Skip to Content

Drawing the wrong conclusions to money experiments

I am always someone who encourages friends and family around me to be more of a scientist. Make small experiments. Observed the results. If you succeed, you might just push on to build something positive in life, money wise, health wise, state of mind wise. If you fail, you learn something about yourself as well.

The most problematic thing is when you do your own experiment and derived an utterly wrong conclusion to your observations.

We were talking during lunch time and the topic drift to me leading into the concept of running paid runs like the Sundown Marathon, Half Marathons or JP Morgan runs. I felt its a waste of money being paid to squeeze with everyone to run UNLESS your main purpose there is to mingle with friends that’s all.

One colleague said that everyone should try running a full 42km marathon once in his life. He took 7 hours to finish the run. After that he never want to run another marathon again.

When I ask what is the preparation work he did before the run, he said he did nothing.

The narrative I get from him even in his evaluation of his IPPT passing standards is such that sit ups passing and running passing should be achieve without prior training.

The 4 keys to long term successes

While one has the initiative to conduct small experiments is encouraging, I felt deriving the wrong conclusions is just as detrimental.

I have stated what I distilled as the 4 keys to success in most things perform:

  1. Decision and Determination to achieve ____________
  2. Knowledge build up to achieve _____________
  3. Creating sound, effective systems and process to achieve ____________
  4. A conducive environment to achieve ___________

This concerns more of 1,2 and 3.

You need some knowledge (2) on your body to know that you can probably struggle to pass 2.4km without training, or marathon for that matter. As you neglect the maintenance, and as time passes without it, its going to get more and more difficult. You cannot expect to not train and still pass unless you are genetically superior (like my army reporting officer who can run once in a year and that is during IPPT test and get below 9.45 min)

Without a sound system and process (3), you are not going to achieve any long term results, whatever that you may derive.

Determination and decisions (1) are fleeting. In this case you might be determined after being challenged by friends to take it or a personal challenge. Once you don’t have that, you don’t sustain it.

The biggest detriment here is that you never want to do a marathon again because the remembering self remembers that every time people bring up marathon or sit ups or 2.4km run, you remember the shit you went through.

Why would anyone want to go through that excorticating shitty period again?

Without sound knowledge that setting up proper system you don’t have to feel so much pain, you might be encouraged to do these things more.

On Money

The root cause of money problems is a lot of times drawing the wrong conclusions. You are always doing little experiments whether you want or not.

I felt that really wise people have an edge here. Because even without reading extensively, they can derive sound and logical conclusions.

They can evaluation based on opportunity cost theory. They may understand money is fungible. They are able to derive you need to spend less than you earn.

For most, they are not so wise, they return all about doing experiments and drawing conclusions back to their science teacher. Once they leave school this is not important any more.

The reason they can’t gain knowledge is that after the painful school period, they gave up reading anything that needs to think at all, the longest piece they will read is to read headlines on facebook and pictures.

And they never solved the problem and derive that:

  • budgeting never works
  • the is always against them and they are at a disadvantage
  • wealth building doesn’t work because most wealth building methods ends up losing money
  • they can NEVER save enough unless they earn 100k

This is where I feel being able to read (2), reflect and proactively come up with systems(3) is so important.

To get started with dividend investing, start by bookmarking my Dividend Stock Tracker, which shows the prevailing yields of blue chip dividend stocks, utilities, REITs updated nightly.
For my best articles on building your wealth, check out the resources section.
Kyith

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

henry

Wednesday 3rd of September 2014

Yes, certainly knowledge is important. Though the depth varies.. as the saying goes: "...a little knowledge is dangerous.."

One way to gain knowledge is, of course, to read. But most people will not know where to begin, and the next part is to understand what has been read!

The alternative is to build relationships with people that you know who have proven knowledge and demonstrated success in their lives. Emulate success. ( as we try to emulate Warren Buffet, etc ).

I would love to rub shoulders with Wee Cho Yaw! but I have to be realistic too! His level of success is way above... so I have to scale down. Mix with people who are in the business that build wealth, manage their own wealth. Begin with old school mates, army mates, people who have achieved success in their lives.

It is the network that will give clues and sometimes offer great opportunities.. an experiment worth the effort.

Kyith

Wednesday 3rd of September 2014

Hi Henry, thanks for sharing. What you say is quite true .. We wish that more people would be able to change their way of living. How I love sadly I had not seen this on my group of friends.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.