Periodic Re-risking

/was commenting in a forum on questions people need to ask themselves in managing their personal finances; my suggestion was that people need to periodically ask themselves if they're taking too little risk - some might find it is true, then save less and spend more on projects/

My background: my folks are super conservative, highly educated, class-conscious, non-business-oriented types. So the way I was raised, and given some more privilege in terms of aptitude ... I had all the tools to stay in the top quartile of the population class/pyramid just by getting and holding down the right kinds of jobs ... this wasn't even a question the entire time I was raised.

My own interest therefore, is in commerce - because it's stuff I don't think I grew up with a lot of knowledge about. I had other priorities marked out until the end of my first degree, so even when professors asked me to do little jobs like "I have some data in Excel that needs doing" I would just tell them "I haven't studied Excel", and they would be like "oh, ok".

Anyway, following my plan, after graduation (2005) I focused on deprioritising non-commercial studies, so that I could focus on commerce (and Malaysian political economy, but that's another story).

After a few years (2012) I found myself too comfortable again. I could just sit at home trading for a few minutes a day on the KLSE (this is not even a high-growth market) and double my ~40k small monies in a few months, while I spent most of my time studying other things. It was at this point that I decided to start discarding money again ... I never had a business environment to play in when I was growing up, and I was aware that business people need to be comfortable taking losses, in order to be able to approach large opportunities. At this point I basically told myself it was OK to torch the whole trading portfolio, just for the experience of it. And that's basically what I did over the next few months - I just let it sit there, and (since most of it was in options), the time value decayed to near zero.

That was one of the big learnings for me - I'm still building on it. I'm still looking for more commercial stuff to learn. I'm not sure if this counts as personal finance, so I don't talk about it all that much ... also I don't think it's relevant to most readers who are usually coming from the other end, and always worried that they have too little money.

I've "had too much" since I was in college ...