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.

Changing Story

We only have one life, and as we grow older we tell ourselves a story about ourselves. It is hard not to grow attached to the story, and want it to make sense. 

As if we need to explain or justify ourselves, our path, and our identity to others or to typically our harshest critic – ourselves. Most other people don’t care about our stories as much as we think they do. They are too busy beating themselves up about their own. 

Capital on the other hand, is inanimate. It can be allocated to any problem, and can move around the world (if the rules allow) to change shape and form almost instantly to apply itself to different problem-solving. “Permanent Capital” is valuable, because it is sufficiently patient to wait for compounding to kick in rather than seeking short-term returns, but it is still detached enough to be available to move should the need arise. 

Much of our opportunity as people is tied to the lottery of birth, which means our meritocracy has individualized denominators. Our potential is grounded in artificial and temporary constraints. Grounded in biases and boundaries. 

Freedom of movement of goods, services, capital, and people looks to chip away at the weight of those constraints. We should be able to solve problems wherever they are, and have people from wherever they are and whatever their irrelevant constraints are solve them if they want to. 

We can dismantle the illusions that separate opportunity. If you have freedom of movement for Capital, Goods, and Services, but not for people... that has a name. Apartheid. You get areas around the world that are far better at mixing groups so that you don’t have bubbles of wealth.

Moving between illusions of difference

Pay or Ask

Money-making requires friction. Perfect meritocracy would be short-sighted. Could you make money in a world with perfect transparency, perfect replicability, and zero transaction costs? If someone could compete, they would. 

There are almost 8 billion of us. With a rounding error I can ignore, I can confidently say that you wouldn’t have a job in a perfect meritocracy. Neither would I. There is someone who does what you and I do better than we do it. 

Why does the person come to you to get something done if they could do it themselves, or get someone other than you to do it better? Money only functions with constraints. 

Relationships are more fuzzy. Communities are a strong container. Communities have reciprocal respect that help each other be part of their lives. Gradually as we solve more money problems, we will have capacity to lean more deeply into fuzzier worlds, with different rules that don’t bow to counting or constraints. 

Sometimes we like the clarity of paying for something because it releases us from fuzziness. Sometimes it is much cleaner to pay a stranger to do something than ask someone we have a relationship with. That can lead to us leading very isolated lives where we don’t have to have difficult conversations. 

We end up with clear rules of engagement and expectation management, but we don’t lean into the difficult, but interesting world of relying on, or trusting people we don’t, and can’t, fully understand.

The Value of Hiding

Own Silence

A danger with the idea that meritocracy works at an individual level, rather than a hand wavy “life is unfair, but you can progress from where you are” way... is that we can take the decisions people make about *us* too seriously. Whether you get a job. Whether you get a promotion. How big your bonus is. Whether someone recognises and understands the work you are doing. 

The strong temptation is to self-reinforce. To lean into the conspicuous. Separating our identity and the problems we are working on is a hard practice. 

We all want to do well. Which make measures of success feel like they are measuring who we are. Which can be a spiralling, relative, search for recognition. Imposter syndrome means most people are constantly self-judging. 

Aging does help you realise there are no real adults in the room, and everyone is just doing the best they can. Michelle Obama was asked how she managed the stress at being at a table with people that were very impressive. Chief Executives and Presidents are all just people with their own insecuritities. “They are not that smart”, she realised... as a different way of realising that “you are smart enough”. 

Some people get jobs due to connections... marriage, inlaw’s friends, birth, friend of a friend. Some people fake the right skill well to the right person at the right time. 

Even the people who are amazing at their jobs, are also useless at other things. Normal people who sleep, eat, and get confused. We don’t have access to what is going on in other people’s heads. 

Silence can appear like confidence. Our own silence is more raw.

"The Art of Silence" (1911)

Odilon Redon

Wound Up

Numbers are blunt tools for communication. The message they convey is more important to us than the countable thing they are supposed to represent. How a number is heard, interpreted, and felt, can wind us up. How they relate to ranking criteria or how we are judged. 

Key performance indicators to measure us. Seeing what you have done. Seeing what you haven’t done. How the environment has changed. Have you put sufficient effort in? 

Has effort resulted in output? How clever are you? Should you be given more responsibility? Should you be given coaching/mentoring/the boot? All the various ways we use to decide if someone is good enough. 

It is always interesting to see how this is connected to the broader questions, and the broader community. Many problems are solved in complex groups. Wealth creation is a team sport. Attributing who did what, and ranking those contributions, can be an impossible task. One that pretends that contribution = value = reward. 

If you look at the long-term growth of countries' “gross domestic product”, it exploded with the industrial revolution. Newtonesque jumping on the shoulders of giants. 

We tend to look at meritocracy as the marginal contribution of the individual (“if they hadn’t been there”) rather than the hard Tim Minchin truth that “If I didn't have you, someone else would do”. 

Accepting that we are inherently replaceable *in the world of money*. People will miss you, but someone else will do the job. Don’t get wound up the numbers. They don’t represent you.

Empowering the Uncontainable

Meritocracy and conspicuous consumption are dirty dancing partners. Value is personal, and price is a blunt tool for exchange. Price is a way to “put a number on anything”, even if it shouldn’t be boxed in that way. 

Demonstrating your wealth via things you can see can be an attempt to put a price on yourself. To show what you are worth. If you buy the idea that people with more merit, have higher prices, and so in a hand-to-mouth world... consume more. Another way of thinking of money and price is a tool to build the capacity to cope with life. Not about ranking or comparison, but rather about endurance and resilience. 

If you snap the need to (always) listen to price, you can internalise the way you look at value. You are not extracting yourself from life, in all its glory, and with all its challenges. You are building capacity which requires support. You can’t do it alone. 

Wealth is built in containers. We need to recognise our communities, and see how the containers we build exist within bigger containers. Trust in the bigger container is part of Adam Smith’s argument in favour of win-win capitalism versus win-lose mercantilism (battleship diplomacy with nations competing). He was able to show that freedom of movement in capital, goods, services, and people is win-win. 

You need to give things shape and form to make money, but those containers can morph and empower the uncontainable.

Changing Shape and Form

Are or Do

Paul Bloom says people are essentialists. Like Plato, believing that all things have an “essence” that define them. We “are” something. “I am angry” rather than “I am doing anger”. “They are a racist” rather than “they are doing racism”. 

We like the baseball that was hit by Babe Ruth, or the jersey that was worn by Kolisi, Smit, or Pienaar. The value (price?) of the jersey goes up if it wasn’t washed! Like there is a permanent spirit in the object. 

I had a coke can collection growing up that I inherited from my older brother, then expanded. I learnt that if you want a valuable can collection, you had to maintain the integrity of the can, unopened, and in its original state. Wasn’t going to happen... so my collection was just for me. 

We start believing that we can be weighed and measured by our essence. That some people are fundamentally better, with more merit, than others. The toxic view that you can gather data points on people till you can discard them because they are not brilliant outliers. The idea that once you have enough information on a person, you can pass judgement on them and decide if they are good enough. 

My view of privilege is that it is part of endurance. It is building up your ability to endure and strengthen your capacity to absorb challenges. Part of that has nothing to do with you and your essence. 

In stilling your money waves, you have to be aware of the impact you have on others, the benefit you receive from others, and the obligations that you have. Part of stilling waves is realising the waves don’t only affect you.

Inspirational Humanity

We celebrate outliers. Record-breaking and extremes of human achievement. Those being celebrated have a combination of barriers to entry the vast majority cannot possibly overcome, and hopefully... a smidgen of humanity we can relate to. Traits we can learn from. We can recognise the pain etched sharply in the face of a lone cyclist being pursued relentlessly by the peloton. With what we are given, we can apply these lessons and make the most of it.

I like the tough love concept of accepting responsibility and avoiding blame. I also get that part of white, english-speaking, male privilege is that I get treated as an individual and have no one to blame. I am not part of any category of people that is massively disadvantaged. So I have to take responsibility, but only from a strong foundation. That is empowering. If I succeed, I am acknowledged... not my category. If I fail, it is my fault... not my category. I get seen. 

It is true that massive groups of people have disadvantages that swallow their inspirational humanity. We are grappling with how to overcome those structural barriers and see people. How do you see the humanity and potential within people who aren’t breaking records? How do we avoid and unwind the disadvantages of a category becoming so engrained, that the shadows and scars remain even when walls fall and doors open? 

Austrian Mathematician wins Gold

Waves of Life

The vast majority of people, even those earning a lot of money, live hand-to-mouth. One way to view meritocracy is that it shifts capital to where it is working the hardest. Another way to view meritocracy is that people who are "better", deserve to live better lives. That how much you spend should be in line with how much value you add to society. For that to be “true”, people need to spend what they earn, and be paid what they are worth. That is not how capital, money, or price works. 

One of the challenges of building capital is that there are always emergencies. There are always events that can stop you and set you back to zero and hand-to-mouth. 

In Australia, they have famously changed national saving habits and built huge superannuation funds. One of the philosophical questions is whether people should be able to access their retirement savings in emergencies. For proponents of Universal Basic Income, a key question stands around whether lenders should have a claim over those payments. Can you borrow against that guaranteed stream of money?

In the early stages of building capital, the waves of life can destroy any capacity to protect, cultivate, and invest in merit. It is hard to grow capital when it is being harassed. It is hard to see each other when we are living hand-to-mouth. 

Forrest in Forest

My dream when I “stopped working” in 2014 was not to do nothing. I just wanted to not have to think about how what I would do would make money. I also did not like my fate being in other people’s hands. In a pure meritocracy, everyone would line up on a theoretical starting line and the gun would go. In reality, there are plenty of gate keepers to opportunity. There is not a path you choose and then knuckle down and crack on. So washing your hands of that rubbish, and saying “I am done” had incredible appeal. Front loading the effort, then constraining expenses going forward. The problem with that idea is I do see myself as part of others. It does not help if I am not stressed, if others are stressed. Like the scene in Forrest Gump where he runs back into the forest (with one r) to rescue people. The idea of financial independence is an illusion. I celebrated stopping working for money as “Independence Days”, but the problem is we aren’t independent. We are interdependent. So even though I talk of financial security and stilling the waves of money anxiety, the reality is it is a process of practice. The struggle to still the waves will continue. Part of stilling is acceptance and perception. Stillness where you are, not where you are aiming for. Stillness within the chaos, not after the chaos.

 

Necessary Friction

Building wealth is not purely about skills and knowledge. There is not a pure play meritocracy with a completely level playing field. The reality is we all have to eat, and that requires a degree of protection to be able to incentivize investing in skills and knowledge. With 7.7 Billion people on the planet, a pure meritocracy with no barriers would mean almost all of us would have to point out that someone is better than us at what we do. That means building wealth does require some friction. Some boundaries. Something to allow you to build an engine and vehicle completely detached from you. That can support you, and your community, without judgement of their merit. To still the waves of financial anxiety, you cannot constantly be weighing and measuring everyone. There has to be some independent commitment. That requires a level of self-awareness, seeing what your strengths and weaknesses are, what your community is, who your clients are, and understanding the market you are in. Developing skills that do not define you, but are transferable between different problems. 

 

All Animals Are Equal

When the supply of candidates massively outweighs the number of jobs available, work givers have the option of being picky. There is a lot of wiggle room to impose their preferences. In “Thinking Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman talks of how hard it is to convince people that interview processes regularly don’t add value. One tool in the Hubris Factory is to be very selective in hires, and regularly fire people. This gives the illusion of meritocracy. It is very difficult to evaluate this process objectively because you have no long-term, definitive, information on the people you didn’t pick, or the people you let go. The people doing the selecting/letting go are also often not subjected to their own criteria. One of my favourite German words is Geschmacksfrage – a question of taste. You need to detach from job interviews/opportunities. It is hard, because you know you. The interviewer does not (cannot), but will superficially form an opinion to think they do, and to reinforce their belief in their process. You are not your job. You are also not the jobs you did not get. 

 

Work Giver

There are formal skills that are easy to quantify/articulate and are specific to the jobs that require technical knowledge. For those, you just need to know what they are and do the work. There are other less obvious barriers to entry. It is not just about skills and knowledge (“Merit”). It is also about supply and demand. How many people have that ability? Why choose you? If there is an oversupply of people in the area that you are interested in, it is going to be difficult to get those jobs. Not because of you. Because of your choice. Qualitative and subjective filtering processes give lots of wiggle room to those selecting who gets the job. In a world where demand for jobs outweighs the number of jobs on offer, employers become guardians of opportunity. The German word for employer is arbeitgeber – work giver. The employer will be faced with similar supply and demand questions one level up. What is the problem they are solving, and how many other employers are solving it? Do they have the Capital needed to solve the problems? Can they solve the problem in a container with barriers to entry? It is not just about you. It is not just about merit. When building wealth, capital and containers matter. 

The Container Matters

Long Term

Although investing is a long-term game, our working careers are short. 5 years is not a long time. Even 15 years is only just long enough for compounding to start hinting at its magic. In “The Psychology of Money”, Morgan Housel points out that Warren Buffetts' biggest weapon was that he started investing at age 10, and has kept at it without quitting for 80 years and counting. At the time of writing the book, Buffett’s net worth was $84.5 Billion, of which $81.5 Billion had been made since his 65th birthday. Housel’s rough estimate of the size of Buffett’s Engine if he had started at 30 (after enjoying his 20s/setting up home), and stopped at 60 to golf, is $11.9 million. That is a big Engine. But no one would know who he is. 80 years is the number that really matters... and all the small numbers that contributed to the foundation years are the only reason the glory years exist. Merit applied to nothing doesn’t get seen. Conspicuous Merit always builds on deep history. 

Time measured in Ice Ages

 

Surface Waves

Stilling the waves of money anxiety starts small. Like building relief from a storm when you have no shelter. The goal is simply to get dry and warm. If you can build a buffer of three to six months of what you normally spend, you start to create the capacity to make some path-altering decisions. You build a capacity to cope. You increase your control and focus. “You” increase it, but really it is the power of the buffer/capital. It is the same you. Just empowered. Similarly, yogis talk about Siddhis. Siddhis are seemingly supernatural, paranormal, or magical powers obtained through regular practice. In other words, mastery. But they are dangerous. Other people might elevate you and you might start believing that elevation. It is nice getting recognition. And that sets you up for the waves of anxiety to return. Real meritocracy is a call to see the value of people and their connection to each other through the waves. Building buffers and capital to power us without building barriers to divide us.

Stilling the Waves

 

Longing for Truth

There is a perception that if you are earning lots of money, you must have lots of natural talent. So you get respect. This is dangerous. In yoga, they speak of the seven stages of development of wisdom. Wisdom isn’t about skills and knowledge. Even though skills and knowledge, properly contained, is how we create wealth. Wealth itself is what the skills and knowledge get applied to. The problem with a directionality in seeing progress and meritocracy as “more” is privilege. The first of the yogic stages is longing for truth. You understand that you are connected to everything, but you still have work to do. Before you can get all philosophical, there is the stuff you have to do, and there is the stuff you want to do. The stuff of life. The experience of life. There are still actions required, but you have to want to get free from the waves of anxiety. That desire is the directionality worth valuing. 

The Directionality Worth Valuing

Hereditary Entitlement

Meritocracy came in as a response to hereditary wealth. Hereditary entitlement. You had a position or role in your caste or class, and that came from your parents or the money you inherited. Meritocracy was the wild idea that you should hire the best person for the job. Which is the most skillful or the most knowledgeable. You should push resources to where they will have the biggest impact. That provides a path for social mobility, and it allows people to move “up”. If you use that directionality. The problem with meritocracy is that the idea is handicapped by the impact of privilege. Part of our incentives is money, but part of it is we naturally want to invest in the skills and knowledge of our children. We quite reasonably want to give them a competitive advantage. One of the barriers to entry is education. If you give someone education, you implicitly strengthen their barriers and that compounds. So there is a lot of thinking to do about conspicuous meritocracy and the barriers that people have to overcome. If we really want to get resources to where the true merit is. 

Focussed on Up