Life is like a snowball, the most important thing is to find wet snow and long mountain slopes.

Editor’s note: Floating Light: This article from the micro-channel public number “notes Man” (ID: Notesman), Author: Jun Mo laugh, ed.

In a complex world, changes and uncertainties are always something we cannot avoid.

The most efficient solution is to accept some valuable experiences and ways of thinking, and then practice actions.

Looking at human history, it can be regarded as a “financial history” to some extent, because finance is dealing with risks (uncertainty) and realizing wealth appreciation through intertemporal arrangements of resources and values.

Therefore, financial thinking is also one of the effective weapons to deal with real-world problems.

1. Discount thinking:

Thinking about the future is the starting point of life

1. Discount and depreciation, affect value

What is discounting?

“Discount” means “discount”, “now” means “now”, and discount means converting current value to future value. The “discount” ratio between current value and future value is the discount rate.

Take a (slightly less rigorous) example: next year’s 100 yuan will be worth 95 yuan this year, and the discount rate (approximately) will be 5%; next year’s 100 yuan will be worth 90 yuan this year, and the discount rate will be (approximately) 10%.

From this example, we can see: the higher the discount rate, the lower the current value.

There is an old-fashioned paragraph that says: A Wall Street elite met a young and beautiful girl who wanted to marry a rich man.

The Wall Street elite said: If I marry you, according to the current situation, you are beautiful and I am rich. We exchange assets, which is a fair deal.

However, getting married is not a speculation, but a long-term investment. In the long run, I am actually very uneconomical.

Because as time goes by, you are getting older and older, and my ability will increase with time, and I may make more money.

Of course, this is a piece intended to satirize the vulgar view of marriage and love, but there is a deep thinking about discounting behind it.

In other words, in the long run, girls’ assets (face value) are depreciating, while those of Wall Street elites (capacities) are increasing—discount thinking requires us to start with a longer-term future under the framework of discounting ,think.

However, as human beings, we instinctively do not believe that the benefits of the future can be realized, so we will discount them a lot in the present, so we will have short-sighted behavior.

Short-sighted thinking will bury the root cause of high consumption and high depreciation—increasing the depreciation rate, which in turn increases the actual discount rate, and finally leads to lower market prices.

It can be seen that the depreciation rate has a great influence on the discount rate. Then, what kind of asset depreciation rate will be low, or even not depreciate, but increase in value?

2. How to use discount thinking?

We might as well divide human capital into two categories:

The first category is natural human capital. For example, looks, posture, and physical fitness. You will know these after thinking about it. In the time dimension, it must be natural depreciation. No matter how hard you work, you can only reduce, but not eliminate depreciation and depletion.

The second category is human capital acquired. For example, knowledge, skills, wisdom, etc. These capitals can be accumulated in the dimension of time. As long as your accumulation speed exceeds the update speed of knowledge and skills, your assets will not be depreciated and depleted, but may increase in value.

Any choice that wants to increase its price (value) must meet two points: first, high growth; second, low depreciation.

In other words, we need to know what is high growth, which is low depreciation, or even non-depreciation.

First, the ancients often said that “the book has its own house of gold”, but there is a certain truth to it. Because the depreciation rate of knowledge is low, it makes sense to keep learning this thing.

From the perspective of economics, the “positive externality” of knowledge is great. People with more knowledge often have more ways and methods to deal with complex and difficult problems, including what we often hear Intellectual property rights, patents-to some extent, it is a monopoly on wealth.

Secondly, avoid wasting time, energy, and health on high-loss, high-depreciation investments, work, and relationships because of short-sightedness.

For example, meaningless social interaction-we will see Zhang San and Li Si scrambling at various wine and dinner parties, pushing cups and changing cups, just like “social flowers”. However, when it comes to dealing with practical problems, this kind of “entertainment” ability is useless.

Third, patience and delayed gratification-discovering new opportunities is beneficial, meaningless changes are harmful.

Daniel Kahneman has confirmed that it is a very frequent matter for humans to make wrong decisions with confidence.

For example, if a certain industry is good, some people immediately jumped to new jobs and found that the industry was not as good as they imagined, and then turned around and ran to another “outlet”—the chasing outlet means only seeing “growth” but not “ depreciation”.

Even if many people are on the right track, they cannot accept some short-term painful things in exchange for something more abundant in the future. What they want is the happiness and satisfaction of the moment, even at the expense of the future.

Finally, it is necessary to add to the previous paragraph.

The value of beauty affects both men and women. In modern society, value of beauty has become an important part of human capital.

There have been studies in top economic journals that have shown that in the long run, good-looking people earn 5% to 10% higher than the average person, especially men.

This is also one of the reasons why the medical beauty and fitness industries are becoming popular now.

Two, leverage thinking:

Find the fulcrum and use the strength to upgrade

Why are some people very hardworking but still poor?

Because he only relies on hard work to make money, the complexity of modern society is far more complicated than most people think, and it has become increasingly difficult to achieve success by hard work alone.

Archimedes once said: If you give me a fulcrum, I can push the earth.

Leverage is actually to amplify one’s own ability by borrowing force.

As the most basic driving force of human society, the principle of leverage contains two particularly important thinking modes: leveraging thinking and hard-core thinking. By making good use of lever thinking, you can use small power to leverage greater power .

1. Leveraging on thinking

From a biological point of view, the gap in physiological endowment between people is not very different. Therefore, most people’s competition is often not in the innate endowment, but how to use their own comparative advantages ( Core competence) and find the best and longest lever to move yourself.

For example, Internet celebrities have been carrying goods in recent years0 times or more income.

2. Hardcore Thinking

In addition to the length of the lever, there is also a fulcrum. If you can’t find a hard fulcrum (hard core), no matter how long the lever is, it will be a waste of effort.

The essence of the pivot is actually its core competitiveness: vision, knowledge, cognition, skills, experience, etc. Therefore, if you want to use leverage in your life, the pivot must be solid enough and you must have real skills.

Buffett once said: Draw a circle around the names of those companies that you can really understand, and then measure the value of these companies, the pros and cons of management, and the risk of business difficulties, and exclude those unqualified companies .

If you switch to an ordinary person, the circle of competence means: the knowledge you have learned throughout your life, the experience and skills you have at work, and the vision and judgment of things. The three add up to a circle of personal competence.

The larger the circle of ability, the harder the pivot point.

How can ordinary people consolidate their ability circle?

First, whether individuals or organizations, focus on their areas of expertise, maximize their abilities, continuously output value to the outside world, and form a cooperative and complementary value network with the outside world, which will naturally form a powerful advantage.

Secondly, it is very important to learn to review your own circle of competence from time to time, check whether the value of the output is out of date, and continuously optimize and improve to form a stable cognitive iteration.

Thirdly, with a sincere attitude, 100% self-discipline in knowledge, experience, skills, etc., to update, optimize, improve, and output.

As the investor Li Lu said: Investment is a thorough and sincere attitude. It is a rigid self-discipline that must be 100% honest in knowledge, and it is the continuous pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of wisdom as one’s own An ethical responsibility. Only by adhering to these principles, you are investing in economic growth, investing in good companies, and obtaining long-term, reliable and safe returns.

The same goes for the competence circle of individuals and organizations.

Three, compound interest thinking:

Believe in long-term strength and speed up running

1. The core is acceleration

Compound interest, which Einstein called “the worldThe eighth wonder of the world”. Today, we are all living in an era of compound interest.

For example, suppose you have 24 U.S. dollars in 1626. If you calculate the annualized 9% investment income (compound interest), then after 374 years, this will become 2368 trillion, which is equivalent to more than 1,000 Apple companies. More than 100 American wealth.

Of course, we will also see that it took 10 years to reach US$24 to US$56.8, and it took 50 years to reach US$1784.6. We have not considered the inflation rate.

But as time continues to advance, around 200 years, that is, after breaking the threshold, the compound interest effect begins to be truly realized, and the compound interest effect is almost “invisible” in the short term-this is particularly evident in Chinese companies.

As Professor Ming Zeng said: The first thing an enterprise must complete is a breakthrough of 0 to 0.1. Before reaching the threshold of 0.1, there is always the danger of capsizing. Therefore, before the threshold of 0.1, any long-term strategic vision is not as important as survival itself.

The same is true for individuals. Before the threshold, compound interest has no effect on you.

If you want to shorten the time, the variables that can be changed include the “initial wealth value” and the compound interest rate.

For most ordinary people, the “initial wealth value” is basically the same. The only thing that can affect your final wealth is the growth rate of compound interest rates—the most important thing about compound interest thinking is not time, but acceleration—in a limited The time, the value added faster than others.

In other words, if our “initial wealth” is insufficient, or the initial ability experience is insufficient, the most important thing to do is to accelerate, accelerate and then accelerate-such as a lot of deliberate practice, and then get positive from the master Feedback, optimize, practice again, and feedback again until the threshold is exceeded.

In the initial stage, we must do our best to maintain rapid growth, strive to break the threshold in the shortest time, enter the acceleration process, and realize the compound interest effect.

2. The focus is on direction

Here, I still want to talk about long-termismIdea, because the three kinds of thinking mentioned above are more or less related to time.

In the past two years, long-termism has become very popular, and it seems that it has been played badly. Many people think that long-termism is to do one thing, do it for a long time, do it continuously, and do it persistently.

But Maynard Keynes said: In the long run, we are all dead.

Then why should we pay attention to long-term things? After all, persistence is useless.

In fact, persistence is not important in itself, only the right direction is important. The long term itself is not important, it is more important to find certainty in the long term.

Long-term is not measured by time alone, but by continuous action to change behavior, in order to adapt to the fluctuation cycle of the macro world and follow the trend.

The founder of Gaoling, Zhang Lei, said on the 80th anniversary of the National People’s University: Life is made up of one choice after another. The direction you choose at each intersection determines what mood you will take on the road and what you will see in the end Such a landscape…I hope you will be friends of time… and friends of time need strong self-discipline and a strong sense of responsibility…

This means that long-termism does not require us to persevere in a certain belief and principle, but to find the right direction, choose the track, and then persevere in action.

The so-called long-termism, or the friend of time, actually has compound interest thinking behind it, which is to find that direction, and then continue to accelerate, accelerate, and accelerate.

Compound interest thinking tells us: choose the right direction and then do “good things”. Don’t think that you will only reap the benefits of the moment. There must be benefits after the benefits, and there is more value behind the value.

Conclusion

Su Shimin, the founder of Blackstone, said: The difficulty of doing big things is the same as doing small things. So choose a grand goal worth pursuing, and let the rewards match your efforts.

First of all, we must use anticipatory thinking to find the ambitious goal worth pursuing;

Secondly, we cannot easily win these huge goals. At this time, what we need is to use leverage thinking (“fulcrum + borrowing force”) to amplify our own value and ability, rather than relying solely on worthless efforts;

Finally, we must believe in the power of compound interest, act and improve in time, and wait for time to give you a good result.

Use these threeThis kind of thinking, put them into your own investment decisions and life planning, better stand on high ground, understand life, understand wealth.