Medium articles: This Could Be My Last Christmas and How to Pay For Christmas

Well, it's getting closer to Christmas, so I thought I'd post a copy of Medium pieces associated with the season:

This Could Be My Last Christmas

How to Pay For Christmas

On a separate topic, here's a nice piece on the importance of fitness as you get older:

Becoming Athletic In My 50s

If you'd like to read more on Medium, you can unlock thousands of excellent stories by becoming a member.

Click here.

Enjoy.

Medium: Winning the Lottery and Slashing Your Food Bills

My Medium journey continues. 

Here's a fun article based on a recent news story:

I Won the Lottery - Just Don't Tell My Wife

And here's one that's probably more relevant in the current climate:

33 Ways to Slash Your Food Bills

Also writing in the last month on Medium was Ryan Holiday, the great writer about stoicism:

The 16 Greatest Lessons From 16 Years With Marcus Aurelius

 And if you'd like to read more on Medium, you can unlock thousands of excellent stories by becoming a member

Click here.

Enjoy.

Medium articles - Weight Loss, Wealth and Followers

My Medium journey continues. 

The momentum has been pretty good in terms of picking up followers, reading time, and earning a few pennies along the way:

Here are a few articles:

How I lost 10lbs in 10 days

Who Wants to be a Millionaire

500 Followers - What I Learned To Get There

Also writing in the last month on Medium was Barack Obama, who writes about stories that need to be told. Check it out - very insightful:

Here's Why I'm Celebrating Banned Books Week

And if you'd like to read more on Medium, you can unlock thousands of excellent stories by becoming a member

Click here.

Enjoy.

Medium articles - Recession, Salvation and Gender Inequality

Here's another round of Medium articles to get your teeth into.

Firstly, I'll start with a Scott Galloway piece. If you don't know his stuff, I would heartily recommend digging into it. In this piece, he talks about recession talk and how it can become self-fulfilling:

Bottom's Up

Next, here's a piece on taking responsibility for what's in front of us. Not everyone does. A lot of us are in denial:

Nobody's Coming to Save You

Finally, here's an important piece on the gender imbalance in the workforce - but this time it relates to side hustles and freelancing:

How to Narrow the Gender Pay Gap in Side Hustles and Freelancing

Enjoy!

And if you're new to Medium, you can unlock thousands of excellent stories for only $5/month. 

Click here.

Curating Articles and Learning from the Best in Medium

I'm still going to dip in and out of Blogger with random thoughts about random things. I've been here for years (albeit with a big sabbatical in the middle) and it feels like a waste to just ignore this site totally.

But instead of reinventing the wheel with my writing, I'm going to more often provide links to articles I've written on Medium. 

I'll also, on occasion, have links to interesting articles spotted there.

Today's articles talk about getting ready for a recession. Whether we like it or not, one's coming (if it's not here already). I'm not pretending to have a crystal ball. It's just the nature of economic cycles. They happen. They have to happen for cycles to regenerate. The issue is always about the timing of such events. But winter will come - it always does.

Here, I try to approach the topic from a work, money and "self" perspective - looking at how to prepare in each of these areas.

I originally planned to put all of my musings into one article, before I realized there was too much good stuff to fit into a single piece.

So it's split into three. Hopefully, the articles can help better prepare readers for the inevitable...

Links to the articles are below:

• Recession-Proof Your Life - Part 1

• Recession-Proof Your Life - Part 2

• Recession-Proof Your Life - Part 3

And if you want to get full access to, and support, the wide-ranging work of thousands of Medium writers (including myself), how about becoming a member? 

For $5 a month (you can cancel at any time) you get access to the writing of luminaries ranging from Deepak Chopra and Ryan Holiday, through to Jeff Bezos, Gary Vaynerchuk, Hillary Clinton, Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins. 

Click the link below to join:

https://medium.com/@spiritworth/membership

Enjoy!

Medium - The target

So I've signed up with Medium. I figured if I'm going to share my thoughts, I might as well see whether I can reach a broader audience and monetize it.

It's early days and I don't know where it will go. But I've got to keep building. The world is my oyster!

Now all I need to do is get my first 100 followers before I can start monetizing...

Feel free to follow, clap and read my thoughts on that platform.

Do you have the courage to be rubbish?

I've been thinking a lot about my goals - "financial freedom" and "personal freedom". Financial freedom is relatively straightforward, in that it's about having enough money to be able to be, do, have whatever life throws in my direction. At least, I think that's my thinking anyway.

Personal freedom is more nuanced. I'm not even sure where I fell upon the concept or what I was actually shooting for when it resonated with me. But the more I think about it, the more I've found a new grounding with it.

Essentially, for me, it's about managing the ego. I'll never get rid of it. None of us can. But it's about reducing the amount by which I identify with it and its trappings. It's about being able to take a few risks. It's about allowing myself to make mistakes. It's about failing and then laughing at myself when I look at myself in the mirror afterward. It's about throwing off judgment when things go wrong. It's about chilling when I hear the praise when things go right. It's about embracing the idea that I'm a small grain of sand in the bigger scheme of everything. 

Does it conflict with financial freedom? I don't think so. The nothing wrong with having earthly desires and a financially liberating environment. Personal freedom is about the internal story which needs to align with the external realities of financial freedom. 

So I'm looking for congruence in my being and alignment with my values for the internal and external. It's about accepting what it's like to be human. It's about having the courage to not get bogged down by ego. It's about allowing yourself to look stupid. It's about having the courage to be rubbish.

Find your Why...and your "Why Not"

I love the principle of "finding your why", espoused by Simon Sinek. It's all about seeking out that sense of purpose that will underpin your intrinsic motivation in life. It's your reason for being, your reason for doing.

It's an excellent principle. Until it's not. The problem for many of us is we simply don't know what that "why" is. Sure, we might have some warm and fuzzy inclinations. But aren't we meant to have a rock solid reason for being? A true north? 

The reality is, we all probably have a number of "whys". Or at least, ones that change with the times and our values in life. There's no point beating yourself up if you don't fit into some perfect cookie cutter role. You don't have the narrative that defines all of your endeavors.

If you're struggling with that (which we all do at some point), how about thinking about finding a "why not"? This can be viewed as a crazy-arsed goal that seems so out there it seems ridiculous (at least to some people). 

But this is about dreaming big. Really big. In a way that you simply don't sell yourself short. Imagine that you are six-years old and someone asks you what you want to be when you grow up. Your response: "President or the first woman on Mars". A bit crazy, right? Well, no. It's about not selling yourself short, not limiting your potential, not falling short of what you could be. It's completely possible, isn't it. Why not?

So definitely ask about your "why". But also think about your "why not".

How can you stand out?

I keep preaching the idea of "controlling the controllable". The idea is that you can't control what happens to the economy, your company or political climate, but you have some agency over how you show up in the world. 

There will be many situations, however, that you'll need to put your best foot forward in order to navigate some of the uncontrollable factors. You may find yourself having to reapply for your current job as your company goes through a restructuring. You may be forced back into the jobs market as a recession takes hold. You may be trying to woo a partner that is already attracting plenty of suitors. 

You still don't have ultimate control over how things will pan out. But you do have more of a say in how you represent yourself. 

This got me thinking earlier about how I've managed to advance over the years in my career. I would never say that I'm the most technically competent finance individual, nor the best salesman. But I've done pretty well for myself. And I realize the reason for that is I've managed to not only play to my personal strengths (flexibility, affability), I've also found ways in which to offer something that rivals haven't. 

One example of that was my first banking role. It was an admin assistant role in a corporate unit and only one rung up from having to make the teas for the team. I wasn't a fresh-faced 18-year old. I came into the position as a university graduate. It wasn't the type of role graduates were looking for back then. They would traditionally be entering via fast-track graduate schemes, or at the very least coming in at a more advanced position. Not many of the team were graduates either but they were happy to welcome a keen, smart kid who would take the crappy work off their plate. That got my foot in the door and I've not looked back.

Over the years I've found ways to stick out in my role search (the only Brit competing for a position in Asia that ultimately suited someone with a European background; one of the few people of an ethnic minority background applying for a role aligned with that ethnicity's part of the world). Sometimes I've been conscious about it, sometimes I've stuck out without realizing it. And thanks to the power of compounding these experiences, it's got me to where I am now.  

I don't think there's a magic formula here. I was extremely lucky in many situations (though I embraced the luck as well). But if you find yourself having to compete with others for roles, it makes a lot of sense to find ways in which to stick out to make you the more obvious choice. Or find situations where there's little to no competition in the first place.

The "law" is an ass

I'm a massive fan of personal development. I embrace the growth vibe that it encompasses. At the same time, I'm fully cognizant of the importance of self-acceptance. Accept who you are, warts and all.

On the surface, there's a conflict. Try to be more than who you currently are but accept that there's absolutely nothing wrong with you. Actually, I see this as a healthy tension. If you focus only on the personal growth angle of more, more, more then you'll never be happy. If you get fully lost in only accepting your lot and the world around you, you miss the opportunity to lift yourself out of hardships.

Combining the two means that you accept the core of who you are, while realizing there's so much more to you than you're revealing. To me, that's a healthy place to be. Try to have a better understanding of the bigger picture rather than just a silo.

As I keep thinking throughout these blog posts, we live in a world of stories and n ot "the truth". Malcolm Gladwell tells a story. Freakonomics tells a story. The Undercover Economist tells a story. They could all be explaining the cause of the exact same situation but with different conclusions. We live through stories and liberal explanations, even more so when social sciences shape our understanding.

Commentators keep using the term "laws" to explain how some things work in our existence, as if they are irrefutable mechanisms within the universe. When such laws are based on physics, maybe there's some proper scientific underpinning. It can be tested. There's some rigor. 

But when you apply "laws" to something which should be loosely termed "rules", you do diminish it. The Law of Gravity has more depth than the Law of Attraction. Don't get me wrong, I'm into the Law of Attraction. I've read The Secret and seen the movie, and I try to live the principle. And I definitely see the value. But do I, hand on heart, believe that it works in equal measure for the 7.9 billion people around the world? No. Do I think the Law of Gravity applies evenly? Well, yes.

We can't take everything at face value. Keep observing. Keep growing a bigger picture. Challenge your thinking. Be curious. That's what I want to do.

Represent

“Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.”  – Epictetus.

One of my biggest weaknesses is being smart. I do say that half in jest, but I've always been a thinker. Pseudo-intellectual, if you will. The trouble with that has been I've been excellent at conceptualizing and horrible at execution. Absolutely dreadful.

I've got so caught up with proving how right I am, how clever my thought process is, how mind-blowing my insights are, I haven't got close to following through on a lot of things.

At the route of it is a combination of a lack of focus and fear. Sometimes my thoughts are so diffused I get lost in the layers of thinking (and that's something I'm finding in writing these blog posts recently). 

But at the crux is a lowish tolerance to failure. It has to be perfect or not at all. The fact that I know all this means that I'm looking at different ways in which to drive action. (I'm also well aware that by talking about it all now, I'm very subtly procrastinating that bit more).

So I'm going to look to practice what I preach. Be more dynamic. Represent an ideal. Embody it, as the quote above says. Live by the principle of Be-Do-Have.

Ok, I've been here before. I just need to keep reminding myself what I'm trying to achieve. Personal and financial freedom.

So time to do things bit by bit. Iterate. And learn along the way.

The world is, well, challenged...but...

The world is going to hell on a handbasket. Or at least that's what we're told on a daily basis by the media.

I have no doubt that things will be challenging. Zero-interest rates for so long finally have a cost, a pandemic that disrupted industries and social structures alike, an uncalled-for war in Ukraine, energy prices hitting crazy levels. I could go on.

The truth is, none of us knows how this is going to play out. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. We live in the world of narratives. The same story gets played out through different lenses. We all live a version of the Rashomon effect - one storyline played out through multiple viewpoints. It really does depend on which ones you expose yourself to and which ones to run with.

But this is not the tine to sit back, eat the popcorn and watch things play out. You really don't want to leave things to chance. You don't want to be ill-prepared for what's playing out in front of you. 2008 proved that. You need to shape the narrative. Your narrative. That means not relying on your job, the government, or whoever. 

This isn't some conspiratorial prepping vibe. It's far more pragmatic than that. The world owes you nothing so you have to control what you can. Stay nimble. Get skilled. Take the initiative. 

If only it was so easy

Part of my problem is that I overcomplicate things. I have so many amazing/excellent/inspirational...(fill in the gaps) ideas that I simply don't know where to start.

Am I alone? No. We all manage to find ways in which to get in our own way. 

And during those times of overwhelm, very often we know what we should be doing. Sometimes our head is telling us. Sometimes it's our heart. Sometimes the gut. Regardless, we know.

But we just to live in our thoughts rather than to do anything about it. That's the "knowing-doing gap". We know exactly what we should be doing (or at least have a fair idea), but we choose to overcomplicate, overthink, procrastinate.

The key (of course) is action. Deep down, we know that. It doesn't have to be massive, life-changing moves. At least, not normally. Just putting one foot in front of the other is what counts. 

And to do that, to eat that elephant one bite at a time, we need to trust. 

Trust that we are on the right path. Trust that our gut feelings are correct. Trust, fundamentally, that if we are not on the right path or are gut feelings are wrong that we will be okay. That's the key reframe.

None of us knows truly what the future will bring. How can we? (Futurists, tarot card readers, stock market strategists take note). All we can do is work on ourselves and our worlds in order to better our environments for what might come tomorrow. To work towards something.

We don't have to beat ourselves up about having too many ideas. We just simply need to experiment. To play. To explore. Keep observing and keep iterating. 

Blurred lines

Ahh, the joy of distractions...

There are so many ideas out there. Some are as old as time (have something physical to sell and find somewhere to sell it), and some are new "shiny object" types (NFTs anyone?).

That's been part of my problem. A lack of focus. Easily distracted. An inability to prioritize. 

It's no wonder I haven't been able to kickstart the road to my millions...

And yet I have been consistent in my thinking in relation to certain aspects of my philosophy. We all have to take ownership of our worlds. We cannot rely on the government, our companies, our jobs. 

You could have the best boss in the world. But what happens if she is ordered to downsize your team? What if she leaves for a better opportunity? What if she's downsized? 

You can work for the best company in the world (at least as far as you're concerned). But what if that company turns out to be a WorldCom, Enron, Wildcard, Lehman Brothers....?

And you can be in what you think is the perfect industry for you. But what if that industry goes the way of the Blackberry manufacturer. Or vinyl record-maker? Or digital camera maker? 

Things change. You simply need to start to control the controllable. To me, that's all about taking control of your finances, career skillset, emotional resilience, health, and relationships. It's about investing across all those areas.

It's about observing how the world is changing around you and adapting. It's about being proactive and not reactive - because being reactive can sometimes be too late.

As investor Warren Buffett once said: "Predicting rain doesn't count. Building arks does."

Time to build arks. How? Well, that's my goal.

You can't always get what you want

I've had two wake-up calls in the last few weeks. Firstly, someone I know passed away. He was a friend of a few friends of mine. He was a larger-than-life character, could always carry a conversation, great at quizzes and liked a drink. I don't know the full story yet but it seems like his lifestyle got the better of him. Mid-50s. Very sad.

Then a few days ago an old friend from university posted on her Facebook account a link to her new weekly blog. This was going to be a no-holds-barred expose on her life. Life hadn't turned out as she had hoped. She was divorced, childless (not by choice, as she states), about to housesit to save on rent, in debt, and struggling to make ends meet working for herself. And the wrong side of 45. None of that fitted with the life path she had expected for herself. And, to be honest, it wasn't the path that I thought she was on either.

The trouble is, that's how life can be. We can only control so much. And pandemics and the like will always be out of our control. But it also makes me think about doing our best to try to shape our reality. Or, more realistically, make ourselves as adaptable and resilient we can be to changing circumstances.

You can't always get what you want. But we all have to at least work towards trying to get what we need.

That's kind of what I want for myself and want to do in the future to help others. These musings do have some rhyme and reason. I just need to flesh them out... 

We're all making this up

I'm a massive fan of personal development. I've read a ton of books, been on seminars, drunk the Kool-Aid. I've often found it to be uplifting stuff. Admittedly, that can be in the form of a short, cheap dopamine hit. But enjoyable nonetheless.

But there's one thing I've come to realize.  It's all nonsense. Not in the sense of it having no value. No, I think there's plenty of value. It can help guide, it can bring you peace, it can help make your dreams come true. The thing is, personal development and its ilk is full of subjective truths, as opposed to objective truths. One guru will tell you that X is the answer, contradicting the other guru saying that Y is, only to be challenged by the scientist that says it's Z. Meanwhile, the mystic tells you it's A all along...

Something that has increasingly seeped into my thinking is that we're all making everything up. Or are, at least, blinded by our little slither of knowledge into thinking we know more. We all think we have a better understanding of the world than we do have, have more control over the world than we actually have, and can navigate the complexities of life better than we actually can.

Sure, you can say the advice is backed by peer-reviewed science. But it's amazing how well scientific input gets cherry-picked to suit a narrative. And it's all narrative. It's not the "truth" because we don't have the capacity to know the full picture. We know so little in the bigger scheme of things. 

Where am I going with this? There's plenty of advice packaged as true. But what works for Peter may not work for Paul. We've all got to get to know what works best for ourselves. Experiment. Take notes. Don't take everything at face value. Iterate. Learn. And start again.

It's about learning to trust yourself a bit more. Ask questions. Question answers. Don't take advice at face value. Adapt accordingly. (That's my view - don't take it as gospel). 

And....I'm back....

Well, that was a strange two or so years, wasn't it?

The last post I made on this site was August 2020. My journey to building income streams for "financial freedom" was taking a slow, meandering path. Too slow. So I stop chronicling it. I'd had enough of spinning the wheels.

Anyway, a lot has happened in the world since then. The pandemic properly kicked in globally and we were still waiting for a vaccine to be approved, the US found itself an even more elderly leader (not before a skirmish on Capitol Hill), Russia decided it was a great time for an invasion, and inflation has gone insane. It's been quite a period.

One thing that hasn't changed is my lack of additional income streams. That's not entirely true. My dividend strategy remains in place. I'm still selling a few ebooks. And I do the occasional paid writing gig. But there's no consistency. No structure. No uniforming narrative to drive me to the next level. 

So what I've decided to do is to use this blog to help me get clarity on my philosophy. Yes, it'll be a bit of self-indulgent noise. No, I'm not likely to monetize much here.

I just want to get in writing some of my thoughts. To shape a worldview that I can build upon. I don't exactly know how this will play out. I'm not even sure of the regularity. I just have this urge right now to try to define my "mission". 

I want to have some body of work that will provide the foundations for consulting / coaching / digital products (all of which I want to have as part of my future - at least, I think so...). At the very least, I'll get to practice thinking outside the box. 

So, here I am - starting here once again. It's been too long!