You are responsible for what happens to you

WEDNESDAY, 2 JANUARY 2019

I was on my way home on my bicycle after buying dinner. A blue truck blocked the entrance to the alley in which I wanted to go down. I went around the truck, knowing that I had to be careful because I couldn’t see who was coming down the alley on the other side of the truck. As I got to the other side, there was indeed a man on a scooter riding at high speed in my direction.

I thought: “If I collided with this guy, I would blame the driver of the blue truck.”

Then I thought: “No. It would have been your fault. It is your responsibility to consider and deal with such risks.”

As thoughts roll around in one’s brain, another thought struck soon after: Imagine you take this idea further, stating that you are always responsible for what happens to you. If someone breaks into your home in the middle of the night when you and your family are sleeping, you are responsible for that. How? You could have secured your home better. If you’re hijacked on the way home, you are responsible for that. Why were you in that place at that time of the day? What countermeasures did you have in place? If you did have countermeasures in place, it was clearly not enough.

It gets worse. If you get assaulted late at night … why didn’t you have a weapon with you? Why were you alone, in that place? Why didn’t you apply self-defence techniques? If you don’t know any self-defence techniques, why not?

It seems as if, with this kind of thinking, one wants to absolve the wrong-doer from his nefarious action or behaviour. Not at all. For example, if the man or woman being attacked in the street crushes the assailant’s testicles and he is never able to conceive children, then he did not fulfil his responsibility to himself. If he gets arrested, and he goes to jail and he is sexually abused by other prisoners, he can only blame himself for it.

The frightening aspect of this way of thinking is that you realise you can’t just blame someone else for your own accidents or hardships. When think about it for a second, you also realise that it means you have much more power in your hands than you might have imagined. The person who is afraid of being assaulted can immediately begin to look at weapons that can be carried on their person – from a gun to pepper spray. The responsible adult who wants to safeguard their home and family has the ability to do much better than they are likely doing at present. And the man or woman with criminal intentions who doesn’t want to be sexually abused in prison has the free will to not commit criminal acts.

Think along these lines, and you ultimately think of yourself as an agent of change, as someone with the abilities to rearrange the world to a large extent in a way that suits you. It also means that you will develop the character to accept responsibility when a lesser person would blame someone else.

WEDNESDAY, 9 JANUARY 2019

Exactly one week later …

SUNDAY, 27 JANUARY 2019

Another insight gained from a traffic situation …

One easily gets filled with bitterness about something other people do to you. And every time someone did something to you and got away with it, you feel even more powerless. And even more filled with bitterness.

“It’s your responsibility,” emerged the phrase again late this afternoon – specifically as a reminder that I had to walk closer to the side of a narrow alley to avoid getting flattened by one of the reckless scooter drivers.

Then I realised: Every time you think something that somebody else has done to you was your responsibility, you take power away from that person, and give it to yourself. You also give yourself more responsibility, to be honest, and more opportunity to be blamed for a situation. But you also give yourself more power to create your own life as you see fit, and more power to protect yourself from what threatens you.

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On religion, and the value delivered by a legend

SUNDAY, 30 DECEMBER 2018

11:00

Read an article this morning that argues that God is imagination – not like imagination, but that God is in actual fact Imagination.

Any case, the part that I really liked was the author’s classification of religion with science fiction, ghost stories, and astrology: “I was expelled from the Paradise of innocence that long ago summer, but imagination never abandoned me. It sank underground throughout my teen years in a voracious appetite for reading, especially science fiction, and hooked itself tenaciously to anything in popular culture that left it room to breathe — religion, ghost stories, astrology, the New Age …”

It reminded me that people who are believers, even in the most traditional sense, have a desire for something more – something beyond this sometimes boring, sometimes monotonous, sometimes horrible, and sometimes sad life. I can even see how such a person could see someone who doesn’t believe in God as one without imagination, even narrow-minded.

This is a positive view of religion – that it is creative, characteristic of a person with a lively imagination.

My problem with religion as I know it, and as it was taught to me as a child, is the strong association with prescriptions and doctrines, which simply must be believed if you want to escape eternal damnation. This manifestation of religion is all but creative – after all, it shows a bold red, ominous “No!” to anything that crosses the line. It does require imagination. It asks you to open your head (or your “heart”) and be prepared to believe in something you can’t see. However, it requires of you to use your imagination just enough to accept what the so-called holy texts prescribe, or what the authorities in the faith community teach you to believe. If you give your imagination free rein, you’re looking for trouble. The “truth” has already been “revealed” – why wonder about things that can only cause problems?

16:11

It’s a cloudy day, with the temperature in the low twenties. I’m in Kaohsiung’s West Bay (Sizihwan) – about 25 minutes from our apartment by bicycle, at the National Sun Yat-sen Alumni House – on the quay overlooking the Taiwan Strait. Except for the sea, my view also includes the great rock with the lighthouse on the peak – in my opinion one of Kaohsiung’s best natural attractions, the mountain at the university, and a variety of people.

My snacks include small tomatoes, a banana, and a filo dough cookie with butter and sugar on the inside that a student gave me on Thursday night. I started my audio session with two Wealth & Mindset podcast episodes, and then moved on to Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town.

All in all, it’s been my best Sunday bicycle outing of the year.

* * *

The second podcast episode I listened to spoke of value that one should deliver if you wanted to make money.

As I was listening to the first two Springsteen tracks afterward, I remembered what I had read what reviewers wrote about him when his debut album appeared in the early seventies: that his lyrics reminded them of Bob Dylan, and his singing style to that of Van Morrison. In other words, there was no Springsteen yet as people know him today, just someone who wrote songs like one well-known singer, and who sang like another famous singer.

What did he do? He kept writing songs, and he kept singing, and eventually found his own place in the sun.

But what made him a legend, not to mention millions of dollars? He created value over and over for people who paid to see him perform. He told stories. He sang his heart out. Unlike some groups or singers, he didn’t only come out on stage and sang his fifteen or twenty songs before he disappeared again. He would keep going night after night for three or four hours. And night after night, concert-goers felt they were experiencing something special.

That’s what Springsteen gave people. And that made him not only a creative and commercial success, it made him a legend.

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On time, writing, thoughts, books, my father, and tradition

WEDNESDAY, 5 DECEMBER 2018

Chris Rempel, a marketer whose newsletter I signed up for several years ago, says about time: “[In] business, focus as much on earning time as you do on earning money. And when the money does come in, use it to further guard your time by choosing investments that aren’t ‘jobs in disguise’.”

What that says to me is that you should, almost as a matter of routine, look at look how you spend the hours of each day, and have a conversation with yourself that looks like the following:

“Is there any way we can liberate that hour?”

“Which hour?”

“That one, between 18:00 and 19:00. Is there any way we can pay someone else to do what we do then? Or, isn’t there a better way to do what we do then? Or is there no other way we can get the same result (probably money) by doing something that takes up less of our time?”

SATURDAY, 8 DECEMBER 2018

What is my writing about?

I have a deep-seated need to understand myself, and also to understand the world in which I live out my daily existence, and to make as much of the one life I have as I possibly can.

Then, when I think I’ve sorted something out or received some decent insight, I have a strong need to share it with people. Writing has always registered in my head as a good way to do this.

WEDNESDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2018

Eventually, I would be able to say that the process of becoming financially independent has been enjoyable, stimulating, fulfilling, and extremely interesting, as virtually everything I have read and applied came down to improving myself.

THURSDAY, 13 DECEMBER 2018

First coherent thought after waking up this morning: “I have to change ‘just reasonable’ to ‘still reasonable’. (In reference to a title, “Did I swallow the red pill, or am I just reasonable?”)

Here I am now, a few hours later, and I still think it’s a good idea. But did I really get the idea the moment I woke up? I don’t think so. I think it was already in my mind yesterday, but too many other thoughts had blocked it. When I woke up this morning, there was no blockage – and the idea was exposed, in a manner of speaking.

Must be why so many people say good things about meditation.

SATURDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2018

I can summarise what I have learned about financial matters this year under three headings:

One: Financial intelligence: What is money? How do banks really do business? Where and how should you invest your money?

Two: Technical aspects of making receiving money: To open a business, follow these steps … or, to trade on the financial markets, start here …

Three: Wealth mindset – sorts under Positive Mindset/Positive Psychology

Useful to keep in mind when considering books about personal finances. Few books cover more than one of these areas.

TUESDAY, 18 DECEMBER 2018

My dad is ultimately my hero. In spite of setbacks that would have pushed many other men over the abyss, he simply picked himself up every time, and kept on walking. That is how I want to be. And not only did he keep walking, he did it with joy. And not with fake joy because he believes he should keep up appearances – I’m talking about a stubborn, resilient joy.

THURSDAY, 20 DECEMBER 2018

I’m reading [an Afrikaans book, the title of which translates as “Communion weekend over the years”] by Professor Bun Booyens. I once again realise: The religion of the Afrikaner involves a great deal of tradition – in fact, many folk traditions of the Afrikaner are religious in nature.

It therefore follows that when I abandoned the religious beliefs of my youth, I also renounced important traditions of the cultural group in which I was born and raised.

But what alternative did I have? Tradition is important – without it, it is more difficult to feel connected to your ancestors. But how could I continue to respect the religious traditions of my ancestors if its metaphysical foundation was no longer credible to me? I mean, is dishonesty a traditional value?

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Should you avoid negative news?

FRIDAY, 7 DECEMBER 2018

I always feel like you have to know what’s going on in the world so you can be prepared for when something bad happens, or if someone who wants to do you harm crosses paths with you. If you’re only focusing on the positive, you are going to be as unprepared for the negative as Maya or Inca villagers were when European soldiers walked into their towns with their coughing and sneezing 500 years ago.

Fact is, however, that millions of bad things happen every day – literally, millions of bad things. Violence occur between people behind closed doors; robberies and murder are committed; attacks take place on unsuspecting people; one person or group bullies another person on the Internet, or at school, at work, or on the playground; people cheat other people out of their hard-earned savings. What you see on the one or two news channels you watch, or in the one or two newspapers or websites you visit, is a drop in the bucket. So, if you want to keep abreast of bad things happening, why settle for a drop in the bucket? How much do you think that drop will prepare you if you’re in a situation where you may become the victim of a malicious person?

The other thing is this: If you focus on positive people, and positive environments, chances are that you will in any case avoid, as far as possible, people who’d want to do you harm, and you most likely won’t venture into environments where there is an elevated risk for something bad to happen.

In the end, you can’t control everything that happens to you. All of us are trapped on a rollercoaster ride to some extent. Or I should rather say, we are all trapped on some or other rollercoaster. You do have a choice where you sit, though, and you sometimes have a very good idea what rollercoaster takes what kind of turns.

A new year is almost on our doorstep, so it might be a good time for a resolution: Go through your social media, and through your other sources of information throughout the day, and purge what doesn’t help you lead or create a better life. And, perhaps more for myself, maybe less news during breakfast is also not such a bad idea.

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