What is clarity?
What I'm Up To (Taxes), What I Reflected On (Clarity), and What's Occupying My Mind (Random Finance Things)- all part of Allen's Friday Flights
Hello Professionally Curious One!
It’s April 14!
So do your taxes.
Don’t be like me, who just did it this week and now I’m proud and boastful.
Cheers,
Allen
Past Publications
What I’m Up To
TL;DR: Taxes!
The Things:
Filed my own taxes, and my own business’s taxes too. You can use TaxAct to do 1120S filings and create your K1, and then use whatever tax software to file your personal 1040, all for under $250. If you have clean records, 2 hours tops. If you are like me and don’t, it’ll take you longer than you care to admit.
I’m jumping on the wagon and trying Athletic Greens.
I started watching Picard Season 3 and well I don’t know if I like it or not but I’m on episode 4.
Do you like Star Wars and Strategy games? The best Star Wars game is a mod for Stellaris. I have conquered the stars.
While I speak about video games, I also picked up Everspace 2 - a fun, Diablo 2 in space style game.
Finished part 7, Persepolis Rising, of the Expanse Series. Onward to Book 8 Tiamit’s Wrath.
This is one of the best French Restaurants I’ve been to, and it’s in Orange County. Get both desserts. Also get the gem salad. And bread.
I sat in on a private a16z Finance event. That was cool. Came with ubereats voucher, which is an easy to get me anywhere.
Anyone want a side gig as a project manager with finance & accounting skills, for about $70-80 per hour for an estimate of 5 hours a week, or maybe 15 hours a month?
Best Reads for Me This Week
Men Yell At Me: The Truth About Going Home
Darrel Owens: No, Welfare Does Not Harm Black Families
What I Reflected On
TL;DR: When, where, and how do people get clarity - and why?
What is clarity?
I once had someone mention to me that in their career, “clarity” was the most important thing they wish they had. This was a year ago (Michael.), and I don’t think I could appreciate what it meant at the time.
The context of that conversation was being able to see a path forward and see what’s next. If I recall, it was in the context of “whats the next move”. The challenge with knowing your next move is that when you see someone else make their move - and they do so consistently - it creates a “what if” doubt, which can impair your clarity.
After all, nothing is set in stone and alternative outcomes aren’t experienced until it happens.
Recent conversations around me have spurred me to seriously consider the importance of “Clarity”.
What is clarity?
I’ve tried to define what “Clarity” means for myself and well I’m terrible at that, because the answer is “it depends” on what I need.
And what I need, is driven by the context.
When it comes to decision making, clarity is being able to receive enough information to be able to make a decision.
When it comes to writing (I like to say it’s thinking), clarity is being able to articulate and capture the abstract thought. From the tip-of-your-tongue into actuality.
When it comes to oral communication, clarity is being able to be understood with such a certainty, that you can actually be quoted.
In the realm of product, it’s the northstar of the moment that allows us to prioritize certain decisions, and remove all the noise.
In accounting, it’s when all the business facts are laid bare and we can finally start to make scenarios over multiple years.
Clarity, however, is hard to achieve.
It can actually be energy intensive.
In the past I’ve heard people take walks or get breaks so that they can “Think”. The activity here is “to think”; however, I haven’t found much literature on just how to think things out. How does one “think”? Is it a brute-force of thoughts until something sticks?
If you think a lot - you may also find yourself thinking yourself to death, in which case, getting clarity is energy intensive and could be not at all enjoyable.
In which case, thinking inside your brain is how you achieve clarity.
I don’t think that’s worked for me in the past - I have a lot of noise in my head.
Different ways I’ve seen clarity be articulated, or achieved
When it comes to written thoughts, I wasn’t rewarded on succinct writing in school, and I wouldn’t see what a clear thought could be until I receive an email from my manager with a task in the subject line of an email with nothing in the body. It’s akin to a first year writing long messages, and then by the time they are 3rd year, those messages can fit the span of a long tweet.
I’ve seen clarity get achieved when two individuals deliberate (fancy words for “talking it out”) until both are satisfied that they either feel more understood, or at least one person can see a little bit more than they did coming in. Relationships, essentially. Sometimes one person is renting the brain capabilities of another to dissect a topic - there is a benefit from not always being in the day-to-day of someone else’s brain.
I have achieved clarity when I get problems to be understood that have such disaggregate information - and I exhaust time researching, contemplating, and corroborating, to the point that by the time I write the “answer” out, my answer seems way too light and too simple that one could argue “how can I justify all those hours for just that one page.” Well, I have to remind myself that I’m being paid for my knowledge, not how long it takes for me to get something done. I can get it done in 10 minutes. But you’re paying me for 10 years of knowledge that made it 10 minutes.
I’ve also seen clarity come about when doing something completely different, engaged in another activity, and suddenly finding a new way to connect the dot because the individual was able to pick out patterns and build a new connection.
Clarity can often come about, overriding previously achieved clarity.
Clarity can be mislabeled
Without being able to define clarity, its quite easy to associate other actions on it.
Organizations often use prioritization as a means to achieving clarity. Prioritization is when you are deciding what to do with resources and time, but I would argue that it is separate from clarity. Prioritization can help you move forward in the wrong direction pretty easily.
Clarity isn’t coming from listing a bunch of tasks out either, and recapping it like a project manager. That isn’t clarity. That’s noise.
Being loud also doesn’t bring clarity, nor is throwing yourself at a wall of information.
So just what is clarity?
I’ve decided that this is my definition of clarity: The freedom from indistinctness or ambiguity. In many ways, clarity provides a level of certainty. It’s “not abstract”, though in the course of a knowledge worker - a lot of things live in the abstract.
You go from not knowing, to knowing.
One could argue that is learning and research.
Another could argue “that’s just thinking”. Whichever the case, getting clarity is hard and developing new ways to get clarity consistently, in such a way that every day you get more clarity through the virtuous systems you have built, is extremely difficult.
Writing has been a way for me to sharpen how my brain can achieve clarity. Running 20 minutes daily and using the time to think out all the things it wants to, is a way for my brain to denoise itself so that it can achieve clarity later on.
What I want to know:
I want to learn how others achieve clarity - especially when conditions are far from ideal. In moments of crisis and emergency, and at the 11th hour, and when everything has gone wrong.
Perhaps I’m approaching this wrong, and the better question here is “what are the different flavors of clarity”.
How would you teach others to seek clarity, and obtain it?
I have no idea, I’m lost too.
What's Occupying My Mind
TL;DR: A collection of financial tips because really, you all saw this coming.
Some tips:
HSA for a mintue: In California, you can establish a High Deductible Medical Plan for a Month thanks to the long enrollment period in Covered California (Oct to January) where you can switch healthcare insurance instantly. This means you can switch to a High Deductible Medical Plan for a Month. And then open an HSA. And then fund the HSA (tax benefit, seriously its great). And then switch your healthcare back to normal.
1120S: Have your own small or solo business and are too bootstraps to pay for business tax filings? TaxAct lets you do that for $129, plus $59 per state. TurboTax is $1k so run for the hills. You’ll probably never want to do this again.
Backdating it: If you are self-employed and are thinking about incorporating and even going S-Corp, you can claim all the earnings (and expenses) before incorporation as part of your annual incorporated income.
A Solo401k is a very nifty way to contribute another $40k to your retirement fund as a tax deductible expense to your business as an employer, while concurrently collecting on W2 401k contributions as an employee (you can be an employee of someone else.)
If you are ever granted a restricted token unit option, make sure to file your 83b immediately - pay the FMV - and enjoy the upside.
You can save a lot of money by simply starving. What? That’s the good ol’ college way of survival.