Given enough time, I try to transfer some of the skills and resources I have to other domains of my work to become more effective at it. The basis for doing this is to simply read aggressively - a lot of readers do not give me enough credit for the sheer volume of books I read too well in my portfolio job roles.
First, when I started teaching in a tertiary institution, I knew I had some basic public speaking skills from many years of Toastmasters work. Above all, conducting training for adults who pay thousands to attend my workshop has also thickened my skin and forced me to address every question that can possibly be contemplated over the subject matter. Paid customers deserve the best answers they can get!
So, I did not come into Adjunct Law lecturing with nothing. I come with a distinctive style adapted from the private sector. I come with software subscriptions to make training more accessible and auditable. It's a personal competitive advantage. Slide creation, rapid diagnostics, and grammatical corrections all accompany what I'm paid to do.
So now I have to perform the reverse operation. What work do I do in the tertiary institution, and what do I bring back into my investment training?
I learned some useful stuff in my transition into teaching in public - Bloom's Taxonomy and various teaching frameworks- which can be too theoretical and not really applicable when trying to convince folks to try dividend stocks in this age dominated by US tech stocks.
But I think everything is slowly paying off, as I'm now trusted enough to teach fundamental business law to pre-employment students or 17-year-olds.
So, I've started reading about motivating young people, which I can use for my kids.
The essence of motivating 10 to 25-year-olds is to banish the idea that teenagers are lazy and incompetent adults who lack motivation. Instead, we need to see young adults and adolescents as folks trying to jockey for a position within their hierarchy in the search for status and respect. If we can find a way to motivate them to do something to look good in front of their peers, they may be more motivated and effective than adults. The hard part for lecturers is that we must adopt a mentor mindset and set high standards while giving high personal support. Being too strict can backfire, but mollycoddling them will also not work as well.
How does learning how to motivate teens tell us about motivating adults?
It's hard in this industry. To understand how hard this is, readers need to independently google the marshmallow experiment; the idea is that children who can distract themselves and wait for the second marshmallow tend to do better as adults when they grow up because they know how to delay gratification. The problem for experimenters is that future attempts to replicate the experiment found that folks who can resist temptation came from wealthy families who may not be too keen to eat marshmallows anyway. I got my son into NUS to run the experiment, but they offered him some KitKat, which was not a big deal. If it was a coin token for an arcade game, it would be much harder for my kids to resist.
Anyway, the experiment was done for kids who can wait, maybe 20 minutes, for another marshmallow.
Imagine what happens when you do dividends investing in SGX.
With PEs between 12 and 13, the long-term real rate of return is about 7+%. Applying the rule of 72, we can calculate that a dividend portfolio can double itself every decade.
So this is the problem with personal finance.
We are asking folks to give up eating a marshmallow to get two marshmallows in 10 years. And we have to tell them that the second marshmallow is not guaranteed because of market volatility. There may even be an incident when you lose that one marshmallow you've held back for a decade.
The industry has invested in many ways around the marshmallow problem. The most effective way is to cherry-pick specific investment themes that are hot with high recent returns and then maybe convince folks that their second marshmallow is just 2-3 years away.
How can folks like me flip the script?
One way is for me to get potential clients to consider this.
If you set aside 12 marshmallows, you can get 1 every year. With 144 marshmallows, it's a marshmallow a month.
Follow my approach, and you will drown in marshmallows, and you will end up diabetic like me.
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