Window Shopping

Relativity is one of the biggest obstacles to mental health. When we wish we were in the position of someone else, and judge ourselves through others. When you hear about good fortune of people you know, and it does not make you feel good. When you go visit friends or family in bigger houses, or when you go on holiday, and are constantly aware of the things you do not have. Window shopping into other lives. We only have a small peak. We never see the full picture. We cannot understand their full story. We only see the conspicuous. We do not see the trade-offs. We do not see the challenges. We glimpse a single angle snapshot of another life path.

Letting go of that idea is vital to be able to fully focus our energy on whatever our bits of the puzzle are. Whatever our choices are. Whatever our position is. That is not accepting your role in life. It is letting go of the idea that people are better or worse.

Through an Opening

The Darkness

The challenge we face with politics is that we want it. The most political people I know use phrases like “leave your ego at the door”, and ask “how do we get rid of the politics?” without a hint of irony. The darkness from lack of transparency protects our interests and vulnerabilities. We like positioning ourselves against other people, if we come out on top. We like the sense of superiority. We like getting better. We like progress. We like being incentivised. We like action. We like feeling like we are doing something right, and moving forward.

We create these hierarchies as a way of making sense of the world. As a way of feeling like we are moving. Feeling a sense of life. It is an easy option to measure the world. Money is like salt, fat, and sugar for the taste buds. It is not subtle flavouring.

Nothing Pie

There are a few hard truths about investing. The market is both noisy and irrational, and making good decisions is not the only factor in success. It is not even the main factor. The father of Fundamental Investing (“Security Analysis” Benjamin Graham 1934) only outperformed passive investment by about 2% over his career. Making alpha (outperforming the benchmark) your goal is incredibly dangerous. It opens up an existential crisis where an entire career can factually (by your own definition) have added no value. You cannot eat alpha. Alpha on nothing is nothing. 100% ownership of a 10% alpha generating nothing pie is nothing. Often the conspicuous success of investors is based on (1) inherited wealth, (2) big salaries, (3) sales, and (4) fees. The main factor in wealth creation is saving and reinvestment. Getting money a job. Making sure that job adds value. Reinvesting the money money makes. It is not about you, how smart you are, or whether you see the matrix. I am not Neo. You are not Neo. No one is Neo. The world is complicated, ambiguous, and random. There are no heroes. We are all just doing our best.

Take as much as you like

Not Good Enough

When the default is to work full-time for one company, that becomes the container into which we direct most of our energy. I think you get a maximum 4-6 hours a day of really good quality creativity. Where you dig deep into the unique path that has led you to where you are, and connect interesting dots of the paths that have led everyone else to you. The values of the container matter. Lots of businesses, communities and containers discuss “Values” to create an inspirational glue for team members. Often it is platitudes like Excellence and Accountability. That can be a hubris factory. Creating, and sustaining, the idea that those in the container are better than those outside the container. Schadenfreude in the failure of others, and a lack of genuine self-reflection as you defend the illusion of superiority. It is dangerous to categorise others into “good enough” and “not good enough”. We seldom have a complete picture of the story of others. The ability to see them. Relative thinking and comparison is often just a reflection of the voices in the heads of those doing the judging. The voices telling them they, themselves, are not good enough.

Self-Contained

Dancing with Algorithms

We spend a lot of time trying to earn our place in the room. The idea of meritocracy is that inequality is acceptable because some people are fundamentally better than other people. Respect, status, and how people view us are such important drivers, people would often do worse in absolute terms, as long as they are doing better than those that surround them. One of my glass half full hopes for Artificial Intelligence is that AI plus *anyone* will be smarter and more effective in traditional 'meritocratic' ways than *anyone* by themselves. Imagine everyone had a very personalised AI coach/assistant with the primary goal to empower them, without disempowering anybody else. That is in equal parts very scary, and very exciting. The whole way we look at the world in terms of what drives us would be challenged. It would no longer be about being better than anybody else as better would lose its meaning. AI would provide the Algorithms. The steps we need to take. We would do the dancing, add the emotion, and create the meaning.

Poppies, Crabs & Shields

Tall Poppy Syndrome is when a group collectively hold each other back because any one individual who does well sticks out. Tall Poppies get cut down. In other countries, this is known as Crab Mentality. In a bucket of Crabs, any individual could easily climb out but they grab at each other trying to pull each other down. As such, they all remain stuck. The problem with relative happiness is that it is a zero-sum game. In particular - prestige, power and status. Even if everyone is better off, how we rate compared to our points of reference often carries more emotional weight. Best friends. School friends. Peers. Siblings. Showing how cross-cultural this idea is, a Scandinavian author came up with the 10 rules of the Law of Jante that simplify to the basic idea that you are not to think you are anyone special, or that you're better than us. The 10 rules are known as Jante's Shield.

1. You're not to think you are anything special.
2. You're not to think you are as good as we are.
3. You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
4. You're not to convince yourself that you are better than we are.
5. You're not to think you know more than we do.
6. You're not to think you are more important than we are.
7. You're not to think you are good at anything.
8. You're not to laugh at us.
9. You're not to think anyone cares about you.
10. You're not to think you can teach us anything.

Half the Picture

It is deeply empowering to accept that the world owes you nothing. Stoically assuming the very worst. Face, and accept, anything that could possibly happen. Expect nothing. Then everything that happens will be positive. What sounds like an incredibly negative world view, can result in being permanently either content, or happy. If happiness is the relationship between expectation, and reality. The heart of this idea is that you are on your own. Your strength comes from within. But in weakness, and in vulnerability, there is a world of beauty that opens to those who are prepared to be disappointed. The beauty that comes from owing, and being owed, everything. Content or happy is half the picture.