1.1: Becoming Wiser with Money

If living well is your ultimate goal, this book is a guide to how to best use your money to achieve it

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt. – Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum

What this chapter is about

Brain surgery – Behaviour change is brain change. Every action is a habitual action. Actions are the tools for changing our brain maps. See right actions not as a snapshot, but as a continual cultivation of a lifestyle choice. Right action today makes right action tomorrow easier. This is a meditative process of remembering who you are becoming, not a product to be ‘arrived’ at.

Your centre of narrative gravity – Your relationship with money is between you, and your money. You need to understand both parts, and how they interact. The ‘you’ is your centre of narrative gravity – the story you tell yourself about yourself. Seeing ‘you’ as a story is key to writing and editing it into a better story.

What this chapter isn’t about

Delegation or denunciation – You do not improve your relationship with money by thinking you can avoid it, through either delegating the decisions that shape it to someone (or something) else, or by denouncing money as evil or irrelevant. This is a participatory process. You want reassurance from within, not the illusory reassurance of the blindfold.

Blindly rabbiting theory – We cover a lot of theory, from neuroscience to philosophy to psychology to economics and marketing. But accumulation is not application. Too many read Socrates and never think Socratically – the opposite, in fact: believing that to have read something and preached about it is a substitute for internalising it. We are aiming at practical wisdom, not the vain gathering of philosophical soundbites.