Author: Brand Smit

Week 19, 2020

MONDAY, 4 MAY 2020

“We don’t have time for all this,” Bran Stark apparently says in the eighth season of Game of Thrones. “The Night King has your dragon. He’s one of them now. The Wall has fallen. The dead march south.”

Okay.

Since I was in high school, I thought studying Philosophy at university level was the pinnacle of profundity. “Isn’t that why people have been attending universities for 1,000 years?” I thought. “To study Truth and Meaning and Purpose of Existence!” That people go to university to learn how to be accountants, or engineers or dentists is simply not right. After all, these are things you can learn from being in the service of an accountant or engineer or dentist for seven years, as they did in the Middle Ages.

Seeing that I had already considered myself serious about things like Truth and Purpose of Existence in my late teens, I naturally wanted to study Philosophy, or at least Theology. It quickly became apparent that the only people who could study Philosophy were students with parents rich enough that they did not need to take subjects at university that could secure them a career.

After university I continued my own education. History of every direction the wind blows, language, geography, economics, even enough biology to understand how cells work. But Philosophy remained mostly mysterious. Over the years, a handful of Philosophy books have piled up in my bookshelf. And once or twice I managed to understand enough of something to incorporate it into my own writing (not sure if I completely understood the concepts, but it came in handy nonetheless).

One of many philosophers about whom you should never attempt an intelligent conversation with me is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). That’s where the quote from Game of Thrones comes in. Attempting to discuss Hegel’s philosophy is like talking to me about the popular TV series. To date, I’ve probably only seen one minute of one episode. What I know is picked up from what other people excitedly share with each other within hearing distance. If the conversation is about Game of Thrones, I’m the one with a mouth full of teeth. Same with Star Trek, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, or Lord of the Rings.

To be able to participate intelligently in a conversation about Hegel, you need to speak Hegelian fluently. As with Star Trek and other cult TV series or films, you’ll be caught out within a minute if you try to join the conversation without being one of the initiates. For example, on Hegel’s Wikipedia page you read: “Hegel’s principal achievement was his development of a distinctive articulation of idealism, sometimes termed absolute idealism, in which the dualisms of, for instance, mind and nature and subject and object are overcome.”

Say what?

The description continues as follows: “Of special importance is his concept of spirit (Geist, sometimes also translated as ‘mind’) as the historical manifestation of the logical concept – and the ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung, integration without elimination or reduction) – of seemingly contradictory or opposing factors: examples include the apparent opposition between necessity and freedom and between immanence and transcendence. Hegel has been seen in the twentieth century as the originator of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad.”

Now look, I have no reason to doubt that people who regard Hegel as an influential thinker really understand what he was talking about. If I could ever go so far as to decipher Hegel, it would indeed be a favourite pastime to expose false Hegel fans. I see myself at a barbecue, for instance, with a drink in one hand and a fork full of potato salad in the other asking a pretentious soul: “So which one of Phänomenologie des Geistes or Wissenschaft der Logik do you consider Hegel’s best early work?”

And if I did my homework properly, I wouldn’t drop the potato salad on my shoe if someone then stepped closer and asked me, “Do you agree with Maurice Merleau-Ponty who wrote that the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis all had their beginnings in Hegel?”

TUESDAY, 5 MAY 2020

Debate is one of the cornerstones of a free, democratic society. On the one end of the spectrum is fairly organised competition between two opponents, or between two teams, with rules, conventions, and even a referee ringing a bell. On the other hand, there is Twitter or Facebook, conversations around the barbecue fire or in a bar that ends with at least one person in the swimming pool or in jail, and discussions between friends and family that make the peacemakers in the kitchen or living room very nervous.

As much as I like a nice hot argument, I have to admit that the Wild West aspect of discussing politics or religion has been annoying me for some years. I can formulate a perfectly logical argument, but because the other person’s voice is of a higher pitch than mine, their illogical clatter is more audible than my logical mumble. And if my opponent also manages to throw in a light-hearted comment to win a little favour with the audience, I can just as well throw in the towel.

With politics these days it is almost worse than with religion. People have sorted themselves into camps, and eternal damnation will befall you if you don’t use the right vocabulary on the right topic – and no fence sitters are allowed! Want to ask more questions about climate change? There’s no time, Denier! The world is going to Hell because of people like you who don’t want to submit to Scientific Consensus! Want to suggest that Trump may perhaps not literally be Hitler? Don’t you know you are empowering the Orange Evil Incarnate with your middle-of-the-road rational approach?!

And on the topic of Trump – mention issues like Russia and Putin, or illegal immigration, or policies against China or the European Union or NATO, or the Kavanaugh saga, or the story of corruption in Ukraine, or the legality of the FBI’s actions towards Trump and the people who worked for him, and you enter a universe where there is apparently no documentary evidence of conspiracies against Trump or wrongdoing on the other side, no email or text message records, no single standard that applies to everyone, no facts. All that matters is what you believe, and with how much emotion you express your beliefs. If you believe X with enough emotion, it must be true. It simply has to be true. The opposite simply cannot be true. Our side simply cannot be wrong. The mere possibility is too painful …

What became of rules? What became of, “Let’s look at this like rational, calm adults”? What happened to “Oh, I didn’t know about that. If so, then I guess I’m wrong”?

When did politics become fundamentalist religion?

All of this almost makes one want to say: Don’t talk politics with me because you don’t accept the rules of the game.

“Rules of the game?” you might ask.

Yes, the rules that say, if I can prove beyond reasonable doubt with dates and references and logical deductions that X=X, you are not allowed to turn away and say it doesn’t matter.

One more thing: Just because I’m not singing in anyone’s choir, or just because I’m sceptical and I ask questions doesn’t mean you can hang a sign around my neck that says “ABC-XYZ Denier” or more repugnant labels. I ask again: When did this virus of religious fundamentalism infect so many people who used to be reasonable?

Last point: I’ve picked up another trend in the last few months. Someone will make a good point. Any reasonable person would listen to it and either agree or say something like, “You make a good point, but I still differ from you for the following reasons …” The trend now is to indicate that the good, reasonable point that one person made is a so-called “talking point” of the Evil Incarnate Eternal Enemy (formerly known as political opponents). Because it has been identified as a “talking point” of Green, Red can reject it outright, or because it is a “favourite talking point” of Pumpkin Eaters, there’s no need for Carrot Eaters to even consider it.

Hello? Is there anything left in your head from when you were a reasonable, thinking person? Just because Green or Red or Pumpkin or Carrot regularly makes a point in discussions on TV doesn’t make it an invalid point!

On any hot topic of the day, whether person or issue, I can see that I could be wrong. If you lay facts on the table that contradict what I know, with proper references, and you use logical reasoning, I would lay down my proverbial sword and admit you are right, and I am wrong. If you have to be honest with yourself, can you?

WEDNESDAY, 6 MAY 2020

I have a basic idea of the history of the Philippines: the original inhabitants of the islands, the Spanish takeover in the sixteenth century, the eventual conquest of the country by the US – although they saw it as the liberation of the land from Spanish rule, Japan’s temporary takeover during World War II, and the iron fist rule of Ferdinand Marcos that ended in 1986.

I’ve never had a great desire to visit the capital, Manila. The impression I get from TV is that it is a noisy, busy, dirty place. Just about everyone I know who has been to the Philippines either goes directly to the islands or they travel through Manila on their way somewhere else.

Pleasant was my surprise then when I read yesterday about the “Intramuros”, an 0.67 square kilometre historic area in the heart of modern Manila. During the Spanish colonial administration, this Walled City was the centre of political power, as well as the centre of religion, education and the economy. Development in the city in the early twentieth century had already taken a toll. Then, in February and March 1945, the Japanese took their last defensive positions, including in the historically important Walled City, to try and stop the American advance.

As might be expected, the Battle of Manila destroyed the city, and most of the historic buildings: “Filipinos lost an irreplaceable cultural and historical treasure in the resulting carnage and devastation of Manila, remembered today as a national tragedy. Countless government buildings, universities and colleges, convents, monasteries and churches, and their accompanying treasures dating to the founding of the city, were ruined. The cultural patrimony (including art, literature, and especially architecture) of the Orient’s first truly international melting pot – the confluence of Spanish, American and Asian cultures – was eviscerated. Manila, once touted as the ‘Pearl of the Orient’ and famed as a living monument to the meeting of Asian and European cultures, was virtually wiped out.”

THURSDAY, 7 MAY 2020

A few weeks ago I caught a song in a playlist of a Bulgarian DJ named Ahmet Kilic. I recognised it as a Metallica number, but only identified it today: “Fade to Black” from the band’s second studio album, Ride the Lightning, released in 1984.

The song – for lack of a better phrase – spoke to me. It wasn’t until I identified the title that I properly considered the lyrics:

Life, it seems, will fade away
Drifting further every day
Getting lost within myself
Nothing matters, no one else
I have lost the will to live
Simply nothing more to give
There is nothing more for me
Need the end to set me free

A little dark, but understandable given the singer’s background and emotions when he wrote the lyrics.

Anyway, the track seems to have become a staple at Metallica’s concerts, but here’s the studio version:

FRIDAY, 8 MAY 2020

I have finally ready a draft document, tentatively titled, “Covid-19: A Reading List”.

This is not the result of careful research. This is simply a series of articles I have read from March 2020, which I have bookmarked if I considered the information or opinion expressed within worth revisiting.

As everyone should know by now, the crisis that people in most countries of the world are currently experiencing is of a medical nature, with growing political and economic consequences. The articles on this list address all three aspects of the crisis.

Given that the crisis is apparently far from over, this list should expand over the coming weeks and months (hopefully not years).

Finally, because I am a South African living in Taiwan, there are some articles dealing with the situation specifically in these two countries.

Again, the link: https://www.brandsmit.com/covid-19-a-reading-list/

______________________

Week 18, 2020

MONDAY, 27 APRIL 2020

Seeing that I’m still working on my coronavirus reading list, something more mundane …

I just got back from the supermarket. I left, on foot, about twenty minutes before ten. The sidewalks were scattered with people. Some people were trying on shoes in the shoe store, others were closing stores. On one corner people were throwing bags in the garbage truck. At the next corner, groups of people were gathered around tables inside and outside the Family Mart. Here and there a parent with a child in hand. At the next corner, at the fourth of ten east-west streets running to the coast in Kaohsiung, I turned left.

The supermarket was still busy. In the fruit section, I picked two apples for our breakfast tomorrow morning. At the dairy fridge, a woman politely asked me in English to get her two boxes of low-fat brown rice milk from a high shelf. Shortly after, I grabbed my usual bottle of drinking yogurt, and on my way to pay remembered that I also needed oatmeal.

At the checkpoint, the only client in front of me was a young man with tattoos on his arms and legs. He was chewing betel nut, and paid for his dozen beers with a fresh NT$1,000 note.

As usual, I paid for my goods with the correct change, and sauntered the twelve minutes home.

TUESDAY, 28 APRIL 2020

Eleven o’clock at night is TV and snack time in our household. TV these days mostly means Netflix. And because I have a pathological inability to make snappy choices, we watch series rather than films.

We started last year with a Canadian-American series on time traveling called, Travelers. Then we watched a German series, also about time travel, called Dark. We followed that up with all the seasons of Big Bang Theory. Then we watched a French series about a man who discovered that a container that someone had wrongly delivered to his home was a portal to his own past – also dark, but not as dark as the German series where people discovered a portal in a cave outside their town. We also recently watched the Austro-German series Freud. The late nineteenth-century historical and political background was of course highly interesting, but the history and the somewhat fictional doings of the young Doctor Freud are not everyone’s cup of tea.

The series we are currently working on is an early 2000s series about a mother and daughter in a small town in Connecticut.

Here’s the thing: I have feelings about the main character – the mother. She’s supposed to evoke sympathy as a single mother and strong female figure, but she becomes more annoying with almost every episode. (I’m talking about the character now, not the actress who does an excellent job portraying the character.) At first I thought it was just me who think there’s something wrong with the woman, but a journalist at the time described the character of Lorelai Gilmore as “narcissistic and at times emotionally unstable, with strains of sociopathy”. A writer on a popular website referred to her “intense, overwhelming self-absorption”, and also opined that she is rude to people but always requires special treatment. Then there are her relationships with men. She and the owner of a local restaurant clearly have a good connection, but she ignores this and rather embarks on a string of relationships with men about whom she is not nearly as serious as they are about her. She even gets engaged to the one guy. When it becomes clear that she just wants to try out what it feels like to be on the verge of getting hitched, she breaks up with him – a few days before the wedding. A year or so later she’s disappointed that he seems to have gotten over his broken heart too quickly. And she speaks incessantly; she’s frivolous, and incredibly selfish. She’s driving me nuts! The creators of the character deserve some serious credit. After all, they could have gone for an underdeveloped, but safer character.

Anyway, it’s time for my late night cup of tea, and another episode of Gilmore Girls.

WEDNESDAY, 29 APRIL 2020

Old readers will know that the bits of text I’ve been producing since last week are not my first literary endeavours. But for the five or six new readers who haven’t yet cast an eye on some older pieces, I decided to give a quick overview of the seven collections I made available for free in 2017 and 2018.

The first volume was In the grip of heretics – or, The Christian, a volume on religion, arguments against fundamentalism, and options for the unbeliever. Not a table, a dog or a pencil is about identity and other questions about human existence. Time doesn’t really fly is a collection of pieces on topics that couldn’t fill a bundle on their own. The real, or non-real purpose of our existence is, as the title suggests, about the potential why’s of our existence. In As long as you remain standing I try to convince the reader that it is better to remain standing, and if you stumble, to get up again. The title of the next volume, The necessary unpleasantness, exposes my feelings at one point about the need to make money. The adult life is about my modest efforts to survive the challenges most adults face. Bundle 8 – On writing and the writer is still in the pipeline, but almost ready.

As I mentioned, the bundles are available for free in PDF at Archive.ORG. In case you wanted a printed copy or wanted to read it on your Kindle, you can purchase it from Amazon.COM. There are one or two changes I still want to make, and the introductions still need work if I have to be honest, but they are nonetheless available as they are.

THURSDAY, 30 APRIL 2020

[Initially just a note to myself. I should have known the piece was going to become another round of public self-criticism.

Quick explanation: Hundreds of thousands of people bet on a daily basis on horse racing in Britain. Betfair.com provides a platform where people place bets, but also where people can offer prices that are better than can be found at other bookmakers. This buying-and-selling of prices takes place quickly enough, especially in the last five to ten minutes before a race begins, and at large enough volumes – sometimes over a million dollars per race – that one can make money trading the prices, as in a stock market. This process is known as pre-race trading.]

Almost three years have passed, and to be honest, I still haven’t processed what went wrong with my once promising pre-race trading project.

By 2013, I was aware that over the previous few years I had failed to focus for long enough on one project to generate a stable income from it. I had been interested in making money from sports and statistics for some time, and had read about people like Paul Shires of TradeShark who discovered Betfair trading in 2008 and quit his job by 2010 to trade tennis full-time. At the beginning of 2014, I read Caan Berry’s PDF on pre-race trading, and although I wasn’t impressed with the quality of the manual, I thought pre-race trading looked like the type of project I wanted to focus on until I mastered it. You could start with nothing more than $200 in your account, and all the action took place over three hours during the UK afternoon – between 9pm and midnight in Taiwan.

And did I focus! Over the next two years, I spent hundreds of dollars on more training – videos, PDF tutorials, online seminars. I watched dozens of videos, and read enough on the topic to compile six documents with notes.

By mid-2017, I had lost steam, and shortly thereafter stopped completely. I did not say out loud that I was going to stop; I just knew I needed a break. Initially, the break was only a few days. After three weeks, I restarted the software and traded a few meetings. But the interest was gone. And the same problems resurfaced.

What then was the problem? The software (Geeks Toy) with which one trades pre-race was honestly outstanding. There was hardly a move or money-flow that wasn’t displayed in some way. You could see in several ways how the price was moving, where the price had been, where it was likely going, and what was going on in the other “markets” – that is, the other horses in the race.

As complex as it was – with every horse in the race actually forming its own market, but all the prices also integrating into one big market, namely the race, and as stupid as I had shown myself to be with numbers, I had managed to get a grip on most of it by the end of 2016. Why didn’t I make money with it?

Two reasons: I frequently failed to close my trades before the race began – which meant you suddenly found yourself in a totally different market, with prices jumping wildly, big gaps in prices, and the strong possibility that your entire account can be wiped out in seconds if you’re not careful. This problem was easy to identify. The real problem was that I was not successful enough in the five to ten minutes before the races started. As I again surveyed this morning the screenshots I took of some races, I once again realised that the problem was not that I didn’t understand what was going on. The problem was that I couldn’t get in often enough at a price at which I knew I needed to get in, and I couldn’t exit often enough at a price where I knew I had to get out. Speed was the problem. It was either my computer’s processing of the software, or my Internet connection, or my reaction. Whatever it was, I was too slow.

In a Word document in which I regularly made notes about my trading activity, I wrote the following on Thursday, 11 May 2017: “People think pre-race trading, especially scalping, is about horse racing, because of the ‘race’ part, or that it is about trading. What they often don’t realise before they’ve already spent a lot of money and a lot of time trying to master it and make some money is that it is in fact a video game. And if you’re not good at playing video games, especially fast ones where things change quickly, you will lose a lot of money, and waste a lot of precious time.”

FRIDAY, 1 MAY 2020

The first area of Kaohsiung where I lived when I arrived here in January 1999 was Fengshan – actually a city in her own right back then, but since 2010 a district. Fengshan is indeed much older than the city of which she is now a part. Kaohsiung was just a small fishing village until Japan took over the island in 1895, but Fengshan had already been an important administrative centre by the late eighteenth century.

On New Year’s Day we visited some historical places in my old district. In a former school for prospective government officials, now a museum known as Fongyi Academy, I came across a model of late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century Fengshan.

The first photo is of the whole town. Interesting to mention that the most important streets in modern Fengshan were laid out on the original dusty roads. The second photo shows where my first neighbourhood was – just across the river, on the outskirts of town.

For more photos of Taiwan, and other places, follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brandsmit.taiwan/

* * * * * * * * * * *

NEXT WEEK: The virus reading list … and other pieces of text.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Week 17, 2020

MONDAY, 20 APRIL 2020

This week sees a new project: A weekly piece on my two journal sites (this one and BrandSmit.NET).

I plan to add something every day – hopefully interesting or useful, or perhaps educational.

By the end of this week, my regular readers (there must be one or two; surely not all my readers are bots from Ukraine or Russia) would either have something new to enjoy, or I’ll quietly change this post to “Draft” or “Under review” and delete it completely after a few weeks.

That’s it for now, seeing that it’s already Tuesday morning, at 43 minutes past midnight.

TUESDAY, 21 APRIL 2020

What drove me to do this (I’m already asking on just the second day of my project)? Here I sit and type falsely that it’s still Tuesday, 21 April whilst the silence in the alley confirms what the clock in the right corner of my computer screen is saying: That it is already Wednesday, and already almost a good quarter past one … and I was already half asleep hours ago on the train on my way home.

In these weekly “newsletters” I also plan to play curator and mention good content I discover in other corners of the Internet between Monday morning and Sunday night. One or two snippets of text on Twitter have caught my attention, but the most useful video I’ve watched so far was one of just over two hours – a lecture by a former Goldman Sachs trader about the pitfalls in which ninety percent of people trying to make money from home by trading on the financial and stock markets fall every day. Very interesting. Still have to finish watching it – the mountain of vegetables I call my dinner wasn’t massive enough last night that I could finish watching the entire video in one sitting.

Anyway, I’m practically lying with my face on the keyboard, so I’m done for now.

WEDNESDAY, 22 APRIL 2020

Before I started looking into trading on Forex and other markets, I had spent some years learning sports betting – waging money in calculated risks, aiming for a slight profit margin.

My way of trading is similar to sports betting in that I use small stakes, with limited exposure. I don’t buy and hold shares before I sell them. I enter buy or sell contracts before exiting the trade after some period of time (could be thirty minutes later, or two weeks later). I wage money on a calculated risk that a particular price is going to go up or down, based on certain criteria. I don’t know that a price is going to go up or down, and I don’t predict that it will do this or that. Because I don’t predict, and I don’t make public any opinion, I won’t feel embarrassed if it goes the wrong way. I won’t feel like a fool for making a certain prediction. I therefore won’t feel like the market “owes” me something, or that I need to get back at it for taking something from me.

I understand that I take calculated risks. I know before I enter a trade what the maximum risk is that I am willing to take. In some cases I also know where I would likely be getting out.

Is this what professional traders do at hedge funds and investment banks? Not sure. I’ve never sat down with one for a chat. I am definitely curious to know what they do and how they manage their portfolios. Maybe after watching more videos like the one about Anton Kreil “annihilating” retail brokers and “trading educators”, I might change how I trade. He does strike one as the proverbial “real deal”, and I am certainly always open to learning and improving what I do.

So, here’s a link to what I already predict would be my video of the week (it was either this or an animated video about how long people stayed alive after being guillotined). It is a seminar by the aforementioned Anton Kreil, of the Institute of Trading and Portfolio Management:

https://youtu.be/L7G0OfJUON8

It’s slightly over two hours long, so I suggest, if you are interested in this, to make some time to watch it with the attention it deserves.

THURSDAY, 23 APRIL 2020

13:04

This morning, as I was making breakfast, I had a passing thought about how N. and I need to renew our passports within the next two years. Then I thought about Taiwanese citizenship. Next thought was about one of the requirements a foreigner has to fulfill before they can apply for Taiwanese citizenship, namely to have a Chinese name.

The way one decides on a name is usually to go through Chinese words and surnames, and then to choose a three-character combination that sounds okay, with a meaning when thrown together that wouldn’t cause a bank clerk or a traffic cop to burst out laughing when you tell them your local name.

Now, I have played around with one or two names over the years – I’ve been both a Mr. Chen and a Mr. Bu. The latter was derived from the name most people call me, “Brand”, which is pronounced in Chinese as “Bu-lan-de”.

Nevertheless, this morning I thought of coming up with a name that would derive from my first baptismal name: Barend.

After reviewing the Far East 3000 Chinese Character Dictionary, I provisionally decided on …

Fairly easy to write; the “Ba” is actually an obscure Chinese surname, and “Ren-de” means something along the lines of charity or goodwill.

A quick Google search provided three examples of these three characters as a name. One is of a village in the Netherlands named, Barendrecht. The second case is of a man named “Barende” who did not want to listen to his grandfather, and the third reference translates loosely as follows: “When I came to Barende’s house again, his family was waiting there, and several monks were chanting. Seeing me coming, his family’s eyes were full of hostility. Angry, they also punched my child.”

So, that’s it, for now. I first have to introduce myself as “Mr. Ba ” to a few people in public. If they don’t burst out laughing hysterically – or worse, I’ll know I have a winner.

14:18

By the way, whilst taking in my daily dose of numbers and opinion on the virus this morning, I was reminded of the childhood rhyme, “Ring-a-ring-a-roses”. I thought again how interesting it was that the rhyme, according to tradition, had been transmitted from one generation to the next for almost 700 years – since the Black Death in the fourteenth century.

Seconds later, I was on Wikipedia, where I was informed that the medieval origins were, according to experts, probably nonsense.

Several reasons are raised against the notion that the rhyme dates back to the fourteenth, or the seventeenth century, including that the story about its earlier origins only started making the rounds after World War II, that the symptoms described in the rhyme – such as the ring on the skin – apparently don’t correspond with those of the Plague, and that European and nineteenth-century versions of the rhyme suggest that the “fall” in the last line was not a literal fall, but a curtsy or a bow, which was common in other dramatic singing games.

And so another old belief bites the dust.

FRIDAY, 24 APRIL 2020

Latest episode of the recurring dream (“On time, but I couldn’t prove who I was”; “Managing to get my stuff together”): I am once again in a house in South Africa, preparing to return to Taiwan the next day. I look around the room: too many suitcases standing around; too many containers that need to be filled (or that can be filled). Another problem is with my clothes. I’ve just washed it, so it’s not dry yet. I also remember that I haven’t bought “South African groceries” yet, and time is running low.

Then there’s the young guy who shows me his portfolio of designs. I look at it politely, and make positive comments, but he shows a lack of respect by putting his feet on the table as I look at his work. I think to myself, in the dream, “What’s the point anyway? The guy’s just going to get an office job.”

What does this all mean? I do have an idea though that the “wet laundry” refers to this new project of mine where I publish text for everyone to see before going through it a dozen times.

* * *

NEXT WEEK: My opinion on the virus, stay-at-home orders, and a list of articles and other pieces of content that have formed my opinion on the subject since February.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

SATURDAY, 4 JANUARY 2020

I’m bored with the whole idea of, “But I’m not an entrepreneur or a business person! What if I do something wrong?”

You almost feel like saying to such a person: “Tell you what? Just take this one small step. You don’t have to do anything else.”

Future-successful entrepreneur takes one small step.

“Wow, what do you know?” you respond. “Your head didn’t explode! Okay, take one more step. Now, to be honest, your head might explode with this one, so I’m going to stand back just a little bit …”

Future-successful entrepreneur hesitates, then takes another small step.

“Wow!” you exclaim again. “You’re practically an entrepreneur! And look! Your head is still in one piece!”

MONDAY, 13 JANUARY 2020

My word of the week: Unlock.

To unlock the potential to be something, or to do something, it is a prerequisite to believe that there is potential behind the lock – otherwise why bother?

Then it usually requires a limited set of actions: Find the right key; put the key in the lock; turn the key – to the right side! – and open the door.

And there you have it: Your new reality.

WEDNESDAY, 22 JANUARY 2020

Sometimes unsure of a new reality?

Just close your eyes.

“But what if I …” you protest.

Close your eyes.

“But I’m …”

Close them!

“I …”

Close!

A few seconds later: Okay, open your eyes. How does it feel?

“Well …” you begin.

Give it a few days.

* * *

A few days later.

How does the new reality feel now?

“All right,” comes your reply. “I thought it would be more of an adjustment, but you know what?”

You’re already used to it?

______________________