Giving people shit to step on

An enjoyable past time when people are eating their meal is to talk about shit. Literally, like the brown manure kind.

A shifu told a group of us this story during a book reading session while I was in Christchurch around late May this year. Enjoy this post (fair warning, faecal references ahead).

A boy left home at a young age to become a vagabond. Travelling the world, he wandered from place to place, surviving on what meager jobs he could find.

One day, he arrives at a town and stumbled upon a mansion that looked really grand. He hung around the gates for a bit, admiring the big compound full of riches.

The wealthy owner of the mansion caught notice of the man however, and told his attendants to get the man for him. When the man saw them running to him, he got scared thinking he was in deep trouble. "I'm just a dirty beggar, I shouldn't be here anyway," he thought, and ran away.

Somewhat disappointed but not deterred, the wealthy owner thought of another way to approach the man. He decided to send two of his men, dressed as lowly servants, to offer the man a job - handling manure.

The poor man readily took up the offer, thinking "Yeah, this I can do." So for the next few years, he shoveled shit from outhouses to the fields, a lowly job that smelt like crap and paid very little But it matched the level of what he was used to doing, so he didn't complain. Ocassionally, the wealthy owner would dress up in rags and blend in so as to check on the man, not that anyone ever noticed.

After a while, the poor man became comfortable with shit (literally), and got offered a position as a labourer. He accepted it and continued to work hard, and his responsibilities gradually increased. Over time, he started to be in charge of the storehouses, and ever larger sections of the property.

Finally, when the wealthy owner grew old and knew he was about to die, he told everyone the fact that the man was actually his long lost son. The mansion and the whole business was handed down to the man, and the wealthy old man passed away.

The son was in tears for having not known that his father was with him all this time. "All this time, how did I not realize the treasures around me were mine all along!"

This is a parable from Chapter 4 of the Lotus Sutra, and there are many ways to look at it. The interpretation shifu offered was that the wealthy owner was [one of the past reincarnations of] the Buddha and the son depicted a normal human being. Quite often, we do not see that the [way to] great riches (Buddha's nature) is already with us. How can it be possible that lowly us (shit shovelers) can attain such great wealth (enlightenment)?

A way to look at this story is as a matter of trust. Trust can be a dangerous thing, and I want you to keep this in mind when reading this post, while also being open minded (hard I know). There are people in this world who are cautious (sometimes for good reason) when someone just comes up and tells them about something that will transform their lives. Trust needs to be earned, it's not something you simply give.

If you are gullible, you will be easily fooled. If you are paranoid, you will pass something by. If you know who and what to trust, you may see an opportunity.

If someone were to come up to you and say: "Hey, I've used this calculator that tells me I can retire in less than 5 years, you should give it a go too!" Will you look at him/her wide eyed and think that he/she is nuts? And just continue doing the same shitty stuff you've grown accustomed to?

Maybe you were swayed a bit by the above paragraph. It is clearly a sales tactic, something too good to be true. The funny thing about sales is it's like magic - once you know the methods, you know where to look, what questions to ask, where the fault lines are - and you see the truth behind the packaging.

Easier said than done though.

I learnt things the hard way about three years ago when I did something similar to the above. I gave my ex-girlfriend this spreadsheet where if you plug in all the numbers on your income, assets, savings and some assumptions on the interest rate you're getting and inflation, you'll be able to see when you can be financially independent.

It wasn't a straightforward tool to use, and I tried unsucessfully to schedule a time with her to teach her how to input the numbers. At that time though, she was carried away with her multi-level marketing side hustle, she managed to sell me onto something but not vice versa.

We broke up not long after.

In a sense, there is only so much sales and marketing can cover up. The lowest level of a sales is a sales pitch, something that looks like shit, smells like shit, and probably tastes like shit. It's the most basic lure, and like clickbait titles, it's the thing you use to tell people about this <great thing> when they don't know about it. If shit is what they know, then throw shit at them.

But once they're past that stage, and you continue to hurl brown faeces into their face... Well, the nice ones will be able tolerate it for a while, others will move on, unable to hold the stench.

Conversely, if they're not even past that stage yet, don't bother giving them the good stuff. It's like forcing fine dining on poor university students, they don't want something high class no matter how many stars it's got, they just want a good quantity of avocado on toast or cheap ramen noodles that fills the belly.

There is a saying:

"When deluded, one's master takes one across, but once enlightened, one crosses over by oneself."

~ Huineng, Sixth Patriarch of Chan in his escape from the monastery

I thought I had crossed over, she probably thought the same too. The truth was, we were young and still deluded, and as with life, some things you just have to learn the hard way.

How often do you see a post about "How to get your spouse on board of Financial Independence?" Maybe not if you're single, but for those of us trying to convince someone close to us, that "Hey, I know a great way for us to break away from that 9-5!" is something incredibly hard to get across.

Why is it hard? Because you don't want to throw shit at them, you wish they were a couple of levels higher but they're not. Isn't there a shortcut you think?

Nope, that's not how it works unfortunately.

There's a reason introvert me hesitates now to force the cult-like ways of FI/RE on my girlfriend, or most anyone. That's because they don't truly see it yet, just like the poor son shovelling shit, they struggle in messy manure, thinking that getting by is good enough.

I was talking to an aunty working at the restaurant two days ago, and somehow the discussion got to how she dabbled in the stock market years ago. Great, I can discuss with her about finance! But she went on on how she bought some stock, some won, a lot lost, and she sold them

Did I bother to tell her what she should have done, or should do now? Nope, she was set in her ways, thinking it was a game for the big players, and warned me to not even go there as you can't beat the experts.

I wanted to scream: "Don't buy individual stock! Diversify into a broad basket you fool (granted, index funds probably weren't around back then) and hold on to them for 10+ years or so."

But no, for the reason that there's no point just giving it to her (and also cultural reasons of not telling off your elders). I didn't say a word. Yes, it's sad when you see people so set in their shitty ways. Heck, she was actually a finance major, and still she didn't know the right way!

Sigh.

The same can be said with scientific communication. Tell people that sea level rise can rise by 70 metres and they might not believe you. Give them the opportunity to work through all the datasets (which will take a shitload of time) on how much water volume is trapped in all the glaciers and ice sheets and then they'll believe it for themselves (and be scared for life looking at another data table).

So yes, great things take time. For the majority of people, it's more about becoming it rather than just getting it. The magic bullet is so elusive that you just can't see it.

You probably know the proverb: "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

Yes, in hindsight, the poor son could have just not ran away, and maybe his father would have just given him his inheritance straightaway. But would he know how to manage all of that wealth properly?

I think the moral of the story is: to realize that you have what it takes inside of you to get out of shitty situations. Shit isn't bad, some of my friends and I used to kid that veggies grow in shit, we eat veggies, so we're literally made of shit anyway.

What's bad is having your eyes blinded by that stuff.

So wipe it off, throw it under your feet, and soon you'll have a shitload hill to bring you to the cleaner air above.

This post is dedicated to my father because it's Father's day in New Zealand. Being a father is really hard. It doesn't help that he is so awkward. Dad would always say Omitofo (literally Buddha) when answering the phone instead of Hello. When you're a kid, it's hard to explain to your friends why he does that...

The idea actually, is that we all have the Buddha nature in our hearts, so it made sense to just call everyone a Buddha when you greet them.

Except that most people would just get confused (or know that it's the right number if you called my home phone regularly).

One of the things I've never really thanked him for though, is for instilling Buddhism in me since I was young. I didn't know much back then, reciting sutras I could read but couldn't understand in the temple, listening to morning prayers in the car to the point that I've memorized them... In a way, he is like the father in the parable, silently pointing me in the right direction. So thanks dad, Omitofo.