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11:48 am Tuesday 4th of January 2025.
I have two and a half hours left to deliver this blog for publishing before Rhiannon kills me. This will be a little out of left field. It’s about learning, something we really all need to continue to do throughout our lives. But learning to invest is a skill with its own emotional cycle. Knowing this won’t make learning something hard any easier, but at least you’ll know how far along the path you are. I’m writing this because it is a snippet of an internal presentation I made to the Blue Wealth team four days ago.
This will be a long-winded explanation, but hang in there with me.
I tell my six- and eight-year-old stories almost every single night. They’re mostly highly detailed plot summaries of novels and movies, spanning from Hemingway to Shakespeare to some of my favorite cult movies like Aliens, Rocky, The Matrix, and Predator. I even tell them horror stories from Dean Koontz and Stephen King. They’re no worse than classic children’s stories like Hansel and Gretel, which have themes like cannibalism, witchcraft, child sacrifice, and their father’s weakness and subsequent redemption.
Most of these stories follow a narrative framework called the Hero’s Journey, which I briefly touched on in a previous blog. I won’t go through all the steps, but in short, The Hero (the main character, i.e., you) journeys from the world of the known and familiar to the world of the unknown. Usually, they don’t want to do this, but they are forced to by a situation out of their control.
Along the way, they face trials before finally confronting their own mortality (The Ordeal) and accepting the possibility of death. Once they pass through that, they return to the world of the known, but the knowledge they gain and the suffering they endure forever change them. Their world is never the same again because the lens through which they view it has changed.
It reminds me of one of my favourite quotes by the great T.S. Elliot.
“We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.”
This is precisely the same process we all go through every time we learn something hard, whether learning to invest or mastering a new skill. We’re generally reluctant to start, but if we’re forced to by circumstance, we go through the same process where we feel like we’re sometimes taking one step forward and five steps back. If we can pass the test and emerge on the other side the reward is the knowledge we get to carry with us forever.
From the viewpoint of someone learning how to invest, it seems like an insurmountable task at first. Sometimes, you make breakthroughs and good progress; sometimes, you get stuck in a rut or learn something new that breaks your worldview and requires you to start again. Fortunately, there is a lot of information on this blog and in our presentations that will fast-track your knowledge, spanning everything from the bare basics to the highly advanced.
It would be hard to make a good movie about the life of the post-industrial man. There are no new countries to discover or great wars to fight. There are few true adventures left for people (other than traveling out past no man’s land on the continental shelf chasing giant fish of course!). Most go to work, go home, eat and sleep. At the weekends, we might take our kids to sports or go out to eat. Then we retire.
If our lives were a movie, I wouldn’t want to look back on it with the regret of not taking some risks and having tried to take back control of some of my time by stepping into the world of the unknown and learning about how to invest.
That’s about all from me today – enjoy the rest of your day.
If you have any topics you want to know about, please email us at enquiries@bluewealth.com.au, and I will see if I can answer your questions.