Maps have changed, but this wisdom hasn’t
So I was out driving in the country with the hubby the other day. We were looking for a spot for lunch.
It’s one of the great things about the Sunshine Coast hinterland. There’s fantastic little pockets all over the place. You should check it out.
(That’s my little plug on behalf of Sunshine Coast tourism.)
Anyway, we were following Google Maps, as you do these days, and we were reflecting on how quickly that just became part of modern life.
There’s a generation of drivers these days who don’t know any different. They’ve never had to navigate the rabbit warren of Brisbane’s one way streets with a Refedex balanced on their knees, or trammel Queensland’s dusty country roads with a fold-out map taking up half the windscreen.
No idea what they’re missing.
Not that I’m romanticising it. I’ll take voice-directed GPS over a paper map any day of the week.
But in our little bout of nostalgia, we got talking about the unique experience of trying to fold up a map the size of a picnic blanket.
Maybe you remember. If you got the sequence of folds just right, it folded up neat as a pin. It was actually incredibly satisfying (if you’re a bit OCD like me.)
But one wrong fold – if you jumped from length-ways to cross-ways too early, or went backwards against the crease – then it was a bit of a mess. It didn’t sit flat. It didn’t give you the satisfaction of having the title panel facing out.
It just didn’t really work.
It got me thinking that life is a bit like this.
Because obviously you can fold a map up anyway you please. There’s no rules. It’s your car and your map. You can fold it however you like. You could go diagonals. You could make it into a giant paper crane and sit it on the dash if you wanted to.
But there is a way – a tried and tested way – where it gives you the best results for minimal effort.
Now this is something I see a bit in my line of work. Over the past twenty years or so, my students and I have developed a range of successful investing strategies. We’ve come up with a suite of systems that consistently deliver results.
That didn’t come easily. There was a bit of trial and error. The rest we just had to nut out. But we did it.
And now I feel that I can say, without any exaggeration, that we have a tool-kit of investment strategies that deliver extremely satisfying results.
We learnt how to fold the map.
And now, the students who get the most out of our training are those students who take the time to learn the way of the creases.
They don’t try to do anything fancy. They’re not trying to make a paper cranes. They’re just following the natural flow of the folds.
Half and half again, now eighths.
And that’s not to say you have to do it that way. You can do whatever you want. You can try get a DA approved for a ferris wheel on top of your duplex if you want.
But the easiest way – the most efficient and most satisfying way – is to just go with those well-worn creases.
We’ve nutted it out so you don’t have to.
And that means you can spend your time worrying about more interesting things… like where to do lunch.
DB.