Assorted Notes

FRIDAY 29 MARCH 2019

A brief description of our Sunday to Wednesday trip through northern Taiwan

Although I’ve been in Taiwan for more than twenty years, and my wife, Natasja, nearly fifteen years, we’ve never spent more than a few hours in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei. Last year we decided to take a few days off for her birthday this month to discover Northern Taiwan for ourselves.

Our journey started early on Sunday morning with a 360-kilometer, 100-minute journey on the high-speed train to Taipei.

Our first adventure followed shortly after we arrived in Taipei: to find an exit from the tunnels below the station in less than an hour. After we finally saw sunlight again, we walked the ten minutes to our hotel to leave our luggage there. On the way, I discovered that our hotel is just about next-door to the National Taiwan Museum – which we visited after making a quick stop at the hotel.

From there we returned to the tunnels under Taipei Main Station. Twenty minutes or so later we were in Shilin, to visit the official former residence of Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling (or Madame Chiang, as she was better known to foreigners) between roughly 1950 and 1975. The building served as the Shilin Horticultural Experimental Station during the Japanese Colonial Era, but was taken over by the Government of the Republic of China after they withdrew to Taiwan in 1949. Here, “old dictator Chiang” – as Roger Waters calls him on Amused to Death – received American president Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as future presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

We couldn’t take photos inside the house, but I was pleasantly surprised by the place. The rooms are more or less the same as when Chiangs lived there – 1950s style furniture, clothes, books, and some paintings by Madame Chiang. It was a chilly, rainy day in Taipei. This, the solemn atmosphere, and the fact that the house is surrounded by trees and plants, contributed to the impression that it was the type of home where a political leader could find peace for his soul at the end of another day during which his opponents and critics experienced everything but happiness and well-being.

An hour or so after we had walked through the home and gardens, we arrived in Danshui – one of the oldest districts in Taipei. The district is located where the Danshui River flows into the Taiwan Strait. This was one of the reasons why the Spaniards decided 400 years ago to build their fort there, and why first the Dutch and then the British also constructed walls in the same spot. The residence that the British had built for their consulate in 1891 is still standing. The fort next door is in the place where the Spanish built a fort in 1628, before demolishing it in 1642 to prevent the Dutch from using it. The Dutch rebuilt the fort, officials of the Qing Empire restored it in 1724, and from 1868 the British leased it. Some of the rooms in the former consulate have exhibitions, but not much to write about. The fort does have a few figures to give you an idea of the people who at one time had spent time there.

After we made a turn at the river, we walked up the hill towards Aletheia University. The narrow streets led past some interesting buildings, and eateries with traditional dishes such as “Ah-Gei” – a hollowed-out block of tofu stuffed with rice noodles, to Danshui Old Street with dozens of shops and stalls along the way.

Dinner was enjoyed at Shilin Night Market, one metro station closer to Taipei than where we had stopped for the Old Dictator’s house. The night market was definitely different from the markets we are used to in Kaohsiung. Stalls were lined up along the busy street that runs past the market, but the rest of the market is situated in alleys that stretch across the entire neighbourhood. There were a few shops with clothes, shoes, and electronic items, but most stalls and shops sold food and drinks – everything from steamed dumplings and candied fruit to ice cream mixed with peanut butter between two hot cakes, and deep-fried octopus.

The next morning, shortly after breakfast, we took the train to Ruifang – about forty minutes from Taipei. We first enjoyed some hot beverages, and by 11:00 we departed on the Pingxi Line – a 13-kilometer railway line that goes through eight former mining towns. The towns and surrounding areas are now mainly tourist attractions. Refreshments and large paper lanterns on which people write messages before sending them afloat are big business.

Shortly after we returned to Ruifang we found ourselves on a bus speeding up a mountain pass on the way to Jiufen – as if the driver wanted to get away from the impending fog that would soon hamper our view of the Pacific Ocean.

Dense fog also made it harder to find our next sleeping spot. Jiufen was once known for its gold mine. Decades after all the gold had been mined out, the sleepy village was once again stirred from its slumber when it was used as the location for an award-winning movie in the late eighties. We had booked a room on Airbnb, and to find the place, I even printed a map. In reality, the streets meander through the mist, and the building we had to find was not even on one of the streets on the map. I eventually had to pull out my computer to read the PDF with instructions on how to find the place.

At Jiufen Old Street with our luggage…

Down the narrow street full of Japanese and Korean tourists, around a few corners, until we reached a traditional wine shop. Next to the shop an exit, with a set of stairs descending into the fog …

More steps, a garden, a footpath …

… and finally, our cosy room.

For the rest of the afternoon and evening we walked through the narrow alleys, had dinner, drank tea, enjoyed sweets, and took more pictures of the people and the alleys and the fog.

The next morning I woke up shortly after six. The fog had lifted in the meantime, so I went for a walk, and took pictures of the hillsides and the Pacific Ocean just a few miles away. Got some hot coffee and bananas at the Family Mart, took a few more photos, and returned to our room.

By 08:30 we were at the bus stop to return to Ruifang, to catch a train to Yilan, a city of about half a million people on Taiwan’s east coast. The railway line runs along the coast for about fifty kilometres, and includes a view of the distant volcanic Turtle Island (which, according to one source, can only be visited with a permit, and timely arrangements with a boat owner).

Yilan is the gateway to Taipingshan Forest Recreation Area, and there are some popular hot springs in the vicinity, but since our time was limited, we only visited some of the few places of interest in the city itself. Less than two hours after stopping in Yilan, we departed again – this time for Hualien, about 100 kilometres further south. Shortly after we found our Airbnb, we hit the road to the Hualien Railway Culture Park – a restored 1932 train depot with a handy model of a large part of the city, in case you had no more than an afternoon and an evening to spend in the city. Dinner was enjoyed at the Dongdamen Night Market. (Hualien is most famous for Taroko National Park – which we visited in November 2013.)

I was up again early in the morning, this time to look for two attractions we didn’t have time for the previous day. Both places were still closed, but I could see what I was missing. The first one was an old Japanese-era military facility, where some Kamikaze pilots, according to tradition, had gulped down their last cups of rice wine before flying into the nearest American ships. The other was the Manor House, the official residence of a major military figure during the Japanese colonial era.

Back at our lodgings we made sure the room was decent, then we walked to the closest McDonald’s for breakfast. With thirty minutes to spare, we pitched up at Hualien train station for our five-hour journey back to Kaohsiung – down the east coast, and through the mountains that form the backbone of this beautiful island.

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FRIDAY, 22 MARCH 2019

YOU are both the agent who decides dozens of times a day between two or more options, and the result of your decisions, or choices. These choices may be relatively unimportant, such as deciding what colour T-shirt to buy. Other times you have to decide if you are a Democrat or Republican (in America), or Conservative or Labour (in Britain), or African National Congress or Democratic Alliance (in South Africa). Sometimes you also have to decide if you are someone who allows something to happen to you, or if you are someone who stands up for yourself and does not allow it to happen. Do you allow yourself to be intimidated by something, or do you decide that you will no longer be intimidated by it? Do you still allow something that someone did or said to you a long time ago, or the fact that someone convinced you to believe certain things, to have an effect on your point of view and on your actions and behaviour, or do you decide to go in a different direction, and believe other things about yourself? Are you someone who believes you are a victim of what was given to you at birth and in the first years of your life until you developed the ability to think and decide for yourself (nationality, culture, socio-economic status, religious beliefs), or do you believe that you are a creative agent who can to a large extent create your own identity and your own life as it pleases you?

* * *

Developmental biologist and self-improvement guru Bruce Lipton talks about programming in your psyche that is like a recording that plays back every time an incident, or a thought, or something someone says, presses the button. He also believes that we are able to change our programming – to replace a recording with one that is more supportive of who and what you want to be.

The author of You Are a Badass at Making Money, Jen Sincero, writes that you have to do things to challenge this old programming, especially if it doesn’t support what you are currently trying to do in your life – to in effect force the old programming to crawl out of its hiding place and expose itself.

And the author of Trading in the Zone, Mark Douglas, writes about beliefs that they are forms of structured energy. (Must be, he argues, because beliefs, like dreams and memories and other thoughts, do not consist of atoms and molecules.) He further believes that we do not change beliefs as much as we transfer energy from one concept to another – one that we will find more valuable in the process of fulfilling our desires and goals.

So it happened that I was thinking of things I spent money on this morning – a piece of clothing, and some items for breakfast that weren’t absolutely essential. I also enjoyed a light lunch in IKEA’s cafeteria. On the way home, I thought about the unusual quality of my Friday morning, and that I don’t usually spend that much money if I didn’t explicitly plan to do it.

I could almost hear my internal cassette player turning on. A decades-old recording started to roll – about someone who considers himself inherently poor and who believes it must be so.

That’s when I thought of Bruce Lipton, Jen Sincero, and Mark Douglas, and what they say about how one thinks and acts. I can confront such a negative thought, or I can replace the recording with something more useful.

Mark Douglas is very specific on this. That type of thought will most likely always get stuck somewhere in the hallways of my brain, and every now and then it will make an effort to be heard. What I can and should do is to formulate a more positive, more useful belief; deactivate, or undermine, the old belief, and then to energize the new belief. When I occasionally again hear the old recording, it doesn’t have to provoke much reaction: It will be like the barking of an old teethless dog.

* * *

Seeing that many readers are probably unfamiliar with Mark Douglas, a short quote from a section of Trading in the Zone, entitled, “The Primary Characteristics Of A Belief”:

“Beliefs seem to be composed of a type of energy or force that naturally resists any other force that would cause them to exist in any form other than their present form. Does this mean that they can’t be altered? Absolutely not! It just means that we have to understand how to work with them. Beliefs can be altered, but not in the way that most people may think. I believe that once a belief has been formed, it cannot be destroyed. In other words, there is nothing we can do that would cause one or more of our beliefs to cease to exist or to evaporate as if they never existed at all. This assertion is founded in a basic law of physics. According to Albert Einstein and others in the scientific community, energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed.

If beliefs are energy – structured, conscious energy that is aware of its existence – then this same principle of physics can be applied to beliefs, meaning, if we try to eradicate them, it’s not going to work. If you knew someone or something was trying to destroy you, how would you respond? You would defend yourself, fight back, and possibly become even stronger than you were before you knew of the threat. Each individual belief is a component of what we consider to be our identity.

Isn’t it reasonable to expect that, if threatened, each individual belief would respond in a way that was consistent with how all the parts respond collectively? The same principle holds true if we try to act as if a particularly troublesome belief doesn’t exist. If you woke up one morning and everyone you knew ignored you and acted as if you didn’t exist, how would you respond? It probably wouldn’t be long before you grabbed someone and got right in their face to try to force them to acknowledge you. Again, if purposely ignored, each individual belief will act in the very same way. It will find a way to force its presence into our conscious thought process or behavior. The easiest and most effective way to work with our beliefs is to gently render them inactive or nonfunctional by drawing the energy out of them. I call this process de-activation. After de-activation, the original structure of the belief remains intact, so technically it hasn’t changed. The difference is that the belief no longer has any energy. Without energy, it doesn’t have the potential to act as a force on our perception of information or on our behavior.” [my italics]

Douglas then provides an example of past beliefs in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy that are now inactive, non-functional beliefs. These beliefs, he explains, still exist in his brain as concepts without energy. (According to him, beliefs are a combination of sensory experience and words that form an energetic concept.) Without energy, the concept no longer has the potential to put pressure on the perception of information or on the person’s behaviour. So if someone now tells the adult that Father Christmas is at the front door, he or she will dismiss it as a joke. Say it to a five-year-old child, and the words will immediately connect the child to a reservoir of positively-charged energy that would force him or her to jump up and run to the door, with no obstacle too great to overcome.

As an adult, therefore, the person has two conflicting beliefs about the world in his head: One is that Father Christmas exists, and the other is that Father Christmas does not exist. The difference between the two beliefs is that the first one has virtually no energy, while the second belief is charged with energy. There is therefore no functional conflict or contradiction.

Douglas believes that if one belief can be deactivated, any belief can be deactivated. The secret to successful belief change is the notion that you are not really changing your beliefs, but only transferring energy from one concept to another that is more valuable in your efforts to fulfil your desires or achieve your goals.

Active beliefs are therefore positively charged with sufficient energy to be able to put pressure on your perception of information, on your behaviour, and on how you express yourself.

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(Introduction)

I’ve been making money since I was fifteen years old – and by making money I mean earning something other than pocket money because I mowed the lawn. I started by delivering newspapers in downtown Pretoria for National Press; the next year I recruited subscribers for the same company. In my second year at university I worked in a men’s gift shop, and two years later as an assistant at the Religious Studies Department. The year before I graduated I delivered food for local restaurants, and about eighteen months after graduation I started teaching English.

All this work can be sorted under the category of someone asked me if I can do something; I agreed; I did the task, and they paid me.

I have also made a small amount of money over the years by selling items – mostly stuff that had filled up space in my apartment that I advertised, but also books that I wrote and self-published, and materials that people could use to improve their language skills, or that could help them to help other people do so.

And then I have also had mixed success with “playing around” with money; buying something at price X and selling it later at price Y.

Seeing that I have been making money for over thirty years, and have made money in various ways, what exactly do I mean when I write that I have – or had – a historical problem with making money? Is it the manner of making money – okay if someone tells me/asks me to do something, not okay if I have to take the initiative? Is the problem with risking money to make money? Do I have a problem identifying a market and coming up with a product or service to meet a specific need?

Long story short, I don’t think any of this is a problem, although it will probably be easier to make X amount of money with one method rather than another.

(End of introduction)

SATURDAY, 19 JANUARY 2019

I can have nice clothes, nice shoes, nice sunglasses, a good quality cap, good quality digital devices and earphones. I can have a debit card with money in the bank. I also have no problem imagining myself riding around on a good quality bicycle. I can enjoy a good meal at a nice restaurant, and even give money to someone else if the opportunity presents itself. With all this, I experience no resistance from problematic programming.

Where programming still throws rocks in the road, is with me doing things and receiving a lot of money as a result. Or rather, I can do things and receive money – as long as it’s just enough to keep me alive.

And yet, I don’t have a problem having money. I know I can manage money well. When I have money, I know how to deal with it – to enjoy it, but not to waste it.

The problem is to make myself receptive to receiving ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times more money than what I need to buy food, pay rent, and generally live a simple life. That I could be the recipient of a million dollars … that I could do things and then receive thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars – that’s where I’m still missing a few planks in the bridge I have to cross to get to the other side.

Monday, 15 April 2019

One does wonder: Why make more money than you need to live a simple life? One reason is that things can change quickly – you can lose your job, get sick, a war can break out in the country where you’ve made yourself at home. So I don’t want money to live lavishly. I just want more certainty than we currently enjoy. And to be able to do and enjoy some things we can’t afford to do at the moment.

MONDAY, 18 MARCH 2019

Whilst taking a shower I thought of two domain names I own, and how I finally decided that I would never be able to sell them. I thought of making money in general, and of financial markets. I think about how I have deactivated barriers in my programming. I thought about how fast it happens/How fast does it happen? Thought of religion, and about how I was programmed for twenty-plus years in a particular religious tradition and associated mythology, and how it was critically deactivated in a matter of no more than two years. Also thought that it wasn’t just the academic course I had been studying; that other people sat with me in the same classes and studied the same material, and their religious affiliation came out more or less unscathed. Thought again about the research I’m currently doing on the stock indices, and how at the end it doesn’t seem too hard to make money, but not too easy either. “What’s difficult, and what’s easy?” I wondered. Thought again about what I still considered to be my bad/flawed programming, or programming that I had picked up, because surely my parents didn’t mean to program me in a way that would make it harder for me to survive and find happiness in the world. Thought again that the flawed programming was that I thought it must be hard to make money: It must be a struggle. “Do I still struggle?” I wondered. Not really, I thought. Trading is a little more difficult than I thought it would be, or it’s taking a bit longer to work through all the options, but I’ve already made a lot of progress, even in terms of profit and loss. “But what’s easy, and what’s difficult?” came the question again. I knew it was important to answer because for decades I believed it must be hard to make money, to be successful, to make your dreams come true. It must be a struggle. But how difficult? When has one struggled enough?

“The answer you’re looking for even though you haven’t asked the right question,” emerged the thought from the part of my brain that hadn’t actively been talking out loud in the shower, “is that you’ll never make it. That was your actual programming. The struggle part is just because you have to do something. You have to try. Otherwise, what are you doing with your life?”

In fact, the sum total of the lessons I observed in my parents’ lives, and of the lessons from the church, and of Radio Pulpit, and of Job’s struggles that had ceased after seven lean years but my parents’ struggles were never-ending – though there were times of hope when one could almost have believed the struggle was over – was that it was never going to happen.

Is that why I have also come close several times … only to retreat every time, for reasons I could never fully explain to myself? Is it because there was a deep conviction not only that I should struggle, but that it would never happen for me? That I will never be successful. That I will never be financially comfortable. That I will always struggle – because it had been written that way long before I knew what was going on around me and inside my mind.

It goes without saying that this is a superficial worldview. It goes without saying that this is merely the result of a child observing the world of adults and making assumptions about how life works, and these assumptions becoming entrenched in his mind. Because it doesn’t have to be that way. But once the seed has been planted in your brain that it is so, and should be so, and you fail to pull the poisonous plant out early enough in your adult life, it will always continue to grow, eventually becoming the dominant plant in the Garden of your Thoughts, which determines how you think about things, how you speak, how you act, how you dream, how you make plans, how you make money, and how you spend money in the hope that you’ll make more money, and how you spend your time hoping you will do better – someday.

“Is it easy to make money?” is the wrong question. “Is it difficult to make money?” is also the wrong question. “Should one struggle?” is not so much the wrong question as it is a stupid question.

The canvas is clean. The paint cans are full of rich shades from my past, and from my imagination, and from what other people will gladly teach you when you open yourself up to it. Will financial independence ever happen for me? The fact is, it started happening for me years ago – I just kept myself blind to it every time, and turned away from it. And made it in other ways, and in other areas that had nothing to do with money.

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THURSDAY, 31 JANUARY 2019

If anyone sincerely asks my advice about “making” money, I will agree, on a few conditions. One is they must understand that this is a package deal: You’re not just going to “make” more money; you are going to transform your life. You have to be ready for it. You need to understand where you are coming from with the whole business of “making” money and spending money. You need to understand that before you knew what was going on, you were programmed about money, and about many other things. Weeks, or even months before we get to the technical aspects of how to start a business, or how to set up a website, or how to trade, you will need to read books like T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s book, Your Money or Your Life (preferably the older version), Wallace D. Wattles’ 1910 classic, The Science of Getting Rich, and even Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass at Making Money. Books like Scott Adams’s How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Bruce Lipton’s Biology of Belief are strictly speaking further away from the subject of money, but can make a big difference. And if you want to learn to trade, we won’t even talk about the difference between the Euro and Brent Crude until you’ve read Mark Douglas.

MONDAY, 11 MARCH 2019

“What is important? What are you supposed to do?” the thought comes to me for the umpteenth time as I leave the house to go buy dinner, after which I will return home to continue my work. (Contrary to my approach, I think of other expat English teachers who go out for 7-8 hours a day to teach 4-6 hours at NT$600-$700 an hour.)

Three options (as usual I will not succeed in disguising my preference):

1. Teach as many hours a day as possible at a set rate, hoping that the rug won’t suddenly be pulled from under you, and that the money will keep you alive for longer than logic suggests.

2. Get a so-called permanent position and hope the rug is not pulled from under you without warning – and if so, that you will soon obtain a similar position, and that the money you earn will be enough to keep you alive for a few years.

3. Live simply, and limit your expenses. Do enough part-time work, or freelance work, to cover your expenses. Spend a good percentage of the rest of your waking hours each day developing skills in more than one area – may be related, but need not be, and expand your knowledge on a variety of topics. Use this knowledge and skills to develop more than one source of income; sources of income that are more sustainable, and more reliable in the long run than any of the part-time or full-time positions you may hope to hold on to.

TUESDAY, 12 MARCH 2019

Question, again: To whom would I offer this advice? Certainly to myself ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago. And certainly to other expats who support themselves with English teaching in countries like Taiwan, China, Korea and Japan.

Does this also apply to other people who do part-time work, or freelance work? To some extent. However, there are people who are risking their future and their greatest hope for a good life in a more traditional profession, where they will increasingly earn more money, and will increasingly occupy better positions. I can see how this guerrilla approach – staying mobile; travelling lightly; keeping things simple; taking what you can get and holding out for as long as possible – won’t apply to them.

[Also read “Advice for the 25-year-old foreigner who plans to teach English in Taiwan for the next thirty years” of July 2018]

FRIDAY, 15 MARCH 2019

The money in your bank account is only a subatomic particle of the amount of money that already exists; money that has no feeling or opinion about flowing your way. If money could “know”, it would know anyway that it wouldn’t stay with you, not in the way a piece of clothing would remain hanging in your closet for years after you acquired it. You spend money. Then other money comes in. You deposit money in your bank account, which in any case means you don’t even own that money anymore – you lend it to the bank, for which the bank pays you interest, and if you want it back, they will give you different money than the money you gave them.

Still, money – which already exists and is in circulation – has no feeling or opinion about spending time in your possession. You’re not special in that sense of the word. If you open yourself up to it and take the right steps to receive it, it will flow to you.

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