Risk and Reward

I am not sure whether I consider myself a “risk taker”. I go through waves, phases, and situations where I am very risk averse and others where I am comfortable with discomfort. When I think of when I was a little guy, there are definitely stories where I was absolutely fearless, and others in the opposite direction. There was a big chap that I had an intense rivalry with at school. I was... not big. I was tiny. Smaller than most of the girls. Still, I played Hooker in Rugby until I was 12 years old. My fearlessness (at that stage) meant I didn’t seem to realise I was so small. My nemesis was in the first team, and I was in the second (of two), and we used to do drills against each other for tap-and-run. Jones would regularly take the taps, and I’d be the guy who would want to tackle him. Maybe it was because of our personal rivalry, but maybe it was because the bigger they are the harder they fall. If you get the tackle right, it doesn’t matter how big they are. It didn’t seem to matter to me that I normally didn’t get the tackle right, and got munched. The (few) times I did were worth it. Risk and reward.

Developing a Practice

Yogas chitta-vritti-nirodhah

Chitta is all the stuff of the mind, intellect, and ego. Our awareness. Our anxiety. Our identity. Our conscious, subconscious, and dreams. The stuff that has soaked deep to form the way we see the world, and see each other. Vrittis are thought waves. “This too will pass”, but the danger is when we absorb the waves, and identify them. When we think we are the storms, winds, and rains of challenges that seem to attack us relentlessly. Money Anxiety comes in this form. Fear of where it will come from. Fear of where it will go. Fear of the aftermath it will leave. Once understood, it is possible to develop a practice to control the financial waves. Working with them rather than fighting. Eventually finding nirodhah (stillness). Financial Yoga is developing a practice to still the waves of money anxiety.

Bit of a Wet

I was a bit of a wet as a kid. At the tail end of Apartheid, we still had Corporal Punishment (which ended with the birth of Democracy). There were two occasions when I almost got caned, but waterworks saved me from Mr Pike and Mr Ash (not making the names up). This was the same culture that had the 2003 Springboks naked in a foxhole while having ice-cold water poured over their heads. The complicated bit is the "my parents beat me and look how I turned out" justification given. Often people who had it hard become the hardest opponents of stopping it from being hard in the first place. Like people who have made it against the odds objecting the loudest to those in poverty being given "handouts". I am still a bit of a wet. I don't regard basic foundations of kindness and respect as handouts. I don't believe in fear as an incentive.

Caning stand from British Prison in Hong Kong

Maximum Drawdown

I stopped working for a salary in August 2014. My theory was that if I kept my spending to less than my invested Capital earned (My Engine), I could focus on things that didn’t make money. To make this work sustainably, I had to cut and control my expenses dramatically and my Engine had to deliver about 10% real return in the long term (ambitious target). From August 2014 to February 2016, one of the two Funds I am invested in fell about 23% (< -16.5% p.a.). It then recovered so that by the start of 2018 I was over that 10% hurdle on average since I started. It then fell again by almost 27% and hasn’t recovered (yet). Still a positive return, but not sustainable (as is). I also have my own shares, and another fund with different (also bumpy) performance. These Drawdown periods are one of the measures of risk. The Fund I talk of had a Maximum Drawdown of 50% with 42 months to recover (vs Benchmark 54% and 66). Part of why we sell our time for a salary is the calm of a monthly pay-check.

Climbing Back Up

Managing Expectations

We view the world relative to our expectations. Some believe you need to visualise success in order to achieve it. Remove doubt. The steps towards your goals will materialise. Others will take the opposite approach. Visualise (not wish for) the worst case scenario. If you know you have the strength to cope with that, then anything else is a bonus. Remove fear. Any good fortune is worth celebrating, rather than being disappointed with what could have been achieved. It is worth practicing detachment. That doesn't mean not caring. Detachment is separating your identity from the thing, task, emotion or event. Identity is just a story. Stories connect to each other. They get retold. It is the telling that matters. The moving. The relationships. Don't be your goals.

Marcus Aurelius

The Stoic Emperor

Inner Stories

I don't suffer from any debilitating fears or anxieties, and am very lucky to have an awesome support network of friends and family. Many of our fears happen beneath the surface though. We see the performer, not the petrified person throwing up backstage. For many, the idea of public speaking is mortifying. For others, any group of people leaves them feeling overwhelmed, and even just a brief self introduction will induce panic. Ironically, these same people may actually love communicating. They may be able to speak to Royalty, Noble Prize winners, Popes and Chief Executives without breaking stride. Something else is going on.

A lot of what we do isn't calm, calculated and rational. I think that is a good thing. A lot of the best bits of life lie in the emotional side of things. The story. The fears. The release afterwards. The beauty is in the battle. It is still interesting to look at afterwards. The story behind the story. The inner story.

Late last year I went on a climb up Table Mountain on a particularly scary route. Although I did it, I carried the fear monkeys up on my back.  In Vancouver, I walked along the Lion's Gate Bridge and the Capilano Suspension Bridge. Both were clearly very safe, and the views were absolutely spectacular. Again, I did it. But. But. Back on safe ground, my heart rate definitely came down.

Capilano Suspension Bridge - Hold On!

Lions Gate Bridge

Capilano Tree Walk

The fear doesn't come from what will happen, or even the lack of knowledge that I will cope. I will be fine. I know that. There is still a what if that sits with me. That will always sit with me. Poking me in the ribs. Refusing to allow my breath to do its thing. This morning, a friend and I went on a hike up to an old train bridge crossing in Victoria (British Columbia). Even though each step was on very solid wood with gaps of only about 8cm (way to thin to fall through), everyone was incredibly nervously walking along. Most would venture about a third of the way across, if at all, and then come back. I forced myself to walk across the whole thing. 

When you got to the edges, the steps were the same distance apart, but in between there was solid earth. Suddenly the speed of walking increased and the breathing calmed. There is something very powerful about knowing that you will be fine if things go wrong. Even if you really don't think they will go wrong. Even if you know that the support is probably, intellectually, fine.

Track Easy, Track Hard

Track View

Emotional support is huge. I am lucky. I have that. I have a deep network of friends, family and people I care about who will pick me up if I stumble. That lets me walk faster. That lets me breathe deeper.

Our support network is not visible. But is as real. Our mental responses. Our emotional responses. That is why when someone is struggling, it may not make sense to us. That is why there are easy problems and hard problems. Easy problems are solved by the wooden slats that make the railway tracks. Hard problems take the deep networks that come with time, trust, belief, relationships, communities and the stories that we tell ourselves.

What Matters

Our memories are multi-sensory. The way we experience the world determines what matters to us. What matters to us determines what we remember. Places, faces, smells, sounds, colours, buildings, books and films trigger emotional connections between ideas. If you want to improve your memory of something, you need to create as many links to that thing as possible. Ideally funny, sexy, vivid or controversial. The monks who discovered this were tormented by the naughty tricks they were using in their heads to remember scripture.

Read 'Moonwalking with Einstein' by Joshua Foer

One of our strongest abilities is to close our eyes and visualise places we have been. The idea of 'Memory Palaces' is built around this. Think through some of the places you have lived. Even as a child. Walk around your school in your head. Through repetition, these places have become a pathway or filing system. Memory Palaces place ideas through connections at various points. They forge the connections through links. To go to an idea, you go to the place. It will be there.

I like using this in chipping away at my cultural ignorance. I have been trying to learn more about the Middle East and the cultural struggle going on with Islam. I just spent two weeks in Morocco. Surrounded by 5 daily calls to prayer and staying in the old Medina, it was the kind of place where reading about these issues would stick. I have started reading 'From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East' by Bernard Lewis. It is a collection of essays on a broad range of topics by a Historian who spent his life studying the region and cultures. I first finished off 'Islam: A Short History' by Karen Armstrong. Other books from the last year include 'The Fall of the Ottomans' by Eugene Rogan, and 'A Man of Good Hope' by Jonny Steinberg.

Creating Memories through Taste and Place

One of the key issues connects quite strongly to some of the raw racial discussions being had in South Africa at the moment. Lewis discusses Group Hate as coming from a detached envy or fear. When we hate an individual, it tends to be because of something. When it becomes a group, it can become more abstract, and often more dangerous and entrenched. When the emotions of envy/fear get involved, defences kick in and we create groups to hate not because of an action, but because of who they are.

History has a habit of destroying prejudice. Look back far enough and you realise how temporary dominance and subjugation are. For most of the time we have had a written record of human history, people with white skin were the Barbarians. Rome was conquered by these Barbarians and sent Europe into a dark age in terms of learning. Learning didn't cease. Some was lost. Some was confined. Europe's dark age was during the Islamic Golden Age. Britain which later came to dominate was so far on the periphery of 'Civilisation' that Rome had given up on it, and the more 'Advanced' societies were far away.

Africa comes partly from the Afri Tribe (Greek word) which lived around Carthage and which subsequently became Islamised as Ifriqiya and the area of Tunisia, Algeria and Libya. The name of the Berber people also derives from Barbarian. All you Black and White people are the same to us Greeks.  North Africa was very much a more established part of the Old World of Europe. The tribes of Britain and Southern Africa were far away doing their thing. As was China.  The idea of a separate continent of Africa and Asia was a much later European Invention. Long after Carthage and Rome had battled for supremacy. Watching 'The Man in the High Castle' and thinking of alternate histories, there are many ways history can play out.

Fear and envy are powerful emotions that can be worked through. As a source of racism, they can be beaten. The pseudo-science that was used to create ideological racism against Jews and Blacks was a weak attempt to justify creating groups to which Human Rights would not apply. That pseudo-science has fallen, and we know race is not a scientifically valid concept in creating groups. It is a human creation. It is a story. One that has created real division. Most of our challenges now involve creating better stories.

Race as Science is Dead, The Challenge now is Emotional & Cultural

The fights facing us now are clashing cultures. History shows that the best bits of cultures have been a give and take. Learning comes and is spread. There isn't a straight line of progress. There isn't a ladder of superiority for groups. We can enrich ourselves creating more connections. By making more things matter. 

By making more things worth remembering.

Real Risks (by Jared Licina)

Guest Post: Jared Licina

Jared is one of those guys that believes sleep is for when you are dead. I got tired just by hearing stories of what he was up to or seeing his name pop up repeatedly on lists of organisers at university. Very involved in debating at school, I was hoping he would be keen on sharing some of his thoughts on this blog, and that is the case. Jared thinks about life deeply and seems to pack in enough for three or four people. On top of that, he is good people.

Jared and I are bottom right, less a decade, some hair and some weight

Real Risk
by Jared Licina


Some of the posts within this blog have looked at how people are notoriously bad at calculating risk in their daily lives, to make logical decisions about what really impacts them. But why, and how can you overcome this? As a public service, we can look at what REALLY is threatening you these days. I started this article as a backlash against some recent adverts for various superfoods, but what I found was interesting...

To begin, why are people so bad at knowing what threatens them? This would seem an important trait at keeping people alive. But while we're good at being aware of immediate danger (e.g. fire, wild animals, GIANT SPIDERS AAARGH) and our reflexes react as such, much more complex problems bring on a problem called attribute substitution. Essentially, humans are bad at correctly calculating complex problems, and so when presented with the challenge, frequently substitute a simplified version of the problem in order to solve it.

For example, when asked "A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?" many people wrongly answer $0.10. Attribute substitution explains this by showing that, rather than work out the sum, subjects parse the sum of $1.10 into a large amount and a small amount, which is easy to do. Whether they feel that is the right answer will depend on whether they check the calculation with their reflective system. This extrapolates to larger and more complex problems by sometimes replacing the numbers altogether. You may not know the exact probability of being killed in a car crash versus a plane crash, but a plane crash seems more horrifying and violent, and so the mind responds by analysing the negative outcome and using that to make the decision, rather than looking at the hard numbers.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman ran a study where some Americans were offered insurance against their own death in a terrorist attack while on a trip to Europe, while another group were offered insurance that would cover death of any kind on the trip. The former group were willing to pay more even though "death of any kind" includes "death in a terrorist attack". Kahneman suggested that the attribute of fear is being substituted for a calculation of the total risks of travel; fear of terrorism was stronger than a general fear of dying on a foreign trip.

A more recent example of this was the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised huge amounts of money to fight the disease; but it's interesting when comparing it to actual mortality numbers in the graph below using numbers from the CDC. To be fair, some diseases like ALS are not simply about mortality, but also about the quality of life impact people have when they are living with it. But it shows the interesting discrepancy between the death something causes and how much we spend to fight it.

So when it comes to actual risks, what are out biggest threats? There are many sources to take a deep dive, but the NHS in the UK as a tool for evaluating probability of mortality and putting it in a way everyone can follow. On the site (http://www.nhs.uk/Tools/Pages/NHSAtlasofrisk.aspx) you can cut your own data by gender, age and location (in the UK) but the consolidated numbers are below.

So in our public service conclusion, we can focus on 3 easy rules for avoiding death that look at the actual probabilities:

1.      High blood pressure: Do not, under any circumstances, watch the South African Cricket Team play at the Cricket World Cup (I’m kidding AB, you guys were amazing and I’ll be watching as usual next tournament, with a pacemaker). But learn how to be zen in difficult situations that normally lift your blood pressure, and have it checked regularly.

2.      Smoking: Quit now. For every Rand or Dollar or Yemeni Rial you spend on anti-smoking aids, you’re likely to see a massive saving on funds, and a huge reduction in mortality.

3.      High cholesterol: Get this checked every year and be very wary of high cholesterol foods.

Some other categories spike higher based on individual factors; for example, suicide is a large contributor to males in their 30’s who live in London (which is mostly international). So I guess be careful of sad music (and the Cricket World Cup). But rather than focus on dozens of different ways to cheat death, focus on these three and you’ll add a massive boost to your probabilities. So now you can make better decisions. As you can see from the low probability of death by diabetes versus the high one from heart and circulatory disorders, if that chocolate bar helps keep your blood pressure down, it’s the smart choice. All in moderation though.

References:

http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/infographic-shows-differences-between-diseases-we-donate-and-diseases-kill-us

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-things-most-likely-to-kill-you-in-one-infographic-2015-2
Wikipedia as always

Many Tongues

I was chatting with a colleague today who could speak 6 European languages fluently from by the age of 20 (I think it was French, Italian, German, Spanish, English, and Portuguese).

I have always felt like only speaking English and Afrikaans (badly), with feeble introductory efforts at Xhosa and Zulu really holds me back from masses of ideas.

Recently in a fit of inspiration I made a valiant attempt at conquering German. I am going to try and keep that up.

I think language is incredibly powerful in ways beyond what we imagine. I believe it is quite possible that a large part of our personalities is determined by the language in which we are thinking and speaking. Culture and language are intertwined with humour and creativity. I believe that without learning other languages we are completely cutting off entire sides of our personality.

An obvious inhibitor is the wealth of literature that a purely English only speaker is restricted from. I am forced to read translations of Dostoevsky which while brilliant likely pale in comparison to the original. My colleague said that if I think English is a punny language, French takes it to a whole new level with subtle changes conveying a whole range of meanings. I would love to be able to enjoy different kinds of humour, philosophy, creativity and expression in their original form.

But, you can't learn a language in a book. This colleague achieved his feat by being the son of an ambassador and moving from country to country being forced to learn a new language. He never spent more than 4 years at a single school.

I spent years learning Afrikaans and I am still atrocious.

One of the reasons is that as an English speaker, learning another language is a nice to do. There is no need. In addition, we tend to be very condescending of foreign language speakers struggling with their English and judge them as stupid. Equally, the barrier of appearing stupid prevents us from being courageous enough to learn a new language.

I am going to try and push forward with German. It is close enough to English that I should have few excuses about difficulty. I have already spent many many hours with the tapes and can tell you what a hair-dresser is, that something is expensive, that I am a health fanatic (hmmm) and count to most numbers. But that is not a language... the real magic is in the subtlety and that is the next level (which 10 years+ of afrikaans didn't get me).

So with i-pods, access to blogs and movies, the Internet, and the lure of book-crazy London in my future, lets see whether Trev can get over the bump and open up a new world to himself.

Exciting Times.