Review: The Four Agreements

If you have read any of Carlos Castaneda's books and wondered what the heck he was on about, then maybe Don Miguel Ruiz's "The Four Agreements" is for you. Subtitled "A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom" it covers some of Castaneda's ground, but in plain English. While Castaneda's books are fascinating, he rambles a lot because he was learning at the time he wrote them. Ruiz instead gets right to the point and he clearly understands what he is talking about. In a nutshell, the book is about how to free your mind of negative, self-limiting thoughts and habits, using the ostensibly straightforward method of making four simple agreements with yourself. He says that what he is teaching is Toltec wisdom, that is, native American shamanism (Ruiz claims to be a nagual), but wherever it comes from, it makes a lot of sense to me. Indeed, I was gratified on reading it to discover that I already apply much of what he teaches: maybe I understood more of Castaneda's books than I realized! Of course, I'm not rich yet, but I am much happier than I used to be, most of the time.

The four agreements, in summary, are these:

1. Be impeccable with your word: i.e., be honest with yourself and others and do not talk yourself or other people down;
2. Don't take anything personally: when people 'insult' you or behave selfishly or foist their opinions on you, remember that it is not to do with you, it is to do with them: they have their own issues and viewpoints, which are not your problem. You do not need to worry about what they say or think;
3. Don't make assumptions: before jumping to conclusions about what people mean by what they do or say, ask them. Go to great lengths to avoid any misunderstanding.
   
4. Always do your best: you can avoid much self-criticism when you can reply to yourself, "I did my best," as long as you remember that your best will vary from time-to-time and you are prepared to forgive yourself for your weaknesses.

He also explains some of Casteneda's other terminology, such as the dream of the second attention. But whether you have read Castaneda or not, read this book. It is one of those books that everybody should read and I am quite sure that it can change lives - for the better.

EBay Scams

I have been experimenting with trying to sell one of my flats on EBay, and my car. Does it work? Er... not so far, anyway. What it does do, though, is attract deadbeats and fraudsters. You have to have your wits about you to avoid getting scammed!

For example, I advertised my car, and someone sent me an e-mail from within the EBay system asking me what my reserve price was. Well, being new to this, I couldn't really see anything wrong with telling him, so I did. He immediately bid that price... and the auction seemed to turn into a dead duck right there. My reserve was too high anyway, but nobody else bid after that. Well, he "won" the auction but, naturally enough, disappeared. Perhaps he thought I would be stuck paying EBay's fees, but I complained to them about him and got a free auction instead. Still, now when people ask, I don't tell them.

I have put the car back in. This time, the scams are different, and more sinister. I have been e-mailed by several different people all saying much the same. Here is an example:

Hello ,on behalf of my client i'll like to buy your (1994 FORD ESCORT)for £695.I'll also wish to tell you that i already have shipping agent that will come for the goods.If you're ready for that,then get in touch with me immediately.

Some ask about the condition of the car. Well, the ad describes its condition, so I guess that they are not reading the ad - possibly some robot or minion is scanning the ads for basic details and leaving the rest. Anyway, it is a clue that something is wrong.

Some offer a price for it - a previously advertised price of £695. Hmm...

Well, I followed up one, "milly". Her opening gambit was like this:

Hello,
I'm milly .I am interested in your[1994 FORD ESCORT 1.8TD LX 5dr Estate]and I'll like to know
your last offering price and to see the pics or to know the condition if it will be okay with me.I'll be
making my payment with a certified cashier's cheque .If you do I want you to get in touch with me
immediately for me to proceed with the Payment. As for the shipping I'll contact a shipper agent of
mine who will arranged for the Pick up as soon as the transaction is sealed and get back .I'll be
looking forward to your response.
Thanks and Have a Nice day.
Regards
milly.

Note in both e-mails the dodgy quoting of the car's details straight from the ad: [1994 FORD ESCORT 1.8TD LX 5dr Estate] in the latter one. Obviously pulled out by a robot, which probably also sent the e-mail to me. Anyway, "milly" had a Canadian Yahoo! e-mail address (although the mail headers, on analysis with Sam Spade, suggest the person is in Belgium), said (in garbled English) that her shipper owed her £4400 and would I accept a cheque for that amount and send her the difference? Er... right. On looking up that scam on the Internet, I discovered that what happens is they send you a false or altered cheque (i.e., a genuine one that has been stolen and altered, usually) that will usually pay in to your account successfully, but which on final checking, the bank will eventually discover is false and will reclaim the money - after you have sent £4400-£695 to the fraudster. Incidentally, she also asked for name and address details for me... a possible prelude to identity theft. I didn't tell her.

I had a phone call from one of these scammers today. Well, I assume it was a scammer - he asked about the condition of the car... I told him it was described in the ad (but it was a bit dented and drives well - he could be genuine after all)... and wanted to know the price. I didn't tell him. I said it was in the auction and he could bid for it there. He noted that it had an MOT (must have read the ad, then) and asked if it was taxed. Nope, it isn't. He could be genuine... difficult to tell with this one. If he comes to view it, I suppose I shall have to watch out for fake cheques or something. Or if he wants to test drive it, maybe he will try and separate me from the car for a minute so he can steal it (mind you, it isn't taxed... so no test drive then). Were I to allow a test drive, I would probably need a friend to sit in the car no matter what during the test drive so there are three people, not just me and him. Dunno. Dunno if I should give him my address so he can view it. I should make sure the official documents are not left in the car at this time, anyway - no point letting him steal those too. But I don't think he will call back, somehow. Mind you, he left is mobile number on my phone. Genuine? Hmm...

Whoa... hold the bus! I've just remembered that I am also advertising it in Auto Trader, where the condition isn't described (due to lack of space) and where the price is £695... Argh! Now what? Are they scammers, or not? Well, if they mention "shipping agent" I would reckon they are. The phone guy is probably genuine, though. Still, it doesn't hurt to take precautions. Just got to avoid the false positives - a bit like trying to filter spam! :-)

Why don't I just take cheques from all of these people and see if any really do clear? I could do that. On paying them in you specify that they are "for collection", apparently, which tells the bank not to pay you until it has been fully verified (I think).

Rental What If

Well, tenants have moved in to both of the flats in my converted house now, since it still hasn't sold. If I had known it was going to take this long and had put tenants in in the first place, I would have had an extra GBP12,000 in income so far this year!!!

Pun: two lots of tenants have moved in, so now I have twenty ants. Geddit??? LOL!

The Microeconomics of Minicabbing

Well, I've been trying to earn a living by driving a company minicab (MPV or people carrier) for a while now, but have stopped because it seem to me that it just isn't worth the effort (or, at least, I don't feel that desperate). I was working for a good company that kept me very busy most of the time. Here is how the finances stacked up:

Weekly Costs
Circuit Fees £135
Insurance £70
Car Rental £100 (this may be an underestimate, I never checked it exactly; using one's own car you would have to put maintenance and depreciation costs in here instead)
Insurance Excess £50 (assuming one minor prang every 10 weeks at 1000 miles per week driven)
Diesel £100 (i.e., £20 per day)
Parking £10 (at least, per day (it is necessary to park at airports when collecting customers))
TOTAL WEEKLY COSTS £505

Weekly Income
My minimum target was a gross income of £140 per day, which I didn't always make. Assuming it is the average, though (a good day could be £200, a bad day, £70), weekly income for 5 days is £700.

£700 Less Costs of £505 leaves £195 net income per week... before tax!

And for that, I would be working from 4am to 6pm, that is, 70 hours per week. What rubbish! As I feel that I can take home the same money for an office job working half the hours, I have quit the minicabbing forthwith.

The figures above are slightly distorted as they exclude account work, which pays for the car rental in theory - although in fact I ended up owing the company some of that from my cash takings too. On some of the days where the cash takings were low, that was because I had done a lot of account work. Nevertheless, if account work is excluded (i.e., the cost of the car rental), net takings are still only £295 per week for 70 hours worked (and more, sometimes). Still not worth the effort, except when desperate, I think. And, although I really, really need the money, I also need a life. The industry is structured so that it is only economic if you are prepared to work very long hours, and probably more than 5 days a week too. No thanks.

Being Someone

Actually, this desire to 'be someone' (referred to in my previous entry) is, I think, the common modern manifestation of the good old search for 'meaning' in one's life. Modern corporations try to elicit passionate commitment to their brand values in their employees by providing a community to which their staff can belong, with accessible bosses, help and training programmes, prizes and so on... and of course, low wages, since once commitment is there, money becomes just that little bit less important to the staff (but not to the company's shareholders or upper management). See this article about overwork, or Willing Slaves by Madeleine Bunting, a book about how people are encouraged to devote their lives to the company.

Me, I have experienced this kind of commitment to work in the past: I brainwashed myself into working hard for L'Arome, a multi-level perfume sales organization that was around a few years ago (now defunct) and worked really hard, moving up a couple of levels in the pyramid and more-or-less breaking even overall. Then, I went in to a computer venture with a couple of friends and worked hard for that too; we did all right for a while but the market became rather too difficult for us and we decided to quit before it got too late.

Right now, however, I am... minicabbing. Driving an MPV (Multi-Purpose Vehicle, or 'People Carrier'). Commitment? I don't think so. Where will I get any sense of belonging when I'm stuck in a car all day? The hours are long and the money isn't so great either: if I can bank a couple of hundred pounds after 50-60 hours' work, I'm doing OK, it seems. And for me, money has always been the key to my commitment: I worked hard in the past in the expectation of future financial rewards. I'm still waiting! :-)

The minicabbing feels to me like a sort of maintenance work: it will keep my finances ticking over while I think of something better, or until I can pay off my debts and then invest (there's little point in investing while debts need to be paid). The cab money won't pay the debts; that's why I'm selling my house; but it will cover day-to-day expenses. And, I guess, that is the position that most people are in who are doing basic jobs for what is really not much money. They and I need to budget carefully, so that income always exceeds expenditure, no matter how low the income actually is.

And wouldn't it be good one day if, finally, I could think of some job that I would actually like to do, and that would gain my commitment naturally and effortlessly, and which would in fact pay well?

It seems to me, thinking about this self-discipline thing some more, that although I am inclined to aspire to a life of leisure, in fact, such a life would not be good for me. What would be good for me would probably be a life of some leisure, with other time devoted to some big projects of some sort.

Otherwise, where would self-esteem come from, if all I'm doing with my life is loafing about? I may aspire to leisure, but I would also like to do something: to be someone as it is commonly known. This is the desire for fame that many people seem to have: the desire not to be an unknown nobody, but to be someone who makes a difference.

So effort is built-in to the human psyche.

Darn.

Socrates (or Xenophon, anyway) also talks about the property business in Xenophon's Estate Manager section 20 (that is, section XX). His character, Isomachus, describes to Socrates how it is advantageous to buy up undeveloped or unworked land, develop it, then sell it at a profit. That was written around 380BC. Property has obviously been good business for a long time!

Of course, it also requires luck, good market conditions, and, above all, application (i.e., effort or self-discipline: a common Socratic theme).

I think one problem I have is that I keep looking for work I can do that will allow me to remain lazy. Hmm... Might have to abandon that particular project. Until I'm rich.

I've been reading The Conversations of Socrates by Xenophon. In the Memoirs, Book 2 Chapter 1, he relates a story by Prodicus about how Heracles was deciding how to live his life: good or evil, basically, and Heracles met two women, Vice and Virtue. Vice described to him a life of ease and idleness, and Virtue a life of sweat and effort, but rewarded with great esteem and glory in the long run. You can read it here. The story starts about halfway through but the whole section is pertinent. This is similar to the Christian notion that the devil's path is wide and easy, but the road to heaven is steep and narrow (Matthew 7:13-14), or as I like to think of it, the devil's path is "Buy now, pay later," whilst God's path, i.e., the good path, is "Pay now, receive later" meaning make your effort or investment early to get the best results later. I mention all this because it is pertinent to the way I have lived my life so far. For various reasons I have been putting in not quite enough effort in most things for most of my life, and have as a result been gradually sliding down that slippery slope to eventual ruin; or so it seems to me. I haven't actually got there yet, as my eyes have been open to it for a long, long, long time, but on the other hand I haven't actually succeeded in solving the problem of how to act differently either.

Until recently.

I think! The key seems to me to be in my Diet & Fitness Page. For nearly two years now I have been gradually increasing my self-discipline and losing weight and exercising regularly. I have found myself a viable job with a minicab company that actually has enough work (at least in the Summer peak season - the rest of the time remains to be seen) and am further exercising my self-discipline by getting up at 3am to start by 4 each day, 5 days a week or more and indeed by going to bed by 7pm to maintain my fitness and alertness, and working around 12 hours each day (including meal breaks). My property is being sold and that should pay off the (stupendous) debts and leave me with some funds to invest (if it actually sells at some point... what an agonizingly slow process it is!). All this is raising my self-esteem, confidence, ability and indeed energy levels all round.

And all because I'm a type 2 diabetic and felt the need to do something about it: the slippery slope suddenly began to look rather too steep for comfort. Let that disease go too far and the physical consequences are truly terrible. So: a blessing in disguise? I guess so.

Well, there is an offer in progress for the downstairs flat, and a more shaky-seeming offer for the upstairs flat, so I could be in business soon!

Unfortunately, I am running out of money as of right now. Payments are teetering on the edge of bouncing. My minicabbing company doesn't pay enough, so I am going to seek out another company. If they pay a lot more (double at least), I may be able to stay ahead of the bills. Gotta start earning that money within days, too.

Going away this weekend, though.

This house not selling is quite a problem, really. I will probably have to remortgage it as two flats to ensure it values appropriately, then pay some stuff off with the proceeds, then finally sell it... Although I suppose that it *could* would out that I could end up being able to keep it... seems unlikely at the moment though.

Well, the property auction was today... but the house didn't sell. It reached £290,000 - not enough, but not far off either. I am hoping the auctioneers can stitch up a deal over the next couple of days. Nothing much else sold at the auction either: out of 18 lots, 4 sold prior, 2 sold at the auction, and the rest didn't make their reserves. I'm thinking the market is kind of toppy. So, I have got back to all the Estate agents and given them a new price: £315,000. They should be able to move it for that, or near offer. I think.

The car is out of order so I am not earning at present either. It broke down near the Baker Street end of Park Road, in the middle of the road. It began surging, then lost power and the engine just petered out. It wouldn't start again. A couple of policemen helped push it to the side of the road and the RAC attempted to fix it on the assumption that the throttle electrics were shorting out, but that didn't work. He suspected a problem with the fuel supply, so towed it to my local garage, MOT's Direct. I have asked them to do a full service on it. Might as well get it done while my loan lasts...

Well, the local estate agents weren't up to much, so the house is up for auction on Wednesday (5th May). I hope it sells then I can release all that dosh and pay some stuff off.

I got the loan, £25,000 from my bank, and I am working as a minicab driver in London to try and get some income. Not that cabbing is working very effectively so far, but I am hoping that as I gradually learn various "routes" around London cashflow will improve as I can do each job more readily. Business has been better the last couple of days, but maybe that was just because it was raining and people couldn't be bothered to hang around for the bus. The car is going OK, although I have scraped it a few times (not with passengers in it, and not against other cars). I will get used to driving it eventually, I suppose. Prior to this I have only driven on odd occasions; this is the first time I've been driving in earnest (that's the name of the car - hehe). I must be doing around 75-100 miles per day. I'm not working the cabbie's usual 12-hour shift: that seems too tiring and I would rather stop when my concentration begins to flag - after about 7-9 hours, typically.

So... what happened to my building blog? Couldn't be bothered, that's what! :-) Still, the house is nearly finished - a few days' work at most now. Planning permission is still pending, since the architect was so slow and incommunicative, in my opininion. Plus, the planning officer is kinda fussy... but presumably that's his job. The house is up for sale at £340,000, with a 3-bed at £175,000 plus a 2-bed at £165,000. Looks nice, too. Credit cards are going over £60,000 now, though. No more credit left. :-( I am looking for work as a cabbie to fend off the impending financial crash, and I might apply for a loan to push things a bit further, too. Got to sort all that out within about three weeks, I should think, or else... my credit rating will begin to suffer. Mind you, I could use my bank overdraft facility for a further month. But the main thing is to sell the house! Can't figure out what the profit might be. It is too difficult, but approximately, anything over £300,000 could well be net profit. We shall see... Soon, I hope.