Financing Value

An essential part of the practice of being good with money is being good with your emotions. 

Making money involves being good with other people, through social, emotional, and cultural intelligence. Despite this, these forms of soft skills are often not the things that explicitly and conspicuously make money. 

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) skills are typically easier to monetise because of the direct application to things you count and contain. Acknowledging that good ideas aren’t always good business ideas, isn’t an invitation to ignore social, emotional, and cultural skills. Quite the opposite, it is an invitation to invest in them heavily. 

A yogi is not someone who is completely unruffled. A yogi participates in and is part of the world. Detachment is not exclusion. Unlike in the past where the incredibly wealthy would flaunt gold and palaces, well managed wealth can connect and empower. 

A wealthy person can live a grounded life, with a background engine reinvested in problem solving. Putting capital to work, and labouring on things that are good ideas but hard to monetise. Unpaid work is often priceless, with value that needs to be funded by the priced. 

Detachment becomes that how you make money is how you finance value creation, not how you demonstrate your worth.

Growing in Muddy Waters

On the Menu

I am chatting to a few companies in my job hunt. Like dating, if you do that while employed, it feels dirty. The company I work for has one employee. Me. And currently no clients, other than people reading my free writing. My 2,800 blog posts over 6 years earned me $23.59 (and you need to reach $60 to get paid). So, it is okay. The context shift of coming back to South Africa after 12 years, means it provides an opportunity to get to understand what is going on here on the ground. My head and heart never left, because of Social Media and working for/with companies with South African links while away. My feet did, and it does feel different. Like buying cupboard items when shopping, rather than hand-to-mouth eating. The gaping hole in my “build capital” mantra is that I am not an entrepreneur. I did not make jobs. I took on-the-menu jobs, and reinvested the gap between my pay and my needs. I studied a degree knowing the salary and demand for the jobs that required that. Old Mutual paid for my studies. The most prominent emotion I have is gratitude. You cannot build capital without a job, and South Africa does not have enough jobs. But I am confident it will have one for me. Not all good ideas are good business ideas. Not all people willing to work can find work.

Savoy Hotel Menu

Cairo 1900

Beyond Good Ideas

I am not a successful entrepreneur. I have a small business, but that is not what pays my bills, and I am the sole employee. At the moment I have no clients, and I have only had a few small projects. Most of my work is unpaid musing and study. I started the business to do Engine repairs, and to use my monetizable skills in a stomachable way. I live off my Engine which I built using money I was paid for professional work. I had a few public shares in the first company I worked at, that were given to us as part of a Broad-Based Share Scheme. I had no shares in the other two, which are privately held. My Engine is invested in two Equity Funds (from the firms I worked at) and a portfolio (that I selected) of large publicly held global businesses. My thoughts on business are therefore academic. Small business is hard. The odds are steep. With plenty of musing, I see few easy paths. It’s not just about good ideas. It is also about building Capital, overcoming barriers to entry, managing risk, and navigating complexity.

Melilla Border Fence