Hindsight + Foresight = Insight

It was my 30th birthday yesterday. I have never been one for big parties, but deciding that it's a milestone, my wife and I organised a poker night for some close friends and ended up having an amazing time. 

I am listening to a second audiobook at the moment, "Start" by Jon Acuff. This is the same author that I had referenced in previous posts. His stuff was recommended to me by a friend. He has an engaging way of communicating, and even though the content is not life-changing, it is thought provoking enough to keep listening. 

His idea in this book is about following your dream... I think. He goes on about finding the thing you really enjoy and discovering that which brings meaning to your life and then how to pursue this life's purpose from beginner to expert level. 

Let me take a step back before I get to him, and get to what I want to talk about. 

I was driving in the car on the day before my birthday. I haven't had any depressing thoughts about being 30 until it dawned on me that I was on the last day of my 20's. I started to think about the last decade and realised that the me that I have got to know as a twenty-something is on the cusp of fading into history. Danie will never be a twenty-something again. That is a weird feeling. 

I was having this thought and was calmed by Jon who was babbling into my earphones that your twenty's are about learning. A time of your life where you would have done your studies and have jumped from one interest to another. You would have had a couple of jobs but you would have a better idea of what you are good at at the end. You have a whole bunch of experiences that you can sift through to find out what your talents are, what makes you happy, what makes you unhappy, what you suck at etc. 

He continued that the next phase of life is the editing phase. This means you that learning has brought you to a point where you know what the handful of things are that you can see yourself doing in life. Your passions. In the editing phase you hone in on these and start applying yourself more intentionally. You become better at the things you want to spend time on and you leave behind the things you have tried and just didn't fit.

This made me not feel so bad as I realised that I had undergone this process and that I'm now at a pretty decent jumping off point for the editing phase. I never wanted to believe that music would only be a hobby and not a profession. At 20 I refused to believe I wasn't going to be a career musician. At 30 I am extremely grateful that I am not a career musician. I have rediscovered an interest in mathematics and I had also realised that, as enjoyable as teaching was, I did not want to make a career out of education.

Thanks Jon. You saved me from not having an answer, or excuse, for myself as I sat thinking about this last day of 20's. 

Later that day I told my mom about this strange feeling, jokingly asking her if there is anything to do on the sunset of your 20's! Much later she told me that a friend of hers just found out that his wife had only 3 months left to live, and how this is so similar, but also has such a sad, sharp contrast to my feeling.

Wow. So terrible how jumping from "what do I do with the last day of my twenties' to "what do I do with the last three months of my life." 

I won't pretend that I know in any way what that it feels like to stare finality straight in the face like that. But with me looking back at my twenties and then having the realisation that life definitely is finite made me feel like I had a clear view for a moment of a person's journey. 

I haven't given it much more thought than that. I will be thinking of my mom's friends often though. Stories like that do something strange to me  and I keep thinking about how no one knows how they must feel, or at least very few do. This won't stop their story from playing out in public, and the group of people that they interact with taking part in their tragedy, whether they want it or not. Some onlookers will be empathetic and others insensitive, while others will just be human. Placeholders of the population, just like they should be. But the degree of suffering must be so great, hurt so much and make them feel so lonely. 

Back to the moment. 

Simply, we need to be the analyst (have hindsight) and the entrepreneur (have foresight) to have clarity in the moment (have insight). This is what I am discovering at work these days. My boss had some figures that the group had all decided were our targets for the financial year. They were great targets and they were very intelligently broken down into the different arms of the sales business where the money was going to come from. 

In the last week I spent some time working backwards from these targets, but I simultaneously played a numbers game where I looked at which metrics needed to change in order for these targets to be reached. I discovered that some drastic changes in the status quo were required. There was great tension between two specific figures. The numbers of transactions per month and the average transaction size. 

The assumption was made that the average transaction size was going to be larger. But how much larger is something that wasn't really addressed. If frequency of transactions increased, then the transaction size was relieved of some of the pressure. 

I shared this with our team and it felt like we were seeing things through new eyes. A new urgency hit our department of what needs to be done to make sure the targets are achieved. 

If we only have hindsight we will never dream. If we only have foresight we will only be dreamers. If we have both then we transform into exactly what the moment needs us to be. We have the wisdom of the past and the vision for the future. 

I think about the past. I hope it has taught me what I needed to learn. I am a natural analyst and I struggle to dream. I have to now start dreaming and then I will be able to edit my life and find more in the next decade than I expect at this moment in time. I hope that if I then find myself in the sad situation of my mothers friends, hopefully years from now, the tragedy will feel defeated by a story of purpose when I look back. It will still be sad and will still hurt. Death is mercilessly awkward and desperately cruel in its finality. I would like to think however, like a curtain drawn back to let some sunlight in, that I wouldn't have regrets in how I have loved and how I have lived. I hope that the warmth of loving relationships and living life with meaning will make that moment one where I don't feel like fate is bullying me, but one where I am standing in a room filled with souvenirs of a good life. 

Freelance living

I am listening to a great audiobook at the moment, Quitter by Jon Acuff.

For those who know his story, can I please say that I started blogging before I got this book. I hope this makes me look less lame.

There are many awesome pieces of wisdom in his book, carried across in a relaxing conversational style. Only one of these nuggets I want to write about today and expand on slightly.

Jon discusses his previous job before his dream job and starts talking about how he was stealing from work when it came to work hours. His employers paid him to work for a certain amount of time but his blogging ended  up leaking into his work time. Excuses like 'I can do the work they need me to do in less time' and 'my real passion is the one that's more important' both rob your employer of funds that they are spending on you per hour. If we were the employer it would be very easy for us to agree that those reasons are total BS.

I started thinking about what my employer pays me to do and my attitude towards it.

Let me give you some background into what I do for a living. I work at a company that buys foreign money from partner banks at lower margins. You might not know this, but depending on where you live and which bank you use, you're not getting the same rate as on the TV or radio for the forex you buy when you travel, pay invoices or emigrate. This is why there is a market for our company. I run the corporate dealing desk, making me in charge of the margins and profitability of this side of the business.

My day consists being available for my clients and staying in touch with them about their FX requirements. When they have to buy some USD, CAD, GBP, or whatever currency they might need, then I would give them a price and send them the invoice for it. Viola! Money in the bank! Literally!

...Unfortunately it's not that simple. I won't bore you with the details but the description above is the basic premise of our business.

The part where Jon's wisdom comes in to challenge me is that I feel like there definitely are times that I do things that are not what my business pays me for. I might end up doing things like trying to help a client with a query that someone else in the business is much better suited to. Or using company time to look at watches I want for my birthday. Or trying to position myself in a way that would make me do less of what I am paid to do and more of what I want to do.

The last point is probably the most relevant. You see, I really want to spend more time on niche clients and do analysis on their business and their needs. I want to work on products that we don't have yet and would set myself up to be too good for the job that I am doing now. It's quite natural I guess.We always want to be pushing ourselves forward. But I still feel like my approach could be different in this regard. I have a feeling that I could make more time to do the basics things that I was employed to do in the first place and be more effective in the way that my performance is measured at the end of the day.

Jon's solution to this problem is to think of our employer as a client and our salary as billable hours. We wouldn't dream of billing a client that we were doing freelance work for for hours that we spent doing something outside our mandate. The same should go for work.

My thoughts drifted to the other areas of life. At the end of the day I felt like it was a question of resources. One party had spent spent some of their resources on another with a specific expectation or outcome in mind. The second party received resources on the premise that they provide a certain return.

Consider algebraically that the two parties and the resources are interchangeable with different elements of a persons life. I am the employer who engages my resource of time with my friend whom I expect to provide me with the outcome of a friendship and increased trust. If my friend takes my resource and gives me something less than what I expected then I would feel like my resource could perhaps have been spent better on something else. Perhaps another friend that would have got the job done. Wow. It's an incredibly robotic view of people, but are our basic needs that much more complicated?

What are my resources? Time, money, emotion, energy. What do I spend them on? What am I getting for it? What resources are others spending on me? Am I getting a good deal on what I am spending or am I being short-changed? Am I a good employee when it comes to what others spend on me? 

Makes you feel like making a list doesn't it?