbles

It used to be the case that you could take things apart, put them back together, and you would know how things worked. Not everything, but at least the things that people had made. 

I once went a reunion of people who had been in the same university residence as me, but up to 40 or so years before.  The anecdotes shared from my year were about the washing machines being connected up to the internet so that you could know what stage of the cycle it was. That way you could rush down from your room rather than waiting down in the dingy laundry. The start of the internet of things. This was odd for older old boys who used to have their washing done for them. The older anecdotes included taking apart someones car and putting it back together again inside the inner quad of the residence.

Part of our material progress from impoverished farmers has come at the cost of complexity. Good luck to the 20 year old students who try the same car destruction reconstruction trick today. With driverless cars, realistic renewable energy and artificial intelligence knocking on our doors comes accepting that there are some things we can't understand. There is just too much to wrap our heads around.

It isn't just cars. Even when it comes to ideas, there seem to be Nobel Prize winners on both sides of arguments. My favourite example is the joint prize for Economics going to Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller. As a complete oversimplification, one is famous for saying the market is efficient and one is famous for saying it isn't. If you believe in market efficiency, your best call of action is to invest in a fund that just tries to get the average return of all the investable companies. You believe that the costs involved in trying to do better than that aren't worth the effort.

 

Some famous investors who do believe they can do better than the market, still advocate that the average investor just aims for average. When asked about his widow's investment plan, Warren Buffett says "My advice to the trustee could not be more simple: put 10pc of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90pc in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund." He suggested Vanguard's. Vanguard was started by John Bogle who is a very strong advocate of aiming for average being the best way to get better than average returns (since you minimise costs).

Whether building stuff, investing in stuff, or just thinking about how society should work, it's hard to wade through the very smart people who speak very convincingly on all sides. When it is building stuff, we can just delegate that and drive the car without knowing how it works. For other things, that messes too much with our feeling that we should take responsibility for our decisions. Not understanding stuff is very uncomfortable. So the tendency is to find someone hardcore who agrees with you. You don't even have to read their whole book. You just need a few soundbites and a picture of them with the award to give some back bone to ideas when they are challenged. You can even say 'research has found' before making your point. It isn't like other people will have the time to research and rebuff the ideas either. This is called Confirmation Bias. If the stuff you read comes from your friends, family, colleagues, Facebook, Twitter, or even your favourite academic, you are likely going to be very confused as to why people disagree with you.

This easiest way to handle this, is to decide they are evil or stupid. On Facebook you can even just unfriend the people who see things differently. Doing more than just waiting for your chance to speak requires a lot of effort. It requires going beyond polite conversation. It requires letting people you disagree with know you are still on their side.

Bubbles are easier. Beyond Bubbles is better.

Big Solvable Problems

Some great ideas don't spread. Just because an idea is awesome isn't enough, it needs a dash of mojo to get it going. We are driven by incentives. We have lots of biases and incentives tend to feed off these biases so that our actions don't necessarily reflect even what we think is the best outcome. Bill Gates got involved in philanthropy when he read that 500,000 children die every year from Rotavirus. Rotavirus is the most common cause of severe diarrhea in children and it disturbed Gates to not have even heard of something that killed so many. Further research showed him that many diseases which had been eliminated, or virtually eliminated, in the US still killed millions of children. His assumption that if vaccines and treatments were available to save lives would lead to government doing everything they could to get them to the people who need them.

Some biases are useful. Some biases were useful in the past and are no longer so. I get the feeling that much of our political tensions and energies are spent on velvet/champagne problems. Now some of them are more obviously trivial than others (and in truth we don't spend a lot of time on them), but I think we actually have broad agreement on some of the bigger global issues. We just lack the dash of mojo and incentives required to get things moving. That is why I get really excited by organisations like the Gates Foundation and GiveWell. Capitalism has been good at gaining impetus to get things done because the handful of people with excess mojo can get rewarded. Most of us like the idea of equality, fairness and people not living in poverty. For the most part though, we only feel incentivised to do anything about it when it is local. This is a bias. At the heart of many investment philosophies is the ability to remove your biases and make the best decision. The profit motive gives us the incentive to act. We should try and remove some of our biases in areas which can't be monetised too. The happiness motive is more subtle, but it is still there. 'The Life You Can Save' by Peter Singer articulates how close we actually are to solving some of the big problems. One of the reasons we don't act is because solutions feel out of reach. This is not true. We are very close to being able to moan without guilt about our money not fitting neatly into our wallets. It. Is. Very. Annoying. Why do we even need cash anymore? 

Hey English people...how do you fit your money into your wallets? #GiantBills #ChampagneProblem pic.twitter.com/v31IRLUZ4H

— Adam Grenville (@adamMgrenville) September 25, 2013

 

 

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Stuart points to this article in the Economist which discusses the latest TED conference. He tells me to look out for Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's TED talk. It is (as far as I can tell) not up on the site yet, but here is an interview with him on Al Jazerra by Riz Khan.

Game Theory fascinated me at university. I only did a brief introductory course which included rather than focused on it, and maybe it was just that I was more fascinated by the movie 'A Beautiful Mind'. I had heard that to a degree it had kind of run its course and become overly mathematical and impractical, but maybe Prof Bueno de Mesquita is on to something?

I am a little skeptical about anyone who claims to have a 90% success rate. I just don't buy it. Especially when they say that they can explain away a lot of the other 10%.

If you come to me and tell me you have a model that gets it right 60% or 70% of the time, I may listen. Skeptically, but I will listen. 90% and I start to smell something.

That being said, it is true that computers and models can be used to help us make decisions and narrow down likely outcomes. I do believe that stripping out biases and processing information can lead to better decisions.

I will delay judgement on Prof Nostradamus.

Overthinking?

I have not been reading enough of Overcoming Bias recently. Stuart believes most children would get a better education by reading that blog every day than by spending 12 years at school. I don't think that is far from the truth, if at all.

But it can be pretty heavy. And thinking about thinking all the time is pretty tough work. Will Wilkinson chatted to Eliezer Yudkowsky about rational thinking on bloggingheads. He made a similar point to Eliezer who is a daily contributor to 'Overcoming Bias'.

In a recent post, Robin Hanson says:

'We are usually only aware of a small fraction of the relevant evidence and analysis that influence our beliefs'

I don't think the claim is that we can be purely rational. In fact, I think we are always in a process of discovering what we ourselves think about any topic. That is why listening is so important. Maybe it is also why we tend to over argue our own points, because we are also trying to convince ourselves in the process. We live in a world of incomplete thoughts, ideas, beliefs and emotions.

I think this means a few things. I think it is worth putting in a fairly big effort to overcome lapses in the way we think, and that effort is worth it. But thinking isn't only done by reading and debating. Thinking and experiencing emotions and interactions are part of it to if we constantly reflect.

It means we can't hold on to any belief too tightly. It means we have to challenge ourselves, recognise holes and try and fix them. It means we need to listen to and seek out feedback and criticism. But, we can also safely recognise that others can give us a glimpse and only a glimpse of ourselves. There may be truth in any feedback, and there may be rubbish. So some feedback, like some ideas we have, is just plain rubbish and needs to be discarded. The art is knowing the difference. And where it is valid and negative, accept it and move on. One of my favourite quotes (which I would attribute if my Internet wasn't so slow tonight) is...

'Those who care about you the most don't care if you make mistakes, it is what you do next that matters'

That doesn't excuse mistakes, but I think is more of a challenge to improve. A call to action, in thought, in action, in emotion and in the way we treat others every day.

I think it is worth the effort Wilkinson refers to.

Exciting Times.

Bench in Kensington Gardens

On my other far more solemn research orientated blog, Protecting Alpha, I am looking at biases that affect investment decision making, and am trying to think of measures for how we go about improving and correcting such behaviour.

But the biases that we have there aren't just about how we invest. There is no magic wall that exists between decisions about money and other decisions. In fact, until you have achieved that elusive goal of financial freedom, money is a very emotional topic that gets woven into everything else.

I often tell people that one of my motivations for studying what I did was that I hated money. My friends from school may disagree having witnessed me in various attempts to make extra pocket money from doing extra chores at home like cooking porridge to a rather successful sweet business when I was 16 that helped me get my first hi-fi set. What I meant rather was that I hated what I saw money do. I hated the control that money seemed to have on emotions, friends and families. As I sat on a bench in Kensington Gardens about 10 years ago having gone to London to try get a visa for France and having just enough for a junior McDonald's burger and a ticket back to Chichester, I was not a happy camper. I had come to London only to return empty handed as the French embassy was closed. Probably the straw that broke the camels back, I realised that delusions I had about other 'first world concern' career choices were for later. If I wanted to do anything in life, money would be necessary. And so I committed myself to figuring out how it works.

Now, I think I have a fair (with lots of room for improvement) understanding, but still little understanding of the psychology of money.

In my little fantasy land, people are all able to deal with 'first world concern' dreams like art, reading, theatre, sport, conversation, comedy and the like. In my little fantasy land, there is never stress over not having enough for the basics or enough to fill your curiosity.

That is a long way off, and until then, I guess we have to learn how to get round the psychological battle ground that that causes. So... I guess that was the reasoning behind what essentially is my new 'bench in Kensington Gardens'.