#10: If Kanye West were a financial adviser
23rd November, 2020
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23rd November, 2020
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Welcome to the Idiot Money newsletter. The newsletter that is occasionally as surprised as you are.
This week: becoming wiser with money by understanding that whether you broke or rich you gotta get this: havin' money's not everything, not havin' it is.
Occasionally these are in the form of ‘Idiot Profiles’: an encouragement to point and laugh at rich people wasting their resources, and by extension, their lives, in the hope that we can follow the threads of their idiocy back to the subtler ways our identical, but less well-funded, wiring leads us astray.
If pointing and laughing at former financial-planning clients or muppets I met in the Middle East or the City were easy, Mr West, I thought, would be easier still. Reader, having trawled through his Tweets, I can see I was wrong.
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He’s dead right.
He even understands that to denounce the numbers game is to keep playing it, and that we only really become free of it when we move beyond it, when we widen the worldview that the dark forces of the salespeople seek to narrow, when we move from freedom to, not only to freedom from, but onwards to freedom for [look out for that one in the updates section of this newsletter soon].
When it comes to urging us to reconnect to our souls, and to pay attention to them rather than other people’s lives, he’s an absolute champ:
Echoing my own conclusion that participating in the process of seeking wisdom is the only way any of us can defeat our debilitating self-deceptions, wise Mr West sets out both the problem, and the plan:
One of the central messages of is that we fail to make the most of our money because of three main sources of self-deception. Kanye’s got them all covered.
I stress the importance of living in a . Mr West counsels us that excitement of the having mode is ephemeral and that its material aims are shoddy substitutes for what we really want:
I wish the world to understand that money is about . Mr West wobbles here. We all do. But he knows where it’s at.
In (and all sorts of other places, especially ) I espouse the idea that chasing money to remove the consciousness from our decision-making is moronic, as it turns the chances of you allocating your resources wisely into a crapshoot.
Mr West, having talked widely about both making billions and mental-health issues, is well aware of this. ‘’ he tells us; ‘’… '’.
Mr West is rightly wary of , and without continually asking: ‘.’
He recognises that while being rich (reminder: ) may dodge the problems of penury, it worsens the problem of being so scared of losing money that you believe being more conscious about what you do have can wait:.
Mr West knows that there’s , but crucially, while it’s necessary, it’s a wholly insufficient aspect of using it to improve your life. He accompanied an article headlined “Kanye West is the highest-paid male celebrity in the world” with simply: ‘.’
Ye knows his . He knows when to zoom in, and zoom out. To live in the present, accounting for past and future presents in the process. ‘’, he says, and, if you think that’s too pithy: ‘’.
As surely as he knows that , he knows that you need to beat your addictions before you can clearly see your real wants, enough is more important than more, and we’re in need of re-examining what we call needs [all big sections to come soon(ish)]..
Ye appears aware that these symptoms, like the self-deceptions that sprout, them come from , that ‘’ and that we should seek to unlearn these fears, ‘’ and generally get strong in good positions, rather than more comfortable in bad ones.
While he’s got you covered for expenditure basics (‘’), Ye doesn’t dispense much direct investment advice. Perhaps he is cautious of inadvertently transgressing regulatory rules. But he does drop this nugget:. Anyone who’s seen a graph of inflows into a fund following a peak in its performance (and possibly an editorialised advert in the money pages of the paper) knows this only too well. Ye’s right to highlight it.
He delights us with bit of investment wisdom, couched in Bruce-Lee-esque brevity: ‘’, he tells us, referring, one assumes, to the need to recognise that humans and their goals are works in progress and not to get caught up in spuriously precise plans, or tunnel-vision for some shit you probably didn’t want anyway.
After the description, the prescription; ‘’… Where should we go, West?
He implores us to focus on : ‘’ (I assume here that he uses ‘happy’ in the the monk Matthieu Ricard does; Ye’s a poet, he’s allowed a little licence).
As I talk of , Ye’s got my back: ‘’.
In a move reminiscent of Marx and Engels’s rousing entreaty to the proletariat to cast off their chains, Ye commands us: ‘’ (without feeling the need to caveat it with something about the technical stuff having a place, only that it should know a little better where that place is – he is, of course, a far better marketer than I).
Finally, he knows that, being human, it is our actions that define us, and, without which, not money, nor anything else, would have any meaning: ‘.’
