Chosen Path

When I reflect on my path, there are often people who arrive at a similar point to me. Path making is so complicated that they normally veer off. I bump into others and have fun memories of the portion of the path we have shared, but it is very unusual to stay in a similar place. Life happens. 

I have learnt to hold lightly to the teams that I am a part of, no matter how much I like them. To hold lightly to the friends that live nearby. Unless it is your life partner, where you have made a commitment to make the hard decisions, and do the work, to forge a path together. With others you care about, paths can cross, fade, reconnect, or run alongside. 

I am fortunate to have a deep bench of friendships, but everyone is wrestling with their own struggles. I do not see enough of anyone. 

Some have taken very traditional career paths. They have built skills and knowledge around a long-term goal of a role they want. They have a clear picture of where they want to be. Others respond to choices life presents, as life presents them... still building, but with less premeditation. Some choose incredibly simple lives, massively reducing what they spend and living more contemplatively. Others have chosen noble professions, but are grappling with financial struggles. 

Some people’s paths are harder to identify with, because there is insufficient overlap. 6 degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. A chain of “friends of friends”. The further along that chain, the harder it can be to understand other people’s decisions. This is true even of immediate friends with no chain to obscure. 

We make different choices, and our choices frame future choices.

Red Pill on Blue Pill

Stillness v Absence

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.

A Micro-Hydro Facility in Vietnam

Going Wild

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. 

Free-ranging Longhorn Cattle

Choosing Decision Makers

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. 

"The Scapegoat"

William Holman Hunt (1854)

 

Rippling Consequences

Westworld explores how others might have a better understanding of you than yourself. The chance, if we aren’t paying attention, that other people can see what we can’t see if they are detached and observant. In “Sapiens” & “Homo Deus”, Yuval Harari questions how willing we will be 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. 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. Attention doesn’t scale. Someone understanding us better than we understand ourselves relies on deep listening and care. Local markets with ultra-local decision-making empowers people to make decisions. Information feeds up through the paths that people choose. Through the impact of their actions. Rippling consequences of meaning creation. It doesn't matter if we don't understand this in watered-down averages and stereotypes. It does matter to the intimate relationships that wrestle with understanding. 

Ripple Marks in Ancient Sandstone

Hating Hierarchy

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 in it. 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 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. 

Central Decision Making

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

Choices have Consequences

I studied money partly because I hated it. Not money itself, because money isn’t a thing. Money is a communication tool. Mostly I hated the unchosen constraints and impact on relationships. Money fights. Money anxiety. Money in the driving seat. There are various stories of Alexander the Great coming across a Yogi on a rock. One trying to conquer, one working on acceptance. Life is about choices, and choices have consequences. Not all good ideas are good business ideas. Personally, I would rather focus my energy on the good ideas that are terrible business ideas. But this reality dictates that we at least have to tip our hats to the world of supply and demand. Where price isn’t value, but a sorting mechanism shifting things you can count and control. If you learn to understand risk, planning, and investment, you can gradually still the waves and choose your constraints. Conscious of the consequences, but with a point of focus.

Map of Alexander's Empire and Route

Securing your Basket

Choices are made in baskets. Once one is made, the set of options changes. There are both intended and unintended consequences. To explore, Economists simplify this pesky problem with an assumption. “Ceteris Paribus” meaning with other conditions remaining the same. All else equal. The world is complicated, ambiguous, and random. We see only a slice of it, and we see based on how we have seen before. We see only what is meaningful to us. We see only when we notice the change/contrast. We have limits. Our worlds bump into each other, and in the past we lived in bubbles with shared baskets and constraints. Now it is difficult to navigate the lack of shared context that stands in the way of staying in touch with other worlds. Our messages to each other arrive as foreigners. We are constantly unpacking and unpicking. Through the chaos, a foundation becomes more essential. A base. Secure space to retreat to and to advance from. Where conditions remain the same.

A Path with Space

One path to superficial financial freedom is a bigger salary. That can open the door to borrowings because most loans are a multiple of income. Spend first, pay later. A deeper level of financial freedom comes at it from a different angle. Goals and spending. Pay attention to what you find fulfilling. Pay attention to the sources of joy and meaning available. Our lives are path dependent. Lots of our decisions are made for us by default. If we don’t choose consciously, life chooses for us. Normally we cast our eyes on those earning more. This means we miss all there is to learn from those earning, and spending, less. Price is just a clearing device. How much is there? Who wants it? Meaning a high price is a better indication of scarcity than value. If you can improve the skill of finding value in things that are abundant, you are on the path to financial freedom. If you can get a gap between your earning and spending, you can start to build capital. A deeper path to financial freedom is creating space to breathe. One step, inhale, another step, exhale, and repeat.

Find a Path

Pay Deep Attention

All lives don’t have the same options. The challenge with reading books, watching movies, and spending time with outliers and heroes is their realities are likely vastly different. I went to watch a play about homelessness in the UK. Something as a Soutie, I had been skeptical about (“You don’t know what poverty is. Come to South Africa.”). The Actors took suggestions from the audience, and then played it out. The lesson? We have no idea how to live other people’s lives. We just think we do. The best generic advice is to pay deep attention to your options. Talk to people whose lives resonate with yours. Find mentors who have walked the path from where you are. Friends one page ahead. Don’t underestimate what you can learn from very average people. What you can learn from, rather than teach, people less fortunate than you. Don’t spend so much time trying to surround yourself with successful people that you lose yourself. Meritocracy can hide what we have under what we want.

UK National Charity for Homelessness

Powering Decision Makers

People without money aren’t infants. They don’t need decisions made for them. They need money. Money is the fundamental unit of decision making in a market-based economy. Democracy shouldn’t be about making decisions for other people unless it absolutely has to be. Adding conditions to how people make their basic choices costs money. You have to employ pseudo-parents to question real life adults. To strip them of their agency. People who aren’t in poverty tend to have big ideas about how people in poverty should make their choices. Either from a moral or “quality” perspective. All businesses boil down to problem solving for people with money. Good businesses have direct relationships with decision makers. If you want to solve the problem of poverty, create more decision makers. Then watch how the problems get solved. Spontaneously. From the bottom up.

detail from a drawing

by Leonardo da Vinci

Scarcity and Abundance

Life preparation was very gendered in the bubble I grew up in. One example of this was that Mathematics was compulsory in High School for boys, but not for girls. I lived in a Patriarchal society where men ruled outside the home, and women ruled inside. Feminism was rising (at a lag), but it was very much focused on Choice for women. No pressure (different pressure). What would you like to do (you should probably do this)? Let’s chip away at the obvious obstacles (well, do our best). Girls doing Boys’ things is serious. Boys doing Girls’ things is funny. Implicitly acknowledging a hierarchy of where we place value. For Boys, choices were squashed and pragmatism was promoted. How are you going to put food on the table? Put childish choices aside. Man up. The horrible truth of the world is that if you follow what you love, it is often harder to monetise. In part, because a fundamental of love is abundance, and a fundamental of money-making is scarcity. In a gendered world, it was women who focused on love, and men who financed it.

Unwinding Scarcity

River Crossing

The Holy Grail of business is 'discriminatory pricing'. The ability to charge different prices (for the basically the same thing) to different people. Normally this is done by creating 'classes' or groups, and slightly different offerings. The heart of the offer can stay the same, as long as the higher paying groups perceive themselves to be relatively better off. Often the thing you are selling is relative status. Sometimes the product may simply be the higher price tag. It is a way of someone displaying their financial power.

If you have to charge one price, you are charging some people too much (they won't buy), and some people too little (they will think they have received a really good deal). The price is an average. Beware of averages. 

"Never forget the 6-foot-tall man who drowned 

crossing the stream that was 5 feet deep on average" 

Howard Marks

As the person buying, this means you have to have an internal understanding of value. Price is not value. From the bucket list of things you want, you have to compare that gap in value and price, and make the best decisions you can.

The problem is you can't always 'just not buy' some of the things that cost way more than you think they are worth. There are some things you have to buy. I think of Housing, Health and Law as 'the three guns'... there are situations where you just have to pay the price that is given. You are a price taker.

The first two rules of good financial decision making are 'Never be a forced Buyer' and 'Never be a forced Seller'. Unfortunately, life has a habit of forcing us to make decisions. The more space you can create to avoid these situations, the more control you will be able to have.

Our wants and impulses also end up pushing our financial decisions. Something that seems like a good idea on a Friday night, is not the same thing that seems like a good idea on a Monday morning. Good financial decision making is about developing habits and 'rules of thumb' for your intuition. Deep soaked Intuitions based on what you really want. What trade-offs genuinely match the kind of life you want.

The rules aren't really rules. They are self-imposed. So a better word for them is 'choices'. To make good choices, you need to be able to step back, decide what you want (in general), and develop your own rules. Rules, choices, and habits are basically the same thing.

If you don't develop your own rules, the world will impose its averages on you.

Who are you?

I find shows like West World, and Black Mirror, disturbing because they seem not that detached from reality. When they start dipping into what it means to be human. A book which also messed with my head is Homo Deus. Part of what it looks at, is how people and Artificial Intelligence will interact. Where will decisions be made? 

Right now, the lowest unit of decision making is the individual. But we all know we have a committee of competing desires (long term, short term, rational, emotional, cultural) in our head. What happens when decision making gets pushed down a level? What happens when decision making gets co-ordinated as we extend our ability to communicate? What happens when we hand over different parts of control?

When we start seeking out 'who we really are', and 'whether we have free will', things get messy. These questions drive us forward. Motivate us. West World simplifies that down to Three Key Drivers and a Backstory. This allows our days to be a loop. A bunch of habits that we repeat every time we wake up. Then, depending on how we get bumped by the world, we respond.

What Drives You?

What is your Backstory?

What is your Narrative?

This is how I understand Free Will and Privilege. Like a Galton Board/Bean Machine where we are presented with a number of choices. This creates the illusion of us being in control, because we feel like we are choosing to go left or right many times a day. The choices are presented to us by the world. We can't break the rules of physics, or the society we are in. Where we start - country, region, city, parents, wealth - matters.  Our drivers matter. Our backstory matters. Our narrative matters.

Bean Machine/Galton Board

Sharper Stones (Tim)

What’s the point of a luxury yacht? You might think that it’s for traveling to exotic locations in grand style and enjoying all the excitement and gratuitous pleasure that money can buy. Nope. A six-year study by a British academic has found that the super rich mostly just moor their yachts in the sort of places like Cannes or Monaco where they are conspicuously available to be ogled and envied. Apparently the main motivation for making these super-yachts ever bigger and more ostentatious is not for the sake of luxury or convenience out on the high seas, but simply to compete with the yacht in the next berth in Saint-Tropez.

I recently had a reunion with some of my old school friends in London. Now that we’re all in our early forties, we’ve had plenty of time to develop our lives, our careers and our investment portfolios. This is something that my friends have done with relish. They’re all very successful in their respective fields: a computer programmer, a vascular surgeon and a something to do with logistics. They have all been sensible with their money and all own lovely homes and flash cars, and undoubtedly have sensible retirement plans. Maybe I missed the starting gun, but I’m still just an English teacher living in a small rented flat full of cheap furniture, and I don’t really have any assets at all.

Tim(e) in London

Usually, I’m pretty content with what I have because I tend to live for experience more than material wealth. But, just as I expected, when it came time to meet face-to-face with my old mates as a group, I was intimidated by their tangible success. It made me feel slightly inadequate that I hadn’t acquired any of their status, or status symbols. This is a bit embarrassing to admit because shunning materialism and status symbols has always been a core value of mine. Nonetheless, these things have a powerful ability to make a person question the course that his life has taken.

But in the middle of our reunion braai, the old friend who is perhaps the most successful of all suddenly got a faraway look in his eye and said with unexpected gravity, “Isn’t it strange how we’ve all followed such different paths?” And suddenly I knew that the envy goes both ways. As much as I may envy their more tangible success, there are times when they envy my lifestyle. I’m no poster boy for the rock ‘n roll lifestyle, but I do retain a certain mobility that I’m quite proud of – fifteen years an expat, having visited almost twenty countries, living in my third foreign country and learning my second foreign language. Ironically, it might be my lack of material entrapments that is my most enviable quality.

It’s always been human nature to look at the caveman in the next cave and admire his extra sharp stone tools. It seems likely that this instinct is an engine of human progress, spurring us on to bigger and better projects that have ultimately benefited the whole human race. Nonetheless, there are times when we have to recognise this feeling for what it is, and not let it deprive us of the joy and satisfaction we already possess.

Space Makes Time

I am not sympathetic to the response, 'I don't have time'. We all have time. 24 hours in a day. We choose between various options. 'I am choosing something else' is more accurate. Buddhists say that if you are twice as busy, you should meditate twice as long. What is very important is managing your energy and your perspective. Quite often, the thing that gets our time is the thing that shouts the loudest. Adding space to your day allows you to consciously make the choice of how to spend your time. Space makes time.

My grandfather's homemade language clocks

Making Time

More Than Everything

Contradictory things are sometimes true. Preferences aren't always consistent. What we want is fuzzy. The Pale Blue Dot picture of earth was taken from more than 4 billion miles away. All we have done in less than a pixel. What we do doesn't matter. And yet, what we do is the only thing that matters. 

'All of human history has happened on that tiny pixel' Carl Sagan

The ability to take what you do very seriously, while at the same time having perspective seems contradictory. I am at my very worst when I am desperate. From a logical perspective, you never want to be desperate. If you can't walk away from something, there is nothing you won't give to have it. Not because it is worth more than everything else. Nothing is ever worth more than everything else. But logic stops when you are desperate. You don't sit back and in a calm fashion figure out what everything is worth to you, what you prefer, and make a choice.

The heart of addiction. Momentary desperation which halts the ability to walk away. An intoxication that destroys your ability to value anything else. Nothing, however true, however important, is worth sucking all your energy away. Holding back allows you to give more. Allowing time, allows you to give more. Laughing. Listening. Relaxing. Space, allows you to give more.

Nothing matters more than everything. Which is why everything matters.

Already Affordable

The 'Law of One Price' is the idea that the same thing should sell for the same price wherever it is. The idea that what determines some things price is its value. This forms the basis for the idea of 'Purchase Power Parity' which compares the output of countries adjusting for the strength of the currency. So while South Africa may 'produce less' in dollar terms, the amount of stuff will be higher than suggested by the dollar selling price. The Economist invented the 'Big Mac Index' as a light hearted way of looking at the idea that the same thing (don't get much more same than a Big Mac) should cost the same. 

One reason the Law of One Price doesn't really earn its stripes as a Law is because we don't choose where to be based on where the specific thing we are buying is the cheapest. If you are sitting at a pub in London and want a pint, you are going to have to hand over £5. It doesn't matter that it would be ridiculous to pay R110 for a beer in Johannesburg. A friend tells me craft beer in Vietnam costs 3200 Dong (That is R2). He had to check that he was converting properly.

One of the problems with comparison (which seems to be a way we try to figure out if we are happy) is Big Maccy. When we see a friends house, we may like the idea of living there. When we see another friend at the Rugby World Cup final, we may like the idea of being there. Whatever the point of comparison, financial freedom/ time/ power/ friends/ intelligence/ musical talent/ blah/ blah/ blah, it is impossible to stand back and consider the full combination of things that go into that.

The exercise of stepping back is useful. Even then, you probably won't have all the facts and feelings at hand. A 2 hour chat with someone about the stresses and benefits of their job will only give you a whiff of what it is all about. What we are generally the expert on is what our experience is. We can tweak that. That's why when we give advice, it is autobiographical.

Trying to step back and think of all the things we spend our time, energy, money, love and worry on can help us realise when we could benefit from a change. It is hard to keep all the things that are important to us in mind. It's worth occasionally stepping back to ask what the most important things are. Why are they important? Then perhaps you will realise that something is worth a trip to wherever your own personal Vietnam Craft Beer is. You might find that you can already afford it. Price is a vote. Value is personal.

Whatever Life Can Throw

Random doesn't mean Heads, Tails, Heads, Tails, Tails, Heads. It may mean Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads, Heads. It is only in the very long run that noise tends to come out in the wash. Bad stuff happens. Goods stuff happens. We control the tweaks and little choices. Life has a habit of throwing strings of stuff at us in bursts of feast and famine. Some of the most challenging - job changes, career changes, divorces, deaths, break-ups, moving home, moving country - can feel like life is trying to annihilate you. I don't think so. Sometimes surviving punches gives you the confidence that you can take whatever life can throw.

The Greatest took the punches first and didn't lack confidence