We need a victim to effect change, a victim whose outcome so outrages a vast majority of people that they clamor for reform.
It’s not right, but it seems to be the only way to incentivize people to create lasting systemic change.
What if you couldn’t charge for it?
That dream job you think about.
That perfect business you think of starting.
What if you couldn’t charge for it? What if you had to make your living doing something else?
Would you still want to do it?
If so, that’s a good definition of a calling in life.
The secret approach to bootstrapping
You can be an entrepreneur: someone who builds something big, hires lots of people to do the work, and gets a ton of start-up money from investors.
Or you can be a freelancer: a skilled craftsperson who does high-quality work directly for clients.
But there’s a third option: bootstrapping.
To bootstrap a business is to find a group of customers with a problem who are so willing for you to solve it that they will pay you up front to build the business that will solve it for them.
And the secret to bootstrapping that many up-and-coming business people don’t know is that you don’t necessarily have to have the solution to the problem.
You simply have to see the problem, empathize with the people who have it, and trust yourself to know that you can and will figure out a solution that works.1
Why does this approach matter? Because smart, solution-oriented people often get so bogged down in the details of how to solve a problem that they never do the hard work of finding customers with a problem that needs solving.
So, find people who need help first, then figure out how to solve the issue.
(H/t to Seth Godin and the folks over at Purple Space)
- Don’t lie to people and tell them you can solve their problem, then take their money and run. That’s not bootstrapping – that’s a con. ↩︎
Fractals, recursions, and setbacks in life
In Jurassic Park (pp. 189-190), Ian Malcolm discusses the idea of fractals and recursion.
In short, a small part of something will look the same as a bigger part of that something. For example, the peak of a mountain will look similar in shape to a small piece of that mountain if you were to put it under a microscope.
He claims that this is also true of events.
Think of a graph in the stock market. A line graph mapping a single day in the stock market will look similar to a week in the stock market if you zoom out. Zoom out again; that week will look the same as a year in the stock market if you zoom out. The ups and downs of each frame will look quite similar.
The same is true for each of our lives. The line mapping the “good things” in our lives will go up, and then something akin to a stock market crash will drive it back down.
You’ll see this in your day: perhaps you’re incredibly productive in the morning, but a bad meeting can send your day’s plan careening off in another direction.
Your week will have a series of good days, followed by awful days where someone cuts you off in traffic and sends you flying into a tree. Or perhaps your child comes down with the flu, and you’re cleaning up vomit for the next three days.
You’ll have a series of great months, thinking everything is about to turn around this year, then your father dies, devastating your family and all the plans you had imagined.
Like the stock market, your life will go up, then fall. And if you survive it, you can rest assured it will happen again. It is inevitable.
“We have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational, change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is.” —Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
Love and mastery
What topic do you most connect with?
What subject fills you with an almost religious fervor?
What do you spend your time thinking and learning about, regardless of what you’re paid to do?
This feeling of love for a field might be pointing you toward something worth mastering.
Expertise must come before audience
We have the process backward for becoming well-known.
The current wisdom is to become famous (most likely on social media) to obtain a big audience. Once you have said audience, you can make a living off them by selling their attention or whatever random idea you decide to push.
However, the opposite approach is not only less sleazy but will also lead to lasting rather than fleeting success.
Imagine building a huge following on social media, then selling financial advice (or God forbid, products!) to that audience without knowing anything about the field. You’d quickly be labeled a fraud or scam artist. (Unfortunately, this happens every day.)
If, instead, you started by building your expertise in the field of finance, then built an audience who would benefit from your knowledge, you would have a group of people who trusted you. And trust is almost as good as currency in the modern economy.
Philosophy, History, and Business – You Need All Three
Why is it considered strange that my bookshelves are full of history, philosophy, and business texts? Furthermore, why is there a cultural push to make people choose between those seemingly disparate subjects?
If you want to study business, you must go all in on it. There is no room for history or philosophy. Or so the prevailing wisdom says.
But that’s ridiculous! Let’s put aside the fact that some of history’s most outstanding leaders were business people as well as great leaders, philosophers, and students of history.
You cannot be a well-rounded citizen without these three subjects combined. One helps you understand yourself and what’s right; another enables you to understand the world and why things are how they are; and the third teaches you how to serve others while making a living yourself.
When combined, all three do a bit of each and compound the effects.
We need more polymaths, Renaissance Men (and women!), and multipotentialites, not fewer. Stop stressing over “picking,” and follow your interests wherever they lead.
Health insurance doesn’t cover gym memberships
Why not?
Most are outrageously expensive (the one I used to attend just raised its prices to $120 per month).
Most people can’t afford to purchase home gym equipment and do not have the space to store it.
Yet, having a place to go to manage one’s health might be the single best investment these companies could make in their customers.
It would save them, and their customers, a fortune in health care costs (i.e., improve their bottom lines… What they really care about).
This would be a no-brainer if it were actually “health” insurance. But that’s not what they sell—they sell medical care insurance.
It’s a case of reactive thinking (treating the illness) versus proactive thinking (preventing the illness from occurring).
Two types of happiness
Hedonic Happiness: Happiness that comes from the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
Eudaemonic Happiness: Happiness that comes from living a meaningful life.
You say you want one, but do your actions speak otherwise?
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Reward the effort, not the outcome
Children flourish if parents reward their efforts rather than outcomes.
Annie Duke’s decision-making education makes it clear that good decisions don’t always result in good outcomes. All decisions involve luck to a certain degree, so neither we nor our children can control how things might turn out.
Sometimes, a good decision leads to a bad outcome, and other times, a bad decision leads to a good outcome. This means we must reinforce good decision-making first and foremost, not just praise decisions that lead to results we like.
This is not to say that all children deserve a participation trophy. It means that we should appropriately reward good effort (i.e., good decisions) and discourage bad decisions, even if they lead to a positive outcome.
The “how” of achievement matters as much, if not more, than the “what.”
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