A good system is an imperfect representation of reality. That is an odd way of phrasing what I am thinking about. In both business and in my new investment ventures I have made a lot of mistakes. It is easy to look at something like the newly created Stable Hands money market account and how quickly simply putting 10% of every deposit into it has grown and and asking what if.
If I knew then what I know now is a famous saying for a reason. We’d all love to go back in time and use our current knowledge to past situations. We would end up in a much better place and we know it and it frustrates us. The real lesson isn’t what we can do for our past selves it is what we can do for the future people like us. Mainly our own family.
That is the issue. I wrote awhile back about the shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves phenomenon and how the first generation learns their lessons in real time and eventually ends up making money, the second generation is handed those systems and continues what was built without full understanding, and then the third generation is handed a system that might be in decline or that was never explained to them.
The saying is usually applied to human greed and laziness. That the first generation built the wealth, the second continued it, and the third squandered it, but being a change of life baby in that third generation I have a unique perspective. I see that the system was never full explained. The tools of wealth generation can also radically change in three generations.
Let’s look at my grandfather who was born in 1914, my father who was born in 1940, and myself who was born in 1981. We all had radically different experiences with money, how it is made, how we’ve seen it lost, and the economic realities of the world. So much has changed in what is realistically a brief slice of history.
My grandfather could never have imagined being able to pull out a pocket computer and trade stocks with tools that professional traders had no access to in his prime money making days. The entire system has changed, but the underlying philosophies live on and it is on me to make sure any systems I create are handed down to the next generation.
David Huzzard Writes 