77 | The Elegance of the One Pager
As with most pieces of art, there is more than what meets the eye.
The one pager is designed to change the way we all think about money and the way we interact with money.
It's timeless.
It's grounded in reality.
It doesn't lie.
It filters out the noise.
It compartmentalizes.
It's comparable.
It meets us where we are.
Just because we've made finances hard for hundreds of years doesn't mean they have to be hard forever.
James Clear says, "The highest level of mastery is simplicity. Most information is irrelevant and most effort is wasted, but only the expert knows what to ignore."
That is target and the one pager hits it on the bullseye.
It's timeless.
With a shout out to Luca Pacioli, the father of modern-day accounting, the one pager is built with his unbridled genius in mind.
It harnesses the power of basic accounting in a manner that is accessible to the accounting nerd, the creative artist, and everyone in between.
It paints a complete picture of one's entire financial picture without an overlooked gap or an unnecessary addition.
Not only can it travel over time, but it holds up across time and leans heavily on the truth that financial well-being depends on a few simple, but difficult to master concepts.
It's grounded in reality.
There are no projections or predictions about the future.
There are no assumptions or placeholders.
There are no calculations because detailed calculations aren't necessary.
No, that's not a typo. And yes, I know it probably contradicts every other financial conversation you've ever had. That's the goal.
The one pager is a concise, efficient summary of what has happened so that we can establish a shared understanding of reality and then spend the rest of our time looking and moving forward.
Because what we have experienced is so much more compelling than what we have been told, it would be a waste to do it any other way.
Additional Reading
Reality as reassurance by Seth Godin
It doesn't lie.
With a shout out to Rasheed Wallace, the one pager doesn't lie.
If something needs tweaking in your finances, we'll all be able to see it.
There will be no lectures or lessons.
Only simultaneous realizations of what needs to happen next.
Your habit of saving (or not saving) will be in plain sight.
Your level of cash on hand will be as apparent as ever.
Either way, those two things alone tell us almost everything we need to know regarding our technical skills for managing money.
Sometimes the truth feels right and sometimes it hurts, but the truth always sets you free - eventually.
Additional Reading
Productive assets and useful flows by Seth Godin
It filters out the noise.
At first, the one pager will probably feel a little disorienting.
It will feel too simple.
You might even wonder if it ignores the layers of depth that exist in managing finances.
This is only a symptom of how we've been trained to hunt for complexity.
The beauty of the design is that it sheds a bright light on 95% of what moves the needle with our finances and allows the remaining 5% to fade into the background or, better yet, never even hit the radar.
If you get the majority of the 95% correct, then you will like the outcome.
If you get the majority of the 5% correct, you'll keep the hamster wheel spinning.
When you filter out the noise it's OK if it takes some time to get used to the quiet.
It compartmentalizes.
Oftentimes, it's easy for a surprise in one area of our finances to impact all the other areas.
If we're not careful, we'll even make some impulse decisions that don’t change the circumstances in any way.
If we feel like we're "behind", we start contributing to investment accounts at a unsustainable level, which in turn drains cash on hand and increases the stress felt in the day-to-day.
If we feel like income is going to be a little tight, we toy with the idea of making a lump sum payment to a mortgage only to realize that it will only reduce our accessible resources even more.
If our investments decrease in value, we begin pinching pennies in every spending category only to realize that we're allowing money to make our decisions for us instead of making decisions about our money.
The one pager allows us to attribute financial progress and setbacks to the correct things so we don't try to fix things that aren't broken or allow the things that are broken to hijack the mic.
It's comparable.
I double-dog-dare you to sit down with someone else and have an open, honest conversation comparing and contrasting your one pagers.
Most finance conversations get lost in rabbit holes and stuck on insignificant details leaving everyone more disoriented than they were at the start.
Conversations centered around the one pager cut to the heart of our biggest financial decisions and feelings right away.
The chaos of the numbers is replaced by the essence of the story.
From Buffett to Bezos to you and to me, everyone's finances fit in the one pager and the underlying emotions and themes are eerily more similar than they are different.
It meets us where we are.
Whether we love finances or hate them, our brains weren't designed to handle that much information at one time.
Almost 70 years ago, the psychologist George A. Miller asserted that the span of immediate memory and absolute judgment were both limited to around 7 pieces of information.
The financial services industry treats this law like Americans treat speed limit signs - nearly total disregard.
As soon as you've said S&P 500, diversification, ETF, tax efficient, emerging markets, asset allocation, and bull market, you've used up a normal person's allotment of digestible information and haven't actually addressed anything that will improve their relationship with money.
Was the one-pager designed with complete intellectual awareness of Miller's Law? Sadly, no.
But it was designed with the knowledge that when it comes to finances, you can't make it simple enough.
And let's be honest, even if we didn't connect the two from the start, it's pretty cool (and validating!) that the one pager has 7 colored bars.
Additional Reading
The complex middle between “simplicity” and “elegant simplicity” by Carl Richards