Tag: Humility

Don’t Play the Status Game

When I first started door-to-door sales one of my biggest motivators was to gain recognition for my work and become respected as a good salesman.

I had bought into the status game. It’s easy to do, because in the hierarchical nature of humanity, seeking status has benefits – you feel more important, and your self-image increases.

But the problem with the status game is that it is a zero-sum game. To rise in the status rankings you need to overtake someone else. There’s two ways to do that: you being better or other people being worse. In my job, I was always working to overtake the salesperson above me and stay ahead of the salesperson behind me. I was hoping to make more sales than them – if I made no sales, I would secretly hope that they wouldn’t make any either, or I would be further behind in the rankings. If I was doing well, I would distance myself to try to stay in the zone, instead of offering to help the other reps with any insights that I thought would help them.

Another problem of the status game is that it is relative. You could be doing very well by your own standards, but if everyone else is better, you can feel a little inadequate. You are low status in this high-performing team but if you were in a different team you would be the best.

The key: Stop playing the status game. It’s difficult because it’s human nature, but staying humble and not worrying about status, and building others up can create a better environment to live and work in. You start to tune into others’ needs instead of constantly thinking about your own. In an odd sense, you might still end up getting the credit and recognition you were looking for the whole time.

How to Increase Job Security and How Much You Get Paid

If you feel underpaid at work, the reason is simple – you’re replaceable. You’re dispensable. There are some types of jobs where you know if you left today, there would be a replacement for you ready and waiting and happy to pick up the slack that you’ve left.

You feel like you’re wasting your time – getting paid too little for a job that you know that most relatively able people can do, or at least get taught to do without too much time and effort.

So what can you do about it? One option is to try and find a more specialized job that involves skills that are more valuable and less common. But what if you have no unique or valuable skills? Then it’s time to start learning, either in your own time or by securing a new job with pure enthusiasm, humility and a hunger to learn.

The other option is to stay in your industry, but to find ways of adding value to your company that you know no-one else can do. This can be by building relationships with people outside your organization, so that you become the channel through which correspondence is made. This can be through learning the ins and outs of the industry, and keeping up with current trends where other members of your company may have dropped the ball. You could offer to take responsibility of big projects, so much so that if you left, the project would be almost impossible to see through. Find specific skills within the scope of your role that you can do better than not only everybody else in the company, but everybody else you know.

Either way, the key to job security and getting paid well is not only your value to the company but your indispensability. Become indispensable to the point where you know it would take weeks or months of headhunting to be able to find someone that could even come close to replacing what you were able to do for your organization’s success.

The Dalai Lama’s Eight Pillars of Joy

At the end of the day, human beings just want to be happy. So how do we do it? The Dalai Lama tells us how in The Book of Joy.

Perspective: Take a step back and view your situation from a variety of angles. Reframe it positively. Understand that things that may seem difficult now will seem unimportant in a few years’ time. Shift from focusing on I and me and mine to we and us and ours. Move away from self-centeredness into viewing the world as interdependent.

Humility: Lose the labels and simply regard yourself as a fellow human being – one of seven billion. When we view each other as the same, we understand how much we have in common. Just like in nature, growth begins in the low places, and being humble means you are willing to learn. Thinking that you’re special leads to isolation and loneliness. Instead, think of yourself as essential. Humility isn’t the same as timidity – still take responsibility to use your gifts to help others and share with the world.

Humor: Laugh at yourself and don’t take yourself too seriously. It punctures your own sense of self-importance. Humor is an effective way of dealing with the anxiety and stress of uncertainty in life.

Acceptance: Let go of the expectations of how life should be and just accept what is. Let go of the attachment to a goal or method, because in the end we don’t control the result. Instead focus on doing your best.

Forgiveness: Forgiveness doesn’t mean that we accept or approve of wrongdoing, it’s choosing not to develop anger or hatred and remembering the humanity of the person doing wrong. Forgiveness is the only way to heal ourselves and be free from the past – until then, someone else will hold the keys to our happiness, and that person will be our jailor.

Gratitude: It’s easy to forget how much we can be grateful for, starting with the opportunity of simply being alive right now. Feeling gratitude simply makes us happy. It makes us accept reality and give thanks for everything that has led us to this point.

Compassion: This is probably the core of the Dalai Lama’s teachings. The more time you end up thinking of yourself, the more you suffer. Think of how you can bring joy to others, and as a by-product joy will appear for you. Compassion makes our heart healthy and happy. Wish for the happiness and joy in all sentient beings.

Generosity: They say money doesn’t bring happiness. But spending money on other people does. Being generous makes us happy. In giving, we receive happiness. Sit loosely with your wealth and status – we are simply stewards of these positions and possessions and be generous. But don’t view generosity as a burden, give with joy. That too, is a great gift.

The Psychology of Money: Morgan Housel’s Finance Tips

Morgan Housel recently wrote The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness. No matter how we think about it, managing our own money and trying to build wealth is a game of emotions. Here’s a summary of the main points:

Go out of your way to find humility when things are going right, and forgiveness/compassion when they go wrong. The journey of building wealth is based on risk and luck. Remind yourself that the journey of investing is filled with ups and downs and to be ready for that emotionally.

Less ego, more wealth. Building wealth is simply spending less than you earn. Richness is buying cars, houses and boats. Wealth is what you don’t see – it’s money saved/invested instead of spent. The hardest financial skill is to get the goalposts to stop moving – life isn’t any fun without any sense of “enough”.

Manage your money in a way that helps you sleep at night. If you’re finding that you can’t sleep at night because you’re risking too much investing, you need to rethink your strategy. You may know it’s the “right” strategy, but if you can’t manage it emotionally, you may need to accept a lower risk and lower return by holding a higher percentage of your net worth in cash, or choosing lower risk strategies.

If you want to do better as an investor, the single most powerful thing you can do is increase your time horizon. Time is the most powerful force for growing your wealth. Be patient, and be in it for the long game like Ronald Read and Warren Buffett. In other words, just shut up and wait!

Become okay with a lot of things going wrong. You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune. Having money in the market means you have to accept that on some days you may lose money, even as much as 30% or more of what you have invested. But if you can use the barbell strategy and invest in some assets with huge upside potential, you can still afford to be wrong most of the time while building wealth.

Use money to gain control over your time. Money means freedom. Being able to do what you want, when you want, with who you want is one thing that having money can bring.

Be nicer and less flashy. You may think people will like and respect you more based on your possessions, but in reality being more compassionate and kind works better. Make sure that when you’re buying possessions it’s for the right reasons – spending money to show people how much money you have is the fastest way to have less money.

Save. Just save. You don’t need a specific reason to save. Saving for something like a car or a down-payment for a house is good, but save as a default strategy too. Who knows what expenses can crop up as a surprise, wouldn’t it make more sense to be financially ready when they crop up?

Define the cost of success and be ready to pay it. The cost of success in investing is the uncertainty, the doubt, and the fear of losing some of your money. But if you want to play the game you need to see those things as a fee for participating. If you’re not willing to pay it, you may be better off just holding everything in cash and settling for a 0% return.

Worship room for error. You never want to be in a position where you could lose all your money, or losses in the market affecting the lifestyle that you live. If you lose a little you can still recover. If you lose it all, you have no money left, and you’ve been ejected from the game with no bankroll to buy back in. Avoid ruin at all costs.

Avoid the extreme ends of financial decisions. The more extreme your financial decisions, the more likely you may regret them if your goals and desires change at a later date. Good investing is less about making good decisions than it is about consistently not screwing up. You can afford not to be the best investor in the world, but you can’t afford to be a bad one.

You should like risk because it pays off over time. But you should be afraid of too much risk that would ruin your chances of winning the overall game.

Define the game you’re playing. Remember that everyone has their own unique financial goals based on the lifestyle and life goals they have. You don’t even necessarily have to compare yourself to overall market returns either. Just choose a strategy that you’d be happy with, without looking at other people and what they’re doing.

Respect the mess. There’s no single right answer in building wealth. Just find out what works for you.

Want to read more on investing? Read about Benjamin Graham’s value investing philosophy.

Imposter Syndrome: How Can You Use Doubt Positively?

We’ve all been taught that doubt is bad. Doubt is weakness. Doubt means you don’t believe in yourself or your ideas. Doubt is less persuasive, doubt is insecurity.

But what about arrogance and overconfidence? A mixture of ignorance and conviction in people can be dangerous – in the past, it led to the 2008 global financial crisis and the Brexit referendum.

In his book Think Again, Adam Grant defines imposter syndrome as competence exceeding confidence. On the other side, armchair quarterback syndrome is where confidence exceeds competence. The sweet spot is somewhere in between.

However, Grant argues that it’s better to err on the side of imposter syndrome. The humility of knowing that we can be wrong and fallible would probably have prevented the disasters mentioned above. With a healthy sense of doubt, Wall Street officials maybe would have stopped contributing to a broken system of bad debt leading to the collapse of the housing market in 2008. Prime Minister David Cameron was so confident of a Remain vote in the Brexit referendum that he felt forced to resign when the public voted in the opposite direction.

A potential benefit in imposter syndrome is that it drives us to work harder and to get better. If we don’t feel like we deserve the role or adulation we have been given, we may be motivated to prove ourselves even more. More importantly, imposters seem to learn better, seek out insight from others, and have the humility to know that they don’t know everything.

In some ways, it makes more sense that confidence should come as a result of competence increasing. Personally, my confidence got shattered quite quickly when I started in sales because I thought I was going to be much better than I actually was. Because my confidence was so high to begin with, it was pretty destructive, but luckily I still had the self-belief that maybe I could improve and finally see some results.

Grant advises us to be both confident and humble. Have faith in your strengths but also be aware of your weaknesses. Be confident in yourself but also have the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. Learning can be never-ending if you choose it to be.