Pre-Investing

Let's be honest. When you have a lot of capital at your disposal, it is very unlikely that you will start a freeform business. You'd start a traditional business — first, second, or third sector — possibly with a storefront and some employees.

Many people think of freeform businesses like "hustles" because it has the public image of someone trying to make some side cash out of something that's less legitimate than a proper business. There are many implications of this perspective both externally and internally. Every time you want to proudly proclaim something about your business you will unconsciously shrink because you feel like people will consider it your cute little hobby.

The Zone of Financial Safety

Consider the fable of the goose that lays golden eggs. You see the said goose in the market, and it's being sold for $1M. Would you buy the goose?

What about if it's for $100k? What about $10k? What about $1k? There's an amount of money that feels like it's "reasonable" to you. That "reasonable" amount usually ends up being an amount you can spend and forget about.

What If Risk Is Actually Good?

But what's the downside of going above the zone of financial safety? You'll be taking risks. There will be a chance that you won't get your money's worth. There's a chance you'll need emergency funding but won't have liquidity. These are things that the modern individual wants to avoid at all costs.

So it's ultimately about what we want to prioritize. And it's so easy to forget this important fact: we can be fluid here. We don't always have to be risk-takers, we don't always have to be comfortable. You can pick and choose periods of expansion and contraction. I just don't want you to always default to a contracted state without even recognizing it.

The path to success is ridden with failures in a world where everything exists in a binary. Anything worth your time will have a sufficient level of difficulty, so the more valuable the success is the more likely you will fail your way through it.

The Binary Trap

In the eyes of the dharma it's more nuanced than that. When you initially think of your desired results you don't have any actions that educate you through the pathway. So you take the actual steps, see that sometimes you get closer, sometimes you get further, and so on until you're set on the right direction.

It's the binary vision that forces us to see things in a negative light. Whenever we're not succeeding, we're failing. In this viewpoint there is no "learning how to ride the bicycle." There is either riding the bicycle or failing by falling. In this viewpoint there is no "practicing basketball." There is either making the shot or failing the shot.

The Ego's Need to Be Right

So we could simply employ a different perspective on success and failure. Then the million dollar question insists on itself: why don't we do that then?

When you cognitively set yourself on a path to success, regardless of how much you learn in the process, your unconscious mind will still take it as being wrong.

Interestingly in the opposite case, when you pre-fear, pre-inhibit, and preclude your failure, your unconscious mind gets validated with the outcome it predicted. It becomes the right one.

This is a pattern that must constantly be surfaced up. In the spirit of the topic of this writing, surface it up by thinking about self-investment.

Go back to the golden goose. Could you invest $1M in it in advance, even if you have to take out 10 mortgages? The answer doesn't have to be yes. I just want you to look at the resistance you feel even when the prospect of returns is as obvious as a goose laying golden eggs.