Hard, Boring, Long

The world is complex, random, and ambiguous. I like it where there is a process I can repeat with things I know that work, and will stay the same. I am not afraid of hard. What gets me down is wasted time. Fake work and indecision. 

When I have faith that I can just chip away at something, the disempowering anxiety that comes with “not knowing what to do” calms down. 

One of my passions is language learning. I can still only really speak English, but I am following the process of Fluent Forever (Gabriel Wyner) to train my ear and mouth muscles on lots of different languages. Not an easy task. What I like is that in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, it is unlikely that there aren’t going to be people who speak those languages. The effort will have been worth it. 

There are certain difficult things you can put the effort in on, where the unknowns are limited. One of the best competitive advantages is choosing things that are hard (in very simple effort terms), boring, or take a lot of time. Language learning is a great example. Breaking out of our mother tongue is incredibly challenging... yet lots of people do it. 

There are advantages that even if you do in the open, and tell people how to do what you are doing, it will take time and application for others to catch up. “People tend to overestimate what they can achieve in a year, and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade”. 

Long-term plans you have to chip away at can be significantly more sustainable than quick wins that burn bright and fade out.

Adding Time

Then you Build

Wealth building is not wealth extraction. It is not a negative competition. Yes, you are engaged with people in a way where you push each other, and challenge each other, but there is no need for schadenfreude and benefitting only if others do badly. 

We can gradually let go of that and have the genuine intention to solve rather than perpetuate problems while drawing rent from them. There is the temptation to have easy containers where the only competitive advantages are fake. 

Real mastery and resilience can cope with, and thrive under, openness and transparency. A really good business idea can be judged through the filter of how it would work in a world with full transparency, zero transaction costs, and perfect replicability. 

If someone knows what you are doing, they could do it too. Real competitive advantage comes from embodied knowledge. You can tell someone what you do and how you do it... and they still won’t be able to, or won’t want to, because it isn’t what makes them tick. You have a relationship with them, and that is something they will keep coming back for. 

The way you see the world can change, and adjust. We can go deep into different areas. Make different choices. 

My goal has always been to develop a resilient world view. One where there is nothing that everything relies on. Where changing one thing doesn’t bring everything else down. Where you hold each part lovingly, but you are not so attached to it that it defines the whole reality. 

Then you build. Choose. Go.

Building doesn't have to leave a hole

Kool-Aid Man

I like being a believer, so I have always been susceptible to “Drinking the Kool-Aid”. I try balance that with healthy scepticism and good old fashioned South African distrust for authority. After giving a convincing answer in a client meeting once, I was shot down with, “That makes sense, but you have a silver tongue”. How do you respond to that? I also almost didn’t get a job once because a reference (attempting to be on my side) said I was very convincing. They didn’t want to hire a hard salesman. Everyone has to eat, so when an offer sounds too good… it is worth adding some doubt. The balance to hard sales is expectation management. Being completely transparent with the downsides and what can go wrong. Transparency requires the admission that we are all making it up as we go along. Making mistakes and making a living. Chipping away at problems and trying to get paid. Building cushions so we are okay even when we are not okay. Building containers so the people we care about are looked after even if they are not the best. Committing and believing.

Decision Makers

Ideally, we would have a very transparent relationship with asking and offering. Money is made by solving problems for decision makers with money. The challenge is making sure everyone is a decision maker. That is a foundation stone for the idea of Universal Basic Income. Information gets lost in central decision making. The more layers there are between where the knowledge lies, and where the power lies, the poorer the decision will be. Central decision makers also rely on concealing information. The true nature of problems. The resources allocated to those problems. This makes it harder for people to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to find solutions. It is hard to ask. It is hard to offer. It is hard to know with clarity what you need to do to help, even if you want to. Part of this is due to trust and communication skills. Being prepared to clumsily iterate through the questions and answers needed to nail what needs doing. Trusting that being open will not bring down the barriers to entry that maintain the illusion of your superiority. Trusting that other people will make different decisions, while respecting yours.

Nailing the Problem

Talking to Each Other

Money is a smarter form of barter. It is a communication tool that allows us to match asks with offers, without needing to swap needs. Money is not a physical thing that does work. It is a placeholder. A story that sits on top of reality to help us make sense of things. To smooth. To spark. To support. It is up to us to look through the story to see what is fundamentally happening. To make things that matter happen. Money should be durable. If you sell something for money, it must still be usable when you find the thing you want. It should be portable. Easier than carrying a belligerent goat to market. It should be uniform and stable in value, so that we trust it. Money itself is not an investment. It is a place holder or a buffer for doing things of value. A blunt tool to count things that cannot be counted, by finding two people who think the number makes sense. The fuzzy value is less than the ask, and more than the offer. If we had smart money, it would be able to understand people and their asks and offers. Like smart cars being able to talk to each other to avoid traffic jams and keep people moving efficiently without dying because they are distracted. Smart money would keep us all moving with strength, flexibility, and control.

Money is a Co-ordination Tool

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.

Polis Smous

I started my career in Finance in South Africa and the United Kingdom during two watershed moments. Just after the bursting of the Internet Bubble, and during the cracking of the walls around endowment policies and remuneration of Insurance Sales. Endowment Policies pay a lump sum after a specific term or on death. They combine investment and risk cover. The sales people often were not professional financial advisors giving appropriate advice. They were remunerated up front, in commission. If the client stopped paying their premiums, or another “Polis Smous” (Policy Hawker) convinced them to churn/swap, there were big, indefensible, clawback penalties. The scandal made the environment ripe pickings for “Pure” investment or risk products, and saw a massive professionalisation of the advice industry. Allow time to pass, and even the pure grow and get legacy skeletons in their closet. The constant trade off between starting from scratch, and keeping the good bits of the old way of doing things. As the environment changes, we need to change. The question is whether we are brave enough to be transparent and honest.

Descaling our Lives

Money is a communication tool. Like words and numbers, it helps us organise ourselves and share our skills, knowledge, and resources. Slightly smarter than barter, but still mostly unaware. We don’t trust each other enough for full transparency. We all need to eat, so even if we know there is a better solution somewhere else, we still want to sell our skills. Secrecy and politics protect our interests. Competing interests. Money-making boils down to matching an ask to an offer. How many people want the same thing? How many people can offer it? A key ingredient is scale. If you can find something lots of people want, where only you have the solution. That is clearly difficult in a world where information flows freely, secrecy is harder, and the winner takes it all. The best competitive advantages don’t have to hide. They are “in the box thinking” which, like exercise and diet, everyone knows about but doesn’t necessarily do. A real competitive advantage is not having to scale. Breaking free from supply, demand, and secrecy. Changing the rules. That requires building Capital to do the money stuff, so we can do something else. Descaling our lives and leaning into the other communication tools.

Informed Consent

Nothing kills an activist like work deadlines, a mortgage, and school fees. Markets work best when there is full transparency, understanding, and the intent to build a relationship. Most importantly, markets work best when there is informed consent and no regret. When sellers are not manipulative, and buyers are fully aware of the trade-offs they are making. The number one rule of wealth creation is “Never be a forced buyer or seller”. The word No is the foundation of freedom, even if we are defined by what we say Yes to. As our responsibilities grow, our fixed expenses ratchet up (because of a world where success is defined by more). Each Yes and No becomes embodied rather than a conscious choice. Ironically, it becomes harder to get a gap between income and expenses with each increase (if you expand to fill the space). We can often learn significantly more about controlling our expenses by looking at those with less than us. Those who peddle Abundance may miss the wealth creation skills of those who defeat Scarcity every day.

Be careful your expenses don't ratchet up