Random Rant #2: Social impact versus making money.

I think a lot of young entrepeneur/ digital nomad / online expat people / young professionals think about this problem.

When do you take money and when do you take social impact. It’s kinda generic that almost everyone gets happy from “helping people”. That’s why you also see a lot of experts sharing their knowledge.

Helping other people gives you a good feeling. That’s just how it is for most people. Definitly when your money goals have been reached.

So than where is the balance and what are things we should take into consideration when thinking about ourselves in this situation.

1. Money is safety, how much do you need?

You need money to survive. you can’t survive on mindfulness. So how much money do you need to be comfortable and safe? That’s a number that is really personal. It’s also very reliable on your income source. When you work for a boss you are probably not getting any more money once you quit.

When you are running some online business you probably can keep a lot of the income with mimimal work. Even expending your business with only 2 – 10 hours a week is possible.

2. What are your plans after it?

The second thing is, what are your plans after. It might be a good idea to spend some time thinking about you want to do next before quiting your current project/ job.

3. What are your skills?

My skills are mostly online. Next to that i am pretty good at human behavior. So for me it wouldn’t make any sense to start a local bakkery. It would make more sense to create an online platform that could help people in a certain way.

4. What are current neccesities that need to be fulfilled?

It’s super cool if you are good at building homes. But if you are living in a 1st world country, there is not a real need for your skills. It would make way more sense to go to a 3rd world country where housing is a problem.

There are also a lot of people that go the route of forcing the “helping people”. These people in general study something like social studies/ psychologie or some other half useless study. At the end they got some skills. But most of the time they still

5. How does your future looks at your work.

So let’s take a look at some work aholics. Some of the most succesful entrepeneurs in the last 20 years are people like Warren buffet and bill gates. They have accumulated more than 100 billion together. One of the most interesting things is that they pledged that they would give away 50-99% of their assets away in their life.

Bill gates is currently curing a bunch of diseases. The only reason that he was able to do this right now is cause he went mortal on his business for decades. Creating a huge empire that also impacted society in a good way. So you should take into consideration what happends when you keep working.

On the other side there are people making 30k – 100k where there will be less impact on their future impact.

The Above Average Matter Most

Warning: This can hurt your feelings. For advice on if this place is for you go to the blog guidelines.

I was reading the "The wit and Wisdom of Lee Kuan Yew" (highly recommended). And in it he emphasised on the importance of the people above that can perform and do perform above average.

This was kinda interesting cause i never really came across this thought. 

It made me think. I was thinking about the following:

1. What is the impact that an above average person has or can have?
2. What is the impact that an average person has.

When you think about a person who is above average than you automaticly come across 2 things. Output and Potential.

What are companies:

Companies are collectives of people that strive to create some sort of value that someone else is willing to pay a certain amount for.

How is a company born?

One person. Sometimes two, sometimes three. Most of the time these people sacrafice a lot of short term gains for long term gains. 

What is there at the end? A machine / system that produces sometimes. Who work on the companies? A lot of average people and some above average people.

Conclusion: Most providers of wealth come from above average people


Where are the people that are just a little above average?

Within a company. Most of the time they have a leadership role. Within this leadership role they influence a lot of people. Saying they are doing a good job (which would imply they are above average) they have effect on a lot of lives. It's the same with leaders in a country. Lee Kuan Yew was 1 person. Yet he has influence on millions of people. Most people who get to those functions are above average. It's hard when you make average decision and put in average time and sacrifice an average amount of side projects (family/ friends) to raise to the top. 

So you can find the average people above average in the top of the fields.

So why is not less usefull to focus on the average. 

The world is hard. There are so many variables that you can only grab a small portion. And that is when your brain is not failing your ass. If your IQ is 80. Good fucking luck getting to a decent position. 

So let's say we have a super succesful person who is than able to teach others to be more succesful (this is the normal method). 

When he has to pick the 5 people he can teach. it only make sense to pick the ones who have the most chance of succeeding (this is not only based on IQ. it's based on stuff like drive and other things). 

You only have limited time and resources to it makes sense to focus precise on the ones that have the ability to get what you are trying to teach. 

Scenario 1: What happends when you take 5 average people

When you train 5 average people you can make them good performing average people. Maybe one will go out and do something really good

Scenario 2: What happends when you take 5 top performing people.

When you train 5 top performing people you end up with 5 good performing people who have good skills. The chance of 2 ormore people doing something really well is way bigger. So the ROI on your time is much greater. 


So now we get to the end result

End result: Discrimination


Holy shit what has the word discrimination a horrible reputation. But what it means in reality. In reality it means seeing differences. 


So when is discrimination not justified? This is very difficult. There might not be a short answer to it. 

I might be more smart to talk about the times it is justified. 


But after thinking about it. I don't know. How about that as an ending. I dont fucking know.

I think about it sometimes. It's an interesting discussion. But I don't have a full answer to it that makes enough sense to me.


RandomRant #1: When and how to reconsider your decisions

I am a pretty analytical person. This has some pro’s en con’s. I can come up with some real cool stuff when i think a lot about a subject.

One negative side though is doubting decisions and analysing after you’ve made it.

This can make you decide multiple times within an x period of time. This week i had a meeting set up, canceled, and set up again within the time span of 15 minutes.

It has struck me more times where i get parrylized by the fact that i have to make a decision. A lot of those times the actual choice does not matter that much. Sometimes you gain a little in x and lose a little in y. For example, loose some energy en gain some social status / experience.

So then comes the question: Is analysing your decisions after you’ve made them usefull?

that’s actually a good question. The first thing that comes to my mind is the impact that the decision had. So this must be established first / in the beginning.

If the importance and outcome difference is minimal  than it’s good to just make a decision and stick with it. Brainpower used for minor life events are totally useless.

So after we established that the outcome makes a decent impact and is worthy to think about it’s time to think about the situation. Hereby there are certain factors that are important. For example:

  • Is there new data that needs to be taken into concideration?
  • Did you previously not have enough time to make the decision?

Decisions are almost always made with having incomplete information. Thereby is also important the amount of different variables. They can be 5 but they can also be 100. When you have 100 variables in a certain decision it’s pretty hard to make the decision. So how would one go about doing something like that?

What pops in my head is eliminating the lesser important stuff. Maybe it’s good to select the 3 – 6 most important factors. Than give those factors a weight. Than rank than and do the rank by weight and calculate what the outcome is.

For example, you want to buy a new house. The most important factors you came up with are:

  1. Location
  2. Price
  3. Squere meters
  4. prettyness

Than the price is probably the most important factor.

Than let’s say you scale them 1 to 5 (3 being average – 5 being good). Maybe the size is less important so you only give that on a 1 to 2.

Another way to use a 1 to 5 scale and do that times a numer of importance.

Enough about calculations. That was a way to make the new decision easier. Incase it’s worth it to reconsider a made decision or you have made one.

 

I hope this can help someone out a little. It helps me atleast to write it down and understand the decision making process better.

P.S. In case i come across another method or read about some stuff i’ll update it.

 

Don’t think you know yourself when you have done limited work on yourself.

This is something that i find holds true with myself and definitely with others. Fuck it's hard to get to know yourself.. I'm 25 right now and I have been trying to "improve" myself for like 5 years. I still don't know myself.


It's at times I am writing things down I get to know myself better. When I write down my objections for why I don't do certain stuff I see the patterns and I am able to anticipate on it. That's also the strength of things like self authoring and having weekly reviews.


It would be funny to have an "objections" tab in your weekly review. There you can write down all the funny and creative objections you came up with this week.

Goals

Weird Objection

How To Fix It Next Week

Meet up with person x

Didn't have time

Have it as a hard goal.

Meet up with person x

Didn't feel like it

Have it as a hard goal.

Most people have no idea on how they work on how to move themselves to do stuff.


You do not know yourself until you are able to control yourself.

The evolution of writing and the thought of people becoming dumb

Guideline 1:

To start off. I like to talk about stuff i know or heard of. This has good things and bad things. The good thing is that i can talk a lot. About numerous topics that i’ve heard about or know people in.

The bad is that it might not be 100% accurate all the time. I am totally fine with this. Some people might not be. For those who are not. you are out of luck. Go somewhere else.

 

Let’s get into the story.

It’s always fascinating to see systems evolve. Currently we are super deep into everything with the internet and all the kind of things. This is also super interesting to see the evolving things like global connection but that is for another day.

Today i wanna talk about an old invention that came to light like 600 years ago (Printing press). This revolutionized things. You were able to think about something. And than distribute it to a large number of people.

One really interesting fact about this shift was the fear people had. It’s also interesting that everything brings a fear, good or bad. But that’s also for another time (Dam i gotta write a lot…)

Anyway, the fear that people had with writing stuff was that we would forget a lot. So people thought they would get more dumb cause you were not inclined to remember it. And that is what happened. since than everyone got dumb and the world is going to end. nah nah, that’s just a joke.

So what did happen?

Being able to write things down has a couple of benefits. In this article I am going to write down some of the benefits that it has. A bit for you, mostly for me. The reason behind it is also here.

 

Creating a better mapping system in your head.

 

Okay so your head super complex and stuff. Really something i want to get into now (not). So my understanding of it is that it kinda works like a folder system. With more memories of a certain item the bigger the folder gets and the easier it is to be found. Next to that it is connected with surrounding folders. So having it stored in the right section is highly usefull.

This makes it highly useful to actually write down the mapping structure a certain subject has.

  1. Understandings things better: This will make you more likely to understand a certain subject better. A lot of things are complex. And people are very limited in the amount of ideas and knowledge that they can store in their head.
  2. Having a low brain RAM: You can only store x amount of items in your brain. Altough that might be a lot of things. It’s still limited. I actually read my dyslexia testimonial a couple years back and it said i had a lot brain RAM. I can relate to this statement a bit. I think i am able to think about difficult things but my head gets full really fast, which limits me in a bunch of ways.
  3. Coming up with more things: one side effect thinking about stuff while writing it down is that while you are thinking about the spider web that is that subject is that you

 

Being able to recoup things easier.

 

One of the most obvious benefits of having things writen out is that you can read it again (yo duhhh). So when you forget shit (which happends a lot) you can actually recall upon what your thoughts about it was. Let’s say you get into a discussion a lot about that vegan is bullshit. It’s easy to be able to just pop out your notes with sources and stuff every time you meet a person who thinks that way. You should understand the benefits of that haha.

Sidenote: You do have to recoup on the things that you have actually writen down. One good way is to create a reviewing system for this where you go over certain important information that you have learned.

Cliffnotes: you don’t want to spend hours reading every little detail you ever came across. It’s better to have cliff notes or summaries of the articles you’ve written

 

Being able to distribute it (saving time for yourself)

Another big thing is distributing ideas. It’s really annoying when you think up something and you want to share it but it costs a lot of time. That’s something you don’t wanna have happening. You want to spend time creating ideas and creating things. Not having to tell everyone individually will save a lot of time.

Note: another great way

 

Feeling of accomplishment

 

We humans love to feel good. The search of happiness is with a lot of people. One thing that writing this delivers is a feel of accomplishment. I couldn’t imagine how it must feel to write a whole book. I know how it feels to write a good guide on a certain subject and that is already rewarding.

 

Tracking progress

 

Another great benefit of writing is he ability to track proces. When you write down how certain events went and you can go back to you actually see the progress. Otherwise it’s not always very easy to track the prices that you made.

 

Being able to think longterm easier

 

Your future is not an easy thing. There are a lot of things to think about and a whole lot of possibilities. That’s why it is good when you think about your future to actually write it down. This way you can also go back to the thought you had and expend on it.

Processing and analysing Emotions

As a human it is really hard to proces emotions. What can help to make this easier is when you write things down. I was recently talking with a girl who got a nervous breakdown just from some small bullshit with a guy. One reason for the break down was that she had certain emotions not under controle. One way to get more stable emotionally is through writing your emotions and situations down and analyse behavior.

Becoming a better writer

This point is kinda big cause I am horrible with language getting practice to become a bette writer is always very welcoming. It doesn’t matter at what level you function. Being a good communicator is key. Bla bla

 

Hope you got something out of it. Peace out bitches

>