Despite appearances to the contrary, this is a blog post about canning vegetables.  No matter what I say next.  We love the recovery of forgotten skills, as our clients know—because we point it out in just about every other issue of American Lifestyle Magazine. I am learning to work wood by hand, and to sew, and yes….to preserve food the old fashioned way.  That means canning and curing, in case you were wondering.  By the way, there is a cool interview with Marisa McLellan from Food in Jars on our site which is worth checking out.  I think it speaks to something we are always talking to people about.  Do what you love, do more of it, and sometimes the world beats a path to your door.  For Marisa, it was canning stuff.  So why are we talking about canning?  Because canning is like planning.

Clients of PFYT know that we love planning.  We conceive of the concept of planning in a far broader sense than most of our contemporaries, I think.   We like to try to see things from a very wide view in addition to situationally, which means our planning process often takes interesting turns, and new ideas are developed.   In my conversations with my peers, mostly they are looking for answers to finite questions, and in some cases, answers that fit into a very specific box that they can fill without a lot of effort.  This is not in any way intended to reflect negatively on my friends, who as financial planners and investment advisors or brokers want to find ways to fit the world, or at least their responsibilities, into a small easily defined space.  A friend of mine who is an insurance agent told me he wants all problems he is presented with to boil down to the answer to this question: “Will this lead to me selling an insurance product to this person?” 

This is no surprise to anyone. In the real world, we are beset by specialists, with a worldview centered around their specialty.   In the United States, we are a modern, fast-paced, consumer and experience driven society, and sometimes all we have time to do is take the advice of that last specialist and use it.  Most of the time, that will be no problem.  Sometimes it will turn out to be a colossal mistake.  It will not be a breach of trust necessarily, but more often a failure of mutual understanding.  Sometimes it is a function of just moving too fast, and at other times it is a failure in scoping the problem to be solved.  Often we come in later in this story and try to sort out the whys and wherefores, and make an attempt to clarify (or rationalize) the situation for folks.  Sometimes we look back on things we did and see that we did not really have the full scope of a situation when we gave certain recommendations, and that new information has come to light.

So what does this have to do with canning?  I thought you would never ask.  I would like to propose three separate parallels between canning and planning.

1. When you start canning, you need somebody to teach you how (or books, resources and time to study).   After that, you can maintain a reasonable level of proficiency without any help.  In some cases, you will learn to think about the process so well you will be able to can anything and make the result delicious and completely reliable, or to look for outside resources and specialized instructions and weigh the merits of the techniques.  Needless to say, there is a bit of a learning curve to preserving food so that one doesn’t die of some horrible food poisoning.    Investing and financial planning are no different.  The issues are more complicated than canning, but they are not brain surgery.  You can totally do it, if you take the time to learn, and have the discipline to keep learning.  Of course, there is the problem which is similarity number 2…
2. Whether your work will be successful is not immediately apparent. If five years from now you open up a can of preserved chicken soup, and the whole family is rendered immobile for a week after eating it for dinner…well…that would be really bad.  Finding out that you misunderstood your risk in an investment after it implodes, sometimes a decade down the line...also pretty unfortunate.  The point is that it is hard to foresee all of the various conditions that will affect the work you do today, and that what you can do is be really careful about your tools and your process.  You need to dedicate a fairly significant amount of energy in the these latter.  Financial planning and canning both have tool kits, and the tools will certainly influence the outcome, or the ease with which you reach it. 
3. I mentioned a process, and there is definitely a process. Successful canning is like an assembly operation with phases that are very particular in their timing.  You clean the work area, gather your tools, set up the assembly line, and prepare your ingredients. There are sanitization steps for the jars and the tools, and there are supplies and tools that you really have to use.  There are recipes for success and well-known recipes for disaster.  However, all of the recipes have nuances that you only really figure out later, after you mess up a bunch.   Even with books and teachers and guides and recipes, there is a bunch of messing up, but that is fine!  Messing up is part of how you learn.  Messing up has been part of every invention and every learning experience back to the time we crawled out of the primordial ooze.  Investing and financial planning is really no different.  Every single person out there has learned it by studying, refining a process that they use, messing up and fixing the process and looking for ways to make the outcome better each time.  I want to stress this last bit.  No amount of studying could ever compensate for the practice.  You hire professionals at any craft with the hope that their biggest mistakes are behind them, and in recognition that yours might not be, at least in the context of the specific craft in question. 

This issue of practice and refinement may be why I am so fascinated by traditional artisanal skills like canning and woodworking and a host of others.  The patient practice based upon handed-down wisdom, and the questioning and refining of that wisdom is such a central component to long-term success in these endeavors.  It is not enough to want to be good at these things, one must make a practice of them.  We say that we have a “financial consulting practice” and in some way it means this same thing.  We practice the craft of advice.  I believe financial industry icon Nick Murray wrote a book under that title, on that topic.  Crafts are honed over lifetimes, with care and diligence.  The results are not always perfect, but the better the craftsman, the less flawed the outcome probably is.   We are always working to improve the tools we use, and the process that we employ to bring them to bear, and we hope that most real professionals in our industry are similar.  We as a group practice a craft.  If we were woodworkers, we would produce fine tables, but we give advice, and I hope that is fine as well.

We support craft, and in keeping with that, we are writing about canning vegetables and other delicious stuff today.  Did I mention that this was a post about canning?  We are interested in any canning stories and anecdotes, just for fun.  Post them on our Facebook page.    I am getting ready to make another run at learning to can, after two separate failed attempts in the past.  This time, I am going to try to replicate some of the recipes in Food in a Jar, by the aforementioned Marisa McLellan.  I will post the (perceived) results of my canning attempts on our FB page as well.  In support of Marisa McLellan, and as a nudge to anybody that might be willing to pick up this gauntlet, we are going to send a free copy of Food in a Jar to one of our PFYT Facebook followers, so if you are interested, head on over to Facebook and Like us.    We really didn’t put any effort to building out our Facebook community, but it is going to be a focus for the next year, so hopefully we can get the word around that there is good stuff to see over there, and the occasional cookbook.