Dying Achilles

Our friends, family, colleagues, clients, and service providers are on different paths that have connected with ours at some stage. 

They may run in parallel for a while. They may veer off significantly. You are only related to yourself from yesterday. Each day, you open your eyes anew. Your relationship with yourself and others evolves. 

You can’t recreate the time when you spent the most time with a friend. It passes. You can choose how to allocate your time now. Accepting that almost everything is temporary. 

In Troy, Achilles says the secret is that the gods envy us... because we are mortal. Because the temporary moments are beautiful and fragile. We have to truly want things to last, and do the work to protect them. To make the tradeoffs. To understand the choices. 

Troubles and challenges come and go. They can be open to a different meaning when, and if, you are able to deal with them. When you feel equipped to deal with them. 

I grew up in a gender apartheid environment where guys are trained to behave in a certain way. One reason men can be less vulnerable is that there is a real feeling of disrespect. Vulnerability can be viewed as a call for help. 

Part of the way I was deep soaked, is in self-reliance. You are “the lender of last resort”. There is no one else to turn to. You should be able to deal with your slice of challenges and give more to the world than it gives to you. It can feel like adapting and adjusting is admitting that you don’t have control. 

The truth is no one does. Our varying paths are attempts at truth seeking and truth creation. Path dependent, and intertwined. With our past, with our future, and with each other.

This too will pass

Within the Chaos

Stilling waves of anxiety starts with separating the temporary and the permanent. What do you want to keep? Holy and worth protecting. What is open to change? Holey and worth allowing to pass. What are the problems you genuinely want to solve? 

There will always be problems. As Nightbirde pointed out, you can’t wait to be happy. Calm exists within, rather than after, the chaos. 

When we are filtering good ideas and good business ideas, business ideas might get elevated because they are easy to contain. The ideas that you can’t contain may be the most valuable. This is not a problem. 

Good business ideas are problems we can solve that we want to go away. Not problems that we want to perpetuate to deliver a rent. You don’t want a good business idea to become part of your identity, because then you will become part of the reason that it doesn’t get solved... making you irreplaceable. 

When something is a good idea, but not a good business idea, it is often something you want to keep. To build on. These are the activities, ideas, and relationships you sustain by building engines of capital. Ideas that are worth spending money on, but don’t generate money. They tend to focus more on abundance, permanence, sharing, and connection. 

For problems that are temporary, we need a process to develop the skills and knowledge to be able to meet challenges and move on. That requires constant learning, reinvestment, and reinvention.

"Chaos amongst the Calm" Nathan Jones

Reply All

I have been lucky to work with awesome people. My colleagues are the part I miss most about a Corporate life, and the thing I am looking most forward to in the trade-offs of a return. You spend a lot of time with the people you work with. Those teams change. As time grows since my first job, it is interesting mentally going through the list of who I have worked with, and where they are now. The old adage of repairing a boat panel by panel, till you ask if it is the same boat. I once got a job as a waiter at a restaurant I loved eating at. Turned out management was awful to staff, and then switched on their smiles. The same can be true in “Reply All” slip ups, and emails forwarded without looking at the full trail. False smiles will out, and containers will change. I love being part of a team, but have gradually realised my real loyalty lies with the people I have connected with. Not the dynamic containers we were using at the time. Clients become colleagues. Colleagues become competitors. Competitors become colleagues. We are all connected, across time and through actions. Money is made in containers with barriers to entry and exit. We are not made in one container. There is always a bigger container that matters more, and will last longer.

You need boxes to move.

But boxes are not the point.

Firm Grip

 “tat param purusakhyater guna vaitrsnyam” Yoga Sutras

“The highest awareness of non-attachment stems from awareness of purusha (the Self)”

You are not your job. There are three elements to making money. A problem to solve, Capital to finance its solving, and a Container to solve it in. You are not the problem, the capital, or the container. They are all tools. “What are you going to be when you grow up?” is completely the wrong question. Money making, and waves of money anxiety, are not about who you are. It’s not about you. The problem with performance reviews, job titles, promotions, bonuses, hierarchy, measures of success, apportionment of respect, and illusions of meritocracy is we associate temporary problems and conspicuous signals with identity. We weigh and measure each other. This leads to impostor syndrome and voices in our heads constantly telling us we are not good enough. A firm grip on a more permanent sense of self lets you hold space between waves of money anxiety and your sense of what really matters.

Deutsche Fotothek