Stop listening to your parents advice

Growing up, I always thought that my parents knew everything.

Whenever I had a difficult decision to make or didn’t understand something, I would ask them for advice.

However, as the years have gone on, I have found their advice less and less useful. Instead, it is often them coming to me for advice.

Unless you have genius parents then chances are, if you keep learning you will outgrow your parent’s wisdom.

It is not entirely their fault.

If you look back over the last 70 years, for the first 30 years between the 1950s and 1980s, not a great deal changed.

All the advances in technology were mostly incremental. TVs changed from black and white to colour and gradually got bigger (but not yet thinner). Games got slightly better with incremental graphics increases.

The stock market continued to gradually increase yearly, and savings interest rates fluctuated between 8% and 15%. On top of that, housing was cheap compared to salaries and jobs were easy to come by.

Our parents had it relatively easy, provided they didn’t do anything stupid. To get a job at 18, you didn’t need any qualifications, provided you turned up to your interview in a suit.

Unless the company went bust, or you were incompetent, you pretty much had a job for life. For example, my Dad stayed at the same company for 37 years. At the end of it, you could retire on a final salary pension.

Since the 1980s and especially since the dawn of the internet, the rate of change has increased rapidly. Long gone are the days of people staying in one job for 30 years, 3 is more likely a maximum. The chances of a company staying in business for 30 years are extremely unlikely, especially in the tech industry.

Companies have to reinvent themselves every few years to stay relevant. Failure to do so means they are out of business.

The stock market has had major highs and lows, and the interest rates have stayed at an all-time low for a long time.

Your parent’s job is to keep you safe and guide you to the safe path in life. However, the path they once walked on has gone into disrepair and is covered in potholes, and no one is going to fix it.

As a result, the advice given to us by our parents is often outdated and not fit for the modern world.

I have been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile this week.

We all know what it means if something is “fragile”, it is vulnerable, easily damaged and breaks at the smallest of shocks.

Often, when we try and think of the opposite, we think of words like robust and sturdy. However, the opposite of something getting damaged by external shocks isn’t the lack of damage, but something that strengthens as a result.

When you lift weights your muscle fibres tear but with some rest becomes stronger. Nassim came up with the word “antifragile” for this, as there seems to lack of a proper definition.

The path that our parents took is now very fragile compared to what it used to be. If your sole income is from one job, when you lose that job, your income goes to zero.

While reading the book, I have been trying to think of ways that I can make my life less fragile.

One of these ways is building multiple income streams, especially those that don’t require my attention on an ongoing basis. Once I have found something that works, don’t worry, I will share it with all of you.

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