Know Value

Know value.  Know what things are worth to who and where.

Until you know the value, everything is worthless.

When you know the value, everything is valuable.

See! It's true!

Do you realize that if you search something on YouTube, watch it and “like” it, it will feed you more videos fo the same idea, the same position, the same viewpoint?  

All of a sudden the world is validating the point of view you had in the first place.

You don’t get diversity of opinion or subjects.  It’s a huge confirmation bias that holds you to who you already are and does not support you being someone different (who thinks differently and gets different results).

You can use this in your favor by typing something better in the search box, and liking a video that’s good for you, so they give you more of them.

You know this right? 

Endurance Training

If you do some physical training and push yourself to do it for a long time, you will have more mental stamina.

Running, biking, working physically…push it for longer than you want to.

You’ll build mental toughness and your other problems will get smaller as you get stronger.

How much time did that cost?

The real measure of prosperity is time.  Do you have time, ultimately your most precious finite resource, to do what you want?

If we produce value that we can get paid for in a reasonable percentage of our time, we have some money.  But if we consume too much relative to our income, we have debt and are spending even more of our time paying the bills.

It’s a balance between the volume of production and consumption, and the nature of the production and the consumption that will determine how prosperous we are – our available time.

How is this playing out in your life?  Tell me with the orange button!

The Optimists Always Win

In 1798 a really smart thoughtful respected guy, Thomas Malthus, concluded that the planet could not feed the growing population and that soon, humans would starve.  It was dire and freaked people out.  He was wrong.

When I was growing up, we worried about an inevitable nuclear war with Russia.  It would be the end of the world.  It never happened.

In the late 70″s really smart people started talking about “peak oil”, and that the world would run out by the 1990s or so.  It was a scary proposition.

In 2001 we talked about terrorism and how we couldn’t fight it because it wasn’t a country.  Smart people told about how it would spread unchecked across the world.

Al Gore and others began talking about how global warming would be the end of us all, and that time was short.  The planet would heat up, the oceans would rise, storms and droughts would overtake us all…by now.

Today we have a pandemic and riots…

Humans worry, because we are wired to pay attention to bad news to survive.  Pessimists like this, smart academics with credibility, have always been there to scare us with their theories.

But look around.  Pessimists never win.  They are always wrong.  The primary reason is that they ignore humans’ capability to solve problems and innovate.  The progress from the majority of the 7+ billion of us trying to make things better can not be stopped.

Optimists always win, and this age will not be the exception.

Unlearning

What did you learn that is hurting you?

What did you learn and accept as true, that is holding you back now?

People are…

I can’t…

I’m no good at…

The world is…

I should worry about…

I’ll never…

Pick something.  What one thing did you learn and believe that, if you are honest with yourself now, is not true?

Lives are made up of moments

We can only live, dream, create, decide, love, and experience here, now.

Decades are made of years, years of weeks, weeks of days, days of hours, hours of moments.

How many decades do we get?  We don’t know.

Make the moments count.  Make them rich.

You are not independent

While we like to think we are self-sufficient and independent, it’s not hard to see that we are very very far from it.  To experience our standard of living takes the work of millions, maybe billions of people.

Look around you right now.  Everything you see uses materials that are great inventions; the creativity and labors of countless minds, all available to us when we call on it.  

This wasn’t planned.  No one mind or small group of them could or does have the power or capacity to design and bring forth such a great world.  It was the effort of billions of minds over many millennia to better themselves by winning over customers by bringing better products and services to them.

This is capitalism.  We are all participants and beneficiaries.  

If we are to continue to progress we must maintain the environment that capitalism flowers best in – individual freedom, rule of law, free trade (across borders), low taxes and regulation, sound money that holds it’s value, and free speech.

Let’s leave an even better world to our children’s children.

Break free from the old, to create the new

When we are small children, everything is new.  Then we start to create our identity, our self-concept and self-worth, chose a career path and have deep relationships.  Things happen to us – maybe good at first, and then they go bad.  Maybe there is some trauma.  

We have all these thoughts and identities in our head, and eventually, there is no room for anything else.  We’re on a treadmill, re-living it all each day.

When we can let go of the old, that is when everything can be created anew.

How to make more $$$

I recently assembled a team of guys to do a project at a property for 4-6 weeks.  Some of the guys I knew, and some I didn’t.  Halfway through the project, we dismissed several guys.  Towards the end, we dismissed two more.  Then we hired two guys permanently.

What made the difference?  Diligence, hard work, and good communication.  The guys who were let go would take most opportunities to stand around when they weren’t being watched.   The guys who were hired permanently were always moving and looking for results and asking “What’s next?”.

It’s pretty simple.  Do more than you are paid for, and you will get more opportunities and eventually be paid for what you do.  There is no other way.  If you do less than you are paid for or only what you are paid for, you will not get a chance to do more and be paid more.