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The Things I Wish I’d Been Taught in my Youth From the perfect high-five to the hidden truths of money, the lessons I wish my family had shown me in my formative years. — skills and insights that would have saved years of fumbling, frustration, or misplaced faith in how the world works. Some are small, almost trivial tricks of coordination and craftsmanship. Others are profound truths about the systems that quietly shape our lives. There are certain things you stumble across in life, often after decades of doing things less effectively and efficiently— and you can’t help but wonder: Why didn’t anyone teach me this earlier? Some are small, almost trivial lessons that make daily life smoother. Others are profound insights that would have shaped the way I understood the world and my place in it. Together, they form a kind of informal curriculum — lessons in awareness, efficiency, and respect for natural order — from the angle of a hammer swing to the arc of monetary history. Here’s my list — a collection of skills and truths I wish to pass onto the next generation. 1. How to land a High-Five It’s such a simple act — a symbol of celebration, connection, and camaraderie — yet how often do we miss the mark? Literally. The secret? Don’t look at the hand. Look at the other person’s elbow. That’s it. The physics and geometry of body movement take care of the rest. You’ll never miss again. 2. How to Use a Hammer Efficiently When I first picked up a hammer, I thought it was about brute force. Grip tight, swing hard, hit nail. Wrong. The trick is in the motion — a relaxed underhand swing with a natural rotation, not the overhand smash you see in cartoons. The hammer’s weight and arc do the work. You guide it, you don’t fight it. It’s a little bit of physics and a lot of finesse — a quiet metaphor, perhaps, for many things in life. 3. The Shoelace Secret: The Surgeon’s Knot For years, I tied and retied my shoelaces, cursing the moment they came undone. Then one day I learned about the surgeon’s knot — a simple double loop that stays tied like a double knot but unties like a single. It’s elegant, efficient, and a tiny act of mastery over chaos. Once you learn it, you never go back. 4. How to Build a Fire That Feeds Itself Most of us were taught the teepee or log-cabin fire — beautiful in theory but needy in practice. They burn bright, then fade, demanding constant tending. Then there’s the upside-down fire method — the quiet genius of efficiency. You start with the big logs at the bottom, smaller logs and then finally sticks and kindling layered on top. Think a miniature pyre, that fits neatly in your fireplace or pit. You light it from the top. The fire burns downward slowly and steadily, feeding itself as it goes. No constant stoking, no frantic rearranging. Just patient, ordered combustion. It’s an idea so counterintuitive and effective it almost feels like a secret. 5. The Great Lesson I Really Wish I’d Learned: How Money Actually Works Here’s the truth that should be on every school curriculum but isn’t: any form of financial engineering that expands the monetary supply leads to higher prices. Coin clipping, fiscal easing, lowering interest rates, quantitative easing, money printing — these are all different costumes for the same act. The only real question is where the inflation shows up. Sometimes it’s everywhere — food, fuel, rent, wages. Other times it hides in plain sight, in asset markets, inflating property, stocks, and collectibles. Understanding this changes how you see the world. Inflation isn’t always a symptom of progress — sometimes it’s the quiet theft of value from those who hold money to those who create it. In a truly open and functioning free market — a world of 8 billion people working in service of 8 billion people, as Jeff Booth so aptly put it — the natural state of things should be deflation. As innovation and efficiency increase, the cost of goods and services should fall, not rise. That’s the reward of human ingenuity, specialisation and technological progress. But when the monetary system is distorted — when we keep expanding the money supply to avoid short-term pain — we break the measuring stick itself. Prices no longer tell the truth. The signal is lost in the noise. And in that confusion, value quietly shifts from the many to the few. 6. The one vital lesson, I was lucky to learn in my youth: The Flow of Energy and the Power of Thought The final lesson is harder to measure, but more foundational than all the rest: the way energy flows outward from each of us begins with the thoughts we choose to think. Every belief, every quiet assumption, every repeated story we tell ourselves radiates energy — shaping the world around us in ways both subtle and profound. Our thoughts become words, our words become actions, and our actions build the conditions of our lives. When we think with fear, resentment, or scarcity, that energy expands outward, colouring our choices and relationships. But when we choose thoughts rooted in curiosity, gratitude, and possibility, the world around us responds in kind. It’s not mystical; it’s the physics of attention and intention. Energy follows focus. Where we place our mental light determines what grows. Had I been taught that my inner dialogue was not just private chatter but the architect of my outer experience, I might have learned to tend my thoughts as carefully as any fire — to build from the top down, patiently, allowing clarity and calm to feed the flames of purpose beneath. The Moral of the List From the perfect high-five to the low maintenance fire, from the arc of the hammer swing to the flow of money — and finally, the integrity of thought that leads to the integrity of actions — these lessons share a single theme: alignment with the underlying mechanics of reality. Whether physical, financial, or spiritual, systems have their own logic. When we understand that logic, we stop pushing against it and start moving with it. If I could go back and teach my younger self one truth, it would be this: The world runs on patterns — of motion, of value, of thought. Learn to see them, and life becomes not only easier, but infinitely richer - vitally potent and grounded in integrity.