I think it would be reasonable for me to describe myself as competitive. Through my years at university I had a goal of scoring a GPA of 90 percent (where a first-class degree is awarded at 70 percent); I added a clause of working a part-time job later on. I’ve enjoyed participating in a variety of contests from young, both in terms of work (Singapore Math Olympiad, ICPC) and play (Sims 4, music exams, puzzles).
Speaking of puzzle contests, I participated in the UK Sudoku Championship 2018 at the beginning of this week. Participants were given 2 hours to solve 16 puzzles of varying difficulty. To keep things interesting, the puzzles aren’t just standard or “classic” sudoku, but also feature additional constraints – for example, the highest-scoring puzzle had an additional constraint where both major diagonals had to have the digits 1 to 9 once each as well. I solved 13 puzzles, which led to a placement of 42 out of 136 (or 157, depending on whether one considers zero scores). I finished the remaining puzzles after the time ran out and would have needed about 2:20 overall; the fastest solver cleared everything in 1:09, just under half that!
I think one of my weaknesses can be a tendency to over-index on pursuing things that I think are worth doing. This may not work out so well if my thoughts turn out to be incorrect or misguided, or if the pursuit causes unpleasant side-effects. Writing this reminds me of the 90 to 100-hour weeks I used to pull in second year when studying for the exams then.
Anyway, one of the things I’ve been looking at recently has been building up a healthy portfolio. I had a conversation with my parents today, and one of the things that came up as part of the discussion was something I used to do in high school.
In Singapore, most food courts and hawker centers have an economy rice stall. The stalls offer steamed white rice accompanied by various cooked dishes. These include meat-based dishes like fried chicken or Chinese char siu, vegetable dishes and tofu, among others. Ordering from an economy rice stall is typically cheap (as the name suggests); thinking about it, it also bears similarity to the low-cost model for airlines in that one chooses and pays specifically for what one wants, and has flexibility in choosing what is included.
My high-school canteen had an economy rice stall, and I remember budgeting S$1 (now 56p; then probably more like 45p or so) for lunch every day. This would typically result in fairly unhealthy meals, admittedly, with rice plus one hot-dog and a small portion of nuts and anchovies. For comparison, many meals in the canteen ranged from S$2 to S$3. Note that cooked food in Singapore is generally much cheaper than in London, and food in school canteens is typically subsidised.
Some of this frugality continued when I entered university. I had similar ‘adventures’ in my first year at Imperial, where I somehow maintained a grocery budget of £7 per week (£1 per day) for a full academic term. Things relaxed over time, especially as I convinced myself that I did have reasonable earning power. To be fair, there was increasing evidence of that as I did several internships and part-time jobs while I was at Imperial.
Clearly, if one is trying to build a portfolio quickly, one factor that can be optimised on would be maximising fresh inflows to the portfolio. Minimising one’s expenses and thus increasing one’s savings rate helps with that, of course.
However, aggressive expense minimisation often leads to other appreciable costs in terms of health, happiness and stress. Apart from direct opportunity costs (for example, from foregoing higher quality or safer food), there are secondary effects as well (affecting socialisation, for instance). The mental overhead of needing to evaluate many small financial decisions every day can be significant as well; I’ve found it to be the case in my personal experience.
Having a sizable portfolio can be useful; I don’t think I have to be convinced of the value of financial independence even though I don’t necessarily have early retirement plans at this stage. However, as an end in and of itself it is not particularly satisfying. I’m fortunate in that I haven’t taken on large debt obligations, and right now (though I may regret saying this later) bumping the numbers in some brokerage account or on my spreadsheets is nice, but brings very little marginal happiness.
It may well be obvious that, to quote a blog post I read this week, life is more than compounding money. In general, reducing it to an arbitrary single end is difficult. Nonetheless, when pursuing a goal I sometimes lose some sight of broader things, and it’s thus important to remind myself of this.
It has been said that “what gets measured gets managed”, and for me at least most goals tend to be fairly quantitiative and measurable in nature. I often place these in some kind of OKR framework which often isn’t as friendly to softer, more qualitative tasks. That probably explains to some extent “losing sight of broader things”. Some may have a very clear and specific view of what they want to do, but I’m not there yet.
