Category: Old age of my youth – 2014

THURSDAY, 22 MAY 2014

Sometimes you are missing a piece of the puzzle, or you have a strong suspicion you’re overlooking something. But – you understand enough to take action, to do what you’ve got to do more or less right, even if your success is limited.

In some cases, though, these missing pieces of the puzzle transform in your head into the mythical “magic penny” you hope will drop sooner or later. When this magical knowledge finally also descends on your head, so you believe, every little part of the proverbial machine will fall into place, the machine will spring to life with a clang and a whistle and a few ringing bells, and everything is going to work out exactly as it should.

This persistent belief in Something that will be Wonderful to Know can become an obstacle to success. Instead of going into action, you wait. Or you keep dabbling, but you don’t want to take what you do too seriously. Certainly there must be more to it, you think to yourself. Certainly those already successful who claim to share what they know are holding back the gems, the really important stuff.

Since the end of last year, I have been looking into the possibility of making money by trading prices on the UK horse racing market. I have read everything I could find on the subject, from £37 e-books to forum posts to articles, and I have watched dozens of videos that explain what you should do and how things work. Still, every now and then I catch myself waiting for a magic penny to drop into my lap – one piece of information that will make it abundantly clear why some people are successful and some not.

I might be wrong, but I am getting the distinct impression I am waiting in vain, that there are no more lost pieces of information without which no mere mortal can ever expect to be successful, or deeply hidden secrets only certain successful people know.

I reckon the only penny that has to drop for me is that I have to accept that a good strategy makes more money than it loses, but that it doesn’t make all the money, and that it doesn’t make money every time.

I believe if you can internalise this and apply it to your financial speculations, but also if you apply the principle behind it to other areas of your life, you are ready to play with the big boys or girls. If you can accept this principle, you are no longer a child, because you no longer think like one.

This also highlights an understanding of success: successful people are not successful because they possess all the information or because they know all the tricks. They simply make the best of what they do have, and what they do know and understand. They are successful because they took action while many others are still waiting for that final penny to drop – still waiting for perfect understanding, or for a plan or strategy that will almost guarantee success every time they take a risk.

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SATURDAY, 10 MAY 2014

My identity functions optimally in certain situations. These situations include

– being in a relationship with a specific person;

– being a foreigner in Taiwan;

– specifically being a South African in Taiwan;

– being on my own; and

– working as an English teacher.

Will my particular identity function well enough if I suddenly have to negotiate a deal with someone in Mexico for two tonnes of steel? What if I have to go work on a sheep farm in Australia?

A challenge like this will depend on how flexible my identity is. Perhaps there are aspects of my identity in an intimate relationship that may be useful. Or perhaps there are aspects of my identity as a South African in Taiwan, or as an English teacher, or when I work on my own projects that can be adjusted to a situation significantly different from the environments and situations where my identity functions at optimal level.

If I cannot adapt my identity to a new environment, or to a situation with which I am not familiar, I will be in trouble.

It therefore follows that I must either remain in environments and situations where my particular identity functions optimally, or I will be forced to … broaden my identity. (How do you broaden your identity? Amongst other things, by exposing yourself to a wide variety of situations, environments, experiences, and to a broad spectrum of people.)

The question is, how well do you want your identity to function in those unfamiliar situations and environments? Would you want to make a good impression on everyone you meet? Would you want recognition as an authority in some area? Or would you simply want to perform a certain task, meaning your unique identity and personality can be suspended for the time being to some extent?

MONDAY, 19 MAY 2014

When you’re 23 years old, you don’t need much more than your ambitions, your dreams, your energy, and faith in your future … or rather, few people in your life expect that you lay more on the table than those things.

When you are 43, ambition, dreams, energy and positive talk are not good enough anymore. Friends, family, colleagues, even strangers expect that at the age of 43 you will have a house, a partner, a stable job, a good income, and most probably children. If any of these things are lacking in your life, many people tend to wonder what went wrong, and when.

And every now and then, in an unguarded moment, you wonder that yourself.

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THURSDAY, 8 MAY 2014

How many people do you meet every day?

You may be counting on your fingers a few people you meet on the train or at work, or at the pub.

I say, you meet dozens of people if you spend any amount of time on the road.

Do people have the same personalities as road users as in the rest of their lives?

I believe they do.

Now, if I am right, that’s bad news. That would mean a significant percentage of the general public – amongst them people with whom you work and rub shoulders on a daily basis, are alarmingly stupid, disturbingly immoral and of disgustingly low character.

The awful reality: Many people get away with who and what they are on the road, and in the rest of their lives.

An important piece of advice: If you are struggling to accept the existence of this stupid and immoral segment of the population, do not use the road, because that is where their behaviour can get you killed.

As for the rest of your life, you don’t have much of a choice. These imbeciles, these people of wickedly low character are everywhere. You can try to avoid them, but you will regularly fail. You will simply have to learn to live with them.

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FRIDAY, 2 MAY 2014

Trading on the financial markets is a writer’s dream. There is the story that you can (in theory) make money in your own time and in your own workplace. Because the trader does not have to appear to anyone much less try to sell them anything, it is also an honest way to make money.

What one does not always expect, however, is the range of emotions and feelings: disappointment, optimism, hope, and how you feel after making a mistake that nullifies all the small profits you’ve built up over the last hour.

Fair enough, if you experience such a wide range of emotions in one session, you certainly make too many mistakes, and you definitely still have some way to go. But even these mistakes provides the author with good material. Trying to eliminate mistakes and take more and more correct actions is a journey, a process of self-discovery – a tale of cautious optimism.

Throughout this process you learn that the ultimate goal is not just to make money, but to get your emotions under control, to remain calm under pressure and to do what you know is right. It is about building confidence in what you are doing, about knowing why you are doing it and why you are on the right path. It is about knowing why you will eventually succeed, and believing in yourself as an agent who can achieve this desired result.

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WEDNESDAY, 2 APRIL 2014

I am currently reading the book, Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, published in 1959. It tells the story of the middle-class Bridge family of Kansas City in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly from the perspective of the eponymous Mrs Bridge.

Mrs Bridge’s life revolves around her children and her social life. The social environment in which she moves is described as “unity, sameness, consensus, centeredness”.

Not much dramatic ever happens in her life, although she is sometimes faced with uncomfortable issues such as class consciousness. She also recalls that her one friend once asked her if she also sometimes feels like she is hollowed out and empty on the inside. She remembers this on the day she learns that the same friend killed herself.

According to Wikipedia, the book did not quite garner the attention it perhaps deserved:

By 1962, when critic Michael Robbins proclaimed that Mrs. Bridge answered the question asked by writer and social critic, “what kind of people we are producing, what kinds of lives we are leading”, the novel was already out of print: readers of College Composition and Communication were urged to write the publishers in hopes of getting the book reprinted. In 1982, when both Bridge books were republished [Mr. Bridge followed in 1969], Brooks Landon, in The Iowa Review, commented that “Connell seems to have become one of those writers we know to respect but may not have read”.

One of Mrs Bridge’s confrontations with class consciousness takes place one day in a bookstore while browsing through a book titled, The Theory of the Leisure Class, an actual 1899 book by Thorstein Veblen. The book is described as social criticism about the habits and lifestyle of financially comfortable members of the middle and upper-middle class. It focusses on what is called conspicuous consumption:

Conspicuous consumption is the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power—either the buyer’s income or the buyer’s accumulated wealth. Sociologically, to the conspicuous consumer, such a public display of discretionary economic power is a means either of attaining or of maintaining a given social status.

Moreover, invidious consumption, a more specialized sociologic term, denotes the deliberate conspicuous consumption of goods and services intended to provoke the envy of other people, as a means of displaying the buyer’s superior socio-economic status.

The article continues:

In the 19th century, the term conspicuous consumption was introduced by the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), in the book The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (1899), to describe the behavioural characteristics of the nouveau riche (new rich) social class who emerged as a result of the accumulation of capital wealth during the Second Industrial Revolution (ca. 1860–1914). In that social and historical context, the term “conspicuous consumption” was narrowly applied to describe the men, women, and families of the upper class who applied their great wealth as a means of publicly manifesting their social power and prestige, be it real or perceived.

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