Swart Donkey

I’ve always been a “try hard.” At school that meant signing up for everything: sport, debating, drama, chasing every chance to prove myself ...

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 wan...

Money-making requires friction. Perfect meritocracy would be short-sighted. Could you make money in a world with perfect transparency, perfe...

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 whe...

Numbers are blunt tools for communication. The message they convey is more important to us than the countable thing they are supposed to rep...

Meritocracy and conspicuous consumption are dirty dancing partners. Value is personal, and price is a blunt tool for exchange. Price is a wa...

Paul Bloom says people are essentialists. Like Plato, believing that all things have an “essence” that define them. We “are” something. “I a...

We celebrate outliers. Record-breaking and extremes of human achievement.  Those being celebrated have a combination of barriers to entry th...

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...

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 mon...

Building wealth is not purely about skills and knowledge. There is not a pure play meritocracy with a completely level playing field. The re...

When the supply of candidates massively outweighs the number of jobs available, work givers have the option of being picky. There is a lot o...

There are formal skills that are easy to quantify/articulate and are specific to the jobs that require technical knowledge. For those, you j...

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 fo...

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 ...

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. ...

Meritocracy came in as a response to hereditary wealth. Hereditary entitlement. You had a position or role in your caste or class, and that ...