Category: Old age of my youth – 2018

SUNDAY, 25 NOVEMBER 2018

This year may end up seeing my return to religion.

I have rediscovered “god” in a way – the incredibly powerful presence that punishes you if you don’t have a good relationship with “him”, but if you can make peace with “him” the world is your oyster.

Faith this time around is also practical. You are invited to think about it … and if you see that it makes sense, you can transform your life. If you don’t want to accept it, you won’t be condemned to hell at the end of your earthly existence, but your earthly existence may be sufficiently miserable to serve as your personal hell.

Of course, I speak here of the view that it matters how you think of yourself and your life, and about you relationship with money.

THURSDAY, 29 NOVEMBER 2018

Positive thoughts, developing a healthy mind and body as part of a process of creating a good life, a positive relationship with an ever-present force, the idea that this way of thinking is like a muscle that needs to be exercised regularly and strengthened … does it all ring a bell?

This morning I imagined how it would be if one had to manage this positive, creative approach to life as other people manage their commitment to Evangelical Christianity, or then as I approached it in my teens and early twenties. Examples include having to meditate for a few minutes every night before going to bed, and every morning after you get up, and maybe to read a page or two from a book on positive thinking or self-improvement. You may also need to make peace with money (definitely an important issue in my case), and start a new, positive relationship with it. (If you want to put an interesting spin on it, you can of course refer to it as Money, with a capital letter.) Your relationship with other people you come into contact with is also affected. Instead of reacting to other people’s negative stimuli, you decide to focus on the positive as far as possible, and not allow yourself to be drawn into someone else’s negative space. Lastly, it also includes – if you are fortunate – regular meetings with people who think and believe like you, to confirm and strengthen your outlook on and approach to life.

The fact is, you either drive through life with no specific outlook, purpose or vision, and simply respond to things people say and do, and to events that affect you, or you deliberately choose a particular view of life that enables you to function better in the community where you live, to do more with your life, and ultimately to be happier, and perhaps to even have a positive effect on other people’s lives. Some people choose institutionalised religion with centuries-old traditions. Other people choose to believe certain things about the functioning of the human body, and how the brain and personality work. (There are, of course, many people in both camps.)

Both the traditionally religious who take daily actions and think and communicate in a particular way, and the person who believes in positive thinking and constantly improving themselves, who also take certain actions on a daily basis, and who thinks and communicates in a certain way, would recognise something in the other – an attempt to live your life in a way that works better than just taking every day as it comes, until you expire.

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WEDNESDAY, 28 NOVEMBER 2018

09:54

Someone says something on Twitter about the consequences of the way they grew up. I imagine some people would criticise the person for complaining instead of being grateful for what he got.

Then I realised: The person’s argument is not one of complaint, but of creative process.

Point 1. Accept you are programmable.

Point 2. Assume you were indeed programmed as a child and even as a young adult, and that this programming is a normal aspect of life amongst members of the same species (other animals do it too). Also, assume that as an adult you continued the process by internalising and confirming your earlier programming, even hardening it.

Point 3. Eventually you confront your programming, and you identify “mistakes” – things you accepted as truths that are not in fact truths.

Point 4. You start the process of programming yourself for the world and the environment where you are living your daily existence.

12:38

You discover yourself as you get older. But remember: Your parents – the primary programmers in most people’s lives – also discovered you as you got older.

You were not born with an instruction manual: “Don’t scare little Jimmy with something slippery. He’ll develop a lifelong phobia …”

Your parents couldn’t wait to get to know you before they started programming you with basic beliefs, preferences, dislikes, and so on. Of course they were going to make mistakes! Time was not on their side. If they had left you a blank canvas until they discovered your unique composition, or until they knew exactly what programming you would need to function optimally as an adult, you would be a bigger screw-up than the one you are today because they had made some mistakes.

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SATURDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2018

I just read an article on currency trading. It’s about a strategy where you spend a few minutes every day looking at the markets, and with just one or two transactions you can produce enough profit to live on. After a few minutes I couldn’t take it anymore: “Hundreds of points profit a month?! And you just look at the market a few times a day?! Could it be that there are people who make money so easily?!

Remember: This eruption came after I recently realised that I had been carrying a particular blueprint in my head for years that dictated it had to be difficult to make money, that I even had to expect to struggle. Also remember that I have confronted this programming, and have already started deactivating it.

The truth is, the idea that some people make huge amounts of money without having to work very hard (to put it mildly), hits you between the eyebrows. You don’t want to hear it. You hear a voice that murmurs from deep inside you, “No … it can’t be …” You think of farm workers hunched over working in the sun for decades, of factory workers doing boring work for decades, of office workers who feel like they’re going to go mad after five years of listening to the rumble of the air conditioning system and the chattering of people sitting in the cubicle next to them trying to sell something on the phone … and then they hunker down and do it for another two or three decades.

And yet we all know there are people who generate millions through the buying and selling of products or property, or businesses or companies. There are entertainers who make millions by singing songs that other people write for them. And there are sports stars who earn loads of cash by posing with a razor for the camera and smiling broadly (and then shaving with a better quality razor).

I think the problem is that most people write these examples off as exceptions to the rule. I think most people expect ordinary people like them to earn their bread and butter in the sweat of their brow (or with an office’s air-conditioning system rumbling in the background). And because most people expect this to be the reality, they take actions to create and maintain this reality.

An cynical reader might ask, “What is ‘easy’?”

Of course, people’s ideas about what is easy differ. What I find easy is perhaps impossible for someone else, and vice versa. Many people also associate easy money with criminal activity.

If you’re sceptical about the possibility of making more money than you are making right now by working fewer hours, I suggest the following test question: Are you prepared to put $1000 on the table in a bet that there are no “ordinary” people who channel large amounts of money to their bank accounts in legal ways that you won’t regard as hard labour? Are you willing to take such a bet? If not, your position that it must be difficult to make money, that you even have to struggle, that the norm is that you have to spend at least forty hours a week “at work”, is not the real truth, but is simply how you were programmed. And how you choose to keep believing, because the alternative might require some serious introspection on your part.

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THURSDAY, 8 NOVEMBER 2018

Not making enough money, or struggling financially, is like being stuck in a small town your whole life because you don’t think you’ll be able to make it anywhere else. You were born in this town. You know everyone and everyone knows you. You know all the streets, all the restaurants, the best places to get fresh fruit and vegetables, the best swimming spots, the best place to look at the stars. Still, you’ve always longed to do more with your life. You’ve always wanted to experience more than just this small town, and to meet other people – different people, maybe even more interesting people; people with different points of view and different opinions. You’ve even thought about learning other languages. You’re often frustrated, sometimes lonely, often unhappy, but everyone is convinced you won’t make it anywhere else. (Look at so-and-so who tried, and look at where they ended up, people would always say.) So, you keep your dreams to yourself and slug it out to the end.

Meantime, the world is full of people who come from small towns, who had dreams, who pursued their dreams, and who believed that they, too, can make it in places bigger than the small towns where they were born and raised. They believed that not only would they be okay, but that they would be able to thrive in a bigger world with fewer limitations and more options – where they could experience more, learn more, and grow into the fullest version of themselves.

* * *

I smoked cigarettes for fourteen years. I thought of myself as a smoker. At social events, I knew who the other smokers were, and enjoyed puffing tobacco with them outside on the balcony or on the veranda. Then came the point when I got serious about quitting (or more serious than previous times). Within a matter of months I started thinking of myself as a healthy guy – a non-smoker. After a few years, I didn’t even smoke one or two cigarettes on occasion outside a restaurant. I had completely outgrown the smoker identity. Smoking was something I did years earlier, but from which I had moved on.

The same with views about money and struggling to make money. For a long time this was part of my identity. I saw myself as someone struggling to make money. I saw myself as someone who would have done better in a world where money wasn’t such a big factor. Other people also knew me as someone who never had much money – if they couldn’t guess, I probably said something that drove the point home.

Now I know that this identity of struggler-with-money was not the truth either. I was never by nature a smoker; it was just a bad habit I had for a few years. Similarly, it is not my truth that I have to struggle to make money. That I struggled with it for years had simply been the result of unintended bad conditioning, lack of proper education about money (for which I myself take responsibility because I have been an adult for almost thirty years), and – like cigarettes – a few bad habits.

* * *

When you are young, ideas about money and about making money sometimes come across as universal; that is, you assume that you share the same ideas and beliefs with your schoolmates and cousins and other people of the same age in your neighbourhood.

What you only realise years later is that beliefs about money, your relationship with money, how it works to earn and accumulate and invest or play with money, even how you spend it, were specific to you, and maybe your siblings. There is a good chance that your schoolmates and friends and cousins of about the same age, and other children in the neighbourhood, had a totally different education about money and related matters.

Of course, you get extended families, or neighbourhoods or communities where there is a degree of consistency regarding what adults teach their children about personal finance. Nonetheless, your relationship with money, and what you teach your children, or what you learned from your parents, cannot as easily be defined as religion or politics or culture, and in many cases the lessons are much more subtle. It is therefore easy to be totally unaware as a child of the effect it has on your development, or as a parent to be aware of what you teach your children.

* * *

A child grows up in a house where he is taught to dance and sing for his bread and butter. In fact, he is somewhat of bashful fellow, and he doesn’t enjoy it at all. It’s not who he is. The stage is not his natural domain. After many years he discovers that he would rather design houses. One can almost say that he is a designer by nature.

For me, the condition of worrying about money is like the guy who is seriously uncomfortable on stage. Being worried about money is not my truth. It doesn’t come naturally to me. It pushes up from inside and gets stuck in my throat. One can almost say that I am by nature a wealthy man who never has to be concerned about whether he has enough money.

What I do now is to confront these negative views and replace them with positive views. The end of the process is that I will be who I have always been deep inside but could not express. So, I am not becoming a new person. I’m just becoming who I’ve always been.

SUNDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2018

It is said that you have to go out of your comfort zone if you want to succeed. For me, with making money, it was the opposite. I believed money was only to be found outside my comfort zone – if something was easy, or pleasant, it could as a matter of course not work. Something had to be difficult, unpleasant, and boring. Then, and only then, did I stand a chance.

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MONDAY, 29 OCTOBER 2018

10:23

A system rather than a one-off goal. The question is, what are the components of a good system?

1. Regular exercise, enough sleep, and a healthy diet.

2. Meditation: At least 5-10 minutes every morning and every evening (clears the obstacles so the subconscious can present ideas and solutions).

3. Regular expressions of gratitude for what you have and for what you’re in the process of creating and receiving.

4. Read, learn and listen: There’s always more to learn, and better ways to do things.

12:43

If it’s not natural for you to get on a stage and address people, you will experience the event as stressful. If it is natural to you, you’ll enjoy it and you will be more relaxed about it.

I find it extremely stressful to worry about money. This is clearly not my natural condition. It can thus be said that it seems to be my natural condition to have money in abundance, and to never worry about it.

It only makes sense to then also conclude that this process of getting an abundance of money is indeed a process in which I will become what I’ve always been but could not be due to misunderstandings about how the world works, and how I was supposed to go about doing things.

16:19

On 12/10/18 I wrote: “I thought I had rebelled against the ideas I grew up with, but I only rebelled against certain aspects. The expectation of failure had been fully internalised.”

One could say I thought I was addressing the problem, but in reality I had missed the elephant in the room.

“What elephant?” I would have asked, pressed against the wall.

“Don’t you smell it?” a smart person would have inquired.

“No,” I would have answered.

“Then why are you pressed against the wall so tightly if there’s no elephant pushing you against the wall?”

“Because I like walls?”

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