Caution: This will be a long one
Time and effort are of limited supply, these are essential ingredients in any constructive endeavor.
Throughout the course of life, demands on our time and effort will be made by employers, employees, customers, colleagues, relationships and many other components that make up the sum total of our experience. Each one of these components have objectives that don’t necessarily match our own, inevitably leading to some shortcomings and the resultant conflicts.
A few examples
- When performance at work suffers, one has to deal with an angry boss who demands more
- When attention at home suffers, one has to deal with a spouse who feels neglected
- To get ahead in your profession, one has to beat back some colleagues who won’t give us any love thereafter
Managing each one of these components in isolation is possible, managing all of them well together, at the same time is next to impossible. Doing a good job at each one of these demands/responsibilities is a local maxima, the sum total of all these local maxima is a global maxima. The problem is that these components have complex interlinkages which aren’t additive in nature. Attempting to maximize aspect 1 and aspect 2 might be possible because they are additive to one another, but then you end up minimizing aspect 3 which may not be additive.
This global maxima equation varies from person to person, the structure of your equation might be very different from mine. A factor that is a 10% weight in your equation might be a 40% weight in mine.
You alone know how to maximize this equation for yourself. It is futile to pursue local maxima, unless one knows how this impacts the global maxima.
The problem is that very few know what their individual global maxima equation is. If you don’t know the very structure of the equation, how can you maximize it?
The devious ways of some systems and their social conditioning rest on the premise that the more they keep individuals from discovering this equation for themselves, the more these individuals’ time and effort can be harnessed into doing things that lead to a global maxima for the system.
Systems do not care about individuals, that is how they become systems. The unstated goal of any system is to keep the individual disposable while extracting the best out of the said individual. Once your utility level to the system is exhausted, the system drops you and moves on.
An example from the business world. CEO XYZ was front page news for almost a decade, the system (the organization) let the game continue as long as the weather was fine. The moment the weather turned foul, XYZ was sent packing and all the ills of the system were blamed on XYZ thereby allowing the system to cleanse away all of its passive sins.
Does the CEO not report into the Board? What is the penalty for these board members who allowed these sins through their silence?
Hush, thou shalt not ask these questions.
When Bruce Wayne becomes the Batman, it is an implicit acknowledgement of this. Anyone can become the Batman, but the Batman as a symbol has to be bigger than the individual who dons the mask and the cape. You can eliminate the individual but you cannot kill the symbol.
The king is dead, long live the king.
One possible answer….
Develop a sense of conscious self-interest that takes precedence over what the world expects of you. Does not mean that you become self-centered and do not care about others, just that you put yourself and your objectives first most of the time.
Contrary to what we believe, the pressure to meet expectations and to keep others happy keeps us from achieving our objectives many a time.
People hang around in the careers they hate not because they don’t have the guts to walk away, but because they don’t have the conviction to put their personal interest above that of their dependents.
People hang around in meaningless relationships that contribute nothing to their lives because society conditions them to believe that they are bad people if they walk out of relationships.
People get into 20-year financial liabilities (read home loans) not because they want to, but because they succumb to the subtle emotional pressure their spouse and family put them under.
Become a work horse and keep doing things you do not care about, so that someone else can sleep in peace. If you question this, you are a selfish human being. Thus, goes the narrative.
Once we spend a few minutes looking back at some of our past decisions and our true motivations for the same, this pattern will show up.
Achilles to his young cousin in the movie Troy “Don’t waste your life following some fool’s orders”.
Achilles cared most about his objectives, which were fame as the best warrior that ever lived and his legacy. He fought because he wanted to, not because his king expected him to. He did fight some battles when his fellow men needed him, but he was doing that as a favor, he wasn’t fighting out of a misplaced sense of duty. He did not care about his allegiance to any king or empire.
Conscious self-interest in its purest form. He did not owe the world anything, he also expected nothing in return. He would earn his stripes by excelling at what he did.
If you see the world through the value lens, all of this ties in pretty well.
There was a time when every well-wisher of mine indirectly told me I lacked ambition and was capable of achieving more. Little did these folks know that I was running a difference race altogether, their definition of ambition was a bit narrow in my opinion. Focusing on career growth would have meant spending a lot of time doing impression management and signing up for initiatives at work to improve my visibility. I actively shunned all of these because I wanted to invest every hour I could into becoming a better investor. A multibagger stock looked more appealing to me than a promotion. A promotion or a better job comes along once in three years but you can hit multiple home runs as an investor in the same year, and it is a replicable process to boot.
My bosses and well-wishers expected more from me but I always put my objectives above what the system expected of me.
My objective was to be independent and to enhance the amount of control I have over my own time. Not to live up to expectations, which are misplaced.
At the age of 45 I do not want to waste my time executing someone else’s vision and trade my time for money.
Not caring about some local maxima played an important role in me getting closer to my global maximum. Principles of reduction work not just in investing, they work pretty well in other aspects of life too.
One could say that my global maxima equation looks superficial and meaningless, but to each his own. Financial independence is just the beginning of many other things, not the end point by itself.
