Simple and uncomplicated

WHICH philosophy do you subscribe to: More is more OR less is more? Your answer actually reveals much about you. We often fall into the trap of thinking that ideas, strategies and procedures must be complex to help us succeed. That’s odd because most of life’s big wins stem from the consistent practise of simple habits and basic disciplines.

For instance, to lose weight: Exercise regularly; eat moderately.

To stabilise personal emotions about money: Increase cash savings in the bank and pure money market funds.

To garner many friends: Be friendly; work at being friend-worthy!

We intuitively know these straightforward life skills work well. Yet most of us still opt to incrementally complicate our lives with every passing year. Why is that?

Oddly, it may not be because we aren’t smart enough but because we are too smart. In the introduction of his intriguing 2019 book The Intelligence Trap, author and award-winning science journalist David Robson confides with his readers: “Like most people, I once believed that intelligence was synonymous with good thinking.”

Robson then takes a stab at identifying the source of that belief. He points out that since the start of the 20th century, psychologists have measured “...a relatively small range of abstract skills — factual recall, analogical reasoning and vocabulary — in the belief that they reflect an innate general intelligence that underlies all kinds of learning, creativity, problem-solving and decision-making.”

The paradigm from which generations of those psychologists worked from has resulted in that same belief — namely the primacy of so-called general intelligence — permeating all corners of modern society. I ought to know...

TIMELY LESSONS

In the late 1980s, during my university days in London, I sat for a test administered by Mensa UK. If memory serves, I had a raging cold that Saturday and so had a box of tissues by my side. Prior to the test, I worked hard, completing countless practice quizzes.

When the results were released a week or two later, I was clocked in with an IQ of 160, which according to Mensa, at the time at least, placed me in the top 1 per cent of everyone alive. (Confession: If that sounds like I’m bragging, well, I am... after a fashion.)

To say my needy ego was inflated by the nice letter inviting me to join Mensa UK (which I did) for a nominal annual fee (which I paid) would be an understatement.

While I have retained my Mensa UK membership all these decades, and am still a member in good standing because of my timely fee payments, in the ensuing 30-plus years I have made more than anyone’s fair share of stupid mistakes, including massive financial ones. (Regular readers know, for instance, about my not one but two bouts of credit card-linked duress in the UK in the 1980s and then in Malaysia for part of the 1990s.)

Such big missteps shouldn’t have occurred since I was supposedly “so smart”! Our expectations are that if we have sufficient cerebral potency to tap into, then our success should be inevitable, right?

Indeed, according to Robson, “Education is then meant to build on that “raw” brainpower, furnishing us with more specialised knowledge in the arts, the humanities and the sciences that will be crucial for many professions. The smarter you are — according to these criteria — the more astute your judgement.”

However, what I have learnt the hard way is that raw brainpower without sufficient and always warranted humility makes for an unpleasant, arrogant, mistake-prone, monumentally foolish person.

Robson identified why that is so, saying: “Intelligent and educated people are less likely to learn from their mistakes, for instance, or take advice from others. And when they do err, they are better able to build elaborate arguments to justify their reasoning, meaning that they become more and more dogmatic in their views. Worse still, they appear to have a bigger “bias blind spot”, meaning they are less able to recognise the holes in their logic.”

Sounds right to me.

SIMPLE IDEAS

Another book I’m reading now is financial guru Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover. While taking a break from writing this column, I dipped into it and came across this paragraph:

“In our culture, we worship the complicated and the sophisticated. If you know what all the buttons on your remote control do, you may not have a good one. In the financial world we have been taught to be arrogant snobs. Some believe that simple ideas are not profound, that instead, simple ideas are for the “little people.” That is a false and arrogant notion.”

By age 26 Ramsey grew to become a US dollar multimillionaire via real estate. Then he lost it all (and more!) over three years because he had ladled on too much debt. He and his wife Sharon subsequently clawed their way up from that abyss by heeding basic financial disciplines.

So, over the next five Sundays I will interleave for you some consistent professional advice I give my financial planning clients with what I consider to be the more interesting — and locally relevant — guidelines of Ramsey’s system for The Total Money Makeover.

Note: All Ramsey’s lessons are founded upon basic, simple principles regular people may benefit from, regardless of their IQs, if they consciously stay teachable. © 2019 Rajen Devadason

Read his free articles at www. FreeCoolArticles.com; he may be connected with on LinkedIn at www. linkedin.com/in/rajendevadason, or via rajen@RajenDevadason.com You may follow him on Twitter @RajenDevadason