SATURDAY, 5 MAY 2018
I have already established the fact and pointed out that as a child I didn’t learn much about money from my parents, just as they didn’t learn much about it from their parents, nor did their parents learn much from theirs, and so on.
Then I realised – just now, if I wanted to learn about pottery, and about engines and cars, I landed with my bum in the proverbial butter. My mother was very competent with a potter’s wheel, and if we showed an interest, she was always eager to teach us. And it was my dad’s responsibility to keep the car we had on the road. At one time, a cheap clunker was all we could afford, so my father had to perform a miracle to restore it back to a working condition. And I was always expected to lend a hand. There were always lessons and instructions – this is how this part works … this is what you call this tool … this is how you fix that.
It is true that I had no interest in pottery or car engines or fixing automobiles. (Especially the latter I have regretted a number of times in my life.) If I had shown an interest, I could have had a strong foundation in place as early as my teenage years for what I might later have pursued as a career. Or something I could have used to make money outside of a formal profession.
My grandparents, and the six or seven generations before them, were cattle farmers. My mother was an artist, and my dad – despite his ambitions to pursue a white-collar profession, was an auto-mechanic. And both my parents had exceptional talent in these two areas.
THURSDAY, 15 NOVEMBER 2018
I seem to look back a lot these days saying I wish my parents taught me about investment and marketing and how to convince more or less social equals to work for you and how to sell a product or a service with confidence. Fact is, they didn’t. But, as I already pointed out in the first part of this text, if I wanted to learn about pottery – and there was a lot to learn, or how to fix cars, even how to buy and restore and old clunker and sell it at a profit (which my father was forced to do because the car was too heavy on gasoline), I couldn’t have asked for better teachers.
It sounds a bit like the child who’s given a sandwich, but who’d rather go hungry because it’s not chicken pie: “I wanted to learn about marketing and advertising and investments, and all my parents could teach me was about pottery and fixing cars!”
In my defence, I can only say that one doesn’t choose your interests when you’re eight years old, or ten or fourteen – you discover them. Plus, it’s not as if I knew at the age of fourteen that in twenty years’ time I would need a working knowledge of investments, and of managing people, and of paid advertising campaigns and how to sell and market a product and service.
______________________