Competently Incompetent

Confidence is attractive because it suggests insight into bewildering complexity. Admitting you are lost doesn’t feel like, or often translate into, a great sales technique. 

I find the strength, and patience, of Arya in Game of Thrones more appealing. Where she goes through the stage of “a girl has no name”, and she learns to find her way when she is blind. 

We can get overly attached to the story we tell ourselves about our lives. The narrative. Life has had a way of humbling me. When things change dramatically, I have to edit my story. I grapple with life trying to control me. 

I do have moments where I feel a sense of freedom through insights. But then the waves come back again, and I go back to grappling. An H-like furrow between my eyes from taking life very seriously. 

Repeatedly coming back to a very basic practice can provide a solid foundation. A dependable place of return, before you have to go back to the madness. 

Truth be told, I love the madness. Free will is 100% dependent on madness. A complicated world means we can be seduced by specialisation, and forget how to be competent at life. To be competent at being incompetent. 

Our bodies, minds, and relationships are use it or lose it, so the systematic practice of yoga means you do a body scan to notice where you are carrying tension. Like climate change, slow significant changes can only become apparent too late, if you don’t consciously build in ways to notice the gradual but compounding consequences of little choices.

Chew On

Cooking is a great example of “sources of joy” where some very simple processes are things people “can’t do”. Have you made mashed potatoes? Fried an egg? Made a pancake? 

Until you have done something, it can be intimidating. We all find very different things intimidating, because every living human is incompetent in some way. 

There are amazing meals that are not difficult to make. Even World Class chefs will do the same. If the ingredients are plentiful, then the price will be low. Price is not value. A high price simply indicates scarcity. 

Often we are monotongue in the same way as we are monolingual. We eat a constrained diet because we haven’t built up our food vocabulary. 

Soups are really easy. Stock and one vegetable will even do it, and let you build up your vocabulary with gentle pairings and exploration. 

I have a funny relationship with fruit for some reason. Something about the texture, but pop it in a (smooth) jam or a smoothy and I am good to go. 

You can gently unwind embedded behaviours with time and coaxing. Learning is about deep soaking. At school, we write the test and forget. Real learning is embodied through repetition. Where it becomes part of your taste buds and habits. 

Narrative Therapy is the idea of understanding your cornerstone events, drivers, and scripts that you repeat. Then being your own detached editor. Tweaking the words and stories the voices in your head chew on.

Will of the Elephants

Agreements are made by getting to know elephants. In Jonathan Haidt’s analogy, the conscious choices we make are the riders, and normally when they pull left, the elephant goes left. The riders think they are in control because the choices are followed, but in reality the elephants want to go left. 

One day, when the elephants go right despite the pull... we don’t even admit the lack of control. We make excuses. We defend. We rationalise. We change the story. The power team of a public relations officer and defence lawyer explain away our behaviour. Like after a difficult relationship, or being fired, or other traumas... we have inbuilt coping mechanisms to make sense of the world. To believe in cause and effect. To believe we have control. The real intelligence is in our habits. 

The real communication is in our complicated and intimate relationships. Full of noise and deep soaked. This means epiphanies are not enough. You cannot just decide to change direction against the will of the elephants. You have to put in the hard work of retraining.

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

First Listen

“Numbers to leave Numbers. Form to leave Form.” This is the way Josh Waitzkin describes his practice of embodied learning in chess and martial arts. Not caring about money can mean ignoring it. Which in turn lets it control you. Stilling the waves of money anxiety starts with paying attention to the rhythms. It can start with arbitrary rules and effort in areas you do not value. To get to the stage where you are in control, and move freely, there is awkward, uncomfortable, work to do. Get comfortable with discomfort. Many of our expenses have a pattern. We do not spend the same each month, but look at enough months and there tends to be a regular high and low. A range. There are also fixed expenses. Things we know in advance will come monthly or annually. Then there is the noise, the stuff we cannot control. But can plan for through building flexibility. If you get breathing space between the exhalation (spending) and inhalation (income), you can build a buffer for whatever life throws. Then you can build an Engine so you can gradually free yourself from being an earning machine. Increasing your capacity to say Yes, No, or not right now.

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

The Battlefield

 “Tatra sthitau yatno bhyasah” Yoga Sutras

Abhyasa is the continuous effort towards firmly establishing the restraint of thought waves.

Stilling the waves of money anxiety requires developing a sustainable practice over a long period of time. It isn’t about “get rich quick” schemes and easy solutions. One of the main texts in Yoga is the Bhagavad Gita, which tells the story of Arjuna on the Battlefield. The chaos is going nowhere. The practice you develop is to find that point of calm within the struggle. To cope. It isn’t just moments of silence found in practicing meditation, outside of life. The aim is to develop new scripts, habits, actions and reflections that combine to deal with whatever life throws. To have the endurance and resilience to draw from and see through the chaos. Each day. For the long term. With commitment and focus.

Arjuna

Making your Jam

I buy many of the stronger arguments about eating less meat, and so am slowly changing my habits. I also buy the argument that we have a quota of self-discipline. There are no brownie points for martyrs and ideologues. Actions are what matter, so deep pragmatism is the most effective path. By definition. My approach has been to gently expand my vocabulary (the foods my tongue recognises) and sentences (the foods I can cook). Addition is the best form of breaking of control. If I look forward to vegetarian dishes, I don’t feel hard done by, by the missing meat. I now love making soup and jams… and experimenting. My meat consumption has gone down. Similarly, I think the way to unwind our identity problems (Nations, Companies, Prejudice) is competition. Start seeing yourself in more places till those places become a part of you. We are a collection of our habits, and our habits build from the words and sentences we attach meaning to and build meaning from.

Mont-Aux-Sources

Unlearning is so hard because most of the things we are really good at soak to the bone. They become as natural as breathing or walking. When impassioned, the words that spring from us come out fully formed as if by magic. Magic that crosses generations when words get planted in us in years we don’t even recall. Because we hadn’t built the palace of relevance in which to store things we care about. The information that controls most of our decision making is internalised. Embodied. We don’t have to think about it. When challenged, we add our intentions or justifications after the event. No one wants to be the bad guy, so the default voices in our heads are the PR officer and the Defence Attorney, “I am not a bad person, my intentions were good. The unintended consequences are not my responsibility. It is not my fault. I am not to blame.” Guilt and blame are an obstacle to learning. Without learning, there is no endurance, resilience, or creativity. Without learning, there is only repetition.

Source of the Tugela River

Erinnerung

The French word for worried is inquiet. The German word for memory is erinnerung. More thesaurus than foreign if you look at the substance. Jonathan Haidt talks about the Elephant and the Rider. Daniel Kahneman talks about thinking fast and slow. What is it that we take from the conscious level and soak into our inners? Is there a quiet focus or a noisy angst? Haidt points out that the Elephant is in control, and the Rider just gives suggestions. Our conscious slow thoughts are the things we sit with. The things we dwell on. The things we chew. The training we follow. The Rider can train the Elephant by being conscious of the things we do every day. The habits. The scripts. The rhythms. The beat. The Elephant will listen to words that are whispered consistently and over a long period of time. Through a process of bringing in. Erinnerung.

Soaking

Clarity and Transition

It is only possible for us to think of one thing at a time. We can do lots of things at the same time. Multi-tasking happens when it is not at the conscious level. But we can only think one thing at a time. Like playing a guitar, it then boils down to the clarity of the sound that comes out with each thought, and the smoothness of the transition. How much control do we have over which particular thought we are focused on, how long we focus on it, and what comes next? How much attention do we give to the various things we are conscious of? In the meantime we carry on doing things. Life goes on without a pause button. Josh Waitzkin talks of “numbers to leave numbers, form to leave form” for his approach to learning. Using numbers and form to get a picture of each thought, and how we swap between them. Stepping back and practising the clarity and the transitions. Eventually, the numbers and form soak in. They become deeper. The healthy mental approach becomes the healthy automatic behaviour. Life still goes on, but a little more musically.

Dancing the Truth

I don’t believe honesty is verbal. You can’t just vomit the truth. We aren’t always even conscious of our “truth”. We are all incredibly skilled at self-deception. It is a coping mechanism. The truth we experience is a story layered on reality in a way that we find useful. That story nudges our choices by creating habits. Scripts. Ways to respond to things that repeat. These are stories that are going on in the background with the mute button on. They have control, but we just scroll down our timelines looking for the cat memes. A lot of mental health work is about developing an awareness of your patterns. Over time. Gently. Even then, once you become aware of the patterns, the work has just begun. Our responses are deep soaked. Down to the way our finger tips talk automatically with our knees. Conversations built over years. Like learning new dance steps, you start slow and internalise the way you want to move. Then you practice every day.

Dance Class

By Default

The law is changing in the UK, so that all citizens are organ donors should they die. By default. You can opt out if you want to. Evidence shows that that is how we make most of our decisions. By default. This is largely how we solve the work problem. By getting a job. That outsources what we have to do, and means that (by default) we get up every week day and pitch up to work. It also means we look for work. We create work. Work for work’s sake. There is no minimum wage for your time when you have sold it all. This means you stop making the decision about whether individual units of energy are worth expending. Work expands to fill the space. This all makes sense. Consciously deciding on things is hard. It is why we embed our habits. It is why in the areas we claim mastery, we are able to act at a much deeper level than conscious decision making. The key is awareness. Knowing what your defaults are, and if you are comfortable with that. Otherwise… change the laws you make for yourself.

In the Light

A real competitive advantage doesn’t need to be hidden. In a world with full transparency, you have to assume that anything that can be copied, will be. Real competitive advantages are embodied. The “information” can be completely open-source, but it is the embedded habits and compounded understanding that can only be accessed through attitude and commitment. Not just showing up today. Not just stepping up today. Today doesn’t matter without tomorrow. Tomorrow doesn’t matter without the next day. You can burn everything to the ground today. If you want to build something worthwhile, it is the long term that matters. It is the relationship between your days that matters. It is time that matters. You can shout that from the rooftops and no one will be able to steal it from you. Build Endurance. Build Resilience. Then do stuff that matters. Every day.

Real competitive advantages aren't afraid of the light

Bits Moving Independently

Most of our money thinking is focused on the “profit line” – earnings and returns. Yet despite the wide range of incomes people get, the vast majority manage to spend it all. Hand to mouth living, even if the hand and mouth are very big. Like the limbs of a drummer, genuine Financial Security requires the bits to move independently. You learn more about spending habits from people who earn less than you. We have fixed expenses each month, we have the ones we can control, and we have the predictable surprises. You can get a sense of that rhythm. Then don’t let the beat change when the earnings and returns get funky. “Save more later” is a nudge where you commit to put any increases to work rather than spending them. There is obviously a bare minimum below which putting anything aside is incredibly difficult. It is what makes poor parents who sacrifice so much to get their children a better education so impressive. Creating music starts with the hard graft involved in training your limbs. Hard, but not impossible.

Bits Moving Freely

Monday Feeling

I am highly suspicious of transformational events. Let's see. Books like "The Happiness Hypothesis", "Blink", and "Thinking Fast and Slow" talk about our intuitive and conscious decision making and behaviours. We tend to identify with the Narrator in our heads. The voice that is a combination of lawyer, a PR officer, and a grumpy old man. Our interaction with the world is significantly more deep soaked than that. We carry with us people and events from the past. Friends of mine with kids talk of remembering childhood engagement with their parents while playing with their own kids. Situations they haven't experience for decades are now repeated from a different perspective. Words and phrases are gradually layered with meaning as they connect us to the world. Then covered up. Then popped up. Much of our behavior becomes automatic. So when anything "changes", I am keen to wait till Monday to see. Then next Monday. Then Monday a year from now.  Meaningful change is seldom fast.

Old Scripts

We speak too quickly for each word to be a conscious choice. The stream that bursts from us comes from deep beneath the surface. A reaction from within. We recognise the situation we are in from situations we have been in. From situations that have repeated themselves into our muscle memory, or burnt themselves into us through sheer force. Seeing things from other people's perspectives is so hard, in part because we haven't had their experiences, but in part because it is so hard to "unsee" what we have experienced. As the experiences soak in, we can forget them but they don't disappear. Accessing the scripts that drive us requires patience. It requires calm. It requires doing the work. This is why honesty isn't just letting down barriers. It is also making time. Understanding can't be forced.

Old Scripts

Rubik's Trev

I lived in London for 8 years before moving to the Shire. Most of it was spent with a normal job, until I decided that was overrated. Normal jobs give a "no need to decide" structure to days. The normal 5 days a week, and two-day weekend, loop. A physical place to go. Perhaps, new problems each day, but within a known category. My blog gives my days that structure now. Most days, that is the thing I know I will do. In the beginning, I used to keep a little log of ideas for blog posts. Gradually, it just became something I did automatically. Within themes. I carry on exploring, but the paths are less surprising. Perhaps I explore a new country, city, or language on Wikipedia, or learn aloud a little more about Universal Basic Income. Or I follow up on a conversation I have had with someone.

The "loopy place" I physically go is more flexible. In London, you can have a degree of anonymity. There are so many people and places, that I could find a little hidey hole and not be noticed. Places open. Places close. To get some recognisability to my loop, I went to my "Artist's Lunch" on Wednesday. Colleagues become the very human part of our loop. The idea of separating work and play is bizarre when we spend so much time at work. Leaving the normal working world meant, in a big part, leaving a group of friends. The Artists from the Wimbledon Art Studio which I was a part of for four years, became my point of consistency. 

Now that I live in the Shire, I still venture back to that Artist's Lunch as often as I can. I like feeling part of something bigger. Even though each Artist is doing their own thing, it feels like you have a degree of 'shared mission'. Similar to separating work and play, separating Competing companies is also rather unnatural. Professional or Trade groups and associations remind people that we aren't defined by the company that we work for. They would do well to have Artist's Lunches.

A "Buhr" was a small fortification. A "ford" is a place that crosses a river. I live in a small medieval town called Burford. Slowly, this Donkey is becoming a local. The South African guy with long hair who is either walking, on his kindle, computer, phone, or playing with a Rubik's cube. As much a part of the furniture as Lady Diana and her mobility scooter. When you regularly cross the river, the river becomes a part of who you are, and you become part of the river.

We like to identify with the thoughts in our head. With our decisions. More and more, I believe our decisions are loopy. "Narrative Therapy" is a form of psychotherapy that helps people create stories about themselves that are helpful. It helps people by "Co-Authoring". You identify the characters, themes, and plots. The backstories, and events, that create the way we respond to the twists. Rather than autonomy over each fork in the road, it helps people step back and look at the road. It helps people identify their knowledge, skills, and values. Choose your road.

To ensure we are focusing on the things that really matter. That we know the things we are becoming part of.

River Crossing

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

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

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

crossing the stream that was 5 feet deep on average" 

Howard Marks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Messy Thinking

I try write in my blog every day. I believe we are mostly a collection of habits. I want writing to become a habit. Making it a part of what I do automatically means I am not waiting for inspiration, I go looking for it.

I know this means that many of my blog posts don't make a lot of sense. They make sense to me! (As I press publish... not always afterwards) I do read through them as carefully as I can. 

The second job I had after working in product development, was as a Marketing Actuary. Trying to take technical ideas and put them into a communicable form. There is a big gap between the people who have the time to think through issues (because it is their job) and the people who are doing other things. The Curse of Knowledge - 'The better you know something, the less you remember how hard it was to learn'.

The only way to find out if an idea can still connect to people, is to engage. The problem is you can't wait till an idea is fully formed before you do that. A lot of people 'stay private till they plonk'. Then when they reach their 'Eureka!' moment, no one else has a clue what they are speaking about.

My thinking is messy. I often confuse myself, and a lot of what I say is nonsense. I have been in several discussions where I have said, 'Okay, I am not making a lot of sense. I am going to shut up now.'

Lost in Thought in the Long Grass

As important as the conclusion you reach, is the path you took to get there. We are good at simplifying that path in retrospect. 'Our story' seems clear in hindsight. I know for me, that is rubbish. Much of our knowledge is what Virginia Postrel calls (in The Future and its Enemies) Tacit Knowledge. We don't know why we know what we know.

This is one of the challenges of a Global v Local world. The further decisions get stretched from the places where the results are felt, the more Tacit Knowledge gets lost.

By writing every day, I am 'thinking in the open'. People who know me will be able to read between the lines. They will read between the lines in ways I don't understand. That is because even if I have shared an experience with someone, they would have seen things differently. That can only add to my understanding if I invite them into my thinking. If we think together.

So I apologise if I lose you. I may be lost too. In conversation or in reading what you write, I will try my hardest to tell you when you have lost me. Please do the same.