money – Endurance Free Living

Conversations with Butterflies

Breakfast with a butterfly, Zakynthos. Photo: B. Morgan

I’ve had some wonderful conversations with butterflies.

There was the time we took the tele-cabin from Grimentz to Bendolla and went for a walk in the mountains on a hot summer’s day.

A butterfly alighted on my hand and stayed for at least five minutes, exploring and obviously finding something of interest to consume.

There was the time on the Greek island of Zakynthos when we went for an early swim and walked along the sandy beach.

As we reached the end, a beautiful swallowtail butterfly danced around us and then alighted on my collar, where it seemed perfectly happy to stay.

We ate breakfast on the terrace of a taverna just above the beach and during the whole time, the butterfly didn’t budge.

Eventually, about an hour later and well after we’d finished eating, it took off again as if refreshed after a snooze.

* * * * *

This week, I was at the lake for a swim and when I came out, an orange comma alighted on my purple backpack and seemed to fall in love with it.

I sat down beside it so I could study it more closely.

I was even able to encourage it on to my finger a couple of times as I wanted to get at something in the backpack.

It’s pretty amusing when they wander over your hand and arm producing a gently tickling sensation as they explore the new territory and even seem to find food on it.

And while I sat there another small blue butterfly arrived and stopped on the sand at my feet.

But what struck me as I played with this very beautiful creature for over half an hour is that really there is nothing more valuable in life than this.

Being in the moment.

Contemplating and conversing with a thing of beauty and wonderment.

A small angel.

What more could one want?

And it’s completely free.

Money has nothing to do with it.

A moment of complete pleasure where the ego has no place.

A moment to be thankful for.

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

Time Is Money

How often have you heard that?

In films, on TV, perhaps from your boss or colleagues or even from your own family.

Thought provoking stuff, huh?

Well, I’m here to tell you that’s it’s absolute bullshit.

Time is infinitely more precious than money and no matter how much money we sell it for, it still isn’t enough because time is IRREPLACEABLE.

We live in a culture obsessed with money. How much do you have, how much does he have, what does she have that I don’t etc, etc, etc?

I would argue that the vast majority of people have got it completely wrong. They should be obsessing about time, not money.

We are born with two assets.

Our bodies and time.

But here’s the thing. We don’t even know how much time we have, which makes it even more precious.

Now many of the articles I write are about looking after our bodies, but truly assessing the importance of the time allotted to you on this earth is equally important. How can you put a monetary value on a commodity when you don’t even know how much of it you have?

The short answer is, you can’t. It’s PRICELESS.

And yet it’s my impression that for many people their time has no value at all. They are only concerned about money.

Now I can understand obsessing about money if you don’t have enough of it to fulfill your basic requirements, if you really don’t know where your next meal is coming from. Unfortunately, there are many people in the world for whom this is true. It’s a real battle for survival and they don’t have the luxury of being able to stand back and assess the worth of their time.

But how many of you reading this blog are really in that position?

I would go further.

I would suggest that if you even have the time to be reading this blog, then you are not in that position.

So how much is your time worth to you?

I want you to take a moment and try to come up with a figure per hour that you would be willing to sell your time for. It’s never going to be enough, of course, because no amount of money can compensate for that time. But hey, we all have to live, buy food if we don’t grow it ourselves, offer ourselves a roof over our heads, some luxuries, navigate in a very consumer orientated world.

But at what price are you comfortable with the idea of selling your time?

If you like, start with the hourly rate you get at work. But be careful. An extremely interesting exercise is to work out exactly what your hourly wage really is once you deduct all – and I mean ALL – the expenses involved in earning it. You’d be surprised how low it can be.

But that’s another article. I don’t want you to get too depressed after all!

For the moment, start with an hourly figure that you feel comfortable with and go with that.

You’ll probably start to think of all the situations when you gave up your time for much less than that.

DON’T.

The idea is not to depress yourself with all the time you’ve wasted, given away for free when you didn’t want to be involved in the first place, all the times that your time was, quite literally, stolen. Don’t beat yourself up about it. It happened, that’s life. The time has been spent and you can’t get it back. No use crying over spilt milk. Move on.

It’s the FUTURE we’re concerned about here. You want to learn from your mistakes and avoid doing the same thing in the future. That’s PROGRESS.

So the next time you think, oh, that’s a nice offer, and you start collecting cereal boxtops to offer yourself a personalized spoon that you don’t even need because you’ve got too many of them already, and for which you have to buy several boxes of cereal but pay money for it anyway, and when you look for the codes you have to send to get the spoon, you find that they are printed right on the inside of the box and that you literally have to cut the box up in order to get at them and then you find that you’ve cut off some figures and you’re not sure really what they are because the codes are so badly printed, and then when you finally get enough codes to send in, you find that the offer has expired ….

STOP and ask yourself, with your hourly wage figure in mind, is this a valid way to be spending my time? Is the return on my investment of time sensible?

And the answer may well come back, NO. So don’t even start down that road.

And then every time there’s a little niggling voice in your head suggesting that this or that might not be time well-spent, apply your hourly wage rule to whatever it may be and see if it makes sense.

There are many people who have made a fortune out of you because you think your time is worth NOTHING. Ingmar Kamprad of IKEA is one of them. The list of companies and people out there doing the same thing is endless.

If you think that it doesn’t matter how much time you spend on something as long as you are “saving money,” think again.

Have a little self-respect.

Are you really going to continue living your life as if your time is worth nothing? It’s an insult to yourself. At least start requiring yourself to measure up to that minimum hourly wage you thought up.

Just think of that next time. I guarantee that simply thinking of your time in these terms will help you to sort out what is worth doing and what is not. And who knows, it may help you to start spending more time with your family and/or doing things that you really enjoy.

And you can’t really put a price on that, can you?

As the late great Muhammad Ali wrote in a note to a neighbour from his childhood days:

“Enjoy life: it’s later than we think.”

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

Isn’t Money A Pain In The Butt?

We all know that money is a pain in the butt metaphorically (never have enough?), but what about literally?

As someone who carried his wallet in his back pocket for years (see photo above), I was particularly interested to watch a video in which a chiropractor suggested that this might be a source of lower back pain, provoked over time by the imbalance in the pelvis due to sitting on the said wallet.

If you carry your wallet in your back pocket, then this video might interest you:

The sound is a bit weak, but the explanation is clear.

Conclusive proof that money can – literally – be a pain in the butt.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

richard@endurancefreeliving.com