Greener Grass

The tyranny of choice is that having lots of options can make life frightening. We spend so much energy thinking about what could have been. Greener grass and bitterness at the hand we have been dealt, when some of those options were never real options (because life isn’t fair) and others were choices we made (which have consequences). 

We live one life. Decisive indecision can leave you constantly spinning. There is always an escape hatch when life gets hard, but if you aren’t prepared to do the hard work then it is impossible to commit. There are always other options. Progress often requires closing things down. 

Real value is built over the long term and so you can’t be constantly starting again. Detachment, importantly, is not a lack of commitment. You can build within boundaries without being defined by those boundaries. Be prepared to do the work. Be able to face hard truths. 

It is easy to get wound up in self-pity and frustrated at the way things work. Your frustration can be 100% valid and yet not helpful. Righteous indignation about the cards you have been dealt seldom changes your cards. Is anyone else going to do anything else to change things, or is it going to have to be you? From where you are. 

Accept the way things are, but not in an accepting way. It is the only possible starting point for understanding, so you can change the setup for who comes next, or with grit... for yourself.

What Makes Money

Income and money operate at a very explicit level. Pay for what you see. Fully acknowledging what makes money and what doesn’t, and not using force to get your way, allows you to go deeper and wider. 

You can shift to embodied learning. To things we can’t explain. To the tacit knowledge that is held by people on the very front lines with zero distance from decision making. Knowledge built through immediate and repeated feedback cycles and real wrestling with real problems. Understanding that is impossible to pass up the chain. 

Research and development can take a lot of time and become a part of you. Where the payback is hidden. 

Competitive advantages I like are ones you can do in the open. In “The Art of Learning”, Josh Waitzkin talks about his jiu-jitsu teacher publishing his training videos. This surprised people, because he was freely giving away his secrets. His answer lay in his confidence that if you were concentrating on what he was doing, he would be a step ahead, because he had gone deeper. 

If you have to safely guard a secret, it’s not really a competitive advantage. It is a fragile wall. 

With an enduring advantage, you can tell people what to do, but the time, commitment, and effort will scare them off. Particularly if that mastery doesn't make money. They will head towards the six easy steps to financial freedom in six months. Not the life of hard graft that will set up the next generation.

Time - Commitment - Effort

Increasingly Released

We will always be thinking of something. Although often pitched as emptying the mind, meditation is practicing letting distractions pass through. Enhancing the capacity for conscious focus. That is the connection between money and yoga. 

If you have or build buffers for financial noise, and an engine to support your immediate physical needs and future development, you gain the ability to choose your point of focus. You can care about things that are bigger than you. 

What are you worrying about? Is it what you want to be grappling with? Can you involve yourself in solving problems that revolve around more than just you, your survival, and your status? 

With community wealth, we become truly invested in the bigger vehicle that solves those problems. We build universal capacity to deal with noise. With a longer-term commitment, it is no longer about mercenaries and sellswords who are rewarded and go on their way. We become a part of something larger. 

Focus can expand when you have confidence that the basics are secure. Focus can expand beyond money, as the money distractions pass through. 

Where money gradually takes more of the burden of working for money, and we are increasingly released to focus on issues that get suffocated by the rules of money-making.

Sani Pass

Feeling the Choices

Local markets should be more responsive to changes in preference, because they are able to respond to tacit knowledge. The stuff we can’t put into words. The stuff we don’t always understand ourselves. Our inconsistency. Our moods. 

Local markets mean relationship building and consequences. Huge markets become more abstract. If you sell someone something that isn’t a good deal for them (because you need/want the money) and it affects them badly, size matters. In a huge market, you disappear in search of the next sucker. In a local market, you still have to engage with the people. 

Local forces commitment, recognising that what we do matters. The boundaries between client, colleague, friends, and family blur. It gets complicated. Dealing with strangers is cleaner. It is transactional. Local and intimate means getting involved in the nitty gritty. Local means we experience the results of each other's decisions. Local means wrestling with issues. 

Standardization can give comfort. Where you do venture away from local to explore, some recognition is useful. When you (think you) recognise something, you don’t have to give it thought. Conscious choice is hard. 

Daniel Kahneman talks of “thinking fast and slow”. You want to embody a lot of decisions and make them fast. Jonathan Haidt talks of our rider (head) and elephant (body/habits). We think the rider is in control, but it is mostly the elephant. 

To embody and relax, we have to trust. It is hard to trust when you haven’t done the necessary wrestling to deep soak shared agreement.

International Standardization

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

Early Growth

Building capacity for endurance and resilience requires space. One of the reasons it is hard to start saving and investing is because you first need to be able to handle the basic noise. You cannot build if there is nothing extra to build from.

The concept of extra can even trigger people as insulting. One of the biggest pushbacks I get as a campaigner for savings and investment is that for the vast majority of people, this seems ridiculous. When I start saying you need self-restraint, and to spend less than your income. The trade-offs people must make are often hard. “Nothing kills an activist like a mortgage and school fees”.

Life starts living people, rather than people living life. Responsibilities make people much more conservative because they have obligations. There is less capacity for flexibility because people have made commitments that are important to them.

Advice is usually autobiographical, because it is heavily dependent on the story of the person giving it and where they came from. These questions do not have easy answers, but how we create space is a beautiful question. 

Early Growth is Fragile

Negative Niggles

Public Speaking is a great opportunity to practice detachment. Where people become confident is when they are no longer thinking of the audience as judging them. When they are passionate about the subject matter and that passion shows. The listener is thinking about the ideas and the person delivering the sparks almost fades away. Their thoughts are being triggered about things they care about. Seth Godin points out that the audience may even be shooting off at tangents where they are being fired up about their own ideas. You don’t live in their heads but what you are sharing helps them connect dots that light up their creativity. Where your words spread in ways beyond your control. It ceases to be about you. They walk away from the talk excited about what they are going to do. A lot of anxiety comes from judging ourselves and others. Weighing and measuring. Separating people into good enough and not good enough. Are they going to choose me? Are they going to kick me out? Am I going to fail? These negative niggles are what prevent us from honest reflection because they lack fundamental commitment. Feedback cycles only work with deep underlying security. Deep knowledge that not only is it okay to make mistakes, but that that is the way we learn. You are okay. You are enough.

Deep Commitment - speaking at my wedding

 

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

Handle the Truth

Senior Management often bemoan the lack of useful information in references and exit interviews. The tendency is for most letters of reference to reduce to confirming the dates someone worked there. For fear of litigation. Other obstacles to honesty are that people don’t want to impede the chances of being hired. Which includes the next job. If you leave a job because you are unhappy, being honest about the reasons can burn bridges when looking for a fresh start. Particularly if the honesty affects the quality of reference being received. Money is made in containers. Meritocracy with the caveat of loyalty and natural self-interest. Protecting the container, and the individual’s space in that container, comes first. In an ideal world you could let it all hang out. Honest reflection on toxic behaviours, structural cultural obstacles, and areas for personal and corporate development. In reality, honesty only comes when there is an existing commitment to each other. An interest in each other’s futures and willingness to do the work. Honesty is built on a shared ownership of the future. Don’t moan about not receiving the truth, if you can’t handle the truth.

Creating Meaning

How you define words matters. What do you mean? Meaning is revealed over time through what we pay attention to, and what relevance we attach. Through the meaning we create. The actions we take. I am a Commitmentphobe, or a Commitmentphile depending on how you define commitment. I believe in Broad Framing. That you need to pause, step back, and reflect on decisions in context. That everything is connected. I love dogs. I don’t own a dog. A dog is a commitment. Affecting holiday choices, times you wake up, cleanliness of the home, and various other things. They also give great cuddles, and I love cuddles. My preference for commitment is to things that I can keep the commitment to. Not in the moment. Not outside of my context. I believe in the long term. That small moments compound. Fully committed to this moment. But also, in how it is connected to the next. And the next. Choosing what we pay attention to. Remembering the connections. Building meaning over time. That’s what I mean by commitment.

Little Me and my Milligan

Hard Questions

You can’t expect someone to change their mind if their core belief is what sustains their livelihood and community. Max Planck said, “Science advances one funeral at a time”. Not just science. We live in a world where we define ourselves by our jobs and our incomes. We spend so much time with the people we work with, they become our community. Can you really expect someone to ask the really tough, existential questions, if the true answer would tear down the whole illusion? If the hard questions will point out the little fellow behind the green curtain, the emperor waving his bits in the wind, and the man in the high castle fretting over alternate realities? Our lives, and particularly our working lives, are too short to wait till the evidence is in. The evidence may never be in. So we commit. Then we die. It may be up to the next generation to ask the really hard questions. Which may include creating new communities. Communities built to ask hard questions.

Can you ask the hard questions?

Part Owner

If you love chocolate, and eat too much, it is easier to not have chocolate in the house. The danger as an investor in the Stock Market is that you can always sell. The price is a quote of what someone will pay you if you do. It’s the chocolate. It is not what the ownership is worth. As a Fundamental Investor, you are a Part Owner. Viewing yourself as an owner, who believes in the product, believes in the management, and believes in the business, changes the way you think about the dips in price. Unless something fundamental has changed, ownership gives you a vested interest in the venture and stakeholders surviving and thriving. Even if something has changed, if a genuine problem is being solved and the business has the capacity to continue solving it, you remain an owner in something of value. It makes bumps and dips part of the texture of life. Perhaps the biggest part of being an investor is self-awareness. Self-analysis. Self-correction. Even though your behaviour and the business are separate. If you have a fundamental belief in what it is you are building, it is easier to see through immediate noise. To keep your head even when instant gratification is always available.

Be an Owner

I have become far less willing to invest in the early stages of something if I am not an owner. I worked at three companies as an employee. All for less than five years. The problem with that is that contributions compound in the same way as Capital. A successful businessman I know said it took him seven years to earn what he was earning as an employee when he started his own thing. Not many people stay at companies for seven years anymore. If you aren’t an owner, is it worth putting the effort in? As a long-term investor, I am not that interested in the first five years, if they can’t lead to the next five years. What you do today almost doesn’t matter if it isn’t connected to tomorrow. The domino effect of compounding will always favour builders over starters. Building an Engine is a substitute way of taking ownership of your effort. Of connecting the days. Ideally, we would all be owners of the things we are building. “Act as if you are an owner” is a terrible substitute for “Be an Owner”.

Attitude and Commitment

“Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.” This is also true of perceived wealth and perceived success. It is worth reflecting on the questions:

1. What opportunities and support have you received in your life?

2. How much have you accomplished?

We visibly see the answer to the second question. There are often shared ranking systems by which the community decides on someone’s success or impressiveness. Who is a big deal? Like being unaware of the fact that a car, clothing, or house were gifts, inherited or the Red Flags of mounting Debt. Both sides of the Balance Sheet count if you want to look at the important bits. Conspicuous is a trick. It is super easy to make a small fortune, if you start with a big one. The impressive bit isn’t the size… it’s what you do with it. Big may give you False Endurance. Big may give you False Resilience. The genuinely important bit is the Creativity. Creativity is driven by attitude and commitment. Showing up fully today. Showing up fully tomorrow. Don’t be fooled by the smoke and mirrors. Look deeper. See people. Always.

What a very Big Ben you have

Two Ways

Three important concepts when thinking about living a fulfilling life are Commitment, Openness, and Results. There are two ways of looking at each of these ideas that can seem, or be, in opposition.

Commitment can mean showing up with a level of intensity. Being fully present, and willing to bring everything you can offer, every time. It can mean a level of quality. 

Instead of showing up "this time", it can also mean showing up "every time". Less intense, more long term. "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed." Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway didn't wait for inspiration. He didn't wait for quality. He built habits that created the environment in which quality is born. He did the work.

Openness can mean a willingness to try everything. It can mean letting go of reservations and leaning into experiences and ideas. A level of flexibility.

Instead of always being prepared to change paths, it can also mean listening while staying on a chosen path. The grass is always greener, and real growth takes time, patience, and building. You can recognise the challenges on your path, and work on them. Every path has challenges. Starting again has costs. Openness doesn't require action as proof.

Results are the way we count and identify growth. Growth is our scorecard. We need to identify a place we were, a place we are, and a place we are going to. Something with words and numbers we can articulate to paint a picture of change. Results are the cornerstone of plans and goals.

Not everything that counts can be counted. Some work is internal. Alexander the Great was a brilliant strategist, and military genius. A man of results. As his Empire expanded East towards India, he came across famous meditating Yogis. Alexander's fame was for conquering the world. The Yogi's success was "conquering the desire to conquer the world". My friend Francois calls this the "Paradise Principle" - where even the staunchest non-believers live a postponed life for some imagined future. Tolerating the present for a future pay-off when our lives will commence. Not all results are about change. Some are about acceptance and awareness.

Commitment, Openness, and Results take different forms. Choose those forms consciously.

Are you Empire building?

Incompetence

Life can become a bit of a pissing contest. One of the reasons public speaking at school is such a nightmare for so many people is you are being judged. The content isn't the thing that is important, it is how well you deliver it. Often the classmates listening are there because they have to be. The true magic happens when everyone who is there wants to be there. When everyone who is there is far more interested in the content than success, hierarchy or anything to do with who is smart or stupid. Meritocracy is a double-edged sword. It leaves us constantly worried about whether we deserve to be where we are. Signaling our intelligence. Earning our place. Add Trust. Add Love. Add Commitment. Then you won't feel like your bladder is about to burst.