The Perfect Me.

This post is about is an exercise I developed a few years back to assist when I was stressed and depressed having had the living shit kicked out of me by the Global Financial Crisis.

We lost everything – the lot, they took as much as was legally possible, then wanted more. Many months later, during a discussion with the Official Assignee, I threatened to quit the well-paying job I had struggled to land and go get a minimum wage job as a burger-flipper if they didn’t let me at least keep some of my dignity and dollars I earned each week.

Hit the reset button

When you go bankrupt, it’s like hitting the reset button on your life. All of a sudden, we went from being a “normal” family (wife, kids, mortgage, family car etc…) to essentially being teenagers again.

Not literally of course, financially. We were in the exact same position as when we were teenagers. No debts, no assets. That’s the beauty of bankruptcy, it really does give you a chance to start over and try again.

Outside assessment

When our business imploded, we had our accountants and lawyers go through the wreckage and try to tell us what we did wrong – that was a smart move. After both professionals had scrutinised our records, they both said the same thing: We did nothing illegal, nothing reckless – we simply were exposed when the GFC impacted with the full brunt. Our business was too small to take that kind of hit.

It's good to have things assessed by outsiders - it can create a great perspective when your brain is not at it's best.

At the time of our collapse, while I was still in some kind of ethereal dream (it sure felt like that), I spoke to owners of other businesses and found out that they too had suffered massive losses within the same seven day period as we had – millions worth of losses in fact. They just had a bit better foundations than we did at the time. If it had happened three months earlier – it would have hurt, but bankruptcy wouldn’t have happened. We just taken on extra staff to handle the workload the following year had promised, only to have all the orders cancelled when the hit came – leaving us with wages and costs that we couldn’t support any longer.

Anyhoo – what’s done was done and we couldn’t change it. I always joked that I’d write a book called “How to go Bankrupt in Style” and detail my experience and what I learned from the whole process.

In the mean-time, we resigned ourselves to the fact that, for three years, we would be in a financial holding pattern.

Towards the end of that period, I began considering how I wanted the next phase of my life to pan out.

The Perfect Me

While working out how to spend the remainder of my un-bankrupt life, I asked myself the question “What does the Perfect Me look like?” From there it expanded to a whole bunch of questions:

• How does the Perfect Me dress?
• What does the Perfect Me drive?
• How does the Perfect Me speak?
• How does the Perfect Me write?
• What does the Perfect Me’s handwriting look like?
• What unique skills does the Perfect Me have?
• What does the Perfect Me eat?
• How does the Perfect Me treat others?
• How did the Perfect Me generate his wealth?

Then from there, it became a challenge to design my perfect lifestyle in infinite detail.

The bloody target keeps moving…

Once I had completed that assessment, I went to work on changing the things I could change. There wasn’t a lot I could do financially, so I had to start on the things that were either low cost, or better yet – free.

One of my Perfect Me categories was about my handwriting. I had been reading a lot about Isaac Newton at the time, and was inspired by his work. I found online content that showed his notes and handwriting and I came to the realisation that in this day and age, technology has, if not destroyed, then mortally wounded the art of handwriting.

I looked at my own children’s writing and found that both my boys had typical boyish, technology inspired script, which resembled the hieroglyphics of a medical practitioner, but without the education to go with it. My daughter on the other hand, had the typical script of an artsy, creative teenage girl (no surprise there).

My own handwriting was a cross between small caps print and a rather crappy attempt at a technical style of block lettering, so I made the decision to re-teach myself cursive script.

4th Grade Teacher: So, you never learned cursive?

Bart: Well, I know "hell" and "damn" and "get ben..."

I learnt cursive script around age 12 and forgot it around age 13. It was taught at Intermediate School and that was the end of it. My regular teacher had to bring in an older teacher who actually knew how to write cursive!

 So, I grabbed a pad and started writing all my work notes in cursive. I actually had to look up how to form certain letters. It took me months to get reacquainted with the skill.

 Now, four years on, I write nearly everything in cursive, unless I am in an extreme hurry, or I know the recipient of the message won’t be able to read it.

An added bonus I discovered was that a lot of people can’t read cursive. This proved to be useful in some circumstances, as other parties cannot read what I’m jotting down – it’s even harder to read from across the table when it’s upside down.

 When I look at it now, the Perfect Me has achieved the handwriting goal. I need to change the target and redefine that aspect of the Perfect Me. I wonder if there’s a good reason to produce all my business documents as medieval illuminated manuscripts?

  Bring on the suit

 Another one of my Perfect Me goals was that the Perfect Me dressed for the career he wanted, not the career he had.

 The environment I worked in was semi-professional. We worked as high end automation engineers, but dressed like high end electricians – mostly jeans or shorts and T shirts. I decided to break that mould.

 I saved my limited cash, and brought myself a business suit – something I hadn’t worn for work for close to 15 years. Unlike my colleagues, I would attend meetings in my suit and I found that it changed the way I was perceived – now I wasn’t just a skilled engineer, I was a professional engineer. Even if I changed nothing else about myself, changing my appearance changed the perception of those I dealt with. I know this is nothing new, I figured it would probably work that way, but seeing the proof in the pudding was a pretty cool feeling.

 I have continued to work on other Perfect Me goals since then. Some have worked out well, others “not so much” – it’s hard to lose weight when you can’t resist cream cakes – part of my next Perfect Me challenge will be some better mental resolve I think.

 So my challenge to you is simple – what does the Perfect You look like? What can you do to bring that reality closer?

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