Four Stories About Money and Energy
Money is a strange beast.
We have so many stories about it.
It is an energetic creature running our societies, slipping in and out of our lives.
1 - A Business With Low Blood Pressure
One of my favourite metaphors for money is that money is to business what blood is to the body: it’s not the point of it, but if you don’t have enough everything starts to feel really quite strange.
I noticed that a few weeks ago.
I got a payment I hadn’t expected to get so soon and suddenly everything in my business felt different.
I hadn’t even quite noticed what it was like to be walking around in a body that was in need of an injection of blood… until I had it.
And felt the relief.
2- Money Isn’t Only Rational
I found myself discussing money with a collaborator recently. At the start of the project, we had spelled out the rationality behind the fees we were each getting and why we were getting paid different amounts.
Then we changed our tasks and it became clear that the rationality had been invented.
We needed a slow conversation to navigate that honourably.
What felt most important was: how do both of us feel about the fees we are getting?
I noticed, for example, that some of the possible new stories we explored didn’t feel right. Even if the amounts might.
We had to find a story that felt right to both of us: one that reflected the truth, that honoured everyone’s contributions.
In the end, it felt like the conversation mattered more than the amounts.
And certainly an old school negotation based on rational fairness and two people battling would have ended with different amounts on the spreadsheet.
But as long as both parties feel satisfied, why does rationality matter?
Money isn’t only rational, after all.
3 - The Small Good Steps Don’t Always Lead to The Good Place
My sister-in-law is reading Sapiens again. I asked her what stands out second time round and she retold Yuval Noah Harari’s version of the story of the agricultural revolution. How, in his view, people ended up worse off after the revolution than before.
This was one of the things that stood out for me from Sapiens, too. How it’s possible that every step taken in insolation is the right step - sensible, and seemingly making things better - and yet we can end up somewhere worse than when we started.
That’s how confusing and complex life can be. And that can happen to us with our money, too.
I noticed recently when deciding to spend more money on part of my business that although that step made sense, somehow my expenditure had got out of control compared to turnover and although the small increase in expenditure made sense in isolation (what’s a few more pounds?), slowing down with it showed me that the small steps had led somewhere not good for that part of my business.
And when I saw that then my energy shifted.
With our money, we have to be careful to slow down, like Harari did, and see the bigger picture.
4 - Slow Down Before You Start Succeeding At The Wrong Game
A few years ago, when I read The One Thing by Gary Keller, I slowed down with my financial goals.
The one thing that would make everything else easier and unnecessary was to pay off the mortage.
And so that became a part of my story.
But we have to be careful about our money stories.
I reflected recently on my financial situation.
Mortgage debt is much HIGHER than it was years ago, and overpayments are fewer and further between.
I felt like a failure every time I remembered that.
But life is different now.
Two young children and a house in Warwickshire is different to two adults alone in a flat in London thinking about financial freedom.
I needed to shift the story, so that my decisions about money were no longer deemed a failure compared to an outdated definition of success.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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