They letter today’s letter comes to us from Little Jenny. Little Jenny writes Little Jenny writes, Dear George, gee, what’s true about money? For a question? Oh, Jenny, what’s true about money?
That’s a great
thought exercise conversation to have just in general, what’s true? What do you believe to be true?
There is objective truth, not just true, true. And there’s Subjective Truth, which is, for lack of a better term, your lived experiences, and of course, your opinions about things. What’s really true about money, and when I think about what’s true, I tried to go to first principles.
And those are the foundational truths, first principle thinking, extremely valuable. I first learned about first principles, thinking through the great Elon Musk learning about his process for thinking about and entering and then disrupting industries. He’s obviously done this numerous times. Now, he made electric vehicles commercially viable. They’ve been around for a long time, but he made them ubiquitous, and he is making space travel. Possible he is with neural link and star link and drilling holes under major US cities. Instead of just going based on conventional thinking, or conventional wisdom, he goes to first principles and says, Okay, this is how the current state of play looks when it comes to launching human beings or stuff into space. This is what current thinking is when it comes to an electric vehicle and a battery, and how it all works. And show I see that, but let’s take a big step back and operate from first principles and see if there’s not ways to make this better, more efficient, smarter. So whenever I think about what it’s true, I try to get rid of all the preconceived notions that I and everybody else have.
And strip away all the assumptions that I have, and try to recognize all the systems that are operating under. Because we’re all operating under so many different systems and assumptions from the way that we’re wired and our operating systems in our heads and the people we grew up with, and the way that we grew up in the places that we grew up with, and everything else we’ve been indoctrinated good and bad, into our line of thinking and our values. And so those are the lenses through which we view the world and the frameworks through which and by which we make decisions about things. And it could be good, it could be bad, but I think it’s always beneficial to think about what’s true. And then to answer Jenny’s question here, what’s true about money? And after all, that, it’s still a great question. So there was a sermon by John Wesley that he delivered in the 18th century, and it was entitled The use of money. So John Wesley, the use of money, he was the founder of the Methodist Church. And his core message on that sermon, the use of money was earn all you can save all you can give all you can. So I think that those are three absolute truths when it comes to money and personal finance. So earn all that you can. Another way to say that would be to maximize your income. So however, that takes shape takes form. It is make yourself as valid, valuable as you can to the marketplace through education through knowhow through expertise, through either figuring out how to outwork people or work more or outsmart or work smarter, or some combination of the two really practical uses are to understand and know your value to be able to ask for it negotiate for what you want. It is to recognize the state of play in the organization that you’re with and what it takes to move up the ladder. It is identifying a gap in the marketplace and becoming an entrepreneur and starting the business to meet the needs and to provide additional value. It’s all of these things. Save all that you can mean that’s about as basic as it gets, but you could certainly throw in there invest all that you can. So are we able to save money my grandpa used to say, and he was had a successful career in the life insurance industry. He would tell everybody they sat down with and he would tell me I could tell you know, I could tell for you to be successful.