How "The Courage To Be Disliked" Can Help Increase Your Wealth In 2025
As I perused the ubiquitous “Best Books of the Year” lists from thought leaders whose reading prowess I respect, one book I hadn’t read kept popping up, so I decided to explore it over the holiday stretch. Aided by its curious title, The Courage To Be Disliked is a parabolic conversation between a youth and a philosopher designed to explicate the intersection of Greek philosophy and Adlerian psychology.
Wait—I realize that might not be the most tempting of descriptions, so in this FLiP edition, I’ll share three specific concepts from the book and how they can help you live a richer life.
BTW, you might notice a different feel to the newsletter this week, and that’s because the Financial LIFE Planning weekly has moved to Substack. We love how they’re innovating and making writing and reading an even more enjoyable experience for authors and learners.
In fact, one of those features is the ability for authors to create article voiceovers, so if you’d prefer to listen to this week’s post, rather than read, you can click above and do just that!
Thanks, as always, for joining us for this week’s Financial LIFE Planning weekly!
Tim
Tim Maurer, CFP®, RLP®
Chief Advisory Officer
In this FLiP weekly you'll find:
Financial LIFE Planning:
How “The Courage To Be Disliked” Can Help You Build Wealth
Quote O' The Week:
George Bernard Shaw
Weekly Market Update:
The Folly Of Predicting The Future
Financial LIFE Planning
How “The Courage To Be Disliked” Can Increase Your Wealth in 2025
First, a touch of background. Alfred Adler was a contemporary of Freud and Jung you may not recall from your Psych 101 class, but his work is notable especially because of his break from Freud. While Freud notoriously fixated on the more primitive (and apparently inescapable) sexual and aggressive drivers of our behavior, Adler offered a seemingly more evolved posture, suggesting that we can (and should) be motivated by future goals and aspirations.
And that’s where we begin to see the applications of this compelling book in our financial life planning. Here are three Adlerian concepts and how each can be applied in our lives and money management:
The Separation Of Tasks
Without an ounce of hyperbole, I believe this concept alone could change your life. As the philosopher instructs the youth:
We need to think with the perspective of 'Whose task is this?' and continually separate one's own tasks from other people's tasks. In general, all interpersonal relationship troubles are caused by intruding on other people's tasks, or having one's own tasks intruded on. Carrying out the separation of tasks is enough to change one's interpersonal relationships dramatically.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack in that, but the simple yet powerful essence is that we must separate the tasks of life that are others’ from our own. Here, we gain new perspectives in many areas of life, but with more than half of marriages ending in divorce and half of the splits citing financial disagreements over money as the primary reason, is it possible that the separation of tasks could aid us not only in saving our money, but also our marriages?
We can also extend this concept to suggest that we must focus—read: stress—less on that which we can’t control, pouring our energy instead into that which we can. For example, you can control how much you save and how you allocate your portfolio, but you can’t control the markets. Our attention, and especially our anxiety, spent on the uncontrollable, is simply wasted.
The 3 Major Life Tasks
Adler—and The Courage To Be Disliked authors Ichiro Kishimi and Fumiktake Koga—instruct us further on tasks, suggesting that there are three particular types that, when considered in concert, help compose a fulfilling life: the tasks of friendship, work, and love. Here’s how Adler, himself, put it:
"Three problems are irrevocably set before each individual. These are: the attitude towards one’s fellow man, occupation, and love. All three are linked with one another by the first. They are not accidental, but inescapable problems."
I encourage you not to focus on the word “problem” here, as he’s using it in a way that is not intentionally pejorative. Think about it more as three challenges—three major life tasks that we all must navigate in life.
First, as we grow up from infancy to adulthood, we all develop our “attitude toward fellow man,” how we relate to others in our families, communities, and society, and precisely how we view them. Adler encourages us to view (and treat) others on a horizontal level—as equals, as “comrades,” as friends—while noting that school, work, and society, in general, tend to nudge (and occasionally try to force) us into a vertical or hierarchical view of humanity that is ultimately counterproductive.
That’s how this task of friendship—our outlook on navigating humanity itself—prepares us for succeeding (or failing) in our work and then in love. Without a horizontal view of those we work with and love, we are not optimally positioned to navigate life—or money, for that matter.
Indeed, our approach to “our fellow man,” our work, and our loved ones can’t not impact how we approach and utilize money. We all wrestle with the false notion that “if I only had more money, everything would be better,” and too often, money wins. And when money wins, we all lose.
Teleology Over Etiology
Yet perhaps the most encouraging of the book’s themes involves the least common words (unless you’re a psychotherapist) and the primary dividing force between Freud and Adler. Freud was the proponent of etiology, a backward-looking theory that ascribes our behavior today to our shaping and forming early in life. Adler’s chief concern with Freud’s approach was that it was unnecessarily deterministic—we are who we are, and we can’t do anything about it.
Adler’s teleological approach reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy in that it is forward-thinking. It ascribes our motivations less to our past nature or nurture and more to the goals and aspirations—the meaning and purpose—in front of us. We can be called to a higher cause rather than trapped by causation.
And here’s the encouraging part about this. If you’ve made any financial mistakes in the past, and especially if you’ve demonstrated trends of poor behavior with money in the past—overspending, underspending (yup, that’s a thing), hoarding, speculative investing, money shaming, piling up debt, financial suicide, or any number of all-too-common challenges—Adler strips you of the excuse that you are destined for failure. In so doing, he frees us for future success.
Here’s how Kishimi and Koga make the hard-to-argue argument against hard-core etiology and determinism. Three children are born into the same household. They share DNA and identical living circumstances, yet each manifests distinctly different outcomes in life. And they argue further that we are also not individually beholden to even our past tendencies and trends:
“No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead, we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.”
In other words, we are not merely the byproducts of what happens to us—good, bad, or indifferent—but the byproduct of how we react to what happens to us. Don’t you find that encouraging?
Or, as Adler says, "Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it."
Yet when we do understand it, our behavior and our response to the world (and whatever it throws at us) are no longer left to chance or “fate” but are now within our domain of control. In other words, people can—and do—change. And you can, too.
One of the first steps, according to Dr. Daniel Crosby, author of The Soul of Wealth, is to stop labeling ourselves as inferior in money dealings—“Oh, I’m just not good with money.”—something that can lead to a genuine “inferiority complex,” a term Adler popularized.
If you’ve had a tendency to cast one of these inferiority labels on yourself, “you’ve engaged in an Alderian safeguarding behavior,” Crosby told me. In this case, you “position the power (and thus the solution) just outside of your reach. The emphasis is either on a personal trait that is perceived as unchangeable (e.g., not good with money) or an externality over which we have no control (e.g., the economy). When there is no power, there is no responsibility to act. Where there is no responsibility to act, we can do the safe thing, and no one can give us a hard time.”
So let’s notice when we engage in these safeguarding behaviors and self labeling. Let’s muster the courage to believe in our ability to change, to improve, and to master the art of financial life planning.
How can you apply this?
As you reflect on these Adlerian principles, consider how they might reshape your financial and life planning. Embrace the separation of tasks by focusing on financial decisions within your control, such as budgeting and saving, while letting go of market fluctuations and other phenomena beyond your influence. Acknowledge and examine the three life tasks—friendship, work, and love—and recognize their profound impact on your financial choices and overall well-being. And consider the benefits of a teleological perspective, setting future financial goals that inspire and motivate you, rather than being constrained by past financial missteps.
I encourage you to read The Courage to Be Disliked to delve deeper into these transformative concepts and their practical applications. This insightful book offers valuable guidance on living a more intentional and fulfilling life, both personally and financially. For further reading, consider Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning and Dr. Daniel Crosby’s newest volume, The Soul Of Wealth.
For further listening, here’s a discussion I had with Dr. Daniel Crosby on his Standard Deviations podcast about Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search For Meaning, and the application of logotherapy in our financial planning.
This article was originally published in Forbes.com.
Quote O' The Week
George Bernard Shaw
“We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."
Weekly Market Update
The market was up big last year, with the S&P 500 index posting a blistering 25% return. So, I suppose it’s taking a bit of a break to start the New Year:
- 1.94% .SPX (500 U.S. large companies)
- 1.58% IWD (U.S. large value companies)
- 3.39% IWM (U.S. small companies)
- 3.48% IWN (U.S. small value companies)
- 1.29% EFV (International value companies)
- 2.58% SCZ (International small companies)
- 0.76% VGIT (U.S. intermediate-term Treasury bonds
The Folly Of Predicting The Future
Contributed by Tony Welch, CFA®, CFP®, CMT, Chief Investment Officer, SignatureFD
“It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
I looked up the above quote to give it proper attribution, but it has been linked to many individuals over time. I’m a baseball fan, so I’d like to think it was the great philosopher, Yogi Berra. Regardless, the sentiment is particularly applicable to investing. Our friends at Dimensional Fund Advisors looked at strategists’ expectations for S&P 500 gains at the beginning of last year and compared them to the actual performance. Of 20 well-known investment banks and strategists, not a single group in the list predicted that the S&P 500 would even match its historical average gain, let alone the 23% that happened. These are smart folks, so what gives?
The reality is that predicting 12 months of market price fluctuations is nearly impossible. Perfect hindsight may make it seem like the story was obvious, but it clearly wasn’t. There were good reasons to expect weaker returns last year, but that’s not what happened. That’s why we cannot emphasize enough – investors should be diversified, rebalance portfolios on a reasonable cadence, and we should only make strategic portfolio shifts based on the indicator evidence in front of us today.
Ned Davis Research (NDR) is my personal “alma mater.” I worked and learned there for 11 years. They expected about a 5% gain last year. However, they also say that we “forecast for fun.” The team at NDR remained overweight stocks throughout the year despite their beginning expectation. That’s because the weight-of-the-evidence developed in such a way that supported stocks relative to bonds.
I’ve already had many conversations where clients have asked me what my expectations are for the year ahead. Typically, I light-heartedly say something like, “stocks will rise, and they will fall.” That’s about all we can be sure of in the year ahead. We’ll continue to stay aligned with the indicator evidence despite any expectations we may have.
The Message From Our Indicators
Last week was all about the labor market, and the reports suggest that the economy ended 2024 on a strong note. The number of job openings increased by 3.3% in November, but the rate of hiring and also quitting ebbed somewhat, both of which point to an easing of wage pressures at the end of the year. Payroll processor, ADP, reported 122,000 new jobs in December, which was below expectations but still a healthy level. And on Friday, the official BLS employment situation report was quite strong. Payrolls grew by 256,000 and the gains were widespread among most industries. The unemployment rate edged lower to 4.1%, and importantly, the rate of wage increases also eased to 3.9%. The labor market is healthy but is not necessarily a source of major inflationary pressures anymore.
Even so, interest rates have risen since the Presidential election, primarily driven by expectations of upcoming expansionary fiscal policy. We believe the rise in rates is something to pay attention to. The relative value between stocks and bonds is beginning to shift in favor of bonds. Higher interest rates increase the cost of capital for corporations, weighing on profit margins and earnings. That said, the rise in rates is beginning to look somewhat overdone in the near-term as bond sentiment is extremely pessimistic.
Additionally, stock market sentiment has also weakened meaningfully. December was a negative month for stocks, and historically, for the bull market to remain intact, we would expect a bounce back in January. That has not been the case thus far.
With the economic expansion intact and our expectation that earnings will continue their positive trajectory, bear market risk is not elevated yet. But we do anticipate that this will be a more challenging year for investors and this early run of downside volatility is well within the range of what we would expect following two very strong years of returns.
Happy New Year to you and yours! We’re fortunate to share this time with you every week and we hope your small investment of time in the FLiP will improve your financial LIFE planning in 2025!
Tim