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Reductionism: How I Almost Missed the Forest for the Financial Freedom Trees

When I first started out on this journey towards financial freedom, I was focussed on living within your means, saving and investing as well as growing and protecting your means.

These are still the pillars behind my strategy to achieve financial freedom, but I forgot to take into consideration the big picture, the why and reason for doing so. My lack of big picture thinking led me almost to miss the forest for the trees as I was putting my gaze only on the trees i.e. the hows of financial freedom without fully thinking through the whys.

What do I mean by all this?

What is Reductionism

I was reading James Handy’s “Age of Unreason” and realised that I was doing a bit of reductionism. I understood the techniques of financial freedom, i.e. living within your means etc, but failed to link back them to the over-arching reason why I needed to do so. I failed to align my plan towards financial freedom with my overall objective in life to be happy and financially free.

I missed out the fact that I can be happy even while I am pursuing my Road Map to Financial Freedom and that it does not have to be contingent upon achieving the goal of having passive income exceeding living expenses.

I can be happy if I hit my target of having investible net worth of $1,000,000. I can be happy even if I hit only $500,000 or even $50,000. The point is, happiness need not be contingent upon achieving that target.

It is the striving towards that target while experiencing life in terms of the day to day interactions with family, friends and colleagues and growing as an individual, constantly learning new ideas, concepts and knowledge that make me a happy person.

It was ironic that in the past I found myself trapped on some days when I thought I shouldn’t be spending to take a cab back or that I shouldn’t buy a car because it didn’t fit into the overall plan for financial freedom. It was this scarcity or Scrooge mindset that made me unhappy even though I was on track towards financial freedom.

Wholeness: Connecting the Dots

The older I become, the more I realise I need to connect the dots to find out what drives me in life. What gets me up in the morning? Increasingly, it is about family, friends and colleagues who make your life more interesting. It is about growing as a person, each day learning new stuff at work and in inter-personal relationships. Becoming more attuned to this whole concept of life.

“The Art of Possibility” by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander also reminded me of the lessons I got from a Landmark Forum training I attended. Basically, life happens. But we invent the story we tell ourselves about life, in that it is our perception of reality that forms our reality.

We actually hold a lot of power in terms of managing our own perceptions of reality. Sh*t happens. But how we choose to react and go forward in our lives despite the sh*t will determine the quality of our lives.

Currently, I am into a personal growth spurt as I’m reading a lot more in the last 6 months than the whole of last year combined.

I find that I’m happiest when growing the connections within my brain with concepts, theories and practice on management, leadership, personal development and technical audit related knowledge. Reading non-fiction where it relates to areas I’m interested in is FUN!

I realise I must follow the cycle of learning involving the phases of  (1) Question (2) Theory (3) Testing (4) Reflection to order to grow as a human being. Many of my small success in blog monetisation was going through this phases by testing out concepts I learnt from others and changing it until I found a viable solution that worked.

Similarly in my quest for financial freedom, I start to do more testing and reflection and it helps me become more comfortable with my portfolio allocations at any point in time because my asset mix between equities, cash and cash equivalents reflect the cash flow needs and risk tolerances at that point in time.

Even in my working life, I realise it is by practising the cycle of learning by trying out stuff I learn from books into real life that will pay dividends in the near and long-term future.

Share with Panzer on how you determine what is your overraching reason for getting up in the morning!

Be well and prosper.