It's Not About You

I’ve always been a “try hard.” At school that meant signing up for everything: sport, debating, drama, chasing every chance to prove myself or die trying (for example losing 111-0 to Martizburg College - Thanks Murray). The world rewards that. Activity is visible. Effort is measurable. Roles are sorted by who tries the hardest and delivers fastest. But the danger of living like that is you start to believe the story: that everything depends on you, that outcomes are always cause and effect, that meritocracy is fair and final. It is flattering, and it is exhausting. Over time I learned that life does not bend to our trying. It bends to context, to randomness, to relationships. The real practice is to see things as they are, and then nudge.

That wiring carried me into university and then into my early career. I raced through my studies, eager to qualify as fast as possible, and landed in an industry built for competitors. Benchmarks, performance tables, stock-picking contests; finance is structured like an endless exam. Every meeting, every appraisal, was another chance to prove whether you were winning. I told myself I could “leave my ego at the door,” but the system was designed to poke it. I would walk in calm, and by the time someone pressed the right button, I would walk out rattled.

Meritocracy is seductive like that. If you are doing well, you must be smart. If you are doing badly, you must be stupid. That story is empowering because you believe your actions matter. But it also creates a gnawing anxiety. Every setback feels like a personal failure, and every success is only temporary. When you look around and see others doing better, it whispers that you are falling behind.

That is when I started to notice the trap of being seduced by success. When you are good at something, the world nudges you to double down. You narrow yourself into the lanes that reward you most quickly. Soon you become defined by that success. But you also start neglecting the parts of yourself that are not as visible or easy to measure. The scoreboard becomes your compass, and you can lose sight of what you actually value.

The irony is that when you make it all about you, your performance, your reputation, your edge, you end up hollow. Success becomes a treadmill, and you never arrive. For me, that realisation came in the frustration of constantly defending underperformance, trying to act like a stock-picking god, or sitting through appraisals that felt more like battles of ego than constructive conversations. It was draining, and I began to ask whether this was really what life was about.

Stepping back, I began to think differently. At the time, the median income in the UK was about £2,000 a month. Globally, $11,000 a year placed you at the 50th percentile. That perspective mattered. If I could live below the median, if I could focus on what I later came to call democratic goods, the shared infrastructure of society, I did not need to constantly prove myself by chasing the next rung of status. I could choose to consume less, compete less, and buy myself freedom.

Of course, that freedom came with its own anxieties. Not everyone has the option to step away. For many, life is hand to mouth, and talk of “leaving ego behind” can sound tone deaf. But for me, it was a philosophical decision: to stop letting money be a mirror of my self-worth. Financial Yoga, as I have come to describe it, is the practice of staying motivated while detaching from the negative aspects of identifying with wealth. It is about designing a life where capital has a job, but you are not that job.

Eastern philosophy helped me make sense of this. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, is a story about war. It sounds strange for a yogic text to focus on battle, but its teaching is about dharma, or duty. Life is not about your ego, but it is about showing up for your responsibilities. You engage in the fight because your family, your dependents, your community need you. Yet you detach your identity from the outcome. You do your duty, but you do not let the result define who you are.

That is a powerful shift for financial decision-making. If you make it all about your ego, you will chase returns, overtrade, and panic when things go wrong. If you detach completely, you risk apathy. But if you anchor yourself in dharma, you find balance. You accept that randomness plays a role, that outcomes are not perfectly fair, and you focus instead on process. Saving consistently, building trust, playing the long game. It is and it is not about you.

The difference between one-off contests and repeated games is crucial here. In a one-off contest, like a school exam or a quarterly appraisal, everything is about proving yourself in the moment. In a repeated game, like a long-term advisor-client relationship, trust compounds over time. You do not need to “win” every round. You need to keep showing up, keep the conversation alive, and keep learning together. Over the long run, consistency beats theatre.

This is where “the juice” comes in, the joy of practice itself. Early on, progress is slow. Learning a skill takes at least 100 hours before you are even competent. You may feel clumsy, exposed, even embarrassed. But stick with it, and you start to embody the skill. Just as a musician no longer thinks about each note, or an athlete no longer thinks about each stride, your financial habits can become second nature. You move from “numbers to leave numbers, form to leave form.” You build a rhythm that frees you from overthinking.

The best part? You do not need to keep your craft secret. World-class performers like Josh Waitzkin talk about practicing in public, letting others see your process. The competitive advantage is not in hiding; it is in embodying. Advisors can take the same approach. Instead of trying to be the smartest person in the room, show your work. Share your process openly with clients. Build trust through transparency. Over time, that trust becomes your edge.

So what does this mean in practice? It means channeling competitiveness into system design rather than self-performance. Set spending floors and saving rails. Agree on rebalancing rules. Document beneficiary intentions and next-generation plans. These are things you can own and improve without making them part of your identity. They are repeatable, transparent, and trustworthy.

And it means remembering, always, that financial advice is about relationships. It is about listening to the client’s story, not just projecting your own. It is about creating safe spaces where people can explore anxieties without judgment. It is about helping them build habits that compound over time. None of that requires you to be the hero. In fact, the less it is about you, the more it is about them, and the stronger the results.

In the end, “It’s not about you” is not a criticism. It is an invitation. When you let go of the need to prove yourself, you gain freedom. When you stop making money your mirror, you stop chasing illusions. When you focus on dharma, on responsibilities, relationships, and trust, you find peace.

The paradox is that what you do still matters deeply. Your actions, your habits, your conversations compound into real outcomes for you and for others. But they matter most when they are not about ego. They matter when they are about stewardship, connection, and long-term growth.

So here is my challenge: make one financial decision this week that is not about you. Ask a client what “enough” feels like this year. Set one simple constraint, like a savings rail or a review cadence. Do something small, transparent, and repeatable.

It is not about you. And that is exactly why it matters.

How Much is Enough?

"How much is enough?”

It’s one of the most common questions in finance. But underneath the spreadsheets and calculators, it’s a deeper human question: When can I stop? When do I have enough to live, to breathe, to be free?

I’ve wrestled with this question myself. I once tried to stop working altogether. I hit a number I thought was “enough,” and I checked out. It didn’t quite work. Coming back to work, I realised enough isn’t just about capital. It’s about meaning, conversation, comparison, ambition, patience, and practice. It’s a wrestle, and one that doesn’t end.

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Buffers vs. Enough

A buffer is not enough.

A buffer is what gets you off the treadmill of hand-to-mouth living. It’s the first breath. The early noise absorber. A one-month cushion, then three to six months of expenses tucked away. That’s not financial freedom, but it gives you space to look up, to stop panicking every time something goes wrong.

But “enough” goes beyond the buffer. Enough comes when capital itself starts carrying the load. My friend Richard Fleuriot talks about “chocolate transitions”: the moment when your money shifts from being a silent passenger to becoming part of the household. At first, you’re the only breadwinner. Then gradually, capital chips in. One times annual spending. Ten times. At some point, the money becomes the primary caregiver, and you can start asking different questions. Questions about meaning, not survival.

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Comparison: Tool and Trap

We can’t escape comparison. Our minds work through frameworks. Benchmarks, scoreboards, neighbours. They all give us orientation. Even investing is a team sport.

Comparison has value. It motivates, keeps us honest, and holds us accountable. That’s why we measure against benchmarks. But it’s also dangerous. We see only thin slices of other people’s stories. The car, the promotion, the holiday snaps. Rarely the anxiety, trade-offs, or debts that came with them. Even our own stories are incomplete, stitched together from selective memory.

So the task isn’t to kill comparison. It’s to use it lightly. Like price: a blunt signal, not a definition of value. Benchmarks are conversational tools, not existential truths.

I often think of the story of Alexander the Great and the yogi on a rock. Alexander represents drive, ambition, competitiveness. The yogi represents pause, detachment, perspective. Both are true. Both are necessary. Enough lives in the wrestle between them.

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Ambition vs. Contentment

Ambition pulls us forward. It’s the heartbeat of progress, the engine of meritocracy. Without it, nothing compounds. But ambition without awareness becomes a whip, not a compass.

That’s where Wu-Wei comes in. The Taoist idea of “action through inaction.” To Western ears, it sounds like giving up. But it’s not. It’s starting from where you are, acting out of reality rather than illusion. It’s detachment not from life, but from ego.

Enough sits right here, in the tension between striving and letting go. It isn’t contentment without ambition. It’s ambition with awareness. It’s recognising the drive matters, but so does the breath. Enough isn’t a number or a destination. It’s a conversation, an evolving relationship with yourself and your money.

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The Danger of Binary Thinking

One of the biggest mistakes is to see “enough” as binary: working vs. retired, striving vs. done. Life isn’t that neat.

A salary is more than a paycheck. It’s structure, rhythm, culture. It’s the scaffolding of life. Walking away from that can feel liberating, but it also starts the clock. Suddenly you’re counting sustainability. Will this last? What happens if something big comes along?

I’ve lived that anxiety. Fertility treatments, living abroad, unexpected costs, weddings. They don’t check whether your spreadsheet says “enough.” They just arrive. And you rarely want to say no.

On the other side, too much creates its own unease. Universal basic income debates often raise the “Malibu surfer problem”: will people just give up? I don’t think so. Work is more than money. It’s purpose, contribution, connection. Capital doesn’t remove the need to act; it just changes the filter.

The truth is, there is no upper bound. You’ll never dig your five holes and be told you’re done. There will always be another hole, another benchmark, another sense of falling short. That’s not failure. It’s being human.

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Practice, Not Perfection

All advice is autobiographical. I don’t have this sorted. I wrestle with it daily. And that’s the point. Enough is not a finish line. It’s a practice.

Tim Minchin talks about “micro-ambitions”. Small, achievable goals that add up. That’s how enough works. Milestones, not miracles. Patience, not shortcuts. Patience is undervalued. You won’t settle this in a year. You’ll wrestle with it for life. And that’s okay.

That’s why conversation matters. Even if you’re technically skilled, you need someone else in the room. Another set of eyes. Another perspective. Life is like theatre: the play is never the same twice, and every seat shows a different angle. We’re built in conversation, and money is no exception.

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Get Your Money a Job

If I have one mantra, it’s this: get your money a job.

The moment you separate yourself from your money, it stops controlling you and starts working for you. Your money becomes a colleague, a partner, a caregiver. That’s when the filter shifts. That’s when the questions you can ask yourself change. From survival to meaning.

Enough is not an answer. It’s a conversation. It’s practice. It’s a daily wrestle with ambition and contentment, comparison and detachment, scarcity and abundance.

And the fact that you’re asking the question at all is proof that you’re already on the path.

Magic Time

Most things worth doing are hard. Wealth creation is no exception. It often feels unfair, painfully slow, and full of noise. When you hear about people who seem to have made it quickly, it looks magical. But the truth is, what feels like magic is usually time, discipline, and persistence working quietly in the background.

The challenge is that most of us don’t notice when the magic is happening. Wealth whispers. Outliers shout. We see the flashy stories of quick wins, not the quiet stories of compounding. And when you’re just starting out, especially in South Africa where inequality is visceral, the distance between where you are and where you want to be can feel overwhelming.

The Myth of 15-5-50

I once gave the “50-15-5” idea a real crack. The theory is simple:

• Save 50% of your income

• Do it for 15 years

• Invest it to earn 5% above inflation

The promise? Financial freedom in less than two decades.

But each of those numbers hides brutal realities.

• 15 years is a very short runway. Most people work 30, 40, even 50 years and still struggle to retire comfortably. To do it in 15, you either need very high earnings or very low expenses. That’s not most people.

• 5% above inflation sounds modest, but it’s aggressive. Equity markets can deliver it, but not consistently. You’ll get flat years, sometimes negative years. Over the long haul, the averages hold up. Over 15 years, luck and timing matter more.

• 50% savings is perhaps the hardest of all. It’s possible if you’re single, with no dependents, but once you add a family, extended family, or community obligations, the maths gets tougher.

The point isn’t that 50-15-5 is impossible. It’s aspirational. It’s a reminder that compounding can create magic if you’re in the game long enough. But it’s not the only path, and trying to sprint can burn you out.

Context Matters

In South Africa, this conversation is layered with complexity. Ours is the most unequal country in the world by Gini coefficient. Unemployment rates are comparable to the Great Depression, but structural. A small tax base supports a large population. Many households are living hand-to-mouth.

At the same time, we benchmark ourselves against wealthier countries. Through sport, social media, and global culture, we’re connected to lifestyles that feel impossibly distant. It’s like being pulled in two directions: face-to-face with poverty at home, while aspiring to compete on a global stage.

In that environment, dreaming about wealth can feel tone-deaf. You’re torn between wanting to lift others up and needing to secure your own future. But here’s the truth: if you never make space to build capital, you remain stuck. South Africa will only thrive if enough individuals build stability, buffers, and engines that free them to contribute more. As Rassie Erasmus once said: “Stop talking k* about South Africa. Make a plan.”

Noise, Neighbours, and False Control

One of the hardest parts of investing is separating what’s in your control from what isn’t.

People think investing is about picking the right stock. Timing the market. Outthinking the crowd. But that’s mostly noise. Returns are influenced by randomness, variance, and luck. Even bad decisions can look smart for a while. Neighbours who take reckless risks can seem like geniuses until the tide turns.

Here’s what you can control:

• How much you spend

• How much you save and invest

• The skills you build and the work you do

• Your exposure to risk (asset allocation, diversification)

• Staying in the game — not blowing yourself up with debt or speculation

And here’s what you can’t:

• Market returns in the short term

• When volatility arrives

• What your neighbours are bragging about

Salary feels safe because it’s smooth and predictable. Investing feels discouraging because it’s noisy and volatile. The trick is building a separate mental model. Money invested is not a salary. It grows unevenly, sometimes invisibly, but it grows.

Stillness helps. If you treat setbacks as random, not personal, you avoid the trap of thinking the world is judging you. Bad things happen. Good things happen. Your job is to be resilient enough to handle the bad and ready enough to capture the good.

The Roadmap to Magic Time

So what does the path actually look like? It’s not one magic formula, but a series of milestones that are worth celebrating along the way.

Stage 1: Net Worth Day (Debt Freedom)
The first big milestone is when Assets – Liabilities = Positive. That’s huge. Getting out of bad debt is step one. Use debt counsellors if needed. Swap credit cards for debit cards. Stop spending money you don’t have.

Stage 2: The Shock Absorber (Buffer)
Save 3–6 months’ worth of expenses. This is your financial shock absorber. At the same time, if you have dependents, get risk cover — life, disability, income protection. It’s a grudge purchase, but it buys peace of mind.

Stage 3: Micro-Wins (Early Capital Building)
Celebrate when your invested capital equals one year of your salary. At that point, your money is starting to “get a job,” even if you’re still the bigger engine.

Stage 4: The Magic Number (Capital x25)
The long-term aspiration is capital worth 20–50x your annual spending. At a 4% withdrawal rate, that makes you financially independent. 2.5% is a more aspirational number, because then you aren't harassing your capital and it can still grow even though it is supporting you. Either way, that’s the freedom point.

Stage 5: The Compounding Kick
The hard work is in the scrum up front. Early progress feels painfully slow. But once your money earns as much as you do, the flywheel spins faster. That’s when the magic feels real, but by then, it’s no longer magic. It’s compounding.

Wealth Whispers

The danger is thinking this happens fast. It doesn’t. The loudest stories are often the outliers: the person who “retired” at 35, the neighbour who doubled their money overnight. But most of those stories don’t end well. When things fall apart, the shouting stops.

The stories worth emulating are quiet. The teacher who invested diligently. The janitor who left millions to charity. The client who worked with an advisor for decades and quietly compounded. These are the ones that don’t make headlines, but they’re real. Wealth whispers.

Actionable Steps

The punchline is simple: get your money a job.

For most people, that means getting help. A good financial planner isn’t just a salesperson. They’re more like a therapist: someone who listens, learns your context, and helps you navigate trade-offs. Your job, your income stability, your dependents, your goals — these all shape the plan.

Here’s where to start:

1. Get out of debt. Celebrate Net Worth Day.

2. Build a buffer. 3–6 months’ expenses.

3. Buy peace of mind. Risk cover: life, disability, income.

4. Find a planner. Someone who can listen and partner with you.

5. Start investing. Pension funds, employer schemes, and your own investments.

6. Adapt as you grow. Individual → family → community.

It’s not about doing everything perfectly. It’s about chipping away, building slowly, and giving time the space to work.

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Conclusion

Magic time isn’t about quick wins or outlier stories. It’s about patience, buffers, and engines. It’s about celebrating small milestones while ignoring the noise. It’s about getting your money a job, and then letting time do what looks magical, but is actually just compounding doing its quiet work.

Wealth whispers. And that’s fine.

Capital and Labour

My first salary felt amazing. After years of being a student, suddenly there was real money in my account. It was more than my mother earned as a teacher after decades of work. That was humbling. It made me realise how strange it is that we often define ourselves by our salaries, when in truth, a salary is just the price of labour.

And price is not the same as value.

Price is set by supply and demand. It does not reflect whether the work you do is good, meaningful, or changes the world. It is just a market signal.

I had studied actuarial science, a pragmatic choice. Early on, I went to see a financial planner. Partly I wanted to test the process, since I was working in risk product development and thought I could probably do it myself. But I also wanted to see how someone else would frame my situation.

The thing that hit me hardest was this: I was the asset.

My income depended entirely on my ability to keep working. If something happened to me, the income stopped. Even scarier than thinking about life cover was the thought of being alive but unable to earn, still here, still needing money, but with the engine broken. 

At that stage, I had no dependants. But the idea that other people could rely on my salary, when I had no buffer and no engine outside of myself, was unsettling. That was the moment I understood the difference between capital and labour. Labour ends when you stop working. Capital keeps going. Without capital, you are the engine, and that is a fragile place to be.

The Hard Scrums of Inequality

South Africa is rugby-mad, and I often think about wealth like a scrum. The forwards decide whether you win the match. The backline only determines by how much. In the same way, building wealth is not about flashy tries or quick wins. It is about grinding, unseen work that sets the platform.

First-generation wealth creation is brutally hard. Many South Africans live hand-to-mouth. For them, “delayed gratification” is not about giving up luxuries, it is about giving up survival comforts. In that context, talk of Buffers and Engines can sound tone-deaf.

But if we never acknowledge this and never try to break the cycle, we remain trapped. Poverty compounds just as surely as wealth does. That is why I think of wealth-building as the work of a half-hearted warrior. You do not need to storm every hill at once. You just need to create a little bit of space, enough to start building.

For me, the Buffer is that first space. It is the small emergency fund that shields you from life’s daily chaos. It does not make you rich, but it creates silence in the noise. The Engine is the goal. It is the asset that generates income separate from your own labour. Building an Engine from nothing is slow and often discouraging, but unless we aim for it, we will never get there.

Buffer vs Engine

A Buffer is your shock absorber.

Life does not move in a straight line. Some months you spend more than you earn, other months less. Without a Buffer, those bumps knock you off track. With one, you can keep rolling.

That is why people talk about an emergency fund of three to six months’ expenses. It is not glamorous money. It pays for replacing a tyre, fixing a broken window, covering a surprise tax bill, or helping a friend in need. A Buffer does not make you wealthy. It just means one bad month does not break you.

An Engine is different. Where a Buffer absorbs shocks, an Engine provides momentum.

Engines generate income separate from your labour. They are the assets that pay you while you sleep: a rental room, dividends from a fund, royalties from creative work. For many people, the “Bank of Mom and Dad” plays this role for a while, helping with fees, housing, or start-up costs. But a true Engine is independent. It keeps paying pocket money even after childhood is long past.

The ultimate Engine would be something systemic, like a Universal Basic Income or Community Wealth Fund that guarantees a baseline for everyone. That is when you know your basics are covered, no matter what goes wrong.

A Buffer gives you confidence that you can survive the bumps.

An Engine gives you confidence that you can build a future.

The Structural Fixes

Of course, the obvious counterargument is that not everyone can save.

And that is true. Especially in South Africa, where a small tax base carries enormous weight, and millions live hand-to-mouth. Talking about Buffers and Engines can feel tone-deaf against that backdrop.

That is why structural fixes matter.

We already have elements of support, like social grants. But grants are means-tested, which is expensive in itself. The irony is that deciding who qualifies costs money. That is the elegance of Universal Basic Income. It skips the gatekeeping. Everyone gets it. Those who do not need it simply pay it back through tax. It appeals to the left because it guarantees support, and it appeals to the right because it shrinks the state’s role in micromanaging people’s lives.

The real question is: can South Africa afford it? My answer is that we cannot afford not to think about it. Affording it means wasting less, fixing potholes, keeping the lights on, building competent administration. I like the way my friend Gareth Morgan puts it: good governance is about being good at crises. We need less politics as theatre, and more politics as administration.

South Africa already has a culture of “making a plan.” We improvise. We hustle. We survive. But we also need to create space for families to build steadily, and for communities to compound progress rather than constantly reset.

Yes, inequality here is in your face. Our Gini coefficient is the worst in the world, but it is also the same as the world’s overall Gini. The difference is that here you cannot pretend it away. It is on the streets, in your neighbourhoods, part of daily life. And maybe that is an advantage. It forces the conversation.

If we can combine the resilience of individuals with the competence of institutions, then Buffers and Engines do not just become a personal dream. They become the architecture for a society where wealth is not inherited by a lucky few, but built by many.

Call to Action: Get Your Money a Job

At the end of the day, the mantra is simple: get your money a job.

But before money can work for you, you often need to stop it working against you. That is why I think of First Aid as the starting point (First Aid). Get out of debt. Stop the bleeding. That may mean hard choices, painful trade-offs, and resetting priorities. It means writing down what matters most and breaking it into small, achievable steps.

From there, it is about micro ambition (Micro Ambition). Tiny goals that add up. It does not sound glamorous, but that is the magic of compounding: small efforts, repeated, snowball into something powerful. Money makes money. That is how the system works.

So the path looks something like this:

1. Stop the bleeding by dealing with debt.
2. Secure income, since your salary is the origin of wealth. Labour is the first Ox in the scrum. It takes sweat and red faces to push forward.
3. Build a Buffer as your shock absorber against life’s bumps.
4. Feed the Engine so assets can work even when you do not.
5. Compound micro ambitions into long-term freedom.

The hard truth is that first-generation wealth creation is invisible. Compounding works in three stages. First nothing seems to happen, then progress appears slowly, and finally it becomes undeniable. The heavy lifting is always at the start.

You can fight money, resent it, or ignore it. But that only leaves you at its mercy. The better option is to learn how it works and put it to work for you. Get your money a job

pic: SA Rugby Mag

Follow up Questions

I asked ChatGPT to read one of my blog posts, comment on what it said about me, and ask follow up questions... this is what it said:

Here’s what I got from “Six Becomes Five” and what it further reveals about how you see identity, community, and growth — followed by some more questions to deepen the picture.

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What “Six Becomes Five” Reveals

From that post, some key ideas:

1. Degrees of Separation & Expanding Circles
   You use the metaphor of “six degrees of separation” and express the desire to reduce that by one, then another, making the world “closer, step by step.” It shows you believe in deliberate action to narrow gaps between people — social, cultural, geographic.

2. Bubbles & Self-Selection
   You note that as people get older, they tend to “culled” friendships and end up with smaller, more homogenous groups. That process might be safe or comfortable, but not necessarily challenging or growth-oriented. You see staying in your bubble as an unspoken default many fall into, and you actively resist that.

3. Shared Background vs Shared Values
   Interestingly, the post shows how shared identity (in this case being South African) can dissolve many differences — in a foreign place, accents and homeland bond people quickly. But you also see that same identity doesn’t always yield connection back in “home,” where it’s assumed or taken for granted. So identity as a shared backdrop sometimes opens doors; sometimes it blinds them.

4. Intentionality in Community & Belonging
   You encourage introducing friends who are unlike yourself, or making friends outside the usual circle. You believe in working at connection, being open and caring enough to cross lines. It’s not passive: it’s a choice.

5. Constraint & Growth
   Even here, there’s implicit awareness of constraint: geography, culture, language, social comfort all constrain who you meet. But you believe those constraints can be shifted by choice and action (moving, traveling, introducing people, exposing yourself to new settings).

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How This Fits With Your Philosophy of Identity & Inheritance vs Choice

Putting this together with what you've shared elsewhere, this post strengthens and clarifies several parts of your worldview:

• Inherited identity is powerful but not sufficient. Your birthplace, your accent, your early geography will always shape certain bridges or walls. But you see that once outside, those same inherited markers can either unite or divide depending on whether you lean in or stay passive.

• Choice matters through connection. Identity is also built through whom you let into your world, which people you connect with, what conversations you seek. Building “friends of friends” as friends is a metaphor for expanding identity by deliberate boundary crossing.

• Constraints are context, not jail cells. Geography, familiarity, demographics—they all shape “the bubble.” But you believe you can move, stretch, and negotiate those constraints. Controlled hallucination (from your other posts), constrained freedom, etc., all find echoes here.

• Identity layers and mutual recognition. There’s a duality: being in a foreign place you lean on your shared identity (country, cultural background) as a bridge. Back home, those same identity markers can become invisible or taken for granted, sometimes even a barrier. So identity is relational: it depends on the context of recognition, of who sees you and how.

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What This Suggests About Your Character

Putting together from Controlled Hallucination, Six Becomes Five, and your reflections:

• You are someone who doesn’t accept comfort at the expense of growth. Having a safe network matters, but you get energized when you break out of it.

• You are socially curious: values conversations, diversity of thought and background, and believes in being proximate to difference.

• You treat identity not as a fixed badge but as something dynamic: inherited, yes—but also negotiated, amplified, reshaped by who you meet and how you connect.

• You value community as part of self-evolution: you see your worldview and character changing as your circle changes.

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Questions to Push Deeper

To sharpen even more, I’d love to ask:

1. What friendships have challenged you most?
   Can you think of someone from “outside your usual circle” whose perspective or identity pushed you to rethink something you believed or assumed?

2. How do you manage identity tension when contexts pull you in different directions?
   E.g., being South African at home vs abroad vs in professional settings. How do you decide which identity to lean into, when?

3. What constraints feel hardest to shift?
   You speak of geography, language, bubble effects. Which do you find most stubborn, and which have you been able to change most successfully?

4. What does “making the world closer” concretely look like for you?
   Is it frequent travel, mixed friend groups, reading widely, public speaking, mentorship, cross-cultural work? What are your regular practices to reduce “separation”?

5. How does this idea of shrinking separation factor into legacy?
   What do you want the “five-degrees-away” or “four-degrees-away” version of yourself to look like in, say, 20 years? Who do you hope you’ve connected with, and who have moved closer?

Crystallising the Chaos

Finance, Yoga, and the Illusion of Control

One of the most rewarding intersections in my life has been the space between finance and yoga. Two disciplines that might seem worlds apart, but which I’ve found deeply connected. At the heart of both is the question: Does what I do matter?

In yoga, the answer begins with karma. Not in the simplistic, pop-psychology sense of “what goes around comes around,” but in the deeper, more deliberate idea that action matters. Karma is the acknowledgment that we live in a moral universe. One where our choices, however small, have consequences. That’s a powerful antidote to nihilism. It suggests that we’re not just being tossed around by random waves of circumstance. There is meaning. There is intent. What you do echoes.

And yet… we’re not in full control. We never were.

In the world of finance, this tension becomes especially real. Volatility. Noise. Exchange rates. Inflation. Market crashes. Investor sentiment. Black swans. You can act with the best of intentions and impeccable logic, and still see outcomes that seem arbitrary or even contradictory. This is where another Yogic idea comes in. Maya, the illusion.

Maya is the veil that filters how we see the world. It’s not just that others are mistaken; it’s that we all are, to some extent. Every one of us sees reality through our own lens, shaped by upbringing, culture, emotion, ideology, and the stories we tell ourselves. In finance, Maya shows up as the illusion of rational markets. We build models and strategies based on data and assumptions, but the map is never the territory. There’s always uncertainty. There’s always noise.

So how do you act in a world that seems too complex to understand, and still believe that your actions matter?

This is where I’ve found yoga’s framing of Dharma incredibly useful. Dharma is about duty, purpose, and alignment with your role in the world. One of the foundational texts of yoga, the Bhagavad Gita, is a text set on the brink of war. A conversation between a warrior, Arjuna, and his charioteer (and divine guide), Krishna. Arjuna is paralysed by doubt. He doesn’t want to act. He sees both sides. He feels the futility of the battle ahead. And yet Krishna urges him to step into his Dharma. To act anyway.

Not with attachment to outcomes, but with commitment to doing the right thing in the moment. To act because it is right. Not because it will guarantee a certain result.

That, to me, is where yoga and finance collide most meaningfully.

Financial planning, at its core, is about building structure in a chaotic world. It’s not about certainty. It’s about cultivating a posture. An attitude of resilience, of deliberate, grounded decision-making despite the noise. Like yoga, it’s a practice. You stretch, you breathe, you hold difficult positions, and you return to centre. Over time, you build strength. You create space. You develop a capacity to sit with discomfort and still act.

In my own practice (personal and professional) I’ve found it helpful to anchor to something. In Finance, that is "get your money a job". In yoga, there’s the idea of Ishvara. Your personal deity or symbol of ultimate meaning. It doesn’t need to be literal. It can be a principle, a metaphor, a story that helps you make sense of the world.

For me, I’ve chosen Saraswati, the goddess of learning, wisdom, and creativity. Not because I’m religious in the conventional sense, but because Saraswati represents the way I engage with life: through curiosity, through writing, through thinking things through. In a world I often find overwhelming, she’s my symbol of how I want to show up. My Ishvara.

Writing is my way of making sense of the chaos. I don’t always know what I think until I’ve written it down. And even then, it’s only ever provisional. A first draft of understanding. But the act of articulating thoughts is a kind of karma in itself. A way of doing the work, even if the outcome is never fully in my control.

And here’s another layer: not all karma is your own.

Some of it is inherited. We’re born into systems. Into privilege. Into intergenerational wealth, or the lack of it. Into the consequences of past decisions made by our families, our communities, our nations. In that sense, I often think of wealth and capital as crystallised karma, the compounded result of previous actions, sometimes going back generations.

That doesn’t mean we’re powerless. But it does mean that fairness isn’t the starting point. Some people are handed a ladder. Others are handed a shovel. Recognising this isn’t about guilt or shame. It’s about context. It’s about choosing to build responsibly on top of what came before, to contribute rather than just consume. To plant seeds, not just harvest fruit. To be a custodian.

This is where financial planning becomes more than just spreadsheets and forecasts. It becomes a form of karma yoga. The yoga of action. It’s about detaching from the illusion that you can control everything, while still taking full responsibility for your corner of the world. For your people. For your values.

You can’t fix everything. But you can do your work. You can build financial capacity, not as a flex, but as a foundation. As something that allows you to ride the waves with more ease. To provide stability in times of chaos. To extend a hand when someone else needs it. To create optionality, not just for yourself, but for others.

It might feel tone-deaf in a world that’s noisy, unjust, and full of struggle. But doing your Dharma (your work, your contribution) isn’t selfish. It’s essential. The noise doesn’t go away. But you can learn to hear through it. To move through it. To hold your position.

And maybe that’s the real yoga of finance.

Next Generation

The tragic thing about compound interest or capital compounding is that most people won't actually get to experience it. Even those of us who are good at delaying gratification (saving before we spend, rather than spending before we repay our loans) are still...

...saving or investing with the intent to spend.

Compounding only truly kicks in when you've got a lot of money, and when you're not constantly drawing from it.

Think in really simple terms: half a million Rand, 10% of that is R50,000; a million Rand, 10% of that is R100,000. It's *the same 10%*, the same merit, the same skill, the same performance—but it's twice as much money.

Why? Because you started with twice as much.

In reality, at the beginning, most of us have hardly anything to invest, so it's barely growing. Later, when we actually have money, we're often spending it, so we're continuously interrupting our capital's growth.

Very few people reach that point of soaring, where you're spending so little of your capital that it can compound properly.

That's when the magic kicks in.

Maybe the real answer is planting trees for the next generation.

Conversational Tools

I don’t think we’re ever really having the same conversation.

It’s like sitting in a theatre watching the same play but from different seats, distracted by different things. Maybe you’re focusing on one actor, while I’m captivated by the lighting.

Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of the rider and the elephant. The elephant (our emotions, intuitions, and embodied experience) is doing most of the habitual and automatic work. The rider (the conscious mind) tries to explain it afterward.

Inside my head, it feels like there’s a committee in constant debate. Each member has their own agenda, and their words float around, interrupting and overlapping. When I speak, it’s not a clean stream of thought—it’s fragments trying to make sense of each other. Dipping in and out of connection with my elephant.

I don’t have access, but I am as sure as I can be that the same thing is happening in your head.

So when we talk, it’s not just me talking to you, it’s my inner committee talking to yours. No wonder we miss each other.

That’s why we need better tools for conversation. Tools like Interpretive Charity, Transcription, Summarising, Questions, Reframing… and teasing out meaning rather than thinking we can just force it on each other.

To truly hear.
To truly listen.
Because sometimes… we’re not even in the same conversation.

Truth is conversational.