Gentle Unpacking

How do you tolerate intolerance? One of the idea-tools I find useful from Yogic philosophy is Ishwara. It roughly translates as “God understood as a person” in contrast to an impersonal, impossible to reduce to words, transcendent “explanation”. Your Ishwara then becomes the closest you can possibly come to an explanation. Your Ishwara and mine can co-exist because they are imperfect and thus compatible. 

Unless of course you insist that mine can’t exist, and your way is the correct way, and I am not willing to accept the binary you are imposing. If me not saying you are wrong or I am wrong, is seen by you as saying you are wrong! I am not allowed to have a “believe what you want as long as it doesn’t impose on me” view. 

There are some impositions we can’t avoid. Some joint decisions we must make. Sometimes you have to come up with pragmatic hacks. “I am going to be as tolerant as possible, but I am going to have boundaries”. 

I like the idea of unconditional love, for example. But what can happen if you gift someone that love, is they come at you hard to test those boundaries. Holding space for someone still needs to include the paradoxic condition of them being loved but no longer involved. 

That is hard when you have a story you tell about yourself. Reality seldom permits completely consistent stories. Real life is a messy combination of learning and unlearning. Everything that happens challenges our story. We have to hold and release to create. We look for answers, while needing to make peace with constantly improving our questions. 

Gently unpacking issues that may never reach resolution.

Accepting Randomness

Accepting randomness can provide comfort. It is when something is malicious that it really works me up. When the intention was to specifically make my life worse. That is very seldom the case. 

I like the idea of where people carry a coin to help them make difficult decisions, that are in truth 50/50. No matter how much analysis you do, it is simply a fork in the road, and you pick or get stuck. Once you know most of the advantages and disadvantages, you can’t craft an option that doesn’t have drawbacks. Keep moving. Pulse. 

Admitting the role of randomness is not a weakness. It is a way of accepting that it is not possible to control everything, and as Nightbirde says, “It’s okay”. Create meaning in the movement. 

Read “Fooled by Randomness” and learn about Black Swans. Events that change the story as we know it. 

We like patterns. They are the heart of the stories we tell ourselves. We create narrative arcs to protect us from storms, and make sense. 

Tyler Vignen’s “Spurious Correlations” where we see the number of shark attacks and Nicholas Cage movies have a similar chart... and so Nicholas Cage must cause shark attacks? 

If you do spin a coin, and record the genuinely random results... most people will see a pattern and say it isn’t random. Real randomness has long periods where life just throws heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads. That can’t be random! It is. It is random. 

The world is not against you. And it’s alright.

Hiding your Needle

I used to enjoy having a well-stocked bookshelf of what I had read, as well as what I wanted to read. When I had friends over, I could give them a book. I would have a few copies of the ones I really liked. 

The bookshelf, photo collection, CDs, and DVDs were a visual story of what I was curious about. A conversation starter. 

When I streamlined, I gave most of those away. I also gave a way a lot of paintings. I had an art studio in Wimbledon for four years, and it was time to find homes for the paintings that hadn’t yet been adopted. I usually gave paintings to friends for special occasions. I love seeing my work on people’s walls. 

I still had some stuff to store that was sentimental. A good friend’s father had a business making children’s playground surfaces. That included having a warehouse for storing the materials. It is dangerous paying “rent” for stuff, but I was lucky. He let me have a corner to put things like my easel, and I guitar I had bought with the intention of learning. 

A former colleague looked after an electric keyboard I had the intention of learning. He had the intention too. 

Like Arya wrapping and burying her sword. A girl may have no name, and we may not want to identify with things, but turns out to be hard to let go completely. Going through the exercise of trying to let go is revealing.

Life is Complicated

Life is way more complicated than any story we choose for sense-making. Stories have narrative arcs that resonate. They set the scene, then something happens, then tension builds, then there is a climax, then there is a result, and consequences, and a conclusion. There are heroes, or moments of redemption, or great insights. Within the constraints of pages, picture frames, or flames of the campfire. 

Half the art of presenting is simplifying the point you are trying to convey into three clear things. So when someone is retelling the story later, they know what they were. They know what the presentation was about. They were surprised by something that was clearly articulated and emotionally engaging, and they could remember it because it found a hook into their world. 

In real life, the narrative is hard to see unless we construct it with hindsight. Our stories layer understanding after the action. Planning becomes a tool to reflect. It is a meditation that can help give you focus. Planning allows you to step out of reality, look at reality, and then adjust the story as reality evolves. Building the capacity for change is a fundamental part of good planning. 

Planning is not about knowing the future. It is not about a specific path. It is very dependent on your decisions and ambitions.

Framing your Decisions

I believe we all experience the world as a controlled hallucination. We take in information based on what we already know. Gradually building trust based on an elaborate story we build up to explain the responses we experience to the decisions we make. You can’t live without a story. Your story acts as the framework for what you want to do, and how you want to make decisions. You need to internalise and embody the disciplines you want to use to frame your decisions. The way a lot of people discipline themselves with money decisions is running out of money. When there is no money there, you can’t spend it. Which means most of us live hand-to-mouth. You cannot build space for autonomy and consent within your decision making that way. You will get stuck in a monthly cycle, or a weekly cycle, or whenever the money comes in. You get income dependence, where you get a job, and get paid, and that determines your standard of living. And there is no space. No extra. If you want something, you save specifically for it, buy it, and go back to zero. Never actually freeing yourself from the constraint of having nothing in the bank. That becomes your framework. 

"The Frame" Frida Kahlo

 

Glitch

Even if we could make purely rational decisions, what would that even mean? Not everything can be counted and quantified. This is the challenge. With pure rationality, there are rules of logic. Rules like prioritising and comparing. Creating relative preference. If I prefer apples to oranges, and I prefer oranges to pears, then I can infer that I prefer apples to pears. If you remember your preferences and they are consistent. Our memory is glitchy. Which is useful. It is useful to be able to forget things. To change the story. It is one of the ways we cope. If something is not working for us, we get to rewrite the story. If we could never forget and things were purely factual, that would be a debilitating glitch. So somehow we need to establish how well we want to understand ourselves. Do you want to do the work? It is hard to be honest. It is emotionally challenging. You need to build up the necessary skills to self-reflect. It is not simply allowing harsh internal voices. You need to feel that you are on your own team, in the same way as when we work with other people.

Glitches can be useful

Part of your Story

You have to choose a path. We are exposed to a number of lotteries that determine our starting point. That is something we have no choice but to accept. It is a strength. It doesn't feel like it because it feels like there should be a level of fairness. We should all have the same options. I like the idea of alternate histories. We keep having to make choices. That is part of autonomy. The reality is that every choice you make, opens a new set of options, and closes down a different set of options. 

Whenever things go badly, one of the philosophies I have tried to develop to do something awesome that would not have been possible if that thing had not gone wrong. To change the story around that event. The idea of “Fortunate Misfortune”  (See 10 Moral Paradoxes by Saul Smilansky). It is not that you start looking on the horrible moment with affection, but you stop wishing it away. It becomes a part of a positive arch in your story.  

New World. Old Vines.

 “If South Africa wins, we all win”. Ian Naude was responding to a question about whether he supports young, up-and-coming, winemakers or sees them as competition. Wealth is made in containers around supply and demand, and the temptation is to forget that we exist in bigger containers. Wine containers. South African containers. Global containers. In “The Art of Learning”, Josh Waitzkin talks of a martial arts teacher of his who was very open with what he knew. His belief was that if other people were obsessing over what he was doing, that was to his advantage anyway. The great insight of Adam Smith was that win-win beats the gunboat approach of mercantilism every time. All containers provide is shape and form to our problem solving. They make for clear asks and clear offers. They are a communication tool, but they don’t have to define or separate us, or our learning. Secrecy is lose-lose. Grow the bigger container and we all win.

craft wines that tell a story

Which Path?

We don’t choose our mother tongue or the country we are born in. Similarly, our relationship with money is path dependent. Money is not a thing. It is a communication tool. A catalyst for things that matter. That is why the conversation about wealth creation, or any creation (even things that don’t make money often need money), starts with understanding someone's relationship with money. A good financial adviser’s key job is understanding you and how you think. You can only take control over your next step on the path if you know where the starting point is. Know where you are. Know what you pay attention to. Know the container you are in. The barriers to entry to what you want to do. The barriers to exit from what you are doing. Your capacity for things not going exactly as you expect. Money is like words and numbers. It can either help you tell your story, or control your story. 

Did you choose your path?

Holding the Knife

Price is not value. Salary is not worth. The best way to see this is to speak to someone who has moved from a big company to a small company. Especially if that small company is a start-up. The layer of story-telling that gets added onto a business to do salary negotiations is simply that. A story. The magic of markets are they let us quantify things that cannot be quantified. If you have someone who wants something (because they think it is worth more than the price) and someone who has that thing to offer (because they can supply it at sufficiently less than the price). Price is just an agreement. In most businesses price determines the size of the pie. Then story gets added and sliced by the person with the knife. If the company has a stable cash flow that allows the illusion of sticky wages (annual increases in only one direction), then people can live in the false security of salaries that reward seniority and perceived merit. Key performance indicators are a tool for those who hold the knife. They are not a market price.