Forests of Connection

Constant learning allows you to release your identity from a specific problem. To solve problems, and move on. It requires mapping your ignorance. Developing the capacity to change your skills and knowledge as the problems demanding focus change. Developing the capacity to step back and have a broad picture of how your skills and knowledge fit into the wider environment. 

Understanding that they aren’t who you are, but are part of a bigger, complex, organism. Your own learning needs to connect to others, and requires communication, to convey your ideas, to listen, and to take on new knowledge. Letting knowledge that is no longer serving you disappear. Rather than being defined by the specific thing you are learning, building the tools to take information in, process it, and make decisions. 

Not purely in a rational way, also developing the emotional capacity for environments that change. Being a decision maker requires real interaction with the world, practically and pragmatically. 

Active Career Management, means looking beyond your line manager or company for performance reviews. Mapping out your own path. How are you connected to your broader profession? 

You could end up working for the company that is now your competitor. You could become the client of your current company. Your employer could become your client. 

I enjoy going to Actuarial Conventions even though most of the presentations are painful, mostly because of the people and seeing their movement around the underlying companies. Even though I may be lost in talks about paths I haven’t followed, only partially recognising some of the symbols from university, I still connect to the names and faces. 

Being attached to that wider community releases some of the pressure of performing within a specific box. Your specific job in a specific company can wind you up. Perspective is helpful.

Forests of Connection 

Funded Abundance

We all need to eat. To eat, we need money. To get money, we need to be paid. One of the fundamental parts of getting paid is the container. The shape and form that holds what it is you offer. 

Without constraints, an offer is a gift. That is because we don’t get paid based on the stable, known, countable, intrinsic value of what we do. We get paid based on supply and demand. We get paid based on scarcity. If something is incredibly valuable AND plentiful, it will have a low price – water, oxygen, love. 

It is possible to free yourself from the constraints of what makes money. If something/someone else makes money for you. You can be born rich. You can marry into money. You can surround yourself with rich generous friends. You can be born in the right country. You can have significant natural skills that set you apart. 

Otherwise, you just need to listen deeply to the signals given by price. What are people paying for? In what containers? How do you develop the skills and knowledge in those containers? It sounds cold, and in some ways it is. 

You start where you are, and you work to release yourself from constraints that don’t work for you. Chipping away with small, achievable goals that add up. Gradually building capacity for abundance funded by scarcity.

Shape and Form

Detached Learning

We constantly need to be learning. It is only in a world that is reliably and predictably the same the next day that you can limit the set of skills you have. 

We need to have curiosity and pay attention to a world wider than ourselves. You can’t assume what you are doing, even if it is working, is going to be the same. If you have studied something for seven years, it is not relevant if those skills become redundant. Especially in a world of artificial intelligence and creative destruction. First in line for automation are things that are repetitive and make money. 

When the rules of the game change, you need to be able to adapt to whatever the new rules are. This makes it important to detach from identifying with what it is you do for money, or are going to do for money. 

We can’t rely on jobs for life. Either for meaning or for sufficient financial reward to finance the rest of our activities. Even when you are in a great team you like and are well rewarded in, teams change. Like the analogy of a boat that gets regularly repaired until every part has been replaced. Is it the same boat? We end up being loyal to companies or countries that like George Orwell’s Big Brother don’t actually exist other than as a perpetuated story. 

Ken Robinson said the three keys to happiness were where you live, who you are married to, and what work you do. It used to be where you were born, someone from the neighbourhood, and what your parent of the same gender did. 

Now our choices have exploded, and the choices evolve.

From a Point

You can rage against the machine, or you can start from a point of deep understanding of where you, and others, are. 

The way we communicate and the choices we make stem from deep soaked agreements. The vehicles we use (companies and countries) are just stories. A way we work together. Money is also just a story. A tool we use to cooperate. 

In order to interact with others, you need to learn about how we communicate. Embedding yourself in the language to let you make choices in ways that are consistent with your values. From a place of understanding. 

Once you have a point of focus, you can select where to deepen your skills and knowledge. You can have a selected portfolio of jobs for your money, and concentrate your attention on understanding those. You don’t have to have a view on everything. 

If the area you are looking at gradually increases your ability to not have a view on things you don’t want to pay attention to. 

Stilling waves of anxiety comes from decreasing the ability of waves to impact you, and simply wash over. Less unconstructive raging, and more focused, connected, and conscious engagement.

Focus

Not About Me

There is danger in mastery. In having control. 

The world is complicated, ambiguous, and random. The confidence that comes with control radiates in a way that is impressive. In the same way as people identify with their jobs, they can also identify with “being impressive”. Being respected. Being in charge. 

Warren Buffett talks about being aware of a clearly defined “circle of competence”. Being aware of the danger of the halo effect. Where mastery tends to leave a leakily positive impression in areas where that mastery doesn’t exist. 

In Yoga, mastery of specific abilities developed through intense practice are called Siddhis. These can appear supernatural or magical. Developing Siddhis is dangerous if you identify with them. Over-identifying with something that separates you from other people. It makes it harder to detach and look at waves of anxiety as not being about you. 

Every wave poorly handled can bring your world crashing down. Every conversation can be about you. Your problems. Your solutions. Self-worship. 

A powerful way of getting through waves is “this is not about me”.

Brain Waves

Releasing Constraints

Building an engine (Capital which can work on your behalf) creates the capacity to stop focusing on yourself as an individual. We all have to eat. Many of us have dependents who rely on us financially. Which unfortunately means we can be seen as productive assets. Valued for the money that consumes the majority of our time. A few get the perfect combination of “what you are good at, what people want, and what you love”. Applying all three filters cuts out a lot of activity. Things you are good at and love, that don’t pay? Things people want, and you love, but you aren’t “good” at? People can get stuck doing things that people want and that they are good at, but they don’t love. Many people can’t pick and choose. They take the opportunities presented, and are too busy being a productive asset and meeting obligations to have capacity to breathe and change path. And life passes them by. If you want to stop seeing yourself as a productive asset, you need to build an engine that replaces your need to earn money. If you need to earn money (as most people do), there will be real world constraints of supply and demand that form the boxes in which we are paid. The hold of those constraints gets released if you can gradually create breathing space. 

 

Demonstrating Skill

I was told that when you go to university, you come out thinking you know nothing and when you go to vocational colleges, you come out knowing very specific and useful skills. What Actuarial Science did was teach me a bit of humility. I failed academic tests for the first time. I had failed things before. I got my driver's license on the fourth attempt. Not because I couldn’t drive, more likely I failed because I was confident I could drive. I got some free lessons from an instructor who saw me in the newspaper. I should have been able to tell from the way he was reading the newspaper during the lessons that there was a problem. Maybe he was looking for new clients? But I “could” drive and backed myself. The point of any test is not just for you to know what you are doing. It is to give confidence to the instructor that you know what you are doing. To follow the structure and rules and demonstrate the required methodology. The way you pass exams is by knowing what the examiner is looking for. I failed three times in short succession (twice in one day) because of observations. By not knowing what I was supposed to be conspicuously demonstrating. I then got a new instructor to smooth the edges and passed on a fourth occasion. 

Conspicuous Skills

One of the ways we develop conspicuous skills is through exams. Exams are not real life, but they are a blunt way to communicate your skills, so in most cases you just suck it up and write them. I prefer to think of exams as sport, where you practice writing “for the exam”. Knowing the content is a different task to showing up for the demonstration. Think from the perspective of the examiner. What are they looking for? I think of my mother as a teacher. Sitting on her bed with piles of marking, tired and keen to get to the end of the slog. As the person writing, you need to make their life easy. Think of the marking schedule. How are you going to be assessed? Unfortunately, exams are not purely about creativity. They are about signals. They are about containers. You are building a box to give the examiner what they want. You need to still your inner purist’s romance around the love of creativity and learning. That is a small part of what you are doing when you write exams. Study techniques are important. Summarising information. Identifying the main point and getting to it quickly without filler words and fluff. Practice answering questions in a way that gives the examiner the ability to mark you, so that you are match fit. 

 

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. 

 

Defining Container

It is horrible not getting the job you want. It is worth remembering you are likely not the only one who did not get it. With so few great jobs, there are normally plenty of candidates for those roles. It would not pay well if we create work-for-work-sake. Just because we want people to have those jobs. There are limits and there are constraints to what is required. Beyond a specific role’s requirements, understanding some generic business skills is important. These are the kind of skills that that are going to be with you throughout your life whatever your “source of wealth” is. However you build your wealth, you need financial literacy. Capital helps you make money. Through financing and risk management. Supporting your skills and knowledge. Developing an understanding of the containers in which all that happens is equally important. The accounting/law/product that creates the shape and form for what you are doing. Detaching a little to understand the things that are not specifically about you and what you do. You need some awareness around that to have a plan for how you are going to build your freedom, your autonomy, and your ability to make decisions. So that one fragile job/opportunity does not become your defining container. 

 

 

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

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

Getting the Cheese

The early bird gets the worm. The second mouse gets the cheese. My brothers are both Doctors. Perhaps that is why I am not. I saw the years and years of study and community service they did (and do), and decided that Actuarial Science was an easier mountain to climb. You have to pick your hard.

One observation was that while my days could be trying, no one died. Medics in your life put the hour download of a tough day at the office in perspective. They also specialised more and more. Knowing a hell of a lot about a small area of complexity. One is now a Professor of Vascular Surgery. The other is a Paediatric Cardiologist.

Maybe extending the analogy too far, someone who studied finance can still have their own career and finances in a mess. Understanding a small corner of the financial universe doesn’t make you a career coach or financial planner. Circles of competence. Asking for help doesn’t mean you aren’t competent.

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Price is not Value

Do not get too obsessed with the specific skills and knowledge which you think will provide the reward you are looking for. Price is not value. What determines how much you get paid for something is supply and demand. Price and value can disconnect for long periods and to extreme levels. The key is to disconnect your value creation from having to care excessively about price. To do that, you need to pay attention to capital and containers. Capital creates space. Containers get you paid. Space snaps the hand to mouth connection that forces you to dip into markets to care about supply and demand. A salary is just the price of your labour. The price of your skills and knowledge. Those are affected by how many other people can do what you do, and whether those paying you need/want you specifically to do the work. You do need to listen to the market to see what skills and knowledge are being rewarded now. You do need to build the capacity to adjust as supply and demand changes. The more you are able to convert your earning ability into capital, the less you will need to care about what other people think things are worth. Particularly, what they think you are worth. 

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

Somebody Else

In my job hunting I have had many conversations with friends, former colleagues, recruitment agents, and friendly strangers on LinkedIn. Covid means I have not done the coffee circuit. I probably saw more people in week-long visits to Cape Town than I have seen in the (just more than a) month I have been properly back. Conversations move slowly. Even when there is an obvious vacancy. Corporates have to go through the process of advertising jobs, screening candidates, and rounds of interviews. I am doing the same in reverse. There are periods of silence. There are forms to fill in. People who do not turn up for calls. Sometimes repeatedly. I am still of the view that a job is a bigger deal for the candidate than the company. Someone will fill the role and the company will carry on doing its thing. As Tim Minchin says in a love song to his wife, “If I didn’t have you… I really think I would have somebody else.” For the candidate, it feels like more of a big deal. How you are going to spend a big chunk of your time. Where? With who? Tim’s point probably still holds true if you do not connect too deeply to any single opportunity. Push on with a little yogic detachment. It matters, but it does not define you.

If I didn't have you

Job Rotation

My first job change was internal. This meant different dynamics to normal job hunts of deciding if someone is “good enough”. There was a rotation committee, and an understanding that people are on learning curves. You are balancing an individual’s career path with the needs of the company. There is still the challenge of limited roles and seats being open or not. You cannot simply pick a job you want and develop the skills required. Timing is a thing. A seat came open for the Marketing Actuary role in Joburg. I had not finished learning what there was to learn in Product Development. My old boss and new boss had overlapping interests though. Marketing Actuaries work with Product Development to listen to what is needed, and iterate towards solutions. There are always trade-offs as people come and go. It helps when there is the common ground of a bigger container.

Into the Jungle

I spent two years between school and university on a work-travel visa in the UK. I did not know what work I wanted to do, and my older brothers were both at university studying medicine. They talked me out of following their path. I waited tables till I had the money for a plane ticket, then got a job as an assistant teacher at a prep school. That gave me time to plot. I initially considered teaching and architecture, but the teachers I knew complained about how little they got paid, and the architects said they did not do creative work. What drove my final choice was an acceptance that STEM skills get paid more. My maths teacher had mentioned Actuaries, but most people (including some who choose to study Actuarial Science) do not even know what they are. The kicker was there were bursaries available. Not a sexy career choice, but on the menu. The hardest part is finding out what reliably needs doing, then putting in the effort of building those skills. Look at job adverts. Look at career paths on LinkedIn. Speak to people one step ahead of you on a path open to you. Then, good luck. It is a jungle out there and we do not all have the same tools and choices.

Winking in the Dark

There is not enough work. Much of the work there is does not pay enough to have some left over to build capital. It is not simply a case of willingness to work. You must find a job that matches your skills and knowledge. Then it depends how many other people could do the job, and whether the employer/client specifically wants you. Ideally this would all be neatly mapped out like GPS. Insert destination, and a road map is provided. The challenge is we all need to eat. In a pure play meritocracy with 7.8 Billion people, there is for all but the Djokofednadals, always someone better. We operate behind smoke and mirrors to protect our containers. A friend told me about a reality show called “dating on the spectrum”, and how young adults with autism deal with the unpredictability of dating. A world where you hope someone stops “looking for someone better”. In some ways their yesses are yesses and noes are noes, and they deal with it. Imagine a world with full transparency where we were comfortable being open with our asks and offers. It would be pretty uncomfortable, but we would do less winking in the dark.

Winking in the Dark

Surviving the Storm

The Agency Problem is the conflict of interest that exists when one party is expected to act on behalf of someone else. In investing, you can try aligning interests, but the reality is you cannot put everyone in the same boat. Even if it is the same storm. If someone is rewarded for performance (deservedly or luckily), there is a butterfly effect. Money is in part made through merit, but also made through capital and containers. As you build capital, you have capacity to have a longer time horizon. You no longer live hand-to-mouth. You can say “No” more often. As you build capital, you can create barriers to entry to protect your “merit”. The key competitive advantage in investing is not the skill of investing. It is the club that has been built. The container used to gather investments of others. The vehicle that gives certain people the privilege to invest other people’s capital. Even when they are not performing. The club buys time for the storm to pass… for the agent.

Survive the Storm