Money – Endurance Free Living

France Layby Petrol Scam

I just thought it might be useful to share something that happened to us the other day. We were driving in France on the way back from the UK and stopped at a small country layby to stretch our legs.

Scarcely had we got out of the car when a large BMW SUV with Bulgarian plates arrived rather fast and drew into the layby behind us. A large dark-haired man got out, used a pretext to start a conversation in French with us, got very enthusiastic and then said he didn’t have any petrol in his car and could we help him either by accepting some rather dubious cash notes in return for some euros or by following us to a petrol station and allowing him to fill up on our credit card and pay us back later. He said that his credit card was blocked in France and everything was closed as it was Sunday. He was going to start work in Zurich the next week and could phone his future employer to help him the next day.

While Brigitte was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, it all seemed pretty fishy to me. I said to the guy that I thought it sounded like a scam (de l’escroquerie) and we got back in the car and drove away.

I take the time to write this because after doing a little research on the internet, it appears that this scam was in operation about ten years ago. Please see the following link:

https://www.survivefrance.com/t/petrol-scam-on-french-roads/4812?page=2

which also references this article from the UK in 2009:

The Petrol Scam

Perhaps there has been a resurgence of this sort of scam.

Anyway I hope you don’t fall for it wherever you may be.

May your life never become an endurance test.

Love

Richard

Lunch Boxing

In an interesting article by Kelli Gardener from GroomandStyle.com entitled Eating at Home vs Eating Out, she talks about the fact that we often can’t choose the size of a restaurant portion and that pushes us to overeat.

I’ve been eating out quite a bit at lunch time in recent years.

Brigitte (my wife) works in a school about half an hour away in Yvonand and I often drive over and we go for lunch somewhere in Yverdon, which is the nearest sizeable town.

We’re lucky because there are a number of good restaurants in the area near the ice skating rink and parking is easy.

Something that was beginning to bother me though, was that we’d often take food home with us in cardboard or aluminium precisely because we didn’t want to overeat at lunchtime.

I’d order a pizza, for example, eat maybe two-thirds of it and then take the rest home in one of those take-away cardboard pizza boxes.

The sheer wastage of these pizza boxes, destined to be thrown away as soon as we got back home, started to get to me.

So rather than compromise and eat more than we wanted to, we got some varying sizes of food boxes and now we take home the pizza and other food portions in those.

It seems the perfect way not to overeat and act against wastage at the same time.

Of course, you have to wash the boxes after use and remember to put them back in the car and take them with you the next time you eat out.

Sometimes we forget.

In spite of this, I think we’ve managed to cut down considerably on wastage from eating out.

After all, there are only two solutions if you want to avoid overeating. Leave the rest on the plate or take it home.

If the food is good, it’s a waste to leave it on the plate. It will only get thrown away. It deserves a better fate than that.

We frequently get an extra meal in the evening out of a lunchtime restaurant portion with the result that eating out is not so expensive after all. It’s often little more expensive than buying a sandwich and I’d much rather have a hot meal – or two – for the same price or less.

So if you find that the portions in restaurants are overlarge, don’t hesitate to ask to take the rest home. You might feel awkward asking to begin with. You might even be afraid of what other people might think. But it’s a mark of respect for all the work that goes into preparing that food, from field to kitchen, and towards the food itself.

And if you bring your own boxes, you don’t even need to ask.

You can just put the food in the boxes yourself.

The link to Kelli’s article again:

Eating at Home vs Eating Out

May your life never become an endurance test!

Love

Richard

The Bottom 100

As you probably know, Forbes issues a list every year of the richest 100 people on the planet.

Now someone has produced a list of the poorest 100 on the planet.

Interesting idea.

The address:

Bottom 100

Each person is photographed against a simple blue backdrop.

If you click on a picture, you can read the story of the person.

Suddenly, poverty and misery are no longer abstract.

They have a face, a personality, a history.

Sobering stuff.

You can even type in your revenue and find out where you are in relation to the rest of the planet in percentage terms.

Think you need more money?

Look at your percentage and think again.

Think you’re between a rock and a hard place?

Read some of these stories.

If you’ve been reading these posts for any length of time, you’ll know I’m a great believer in the necessity of being thankful.

Of consciously being thankful.

I defy you to visit this site and not feel thankful for what you have.

I hear a lot of people complaining about their daily lot and filled with incredible negativity.

Jealous over trivia.

It’s time to stop pretending that you’re a victim and get a life.

Reading these stories might just help you do that.

May your life never become an endurance test!

Love

Richard

About Cake

Brigitte, Cake and Kimono (not sure why).

“You can’t have your cake and eat it.”

I heard this a lot growing up.

For Brigitte, who is Swiss, and probably for other non-native speakers of the language of Shakespeare, this is actually a very confusing statement.

“I can’t understand it at all,” Brigitte has said on many occasions.

Which is understandable.

Because we English often use the verb “have” to mean “eat,” as in “have breakfast” or “have a sandwich.”

So for her, it’s like saying, ” You can’t eat your cake and eat it.”

Which doesn’t make much sense.

If we choose another verb, such as “keep” then the idea behind this little gem of popular wisdom becomes clearer.

Now we have, “You can’t keep your cake and eat it.”

But it’s still nonsense.

After all, what are memories but things we have consumed that we keep?

* * * * *

On a visit to England last year, I had lunch with a friend and his mother, who is now well into her eighties.

“You can’t have everything,” she said.

And then she said it again.

And throughout the conversation, it came back again and again, like a kind of limiting mantra.

Eventually, I couldn’t let it pass.

“You can’t have everything,” she said.

“I don’t see why not,” I replied.

And later, when she said it again, I said, “I don’t see why not.”

It became quite funny.

We all chuckled.

* * * * *

These are the kind of limiting beliefs which make up our education and sometimes our lives.

But we can de-mask them.

Of course, if we say, “You can’t have everything,” or “You can’t have your cake and eat it,” enough, then it becomes a kind of truth for us and it’s very unlikely that we will have everything.

It’s important to keep the door open.

It might be difficult to “have everything,” which of course means different things to different people anyway, but it’s not impossible.

There is no objective reason why we shouldn’t have everything.

So what happens if we start to challenge all those unhelpful comments which surround and inhabit us.

“It’s normal that you do less as you get older,” a favourite of my mother’s.

Is it?

“You’ll never be a star.”

Why not?

“I’ll never be rich.”

Why not?

And so on.

I think we can push back the barriers at any age and our world will be brighter for it.

And if our world is brighter, then it will be brighter also for those around us.

May your life never become an endurance test!

Love

Richard

Suits

A rare picture of me in a suit from 2009. Can’t remember the occasion….

Have you ever felt under-dressed next to someone in a suit, particularly if it’s a good one?

Well, there are a couple of ways of dealing with this.

You can quote Eleanor Roosevelt to yourself:

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Good point, but not always easy to apply.

The other way is a little more subtle but I find it helpful.

After all, how many people choose to wear a suit?

Not many.

So at the end of the day, it’s just another UNIFORM that people have to wear.

It’s really no different from wearing a uniform for serving in a café, or dungarees for a garagist.

It may be made of cashmere, and hand-tailored at the fanciest shop in London, but ultimately it’s just a uniform.

So if you are wearing what you want, you’re actually much more fortunate than the guy wearing the suit.

You have the enormous power of freedom of choice.

He doesn’t. He has to keep up appearances.

So the next time you’re queuing up for coffee or standing in line at the bank and you feel someone looking down at you because he’s wearing a suit and you’re not, tell yourself that he’s just wearing a uniform.

Trust me, it turns the tables completely.

You may even find yourself feeling sorry for him.

May your life never become an endurance test!

My preferred ‘uniform,’ Mallorca 2008. Photo:B. Morgan

Love

Richard

The Start of a Backlash?

I thought this was an interesting article on BBC News recently:

Some cafes are banning wi-fi to encourage conversation

I’m relieved to see that the fact that everybody’s noses seem to be stuck to their screens all day long at last seems to bother some people.

It’s no substitute for real human interaction as another article from BBC Newsbeat suggests:

US Psychologists Claim Social Media Increases Loneliness

Personally, I’d like to see more places that are wi-fi, laptop and mobile phone free.

It really is time that people reclaimed their lives and started returning to the real world.

The mobile phone is a tool over which many people have no control whatsoever.

If you do not master a tool, then you become its slave.

Other tools that people are often enslaved to are money and TV.

Same thing applies.

Ask yourself honestly:

Do I have control over my mobile phone/money/TV or does it have control over me?

And if your answer is that you don’t have control over these things:

TV and mobile phone:
Discover the off button and practise using it.
Start real conversations with real people in front of you.
Do not reply to the phone when you are already in a conversation with a real person.
Try looking at the world around you. It’s full of beauty.

Money:
Try being thankful for the money that you already have.
Try sitting down and working out how much money you really need.
Try evaluating the real cost of obtaining the money you earn.
Try giving some away and see how it feels.

Good luck in all your endeavours.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

They Say

A new scientific study seems to appear almost every day.

Some of them might be useful.

Many of them are not.

For example, a recent study found that the reason natural fibre garments smell less than those derived from petrol is that natural fibres, such as cotton, wool or linen, absorb sweat whereas artificial ones do not.

Now I don’t know how much funding ‘they’ got for this study, or indeed how ‘they’ got any money at all, but I could have told them that before they started.

It’s common sense.

The problem is that what used to be common sense isn’t any more.

Money must be spent in order to establish the obvious.

Take another recent study that found that if an ‘independent study’ was made (that’s right – we even need studies about studies now) using money from an interested source, then it was 40% more likely to be biased.

In other words, and to give a fictional (?) example, if a cigarette company gives a lot of money to fund a study about the causes of lung cancer, it is more likely that the conclusion will be that the major cause in smokers is prevalent air pollution rather than smoking cigarettes.

Who would have guessed?

My only comment about that study would be that the 40% of increased probability is much too low and that some interested party probably put enough money into the study to get ‘them’ to bring the figure down from 100%.

Moral of the story: human beings are infinitely corruptible, especially where money is concerned.

So the next time you hear someone “they saying,” I suggest that your very first reaction should be:

“Who are “they”?”

Oh, it’s a report from a government body….

“No, who put up the money for the research?”

It was a health organization….

“No, who really put up the money?”

Because on closer inspection, no ‘independent report’ is independent.

Someone somewhere has always got something to prove, an agenda, an ‘interest.’

It would be much more honest to admit that bias.

Who knows, it might even help to make the findings useful?

Have a great weekend.

Love

Richard

The Dreaded In-Between (continued)

If you read my post a couple of weeks ago about reducing those floating moments (minutes, hours, days?) between actions, then you might be interested in having a look at this video:

3 Signs That You Will Become Rich One Day.

Don’t be put off by the mention of money in the title and the business-inspired aspect of the video.

This advice applies to anybody and anything.

It’s about the importance of time and using it to our best ability.

The remarks at the end about going out and doing things rather than wasting time on social media are spot on (although, I suppose, if you’re reading this, it’s technically a form of social media. Oh well, mummy knows best.)

Hope you find the video useful.

And don’t beat yourself up if you didn’t achieve all you wanted to do today.

Just try again tomorrow.

Love

Richard