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Currency -JB

Anything related to matters of the mind

Johnny boy

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Money is a flow of water.

That’s why it’s called currency.

Money is like water in that it is essentially fungible. You can track a bottle of water like an account. You can measure how much is in it, you can see when it is emptied and by how much. You can match it with whatever receptacle it went into, but once you mix it, you can no longer identify which water or money came from which container or account.

Money is like water in that it lasts longer than you.

Water goes from the ocean to the skies, from the skies to the rain, from the rain to the ground, from the ground to the wells, and into your drinking water, out through you, and back to the ocean in one way or many other ways.

Money comes in through your income, it flows through you to somewhere else, in one hand and out the other. On and on forever.

Money is like water in that some places are wet and some places are dry. You can struggle to find water in the Sahara desert, you can get drip fed water in a cage like a little gerbil, or you can get soaked just walking around sea world. You can be a genius in a bad environment for making money and be poor, and you can be a goober rolling in millions because you were in the right places, or you were smart enough to move yourself into position.

There are billions flying around us, giant mile wide rivers flowing and being diverted, giant oceans and reservoirs, flowing so loud it would be deafening to hear.

Your employment income in reality is droplets. You are selling away the only thing that exists, your life, an hour at a time, for the price of a chipotle bowl. “Not me, I’m successful, I get drip fed at the rate of 3-4 chipotle bowls an hour”.

And you pool up your flow into a little pond, big enough for a frog to live in, and it gets stagnant. Selling away your time to end up with what? A little pool? Say you’re somewhat successful but still a normal person like even many of the successful people here… Your pool is bigger. But over the long run what really happens to it? It flows out to shinier things and maybe a little to an orphanage or something, but what did it really DO? In the long run it changed hands like it always does.

As we know with water, it has to go somewhere. It will flow someplace else, and what changes?

All you did was pool it up to go some other place. That’s what your savings are, a stagnant pool to be sent off somewhere else later. Every dollar is already spent if you realize the truth of money.

Because of this, money is not real. It comes in and goes out. It is zero sum in that way.

The ONLY thing that matters is what that flow allowed to happen in the REAL world.

THAT is how you take something that is not real and make it real.

You are a conscious creative mind, that can see the world and decide the flow of this current, and you have the power to direct the useless, fungible, flowing current into something that can be real and tangible.

It is very easy to misinterpret this message as “yeah, make some cash and give it to charities”. That is small thinking. Completely not what I’m really talking about.

I pay zero attention to collecting a stagnant pool. I pay very little attention to irrelevant expenses that are not indicative of tracking the actual health of my business model, not even my business itself, but the model. I don’t care how much is in an account. I only primarily care about the path going from where I am now, to a point in which I have complete dominion over an enduring, growing, unfathomably large current for the main purpose of diverting in for other specific purposes. But the money itself is pointless. I make it, spend it, forget it, and it doesn’t matter. “But what if you run out and lose it all?” I have a strong feeling I will not die, and I don’t think the underlying structure of what I’ve built can die so easily. We have all of our customers names. I know they all trust is to perform services at $X per month. I know I have relationships and partners. Money is not attached to those things. They are more of an asset to me than whatever can be in my bank account.

It is also not important just to “have control” over large amounts of money you don’t really control. Being a hedge fund manager is not controlling that money. You are doing the same thing another hedge fund manager would do, optimizing profits. You did not make something real out of something worthless.

If you have a mind like everyone else too, then diverting a current was essentially pointless too. You sent it someplace anyone else would send it to. You changed nothing. Your life was a script with a fill in the blank for your name, favorite hobbies, and what car brand you drove. Net neutral change.

Forget about cliches like “helping people” and “making a difference”. Think about the fact that money is a flowing current and the only way to make anything real is how that flow of money actually moves and affects other things.

Your margins are the flow that can be used for anything. Revenue comes in and flows out with expenses, but the net can be directed anywhere.

How you live is actually irrelevant. How you spend is actually irrelevant. If it is actually relevant then you are thinking way too small. Any amount of money I am dealing with right now is actually irrelevant. The only thing is the long term path to eventually being able to have complete dominion over a massive flow of margins to be directed at anything. The $20 grand I made in a deal didn’t matter. The mustang I bought yesterday doesn’t matter. It’s all droplets. What matters is the millions of gallons a second a massive corporation can turn over when it is at scale and offering massive value.

You can do as you wish, but I will remain entirely unconcerned with what is or isn’t in my bank account, and instead focused on the general path from where I am now to being in a position of entirely controlling a massive flow, and in a lasting way that is not a flash in the pan startup with an exit.

And that’s when phase two can start.
 
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Spenny

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Poetry. Thanks for posting this, love the approach!

Note: Now that I've gone away and thought about it, the bit that is the most appealing is the cashflow part. Less focus on hoarding, more focus on what you can get in.
 
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heavy_industry

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Pure gold, as always.

One of the best currency analogies I've came across.

Don't get emotionally attached to some pieces of paper, because what we call "money" is much more than that. It's the very life source of the human civilization. It's the flow of energy that powers the world economy.

Want to get more money? There is an endless supply of it.
Adjust your input/output, and the water will flow.
 
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Johnny boy

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Poetry. Thanks for posting this, love the approach!

Note: Now that I've gone away and thought about it, the bit that is the most appealing is the cashflow part. Less focus on hoarding, more focus on what you can get in.
add up everything you could spend in a normal lifetime as a normal person. 10 million? It's nothing. Go make that amount. But you are still scripted in a way if your flow looks like this profit->spend money on stuff->die. It changes hands and the world is not really different. Nothing tangible happened.

Make your money REAL by something tangible happening as it flows through you at a massive scale. And something vastly different from what another typical person would do with it.

It's not a post about "make more money by looking at it like a flow" it's about realizing the futility in making then spending only to end up with nothing happening that was real, even if you end up rich.
 
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Subsonic

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Money is a flow of water.

That’s why it’s called currency.

Money is like water in that it is essentially fungible. You can track a bottle of water like an account. You can measure how much is in it, you can see when it is emptied and by how much. You can match it with whatever receptacle it went into, but once you mix it, you can no longer identify which water or money came from which container or account.

Money is like water in that it lasts longer than you.

Water goes from the ocean to the skies, from the skies to the rain, from the rain to the ground, from the ground to the wells, and into your drinking water, out through you, and back to the ocean in one way or many other ways.

Money comes in through your income, it flows through you to somewhere else, in one hand and out the other. On and on forever.

Money is like water in that some places are wet and some places are dry. You can struggle to find water in the Sahara desert, you can get drip fed water in a cage like a little gerbil, or you can get soaked just walking around sea world. You can be a genius in a bad environment for making money and be poor, and you can be a goober rolling in millions because you were in the right places, or you were smart enough to move yourself into position.

There are billions flying around us, giant mile wide rivers flowing and being diverted, giant oceans and reservoirs, flowing so loud it would be deafening to hear.

Your employment income in reality is droplets. You are selling away the only thing that exists, your life, an hour at a time, for the price of a chipotle bowl. “Not me, I’m successful, I get drip fed at the rate of 3-4 chipotle bowls an hour”.

And you pool up your flow into a little pond, big enough for a frog to live in, and it gets stagnant. Selling away your time to end up with what? A little pool? Say you’re somewhat successful but still a normal person like even many of the successful people here… Your pool is bigger. But over the long run what really happens to it? It flows out to shinier things and maybe a little to an orphanage or something, but what did it really DO? In the long run it changed hands like it always does.

As we know with water, it has to go somewhere. It will flow someplace else, and what changes?

All you did was pool it up to go some other place. That’s what your savings are, a stagnant pool to be sent off somewhere else later. Every dollar is already spent if you realize the truth of money.

Because of this, money is not real. It comes in and goes out. It is zero sum in that way.

The ONLY thing that matters is what that flow allowed to happen in the REAL world.

THAT is how you take something that is not real and make it real.

You are a conscious creative mind, that can see the world and decide the flow of this current, and you have the power to direct the useless, fungible, flowing current into something that can be real and tangible.

It is very easy to misinterpret this message as “yeah, make some cash and give it to charities”. That is small thinking. Completely not what I’m really talking about.

I pay zero attention to collecting a stagnant pool. I pay very little attention to irrelevant expenses that are not indicative of tracking the actual health of my business model, not even my business itself, but the model. I don’t care how much is in an account. I only primarily care about the path going from where I am now, to a point in which I have complete dominion over an enduring, growing, unfathomably large current for the main purpose of diverting in for other specific purposes. But the money itself is pointless. I make it, spend it, forget it, and it doesn’t matter. “But what if you run out and lose it all?” I have a strong feeling I will not die, and I don’t think the underlying structure of what I’ve built can die so easily. We have all of our customers names. I know they all trust is to perform services at $X per month. I know I have relationships and partners. Money is not attached to those things. They are more of an asset to me than whatever can be in my bank account.

It is also not important just to “have control” over large amounts of money you don’t really control. Being a hedge fund manager is not controlling that money. You are doing the same thing another hedge fund manager would do, optimizing profits. You did not make something real out of something worthless.

If you have a mind like everyone else too, then diverting a current was essentially pointless too. You sent it someplace anyone else would send it to. You changed nothing. Your life was a script with a fill in the blank for your name, favorite hobbies, and what car brand you drove. Net neutral change.

Forget about cliches like “helping people” and “making a difference”. Think about the fact that money is a flowing current and the only way to make anything real is how that flow of money actually moves and affects other things.

Your margins are the flow that can be used for anything. Revenue comes in and flows out with expenses, but the net can be directed anywhere.

How you live is actually irrelevant. How you spend is actually irrelevant. If it is actually relevant then you are thinking way too small. Any amount of money I am dealing with right now is actually irrelevant. The only thing is the long term path to eventually being able to have complete dominion over a massive flow of margins to be directed at anything. The $20 grand I made in a deal didn’t matter. The mustang I bought yesterday doesn’t matter. It’s all droplets. What matters is the millions of gallons a second a massive corporation can turn over when it is at scale and offering massive value.

You can do as you wish, but I will remain entirely unconcerned with what is or isn’t in my bank account, and instead focused on the general path from where I am now to being in a position of entirely controlling a massive flow, and in a lasting way that is not a flash in the pan startup with an exit.

And that’s when phase two can start.
Great post man.

You are one of the few people where I know that every post or comment is going to be worth reading and remembering.
 

BizyDad

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what that flow allowed to happen in the REAL world.
money is not real.
the only way to make anything real is how that flow of money actually moves and affects other things.
How you live is actually irrelevant. How you spend is actually irrelevant.

images (1).jpeg

I only primarily care about the path going from where I am now, to a point in which I have complete dominion over an enduring, growing, unfathomably large current for the main purpose of diverting in for other specific purposes. But the money itself is pointless. I make it, spend it, forget it, and it doesn’t matter.

Okaaaay....

You didn't go to college right? So you missed out on that philosophical college stoner phase? Is this you making up for lost time?

I don’t think the underlying structure of what I’ve built can die so easily. We have all of our customers names. I know they all trust is to perform services at $X per month. I know I have relationships and partners. Money is not attached to those things. They are more of an asset to me than whatever can be in my bank account.

Two thoughts.

1. Hubris. If you don't think the underlying structure of what you have built can die so easily, then you haven't looked at it hard enough for it to be sustainable.

2. Are these relationships and partners real? You sure money's not attached to your relationships and partners? When you're the kind of guy to kick a girlfriend out of your house for simply being too good a girlfriend and thus a distraction... When 80% of what you talk about with your friends is business... What are your relationships based on if not money? Success? Peacocking? Living and looking good?

Maybe I'm too old, but I really don't get the value of this post. There is some Zen talk about money. Nothing is real. And in the end Johnny has a phase two master plan. But he's not going to tell us yet. He's got to get Uber rich first.

I respect your posts generally, but I'm honestly missing the point here.
 

BizyDad

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Make your money REAL by something tangible happening as it flows through you at a massive scale. And something vastly different from what another typical person would do with it.
Buildings. Authorship. I'm trying to think of things that last beyond our lifetime. But everything I'm coming up with is what a typical person would say. Because we have this thing called human history. It's pretty rare that someone comes along with a genuinely new idea.

Is this your way of saying that you're the next Elon Musk, and you're going to take us to Mars?

Or revolutionize society by building super highways under the ground?
 
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G

Guest-5ty5s4

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View attachment 47729



Okaaaay....

You didn't go to college right? So you missed out on that philosophical college stoner phase? Is this you making up for lost time?



Two thoughts.

1. Hubris. If you don't think the underlying structure of what you have built can die so easily, then you haven't looked at it hard enough for it to be sustainable.

2. Are these relationships and partners real? You sure money's not attached to your relationships and partners? When you're the kind of guy to kick a girlfriend out of your house for simply being too good a girlfriend and thus a distraction... When 80% of what you talk about with your friends is business... What are your relationships based on if not money? Success? Peacocking? Living and looking good?

Maybe I'm too old, but I really don't get the value of this post. There is some Zen talk about money. Nothing is real. And in the end Johnny has a phase two master plan. But he's not going to tell us yet. He's got to get Uber rich first.

I respect your posts generally, but I'm honestly missing the point here.
Nah, @Johnny boy is right.

Money isn't real. It's just a piece of paper or a number on a computer screen. The number can be changed by a couple of clicks on a keyboard in Washington DC, or at any of the Federal Reserve Banks around the US, for example.

It becomes real when it's used to build something of actual value, an asset.

That would be a building, a piece of equipment, a business that produces a profit, etc.

You already know this, but not everyone on the forum knows this.

So in your quest for the temporary pieces of paper, don't forget to turn them into lasting value.

And don't forget that the greatest profit isn't in exchanging paper for more paper, but in building that real value for others as well.

Make money, but turn it into some value that you can keep.

Remember that ice cream melts.
 

Spenny

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BizyDad

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That would be a building, a piece of equipment, a business that produces a profit, etc.

You already know this, but not everyone on the forum knows this.
Oh. Ok. So when I was thinking of a piece of equipment or real estate etc, I thought I was thinking like everybody else. But you're pointing out that most people don't think like this. Gotcha.

Yeah I guess I've kind of always thought this. And the people I'm around think like this. So that's how I missed the point..

Thanks for the assist @thechosen1
 
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G

Guest-5ty5s4

Guest
Oh. Ok. So when I was thinking of a piece of equipment or real estate etc, I thought I was thinking like everybody else. But you're pointing out that most people don't think like this. Gotcha.

Yeah I guess I've kind of always thought this. And the people I'm around think like this. So that's how I missed the point..

Thanks for the assist @thechosen1
Yeah, the average person outside of this forum thinks about making money and this is their goal:

5a04c6755c87172d825cf4d9da716246
 

heavy_industry

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Yeah, the average person outside of this forum thinks about making money and this is their goal:
And that's exactly why money chasers never hit the target.

All effort goes into fantasizing about the end product of a lifetime of wisdom, discipline, hard work and smart decisions. They only want to see the effect, while completely ignoring the cause.

If you want to win a marathon, stop staring at the finish line and start F*cking running.

After they fail repeatedly, 1% learn from their mistakes and change their way of thinking, while the other 99% resign to adopting the delusional and self-deceptive "money doesn't buy happiness" pseudo life philosophy.


You can't run from yourself.
Your lies and justifications can't shield you from the crushing reality.
 
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