Swart Donkey

Happy 32nd Birthday South Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:27:00 +0000

My 32nd birthday was a special one. A deep reset. Leave can be a way of squeezing a break in. Not less work, just work squished before and caught up after. I took what felt incredibly indulgent. 4 weeks.

I signed up for a month long Yoga Teacher Training Course. After a week, not only had I started to relax, but I knew I would still be relaxed in another week, and still not mentally preparing for a return to work.

Fast forward 14 years and I am in a very different life stage, where that feels like a parallel universe. With an almost 3 and almost 5 year old, my relaxation is mostly toilet breaks.

The trick of yoga becomes yoga in reality. Month long escapes to reflect and invest in your physical and mental health have to be condensed to a simple deep breath.

South Africa’s reset is full of the big challenges of consensus and coalition, while not forgetting that those have to be built on the basics - water, ports, rail, electricity, roads, security, work.

The yoga I learnt focused on 5 basics:

1. Proper Breathing

2. Proper Diet

3. Proper Relaxation

4. Proper Exercise

5. Proper Thinking

Interestingly one of the main yoga texts isn’t about mat work. It’s about war. The Bagavad Gita doesn’t tell you life is just an illusion, so check out.

It is a recognition that life is lived under pressure.

A life worth living starts where you are.

The World Exceeds Us

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:39:00 +0000

The deeper philosophical challenge of AI is not merely that it may become more capable than us in many domains. It is that it makes us feel, in a newly intimate way, that we live inside a world that exceeds us.

That feeling is not new. Human beings have always lived among things larger than themselves. Nature exceeds us. Time exceeds us. Death exceeds us. Society exceeds us. History exceeds us. Chance exceeds us. For many people, God exceeds us.

But AI introduces a different kind of excess. It is not wild like weather or distant like the universe. It is closer. It speaks our languages. It works inside our symbols. It enters the territory we most associated with being distinctly human: thought, language, creativity, strategy, memory, analysis, even the imitation of care.

That is why the unease runs so deep. AI does not only threaten jobs, industries, or business models. It unsettles a deeper assumption many of us carried: that the world of meaning was still scaled to the human mind. However vast reality might be, language, interpretation, and thought still felt, in some final sense, like ours.

Now even that feels unstable.

So I do not think the AI question can be answered only with policy, economics, or productivity gains. Those matter. But beneath them sits something more existential. What does it mean to live well in a world where intelligence itself is no longer scarce, singular, or fully human? What does agency mean when cognition is increasingly distributed? What does authorship mean when the line between originator, editor, curator, and machine becomes blurred? What remains deeply ours when so much becomes replicable?

In response, I find myself drawn not to philosophies built on certainty, but to frameworks that begin with uncertainty and remain standing anyway.

My search has been for a philosophical framework that does not fall apart when one of its key claims turns out not to be true. Too many systems seem strong only while their central premise holds. They rely on a stable metaphysics, a fixed hierarchy, a final truth claim, or a clean theory of progress. But reality is rarely so polite. Randomness intrudes. Ambiguity persists. Infinity opens beneath our feet.

And yet there is something oddly grounding in that. These are not deficiencies in the world. They are its texture. They do not promise closure. They do not collapse when life refuses resolution. They make room for creativity because they make room for unfinishedness. They let us build without pretending we have arrived.

This matters because the information is not always in the solution. Often it is in the pressure that shaped it. In the trade-offs. In the contest. In the adaptation. In the imperfection that reveals where theory met reality and reality pushed back.

There are also many things of immense value that have no final solution at all. Love has no final solution. Parenting has no final solution. Trust has no final solution. Meaning has no final solution. Coordination has no final solution.

These are not problems to be solved once and for all. They are conditions to be navigated repeatedly.

That is where an evolutionary lens helps. In Red Queen worlds, the point is not arrival. The point is continued adaptation. Survival belongs not to what reaches perfection, but to what stays responsive.

Progress does not eliminate problems. It changes them. Even if marginal progress dwarfs historic suffering, new problems emerge. Better knowledge solves some constraints only to open new frontiers of difficulty. The dream of a world with no problems is not optimism. It is a category mistake.

But there is a danger here too. Process matters. Practice matters. Embodiment matters. But process can also become a hiding place. You can become so devoted to craft, routine, learning, or self-development that you quietly avoid contact with consequence. You can hide from winning and losing inside the language of process.

Reality, however, keeps score.

That is why I think the wrestle, the fight, the flow lies in the unobtainable. Not in fantasies of final mastery, but in repeated engagement with what resists final capture. The point is not to pretend there is no scoreboard. The point is to accept that the scoreboard exists in games that do not end.

This is also where flow becomes useful. The best moments of human experience are often not those of full control, but of deep absorption at the edge of challenge and skill. Flow is not closure. It is participation. It is not the fantasy of having solved life, but the felt experience of being fully engaged in something meaningful, difficult, and alive.

That supports the intuition that a good life is not built on final certainty, but on responsive involvement.

Positive psychology adds something too, though in a more practical register. A worthwhile philosophy cannot only ask what is true in the abstract. It must also help filter for what helps a life go well. Pleasure matters, but it is thin on its own. Engagement matters. Meaning matters. Relationships matter. Strengths matter.

A philosophy of participation must help distinguish between what merely feels good in the moment and what deepens aliveness over time.

But none of this is lived by abstract minds. It is lived by nervous systems.

That is where emotional and social intelligence matter. A world that exceeds me is not only a philosophical problem. It is an emotional event. It triggers fear, envy, shame, excitement, defensiveness, awe, status anxiety, and disorientation. AI does not only challenge our theories. It challenges our self-concept. It presses on our sense of worth, distinctiveness, and place.

So a philosophy of participation must include self-awareness. It must ask not only what is true, but what is being activated in me? Am I responding to reality, or defending identity? Under pressure, people narrow. We become reactive. We lose subtlety. We defend image rather than truth.

Any framework meant to guide action in ambiguity must include the capacity to notice emotion before it hardens into ideology, panic, or domination.

Self-regulation matters just as much. It is one thing to admire uncertainty in theory. It is another to remain steady enough to act well inside it.

And because human life is irreducibly social, social intelligence matters too. Participation is not merely about me and the world. It is about me with others inside the world. Social intelligence is the ability to sense what is happening between people: who feels threatened, where trust is present or absent, what is unsaid, what emotions are spreading through the room, the marriage, the team, the institution.

That matters because coordination failures are often not failures of logic. They are failures of attunement. People can share data and still miss one another. They can agree on the facts and still corrode trust. They can build brilliant systems and poison the social field in which those systems must operate.

So a philosophy of relationship needs more than metaphysics. It needs emotional regulation, social attunement, and the capacity for repair.

And it needs to learn from systems that have been practising coordination far longer than we have. Nature’s intelligence is not a single mind. It is distributed intelligence: biodiversity, redundancy, excess variation, experimentation, seeming wastefulness that turns out to be resilience. Nature does not optimise for elegance alone. It builds through abundance, overlap, and contingency. What looks redundant in stable conditions becomes essential under pressure.

A system with no redundancy is efficient right up to failure.

That observation matters far beyond ecology. It matters in finance, relationships, politics, organisations, and inner life. Cash buffers matter. Friendships matter. Broad skills matter. Slack matters. Emotional range matters. A family, company, or civilisation that optimises away all redundancy may look smart in calm conditions and prove fragile under stress.

This is where reversibility becomes such a useful filter. Not all decisions deserve the same weight. In a world of ambiguity, you do not need perfect certainty for every move. You need to know which choices can be revisited, repaired, or abandoned, and which ones lock in consequences.

Good judgement is not only about being right. It is about preserving room to adapt.

Many people stay stuck because they treat every choice as final. Intelligent action often comes from moving early where the cost of learning is low, and slowing down where consequences are harder to unwind.

This brings me back to the philosophical thread underneath my AI concerns. Perhaps what I am looking for is not a philosophy of certainty, but a philosophy of orientation. Not a system that promises final answers, but one that helps us participate well in a reality that exceeds us.

A philosophy of coordination, relationship, and participation.

For decisions, it would help filter not for perfect certainty, but for reversibility, resilience, relational cost, and long-term generativity. For relationships, it would privilege mutuality, honesty, repair, and trust. For ideas, it would ask not merely whether they sound elegant in theory, but whether they remain useful when life gets messy.

AI intensifies the need for this kind of philosophy because it presses directly on the old human fantasy of centrality. If my framework depends on me being uniquely special, irreplaceable, fully in control, or the sole meaningful centre of thought, then AI destabilises me at the roots. But if my framework is already built around participation in a world larger than me, then AI is not a total refutation. It is an escalation.

Losing centrality is painful. But it need not mean losing significance.

You do not need to be the centre of everything to matter deeply within it.

Perhaps maturity is the shift from centrality to participation, from control to coordination, from dominance to relationship. That, to me, is the existential crisis of AI. Not merely that it may exceed us, but that it makes thought itself feel less exclusively ours.

A world that exceeds me used to mean nature, time, death. Now it includes intelligence.

So the question shifts.

Not: how do I remain on top?

But: how do I remain human, agentic, creative, and in good relationship inside systems of intelligence that exceed me?

That feels closer to the real question.

And it leads to the practical ones.

What should I do next?

Do the next thing that is alive, honest, and reversible enough to learn from.

What should I build towards?

A life with more coherence, more optionality, and better forms of participation.

Why?

Because life is not asking for a final theory. It is asking for good participation.

There is no solution.

But that need not be despair.

It may be the beginning of a more durable kind of hope. Not hope that the game will end, or that uncertainty will disappear, but hope that we can learn how to participate well. That we can become the sort of beings who do not collapse when the world exceeds us. That creativity, relationship, and wisdom are still possible, not in spite of unfinishedness, but because of it.

The Blue Marble

Stronger Coordination

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:10:00 +0000

Most people do not fully choose the work they do.

That is one reason I have never liked the line: do something you love and you will never work a day in your life. It is too sugary for reality. It flatters the lucky, shames the constrained, and misunderstands where meaning often comes from. Meaning is not the absence of effort. It is often found on the way through something difficult. Meaning exists on the journey to the other side of hard.

We make it difficult, though, for people grappling honestly with reality to say that aloud. The useful lessons are often the least marketable. Motivation gets sold as sugar. Hardship gets edited into slogans. The rough edges are sanded off so the message can travel. We package encouragement as if truth must always come sweetened. But truth rarely arrives clean. And truth without space for repair is provocation.

That matters because we increasingly talk about intelligence as though it were exam intelligence. We imagine fixed answers, faster retrieval, cleaner optimisation, fewer mistakes. We talk about AI as if it were a giant answer engine arriving to solve the world. That framing is wrong in at least two ways. First, many of the most important human problems are not fixed-answer problems. They are relational, iterative, moral, institutional, and contested. Second, our understanding often misunderstands understanding. At the heart of insight there is more stillness, randomness, and infinity than we care to admit.

That may sound mystical, but it is practical. Some of the deepest forms of knowing are tacit. They sit in judgment, timing, feel, pattern recognition, and local knowledge before they ever become explicit speech. Adam Smith saw that local exchange contains information that no central planner can fully gather. Markets, under the right conditions, can release knowledge that nobody possesses in full. They help coordinate human action without requiring anyone to know everything.

That is one reason money matters more than moralists often admit. Money is not just greed tokens. Under the right conditions, it acts like crude artificial intelligence. It is a distributed signalling system. It coordinates effort, reveals scarcity, creates incentives, and allows dispersed people to respond to changing conditions. But only under quite demanding conditions. Rule of law matters. Creation matters more than extraction. Consequences matter. If those conditions break down, money stops being a decent release valve for tacit knowledge and starts becoming a tool of capture, distortion, and exclusion.

You can see both truths at once. In some parts of the economy, markets work remarkably well. Things get better and cheaper. Discovery happens. In other parts, the opposite seems to happen. Healthcare, law, education, and housing often feel like markets designed to fail. Prices rise faster than quality. Access narrows. A healthy market should usually make at least some things cheaper or better. When the price of something keeps rising without obvious improvement, we should at least ask whether the market is coordinating well or merely protecting incumbents, credential barriers, and administrative layers.

This is where David Graeber's critique in Bullshit Jobs becomes useful. We cannot deify struggle and work as if they are inherently noble. That has always been a convenient story for those who benefit from other people's constrained choices. Some friction has value, but not all friction is virtuous. Some difficulty deepens craft and meaning. Some difficulty is waste. Some is domination. Some is bureaucracy defending itself.

That is part of what interests me about AI. The disruption is not only that machines may perform some tasks better or cheaper. The deeper question is what happens if price discovery for monetisable problem solving ceases to be the engine that funds and filters so much of our other problem solving. We already do a vast amount of work for free. Parenting. Friendship. Open source. Volunteerism. Community care. Art. Thought. Most of life's meaning-rich activity is either badly paid or not paid at all. Money has never captured everything important. But it has still acted as a powerful filter for where effort, legitimacy, and attention go.

So what happens if that money filter starts to break down?

Markets have long served as one of our best decentralised coordination mechanisms under conditions of ignorance. People do not know the whole menu. Chance encounters, price signals, and partial knowledge lead to discovery. It is messy, but it works often enough to beat central planning. But what if artificial intelligence becomes a better coordination layer than chance market encounter? What if it can surface options, match needs, reveal paths, and coordinate effort more effectively than the old mix of price, search cost, and luck?

Then the old binary of market versus central planning starts to wobble.

We may be facing a third mode: machine-mediated coordination. Not a commissar directing the economy from above. Not pure market wandering below. Something stranger. A layer of prediction, recommendation, matching, and optimisation sitting between people and possibilities. Something that can show you opportunities you never knew existed, collaborators you would never have encountered, treatments you would never have considered. In some domains that could be extraordinary. It could lower waste, reduce search costs, and widen access.

But better coordination is not automatically better society.

We talk about AI as though it were singular. What if it is multiversal, as we are, if not more? Many models, many agents, many incentives, many institutional wrappers, many owners, many hidden goals. The need for rule of law does not disappear in that world. It becomes more important. Audit trails matter more. Institutional checks and balances matter more. If intelligence becomes more diffuse and more active in coordination, governance has to grow with it. This is not a case for central planning. It is a case for constitutional seriousness.

Nor should we become too Pollyannaish about optimisation. There must be space for chance, for wandering, for eccentricity and dissent. Recommendation systems that become too effective may start narrowing life under the guise of helping. If every path is pre-coordinated, some forms of discovery disappear. Soft destiny replaces open search.

At the same time, we should not romanticise the old world just because it had friction. Friction is not sacred. We should not defend waste merely because it feels human. Some problems need solving. Some jobs deserve to disappear. Some professional mystique deserves to be punctured. The point is to distinguish between frictions that protect freedom and frictions that protect control.

That may be one of the central questions of the next era.

Which frictions are waste? Which are domination? Which are the price of reality? Which protect freedom, meaning, and plurality?

The answer will not be singular because the world is not singular. The future coordination layer, whatever shape it takes, will not remove the need for judgment. It will intensify it.

Money was always a crude intelligence. Powerful, but crude. AI may become a more powerful coordination mechanism in some domains. It may release new forms of tacit knowledge while distorting others. It may reduce some waste while generating new dependencies. It may widen the menu while narrowing the soul. The real question is not whether optimisation wins. It is what kind of society we are coordinating towards, and what we refuse to optimise away.

Because if meaning still exists on the other side of hard, then the task is not to abolish all difficulty.

It is to stop confusing meaningful difficulty with needless suffering.

It is to keep space for truth to reveal itself slowly.

And it is to make sure that in a world of stronger coordination, there is still room for law, repair, dignity, and chance.

Quiet Art

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 11:20:00 +0000

The Quiet Art of Leaving it Alone

Most of us start by trading time for money. We work, earn, save, and hope one day to spend what we’ve built. But the real purpose of capital isn’t to be spent. It’s to create a dependable, resilient stream of income that supports you, and ideally, outlives you.

Capital is the goose, not the egg.
It’s money you don’t harass.

The shift from earning to investing requires a psychological unhooking. You have to detach your sense of income and identity from your salary. Capital doesn’t get a monthly paycheque. It doesn’t clock in at 8 and leave at 5. It breathes (sometimes strong, sometimes shallow). That breathing is the rhythm of markets, and learning to live with it is the foundation of long-term wealth.

Liquidity and the Problem of Forced Selling

When your capital breathes out (when markets fall) the real danger isn’t volatility. It’s being a forced seller.

Forced sales turn temporary paper losses into permanent impairment of capital. If you have to sell assets in a deep drawdown to meet expenses, you lock in losses and shrink your future compounding base. A 50 % drop requires a 100 % recovery just to break even. You’ve broken the flywheel.

Liquidity is the antidote. It’s the availability of cash when you need it, without having to sell long-term assets at the wrong time. Life doesn’t happen in a straight line. Some months cost more than others. Liquidity buys you time. It lets value reassert itself.

That’s why good planning builds buffers (cash and near-cash reserves) that cover short-term needs so that long-term capital can be left alone when it’s under stress.

Smoothing: Turning Chaos Into Continuity

Markets and life are noisy. The challenge is not to eliminate the bumps, but to smooth them enough that they don’t throw you off course.

Smoothing is about reducing short-term volatility to create the experience of dependability. In investing, that means setting aside reserves in good years to supplement income in bad years. In personal finance, it might mean using cash buffers or conservative drawdown rates so that your lifestyle doesn’t depend directly on market swings.

The idea isn’t new. The earliest insurance contracts were designed to smooth risk across merchants whose ships faced uncertain fates. One ship might sink, another might return laden with treasure, but by pooling together they turned catastrophe into inconvenience.

Smoothing acknowledges that when we live through the same storm, we don’t all have the same boats. The boat matters. It’s what turns capital into a more reliable partner.

Asset Allocation as Planning, Not Prediction

Most people approach investing as if it’s a race to pick winners (which asset will outperform next year?, which market will surge?). But asset allocation shouldn’t be a guessing game. It’s a planning decision, not a timing decision.

Each asset behaves differently, and understanding those behaviours helps you design around your needs.

Cash is the most liquid. It earns little, but it’s stable. Perfect for near-term expenses and psychological comfort.
Fixed income gives your money a salary. You lend capital to others and earn predictable returns in exchange for giving up flexibility.
Equities represent ownership. They can provide dividends (which is a management smoothed payment for allowing your capital to be put to work) but most of the reward comes from long-term capital growth. That growth depends on what buyers and sellers agree in the future, which can be volatile.

Your personal rhythm (your spending patterns, beliefs, risk tolerance, and emotional capacity for uncertainty) should drive the mix between these assets. Get as much money a job as you, honestly and responsibly, can.

A good plan doesn’t rely on guessing when markets will turn. It ensures you can survive and even thrive through all the turns they take.

Drawdowns and the Emotional Cost of Compounding

Every long-term investor experiences drawdowns. Those periods when the value of your portfolio falls from its peak. They are the emotional tuition fee you pay for compounding.

A 10 % drawdown feels uncomfortable. A 30 % one can feel existential. But it’s the same underlying truth: prices fluctuate more than values do.

Drawdowns only become dangerous when they trigger emotional or financial panic. When there is nothing to hold on to, and a bias to do something. The investor who sells at the bottom cements the loss and often misses the recovery. The professional who must liquidate because of leverage or margin calls loses not only capital, but the right to compound from a stronger base.

The antidote is preparation. Holding enough liquidity, diversification, and humility to withstand the cycles. Managing your expectations and knowing what you have bought. You can’t control the markets, but you can control your exposure to being forced out of them.

Risk Cover and the Cost of Being Mortal

There’s another kind of forced sale we rarely acknowledge… the one life forces on us through illness, death, or disability.

Risk cover exists to prevent those events from derailing your capital plan. Insurance, in its truest form, is collective smoothing. You pay a small amount so that, if disaster strikes, you don’t have to liquidate assets or burden others.

For a household, life cover, income protection, and medical insurance are the equivalents of liquidity buffers. They protect your compounding engine from being interrupted. They ensure your capital isn’t sold off in distress, or that your dependants aren’t forced to.

It’s tempting to see insurance as a drag. Money spent on something you hope never to use. But it’s really just another expression of stewardship: sharing risk so that no single event wipes out years of progress.

Mental Accounting and the Psychology of Stewardship

Money isn’t neutral. We give it stories. We separate it into mental accounts. The “holiday fund,” the “retirement pot,” the “emergency stash.” Behavioural economists call this mental accounting.

It’s not all bad. These stories help us manage complexity. A “do-not-touch” capital account can protect us from ourselves. A “spending bucket” helps us live without guilt. But unchecked, mental accounting can lead to contradictions. Hoarding cash while carrying expensive debt or chasing performance in one bucket while ignoring risk in another.

The goal is not to erase mental accounting but to align it with reality.
Think of your money in layers of time and purpose:

Liquidity layer — cash for now.
Income layer — investments that pay dependable returns.
Growth layer — ownership that compounds for the future.

Each serves a role. Together, they create a structure that supports both peace of mind and progress.

From Survival to Stewardship

Wealth creation starts with survival… earning, saving, and building buffers. But it matures into stewardship. The responsibility to protect and sustain capital so it can keep serving others.

That means learning to live with uncertainty without being ruled by it. It means having liquidity for life’s bumps, smoothing for stability, insurance for the unexpected, and an allocation plan that reflects your real world, not just your return targets.

It also means accepting that markets are noisy, drawdowns are inevitable, and value creation takes time. You don’t get paid for taking risk. You get paid for bearing uncertainty while continuing to add value.

The best investors aren’t fortune tellers. They’re patient architects building futures and designing systems that survive volatility and thrive on patience.

The Quiet Art of Leaving It Alone

The hardest part of investing isn’t finding ideas or calculating returns. It’s doing nothing when the world demands action.

Capital grows in silence. It needs space to breathe, to compound, to recover. It doesn’t like being harassed.

So build buffers. Plan your allocations around your life, not market cycles. Smooth where you can, insure what you must, and let time do its quiet work.

Because capital that is cared for (not chased, not panicked, not forced) becomes something extraordinary.

It becomes something that releases those with it to think differently.

Three Frictions to Wealth Creation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 12:50:00 +0000

Wealth creation is hard. Not just because it takes time, patience, and discipline... but because life itself seems set up to encourage us to spend rather than save.

Living hand-to-mouth is normal. When income arrives, the natural incentive is to use it to make life more comfortable. My wife likes to tease me about this when she notices (correctly) that I too genuinely like nice things. We met when I had chosen to dramatically cut back. Not because I’ve stopped enjoying the finer things. Restraint is not about becoming a monk; it’s about choosing sustainability, within chosen contraints, over short-term gratification. You can have the nice things, there are just different choices you then have to make.

When I left corporate life, this hit home in a surprising way. Walking into shopping centres made me almost panicky. Without the cushion of a salary, every purchase looked different. My wife has coeliac disease, so when she looks at a menu, she often sees “non-food” where others see choice. I began to feel the same in shops. The shelves no longer offered me freedom, but a reminder of limits. Living off capital is not the same as living off income. Salary feels renewable. Capital feels finite. The shift in mindset is profound. Spending Capital is firing it. Permanently. Spending a salary has options.

And yet, those frictions are not moral failings. They are natural. Just like in business, where barriers to entry and exit, or the need for scarce skills, create value, personal wealth requires overcoming obstacles. If anyone could copy a good idea instantly and for free, there would be no profit in it. The obstacles are what make the rewards possible.

In my view, three main frictions hold people back from building wealth: countries, currencies, and generations.

Friction One: Countries

It’s tempting to only invest where you spend. It feels safer to back your home team. There have even been long stretches where staying local has paid off.

In the 2000s, investing offshore often felt painful for South Africans. Those who stayed at home were rewarded. But the last decade has told a very different story. Global diversification has been the winner.

The problem is what statisticians call the “small sample problem.” Just because a small group has a certain outcome doesn’t mean they’ve discovered the secret formula. Take the “Blue Zones”... regions where people live unusually long lives. The differences often come down to small populations, not universal truths.

South Africa is just a tiny slice of the global market. Limiting all your money to one geography magnifies risks unnecessarily. It’s not about “South Africa versus the world.” It’s about recognising scale.

I see this often with clients. They’re proud to live, work, and build here, but they don’t want all their savings tied to the fate of one economy. Investing offshore gives them an engine on the outside, a second stream of security. It doesn’t mean they aren’t contributing at home. It means they are building resilience.

Here’s the way I picture it: people must pick one job. You train, study, commit. If you choose IT in the late 1990s, you might ride the dotcom wave, or graduate into the wreckage after the bubble burst. If you spend a decade training as a doctor, only to realise you dislike the work, it’s very difficult to change. Ministers who lose their faith have the same challenge. People commit their lives to a path, and changing direction can be devastating.

Money is different. It can take multiple jobs at once. It can switch industries without retraining. It doesn’t need a job interview. That flexibility is a gift we should use. Money should not be tied to one “career path” in a single country. It should be free to pursue opportunities across the world.

It’s not about abandoning your home team. It’s about not confusing investing with sport. Loyalty is admirable in rugby; dangerous in wealth creation.

Friction Two: Currencies

Currencies add a second layer of noise.

Every week I meet people convinced the rand is about to surge to R13 to the dollar… or collapse to R25. Both can’t be right. Yet both are said with absolute confidence. The noise is relentless.

I remember it vividly myself. Back in 1999, at Kingsmead, the Barmy Army were singing their way through the exchange rate: “six rand to the pound, seven rand to the pound…” By the time they got to ten, they had to use both hands. Today, it’s around twenty-four. They need their toes, and their child's limbs. The dollar sits stubbornly between seventeen and twenty. The swings are massive.

The temptation is to treat this like a game. Guess right, and you feel clever. Guess wrong, and it stings. But those moves are so wild, it becomes more like betting than investing.

The fundamentals are clearer: strong “hard” currencies tend to hold their value. Emerging markets need to attract capital, which means offering cheaper costs (think the Big Mac Index) and higher yields. It’s not a criticism of South Africa. It’s simply how markets work.

The problem is mistaking short-term noise for signal. Watching currencies daily is like staring at the waves instead of understanding the tide. You’ll get soaked and miss the bigger picture.

This is where the idea of price versus value matters. Currency movements put a price on something. But price isn’t the same as value. A salary isn’t worth. A headline exchange rate doesn’t tell you whether your money is truly working. Obsessing over the number misses the substance.

That’s why I always come back to my mantra: get your money a job. Don’t obsess about whether today’s rate is the best. Focus on making sure your capital is consistently at work in productive assets. Currencies will fluctuate. The discipline of putting money to work matters more.

Friction Three: Generations

The third friction is the deepest: how we think about money across time.

Too often, we live hand-to-mouth. Every decision is filtered through this month’s income and expenses. That mindset is limiting. It keeps us locked in short cycles of survival, never building the buffers that create freedom.

Sometimes, we even make hardship into a badge of honour. The “Malibu Surfer Problem” comes up in debates about universal basic income: if people are given too much support, won’t they just “check out”? Or we say, “I had it hard, so the next generation should too.”

But why? Do we really need to punish the next generation to build resilience? Surely the point is not to make life easy, but to give them enough breathing space to build skills, pursue passions, and make better choices.

Of course, capital carries its own risks. Rassie Erasmus often reminds the Springboks that no one is bigger than the team. Wealth can fool you into thinking it’s all about you. Capital needs humility and grounding.

Becoming a parent sharpened this for me. Life narrows when kids arrive. It’s no longer about your personal ambitions; you’re on the bus now, and the bus is carrying family. Wealth creation becomes less abstract, more existential. I find myself not only trying to make good decisions, but wanting to change the filter through which my children will one day make theirs.

There’s always a touch of resentment in this... not in a bitter sense, but in the deep human wish for your children to have better options than you had. More choice. Less constraint. A bigger horizon.

I’ve seen this in my own family history. My grandfather was a farmer until the weather wiped him out. Then he built a toy factory, only to lose it in a fire. Finally, he became a financial adviser. Reinvention wasn’t a luxury; it was survival.

Most people work not because it’s inspirational, but because it provides. That’s real. But capital changes the horizon. It allows future generations to choose paths not defined by immediate survival.

Sometimes you do what you want. Sometimes you do what you must. The point of wealth is to increase the proportion of the former.

Overcoming the Frictions

Unlike us, our money doesn’t need to stick to one job. It can take on multiple roles, across borders, industries, and generations. Where people are constrained, capital is free.

That freedom allows us to be choosy. Not all good ideas are good business ideas. But your money can be directed towards the ones that are.

The practice and mindset are simple, though not easy:

Get out of debt.
Get a job.
Save consistently.
Build a buffer.
Start getting your money a job.

Over time, your capital shifts roles. At first, it supports you. Then it begins to match you. Eventually, it surpasses you, to the point where your spending becomes a rounding error, and the engine keeps compounding for the next generation.

That’s how you chip away at the three frictions: countries, currencies, generations. You can’t eliminate them. But you can turn them from barriers into opportunities.

Wealth creation will always involve frictions. The challenge is to put your money in motion. To get it jobs that you can’t do yourself. And in doing so, give yourself and those who follow you choices that survival alone can never provide.

Get your money a job.

Pollocks

Stages, not Hacks

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 07:25:00 +0000

The First Stage is a Scrum

Wealth creation is not about hacks. Hacks imply shortcuts, quick fixes, a secret lever that lets you skip the hard parts.

In truth, the only real shortcuts are two very blunt tools. And those blunt tools are the same ones you’d use if you wanted to take a hammer to wealth rather than build it: concentration and leverage.

Concentration means betting everything on one thing. That’s the classic “overnight success” story we all admire. The tech founder who picked the right idea. The entrepreneur who built the outlier. The investor who picked the one stock that ran a hundred-fold.

Leverage means using borrowed money to amplify outcomes. It’s paying someone else’s money a salary in exchange for growth. If your returns are higher than the salary, you win. If they’re not, you lose... and you still owe. Imagine leading an army of a million mercenaries. If they win the battle, you look like a genius. If they lose, they turn on you, because they still want to be paid.

Both concentration and leverage can create spectacular wealth. They can also destroy it. These are not refined chisels. They’re blunt instruments. Anyone can swing them, but few survive the recoil.

The more sustainable path to wealth comes in stages, not hacks. And the first stage is a scrum.

Stage One: The Scrum

Stage one is the hardest.

At this point, it’s all on you. You are the last line of defence against noise, accidents, and life’s randomness. Death, illness, disability, family responsibilities, redundancy, pandemics, bad luck... all of these can knock you flat.

Worse, they can push you backwards into the shadow world of wealth: the debt trap. That’s when you’re working hard just to pay the salary of the money you already spent.

In the first stage, you have to be pragmatic. Ruthless, even. You look at the menu of options and pick something difficult. Something not everyone can or wants to do. If it were easy, it wouldn’t pay.

This is where many people underestimate the grind. Stage one requires doing hard, unglamorous things, often under pressure, often alone. Your job is to turn labour into surplus. That surplus is fragile. It must be protected and reinvested.

So, what helps you survive the scrum?

Risk cover: insurance against the catastrophic blows (death, disability, illness) that would reset the game.
An emergency fund: liquid reserves to absorb shocks without selling your future.
Social capital: networks, mentors, colleagues. You may feel alone, but you don’t have to be. Borrow wisdom and opportunity where you can.

Stage one is about survival and surplus. Without surplus, there is no engine. And without an engine, there are no later stages.

Stage Two: When Your Money Has a Job

Stage two begins when your money earns as much, or nearly as much, as you do.

This is the point where compounding becomes visible. Your capital is no longer just savings. It is a worker. A co-earner.

At this stage, you face a choice:

You can let capital shrink while supporting you in retirement. The aim is to outlive your money.
Or you can keep working while drawing on your capital’s earnings, letting the engine continue to grow.

Stage two is fragile in its own way. Market volatility can give and take. Inflation can eat away. Overspending can undo years of progress. But for many, stage two is enough. It’s financial independence, even if not absolute. It allows flexibility, optionality, and support in tough times.

Stage Three: Stewardship

Stage three is rare.

It’s the stage where your spending is comfortably less than what your capital earns, and the capital can still grow.

Here, your framework changes completely. Time is no longer forced through the filter of “what pays.” You can spend your days on things driven by curiosity, care, or legacy. You become a steward of capital rather than just its worker or consumer.

At this stage, your decisions aren’t about survival. They’re about purpose. You are no longer asking “How do I earn?” but rather “What do I enable?”

Stages, Not Hacks

Too often, we mistake outlier stories for the norm. The billionaire who made one big bet. The trader who caught the cycle. The founder who built the unicorn.

Yes, those stories happen. But they are concentration and leverage. The blunt tools. For every one of those, there are thousands who swung the hammer and shattered everything.

For most of us, wealth creation is slower. It’s about progression through stages. First the scrum. Then the engine. Then, if fortune allows, stewardship.

The key is knowing where you are and what matters most at that stage.

In stage one, survive and build surplus.
In stage two, let capital work and protect its job.
In stage three, steward with wisdom.

There are no hacks. Just stages. And the first stage is a scrum.

Money Gets Treated Better Than People

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 14:52:00 +0000

Money often gets treated better than people. A company can rebrand, pivot, acquire, or spin off new divisions. Its capital is fluid. We, by contrast, are much more constrained. To earn, we must pass narrow filters: someone must demand what we do, be willing to pay for it, and others must not be able to do it better or more cheaply.

And one day, our salary will stop. Whether through retirement, illness, job loss, or age, we can no longer rely on being the “active” earner indefinitely. Most of us build our lives around that expectation. Yet the more interesting question is whether we can build capital instead. Capital that pays us rather than the other way around.

The Dividend Analogy

This is where the salary and dividend comparison becomes powerful. A company's dividend is a flow of cash, intended to be smooth, predictable, and ideally growing. It is a commitment management makes to shareholders. Share prices themselves are volatile, but dividends tend to be steadier.

Warren Buffett once noted that, on average, a stock’s 52-week high and low differ by around 80 percent. He referenced historical data from Value Line, which tracked about 1,700 companies, to illustrate how wildly prices can swing. These swings often happen without much connection to the underlying cash flows. He intentionally frames volatility as opportunity rather than fear.

Robert Shiller’s work reinforces this point with rigor. He showed that stock prices move far more than the discounted value of their underlying dividends would warrant. In other words, market noise, sentiment, and narrative drive swings beyond fundamentals. This is called the excess volatility puzzle. Shiller’s CAPE ratio, which averages inflation-adjusted earnings over 10 years, helps smooth out that noise and show a more grounded valuation metric.

The lesson for individuals is similar. Smoothing matters. Dividends are smoother, salaries (until they stop) are steady, and capital that pays dividends can bridge from one to the other.

Retirement as a Dividend Machine

Once you stop earning, your capital must transform into your income. In South Africa, many retirees use living annuities, which legally allow you to draw between 2.5 percent and 17.5 percent of your capital each year.

At 2.5 percent you may preserve or even grow the capital over time.
At 17.5 percent you run a high risk of depletion unless your life is short or returns are stellar.
The risk of outliving your money, called longevity risk, becomes very real.

In the United States, the often-cited 4 percent rule suggests that a 4 percent initial withdrawal, adjusted for inflation, gives you a better than even chance of lasting 30 years. That implies having around 25 times your intended annual withdrawal as capital. But many retirees, constrained by their actual savings, end up needing to draw more.

So a practical sustainable drawdown zone for many is roughly 2.5 to 4 percent. Above that line, you begin entering the decumulation phase and accepting trade-offs. Below it, you might preserve capital, but balancing lifestyle and security becomes a delicate art.

First, Second, Third Generation Wealth

There are three stages of wealth. Capital can transition from active earning to quiet income.

First generation: building from scratch, working for every rand.
Second generation: capital begins to earn alongside you, and you balance salary and capital income.
Third generation: money earns enough that you may draw without exhausting principal, while still allowing growth.

In that third stage, drawing capital feels more like a dividend, a small fraction of a large, compounding base. You can live, grow the base, and detach more fully from the necessity of employment.

That is the destiny many financial plans aim toward: your capital supporting your life, not the other way around.

Compulsory and Discretionary Savings

Another piece of this puzzle is how you save.

Compulsory money, for example retirement funds and pension contributions, is often pre-tax, sheltered growth, and restricted access. It is the “forced engine” the system incentivises you to build.
Discretionary money is after-tax, flexible, and liquid, but taxed on growth and exposed to volatility.

Compulsory savings encourage a long-term mentality because you cannot touch it too early. They act as guardrails against short-termism. Discretionary money gives you optionality but also temptation.

Part of aligning your money to be salary-like is balancing these two. Use the system’s incentives where possible, but make sure your discretionary capital also works hard, fills gaps, and gives breathing room.

The Emotional Landscape: Identity, Fear, and Over-Frugality

One of the trickiest parts of the decumulation phase is the emotional shift. Most of our identity is tied to doing, producing, being paid. When salary stops, that scaffolding dissolves.

Thinking of money as a dividend machine helps detach identity from income. The Norway sovereign wealth fund offers a metaphor. Originally built on oil revenue, its identity is no longer just oil. It diversified globally and broke free from its original source of wealth. People, in their financial lives, can similarly detach: from “my job is who I am” to “my capital supports my purpose.”

Another emotional risk is under-consumption. People become so scared of running out that they live too tightly. They never enjoy retirement, even though the money is there. The fear that capital will be eaten away becomes a prison.

Thus, planning is not only about avoiding ruin. It is about calibrating ambition, security, and enjoyment. It is about allowing your money to feel like salary, predictable and generative, while still giving you permission to live.

What You Can Do (Rule of Thumb)

Aim for 2.5 to 4 percent drawdowns in your planning horizon.
Use capital multiplied by 25 to 40 as a working target, recognising it is not a guarantee but a frame.
Treat every bit of cash you do not need as a worker: get your money a job.
Balance compulsory savings, which provide guardrail capital, with discretionary investments, which provide flexibility, growth, and optionality.
Think of your identity beyond income. Allow the possibility that your life can outgrow the filters of paid work.
Accept noise. Let the market fluctuate. Use smoothing, through dividends and stable allocations, to moderate how much of that noise hits your daily life.

Provocative Question

How salary-like do you need your money to be?

That question is not just for the ultra-wealthy or future retirees. It is for anyone with capital or ambition. It shapes what type of assets you lean into, how much risk you accept, and how you define purpose beyond your paycheck.

It's Not About You

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 08:28:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 07:43:00 +0000

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 08:07:00 +0000

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:

Get out of debt. Celebrate Net Worth Day.
Build a buffer. 3–6 months’ expenses.
Buy peace of mind. Risk cover: life, disability, income.
Find a planner. Someone who can listen and partner with you.
Start investing. Pension funds, employer schemes, and your own investments.
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.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 12:30:00 +0000

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:

Stop the bleeding by dealing with debt.
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.
Build a Buffer as your shock absorber against life’s bumps.
Feed the Engine so assets can work even when you do not.
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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 10:51:00 +0000

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.

What “Six Becomes Five” Reveals

From that post, some key ideas:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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).

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.

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.

Questions to Push Deeper

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

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?
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?
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?
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”?
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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 12:57:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 12:53:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 08:04:00 +0000

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.

Refining Conversation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 08:29:00 +0000

Conversation is not the same as the written word.

When you read a transcript of a lively discussion, it often looks as if we’ve forgotten how to speak. Sentences zig-zag, filler words appear, we change tack mid-thought, someone interrupts, and on paper we can seem semi-literate. We blame the voice-to-text software, but the truth is that real-time conversation is messy by design.

Think about how we listen. We are not like a driverless car with hundreds of sensors. We have one brain that’s simultaneously attending, drifting, and free-associating. We catch enough to respond, yet our thoughts wander to whatever the moment triggers. Transcribe that dance and it’s chaos.

Inside my own head (and, I suspect, yours) there’s a five-person committee chattering away. Jonathan Haidt’s “rider and elephant” analogy captures it well: the rider (conscious mind) believes it’s steering, but the elephant (subconscious) actually decides where we go, and only afterwards does the rider cook up a justification. Free will exists, but it’s more like gentle guidance than total control.

That’s why stories matter. They take those bouncing ideas and smooth them into a clear arc: beginning, conflict, resolution. Even then, a short story or a two-hour film is a drastic simplification of real life, which is infinitely messier, full of randomness and ambiguity. Storytelling is how we compress complexity so we can think, and act.

Writing is the workshop where this compression happens. Forcing thoughts onto the page helps us sequence them, trim the excess, and discover what we really believe. It’s also why I’m excited about large language models. They act like mirrors to our half-formed ideas—reflecting, rearranging, challenging. Modern AI isn’t rigidly rule-based; it learns the way children and, yes, elephants learn: through iteration, feedback, and embodied patterning.

That’s not something to fear. Humans excel at adaptive learning too, especially in the context of relationships and collaboration. The task is to stay aware of what our inner elephant is absorbing, remain reflective and conversational, and keep refining the stories that steer us.

Conversation is the raw material, writing is the refinery, and learning (human or artificial) is the fuel that keeps the whole system evolving.

Catalyst

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 May 2025 07:37:00 +0000

I use social media as a catalyst for real-world interaction.

I’ve been writing a blog since 2006 called Swart Donkey. That name came from my surname before I took my wife’s (Black) and because I’m stubborn, noisy, and ignorant… but loyal and willing to put in the work.

I enjoy sharing my thoughts openly and honestly. I write about things happening in my life and the observations I make, always aware that it's a public space. And I know people won’t read everything. You can’t stress too much about trying to be interesting to everyone all the time. Just be yourself. The right people will connect with the parts that matter to them.

What I love about this is that when I speak to someone in person, even if they didn’t read everything I’ve shared, something will have resonated. That’s where the conversation starts.

When I was posting regularly, I found that the people who were reading, or even just skimming, would pick up on the bits that mattered to them. And so we’d go straight into a meaningful, open conversation.

Because I was open, they felt safe to be open too. I’ve had some of my best conversations this way. Not because I was trying to sell something or manipulate anyone, just because I was being real.

And I think we can use artificial intelligence in a similar way. These language models are brilliant at connecting ideas through analogies.

Let’s say I’m trying to explain financial planning, and you’re into rocks, diamonds, star signs, or you’re a Star Wars fanatic, whatever it is. The model can help me use your language to explain my world. And that creates connection.

But for me, it still comes back to real-world interaction. These tools are like GPS, they’re useful to look things up, but they don’t replace the journey.

We become the things we repeat. And we become like the people we spend time with. That deep connection comes from ongoing, human conversation. From engaging, unpacking, repacking, learning, unlearning.

That’s what makes us human. That’s what excites me.

So I’m going to use AI as a catalyst for connection. To spark better relationships, not replace them. Because that’s where the magic is: around the fire, eye to eye, seeing and being seen.

Happy 31st Birthday South Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 11:14:00 +0000

I was 31 in 2011. It was a watershed year for me in terms of assessing what was important. I dived into a “Project Mojo” to get myself back on track. I was living in London and started renting a lock and go studio at Wimbledon Art Studios. When I chose what to study, it had been a very pragmatic acceptance of the idea that, “Not all good ideas are good business ideas”. I loved art and maths, but it was more likely that I could monetize maths/business than art. I kept up at least one painting a year, but that was all I got round to. I had always prioritized later, but decided I need to bring some of that prioritizing into fruition.

Every Saturday and Sunday, I would head to my studio for a couple of hours. I specifically chose to spend the year focusing on abstract expressionism. Trying to turn my mind off and focus on automatic, glutral painting, that came from somewhere else in me. Color and texture. Layers and energy. What makes you an artist? Renting a studio? Selling a painting? Believing you are one? Making a living from painting. I have always loved art. My mother was an art teacher, and I did take it as a Matric subject. Turning creativity, directly and conspicuously, into a career is something I considered… but always felt like a path with lots of resistance. These two or three hours, twice a weekend, had none of that baggage. It wasn’t for anyone else.

Wimbledon Art Studios has two open studios each year. Most of the artists clean up their studio and turn it into a gallery. There is a huge range and plenty of deals on offer. It was also very humbling for me, as you sit for hours with people poking their head in and making snap judgements of whether it is worth coming in. I did sell a few… but certainly nowhere in the range of convincing myself that this is a better career option than Asset Management. Art remained something “for me”. Not something that I would bend and twist into the mould required for paying the bills.

We all need to pay the bills. Even South Africa has to figure out a way towards economic prosperity if it wants to have these indulgent “finding yourself” years I was able to afford. Sometimes you do what you want to do. Sometimes you do what you have to.

Stay Grounded

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:10:00 +0000

There’s a big difference between embodied knowledge and surface-level learning.

Think about how we used to find our way home. You’d either know the route or use a physical map. That’s embodied. Now, with GPS, it does the work for you—you follow the instructions without really learning the route. This is one of the core fears people have about artificial intelligence: Will we be replaced? If something else is making the decisions, what value do you add?

But I’m not scared of that. Just like I’m not scared of investing.

I don’t panic that there are a thousand PhDs trading in the markets—because I’m not trying to out-trade them. I’m not a trader. I invest because I believe value is created by companies doing real things: building products, serving customers, solving problems. When I invest, I own a slice of that. I’m not gambling on price movements—I’m backing something real.

It’s the same with decision-making and Artificial Intelligence. Own a slice of yourself. Be the person in the room.

When something becomes embodied, it’s because you’ve done it so often it becomes part of you. You don’t have to think about it—it’s second nature. That’s mastery. That’s magic. It lets you move fast, connect dots, and act with intuition.

It’s like language. Words only have meaning when they’re shared. You and a close friend can say a single word that carries a whole story. That’s relational depth. That’s how embodied learning works—you repeat, you refine, and it sinks in.

Eventually, it changes how you respond. Your reactions are no longer deliberate—they’re instinctive. That’s the gift of repetition, of depth, of care.

But here’s the key: Stay embodied. Be aware of the habits you’re forming. Watch what you repeat—because what you repeat becomes who you are.

Learning something deeply is hard. But now, with the tools we have, it’s more possible than ever. The opportunity is there—if you’re intentional.

That’s why I don’t panic—about money, or Artificial Intelligence, or being replaced. I get my money a job. I let it work. I stay grounded in relationships. And I focus on what I value. That’s the difference.

Happy 30th Birthday South Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 12:26:00 +0000

The more you can have a focus on something bigger than yourself, it allows you to stop the wrestle of "Am I good enough?". I had a difficult year both professionally and personally when I was 30. A year that forced me to look deep at what was permanent, and what mattered. A year that forced me to detach from some of the existential turmoil of my 20s.

I had a particularly difficult month that I still think of as "Red October". A three week roadshow around South Africa where I was explaining a challenging period of underperformance. Fundamental Investors track themselves against passive "just buy everything" benchmarks. This means that the facts can demonstrate that over a long period, you have unambiguously added no value. That can be hard to stomach when you are a stock/business picker and that is your primary point of motivation. There are all sorts of hoops you can jump through to wiggle out of that truth mirror, but hanging your identity and inner worth on "alpha" (a measure of outperformance of the alternative) is a recipe for a world of pain.

I made a commitment to myself to "detach". To find other sources of inner strength. I booked a Yoga Teacher Training Course for the following December/January (during which I turned 32), and I started renting a lock and go art studio, that I would go to on weekends.

I am someone who wears my heart on my sleeves. I like caring. That is likely a deeper source of my identity than outperformance. I still wanted to be motivated. Coming to understand that detachment doesn't mean apathy, and can release you to perform better was part of my 2010 lesson.

South Africa is also at an existential crossroads politically this year. A ruling party that looks like it will lose its majority, and a populace that has to soul search. To realise that all of us are trying to make a life, as we enter a period of consensus building... so that genuine building can proceed. Holding onto something better than the individual containers we fight so hard for.

A 30th Birthday Treat

Happy 29th birthday South Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 11:25:00 +0000

The goal of the teacher in my very first yoga class was for us to walk out feeling “introduced to relaxation”. I was 29 years old and was in my first year of having moved to London from South Africa. I was looking for something in doors (normally cold and wet) and close.

The road I was renting in had a yoga centre I walked past… with taster classes for those wanting to see what was going on. I had resistance to overcome… the centre seemed religious. It was run by Swamis wearing orange and volunteers. The classes included chants and omming, and no Lycra and energy drinks. But I gave it a go.

I did come out of it feeling relaxed, and curious. The exercise was gentle, but nudges you from wherever you are. That remained a key lesson for me when I became a yoga teacher. The temptation is to dump learning on students. To correct everything. If you try correct everything, you normally correct nothing. A willingness to nudge patiently means you can take things from where they are.

Turns out the centre and yoga in general are not religious in the sense I was brought up… and I was able to apply the Bruce Lee approach of “take what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own”. Start from where you are… is useful. In 2009, I was 29, and in the same road as a yoga centre. I started. Happy 29th birthday South Africa.

Counting and being Counted

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 13:40:00 +0000

The easiest problems to tackle are the ones that focus on things that you can count. If you can count something, it is easier to control. STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), all revolve around things that you can count. Science also provides a framework for experimentation and research. There is a process of trial and error. Physics, chemistry, biology, biology, technology, and computer engineering (for example), tend to make it easier to find jobs because it is easier to specify problems.

In product development, you have a “Product Specification” which identifies what the problem is and maps out the intended solution. If it is easy to put something into words and numbers, it is easier to communicate. It is easier to get funding for problems where you can explain how you can make a profit. When it is clear the act of solving the problem can finance itself. As soon as something is qualitative, it is much harder to explain what the benefits are. Because it is not necessarily tangible. It may be something we feel, and we may feel differently about what is valuable.

Not every good idea is a good business idea.

If an idea is a good idea, but it very difficult (and not desirable) to create barriers around it to monetize, then it becomes a passion project. It can still be something that gives your life meaning and gives others meaning. But in order to make it happen, the problem requires resources. You need to find funding.

It might be government funding. It might be grants. There might be someone willing to give you money, but that's a whole different world. That's a world where you learn to do fundraising. To convince people that art/service/change is good. That ceases to be about some key numbers. It becomes storytelling. You need to be able to convey information in a way that grabs someone.

You need a decision-maker who is willing to give you money.

Part of acceptance is why you are doing what you are doing. Coming down to the nitty gritty of what drives you. What are your incentives? What's the bigger plan? What's driving your daily practice? What are you going towards?

Quite often we don't choose that, because we are just on a set path that is given to us by others. That path comes through comparison and relativity. You start looking at friends and family and building towards what is expected. Maybe it's a bigger house. Maybe it is expenses related to children’s education. It might even be that your chosen job has a natural progression. The better you are at your job, you get promotions and raises. We don't necessarily find something that works for us and build mastery around it. We want to see conspicuous evidence of progress.

We need to unpack what we mean by progress.

In its historical context. Is it a cultural thing? Is it controlling nature? Is it controlling our environment? Is it something we have to rethink? Given challenges like climate change and sustainability. Do we need to come up with different measures that aren't so focused on the numbers and social mobility?

The world is getting progressively (but bumpily) less racist, sexist, homophobic, and classist. We are breaking down barriers, but we still have hierarchy. The concept of people being better and lifting groups of people. The directionality of that is interesting because living a simple life can be a choice. There is a story of Alexander the Great out empire building and he comes across a sage sitting on a rock. The one doing external work. The other doing internal work. The Gini Coefficient measures inequality. A Gini of Zero (0) in a two-person world would mean Alexander and the Yogi had the same. One (1) would mean Alexander had it all. If we shared everything, there would be no incentive to get more because it would immediately be watered down (particularly if it was among the 7.8 billion people on the planet).

We want to have a sense of reward for what we do. Conspicuous reward. Well done, here’s a gold star. Here’s some money. That’s how we do incentivization. You do something. You get measured against other people. You do something more. Understanding what we do, starts with understanding what incentivizes us. If we are going to plot *how* we do what we do, we need to understand *why* we do what we do.

Alexander the "Great"

What is Greatness?

From Where You Are

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 08:12:00 +0000

We need a process to develop the necessary skills and knowledge. That is getting easier. There are a lot of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). You can get the information online. There is Wikipedia, Udemy, Coursera, and a world of online resources for you to gain skills and knowledge. But you need to know what you need to know. A list of skills and resources that are required and remunerated. The process of learning becomes lifelong and iterative. Changing as needs, supply, and demand change.

We need to constantly set aside time for development. In professional terms, this is called Continued Professional Development (CPD) and you are required to evidence your annual learning. Effectively keeping a Journal. Whether it is through a book, an experience, or an actual course where you need a certification.

You need a map. To understand what the problem is that you want to solve, and then you need to figure out how you can solve it. You need is a container for problem. Containers created by barriers to entry or exit. Barriers to entry are things like formal qualifications, evidence and proof that you can do a specific type of job. It might be a very well-defined job. If it is an old profession like law, accounting or medicine. Something that a group of people have created a formal framework for around a specific set of problems.

There are also generic skills. Any job is going to need you to have excellent communication skills. The ability to understand problems and explain them to others. To gather and process information to make decisions based on the story that emerges. Skills like time management, being reliable, and being able to do administration are essential. Simple tasks like paperwork, being able to read information, process it, and keep it in an orderly fashion so that you're able to find it again quickly. Without being a specialist, you will need an understanding of project and diary management, and the ability to write clearly. Writing well, so that information is carried across clearly. Networking is incredibly important. The human skills of social, emotional, and cultural intelligence. Understanding people and understanding how they make their decisions.

To make money, you need to find decision-makers with money and help them. Understand their world and what it is they are concerned about. What it is they want. To do that, be curious. Genuinely interested in what is going on.

Different jobs take these skills and attitudes to different levels, but they are generic skills that will make you better placed to be able to solve problems.

Being curious and reading and learning about the world will put you in a position to note the different options that are available. To find case studies and best practices, by reading what other people have done and what options are open. People that are on similar paths can act as mentors. You can then map the path of skills development for yourself. Gain an understanding of the various barriers that stop you from being able to solve something. Solve the problem of overcoming them. You can look at job adverts, and see the skills and knowledge required. On LinkedIn, you can look at the public profile of people doing the type of work you want to do. Do you really need to go to university, or can you pick the skills up elsewhere?

Can you just start a business and solve the problem? How do you find clients? There is a lot of done in the open if you pay attention. You want to be very aware of the environment that you are in. Who are the suppliers that you are going to have to work with? We live in a much more connected world. The information is out there on social media. Paying attention and understand what it is that stops you from solving the problems you identify. That might be regulation. It might be expensive to pay for the insurance (e.g. professional indemnity insurance). You might need software. There might be capital that you need in order to solve specific problems. What are the challenges to get around?

Not everyone has Capital. Not everyone has access to the containers in which the problems can be solved. You need to create a map of how to go about being in the right position. You also need to be able to distinguish between good ideas and good business ideas. To develop a filter to choose which problems to focus on.

Authagraph World Map

Finding the Answers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 09:25:00 +0000

When we are at school, we see the same people every day by default. If you get to go to university, you can make great friends with more of your own discretion, but we start dividing up as we specialize. The people that we spend time with are other people that we work with. We end up living very different lives.

Genghis Khan was a controversial “successful” historical figure, but his life was not that different from his warriors’ lives. He still lived in a Ger and spent most of his life as a nomad moving with his with his own forces. Now the people in control lead very different lives from other people in institutions, particularly the bigger the organisation gets. As we get more specialised, we stop having a common vocabulary of things we can talk about.

To parse what you hear, you need to find someone whose life resonates with yours. Whose choices resonate with yours. We can give each other some generic guidance, but most advices advice is to a younger version of yourself. Austin Kleon says all advice is autobiographical. A chance to revise your story. I enjoy revising my story. Going back in the past and reviewing the decisions that I've made.

It helps me understand the decisions that I am making now. To understand the work that I need to do to change the way that I make decisions. Like everyone, I am not always aware of all the decisions that I am making. Some of them are made automatically. I believe in Free Will. I just think it is hard. The impact of decisions compounds and restricts the freedom of future decisions without dramatically pressing the restart button. For the most part it is easier to let the random, complex, ambiguous World make decisions for us. That way we don’t have to take responsibility if things go wrong. Planning comes with the price tag that there is no one to blame. That can be a scary or lonely place.

Once you have case studies, you have people who are one page ahead of you. A lot of the studying we did at school was through peers. We taught each other. I learnt much of what I needed to know for exams on the phone with David or Kyle. That is often a better way to learn. ”The curse of Knowledge” is that people forget what it feels like not to know. As something becomes natural and embodied, our consciousness shifts elsewhere. We forget that it was hard to learn to walk.

Professor Dorrington was frustratedly trying to teach my class the concept of “Exposed to Risk”. There was a room full of 40 or so maths loving try-hards and none of us could get it. He could not explain this concept to us. We were all absolutely confused. In hindsight, it seems like a simple concept to me now. And for him, it was a simple concept then. We are exposed to various risks and Actuaries try figure out the probability of that happening by looking at what has happened. It is two numbers. The one is how many times the thing happened. The other is how many people it could have happened to. But as the thing happens, the people it could have happened to shrinks. Or maybe new people join. So every time the thing happens, you need to know how many people were “exposed to risk”.

It is often easier to find someone who has just grasped the concept. They didn't understand it a short time ago, and now they understand it. They remember the path. Those are the people who can help you.

To make money, you need things that you can count. Price acts like traffic lights. It is a signal that indicates if there are enough people providing a solution. If not, we need to shift some resources there. A high price shows what we pay a lot of money to people to do. If we have a lot of people willing to do this, then the price goes down.

In order to solve problems, you need skills and knowledge. Those tend to be specialized. We don’t have the capacity to do everything, which creates a barrier to us solving any problem that needs solving. The world is more complicated, and we are not all farmers anymore.

We don't all live in similar Gers

Sorting Roles

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 08:51:00 +0000

Acceptance is difficult. I have always been a bit of a “try hard”. That was what we called people at school who were constantly doing something. The implication being that you are trying to impress the teachers. Like the idea of a “Teachers Pet” or “Brown Nosing”.

The world is structured towards encouraging activity, and the conspicuous things that we can see. We look for cause and effect, so that we can control our environment. The assumption being that we are the reason for things, and knowledge will allow us to act with dependable outcomes. By acting, we further our goals. Which seems logical, and Cartesian. We think, therefore we are. Think then do. Try.

Through Josh Waitzkin, and his book “The Art of Learning”, I was introduced to the idea of Wu Wei, which means action through inaction. You start by seeing things as they are, rather than living in our minds. Rather than living in how we want things to be. See then nudge. A less anxious way of engaging with the chaos.

To really gain an understanding of the world, you need a pinch of salt for the way you think things work. Understanding that can be quite frustrating when things do not respond the way you thought they would. When we are children, we are much more willing to let things play out. We enjoy being surprised. It delights us when things are interesting. Rather than the joy of a fascinated two-year old, we can be enraged.

Ken Robinson pointed out that almost all children believe they can draw when they are 5 years old. You learn your way out of creativity. By the age of 15, someone has convinced most of us we cannot draw. Our creativity is bounded by the belief that we need to be sorted by conspicuous, immediate, competency. We stop learning as we create a story about who we are, and how we control the world. We specialize to get recognition for how we are special. We tell stories so that we can categorise and create boxes in which we can find comfort. A safe space we understand. That allows us to ignore the world that is not the way we want.

These worlds we understand are less confusing. We prefer doing things where there is a script. The stories we tell ourselves become stories we recognise. When somebody clashes with that, it is difficult. Accepting this confusion, accepting that the world is to complex, ambiguous, and random is a challenge. But from a point of acceptance, you can start to see how things work. Without trying hard.

We can start to get an understanding by looking at how our story connects to the story of others. As people, we can pay attention to the past and to others. We can look at case studies and see how other people operate. We can learn through the people we meet. This is why a lot of privilege comes from from the bubble that you're born into. The conversations you are exposed to. The mentors. The questions that you are asked. The possibilities that seem possible because you have seen them in someone who seems vaguely like you, becomes the set of options you recognize. And that can feel unfair.

A lot of what we are doing is unpacking things like past prejudice, and pre-determined roles. Historically, many people were born into roles. There was someone who could tell them what their path was. The options are opening up, there are fewer people who can tell us what that path is. There are fewer people to walk with us. There are lots of options. Lots of places to go. We start going off on our own. We live more isolated lives where people don't necessarily know our story anymore. Don’t want to know. When you are growing up, your parents are there to guide you. They are interested in your story. But once you leave home, you start making your own way in the world. And because we have so many paths, even the people who knew us well when we were younger massively diverged from where we are now. We might not make time or space for each other in the new lives. When we are at school, we see the same people every day by default. If you get to go to university, you can make great friends with more of your own discretion, but we start dividing up as we specialize. The people that we spend time with are other people that we work with. We end up living very different lives.

Sorting and Type Setting