Building and Rebuilding

A big part of life is who we partner with. I have gone through difficult break-ups and a number of years of losing myself in the process of building or rebuilding a picture of the life I wanted. In 2011/2012 I used yoga and my art studio as tools to find myself again. 

One of the investment lessons I had learnt is that you should never be a forced buyer or a forced seller. When you want anything too much, and when it becomes your absolute focus, you can lose focus on everything else. If you are in a corner, and you have to make a decision, that may be the most important time for you to make the opposite decision. When you feel like that is the only thing that matters, at the cost of everything else, then it may be time to walk away. 

I had to really dig deep and come to terms with myself, and so I went to the mountains. I went to Austria, and it was just a magical time. As a South African boy, one of the things that blew my mind was REAL snowflakes. Crystals of fragile beauty. Snow with those mathematical patterns that cast spells as they stop time in their gentle floating till they softly butterfly kiss and lie with the ground. I had seen blobs before. The wet and soggy sort that grinds London to a halt like summer sweats or any other extremes. In Austria, there were magical mornings with clear skies and silent walks. The Yoga Teacher Training I did was over the year end, and a bunch of Swamis came from all over the world to join the small group I was in for the period between Christmas and New Year.

Through and Towards

Eternity is a concept that is hard to wrap our heads around. We think in contrast and action, and stories. Stories of change and growth. It’s the only way we can think. It can be hard to focus on life... the pulse, the signal within the noise, the process, the questions, the connection. 

There are ideas we can’t grasp and fully conquer, and questions that we will not find the answer to in any book or any particular conversation. There is a lot of uncertainty. 

As you get older, you realise that there are no real adults in the room. Even 70, 80, or 90-year-olds are just big children that experience the world in a particular way. No one's experience is the same as yours and we are all just doing our best. 

Holding Space is the idea of non-interventional listening. You aren’t listening TO construct a response. Their story doesn’t trigger recognition of their story in your story, and anecdotes from you. You allow them to tell their story without claiming it. You don’t respond to someone’s story about their cancer with a story about a family member of yours with cancer. 

Stilling your own waves, and stilling the waves of money anxiety, doesn’t always mean solving problems directly for someone. There are also challenges around empowerment and allowing people to solve their own problems. If people are best placed to make their own decisions, you want them to make those decisions. 

There will always be waves. Stilling the waves is how you experience those waves. Financial Stillness holds space for you to make connected decisions through the waves. To build through things that pass, towards what truly matters to you.

Action and Consequence

As our decision-making scales, it also has consequences that ripple. I find it incredibly disheartening when I have done a lot of work, and then a decision gets made that means none of that work is used. Scale also means disconnection between where the work is done, and where the consequences are felt. If the decision maker is doing the work, they can be doing constant triage on marginal effort. Once outsourced, if the work goes done a different path, you need to wait till check-in points to find that out. 

Outsourcing work without outsourcing decision-making requires very clear questions. For anything to actually happen, late-stage decision-making often involves closing down options. Accepting constraints and shipping. Making choices in the face of ambiguity. Reducing the number of things that will make you change your mind. In a world of practical decisions, you can never make the perfect choice. There are always trade-offs. 

“An ounce of practice beats a ton of theory” requires loops of action and consequence. Consequence that can be felt in a reality that is complex, ambiguous, and uncertain. We have to engage with the world. Learning to build consensus is how the interconnected scale works. Unstated rules that allow us to go deeper, but when those rules break... require engaging in difficult unlearning and relearning. 

There are very few areas where we can be the only decision maker. Where it doesn’t matter what other people think. In most cases, we are forced to engage in the messy process of joint decision-making. That requires skills like social, cultural, and emotional intelligence and an awareness of, and interest in, other people’s stories. It requires acknowledging the challenge we face by only being able to judge from our context, and our need to expand our context to see and resee.

Feeling Consequences

Erosion gully caused by introduction of Rabbits as game animals

Get the Game

Stilling anxiety and making decisions we are comfortable with can revolve around building agreements. Managing expectations through commitments to each other that are understood. An ability to build driven by confidence in intended consequences, and capacity to absorb and adjust to unintended consequences. A calm and inspired sense of general direction. 

If you feel like you “get the game” so you can apply yourself and get rewarded, and have a transparent understanding of the cost of breaking agreements. A world where there is consensual agreement making. Yes means yes, and no means no. 

People feel like they are honest with each other and themselves about what their needs are. Where people find other people who willingly and enthusiastically want to be part of each other’s lives. Where no one is forced to act against their will. 

The challenge is tolerance. We don’t live in isolation. Independent decision-making is very attractive. In your world, what do you think you should do? That results in multiple, very detached realities, that sit separately from the shared world and aren’t a part of it. That has consequences. 

A difference between an investor who makes independent decisions and an operational decision-maker, is operations have momentum and they have mojo (the morale of people). Changing an investment decision affects no one. Changing an operational decision has consequences, and you can never get momentum and start compounding if you are constantly changing your mind.

Do you get the game?

No for Now

One way to pay for a Universal Basic Income would be to build up the capital to dedicate to it. 

That is true of everything. Not all good ideas are good business ideas, but you can pay for good ideas that can’t pay for themselves. Our spending choices are seldom made in isolation. There are trade offs. 

This is why it is so hard to build up capital when immediate needs are forced decisions. Many people borrow for emergencies because they have no other choice. They can’t afford to wait. This means they end up paying more than they can afford, because the price includes interest. If they couldn’t afford to pay upfront, they may struggle to pay the loan off... so they can end up paying interest on interest. They can’t afford to wait OR to borrow. 

Each spending decision is not simply about whether you want the thing or not. Spending decisions have consequences. If you open one door, what door does it close? Broad Framing is the abilty to stand back and evaluate your decisions in context. Saying, “No” to one thing may enable you to say “Yes” to another thing that is more important to you. 

Being able to hold onto things that are important in the long term is one of our biggest challenges. Giving equal weight to our future selves. Building capital is a cost effective and powerful way to prevent forced short-term decisions... if you can fight off the short-term decisions that stop you from building capital!

Tristan da Cunha

The World's most isolated island

Decisions are not made in isolation.

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

Points of Contrast

The entry ticket of the community you are a part of goes up if the choices the collective choices they have made were good business ideas. This can limit the ideas you can choose to focus on if you want to be a part of those communities. To eat in the restaurants people eat in, send children to certain schools, or live where and how they live. 

It is easy to say, “don’t judge yourself based on your peers”, but it can get more practical than that. Going to visit a friend for dinner, you can’t help but see their comparative lifestyle. It is more challenging to see the whole picture. We only see what is conspicuous, and process the immediate points of comparison we notice or pay attention to. It can be difficult to hold on to your values and choices when spending decisions become joint decisions because of peer pressure. 

Part of stilling waves of anxiety, is realising that each wave is not the only wave. Each thought is not the only thought. There are others. The thing you are aware of in a particular moment will pass. 

When I stopped working and starting writing and thinking about non-monentary things, I realised that most of my friends were happy, but they had made a wide variety of choices with trade offs and consequences. Every opportunity you take, closes the door to other opportunities. Keeping all your options open can mean not actually experiencing any of those options. We can’t do everything. 

The other realisation I had was that there are a whole bunch of people who aren’t even in the position to question their choices. What can happen if you are solely focused on financing your own choices, is you can forget about the hills in Umlazi. Other bubbles are out of sight and out of mind. The nature of global apartheid is that not everyone has the same opportunity.

Imagining a Post Work World

In order to consider a “post-work” world, I had to do some reading about minimalism, and explore the reasons why we get tied into expensive lifestyles. 

The default can be to commit to paying off the debt of expenses that end up controlling us. Each spending decision has unintended consequences. Minimalism doesn’t mean you don’t like the thing you don’t buy. It isn’t a case of “I don’t want it”... normally you do want it. The better question is, “in the broader context, is it worth it?”. 

At the time when I stopped working, I was single, and I had no dependents. I believed I could sustain paying for the things I valued if I held a broader context in mind. 

I get quite defensive of the younger version of me. The problem with being contrarian, and doing something that is different, is that almost everyone tells you that you are wrong before you do the thing that is different. Still, I took my shot. So, when I had to go back to work, there was an awareness of the obvious and plentiful, I-told-you-so retorts. 

The world is complicated. Plans change. I still believe it is possible to live off capital in a post-work world. There are consequences. I learnt a lot in my 6 years of attempting to step away from the world of money. So, I try and be compassionate to the younger version of Trevor that stopped working. 

I still think strategizing around how to release ourselves from the constraints of how to make money is something worth giving energy to. I still want to figure out a way to direct less of my time and energy to thinking about money. What I did realise about a year and a half in what just how fortunate my bubble of friends and colleagues were. 

There are obviously stresses, but decisions have consequences. There are tradeoffs. People make choices. Honestly reflecting on choices and constraints is a privilege.

Contrarian Choices

Monday Happens

Behaviours get embodied. When we respond in a certain way for years, we can cease to be aware. Our minds and bodies are ruthlessly focused. 

If you do press-ups, they will progressively get easier. If you aren’t exercising, then you go for a run... you will be sore, because you have told your body those muscles don’t matter. 

Regularity allows deep soaking. If you learn superficially, then the knowledge can disappear. Explaining or teaching is one method to allow you to constantly re-engage and not forget the steps. 

"The Curse of Knowledge" is when we forget what it is like not to know. 

If the steps suddenly stop working, it can be hard to fix the problem if you have been on automatic pilot. 

In Jonathan Haidt’s analogy, the elephant is in charge even if the rider looks like they are holding the reins. 

The elephant is our habits. The rider is our perspective of the decision-making. The rider can point, and even believe they are in control, until the elephant wants to do something else. 

You can train your elephant, but it takes work, consistency, and time. I believe in Free Will. But it is incredibly hard. You don’t just have life-changing epiphanies in a weekend away, or by reading an article online. 

Monday happens. Repeatedly. Do the work to create the meaning you want. Invest in the resilience and endurance needed to hold space for you to create.

Galileo's 1616 drawing

of the phases of the moon

Then you Build

Wealth building is not wealth extraction. It is not a negative competition. Yes, you are engaged with people in a way where you push each other, and challenge each other, but there is no need for schadenfreude and benefitting only if others do badly. 

We can gradually let go of that and have the genuine intention to solve rather than perpetuate problems while drawing rent from them. There is the temptation to have easy containers where the only competitive advantages are fake. 

Real mastery and resilience can cope with, and thrive under, openness and transparency. A really good business idea can be judged through the filter of how it would work in a world with full transparency, zero transaction costs, and perfect replicability. 

If someone knows what you are doing, they could do it too. Real competitive advantage comes from embodied knowledge. You can tell someone what you do and how you do it... and they still won’t be able to, or won’t want to, because it isn’t what makes them tick. You have a relationship with them, and that is something they will keep coming back for. 

The way you see the world can change, and adjust. We can go deep into different areas. Make different choices. 

My goal has always been to develop a resilient world view. One where there is nothing that everything relies on. Where changing one thing doesn’t bring everything else down. Where you hold each part lovingly, but you are not so attached to it that it defines the whole reality. 

Then you build. Choose. Go.

Building doesn't have to leave a hole

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.

Detached Learning

We constantly need to be learning. It is only in a world that is reliably and predictably the same the next day that you can limit the set of skills you have. 

We need to have curiosity and pay attention to a world wider than ourselves. You can’t assume what you are doing, even if it is working, is going to be the same. If you have studied something for seven years, it is not relevant if those skills become redundant. Especially in a world of artificial intelligence and creative destruction. First in line for automation are things that are repetitive and make money. 

When the rules of the game change, you need to be able to adapt to whatever the new rules are. This makes it important to detach from identifying with what it is you do for money, or are going to do for money. 

We can’t rely on jobs for life. Either for meaning or for sufficient financial reward to finance the rest of our activities. Even when you are in a great team you like and are well rewarded in, teams change. Like the analogy of a boat that gets regularly repaired until every part has been replaced. Is it the same boat? We end up being loyal to companies or countries that like George Orwell’s Big Brother don’t actually exist other than as a perpetuated story. 

Ken Robinson said the three keys to happiness were where you live, who you are married to, and what work you do. It used to be where you were born, someone from the neighbourhood, and what your parent of the same gender did. 

Now our choices have exploded, and the choices evolve.

Pulses Ripple

Reality is complex. We can’t simplify it as much as we would want to. We can create structures and simplifying stories to help us make decisions, but there needs to be an acknowledgment that we don’t all live the same lives. 

Our realities bump. Understanding requires work. No one has the capacity to understand in every way. We end up having to trust each other. Trust each other to go down different paths, while figuring out a way to stay in connection. 

We can be right on the edge of human knowledge. If there is no connection back, even if someone expands those boundaries, no one else will apply the learnings. 

There is a big tension between applied knowledge and theoretical knowledge. Opening questions up and closing down options to make tangible decisions. Sometimes by going down theoretical rabbit holes, you lose touch with other people. You live in a different place even if you are physically in the adjacent spot. 

Because of randomness, ambiguity, and complexity, we don’t and can’t understand how everything is connected. We don’t and can’t know all the consequences of our decisions. We need to build in feedback loops, and capacity to understand the impact we are having on the world. 

Actions matter. Actions have consequences. Consequences have consequences. We pulse, and our pulse ripples. The ripple is too complex for us to understand. We have to let go of that. 

We are here. We are part of the world. Making peace with that complexity is difficult and important.

Shifting Winds

When you make choices, you narrow future choices. When you get on a path, you seldom get an opportunity for broad re-evaluation. An opportunity to say, “right, I am going to start from scratch.” 

When attempted a clean slate in 2014, I removed the stake in the ground of where I physically had to be. Normally that stake is your job. If you have kids, their schools. If you have a house, you can rent it... so maybe that is a medium rare stake. You can also change jobs and schools. The change is not a trivial one. 

I packed up a single week’s worth of clothing, carrying my world on my back. Australia and New Zealand chose themselves as my first destination because of a wedding invitation. 

Ironically, just before I left, I met my future wife. She was heading in the opposite direction. She is an Anthropologist and was transitioning from being an academic to engaging with the corporate world. She was shifting from living for the love of learning to a pragmatic and purposeful engagement with applying ideas. 

When I came back, we had to figure out a balance of two visions of the future. A challenge in building autonomy is our decisions impact others, particularly if we want to share our journey. 

How do we agree on the stakes? Our choices are path-dependent, and what happens affects what happens next. We are never in complete control. There is an element of randomness to it all. Within those constraints and shifting winds of change... we get to have an influence on the direction.

...and he's off

Time to Judge

One of my unlikely financial heroes was Bill Cunningham. He didn’t manage money. He took photographs. The friends who nicknamed me Donkey (“noisy, stubborn, ignorant”) will appreciate why I love his line, “if you don’t take the money, they can’t tell you what to do”. 

He was not rich. Quite the opposite. Yet since he lived so cheaply, that gave him the creative license to do whatever he truly wanted to do. That passion fed through to his art. 

If you are able to build an engine that earns reliably more than you consume, you can focus on things that aren’t conspicuous. You are wealthy. You can release yourself from the pressure to constantly justify yourself, and prove that what you are doing adds value. You can do things that only have value in the long term. 

Rather than disappointing people who expect far too much in too short a time frame, you can wow people who underestimate what you can do in the long term. 

Especially if the time you are thinking of is longer than people use to judge.

"If you don't take the money, they can't tell you what to do."

Decision Maker with Money

A good idea can be impossible to make money out of. Impossible to contain. It can be incredibly difficult to quantify and control qualitative value creation. 

That becomes a “cost centre” which needs money to be spent on it, but does not generate money. A “profit center” explicitly pays for itself, and generates cash beyond its needs. Profit centers don’t need much justification. 

In fact, they may need strong arguments why they are not good ideas despite making money. Maybe the costs are felt by others. Maybe the qualitative consequences are not worth the cash. Maybe the cash will come in the short term, and the costs... even ones you can count... will come later. 

A cost centre generates something that doesn’t work according to the rules of money, but is still worth doing. A job that doesn’t pay enough to cover your basic living costs. 

Perhaps it is work that pays nothing at all. Care work. Perhaps it is something beautiful where the line between work (is it only work if you get paid?), play, and creative exploration blurs. 

These endeavours don’t need a price if they have a believer. They just need a decision-maker with money to say yes.

Getting Paid

Bewildering Respect

Starting rich is a safety net. Not all safety nets are viewed the same. 

A lot of Government safety nets come at the cost of respect. They are the opposite of a job interview. To get help, you must prove you need help. With a job, you know there are limited vacancies, so you are proud they chose you. To get help, you prove you cannot self-sustain. That is a belittling acknowledgment to make. 

When we look at other people’s problems, our advice is autobiographical. We look at their problem with our whole picture. With our capital, our knowledge, our skills, our experience, our way of seeing... but I am not you. You are not me. 

Watching a participation play where the actors take suggestions can leave the audience frustratedly correcting and recorrecting as no decision plays out as if they were acting. I even ended up as one of the characters, “let me have a turn”. Even then, you are just one of the participants and many decisions are team efforts. The decision you would make in that situation would not be the same, because you would not be you in that situation. 

I find seeing real poverty humbling because it strips away how much credit I give myself for my own personal merit. It strips away vast chunks of the justification for why I am as fortunate as I am. It leads to a re-evaluation of thorny ideas like white privilege, civilizing missions, and unintended consequences. 

It leads to bewildering respect for people in their worlds.

Waves Matter

While the idea of meritocracy might focus on the best skills and knowledge, it misses other components of money-making. Specifically, capital and containers. 

Capacity for risk is a form of strength. The way you view risk can depend on how much capital you have behind you, and the risks YOU can take. It is not, and never will be, the same for everybody. 

We don’t start from scratch every day. We don’t want to start from scratch every day. On the surface, you might have “alignment of interests” where the surface noise is “shared” by everybody. It is not the same if you have deep support networks. 

That is why a lot of entrepreneurs are just rich kids with safety nets. It is not that they are more willing to take risks. It is that the consequences are not the same. History matters. 

Yoga might be about stilling waves, but it acknowledges the waves matter. Waves are karma. We all have a history to work through during our life. The sum of past karma. The results of current decisions and actions. Our ability to act, relies on acting mattering. An impact on the next generation. On those around us. Positive and negative. 

That is why it is so important to be aware of intended and unintended consequences. If you genuinely want to have the ability to see underlying merit, you have to be aware of context.

acknowledge the waves

Shared History

How many of our decisions are inherited? How many are embodied? Things we do well. Things we do badly. Not many of our decisions are made with a deep understanding of all the other decisions those decisions affect. That is too high a benchmark. 

What we do matters. Actions have consequences. Yet, not everything is cause and effect. We are just one element heavily affected by the ways we were taught. The repetition of parents, teachers, mentors, coaches, family, and friends. 

Sometimes it takes events happening to you in later life to trigger patchy memories of something that happened early on. Maybe we hear our parents' voices coming out of our mouths? Maybe we see the expression of a sibling in the mirror. Sometimes I can’t even see the expression, but the muscle memory makes me think of my brothers. 

We are very connected. We are built in a world where money is dependent on skills and knowledge, and being paid for those skills within enclosed containers. Skills, knowledge, and barriers (to entry and exit) can compound in the same way wealth does. 

Subtle skills like network building, trust, and the ability to communicate, depend on the deep work of being able to understand other people’s problems from their perspective. A lack of shared history makes that challenging.

Unintended Consequences

Nothing Else Matters

It isn’t only the idea that matters. It isn’t only your merit that matters. Liquidity (enough to cover immediate needs) and Solvency (you have more than you owe) are cornerstones that carry anything with potential value through the chaos. 

Liquidity recognises that the short-term can swamp and swallow true value. If you think of true value as what would happen if everything went according to plan, and everyone saw the world as you do. 

Solvency is what lets you carry on carrying on, for a chunky period of time. 

If you aren’t being creative in the long-run... Liquidity and Solvency won’t save you. What they do do, is prevent you from being forced to make decisions. 

If “No” is not an option you have, the forces of supply and demand will eat you alive. Desperation is blood in the water to sharks. If you have to buy, at any price, the price will go up. If you have to sell, at any price, the price will go down. 

Value is almost meaningless in a pressure cooker. If one thing is so important, that nothing else matters... you won’t be able to see, hear, or feel anything else.

Shark's Eye