Blunt Tool

Money-making is not driven by fixed and knowable value and worth. Value and worth are deeply personal. We use money to communicate our conspicuous needs bluntly through supply and demand of resources. 

The price will be highest where the demand for those resources is not being met. Price (for solving) and cost (to solve) are signals attracting and repelling focus of those who are looking to identify quantifiable, measurable, rankable, prioritizable, manageable, solveable (monetizable) problems. 

Separate your identity (who you are at the core), and how you measure value, from the market. Create space. Use the market as a tool to internalize value it knows nothing about. Transform what you create into what you value. Use the strengths of the market to power where it is weak. To take the energy that can fire your endurance, and build your resilience, in the way you work with the market. Do not take it too seriously. You are the one creating meaning in the way you want to create meaning. 

See beyond the superficial. What we do matters. Actions have consequences. Fundamental investing is about looking beyond the smoke and mirrors to get a sense of what is really being done. What problems are being solved? Is the problem being solved scarce and worth focusing on in the monetary world? A deep acceptance of the problems others are communicating, so that you can free your attention for the things that are more qualitative and important to you.

Use and develop the tools available

Knowing the Game

Knowing what communication game is being played, and how to play it, is fundamental. Like when someone comes home from work and they need to dump. They just need to moan. To whine. To vomit out the bad day. They don’t necessarily need someone to fix the problem. They don’t need to be fed back what has come out. That’s gross. 

Part of communication is often simple observation and attention. We do not always need feedback. Sometimes you need periods where you are just getting stuff done. Feedback-free action. Where you are a little kinder to yourself and just relax into whatever your automatic process is. Trusting yourself. 

In Yoga, you relax into the posture. Sometimes you are stretching hard, but at other times you stop trying and focus completely on deep breathing. Letting your body be where it needs to be without beating yourself up. Do not only have one tool in your toolbox. Planning is both creating a plan, and detaching from that plan. The only thing you can be certain of is that it will not play out in the way you thought. 

Planning is like financial modeling. You can have disdain for the projections and trying to measure everything, because it is so obviously going to be wrong, but sometimes it is still worth doing. Simply as a tool for thinking through problems. We think in stories, and simple things that are wrong still let us nudge towards an understanding of advantages and disadvantages. We can only think in simplifications of reality. Then adjust how we lean into the chaos with different games and tools.

Right Tool

Sometimes in conversation, we get confused about what we are actually doing. There is not clear agreement on “the game we are playing”. Is it advice? Is it listening? Are we just waiting for our turn to speak? The advantage of knowing what game you are playing, is that you don’t get into a situation where the games conflict and neither person gets what they are after. 

One game I call “8 Mile”, after the movie about Eminem. In it you trash talk yourself for 5 minutes, then you specifically ask people to be nasty/aggressive for 5 minutes. In a controlled setting, you go to the places you least like going. I am normally not a fan of devil’s advocate approaches, or the academic style of critique. 

I prefer a Theatre Sport approach, where you build on what the other actors do. If someone pokes you with a banana, pretending it is a sword.... go with it. Pretend too, and act like you have been stabbed. Don’t go, “but that is a banana”. 

Theatre lets us get to truths behind the truth. If people know that that is the point. A lot of the time we are playing competing games without clarity of what the point is. Of where the game is leading us. Of whether we even want to be part of the game. Different tools have different uses in different situations. Not every problem is a banana.

Wrong Tool

Adapt

Investment Analysts build models of businesses to help understand complexity. The point of the model is not to be correct or not. You know in advance that you cannot have an accurate map of the future.

Nature does not subscribe to the simple cause and effect story that we use to try control the world. The point of any of the models in our toolbox is simply to help us make sense of things in a human way. To add a story. To add meaning. Like other tools we have made up – countries, words, money, political parties, ideologies, agreements. They sit on top of reality to process our controlled hallucination.

Personal Financial Plans are similar. They are not fixed in stone. They are not correct or wrong. They are an ongoing conversation. The only thing you can truly plan for is things not going according to plan. A good plan starts with a picture of where you are. Then builds towards capacity to adapt, adjust, and accommodate. As you change. As you live. As you add meaning.

adapt for specific uses