"The really idle man gets nowhere. The perpetually busy man does not get much further." ~
Heneage Ogilvie
What do we know about Afghanistan?
Probably very little. We all know of it’s existence, we speculate about its tentative links to terrorism yet very few of us understan what our historical links or reason for being in Afghanistan are.
I’ve started on Hamida Ghafour’s "The Sleeping Buddha" - a narrative on her return to Afghanistan after the "liberation". Ghafour provides a personal insight into the distint land that lies beyond the Hindu Kush taking us beyond the initial stereotypes of women in chadaris, taleban riding shotgun in pickup trucks and opium traffick.
Ghafour reminds us that this remote central Asian province has provided the theatre for a clash of civilizations that spans centuries. The once imperial British masters and their viceroys have simply been replaced by those from a different land.
Strategically placed as a nomadic nexus between east and west, communist bloc and the "free world", Afghanistan has been the platform for the egos of the world’s ideologies and beliefs to express the desire for significance.
Since the latest war, 6 million have reportedly fled their homes with a further 2 million dead or wound. Consider that in addition to the millions already displaced and killed by the prior Russian invasion. No wonder extremist ideologies find fertile soils in an otherwise barren and unforgiving landscape.
When Ghafour reminds us that Afghanistan was the otucome of so many ideologies struggling for supremacy I can only think of Carl Sagan’s "Pale Blue Dot" (below) in which Sagan argues the sheer ignominity of all the bloodshed in history for the sake of dominance in a fraction of what transpires to be a fractional and rather inconsequential element of our known Universe - Earth.
"Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot" (Carl Sagan - ‘Pale Blue Dot’)
In the last 86 years, Afghanistan has had 9 constitutions and has been at one stage a constitutional monarchy, absolute monarchy, socialist republic, communist state, a theocracy and now, on paper at least, an elected democracy. For what purpose all this bloodshed but to satisfy the egos of those who begin with the words "I am…" and with it an ideology that helps them define absolute right and wrong, good and evil.
As Ghafour states, once proud Afghan tribesmen had been reduced to begging for alms in the filthy backstreets of Kabul because someone somewhere thought that their world view could bring them a better life and made everyone pay the price to realize their dream.
Being idle is good for you. Only lazy people work hard. Time to take a good look at the received wisdom of our modern times that constitutes the busy man's yoke.
Tom Hodgkinson's book "How to Be Idle" is fundamental reading for the mini-retiree.
At first your reaction will be "why enourage sloveliness"? Isn't that bad?
Well, let's consider the opposite and start at the beginning - when you wake up. You can thank Benjamin Franklin for the maxim "early to bed early to tise makes a man wealthy and wise" amongst numerous moralizers since the industrial revolution who have shaped the common psyche with concepts such as the "9-5", "never mix business with pleasure", "the career" and so on.
In Franklin's day, hard work made sense. In the factory or field time input equated to value output. But it's been a generation or two since we've downed our tools and the habits still remain.
In the post-Google era the fitness landscape changes. No longer is Aaron Aadvark travel agents best placed to win your business but "bespoke luxury family Ayurvedic tours in Kerala, South India". No more compromise, today we want exactly what we want.
Hard work now is the lazy option. It's easy to work long hours, work in a safe company, keep your head down and wait for that golden parachute when you retire to enjoy the last few years of your life. It's so easy in fact that it's lazy.
Working smart now means taking risks, making decisions and implementing creative ideas.
Ironically little of this can be manufactured an a time/efficiency basis. You may well achieve the same results in 3 hours as in 30. The challenge is therefore creating the right environment for it.
Franklin may not approve of staying in bed, but you can guarantee many of his modern proteges are simply going through the motions, waking up early because it's the no-risk easy option.
Hodgkinson suggested his own life improved dramatically when he got rid of his alarm clock. I was willing to try it out as an experiment. I had already disposed of the biggest enemy to the mini-retiree - the TV - so what harm would losing another gadget do?
Waking up without an alarm clock is far more pleasurable. Ironically I wake up more or less the same time as I was doing pre-alarm except for the days when I'm tired and decide to indulge and wake around 9am. It's not that easy sleeping in when you have a 3 year old jumping up and down on you and using you as part of a Thomas the Tank Engine film set. Nevertheless being woken that way rather than by the alarm is far better for your condition. Alarms only seek to "alarm" and starting out in an alarmed state is certainly not conducive to creativity.
Of course there are days when I need an alarm clock for backup - days when I need to be somewhere but on the whole I'm living a more natural cycle - sleeping and waking when my body tells me too.
As for the luxury of naps - that's the subject of another post entirely.
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Sleep is one of life’s few unadulterated pleasures.
It’s in our sleep our subconscious mind, our real executive, manifests it’s life plans.
"Sleep on it" we’re advised. Why? Because it’s in this state we are able to piece together our cosnscious dilemmas and evoke their meanings and rational solutions albeit in a visual or semantic format.
Plus there’s no denying lying in bed feels pretty good.
But the puritans won’t let us lie without a healthy smattering of idle guilt.
"Your sleeping your life away if you’re sleeping more than 4hrs a night", Tony Robbins preached to the converted UPW congregation of which I was one. 4 hours? I was pushing 8. This was making me feel guilty.
If only I could sleep less. Imagine how productive I could be if I could get away with 3 hours a night.
We’ve all been there. And now I’ve just stopped fighting it. Apart from a few common-sense habits such as sleeping at a reasonable time and not using the computer or eating late, I’m sleeping and (importantly) getting up when I want.
When I’m not anxious about waking up at a specific time, I sleep better and often wake up early anyway. Early, I mean 7 am. My days of machoing out my coworkers by waking before 5am are long gone.
Sleep is a key part of our happiness and conditioning ourselves to get by on unnatural amounts of sleep carries long term implications for health and wellbeing.
Sleep is so important in fact that Tom Hodgkinson devotes the opening chapter of his excellent tome on doing less "How to be Idle" to the subject of sleep moreover, waking up late.
In particular how one wakes up naturally without an alarm clock. Yes, "alarm clock". Hodgkinson asks us to think on that very invention. Perhaps two of mankind’s mental jailers - the alarm and clock wedded in one frightening object.
Quoting Benjamin Franklin’s maxim "early to bed early to rise makes a man wealthy and wise", Hodgkinson reminds us how we have been conditioned from an early age by the social apparatus to associate late rising with non-productivity and guilt.
Hodgkinson cites Methodist John Wesley whose morning rise of 4am was swiftly followed by sermons on subjects such as the deadliest sin "sloth" being the murderer of time. Whilst we may find the analogies far fetched, we have done little to question the reality of our own society’s received wisdom.
We do, for example, now find ourselves in a society where long leisurely lunches that encouraged reflection, the building of relationships and perhaps a few beers being replaced by the 30 minute pit stop to refuel with anxiety - coffee and bread.
Perhaps it was anxiety associated with our inability to haul our ass into the gym everyday at 6am, because that’s the image I remember from the personal organizer advert "6am…Gym"
Perhaps it was my own earlier "issues" with enforced timing that creates the platform for this current thought train. Such was my inability as a teenager to wake that I regularly woke only 5 minutes before my ride to school. 5 minutes was obviously not enough time to get ready so I took to getting dressed, fully clothed in school uniform with tie before I went to bed.
The solution was ingenious and worked up until the point teachers smugly began to remark "Brown, for god’s sake, it looks like you’ve slept in your uniform" to the roar of the classroom.
Little did they know.
Yet if waking up early was key to our success how could Franklin account for all those struggling to keep their heads above water on the 0705 misery express to London Waterloo. Too tired to think about why they’re doing this in the first place and too scared by their freepaper about disease, terrorism, crime and market crashes to think there any consolation from taking their foot off the gas. An extra hour in bed is an extra hour of money lost.
Lest we forget Franklin gave us that great one liner "Time is Money".
Yet the contradiction inherent in the aphorism lies in its sell by date.
The days when time input equalled results output are gone all except for those performing menial labour such as farmhands, shelf stackers and most lawyers.
Results now come from the ability to take risks, creativity and making decisions not hours worked. Some of our most creative thoughts are seeded when we are lying on our back and staring at the ceiling. Having a good head on you is essential and sleep the purveyor of all mental clarity.
So here’s to turning our backs on the tyranny of peer pressure that glamorizes those who wake up before they go to bed. Thatcher slept only 3 hours a night I am often reminded. That’s exactly why we all need a good night’s sleep. Sleep well.
Why work for a living?
Few would argue with the Confucian maxim "Find the job you love and you’ll never have to work another day again" yet the vast majority that catch the 0705 misery express to London Waterloo, queue in line to buy designer coffee and melt into the humdrum of a life called "work" could ever claim to have realised the addage.
My journey of discovering life beyond work has been one of letting go… mainly letting go of ego and identity associated with work. I once enjoyed the superficial fruits of my labour - a title, a company, a big car and the responsibilities and pressures that were the moniker of a CEO. Going "beyond", into a life where there is little "work", an abundance of free time and a long forgotten enjoyment of daily living is a test of the ego, or rather relinquishing its hold on our life.
A Mercedes S Class with 18" AMG Wheels won’t leave you much change out of £65,000 ($130,000). How much "work" is required to keep that car? Assume fuel, maintenance, insurance, tax etc cost you the thick end of £5,000 a year. Add to that depreciation of another £8,000 a year and you are paying £13,000 to keep the car on the road - that’s net of tax.
Some sources claim that in the "developed world", £13,400 (or $25,000) is itself enough to live on - if (importantly) you change your lifetsyle. When your outgoings are £13k per person in your household you can save some serious $$s when it comes to investing. Now once you start adding Mercs, extensions to your house, expensive work habits, travel, gym, drinks out with colleagues to your expenditure - net yearly outgoings of at least £40k ($80k) would not be uncommon. That means you’ll have to earn £70k ($140k) gross to keep your head above water.
The Merc is an exemplary case, but all cars and the "trappings" of our lifestyles are the same. We are convinced by media that unless we have such content in our lives we are not enough, so the mental "debt" effectively enslaves us to "work" for that which we don’t really need. The media manufacturerd "neuroses" is widespread .
Tom Hodginkson’s account of 9am in his excellent book "How to be Idle" provides an accurate description of working life worldwide:
"9 am is surely the most brutal and feared of all the hours in an idler’s day, for it is the time when someone, somewhere decided that work should start. Just before 9am, buses, trains, trams and roads heave with grim faced toilers as they lug themselves from one part of the town to another. Lifts sigh with large jeaned marketing executives, office girls with lots of make-up clatter through reception, recent immigrants with hard hats arrive at building sites, city boys charge up on coffee, retail workers wait outside the shop for the boss to arrive with the keys, escalators take us from an airless underworld and deposit us in equally airless offices. We read newspapers and become anxious. We have a a job. A job! Our rewards after years of education."
I remember once liking the "buzz" that pervaded the awakening city centres prior to the 9am rush. Every seemed to be going somewhere, on a mission. There was a sense of optimism. However, it wasn’t long before I realized, for the masses that sense faded soon after the first coffee of the morning wore off. Few could claim to be doing much more than "going to work".
Perhaps one reason why I enjoyed the buzz was that I was finally going to a job where I wasn’t performing menial tasks day in day out. What could be more soul-destroying that stuffing Funny Feet yoghurts into their containers, hauling backs of cements around the builder’s yard or the daily task of sticking 7000 polyurethene sheets onto battery packs that faced me every day in my youth, regardless of weather, week or will.
For most of us we lost ourselves when we transformed into "human doings", where peer group pressure lavished praise on those that were "snowed under", execs that were "on the redeye", "headhunted", "pulled into meetings" or whose schedule was "manic", "busy" or just simply "nuts!".
It isn’t a recent phenomenon associated with the "always on" road warrior either. The industrial revolution and precursory management gurus - names such as contemporary moralist Andrew Ure in his seminal work "The Philosophy of Manufactures" - actively encouraged "gain" and its the suppression of the recalcitrant individual desire for freedom through the manipulation of culture.
"…it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty…[there is] a need to supress the refractory tempers of the work-people accustomed to irregular paroxsysms of diligence… it is the interest of every mill-owner to organize his moral machinery on equally sound principles as his mechanical…there is in fact no case to which the Gospel truth ‘Godliness is great gain’ more applicable that the administration of an extensive factory"
We may claim freedom but we still find ourselves working 9-5pm, the hours first carved out by the mill owners and adminstrators. Culturally we may claim to have "progressed". How? We now how prozac for pets .
The "moral machinery" employed by mill owners to strike fear into the masses was the spectre of hunger and fear through losing work. Today, the fears are possession and status. Take a moment out to study the advertising and see how fear, or more importantly the fear of "not being enough" or "missing out" is core to successful marketing .
The irony is so little of this "work" in the post-industrial era, however, amounts to anything, because it is simply working, not creating.
Life outside the hamster wheel means less stress. It means having freed myself from the yoke of "work" and its taskmaster the "job", I wake up when I want (ironically I now wake up earlier without an alarm clock), working when I want, spending less, enjoying time with the family and earning more than before. Even if you still take the corporate sovereign, you can still work less and impress .
Some have experimented with taking a mini-retirement with mixed results . The key is to have tried and to gain perspective from the whole process of "stepping out".
We are mentally bound still to the habits of the Hamster Wheel but find ourselves too embedded in our comfort zones, too fearful of loss of identity in losing that title, the car and all the responsibility that goes with it.
Life hasn’t always been like this. Ure’s earlier advice to adminstrators stems from the inherent perceived "laziness" of the pre-industrial artisans, individuals who essentially owned their own businesses, worked as they pleased and paid little heed to 9am let alone a 9-5 schedule.
There is a wonderful extract by Hodgkinson on the life of a pre-industrial weaver, the very scourge that Ure’s prescriptive tome aimed to suppress.
"Work and life were intertwined. A weaver, for example, might weave 8 or 9 yards on a rainy day. On others, a contemporary diary tells us, he might weave just two yards before he did ’sundry jobs about the lathe and in the yard & wrote a letter in the evening’. Or he might go cherry-picking, work on a community dam, calve the cow, cut down the trees or go watch a public hanging…[The] question [is] of whether it is not a ‘natural’ human work-rhythm."
"England before the invention of the ‘dark satanic mills’", writes Hodgkinson "was a nation of idlers".
One contemporary observer, John Foster, noted with horrow how labourers having finished their work "were left with several hours in the day to be spent nearly as they please… They will… for hours together… sit on a bench, or lie down on a bank or hillock… yielded up to utter vacancy and torpor".
The irony is that as Rich Dad says "only poor people have jobs" . Financial freedom does not come from long hours worked to clear the mortgage but by the acquisition of knowledge that enables you, whatever your situation, to create the money necessary to live the lifestyle you want.
For these pleasures, those on the 0705 misery express pay good money in the form of a vacation. How many weeks or months work did that require?
Stepping outside the hamster wheel means being able to question the legitimacy of the received wisdom - the notion that happiness is intertwined with toil and the quest for "more", when ultimately doing less provides…and it’s a lot less work.
Got a call today to tell me the prospective tenants on one of my
investment properties had backed out. Its early August and student
term starts in 3 weeks.
Plenty of excuses from the agent why it wasn't going to happen. Ignore
them. Point is I have a very large house recently refurbed with a
sizeable mortgage payment standing empty.
These are the times when "mini retirement" seems more myth than reality.
Last night a tenant texted me to inform me the hot water hose from the
washing machine had detached and soaked the downstairs apartment.
These are the days when you hear the voices. Its all I too much trouble.
I found myself repeating the words "It doesn't matter". Amazing how
reassuring it was. Everything could be sorted. We'd find new agents to
source tenants and the tenant in the other property could call a
plumber.
Yes it cost money but the more that could be outsourced the better.
Money buys you peace of mind. It'd cost half a day plus the aggro of
parking etc to sort the washing machine myself. Plumbers are expensive
but if you want to get leverage you have to start viewing your time
more valuable than their's.
Multiplication is another great discovery.
I spend 30 minutes calling agents book 5 appointments for tomorrow
morning in the space of 1 hour at the property. At the same time I can
catch up with my builders currently involved in a refurb. Travel time
included its half a day maximum.
I'll be out of pocket but I'm thinking long term. It's all to be
factored into the long term cash situation for these investments.
You'll always have problems to deal with and the challenge is not
living problem-free but having a system to deal with these problems
and remove the anxiety. It doesn't matter.
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