Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

A Certain Discipline

A Certain Discipline

It does take a certain discipline to put your own interest aside.

You can put your current desires aside for future opportunities (savings, for example), or you can put it aside in the interest of others (parenting, for example).

Heck, you might even be willing to fight a war over something like “freedom.”

The point is that some generations have understood a responsibility that was higher than “self.”

Another word for this is duty.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Avoid Becoming A Master

Avoid Becoming A Master

You need to avoid becoming a master.

For being a master is the other side of the coin of being a servant.

See, a boss and corporate job enslaves you by telling you what to do, where to sit, what to say, and how to dress, in exchange for a weekly check.

But being the owner/boss of an 800 person company does the same thing. You are beholden to employees and customers dictating your time in exactly the same way.

Financial freedom is a liquid portfolio giving you dividends and coupon payments.

For example: 200,000 shares of Dorchester Minerals, or the diversified like.

You don’t become completely free by just avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.

-Nassim Taleb, The Bed Of Procrustes

Sterling Terrell