Money Blind
Sign up for updatesFollow me on Twitter
  • Welcome
  • Twitter
  • Newsletter archive
  • The Book
    • Introduction
      • Revolutionising your relationship with money
      • Better money decisions, step by step
      • The slow suicide of monetary self-deception
    • 1: Towards Financial Enlightenment
      • 1.1: Becoming Wiser with Money
        • 1.1.1: Becoming a better investor
        • 1.1.2: Financial philosophy: what is it and why is it necessary?
        • 1.1.3: The two types of financial errors
        • 1.1.4: What unites every money decision?
      • 1.2: The Root of All Deception
        • 1.2.1: Where does the path to good investing begin?
        • 1.2.2: Why focus on money?
        • 1.2.3: What other investment books miss
        • 1.2.4: Money Blind
      • 1.3: Money and the Good Life
        • 1.3.1: You are a brain surgeon
        • 1.3.2: The four types of knowing
        • 1.3.3: Putting knowledge to use: becoming practically wise
        • 1.3.4: What is the Good Life?
      • 1.4: Is the Good Life for Sale?
        • 1.4.1: Money. Huh. What is it good for?
        • 1.4.2: Is success for sale?
        • 1.4.3: Editing your life story
        • 1.4.4: From having a mind full of money to being mindful with money
      • 1.5: Money Maxims
        • 1.5.1: Resetting your relationship with money
        • 1.5.2: Principles
        • 1.5.3: Rules
        • 1.5.4: Triggers
      • Storytime: The most valuable knowledge in the world
    • 2: How to Have a Healthy Relationship with Money
      • 2.1: The Inner Game of Investing
        • Storytime: It. Never. Works.
        • 2.1.1: First per cent problems
        • 2.1.2: The only way to solve money problems
        • 2.1.3: Does financial advice help or hinder?
        • 2.1.4: How to stop financial rumination
      • 2.2: Misunderstandings and Lethargy
        • Storytime: Doubling down
        • 2.2.1: Expenditure is more important than income
          • 2.2.1.1: Universal basic instincts
          • 2.2.1.2: How to spend it, and not spend it
          • 2.2.1.3: The unexamined dollar is not worth a dime
          • 2.2.1.4: Adviser or enabler?
          • 2.2.1.5: The game of life is not a numbers game
        • 2.2.2: Enough is more important than more
          • 2.2.2.1 Give, give, give, me more, more, more
          • 2.2.2.2 If less is more, then more is also less
          • 2.2.2.3 Enough is enough
          • 2.2.2.4 Right place, wrong mime
          • 2.2.2.5 Enough is more than enough
        • 2.2.3: Value is more important than price
          • 2.2.3.1: Is it better to look rich, or be rich?
          • 2.2.3.2: Is it better to own or to rent?
          • 2.2.3.3: There is always an underlying emotional reward
          • 2.2.3.4: Selling style over substance
          • 2.2.3.5: Putting a price on real value
        • ↓ Coming Soon ↓
        • 2.2.4: All purchases are investments
      • 2.3: How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything
        • Storytime: What do Blackheath people do?
        • 2.3.1: Beware the Arrival Fallacy
        • 2.3.2: Beyond needs and wants
        • 2.3.3: Denunciation is still attachment
        • 2.3.4: Take control
      • 2.4: All Success Is Subjective
        • Storytime: Hollywood Hero
        • 2.4.1: No human is an island
        • 2.4.2: What are you worth?
        • 2.4.3: Write your own success story
        • 2.4.4: Be your own hero
      • 2.5: Inspired by Love and Guided by Knowledge
    • 3: How to Invest Like a Non-idiot
      • 3.1: All Investments are Gambles
      • 3.2: Your Life in Your Money and Your Money in Your Life
      • 3.3: The Investment Universe in a Grain of Sand
      • 3.4: There Is No Best Investment
      • 3.5: No Investment is an Island
    • 4: How to Get Help That's Actually Helpful
      • 4.1: Help!
      • 4.2: (Almost) All Financial Advisers are Crooks or Idiots
      • 4.3: Know your Enemy, and Your Friends
      • 4.4: Should You Hire Help or Go It Alone?
      • 4.5: The Future of Financial Advice
    • 5: How to Buy a Better Life
      • 5.1: Be a Financial Philosopher
      • 5.2: The At-Least-I-Know-I'm-Doing-Something-Right Investing Checklist
  • Sign up
    • Enlighten me!
  • Other
    • What this book is about
    • What this book isn't about
    • This book's logical flow
    • If... Then...
    • Stories
    • Maxims
    • Contact and comments
    • Editing guidance
    • Endnotes
Powered by GitBook
On this page

Was this helpful?

  1. The Book
  2. 2: How to Have a Healthy Relationship with Money
  3. 2.1: The Inner Game of Investing

2.1.4: How to stop financial rumination

Becoming wiser with money requires you to first stop your head spinning in ruminatory circles

Previous2.1.3: Does financial advice help or hinder?Next2.2: Misunderstandings and Lethargy

Last updated 4 years ago

Was this helpful?

There is a rule in coaching and negotiation circles that ‘why’ questions are a bad idea. A ‘why’ question should be rephrased as a ‘what’ question because ‘why’ questions risk sounding accusatory and putting the receiver on the defensive. This is entirely true. However, in introspective interrogations, there’s another reason ‘what’ questions are better: they make it much harder to get trapped in a solutionless centrifuge of rumination. ‘Why can’t I do this?’ inflames itches that ‘What is it about this I’m struggling with?’ starts to soothe. ‘What about this is important to me?’ demands the sort of answer that ‘Why do I bother?’ is set up to forego in favour of wallowing in sticky self-pity.

This book is an encouragement to turn whys into whats, and then to persistently pursue answers that unlock hitherto unknown levels of comfort and confidence with managing money. It’s about moving from ‘why must investments be so complicated?’ to ‘what is it about investments that I want to understand better?’ or ‘what do I need to know to be able to trust that the advice I’m getting is as helpful as it is well-meaning?’ It’s about recognising that if you walk around blindfolded, then someone will always be happy to sell you directions, and that when scruples are optional, if you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t know when you’ve been taken for a ride in the wrong direction. It’s about removing the blindfold and stepping into the light, fit to first find your own path and then to skip happily and confidently along it. It’s about not dwelling on money problems, but methodologically moving towards solutions to them.

If you don’t pinpoint your concerns – if you don’t move from ‘why?’ to ‘what?’ – you’ll jump into getting help that’s simply not very helpful. And you’ll continue to get stuck in rumination rather than moving to resolution.

This is a suicidal waste of your life’s resources. ‘Regardless of the possible number of computations our brain is capable of,’ wrote neuroscientists David Perlmutter and Alberto Villoldo, ‘the truth of the matter is that most people use most of their computational ability to dwell on everyday problems. This waste of a good brain leaves hardly any computational power for innovation, creative problem solving, and enlightenment.’[i]

As we saw earlier, there is no shortage of personal finance books that set out in sane, user-friendly steps how to manage your money. However, if you don’t manage your mind first, it’s perfectly possible, almost perhaps inevitable, that you can manage your money in textbook fashion and still have the very thought of that money do nothing but cause you discomfort, and detract from the goodness of the life it should be enabling.

The point of this book isn’t to tell you which investment is the best,[1] or to tell you to use or not use any particular type of investment guru, just as it isn’t to tell you how to spend (or not spend) your resources. It is to encourage you simply to think through these and other aspects of your relationship with money and how it can contribute to or distract you from your Good Life. It is to provide frameworks for thinking that cut through the crap (and there’s a lot of crap), and to know how to see true value in a world blinded by price. It is for you to learn how to advise yourself, even if you then delegate the donkey work (and to learn how to not delegate it to an actual donkey).

I hope you found this useful. If you did, to get regular insights in your inbox. If you didn't, to get extra content as redress.

Have something to say? Go . Witty comments welcomed. Insightful ones win prizes. Reading guaranteed. Replying not.

---

[1] There’s no such thing, as we’ll see in .

---

[i] David Perlmutter and Alberto Villoldo, Power Up Your Brain: The Neuroscience of Enlightenment

2.2: Misunderstandings and Lethargy
sign up
sign up
here
Part 3, Chapter 4