It's Not About You

I’ve always been a “try hard.” At school that meant signing up for everything: sport, debating, drama, chasing every chance to prove myself or die trying (for example losing 111-0 to Martizburg College - Thanks Murray). The world rewards that. Activity is visible. Effort is measurable. Roles are sorted by who tries the hardest and delivers fastest. But the danger of living like that is you start to believe the story: that everything depends on you, that outcomes are always cause and effect, that meritocracy is fair and final. It is flattering, and it is exhausting. Over time I learned that life does not bend to our trying. It bends to context, to randomness, to relationships. The real practice is to see things as they are, and then nudge.

That wiring carried me into university and then into my early career. I raced through my studies, eager to qualify as fast as possible, and landed in an industry built for competitors. Benchmarks, performance tables, stock-picking contests; finance is structured like an endless exam. Every meeting, every appraisal, was another chance to prove whether you were winning. I told myself I could “leave my ego at the door,” but the system was designed to poke it. I would walk in calm, and by the time someone pressed the right button, I would walk out rattled.

Meritocracy is seductive like that. If you are doing well, you must be smart. If you are doing badly, you must be stupid. That story is empowering because you believe your actions matter. But it also creates a gnawing anxiety. Every setback feels like a personal failure, and every success is only temporary. When you look around and see others doing better, it whispers that you are falling behind.

That is when I started to notice the trap of being seduced by success. When you are good at something, the world nudges you to double down. You narrow yourself into the lanes that reward you most quickly. Soon you become defined by that success. But you also start neglecting the parts of yourself that are not as visible or easy to measure. The scoreboard becomes your compass, and you can lose sight of what you actually value.

The irony is that when you make it all about you, your performance, your reputation, your edge, you end up hollow. Success becomes a treadmill, and you never arrive. For me, that realisation came in the frustration of constantly defending underperformance, trying to act like a stock-picking god, or sitting through appraisals that felt more like battles of ego than constructive conversations. It was draining, and I began to ask whether this was really what life was about.

Stepping back, I began to think differently. At the time, the median income in the UK was about £2,000 a month. Globally, $11,000 a year placed you at the 50th percentile. That perspective mattered. If I could live below the median, if I could focus on what I later came to call democratic goods, the shared infrastructure of society, I did not need to constantly prove myself by chasing the next rung of status. I could choose to consume less, compete less, and buy myself freedom.

Of course, that freedom came with its own anxieties. Not everyone has the option to step away. For many, life is hand to mouth, and talk of “leaving ego behind” can sound tone deaf. But for me, it was a philosophical decision: to stop letting money be a mirror of my self-worth. Financial Yoga, as I have come to describe it, is the practice of staying motivated while detaching from the negative aspects of identifying with wealth. It is about designing a life where capital has a job, but you are not that job.

Eastern philosophy helped me make sense of this. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, is a story about war. It sounds strange for a yogic text to focus on battle, but its teaching is about dharma, or duty. Life is not about your ego, but it is about showing up for your responsibilities. You engage in the fight because your family, your dependents, your community need you. Yet you detach your identity from the outcome. You do your duty, but you do not let the result define who you are.

That is a powerful shift for financial decision-making. If you make it all about your ego, you will chase returns, overtrade, and panic when things go wrong. If you detach completely, you risk apathy. But if you anchor yourself in dharma, you find balance. You accept that randomness plays a role, that outcomes are not perfectly fair, and you focus instead on process. Saving consistently, building trust, playing the long game. It is and it is not about you.

The difference between one-off contests and repeated games is crucial here. In a one-off contest, like a school exam or a quarterly appraisal, everything is about proving yourself in the moment. In a repeated game, like a long-term advisor-client relationship, trust compounds over time. You do not need to “win” every round. You need to keep showing up, keep the conversation alive, and keep learning together. Over the long run, consistency beats theatre.

This is where “the juice” comes in, the joy of practice itself. Early on, progress is slow. Learning a skill takes at least 100 hours before you are even competent. You may feel clumsy, exposed, even embarrassed. But stick with it, and you start to embody the skill. Just as a musician no longer thinks about each note, or an athlete no longer thinks about each stride, your financial habits can become second nature. You move from “numbers to leave numbers, form to leave form.” You build a rhythm that frees you from overthinking.

The best part? You do not need to keep your craft secret. World-class performers like Josh Waitzkin talk about practicing in public, letting others see your process. The competitive advantage is not in hiding; it is in embodying. Advisors can take the same approach. Instead of trying to be the smartest person in the room, show your work. Share your process openly with clients. Build trust through transparency. Over time, that trust becomes your edge.

So what does this mean in practice? It means channeling competitiveness into system design rather than self-performance. Set spending floors and saving rails. Agree on rebalancing rules. Document beneficiary intentions and next-generation plans. These are things you can own and improve without making them part of your identity. They are repeatable, transparent, and trustworthy.

And it means remembering, always, that financial advice is about relationships. It is about listening to the client’s story, not just projecting your own. It is about creating safe spaces where people can explore anxieties without judgment. It is about helping them build habits that compound over time. None of that requires you to be the hero. In fact, the less it is about you, the more it is about them, and the stronger the results.

In the end, “It’s not about you” is not a criticism. It is an invitation. When you let go of the need to prove yourself, you gain freedom. When you stop making money your mirror, you stop chasing illusions. When you focus on dharma, on responsibilities, relationships, and trust, you find peace.

The paradox is that what you do still matters deeply. Your actions, your habits, your conversations compound into real outcomes for you and for others. But they matter most when they are not about ego. They matter when they are about stewardship, connection, and long-term growth.

So here is my challenge: make one financial decision this week that is not about you. Ask a client what “enough” feels like this year. Set one simple constraint, like a savings rail or a review cadence. Do something small, transparent, and repeatable.

It is not about you. And that is exactly why it matters.

Counting and being Counted

The easiest problems to tackle are the ones that focus on things that you can count. If you can count something, it is easier to control. STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), all revolve around things that you can count. Science also provides a framework for experimentation and research. There is a process of trial and error. Physics, chemistry, biology, biology, technology, and computer engineering (for example), tend to make it easier to find jobs because it is easier to specify problems. 

In product development, you have a “Product Specification” which identifies what the problem is and maps out the intended solution. If it is easy to put something into words and numbers, it is easier to communicate. It is easier to get funding for problems where you can explain how you can make a profit. When it is clear the act of solving the problem can finance itself. As soon as something is qualitative, it is much harder to explain what the benefits are. Because it is not necessarily tangible. It may be something we feel, and we may feel differently about what is valuable. 

Not every good idea is a good business idea. 

If an idea is a good idea, but it very difficult (and not desirable) to create barriers around it to monetize, then it becomes a passion project. It can still be something that gives your life meaning and gives others meaning. But in order to make it happen, the problem requires resources. You need to find funding. 

It might be government funding. It might be grants. There might be someone willing to give you money, but that's a whole different world. That's a world where you learn to do fundraising. To convince people that art/service/change is good. That ceases to be about some key numbers. It becomes storytelling. You need to be able to convey information in a way that grabs someone. 

You need a decision-maker who is willing to give you money. 

Part of acceptance is why you are doing what you are doing. Coming down to the nitty gritty of what drives you. What are your incentives? What's the bigger plan? What's driving your daily practice? What are you going towards? 

Quite often we don't choose that, because we are just on a set path that is given to us by others. That path comes through comparison and relativity. You start looking at friends and family and building towards what is expected. Maybe it's a bigger house. Maybe it is expenses related to children’s education. It might even be that your chosen job has a natural progression. The better you are at your job, you get promotions and raises. We don't necessarily find something that works for us and build mastery around it. We want to see conspicuous evidence of progress. 

We need to unpack what we mean by progress. 

In its historical context. Is it a cultural thing? Is it controlling nature? Is it controlling our environment? Is it something we have to rethink? Given challenges like climate change and sustainability. Do we need to come up with different measures that aren't so focused on the numbers and social mobility? 

The world is getting progressively (but bumpily) less racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist. We are breaking down barriers, but we still have hierarchy. The concept of people being better and lifting groups of people. The directionality of that is interesting because living a simple life can be a choice. There is a story of Alexander the Great out empire building and he comes across a sage sitting on a rock. The one doing external work. The other doing internal work. The Gini Coefficient measures inequality. A Gini of Zero (0) in a two-person world would mean Alexander and the Yogi had the same. One (1) would mean Alexander had it all. If we shared everything, there would be no incentive to get more because it would immediately be watered down (particularly if it was among the 7.8 billion people on the planet). 

We want to have a sense of reward for what we do. Conspicuous reward. Well done, here’s a gold star. Here’s some money. That’s how we do incentivization. You do something. You get measured against other people. You do something more. Understanding what we do, starts with understanding what incentivizes us. If we are going to plot *how* we do what we do, we need to understand *why* we do what we do.

Alexander the "Great"

What is Greatness?

Difficult Questions

We do not all have the same skills and knowledge. We do not all have the same barriers to entry. We have different opportunities. We have different sources of funding. We are consuming resources unsustainably, yet the average global GDP is only about $11,500 per person. Can you live on $11,500 a year and still create space to save?

If you are earning more than that, can you reduce your consumption to that level? Yet, there is a whole swathe of the world’s population living in poverty. How do we raise people out of poverty, when we can’t all consume the amount that is being consumed by those who are consuming too much?

How do we incentivize if consuming more is not an option? How do you get someone out of bed in the morning, if you are asking them to have a worse day than yesterday? Every day?

These are difficult questions that require some fundamental reframing of how we make our decisions. 

Framing and Structure

Understanding Incentives

The world is getting progressively (but bumpily) less racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist. We are breaking down barriers, but we still have hierarchy. The concept of people being better and lifting groups of people. The directionality of that is interesting because living a simple life can be a choice. There is a story of Alexander the Great out empire building and he comes across a sage sitting on a rock. The one doing external work. The other doing internal work. The Gini Coefficient measures inequality. A Gini of Zero (0) in a two-person world would mean Alexander and the Yogi had the same. One (1) would mean Alexander had it all. If we shared everything, there would be no incentive to get more because it would immediately be watered down (particularly if it was among the 7.8 billion people on the planet). We want to have a sense of reward for what we do. Conspicuous reward. Well done, here’s a gold star. Here’s some money. That’s how we do incentivization. You do something. You get measured against other people. You do something more. Understanding what we do, starts with understanding what incentivizes us.

Gini Coefficients by Country

Losing Focus

There is a conflict between the idea of “leave your ego at the door” and meritocracy. If we believe in a world where the quality of life you can live is determined by your “underlying permanent” skill and knowledge, then constant evaluation of an individual’s fundamental intrinsic worth makes sense. If you believe in Elite teams, then you need to be regularly dividing people into groups that are good enough, and not good enough. The justification for meritocracy is that all boats rise if resources are pushed to those who are the best. Not for spending. For reinvestment. Politics is bound to be brutal and closeted if you pretend to be gods. Ego gets left at the door when it is all hands on deck to find solutions. When someone is confident enough about their place that the focus is on the problems, not the person. If you are surrounded by naked emperors, the focus is likely to be on, smaller things.

Graffiti in Tartu

Polis Smous

I started my career in Finance in South Africa and the United Kingdom during two watershed moments. Just after the bursting of the Internet Bubble, and during the cracking of the walls around endowment policies and remuneration of Insurance Sales. Endowment Policies pay a lump sum after a specific term or on death. They combine investment and risk cover. The sales people often were not professional financial advisors giving appropriate advice. They were remunerated up front, in commission. If the client stopped paying their premiums, or another “Polis Smous” (Policy Hawker) convinced them to churn/swap, there were big, indefensible, clawback penalties. The scandal made the environment ripe pickings for “Pure” investment or risk products, and saw a massive professionalisation of the advice industry. Allow time to pass, and even the pure grow and get legacy skeletons in their closet. The constant trade off between starting from scratch, and keeping the good bits of the old way of doing things. As the environment changes, we need to change. The question is whether we are brave enough to be transparent and honest.

Win-Win at Scale

Before Amazon, Netflix, Google, and other big disruptors entered the world lived Sam Walton. The founder of Walmart realised that you aren’t trying to maximise profit on every item you sell. You aren’t trying to maximise price. You have to look at the big picture and give your customer a good deal.  By charging lower margins on the stuff he sold his clients, and really understanding both their needs and how to get them a good deal, he combined Win-Win economics with scale. When people speak of “Meritocracy” for companies, and principles of excellence they are still looking after themselves, their container, and their spot in that container. They will look for people to join them that improve the merit of their container, but not at their expense. Very few people are that self-less, and the goal isn’t that noble. Stepping aside for someone who is smarter and more effective than you is hardly philanthropy. You would only do that if you are an owner. Similarly, part of the challenge with transformation is hiring people that companies fear will leave. Loyalty trumps merit. People hire people like them who like them. Then knit their lives together. The only way things will transform is with bigger containers we trust, and feel a sense of ownership in. Win-win at scale.

Sam Walton

Safer in the Dark

Money is a smarter form of barter. It partially solves a coordination problem, but it is not the best we can do. If you have wheat and you want milk, you can sell the wheat for money and buy milk rather than finding someone with milk who wants wheat. There is still a chain of dependency. If one person had money, and ninety-nine had both something to offer and something they wanted, a purely money-based economy would need that money to slowly make its way around. Smarter Barter would be very aware of the complex market and would be able to pair and co-ordinate people without money. Half the problem is mapping. We walk around in bubbles unable to clearly articulate what we want, and unable to see what we could offer with the appropriate training. Unclear destinations. Unclear paths. We try sneakily figuring out offerings and finding customers without alerting competitors. In a world with perfect transparency, zero transaction costs, and the ability to copy instantly, the worry would be that there would be no friction to act as a container to reward effort. We live in the dark as a way of protecting ourselves. Real meritocracy would hardly reward anyone. No one isn’t replaceable in the world of money.

Solid Base

What I enjoyed most about my introduction to Yoga in 2009 was the simplicity of the base. Swami Vishnudevananda talked about 5 key points. Proper exercise, breathing, relaxation, diet, and mental health (thinking and meditation). Whatever the challenge, there is a point of return. A first principle. Start from the basics. Slow things down. I think of this in the way I think of just how good my mother was at raising me. I am completely comfortable being lost in the grass while learning, because of the security of my base. I couldn’t have had a more solid foundation. She was that foundation. Returning there just requires closing my eyes. That is why I think individuals need a secure foundation more than they need to “know their place” (have a hand to mouth job). That place is fragile, their place shouldn’t be. I don’t believe in fear and wolves at the door as the ideal motivator. True creativity comes when people are secure in their place. That comes through getting the basics right. Starting from a point of strength. Then stretching into the chaos.

Reverse Darwinism

Homo Economicus is the imaginary human with an infinite ability to make rational decisions. This character doesn’t exist, but is useful in models of how real people make choices. Behavioural Finance focuses on painting a better picture of the more complicated ways we really engage with the world. The idea that businesses focus only on profit is also imaginary. Partly because incentives are complicated. Partly because businesses are imaginary models too. Businesses are collections of real people with real behaviours. The future is unknown, and the consequences of our actions are unknown. “Reverse Darwinism” is the idea that people hire people slightly less intelligent/more controllable than them so that their place is secure. People get promoted till the hit their level of incompetence, or a political ceiling. If someone promising threatens to leave, let them. There is always another promising, less demanding, person to fill their place. This all sounds cynical. My point isn’t that people are bad. It is that merit and profit aren’t clear. People are complicated with inconsistent goals to match an uncertain world.

Endless Knot

Actions have consequences. Some are intended. Intention and incentives matter, but the world is so complicated (and getting more so) that we don’t, and can’t, have a strong grasp on cause and effect. The stories we layer on the world are glitchy and built on our own personal faulty understanding. Then thrown into the mix is a double helping of randomness that tends to swamp our efforts. The only thing you can truly plan for is that things won’t go according to plan. Build in a feedback loop. A little lesson from each step. Realise that each step taken changes the world. The lesson you learnt applies to a world that no longer exist. And is only relevant to one of the ways that world could have played out. Complicated. Ambiguous. Random. In a way that is empowering. No one understands. Don’t expect yourself to. The main goal is to create an environment that gives you time. Then the ability to adapt, adjust, and accommodate. Then create. Do something meaningful to you. Build. Learn. Rebuild. Every day.

Team of Owners

You can’t “think like an owner”. You either are an owner, or you have different incentives. The Agency Problem is the conflict of interest that exists when one party is expected to act on the behalf of others. Interest alignment only goes so far. The Managers of an Equity Fund may claim, for example, that they co-invest and fees are performance based. But interests are holistic. You can easily hedge your exposure on the side, only invest a small part of your assets, or just be so wealthy that losses matter less (maybe less easy without family wealth). Owner Managed firms get around this because getting a firm off the ground typically requires most of your capital. Participation in profits is not the same as ownership. Participation tails off when the individual stops working. Ownership is foundational and cross-generational. Real long-term wealth is created over a longer time frame than any one working life. Real long-term wealth creation is a team sport that requires a team of owners.

Agency Problem

Finding Space

How do we wean ourselves off structural income dependence? Even most of the wealthy live hand-to-mouth in a fragile way. We don’t look at wealth by stress testing. We look at the surface. We live on the edge. Few people suddenly become all Zen when they reach a level of income or capital where they feel they have “Enough”. The incentives of bigger, better, more, provide more immediate gratification than the incentive of deep soaked security. We stretch. We push. We reach. Income Detachment starts with space between spending and income. It is hard to motivate for Buffer and Capital building. There is no shiny new thing on offer. A Buffer just removes the noise. An Emergency Fund of 3-6 months spending. A productive Engine should generate income over time, but spending more than 2-5% of it is likely to put it under pressure. You can go Cold Turkey and extract yourself from spending-based environments, but we are in this together. Wealth creation is a team sport. It is a long-term venture. Across generations. Embedded in culture and relationships. We have to value the ability to breathe, and gradually build our lung capacity.

Foundation Building

We don’t have to live hand-to-mouth. Capital can earn money that can finance our needs, and in good times wants. It can provide a buffer for the knocks. Then how we spend our time ceases to be filtered through the question “how can this make money?”. We can free ourselves from a pass-the-parcel economy where a break in the chain causes us to all fall down. We can afford to do care work that doesn’t pay. A challenge with this is “Agency Risk”. There has to be trust and alignment of interest if the managers are not the owners. A lot of risk management focuses on performance. What you can see. What you can see isn’t all there is. Risk control is holistic. If managers get rewarded in good times, but feel no pain in bad, interests aren’t aligned. If (some of the) managers co-invest (for show) but have substantial other assets and safety nets, interests aren’t aligned. The advantage of scale is that standard solutions can spread, and be provided by fewer people. The disadvantage is that things become abstract, confusing, and distant. Without a solid, explicitly-aligned, universal foundation, trust is bound to be superficial and dependent on a fragile illusion being maintained.

Foundation Building

Alpha on Nothing

Wealth Building and Institution Building are closely connected. The biggest determinant of the “Bang for Buck” of your Merit is the country and community you are born in. Meritocracy rewards the marginal action… the last decision. How much value did you create based on what you did, and how much would there have been if you hadn’t done it? That is completely blind to the “Institution Value”. Alpha in the investment world is a way of leveling the playing field. “Time Weighted Rate of Return (TWRR)” allows comparison of individual performance. TWRR versus a Benchmark gives a sense of merit. But Alpha on Nothing is Nothing. At the end of the day, it is what we build together and over time that counts. It only makes sense to build something if you have real ownership that extends beyond your marginal actions. Far into the future. Compounding means what you do now matters far more to what happens long after you are gone, than what you can see now. Real ownership matters. Real institution-building matters. What you do, matters.

Laying Groundwork

One objection to Capital is that the owners aren’t doing the work. There is a moral feeling that the people involved should be the people being rewarded. It’s complicated. Reward and input don’t go hand-in-hand. The feedback isn’t instant or clear. Often there is a substantial delay. If you look at an ultra-long-term growth chart of GDP in the UK, you will see that a lot of the value “has been added recently”. Rubbish. The majority of value gets added in laying the foundations. The dirty, unglamorous, upfront work. Like in Rugby. The match is won by the forwards, and the backs determine the scoreline. “Meritocracy” tends to financially reward the last decision maker in a binary, “what would it have looked like without this decision” way. That is lazy attribution. Capital allows owners to do the dirty work knowing they will benefit even if they walk away when different skills are required. Or they get tired and lose sufficient inspiration to overcome the attached nonsense. The challenge is hereditary entitlement. The balance between passing on unearned wealth, and recognising that most of the groundwork for today’s Merit has been layed over the 50,000 to 2 million years since we started speaking to each other. Community Wealth.

Internal Balance

To gain balance, you need to fix your eye on something that is stable. Something permanent. Then to internalise that stability so you can close your eyes, and still keep focus.  If your performance measure is more, or relative, then you are going to wobble. If your goal is to beat a Benchmark, then you can still “do well” when you lose. If you lose less. That can’t be the point. The best investors I know are process focused. This is true of Capital creation in the same way it is true of any form of mastery. The world is complex, ambiguous, and random. Worthy performance measures have to be internal. They have to be able to look at the fundamentals. What is really going on? What is really being built? Why? If your measures are about winning and losing, about relative success, then don’t be surprised when you blink and the flame you were looking at moves.

Stuck in the Mud

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit” (Harry Truman). Much of the creation of a business is in the packaging. The property rights and the ability to secure barriers to monetise the idea. The legal form. The relationships. The financing. The complex system that eventually makes things happen requires some sort of division of the pie, and attribution of where the value is added (even if this is nearly impossible). The beauty of a market for price discovery is we can fudge a price. Price isn’t value. It is a way of saying “this is a mess (too complicated to be precise), but I am happy, are you happy?”. It is a clearing mechanism. There are lots of places where we can get stuck in the mud trying to allocate credit. We get comfort in numbers. They give the illusion of precision. Money isn’t precise. It isn’t even a thing. Money is just an imprecise lubricant to clear things that get stuck. It’s in the complex web of fundamentals underneath where the amazing things are accomplished. Beyond credit.

Big Changes

In Europe, in the mid-18^th Century, parents lost between 3 and 4 of their children before the age of 5 (See, OurWorldinData.org/child-mortality). I know only a handful of people who have suffered the awful tragedy of a child not reaching their fifth birthday, yet then (and now in really poor areas) it was commonplace. As a single, summary, measure of progress, a fall in global child mortality from 43% in 1800 to 4.5% in 2015 tells the story of a fundamental shift in the type of life we live on this rock flying through space. Big families were partly a human Buffer against this loss. The global fertility rate is 2.5 children per woman, while in the pre-modern era 4.5 to 7 was common. One brutal way to look at this is that about the same number survive. People as Buffers. The same is true of people as productive assets. As we shift from survival as the goal, we get released from the crudest of incentives. The cruelest of numbers. Have spare children. Earn money to survive. We can build Capital that can provide base security. That can empower us to be the author of our stories.  

Just a Job

An early Mentor of mine lamented that staff showed little interest in the broader business. The company I got my first job at was huge. It was easy to get lost and just focus on your particular role. It was also listed. This meant that anyone in the public could buy a slice of ownership. A share. Every year, the company would also have to put out an Annual Report with a letter to shareholders. Along the way there are quarterly updates. A pet peeve of mine is someone (particularly if that someone is me) being told to “think like an owner” when they aren’t. If you work for a public company though, that choice is yours (assuming you are able to squeeze a gap between what you earn and what you spend). I like to think of investing my money, as getting it a job. The advantage with shares, is you can get it 20-25 jobs (or more) and swap those jobs without the emotional baggage of swapping the job you do personally. The million-dollar question is whether you would work for a company you wouldn’t invest in? That is the heart of my mentor’s lament. When incentives are not aligned. When a job, is just an isolated job. The goal the paycheck. When we connect to something bigger, it affects every little decision we make. That is ownership.