It's Okay

Much of the anxiety I have experienced comes from expectations. Stated and unstated. Known and unknown. Managing both the conversations in my head, and the clash of projections when I am bumping into other complicated conversations in other heads and hearts. 

I don’t completely buy the Stoic approach of having periods of nothing and realising you are completely okay. If *nothing* is acceptable, then you know you can handle *anything*, because having nothing, can't destroy you. I like building. I am worried about unintended consequences, and loss from pressing the reset button. 

For me, the idea of constantly being negative, so that when horrible things happen you were expecting them, is dangerous. For the simple reason that being constantly negative is unpleasant. 

Managing expectations has to be a tool, rather than a purpose. I do think you need to be aware of what your default setting is. My preference is to be optimistic. I think if you can get through the noise, the confidence you need isn’t knowing what will happen, but feeling like you can handle what life throws at you. 

I want to find joy in life. I want to enjoy the process. Manage expectations, but not be constantly bitter and twisted. 

In Wu Wei philosophy, they talk about De (德) (like 'Duh' in American) which is something like charisma and confidence... but deeper soaked and with less to prove. 

Less that waves of anxiety are not there, but exuding the sense that, fundamentally you are alright. Fundamentally, you will be okay.

Spinning Wheel - Right and Wrong whirl around like spokes

Multiple Canvases

Life is random, ambiguous, and complex. Sometimes things can be interpreted in multiple different ways. That’s okay. 

We interpret the world through our own controlled hallucinations. We take in information. We process it. We create a picture of what is happening. 

We ignore a whole bunch of stuff that we don’t think is relevant, don’t understand, or just don’t have the capacity to absorb. If something happens in an order that we recognize, then we expect the thing that normally follows. Sometimes even if that event doesn’t happen, we will still experience it because our created reality fills the gaps. When we don’t pay attention because we have “seen it all before”. 

This is helpful. The power of biodiversity is we can try different things. Respond in different ways. Fail creatively. 

The “Curse of Knowledge” is that once you understand something, it is hard to imagine not understanding it. If you can read music, you can’t look at a page of music and not imagine the sounds. 

If you can understand Hebrew, Arabic, or Russian... you will unavoidably experience looking at a page where I see squiggles differently to me. Once you understand a language, you no longer hear just a string of sound. It is no longer just noise with no emotional connection. 

Our collective ability to experience differently creates multiple canvases for understanding.

Whose Milestone?

Part of how we are weighed and measured is how much income we make. The assumption being that salary (the price of our labour) is a useful direct form of comparison. Spending can be directly tied to income in a hand-to-mouth world. 

Spending becomes the conspicuous symbol of whether our life is a success or not. A long shopping list of age-measured milestones. “By this age, I need to have done this”, in order to be regarded as meeting expectations. 

It is often community-based. Financial planning can be a team sport. There is an entry ticket price attached to who you spend time with. If you are part of a community, you are measured by its standards. Even smack-in-the-face-obviously wealthy people may not feel wealthy because it is relative to their expectations, and they may feel like they are failing. You can be the 100th richest person in the world, comparing yourself to the 99 with more. 

Unless you can detach from that craziness, you are always going to be treading water. You are always going to feel like you are not in control.

Managing your own Milestones

Weight of Expectation

Difficult times force us to see. To cancel things that can wait. To put aside petty grievances. To focus. To deal with deep challenges honestly and uncomfortably. The root word for the conscious yogic practice of difficulty (Tapas) means “warmth, heat, or fire”. Some of the earliest mentions coming from the heat required for birth. The warmth of the womb. 

Expectation Management is not just living in a world of negativity and expecting the worst. It is not being a “permabear” (permanently talking about doomsday and how good the old days were). If you detach a little from the result and focus on the process, you can start to give generously. Planning can make you obsessed with cause and effect. I did this, so I expected this, and it didn’t happen. 

Expectation Management helps people do anyway. Then do again. Freed from the weight of expectation. The weight of having to prove themselves and their team. I see too many people grappling with monsters in their head to show that they, and the groups they identify with, are “good enough”. Life becomes this long exam where you are constantly weighed and measured. Mainly by yourself and your expectations. 

Scales and Weights

Comfort in Discomfort

Planning is not just picking one desired path. It is also preparing mentally, emotionally, relationally, and financially for the possibility of multiple paths. Expectation Management means that you are less likely to be caught unaware, even if it is an outcome that was not of your choosing. 

The Stoic school of philosophy and the Yogic idea of Tapas are all about building comfort with your foundations. What is the bare minimum you need, and can you come from a base level of peace? I like being an optimist. I am lucky to be wired to believe that things are going to turn out okay. I don’t need to explore all the worst-case scenarios. There are some who prefer going there. If you expect the worst, you can only be positively surprised. I am wary of the constant cloud that involves even on sunny days. 

There is a middle ground. Making time to think of, and prepare for, things not going according to plan... but moving in a direction of our choosing. Building comfort in simplicity and absence of comfort. Simplifying. Removing. Cleaning. Growth is not always about more, and often we learn what is really most important to us during our darkest challenging times. We need to remember to look after those things when times are good. To always know what the important things are.

Worst Case

Expectation Management

We all have to eat. To eat, we need money. To get money, we need jobs. There are not enough jobs. Once there were not enough people for the work that needed doing, and Governments had to impose hut taxes to force people into the economy. If you tax in cash, you need to be paid in cash to pay your tax. 

If we live hand-to-mouth, then we cannot survive without a source of income. Part of wealth is the capacity to have disruptions, bumps, and gaps in money flowing in. An ability to survive the winter. An ability to plant in the spring. If you treat people as in-the-now productive assets, then their quality of life is chained to the marriage of the supply of work and demand for that work. This filters through to how people build relationships and communities. 

The sad truth is that when you are young, it is about love and purpose. As you get older, it can be about the work that the person does and how they pack the dishwasher. Relationships come loaded with expectations. One of the key drivers of wellbeing is expectation management. The comparison between what you think should be, and what is. It is hard to manage expectations if we are at the limits of our spending.

Ability to Rest

Managing Projections

Calm and clear decision-making starts with managing expectations. If your desire for returns is too high, you open yourself to a new world of dangerous projections. Visions of alternative lives, problems solved, and trouble-free existence. Dreams of replicating the lives of outliers who seem to orbit different realities. 

The numbers get ridiculous quickly. A good day, month, year, or even decade, is not put in context. It gets “extrapolated” with blind spots, a ruler, and a poke in our vulnerable desires. 

 That is why Ponzi Schemes attract victims. They are not sustainable. The numbers don’t add up. They convince new people to join, and the first exchange of money is from those joining the scheme. Joiners are promised a multiple of the money they give. 

The money does not work. Nothing is made. It sounds exciting. It can even be wrapped in other clothes that make it seem caring/ community-based/ not-about-the-money. No one asks “how does this end?” or “why does this make money?”. The new money comes from recruits, and recruits run out. 

Money is made by doing the work. Understand the work.

Projecting

Kool-Aid Man

I like being a believer, so I have always been susceptible to “Drinking the Kool-Aid”. I try balance that with healthy scepticism and good old fashioned South African distrust for authority. After giving a convincing answer in a client meeting once, I was shot down with, “That makes sense, but you have a silver tongue”. How do you respond to that? I also almost didn’t get a job once because a reference (attempting to be on my side) said I was very convincing. They didn’t want to hire a hard salesman. Everyone has to eat, so when an offer sounds too good… it is worth adding some doubt. The balance to hard sales is expectation management. Being completely transparent with the downsides and what can go wrong. Transparency requires the admission that we are all making it up as we go along. Making mistakes and making a living. Chipping away at problems and trying to get paid. Building cushions so we are okay even when we are not okay. Building containers so the people we care about are looked after even if they are not the best. Committing and believing.

Messy Trade-offs

Sometimes you have to do things. If you are fortunate, what you have to do depends on what you want to do. There are realities to accept once you have figured out what you want. Trade-offs. Each opportunity taken closes doors to other opportunities. The tricky bit is negotiating through complex competing relationships and trade-offs. The deeper your network of meaningful connections, the more you have to take into account the desires of others. A lot of my anxiety comes from the managing of expectations. If no one expects anything of you, and your actions do not impact anyone else, then you can do what you want. If you cut yourself off from the world. If you engage, it is messy. A friend of mine took this approach when he started work. He said, “you have to do a good enough job that you don’t get fired, but not so good that they come back”. It is comfortable under the radar. That strategy did not last long. Eventually, he wanted to engage, and people started coming back. A life worth living is messy.

Under the Radar

Fifteen Years

I am not afraid of hard. Hard is an incredibly sustainable competitive advantage. The first step of financial security is finding an income. To do that you need monetizable skills and knowledge. If someone promises you this in just 6 months, I’d take it with a pinch of salt. More realistic is probably 5 years to develop the skills and knowledge, five years to build a buffer and some Capital, and another 5 years for that Capital to just start learning to walk. If you have 6 months, I’ll have a beer and a moan with you. If you have 15 years, then we’re talking. What I am afraid of, is gambling. Hard, with the odds stacked against you. Hard, where you can have put the 15 years effort in and still be nowhere. That is why I prefer micro-ambition. Learning a little each day. More endurance. More resilience. More creativity. Developing a practice that you can have confidence in. Breaking hard down into little chunks. Then connecting each day to the next. Making a life out of those connections.

Holy Cow

Milk doesn’t come from the shops. It comes from Cows. Most of the products we now end up using are assembled from bits that come from all over the world. The words we use have danced off the tongues of hundreds of thousands of people as they criss-cross the globe. Sharing flavours. Bending structure. Breaking rules. What you see isn’t all there is. The problem with bowing down at the alter of the obvious, the conspicuous, and the evident, is it cuts us off from the stuff you can’t count. Quantitative Finance likes to boil decisions down to two numbers. Return and Risk. The problem is, you don’t actually get paid for taking risk. In the long run, you get paid for adding value. Value is a deeply complicated, often abstract, internal, personal, and relational story. It is important to regularly remind yourself where your milk comes from. To look for, and retain awareness of, the source.

A calf and a Sadhu

Post Work World

There are two big problems with the idea of a “Post Work” world I have discovered since I stopped being an employee five years ago. We build everything around work. The first question people often ask you is “what work do you do?”, and we ask children, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. In a way that embeds the idea that you are defined by the label of work. A regular question artist or writer friends of mine get asked is, “do you make enough money out of that?”. The two problems are Conspicuous Leisure and Conspicuous Wealth. If you can’t visibly demonstrate what progress you are making, you look lazy or lost. If you aren’t working for money, you look greedy. Money is the most conspicuous demonstration of progress. You don’t have to understand what someone is doing if someone else is willing to pay them. The easiest way to free yourself from financial pressures is to control your expenses. But if you have an Engine, you have to explain why firing bits of it is so painful. You “have” money, but not really. It is working. I have discovered that it is very hard to create a “Post Work” life in a Work focused World.

But what are you doing? 

Pic Credit: Matt Hussey

If You Care

I did Marketing courses at University, but I didn’t learn Marketing there. My approach comes mainly from following Seth Godin. I was once told by a client (who actually liked me) that I am “the worst salesperson they know”. This is because I don’t play the game. In a world that is complex, ambiguous, and random, the product is normally confidence. Clients are confused and are looking for someone to provide clarity in the form of Point A (here, problem) and Point B (there, solution). I believe in relationship building (which takes time), trust (which takes competence, vulnerability, and time), and expectation management (which takes honesty, and time). Three key pillars of Seth Godin’s approach are Storytelling, Permission Marketing, and Tribe Building. You need to understand the story of the listener for your story to resonate. The stories need to merge. You need to see each other. You need to get to a stage where if you weren’t there, you would be missed. Your voice and help isn’t interrupting, it is desired. Good marketing isn’t a transaction with the pressure on one party to deliver. It is a relationship. The word may seem dirty, but if you care about something, you are a marketer.

Seth's Blog

Have your Cake

I have always struggled with the concept of “covering reasonable expenses”. Reasonable is in the eye of the beholder. Even if people are told to “spend roughly what they would have spent on themselves” anyway. I am a cheap bastard most of the time. Spending money is firing money. One of the best magic tricks of Capitalism is to convince people that it is better to “have their cake, but not eat it”. Then, instead of cake, they get a number that grows. Many of the super wealthy we look at are super wealthy “on paper”. They fire (draw salaries to spend) at different rates. Another rule of thumb for reasonable is “think like an owner”. But an owner knows not eating their cake means it gets bigger. An employee isn’t an owner. So expenses are often considered part of the remuneration. If you want to see entitlement, don’t look towards the poor. Look towards senior management. Actions normally follow incentives. Reasonable completely depends on how you look at the world and what drives you.

Slowing Down

“I’m slowing down the tune. I never liked it fast. You want to get there soon. I want to get there last” sang Leonard Cohen. Sometimes we need to pause, and take a breath. The destination isn’t the point, because we never arrive. “Bear insult, bear injury, highest Yoga. Bear insult, bear injury, highest Sadhana” sang Swami Sivananda. Yoga is union/joining. It is the stilling of the waves of the mind and heart. Sadhana is practice. The practice of seeing the union in everything. Of letting go of weighing and measuring the bits of everything, in comparison to each other. The biggest insult is often when people think we are failures. When we fail to meet their expectations. This is regularly because we are seduced by Conspicuous Progress. Outward signs of being very impressive. Successful. Most of the mental health work we need to do is internal. The waves only we get disturbed by, even when outwardly calm. The irony is that the insults of disrespect, dismissiveness, and derisiveness are probably a sign of the internal struggles of the person sending them out.

CREDIT: Kezban Özcan

Me in the Corner

A lot of my anxiety comes from a feeling of having let people down, or being in a corner. A lack of control over expectations. Being disempowered. I feel anxiety in my chest. A rise in temperature and a shortness in breath. I like the idea of Buffers. A feeling of comfort that I have the skills, knowledge, and capacity to deliver. Managing expectations allows you to take control. You still engage actively with the world, but whatever happens is a bonus. Something worth celebrating. Unfortunately, that isn’t how the things work, is it? We seem obsessed with meritocracy and playbooks of success. Inspired by the hero rather than the normal. Obsessed with promising in advance what is going to happen when we live in a world that is complex, ambiguous, and random. Weighing and measuring everyone rather than seeing them. I like feeling seen. I am often lost in the grass. Thoughts and actions all over the place with a general sense of direction that only I am comfortable with. “Comfortable with”. Mental Health is a team sport. When we see each other, we are empowered to surrender into the chaos. To return to room temperature and breathe.

Nobody puts Baby in the corner

Creating Space

One of the techniques used in teaching people to draw is to forget the object. Draw the negative spaces. Don’t draw the chair. Draw the shapes – between, around, above, below. The chair emerges. One of the techniques used in embodied meditation is to dance with the spaces. Let the spaces be your partner. Mental Health is partly about creating space. How do we create space for exercise, healthy eating, breathing, relaxation and positive thinking when we are so busy? Perhaps we are trying too hard to meet expectations? Perhaps we are too focused on success? Part of creating space is just seeing the spaces that are already there. A different perspective. But that is too easy. You are still drawing a chair. You are still dancing. You still want to have purpose. There is still work to do. Do the work. But see the space. Feel the space. Draw from it. Dance with it.

A sketch of a chair by Vincent Van Gogh

Ups and Downs

In my Corporate incarnation, I once had a client telling me I was the worst Salesperson he knew. I took it as a compliment. In my line of business, as is probably true of most long-term commitments, expectation management was way more important than the sale. Airing the dirty laundry visibly and loudly made it less likely someone would be disappointed if they jumped on board.

Just over four years ago was the last time I received a steady pay-check for full-time work. Over my career, I had been an aggressive saver and investor, living well within my means. I had built what I call an Engine, that had the capacity to earn more than a relatively frugal life would require me to spend. Not by any means frugal in a global context. Sufficient to allow me to still participate selectively in my Bubble, but with much more disciplined spending. I figured reading, writing, and spending time with people was what gave me my kicks. That is all rather cheap.

The last decade has been a bizarre time in Financial terms. Governments in desperation to keep economies ticking have used one of the few blunt tools they have - interest rates. By keeping these low, the theory is 'the price of money' is low... so businesses can borrow and invest. The problem is interest is also the salary paid to Savers. People who retire often put their money in Fixed Interest vehicles. Cash and Bonds. This is also "money available" to businesses to put to work in exchange for interest. Banks and Insurance Companies act as the middlemen. This means, lowering the interest rate may benefit homeowners (cheaper mortgages) and other borrowers, but not those living off stable interest rate savings. The thinking is that borrowers will put the money to work.

I was 34 when I stopped working for money. So I was under no illusion that I would be able to live off salary like fixed interest. Unlike me, my money couldn't sit around reading books and having fat chats. My money had to work. Hard. My Engine is invested in real businesses. Through a couple of Equity Funds, and then gradually through individual companies I have selected. I now have a portfolio of 20 companies. My money doesn't earn a salary. It only grows if the companies that I have invested in grow over time.

That doesn't happen in a straight line. In 2018, the businesses I selected made me nothing (roughly worth as much at year end as at the beginning), and the biggest fund I am invested in lost just over 20%. My strategy works if I can earn (on average) more than I spend. If I have too many 2018s, then it doesn't work. 

For those who depend on fixed interest rates, the traditional approach to retirement doesn't work if you have too many 2008-2018s. When interest rates are almost zero, you are no worse off if you just keep a pile of money under your bed. Like most of us, we need an incentive to work.

I talk about Buffers and Engines. A Buffer buys you space and time. It allows you to look up and plan. It reduces panic. An Engine can actually do the work for you, so you can think of things that are nothing to do with money. What the Engine does, matters. "Fundamental Investing" is called that because beneath the numbers are real businesses. An Engine that isn't working is just a Buffer.

Normal jobs, the kind with salaries, are very similar to fixed interest bonds. Someone pays you a salary to take away the noise. The owners of the business have to deal with the stress of 20% down, or even 40-60% down, years. Clearly if they have 100% down years, then redundancies kick in. A well-run business, with a good business model, doing good work can give employees a degree of certainty. Those businesses will have Buffers for the bad years so they can carry on working through the times when no money is made.

This post is a version of 'airing my laundry'. I don't want to paint a false picture that some do of Entrepreneurial lifestyles. I believe in Buffer building, and Engine building. I believe Capital can set Labour free to work on things that have nothing to do with money. The stresses don't disappear though. They just change form.

The question I keep returning to is "How do you build a sustainable daily practice?". How do you decide what it is you want to do with your time? What you are building? We live in a world that needs financing... we have to pay the bills. The bills aren't what matter. What we do matters. The bills just have a habit of getting in the way. Crafting financial security and financial freedom, is the process of putting that stress in its place.

Doing the Laundry

Gender Wars

Traditional Western Gender roles can be oversimplified as an exchange of money, muscles and sperm for a home, a family and food. In very conservative households, that can make life incredibly simple. Everyone knows their role and does it. A lot of the time consensually. When there is confusion, you go to an elder and they tell you what the expectations are. No discussion. In a Liberal world, all bets are off. Every expectation needs to be discussed, unraveled and rebuilt. You aren't a category, you are a person. There are no elders to turn to. It is confusing. I believe in a liberal world. I am prepared to wrestle with each decision to come up with something that works. I can fully understand why people would consensually opt in to just doing what they are told. I can't. I am a Donkey. I need to believe in what I am doing wholeheartedly, and if someone pulls too hard... I just stand still even harder.

No Try

The trick in hypnosis is that there is no trick. It is just a deep state of relaxation, and a willingness to hand over control to someone else. If it isn't up to you to decide what the obstacles are, you are more likely to do things without even trying. More likely to do or not do. More let's see exploration than I can't predetermination. I am a 'Try Hard'. If someone says 'You can't lift your hand', I find it incredibly difficult not to challenge them and test if I can. Of course, I can lift my hand. That isn't the point. If I challenge on that first point, I don't get to go on the journey. Fiction can go further than fact because it isn't constrained by our understanding of each step.