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The Art of Learning and Financial Freedom

I’ve read the book, “The Art of Learning” by Josh Waitzkin and was completely blown away by some of his ideas as well as his personal achievements in the world of competitive chess and martial arts (Tai Chi Quan).

If you are interested to learn how we can learn better and to achieve peak performance in whatever fields of endeavour; which includes the field of personal finance and financial freedom, then you should consider reading his excellent book.

You can read more about Josh Waitzkin here.

His book makes for a compelling read for many reasons.

Financial Freedom is a Learning Journey

I have mentioned this concept a few times and it is important enough to reiterate here. The only way we can move forward and grow in our knowledge and skills of becoming financially free is to be in the continuous learning mode. Learning continuously does not mean just reading and reading and reading personal finance books. Reading personal finance books are an necessary but insufficient condition in us achieving mastery over our finances and ultimately ourselves.

Having a Beginners’ Mind

What we need to do in addition to reading is to integrate our learning into our experiences, i.e. do. To practice investing based on the principles we’ve learnt. One of the interesting themes I got from “The Art of Learning” from Josh Waitzkin was that peak performance comes from first starting with a beginners’ mind, i.e. to be open to learning the principles. When it comes to this journey towards financial freedom, I realise my openess to the principles allowed me to absorb what is to now become my principles of living within my means, to save and invest, to grow and protect my means.

His book takes a philosophical and yet practical look at how he achieved peak performance in his chess career as well as tai qi quan career. His world class performances in both these diverse and yet complementary (in spirit) disciplines allowed Josh Waitzkin to distill the learning principles he used to achieve his own peak performance.

Invest in Loss

I realise that for me to realise my own potential in financial freedom, I also need to reflect on my past investment mistakes and to learn from them in order to better avoid being wiped out in investing my capital. It is through such losses that Josh learnt more about performing better in his chess and martial arts career. So too would I grow if I let the lessons of my own investment failures teach me to make better investment decisions.

Develop Your Own Style

Josh also strongly encourages us to develop our own approach in our pursuit of excellence in our respective disciplines. Hence, to achieve my goal of being financially free with passive income exceeding living expenses, I should work to my strengths, beef up my weaknesses but most importantly to allow my innate personality to emerge into my execution of the principles.

Hence, investing by listening to personal financial consultants who read and know less than me in personal finance and my own investment goals is a recipe for disaster. I know my character best especially if I take time to reflect and think about my own mistakes. This knowledge which leverages on my own personality is what will get me to my goal of financial freedom.

By nature, I am relatively risk adverse. Hence, it is not for me to take one big bet on the market to hit my financial freedom target. I should work on the passive income portion while devleoping my other skills to monetise them in cash flows to build up my investible capital.

The reality is that I should make full use of my accounting and audit skills for maximum monetisation as I am my biggest income generating asset.

Ultimately, I realise that the learning and growth journey is what drives me towards financial freedom and not the goal itself of being financially free. Enjoying and appreciating the process that gets you there is just as important as the goal itself.

Have you read any books (especially non-finance related ones) that have shaped your thinking about financial freedom?

Share with Panzer in the comments section.

Be well and prosper.