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.