The economies of the United States and most industrialized nations around the world are based on a model of capitalism. In its most basic interpretation, under a capitalist system, private individuals own and control the means of production; this is in contrast to socialism, where the government owns and controls the means of production. 

In capitalism, consumer demand drives production and consumption. Capitalism gives consumers more of what they want and are willing to pay for, and less of what they don’t want and are not willing to pay for.

What people want usually isn’t so great, because unfortunately it is often not going to save anyone’s life. Bigger houses, faster cars, more expensive jewelry—how many of these things are what you will remember on your deathbed as what mattered?

As an entrepreneur, you must choose: do you want to get rich the easy way first by giving people what they want, and then try and do good in the world (the Bill Gates method); or should you take the harder route, and get rich by making the world a better place along the way?

Technology is letting us do some cool things today that we couldn’t do before. In Sweden, there’s a program that if you give blood and your blood is used to save somebody, you receive notification about that. Well, that’s pretty cool if people are going to do good things and get good results for the world. It seems like a great idea to actually let them know about it, and like a great idea to reward good behavior.

There is also an app that allows you to act as the eyes of a blind person. When a blind person might need to see something they need a description for, they can show it with their smartphone and let someone else tell them what their phone is looking at.

There are other cool things, like utilizing an unoccupied car sitting in a parking lot. In the world that has the ability to transport people and goods, this reduces the number of cars on the road because we can use all the cars that are just sitting at rest in parking lots to do good things for the world and move people around. Then you don’t need as many cars; you could take the fewer cars that you have and get more performance out of them.

That’s why Uber is worth billions of dollars even though they don’t really own any cars. They’ve created a strategy whereby other people that have unused resources like cars (or like Air BnB did with housing) that were going underutilized, now we can maximally utilize the things that we’ve already worked hard to build and maintain.

There’s probably some more industries that have underutilized assets that somebody is going to come in make a couple billion dollars off of find a way for us to get more of what we already have.

Let that person be you!

The checkpoint is that if you were restrict the pool to a small set of years that are introduced technologically and not through lifestyle and health change. You know people then would have to work on the technology. The benefits of the other side of that checkpoint are economic benefits by not having to pay for that last year of life whose medical costs are equal to all the previous years of life combined, and the insane increases in proactivity by having the smartest, most effective, most productive scientists and researchers, the avengers of the world.

What if Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell were awarded a couple more years just to finish up those things they didn’t complete? We could have had more scientific and economic benefit. The same greatness is expected of you. Utilize your extra years doing positive things for the world; maybe you use one extra year off your life to say goodbye to your family and tick some boxes off of your bucket list.

The funny thing about money is that if you properly get the most value from it, and turn it into goods and services, you don’t actually have it anymore. If you used it to buy a business, what you really bought was goods and services for other people, because that is what businesses do. Really all the cool things that people want, that they need money to buy, they don’t really go in the money section, and they go in the environment section.

Now in theory, the things that you could own but not have in your environment would just really affect your internal environment emotionally knowing that you own them, even though you wouldn’t be physically in their presence.

Imagine that when you closed your eyes, millions of dollars were put in your bank account, and sometimes they were taken out. They came and went like breath. Would you feel it? Then why do you care so much about how much money you have that you’re not using? Once you become wealthy, you feel the need to get more and more, and for most, it never goes away. The greed and the desire is real, and you become trapped by success. You become your work, you become your bank account, and it’s a terrible thing to happen to anyone really, for how can one cleanly decide what one wants from life when there is so much risk involved with changing, while one gets so much reward by staying the same?

Some people are happy to get a 50% discount someplace where they’re valued. Others are happy to say they get half off the planet, because they’ve got twice the income.

“If you’re so smart, how come you aren’t rich?”

“If you ain’t rich, life’s a bitch.”

Warren Buffett, the difference between rich people, and really rich people, is that really rich people say “no” to almost everything.

This is the world we live in today. Some people have lots of stuff, and some people have no stuff, and when you think about how that actually occurs at the micro level, it goes as follows:

You wake up in the morning, have a nice coffee and a shower, and you decided you’re going to build yourself a nice addition on your house. Nope. You can’t, because you have to go build an addition on someone else’s house instead, so that you can buy food and pay your rent. What you find is that your days are almost constantly going to enrich the lives of other people instead of yourself, because well, one, you don’t really want more of what you can already do for yourself, you’re probably bored of it by now; and two, you are in debt because you need so many things from everyone else around you. You wouldn’t have the time in the day to both go pick your own food, and water your own lawn, and take the kids to school. You get the idea. So the point is, in this world, instead of spending your days improving your existence by your own hands, you improve others existence.

Look at it this way: I want you to imagine that you were the only person in the world. You needed to pick your own food, build your own shelter, make your own fires, etc. One day you decided that you wanted to build a house, and in that house you would like to have some furniture. How long would it take you to put it together? Perhaps you’d never have a house at all, but you’d give up and just try to find a comfy cave to stay in.

Now why is this interesting enough to even mention? For the reason that you have to be more happy about what you have in this world. And if you have lots, it’s because you have quite literally robbed and starved other people of the fruits of their own labor. So you really should appreciate it. If you currently own, use, and benefit exclusively from lots of stuff, and you couldn’t have built all that stuff on your own, you better get grateful.

Someone else had to build something for you, instead of themselves, or you wouldn’t have it, unless they died and left it to you.

Check out the video of Barack Obama, while president of the USA, interviewing Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, and a multibillionaire. Jack Ma says his biggest regret was starting Alibaba, the company that made him a multibillionaire, and put him in the center of the stage with our president off to the side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WACqJ28OJUY (APEC CEO summit 2015)

Why would you want to own anything that has periods of loss greater than two to five years? You would be better off not owning anything in that case. Unless perhaps you’re hedging?

Owning a business is an easier way for making lots of money than a solitary profession.

The most solitary professions are also often the hardest to compete in. Since the most rewarded and powerful concept in the world we live in is the concept of ownership and property, then anything related to business, investment, and capitalism in general is aligned with that most powerful of principles. Thus, you kind of get to cheat the system a bit, because not everyone else is interested in taking advantage of that capitalist magic for themselves. This leaves you the free profit left on the table that they weren’t interested in. So they go off and compete against each other in the dog-eat-dog areas of art, or fiction writing, or music, instead of business. It’s like going off to war with no guns or weapons, and just going bare handed. Sure, you might be able to do ok, but it’s much easier if you take a force multiplier with you.

If you choose a solitary way to make money, you’ve left behind some of the easiest “don’t leave your force” multipliers behind. Don’t try to change the tire on your car without a jack. Don’t try to skydive without a parachute. Don’t try to get rich without ownership.

The most successful solitary professionals, like novelist Stephen King and JK Rowling, create works that can be leveraged into mass-marketed products, such as movies.

A useful trait that buying productive land or companies has is that you’re less likely to sell the whole thing off and more likely to spend only out of your profit, than you are with a stock or other lump sum speculative instrument. It’s harder to separate in your mind that you had a profit from a trade, and that you should only spend the profit. You can also much more easily find yourself without any income or any gain, or having to sell of a little part of your business every time to create profit, because that’s what it is. If your stock appreciates and you want to eat, you have to sell some of your stock, so you’re actually constantly owning less and less of that actual productive thing that you own, which is the company, because you need to get money out to eat.

That’s not beneficial. That’s part of the reason that when someone tells you that you need to use compounding interest, save forever and never take anything out, because one day when you can’t go back in time and buy back quality of life in earlier years, you have more money than you need. Yay. Now you have more than you need, by going without for so long.

Scivive is not very interested or excited about testing to the limit of everyone’s delayed gratification muscle. Scivivors would rather see you become excellent and make money by making the world a better place than sitting on your ass and letting compounding interest try to make up for your personal lacking. Go forth and kick ass, forget about compounding interest.

They say you need only make $70,000 a year to get maximum emotional benefit.

Scivive probably won’t reference the science of this stuff, and make it more folks knowledgeable.

I don’t like this $75,000 thing http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full,

Let’s look at how inaccurate this number is.

Do you have addictions like gambling and drugs? You need more money.

Do you have kids and a trophy wife? You need more money.

Do you live in a super expensive place like San Francisco or New York City? You need more money.

Are you terrible with finance and have lots of debt you need to pay off? You need more money.

Saving up for retirement? Well is that 5, 10, 20 percent of your salary? You need more money.

With all the variance between different locations, lifestyles, and luck, it seems pretty silly to slap $75,000 on the price tag and call it the price of happiness. How useful is this number to people living outside the United States? Not very. How does one see if the cost of living adjusted this? That would make it slightly better. How many people do you know that actually got rich this way, only through compounding interest?

If you look at anybody that’s really wealthy and they have something expensive, that took many people a long time to build. Maybe it’s a house, maybe it’s a car. It just shows kind of the unfairness in the world that ten people had to sacrifice all of their time for the joy and benefit of one person. It’s a little bit interesting, and why do they do that?

Because he was here first, it’s a little weird.

Our small world programming for property being a thing and making great sense was extended to these new giant things that we couldn’t dream of back then, and it’s rather perverse. Intellectual property is even funnier, how can you own an idea? Literally own it. And then own it 50 years after you are dead. Do you really need to own stuff while dead?

The mega-corporations win every day, the public loses.

Let’s be serious, if everyone that read a book on how to get rich, acted on it, and became rich, there wouldn’t be many poor people in the world. How easy it would be to read a get rich quick book and get rich quickly? The world has no shortage of get rich quick books, but you could say that the world does have a shortage of rich people. So how does that happen? You could say that reading a book on its own doesn’t do much. These types of books have been coming out for hundreds of years.

People sell you on doing what they used to do, but not what they’re doing now. You’ll see that they found greatness the minute they stopped doing what they’re trying to sell you and started doing what they’re doing to sell you. They’re selling shovels to gold miners, not mining for gold.

You only hear about the fake, feel good, not hard work methods of improvement. Rarely will someone tell you that in order to kick ass and outcompete others, you have to learn the hard shit that you didn’t want to learn in school, because that’s the most useful stuff. Like statistics, and the method of loci, and excel formulas. It’s not fun, it’s not pretty, and it’s the real world. The real, sustainable world desires facts and figures, and feats of artistic excellence, all of which require time, effort, dedication and a foundation of study that has no shortcuts. Good luck getting people to buy that book.

No one buys the “Get rich slow” scheme.

What if they do? What if people are so disillusioned by the get-rich-quick schemes that if someone actually just told them step by step how to get rich in two years, country specific. Goddamn if they don’t want to read that stuff, the people who actually willing to work to become rich.

If you really want to make the world healthier, happier and smarter, billions of dollars are going to be generated. The difficulty of how hard it is to make genuine change in people’s lives through for-profit corporations. It’s much easier to negatively affect people’s lives with a for-profit corporation, because there’s more barriers to entry which allows for profit.

Things that influence people at younger years and things that influence people at older years, everyone that’s joined the giving pledge, they were reached out by a man, who tried and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable endeavor. Good ideas cause absolutely gigantic multiplier effects in money, that no matter how hard you work, you will never be able to achieve personally.

If you tell someone, “Listen, build my client’s new house this week. I’m going to pay you on Friday,”

He says, “I don’t think you’re going to have the money to pay me on Friday. I need to get paid on Monday.”

Then you go to the person who’s paying to get the house built and you say, “I wouldn’t normally need so much money upfront, but everyone wants to be paid on Monday instead of Friday now, so I need more money upfront.”

And that guy replies, “It doesn’t look like you’ve got control of your workforce, maybe you pay them on Monday and the house never gets built, so I don’t feel comfortable giving you the money now.” So it just goes up the chain.

That’s the paralysis of this boom and bust cycle, where you give away credit for free and then you constrict it. When it constricts, everyone goes into safety/security/savings mode, and then the money multiplier effect causes the money not to get spent.

In case you didn’t know it, the money multiplier effect means that for every dollar you spend, that’s someone else’s income.

For every dollar that you give someone who’s selling something to you, they now are very likely to spend roughly 80% of it. It’s different in different societies. In America, we have a very high money multiplier effect because we have a very low propensity to save, whereas in China, they have a very high propensity to save, and therefore their money multiplier effect is lower. If you were to put $100 of your own money into building something in China, the net benefit to that economy would multiply less. It would turn over fewer times, because it would get suctioned off into savings and buried in the ground, or whatever form of savings that they would perform. The funny thing about savings is that unless they just bury it in the ground, if they put it into a bank, the bank tries to counter-reallocate it.

If you’re in a country that has a big propensity to save, you’re probably also of the mindset that you don’t want to take additional loans, because that’s the opposite of saving. Taking on debt and owing people money is the opposite of having extra money. In countries where people save more, those people also probably also take out less loans, and thus are less likely to have exponential growth because the money multiplier isn’t as strong.

When people want to make a lot of money and get rich, I try and tell them to get on the sales side, because it’s got exponential growth capacity, whereas cost savings, manufacturing differences and those things do not have exponential growth capacity at all unless you combine them with the required sales increases.

The way that human beings treat large purchases with less care than they do small purchases, like the purchase of a house or starting a business opportunity/franchise versus buying a new pair of shoes, pretty much means that those industries are the most ripe for unethical business tactics, because the same unethical tactics earn you more than they would with lower ticket items.

People usually spend more time investigating a two-hundred-dollar television purchase than they will a two-hundred-thousand-dollar house or a two-hundred-thousand-dollar business. This is because we do not properly allocate our conscious decisions on these giant, hard to understand numbers.

A dollar saved is a dollar earned. A pound lost stays lost forever. Original quotes I don’t like in form, however, I do like in function, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” or “Pennywise, pound foolish,”—linear expectations for constant correct behavior. Every dollar you save now, every dollar you save stays. Same with calories.

The point at which a car goes down in value the fastest is when it drives off the factory lot, which makes good sense because why would you pay the same for a car that just drove off the lot, when you could walk a couple feet farther, and have a direct relationship with the dealer.

Thus, when you lease a new car, and you keep getting new leased cars every couple of years, you keep losing the maximum amount of value on the car because you keep paying for it during the period when its value is going down the fastest.

You also pay the maximum number of transaction overhead costs and visits to the dealer, and spending time choosing which car and specs you want. Then on top of all that, you’re also paying extra interest on borrowing the money to pay back the loan that you got to pay for a car that is going down in value the fastest it ever will during its lifetime. Oh, and you’ve entered the “GOTHCA went over mileage” insane fees lottery, or other hidden fees lottery. And you have to have a higher spec of insurance sometimes to protect the leasing company’s interest in your car.

Thus, if you want to save money on a great car, you can own it when it goes down in value slower, after some other dumb-dumb has already paid to drive it off the lot for you. Another fun fact, let’s say you buy a performance car like a BMW M3, you can’t even rev the engine to max during the first couple thousand miles because the engine is still breaking in. Why would you want to own a performance car during the period when its performance is crippled?

Also you’re forced to do extra transactions after a lease, whereas if you own, you can just hold forever, and skip the transactional costs and friction.

“It’s only 10 bucks a month.” It’s easy to say that, because you look at your total income and think “what’s 10 bucks out of 2400 dollars a month?” But is that the right way to look at it? You have real bills you have to pay every month. So why don’t we take that 10 bucks out of the money you actually have available to you. 40 hours, 15 dollars an hour. $600. 4 weeks in a month. $2400. Minus rent $1200. Gas $200. Phone $60. Car insurance $100. Food $1500. Internet $60. So now what you really have left is 2400-(1200+200+60+100+1500+60)= $-720. So it’s really 10 bucks a month out of $720. Uh oh. You do pay taxes right?

So in the $30,000 bracket you lose about 18% to taxes. Which leaves you with only $1968 a month. So it’s really = $-1152

Now if you never buy yourself clothes, never see a movie, never have to fix your car, never take a flight, never get a speeding ticket, never have any other expenses at all, your just 10 bucks a month is actually 10/1152. 1968-(1200+200+60+100+1500+60)= $-1152 Wow. So if you spend 1200 on rent and 1500 on food, you’re already gone over budget by 25% of your salary after tax. So uh. You’re already in debt $1152 a month before you gave away the just 10 bucks.

It’s hard to show how important 10 dollars is, when you can’t even divide it into a positive number, but are already in debt, so you have to just add it to your monthly debt. Let’s say you only eat McDonald’s meals. $6 a big mac. So 3 meals a day, 30 days, $6*90=540. Let’s say you get your rent down to only $800 a month. Now you are at

$1968-(800+200+60+100+540+60)=$208.00 So just 10 bucks is going to come out of the $200 you have left end of month, if you never buy anything, ever and only eat McDonald’s meals, no desserts, ever.

Oh, and we forgot electricity, water, garbage, home insurance, health insurance, girlfriend, pet, family, cable. So, you’re pretty much screwed. Do not give your money away. What about all those other things that show up on your credit card bill that you never got around to canceling?

You probably need to eat rice and beans, and pay down that debt. Affordable healthy food is a great start to making money appear where there was none.

Imagine 100 years ago you were a concert musician, and you heard that there was a new device that was going to take your job. This magical device would allow people to record a better musician than you, on the same instrument that you play, and everyone else in the world would be able to listen to that better musician perhaps with a better instrument from the comfort of their home, over and over again for free.

You would be pretty scared and pissed off right? You would no longer be as needed as you once were. The benefits you would need to provide people in order for them to choose seeing you and hearing you instead of seeing or hearing the recording of a better musician would have to increase. The point is, what makes a better world? Are there more people listening to music or performing it? It is obvious the world is better off with the ability to make recordings of our loved ones and music and film. The world is vastly better off than it once was, and yes, at some time in the long ago past, some musicians actually had to take a hit, for the world to become greater.

 What’s the solution?

Pay the affected minority.

It is always better to move the world ahead at the cost of a small minority, for that small minority can be easily compensated out of the mass earnings that come from implementing the better world, if you choose to do so, or they can just live off the saved earnings their monopoly power used to afford them. Or they could be re-trained for new jobs.

Peak horse population occurred in 1920 in the United States. The car made the world a better place than the horse. Few people today know that the citizens of New York were worried they would be literally covered in feet-deep horseshit over time, because it was accumulating faster than they could clear it. Not to mention the thousands of dead horses that had to be carted away and turned into glue.

Consumers demand better quality products at ever lower prices. Businesses produce goods and services for their customers and usually maintain a workforce of people to execute the tasks required to fulfill their customers. Usually when lots of employees are laid off, it is because there has been a downturn in business, or the jobs have been moved to somewhere where the people will work for cheaper. This is complained about by the employees and by the general public and politicians. It’s often not complained about by the company managers and shareholders, though, and often the value of the company rises. So what’s going on here? Why is it that the same event causes such a difference in emotion? Well the answer you see, in that case, is that the workers do not care about the plight of the poorer people who are now doing for less the same job they used to do for more. They couldn’t care less about those people. The workers do not know their names, haven’t been where they live, and often can’t even speak the same language, so it’s quite easy for them to ignore the plight of the people that need the jobs more.

The people in charge of the company are legally obligated to look after the shareholders’ interest by maximizing the profit of the company. If there’s worse off people in the world that can do the same job as well as or better than the higher paid better-off people currently doing it, it’s the directors of the company’s job to do the more profitable thing.

While the flight of jobs from the United States in the 1990s and beyond was bad for American workers, it was a boon to Asian workers who would work for less money. The shift helped lift millions of people out of grinding poverty across the globe.

Automation taking jobs is great. Thus, the man who invented the phonograph, which allowed us to make recordings of sound and play the sounds back where and when we wished, did the world a great, great favor. We have similar improvements to our technical abilities as a race quite often these days. Nearly anything that slows that progress shrinks the pie from which we all must eat. Technology enlarges the pie for all, and it’s the job of our social systems and governments to make sure that no one party is overly harmed in that progress, and to redistribute the earnings from technological progress across the people. There is no good in this world but for that which benefits man. Without man, there is no good.

Funny enough, if you don’t appreciate wealth redistribution, you must never have met a man destroyed by wealth. Too much wealth is much more a burden than a blessing. How many lottery winners are better off from becoming wealthy? The point is, owning a thing basically just means the right to make sure other people don’t get to use it. It’s a right of exclusion. How noble is that really? How beneficial is it that you get to control the location and use of a thing exclusively?

Seems pretty greedy when you put it that way.

Thus, technology is all that will save us. Some groups will get less pie of the enlarged whole, it’s the job of governments and society in general to see that these harmed parties are still made well, so that other parties in the future see less benefit in slowing down the progress of the world.

The means of solving the problems of the middle and lower classes is outside the abilities of technology. The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting richer, except in percentage terms compared to the rich.

Wouldn’t it be funny if we lived in a world where there were only very, very wealthy men who lived on the moon, and left all their possessions here on earth? We would live in their houses, swim in their swimming pools, and they would never bother to even see them. Of what use is owning a thing you can’t see, and do not use? It’s social signaling value, and fulfilling your greed, or hoarding desire.

The point is, don’t hinder technology to try and make up for bad governance and wealth distribution. If you do, you’ll still have a bad government, and you’ll still be broke, however, you’ll also have no cool tech.

How many people want a job, any job that pays well and isn’t too hard? Why would one restrict themselves to a vision that sees no farther than their paycheck and day at work? We live in a world where people don’t really care too much about what the actual result of the work they’re doing is. If people cared more to be doing work that actually made the world a better place, than it would cost less to get people for those wholesome and productive jobs than it costs currently.

If more people cared to work on empowering things, then more empowering things would get done, because it would leave less people available to do the work that was shittier, driving up the cost of shittier work, in an attempt by employers to fill the positions. Thus as a thought experiment, if more people wanted to plant trees, then there would be more tree planters in the world, because the price would be lower per tree planter, and if less high pressure tactic scam salesman wanted to do the job, then the pay would increase, and there would be less high pressure sales people. Thus we would live in a better world if people cared more specifically about what the outcome of what their labor was, outside themselves.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/03/daily-chart-2?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/revengeofthenerds

Yay hackernews agrees that real jobs beats fake brain jobs

Just like protein turns into muscle easier, muscle is protein the same way that being sales turns into higher pay for you easier because you generate higher profits for the company. It makes it easier for them to give you what you yourself are creating, whereas if you create software instead of money, you are easier to consider a place for money to go out, instead of place where money comes in. This is because for every extra layer away from the physical check that gets written, the easier it is to see you as an expense.

Curation and catalyzing is super valuable. Shouldn’t other curators and lubricants, catalysts, introducers, and networkers be similarly rewarded for performing the same functionality as synapses in the global super-consciousness? How valuable is the firing pin and primer to a bullet? What’s worth more, the spark or the flame? Depends on how many flames you have right? Zero flames, spark is everything. Lots of flames make sparks less valuable.

You sign a single piece of paper, the whole weight of the government and men with guns takes your stuff at gunpoint to make sure that you keep your word. Contracts are cool. Love the contract. Good contracts make good friends.

Treat your potential employees with the same respect you treat your customers when you market to them. Do not command them. Do not insult them. Respect them. For some reason these days when you look for a job, you’ll see tons of fluff and bullshit.

When you write a job offer, if no normal human being would use any of the phrases to describe themselves that you’re “looking” for. Then you’re just disqualifying all the people who are actually qualified. Do you really give a damn about half these things? If you make your requirements so fantasy based, the only applicants you will get are those that are more than happy to lie to you, and pretend they meet these bullshit specs. No honest person feels comfortable applying to such a fantastic list of nonsense. There might actually be 0 people on the planet that match these specs. Easy things like, 10 years of experience required using a tool that’s only existed for 5. Why do you care how many years someone has worked with a thing? Does years using a thing actually point to competency? If a person bashes one’s own big toe with a hammer for 10 years, does that make that person a master carpenter?

It doesn’t matter what you have done, it matters what you can do. Fluffy word-laden bullshit fantasy paragraphs describing humans that don’t and really shouldn’t exist, serves 1 and only 1 purpose; to make your HR person look like they’re useful. If you HR person writes stupid ads like this, fire them. These types of job postings do more harm than good.

From <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022004>

What do they even do?

Oh, they put funny hats on your selfies.

Wow. Just wow.

Every sentence is so full of fail, that it’s like picking out diamonds out of a pile of diamonds.

Protip: People reading Job ads are not “looking for their next growth challenge.” They’re looking for paychecks. Might you mention a single thing they would actually care about?

Are your chairs comfortable? What real humans would they be working with in the office? What do you pay? The friction introduced by neither party throwing a pay number out there, far cancels out whatever negotiating power you think you’re getting.

Imagine if you treated your customer-facing ads the same way you did this job ad: “You are user, come spend time on our app so we can make money. You will drive up our minutes on site. You will make your friends use our app. You will be our customer now.”

This poor form, that you would never do to a user, you’re doing to the people you hope to work alongside in the real world? Speak to their needs first, then yours...

Well if everything can be an example or a warning, I award you: best example...of a warning! Please Learn 2 English for your next growth challenge bad HR guy. Perhaps look for a human that’s ever actually existed, you “iconic” yet “day one” legend you.

It’s probably poor form to make fun of an ad for a company parodied in the Silicon Valley TV series.

Please treat your potential employees as you should you customers, speak to the things they might actually care about. You are writing the job listing for them...aren’t you?

I used to play poker when I was supposed to be studying in school in between classes. I’d be able to deal standing up while I was walking around and it was a lot of fun. I had this one friend named T.D. and T.D. would lose a lot. We used to play very volatile style, and he would owe me a lot of money. He would say double or nothing, and we would do double or nothing and he would lose, double or nothing and he would lose again. Now he owed me so much money that he could never pay it back, and since he would never be able to pay me anyway, why don’t I just let him double or nothing until he was even, and then maybe we can get him to lose an amount he’d be comfortable paying.

That’s what life is, because of bankruptcy and because we don’t have debtors prisons, and prisons full of slaves. (or at least not there because of the slavery.) Then if you are the risk taking type of guy who’s willing to double or nothing enough times, all you need to do to be rich is just to leave off on a double win, because when you lose you don’t go under negative, just file bankruptcy and you go back to zero. It’s an asymmetrical war. You have a call option on the progress of the world. You take risk, double or nothing, double or nothing, stop on a double. If it doesn’t work out, you don’t go into the negatives, you just go to zero, because you are able to wipe out your debt like that. People that are constantly rolling nothings eventually get a double.

When you own a business, you help many people. When you work a job, you help one person, your boss, assuming the company has a single owner. It’s kind of like that.

You’ll get more from serving others than you could ever get serving yourself.

The sooner you start helping everyone else get what they want, the sooner you can hire a team of people who focus solely on making your life better, so you don’t have to. New computers coming out? They migrate you. New restaurant opening, you’re already there on opening night, because their job is to spend 40 hours a week making your life awesome. The sooner you can benefit others at scale, the sooner you can reflect that scale back to yourself, and have multiple people doing fulltime, what you could never have the time, inclination, or perhaps ability to do for yourself.

It’s easy to think that what makes a man rich is what he does. In fact, what makes a man rich is what everyone else does. Bill Gates isn’t wealthy because he started a business, he’s wealthy because the entire world bought his products. It is the world and its systematic behavior that causes things to happen. This way you can understand better that a different human Bill Gates would have emerged having performed the same task perhaps at a different time. There has to be some merit in shifting the focal point externally. I know it accounts for monopoly.

If the government doesn’t enforce your contracts or keep people from stealing your ideas and customers and goods, what do you have? Commerce is only possible through a group communal enforcement of goods. It’s the system of other people that allows you to do whatever business you wish, more so than it is your raw desire. You’re probably already copying and using the same ideas and principles that have existed for thousands of years. Let’s give society and the system the respect it’s easy to forget is deserved in the nice first world. If you were to try and operate a business in the 3rd world, you’d quickly long for a real court and real police.

You have to put things in the right perspective. Look at the whole world. Give a random person one million dollars, or take away a million dollars. One’s quality of life in regards to longevity, health, and enjoyment of life won’t be greatly affected. But if some huge breakthrough is found that cures a disease that might develop, or if some new popular thing comes along that brings great joy to one’s life, the things that may or may not make that person’s life more enjoyable or longer or healthier have much more to do with things outside of control whether that person has that million dollars or not.

Look at the Tesla car, for example. It’s the safest car, it’s the fastest car, and whether you had a million dollars or not, you couldn’t buy one until someone with a couple hundred million dollars put money on the line to invent it, build it, make it available, and allow you to be aware of it. And so, if you’re truly globally conscious, you’ll minimize the degree to which you think your money is going to make a huge effect in your life, and maximize the degree to which everyone else’s productivity will.

Focus on something that someone else actually cares about that you can solve a problem for. Study marketing tactics, a lot of people get to choose price points, maybe in this industry one price point beats another price point. Study color scheme, what color scheme should your website be? Does orange actually make people hungrier? Does hunger actually sell more of your product? Study timing, study cross sales, study up-sales, and study something that can exponentially grow so that you can solve somebody’s problem financially. Don’t study things on the cost side that you can’t get exponential growth from. “Oh, I reduced your costs to zero. A linear benefit. Please let me get a little bit of money, please sir?” And then, it’s not applicable across industries usually. “Oh, I found you a way to make this product without using this chemical so now you save more money.”

“Okay. Well, great. What does that got to do with selling tea in China? Not a thing.”

Goods and services are all that matter. If goods and services are how we measure the productive output of the world, then you only have two choices for making honest money in this life. If you start out as most of us do in this world, then you have to work for a living. If your choices are to perform services or make or sell products, Scivive strongly suggests you go the products route.

Products are better than services. A lot better. When you sell the hours of your life for money, you never find more hours to sell. You can also never increase your product range. You only have the hours you have. The best you can do is improve the market into which you sell your service, the hours of your life. You raise the price on your services. This is called getting a new job, and finding a new boss to pay you.

With products, you can scale up. You can expand your product range, expand your sales into other states and countries, get better prices, have special offers, package it better, offer it with other things, cross sell, upsell, cobrand, private label, on and on and on. And now you have a brand that has value of its own. You not only have a future, and options, you can also make 10 time more sales every year, for quite a few years.

Now let’s say you instead start a service “business” and now you’re relying on the most unreliable thing you’re likely to find. Teach your first apprentice? Great! Now you have your first competitor. You want to serve 10 times more customers in a year? It’s easier to sell 10 times more boxes, quite hard to do 10 times more house calls.

If you want help doing something, you need only dream what tickles your fancy. If you are driven by curiosity, like many are, it creates a drive in you that is not easily overcome.

Let’s say that you thought about a cool new idea that would solve a problem you have, and you decided that you would go forth and solve this problem and execute that cool idea you had. Then you remembered one of the tenets of a Scivivalist, which is if you work hard to solve a problem for yourself, and that problem isn’t well solved for other people, then you should take the time required, in this ever shrinking and more niche, crowdfunded world to solve that problem for others. Now you not only get to enjoy the solved problem for yourself, you also get to enjoy the profit and prestige that comes from making others’ lives better.

Here is where you might run into a problem. Imagine now that the problem you had was well solved by the idea you executed. Now the original drive and curiosity is gone. If you want to remain engaged with the project, you must find a new drive and curiosity. What is it about the project you just finished for yourself that would make you interested in solving it for other people? Well, what cool thing could you do with the prestige or money that would come from solving the problem for others?

Perhaps by getting everyone else’s capital committed you could solve the problem even better, with a better material, better rounded edges, a better feel or sound, whatever you have in your mind. Nevertheless, the idea is the same; whatever you solved once for yourself, you could probably solve again for yourself in a better way if you had more money available. Why wouldn’t you have 100 times the money available? Surely, as a true Scivivalist problem solving master, you could find over 100 other people in the world with the same problem. (Otherwise you would have picked a different problem to solve in the first place.)

Try this for fun. Take something that you want, anything, and plop it in your mind. Boom, There it is, the thing of your desire! It is now sitting on a well-lit white stage in your mind’s eye. Now let’s dream this dream backwards. How did what you want get there to that stage? Ok, and what came before that, and before that, and before that, until you get to where you are right now, sitting down, reading these fine words. We’ve dreamt a very rough path that is possible for what you want to become reality. The challenge is that it just takes so damn long, and so much effort. Unless perhaps what you dreamt was a sandwich, in which case, hit the refrigerator and quench your desire at once.

That last part is quite common. Knowing your outcome, visualizing your destiny, and dreaming the future, that’s been common knowledge for quite a long time. This part is new; we looked at steps on the path to what you want, for they’re obviously just as important. You will not get where you want to go without hitting some waypoints along the way. Teleportation isn’t going to happen. Going backwards and visualizing those waypoints is super important, for it enhances the chance that you will reach the first of them, and then the next, and the next, and so on.

So we did some backwards way-pointing. Cool. What other awesome thing could we do? A creativity exercise could be beneficial. Let’s imagine as well as we can, that whatever you dreamt, it instantly became true, for giggles. And so as to not go off the rails into not doable la-la land, let’s stick to dreaming things instantly coming true just in the direction of that think that’s sitting on that well-lit stage in your mind.

Here we go, use this example to give it a try, use something that has been in your mind for a while already, so it’s a little easier for you to follow the waypoints. Let’s use a common one, a website idea. On your stage you can visualize the website. Back in the old days you might have dreamt it as a building, but how many people can you positively touch with a building that contains a single business?

At the top of your website is a beautiful call to action, a headline, something that the people visiting would actually care to hear and read about. It could be funny, it could be true, or both. You want your website to have none of the time wasting meaningless dribble that consumes so many other websites that are much more concerned with themselves, than the customer. The highest and best use of a website is to serve their visitors.

So how is this website going to serve its visitors? In this instance, it is to share with them a very unique product that has never been for sale before and solves a few problems. You decide to go over a list of the problems it solves before choosing the language you will use to encapsulate the solutions. You must first visit the negative frame to invert it, and focus on the positive. It’s actually also useful to use positive and negative space, as it is to use rewards and punishments, there’s really no reason to limit yourself to just pulling or pushing when you can do both. (Sometimes negative space poisons the experience, so try to have someone else lose those cool points, while keeping the good ones, if possible, it’s an art.)

Problems to be solved: Our phones, computers, and electrical gadgets have never been more important to us. The one thing all these gadgets have in common is that they need electricity. Thus there’s always a question of how do you get the power from the wall into the devices you love?

It’s much easier to dream of a nice future when you see other people living your dream. What an easy shortcut to consensus on a viable path. Well, at least more viable than any other known way, might still be impossible for you personally if you’re a 4-foot tall guy who wants to play in the NBA.

Make things scalable, make them into kits. Little problems that you spend lots of time on, like customizing a car, end up taking just as much time and failing much harder than almost anything having to do with business, so just do the business and buy a better car.

You should try advertising whatever you plan to sell, without actually stocking it. You can say that you just sold out, or you can say that you were just testing. If you can’t get people to call the ad, what’s the use of having the product at all?

Focus on creating a design that human resources can advance without you. You don’t have to be hard on yourself because you don’t actually matter. What matters is the design. If you’ve got enough money to get a head start, set the right design and have the right human resources. You could do a terrible job and waste your life away, but the thing you create will do a great job and perhaps those people that you hired and that you control, they’re going to do a great job no matter what you do. Then, despite yourself, no matter how bad you mess things up, your employees are still going to do good work because there’s people out there that just exist that way; some people just kick ass because it’s what they do.

“Startup” is a misnomer, a useless description of companies. If you are going to use words to describe things so that you know the difference between one thing and another thing, which is why everything doesn’t have the same name, then you might as well stop calling businesses startups. This is because the important component of the endeavor is what they are out to do, not how old they are.

That would be like calling McDonald’s “that 50 year old company.” No one cares how old or new your company is, we care about what you are doing. Let’s stop calling all damn startups, startups. Let’s refer to them as to what they are actually trying to do, and stop focusing on their age. Or maybe, if you wanted to, you could use their user account or some other metric that is actually useful. There’s not a great deal of similarity between a company that’s got a hundred thousand customers and is only 6 months old being called a startup, and some dumb idea that you had in your basement about selling lemonade at a cardboard stand in your front yard also a startup. Calling both of those things the same thing kind of breaks the usefulness long term, which was not useful to start with.

When you launch a start-up, there’s a very good chance that you’re not going to make a positive impact in the world, because you’re going to run out of money.

Lots of people come up to you and say, “Hey, I’ve got a really great idea, but I’m afraid to tell it to you because I’m afraid that, you know, you might do it.” And then you say, as Seth Goldin does and lots of other respected authors in the business world will do, is tell them that ideas are actually quite affordable. As a matter of fact, ideas are just about the least costly part of any business. You’ll see lots and lots of great businesses with great ideas fail because in fact the hard and expensive part is cutting the wheat from the chaff. In addition, some of the best products that you’ll find in the world that are well executed were not what they started out as.

For instance, Flickr was originally a video game company. They accidentally became a photo sharing company; a good photo sharing company. Facebook was once meant to be just a way for people to talk to their friends at Harvard. Then it became a status symbol.

From Wikipedia: “Facebook is a social networking service launched in February 4, 2004. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University student Eduardo Saverin. The website’s membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid (Harvard) email address.”

They wanted people to be able to get an address there, and they thought that that was their value preposition. “Hey, look, your friends will kind of think that you’re at this exclusive college.” And then it turned out that no one cared about that, and they cared more about all the other things the website offered.

Slack, a multibillion-dollar company, became a chat and collaboration app, but originally they were supposed to be something entirely different. I can’t remember right now, but they just built that app in-house to manage the stuff they were doing.

And 37 Signals I believe started the same way. They just needed something in-house and they did what they needed.

XX – Fact check the above references and cite them properly

That story has happened over and over and over again where execution is so good that the idea you didn’t have originally is what makes you all your money, all your success and makes everyone happy and gets you all the clients. The thing you weren’t thinking of, which you thought would not work well, the side thing, is what actually got attention from the masses. The thing that you thought was awesome, the thing that you got funding for, the thing that you worked so hard for, failed and disappeared. Only because you were able to execute great on this other idea by making a smart pivot move are you now able to make billions of dollars.

If a matchmaker introduced a man and woman for pair bonding and said, “So I’m going to need you both to have sex with me 10 percent of the time you have sex with each other, because I helped the deal happen, that’s my cut.” This is an example of how middlemen use scum tactics.

Dad, son, and Facebook.

Son tells Facebook, come see my soccer match.

Facebook tells dad. They’re all at the same table. Dad then tells Facebook “ok”, then Facebook tells son “ok”, and also mentions that he might want to buy some soccer shoes.

This is the world we live in.

Scaling is easier when code does the work for you.

Part of the reason that doing a software business is so much better than any hardware business, if effective, is because the amount of good that you can do for others isn’t restricted by them having to buy, have shipped, store, and perhaps charge for a physical thing. Their life can be affected in a beneficial way at nearly zero cost per extra user.

That’s why if you can find ways to help people digitally, or through information, it’s much easier to help more people.

It’s easier to make money by affecting millions of people a little bit rather than a few people a whole lot. It’s basically the limiting factor of how much you can positively affect someone’s life. Even if you meant the “whole world” to a person, how could that person’s whole world possibly compare in value to a small piece of “world” but from 1 billion people? No matter how much you could do for a single person, you’d find it hard to not make more of an impact no matter how individually small times 1 billion people.

Leave the less impactful things outside, just bring in the profit. Try to do the things that are worth doing and not all the things you could do, but aren’t really worth much. The 80/20 rule makes it so that 80 percent of your problems come from 20 percent of your customers, and 80 percent of your profit comes from 20 percent of your products, etc., so by focusing on the good stuff, and getting rid of the bad, you can do great things.

Chew and swallow before you take your next bite.

Imagine that you start 100 businesses, and you spend all your time shopping for 100 locations for them to exist, and building 100 logos, etc.

It’s likely you will end up with zero businesses.

Instead, let’s imagine you just start one business, do whatever you need to do to get it up and running, and doing well, and then you go on to business two. It’s much smarter to start a thing and finish the thing so that it can be making you money in the background while you start the next thing, than it is to half start 10 things, and watch all of them fail. Or really even worse, they never fail, because you think that they are all in progress, while in reality they’re all progressively and slowly failing despite your ongoing effort. Ten chefs going into the kitchen and blowing hot air on a steak isn’t going to do as well a job cooking it as one chef putting it on the grill.

Your customer sales processor should be more like a red carpet than a funnel, because red carpet is affordable these days right?

Evil business / Dark patterns

Employees

Hire the right people

Peter Thiel has cool points

Do you have to be devoid of empathy to break out of groupthink and find a profitable monopoly for yourself? (Not caring about what others thinks allows you to work longer, harder, and on things no one else would care to.)

A “10x developer” is an individual who is thought to be as productive as 10 others in his or her field. The 10x developer can produce 10 times the outcomes of other colleagues, in a production, engineering, or software design environment.

Some things are so hard that you can either do them or not, you can’t half do them. This is where l0x developers actually exist. Some things are incremental, like data entry. It’s very hard to find someone that can speak or type 10 times faster than someone else. Thus, sometimes l0x developers seem to exist, because they can do the thing that others can’t, 0 or 1, binary. And sometimes that same developer isn’t l0x at all, because the project doesn’t support the complexity required to stop others from performing, and thus allowing one to achieve a l0x status. Thus, if it’s not complex, you’re not going to have l0x.

If it is complex, some people will never be able to do it at all, and in that case, they’re really infinite x developers because that’s the difference between something existing and not, right?

For instance, let’s say you need to bench press 500 lbs. Well, you either can, or you can’t, there’s really no half way doing it, right? So is it fair to say that the person that can bench 500 lbs. is l0x the person that can bench only 50? Nope, not if you only care about the 500 lb. It’s binary. The 50 lb. bench guy isn’t useful for this task.

In Summary, l0x is misleading, it’s often all or nothing. Complexity allows l0x to exist sometimes. It is the thing being worked on that decides whether you can be a l0x performer or not. Before you look for a l0x person, ask, is this a thing that actually can be multiplied tenfold?

To sell more boxes, you need barely any new infrastructure. Maybe more space, maybe more shelves. You want to do 10 times more house calls, or service of whatever sort? You need about 10 times the people, and 10 times the vehicles. And then you’ve got lots of people that work for you. They get sick, they steal, they compete against you, and they make a union to get the most pay possible. Now you have 10x the problems! They don’t aim when they pee. Depending on where you live, you might not be allowed to fire them. They might get pregnant and leave, and you can pay them for the next year while they take care of their newborn. Lucky you!

If business doesn’t go so well and you can’t keep everyone, you have to let some go, you come off as terrible. You find people that will do the same or better work for the same or less money, and you want to switch to them? DAMN YOU! How dare you allow competition!

Being an employer is not all that it’s cracked up to be. And it’s worse than that. You will feel great stress as a nice employer, feeling it’s your lot in life never fire anyone, and never give anyone a pay cut. And that social stress of being responsible for so many friendly faces should be more stress than any purely financial stress should be. Money rarely calls you a bastard to your face, or behind your back. Money also rarely punches you in the face.

Take a look at the richest people in the world. How many of them make products, and how many make services? Barring amazing gifts of ability in performing services, always choose products! 

Non-compete agreements are basically like door locks. They’re just there to keep honest people honest. Like door locks, they don’t stop anyone actually motivated to break the law.

It’s curious that you can, for $10,000, get 150 people to create something in competition for it. It literally means that you got 150 people to do something for $67 dollars each. Yep, hard to believe it, but $67 dollars times 150 people is $10,000 dollars. Wow.

Forced vacations are nice because you can tell who’s actually important, and who’s just a pretender. If they go on vacation and no one even notices, they very well may be a leech.

Just like you’re not always doing what you should do, I assure you, neither are your employees. If you happen to be in the tech business and you have the bandwidth, you might find it useful to just screen share their screens on your screen. If you have a 4k screen you can look at 4 full resolution 192x1080 screens. You can probably detect them messing around at a compressed resolution, depending on how large an area their messing around is taking up.

You could also use a program like ManicTime to track what files, websites, and programs they’re actually spending time on.

If you have enough employees, looking over their shoulders should be a full time job, unless it’s a hard to measure thing, like software, in wish case you may not be able to detect good things, but you could detect bad things, like Facebook, or Reddit.

When you don’t have to manage other people, you don’t think work is getting done when you’re not doing it. You’re more likely to start doing shit once you lose your employees, because you’re messing around becomes infinitely more obvious. When you are “busy” managing other people, you’re not personally doing work to get the project done. It’s even likely that the increase in performance you get out of the other people by managing them is less than you would just letting them be mediocre and working alongside them. This ratio changes the more people you are able to influence. The smaller the team, the more you should just work hard and let them mess up.

More money = less risk. Better environment = more opportunities.

The compounding effect says that if you live in a better neighborhood, you have better friends, and you’re more likely to make more money. If you make more money, you can have better healthcare and a car that avoids getting into accidents with other people. Go on YouTube and search for the “Tesla auto collision avoidance system” or other manufacturers, you’ll see accidents that definitely would have happened but didn’t, because they had enough money to have an anti-collision system in their car, and if you don’t have the money for that, then you are going to have more risk in your life.

The more money you have, the more time you have. The healthier you could be, the healthier you can eat, and the smarter your friends are, the more opportunities that show up. Where some people will die by getting the wrong treatment, you’ll get the right treatment, and where some people will die by getting into a car accident, you may not because your car can save you. As a matter of fact, you could have so much money that you don’t have to drive anymore. Or you could ride in a bus that’s so big that the world could run into you and you wouldn’t notice, because the momentum of your vehicle causes everyone else to be pushed aside.

Lots of people grow up working for the family business. One could imagine lots of them get paid hourly. Paying your family members to work seems to be all right.

The chance that you have a family business where your employees can actually grow is pretty slim. It is more likely they’ll just leave you when they can.

What is the least you’ll take? (Buying something). What would have to happen to convince you of this? If you can’t get a good pre-question answer, you won’t get a good real question answer. If you can’t hold hands with the girl, you can’t kiss the girl. If you can’t get into a conversation with the girl, you can’t hold hands.

Hoop theory: two small hoops, one large hoop. This is like the Benjamin Franklin strategy that if a person does one thing for you, it’s easier to get them to do more things for you. “What’s the least you will take?”

“If I do X, Y, and Z, will you do M right now?” No commitment, then you don’t do X, Y, or Z. If I can get you a discount on this model, and get you the red color, will you buy the car right now? If I pay you cash, and buy right now, can I get a 20 percent discount? If they fail the pre-test hoop, then you haven’t just given away margin for nothing. It’s like security at the credit card company. 

They don’t care what you have, they just want you to have more, they want to feel like they broke your balls a bit to prove who you are. So any information you volunteer without them asking is just wasting the finite amount of data you have to offer, and wasting time. Hell, you’re probably messing up their script as well. Lots of lower paid people don’t work so well off-script.

There are a lot of people in this world who have employees, and some of them haven’t learned to lead through example. They’re paying a great privilege to have employees and instead of becoming better men themselves and getting more performance out of their employees, they’re shittier men themselves. And so, not only do they get less from their own weak performance because they don’t feel obligated to perform and lead, be honorable and respected through positive behavior and output, and so they lose twice.

They lose once by being terrible workers and they lose again when their employees notice how bad they are and end up doing less as well. Winners lead by example and are honorable and bring their “A” game. The ones who win get all the benefits from themselves, which may exceed what the employees can generate. It may depend on how many employees are working and whether they are being allocated properly, and if the employees are driven to excellence. You cannot find too many examples of successful teams or successful companies who have nothing good going for them. Maybe they exist, but they’re probably the exception rather than the rule.

To know all those things, that’s actually specialized knowledge. Unless you’ve been trained in it, or are otherwise a very gifted and lucky person, you probably don’t know what makes a good business a good business.

Even if someone gave you an amazing profitable idea with a high likelihood of working, you still wouldn’t do it. Your super special, super amazing ideas that you think are so good and worth so much money are probably actually not, because you don’t know what making a lot of money looks like unless you’ve done it a couple times. There are people who are qualified to know the difference between a good business and a bad business, and you may or may not be one of them. Just because you had the idea doesn’t mean that loads of other intelligent people all over the planet didn’t come up with that same idea and patent it before you. If you invented it on your own, it doesn’t matter because so did lots of other people. While we’re talking about simultaneous invention, guess how many times the super important, super awesome eye ball has been invented in different creatures on completely different paths. Thirty, forty, fifty times?

It’s something that’s so important and so useful that if we all died off and there was nothing left here, but the chance of life occurring again with near certainty. If earth was similar in environment, then eyes would be created yet again because they work well.

If you want to know how sticky your idea is, you can just look at the profitability of your idea. The reason some things aren’t profitable is because people don’t want them to be. People vote with their dollars. If your ideas are terrible, people will let you know by not buying it. Whereas you might like to dream that the non-profit oriented, more charitable idea is the better idea, actually what you’re doing is you’re just cutting off the voting ability of the people on the other side of the transaction. If you did charge a price, that price that you’re charging is the ability for people to vote. That’s their ballots that they got to tell you whether what you have is good or bad.

If you’re interested in serving the customer, if you’re interested in serving the world, then you should give them the ability to tell you what they think by buying or not buying your thing. If you don’t give them the ability to vote with their dollars, then you’ve never truly asked them whether what you’re doing is liable or not. This is because the only reliable answer that you can use to know whether what you’re doing is truly valuable to someone else or not, is to ask them to answer you in cold hard cash.

Hire non-attractive if you can. Beautiful people absorb the time and consciousness of everyone near them, either actively trying to become romantic, or actively trying to not think about it. That’s the definition of attraction. It’s not a choice. Obviously, if you’re hiring booth girls, or outside sales reps, actors, etc., then you will need to have some beautiful people on board. If you’re working in an office though, it’s very likely you will do better with uglier people, at least from a distraction perspective.

Now, on the recruiting angle however, you might have some challenges attracting new talent if your office looks like a zoo of human oddity. You could also try hiring all of a single gender, but that would not go over well with the Social Justice Warriors.

Harness the power of beautiful people for your endeavors. Making a TV show? Fill every single role up with unrealistically beautiful people. Attraction is not a choice, we will tune in. Every time someone visits your store, or sees your marketing, if you don’t have a beautiful face on it, you’ve missed an opportunity to trigger an easy to get attraction response. We love beauty, give us what we love.

You may have yet to discover that when you are courting a beautiful woman, the amount of time and effort that goes into cute text messages, dressing nicely, going out on dates and such is exactly the same whether that girl is a 10 or a 5 on a scale from 1-10. Then why not aim for the 10’s? It’s their job to shoot you down, not yours. Go in there, take your licks like a man, and try to make it work. As they say, if you shoot for the stars you very well may hit the moon. The interesting part of this discovery is that it applies to business even more adeptly than it does to love.

The time and effort that you put into a business that has small growth potentials is identical to the time you put into a business that has billions of dollars of potential. In either business you’re likely to think about it and pay attention to news regarding it in your free time. When you’re not in your free time, you’ll likely be doing the 8-14 hour days that business people who want to be successful often put in. Why spend your time in a business with 10 to 1 million times less potential? How can you tell how much potential your business really has?

A good metric some like to look at is, how many lives can you affect? Is someone else already doing this for free? For example, let’s say that you wanted to create a store to compete with Walmart. Hmm, how will you out compete them? Better selection? Better price? They maybe work on a 3 percent margin? They have the lowest costs from their suppliers. It’s really useful to compare the exponential growth side of sales to the linear cost savings side. One can go up really high and the other can move very far.

Disrupt sounds like disruptor in a Star Trek movie. It’s not something you do to a business. When the giant banks came and ate up all the little banks giving you the maximum risk with the minimum choice, that was disruption. War is disruption. Disruption isn’t a noble goal. It’s the difference between change and progress. What you want is not disruption, but progress.

There are whole business conferences literally called “disrupt” because they love to see things “disrupted” because they think it’s very profitable to be “disruptive” to the existing companies in a “space” who are making lots of money.

First, shareholders in businesses are a minority of humans, not a majority. The only people who love the disruption are the people that are in the minority that stand to benefit massively financially from it, or perhaps anarchists in general.

Change isn’t what we need, progress is.

Disruption isn’t what we need, progress is.

If you consider a massively successful “disruptive” industry like casual gaming on your phone (which destroys thousands of years of useful human conscious ability every year) it should be a warning, not an example. Its profit is not a marker of how much better it has made the world, but of how much life it has wasted. So basically, disruption is often anti productive. If you focus on disruption, you are taking what already is and inverting it. You are not inventing what doesn’t exist yet. When you use what already exists as a starting point to calculate the next thing that you will do, then you already have blinders on that will limit your creativity. You don’t need a better game, you need a way to gamify things that actually help mankind. You don’t need a way to make long distance phone calls cheaper on land lines, you need to stop having land lines. That type of thinking.

Look past the sale. What common behaviors do your customers have to perform after they buy from you? Do they have to buy other parts? Do they need installation? Do they have to track shipments? What about before the sale? Are there special tools? Do they have questions that must be answered? Why force them to become experts, and know more about the business than you do? Why don’t you do the experimenting and science for them? So few people do this that you can actually make it your brand.

You know what your overseas B2B customers have to do when they buy from you—track shipments, and pay customs, etc. Why don’t you pull the tracking data off the shipping vendor for them, so they don’t have to figure out two websites and can just visit yours? Then you can scrape the data to see if one of your mail carriers is slow or losing packages, and they have a reason to come to your website more often. If you give them the tracking number and want them to use it on the shipper’s website, why would they come back to your site and see your cool new products? Foot traffic and eyeballs are valuable.

You spend millions on packaging material and design, but if someone wants to see an unboxing video, they have to go to some garage video YouTuber. Why don’t you pay for your own professional unboxing videos? Why don’t you do your own reviews as a giant corporation? You see how popular they are, right? The end users care more about the unboxing and review videos than any of the sad marketing fluff bullshit on your websites! Stop looking inwards and get in uptime. Know what your customers should want before they do. Know more about your product than they do. Do all the post-sale stuff for them instead of relying on amateurs to do it for you. Perhaps in the process you will even learn more about what you are making and selling, so that your next version can be better.

Why don’t we see more multitier usage of people in markets? “Hey, you know someone that has this, you get an x finder’s fee.” Or, “Hey I’m looking for this, I’ll pay this, and throw you x dollars for the introduction.” You could look at it like TCP / IP syn / ack overhead. It’s a low price to pay for finding and being able to transact on what you are looking for.

Google is an affiliate, an information middleman.

Look how much money Google makes serving this exact purpose. They’re a giant middleman to the world’s information. They generate no content worth reading compared to what they index. Look how much money they make.

Overall, lenient return policies led to increased purchases, the study found.

From <http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2016/1/19-31863_Researchers-Examine-Effect-of-Return-Policies-on-C_story-wide.html?WT.mc_id=NewsEmail>

It’s easier to build down the stack than it is to build it up, because you’re already a customer of what is below you. You have an engineering and product scope problem going up the stack, you’re not as qualified to know what the customers want up there.

More at: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-failing-the-stack-fallacy/

You can offer 20 percent over anyone else’s offer, and if there’s any other action, why wouldn’t they come to you? If the other people’s offers are too high, you can just say so, you’re not morally bound to get super screwed. Or you could include the language, with a reason. Some people like the language, “I’ll give you 30 percent over anyone else’s highest real offer.” This works for items that you really want, and don’t actually cost that much. However, most other people, for whatever reason, just aren’t willing to pay that much for them. You could use this strategy if you have more money than the average bidder, or you could reduce the amount of the other bids you are willing to pay. For instance, you might say only 10 percent, and they could still be happy with it.

Why would you ever bid early? Always bid at the last minute.

You hear people say good things about doing a startup in an industry that’s risky, and saying that it’s like leverage, you’re getting an option on an option. Those people are likely incorrect. What you’re actually getting is dual points of failure, either which of which drives the other to zero. You’re not getting an option on an option, you’re getting basically something that sucks multiplied by something else that sucks. Let’s do the math. You just buy stock in an index, so the underlying thing, it goes up, you win. You buy stock in a company that invests in the thing. Company goes to zero, you go to zero. The thing that the company is dealing with goes to zero, you go to zero.

Would you rather have two chances to go to zero that multiply by each other? Either one of them goes to zero, you’re out, or would you rather just have a single failure mode? Stacking failure modes on top of your idea doesn’t give you more leverage, it gives you more failure.  

If you want proof of that concept, consider start-ups in the Bitcoin space versus Bitcoin itself. Which one’s doing better? No start-ups are doing even bearably good, while the project itself is doing fine.

We didn’t need to understand how horses worked internally to build the car. You don’t need to understand how cancer works internally to find it and destroy it. The solutions to many problems are found by not looking or caring about how or why the problem exists, but just focusing on what you want, and getting that, not focusing on what you don’t want. Would you rather analyze and understand why your room is messy, or would you rather just clean it? Not only does it cost too much, it also limits your creativity, putting blinders on you.

Dealing with retailers and worrying about their stock is almost nearly always more stupid than finding the root, the manufacturer, rather than hunting your distributors down. Calling all them to see which retailers have a thing, then you know you didn’t miss any products.

The markets are where you go to make a small fortune out of a large fortune.

If a guy is looking at screens all day long, guessing will it go up or will it go down, how does this make the world a better place?

The people that lose in the market get to go back to work, it’s basically a battle for who has to work, and who doesn’t.

When you think people are long or short, it can be the other way, because it reversed depending on whether they have already placed their trade or not. Did you ever notice that Berkshire Hathaway is always entering or exiting, and never really done with the position? That’s because they enter the trades intelligently.

When you name files, spam them with the words you will be using to find that file later, or don’t be surprised if you never find it again. Do the same for your ads and when you look for things. Keycap and keycaps and key cap, and key top, and keyset all give you different results, but what you’re looking for is the same damn thing. Expanding your saving tags and searching tags. The larger sites out there should do this work for your customers. Why do they have to be thesaurus experts when you can tell that smart shoppers search common terms one after the other to land at the same ads? This can be done algorithmically surely, or by human.

Make sure your business and website don’t have homonyms, or you will have to spell it out every single time you tell someone about it, if you’re even lucky enough for them to know to ask.

If you only have one item, why do you have a “cart” for shopping?

Visualizing what you’ve got for sale. Perhaps let people see things in spreadsheet form in multiple orders and styles?

Analysis paralysis is real, if they don’t know what they’re buying is the right thing you offer, they won’t buy. This is why more products can be worse. Just like more payment methods can be worse.

We live in a world of 4k screens, yet no matter what site you expand on your screen, it still wants to pretend you’re on a cellphone, pretty much. Just like companies produce halo and concept products to lend value to all the other products in their lineups, so too should websites offer a halo experience, which would lend value to all the other inferior, smaller experiences they offer on mobile sites. People are trying to spend money on your sites, why does one have to click “next” 40 times, and see only four columns at once? Why is the search feature so deficient? Why do customers have to search four different regional sites, and beat up on your options to actually see all of what they can purchase? Amazon’s search is so bad that people are actually building their own external searches to make the experience better.

In sales you can offer someone a lie that has monetary value to them. You can tell them that something is the last one you have, when it’s really not. You could also say that the item was priced wrong, and that the sales rep will get in trouble if you buy it, and it will also increase the value of the product in their eyes at the cost of a single lie, and some reputation, and you could say, your moral soul.

Next time you’re offered any kind of discount or bargain, you have to assume the odds are not in your favor, because the person making the bargain or discounts or offeror’s job to get the maximum amount of profitable dollars out of you. And thus, unless some odd mistake has been made by that person and he will actually end up getting less dollars - you are going to end up getting screwed.

In 2017, based on a pattern of complaints by consumers, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) revoked the accreditation of Minnesota-based MyPillow, lowering its rating to an F. The BBB made the decision after reviewing MyPillow's ongoing “buy one get one free” offer, which violates the organization's code of advertising.

“Among other issues, BBB has attempted to persuade MyPillow to discontinue their ‘buy one get one free’ (BOGO)/other discount offers without success,” said Dana Badgerow, president and CEO of BBB of Minnesota and North Dakota. “Continuous BOGO offers, which can then be construed as an item’s regular, everyday price, violate not only BBB’s Code of Advertising - which all BBB Accredited Businesses agree to abide by - but also other state and national organizations’ rules.”

Having a secret discount network that unionized and gave the purchasing class some type of competition against the price-fixing retailer distribution networks that force retailers to screw you over with high prices, one might think that the secrets that they keep regarding their costs should be cancelled out by the secrets that we keep regarding the discounts we give.

Avoid the marketing serpentine in all stores (they route you like a sheep, a stupid shopping sheep that dispenses money).

The self-help industry is based on you estimating what your future is worth, thinking someone is going to help you get there, and then paying that person a percentage of it up front, while I do nothing for the good luck that you might happen to stumble upon.

Clarity.fm is a marketplace claiming to offer one-on-one expert advice on a wide variety of business topics. The site makes it easy to facilitate quick Q&A-style consulting calls.

Set up extremely overpriced Clarity.fm account to establish value by proxy. Spam search results on Linkedin to establish value by proxy. If you set yourself an account as an expert and you put your price high, it makes you seem valuable.

So is it solvable? Yes. Should someone solve it? Yes. It shouldn’t work for more than just promoting Bitcoin. But it’s easier to do that because people see financial gain. Such as, put in 0.5% of your holdings, do this marketing campaign, watch the new money come in, and see your wealth grow. You could even sell into the new money and make back your $5,000 and roll it again, and roll it again, and roll it again. And that’s how marketing works. Your lifetime value of customer exceeds your cost of acquisition, and you’re rolling in the dough.

If searched for, many of the habits and inclinations we have can probably be traced to a hardcore marketing campaign.

How to file a patent, fire and forget, you will spend more time researching if a patent already exists than paying your fee and letting the examiners do their jobs, which is to find out if it already exists. Also, the more searching you do and the more you learn, the more risk you have because you are legally required to disclose anything you knew about that was relevant, and the situation could quite easily exist where you disagree on the relevance of a thing, and now you are legally liable for breaking the law. If you didn’t over search, you wouldn’t be breaking the law. Now, there might be some minimum search that is required, in which case if such a thing did exist one would suggest you meet that expectation within a comfortable margin and not exceed it, unless you are short on cash.

Selling to greater fools can be better than selling to wizards. The wizards aren’t likely to get a bad deal, so if they want to buy, perhaps you shouldn’t be selling.

If great investors want to buy your business, perhaps you shouldn’t sell. If Warren Buffett wants to buy your business, you have to think to yourself, “I’m basically taking the most opposite position on a transaction against a person who is known to make better decisions in this area. Is that really what I want to do?” Perhaps you prefer freedom more than money, maybe, but if you’re selling for the money you’re better off feeling good about the trade when the person on the other side of it is an idiot, than when the person on the other side makes you look like an idiot in comparison.

The funny thing about being scammed is that if you don’t have much money, you can’t be scammed for much money. If you do have lots of money, it’s likely that you are able to make lots of money, and therefore if you are scammed, you can recover and go back to having lots of money.

Scams are kind of self-regulated against being too gigantic to the individuals they are perpetrated against. There are some pretty tragic non-monetary side effects, like taking up all of your making money energy trying to recover that which was lost. The disenchantment with the overall dog-eat-dog nature of many people’s actions and identities.

For some people the self-regulation doesn’t count, they lose their life savings in a single swoop and don’t have enough life left in them to be made whole again. People whose families depended on them and they find themselves out in the streets.

If you want to avoid being scammed, it helps to know what scams look like. And it helps to see all the advanced fee fraud scams that exist. “My wife lost her ring here, or a watch here, or a valuable thing here. I have to go, so just give me this small amount and she’ll come back and get it later.” Right; this is an obvious scam, don’t pay them anything. There’s a couple websites that just deal in calling out scammers, and they’ve literally categorized all the different kinds of scams. Be knowledgeable about the many ways to be scammed.

Scivive would say you should focus more on being productive than you should focus on being not scammed. The useful advice is reversed the older you become, or if the one-time nature your current wealth is the result of, perhaps a court settlement, divorce, or sale of a company you have a non-compete with, or you’re just older than you are young. If you currently have much more than you’d ever be able to make back, definitely focus more on protecting what you have than trying to grow it.

One day the poor staff will have to do a literal song and dance to get you to buy some new leggings or whatever the sale of the week is. I’m pretty tired of seeing scams in the inflight magazine. This week it was a $300 LED light. Really, a piece of plastic with some green and yellow LEDs in it, three hundred dollars. Says it was tested, clinically. There’s a star next to the clinically that says tested on 30 volunteers. Wow. Then you’ve got all these bracelets with a magnet in them, three hundred dollars. Says it helps you sleep, and feel better, and focus, and whatever else you need to hear to pay $300 for a $13 item.

It makes you wonder whether misleading advertisements and the money it parts people with are justified the same way that people justify the lottery. It is quite literally a tax on people that can’t do math, and it ruins literally the lives of nearly all that win it. But it somehow perseveres. Perhaps we feel better thinking that someone was going to part the stupid with their money, so it might as well be for a cause that is kind of good.

It is pretty mind boggling, the mental gymnastics people will do to justify evil things which only profit them. For instance, taking money from people that are too stupid to keep it, makes them have to work harder, and through their hard work, they likely make the world a better place. Hell, that’s not even very gymnastically inclined, though it might actually be accurate in some cases. One could assume there will be edge cases where someone is literally already working to capacity, or wouldn’t be able to afford better production precursors or equipment.

Scivive argues that in an ideal world, whatever marketing and leverage and incentives you can use to make the world a better place will probably make the world a better place. If you think playing the lottery is bad for you, and it’s bad for everyone else, then we probably shouldn’t be marketing it with state funds on television. Perhaps an advertisement for eating healthy, which, if effective, would lead to reductions in health care spending for the state and increases in happiness and healthiness. It wouldn’t be surprising if more fit people led to more children being born, because fit people are attractive, and being attractive can cause attraction, which causes proximity, which causes love and all the nice tricycle motors that go with it.

In the world of competition for your eyeballs, the people that give you the best deal can’t afford to be seen, and the people that screw you the hardest can afford to pay for your attention. Hedge funds weren’t even allowed to advertise to you until 2013, but the scams have always found a way.

If it reached out to you, more than you reached out to it, then it’s more likely to be a scam, and there’s an art to making you believe that you, and not they, did the reaching out.

There’s a fool at every table—and if you don’t know who that fool is, then you’re the fool. When you’re betting, buying, or selling, or even working with other people it really helps to know who the fool is.

One of the better things that can come out of this digitized world is better cooperation. Now if you let someone rob you, you have not only turned them into a bigger crook, because you offered them such great profit. You also lost money and a friend, or money and a relationship. Now you have also sent a pointer that anyone else that wants to make money has that as a behavior that they can do. It’s just all around bad.

Don’t fall for MLMs (multi-level-marketing schemes), get =-rich-quick schemes, or Ponzi schemes, or any of the other stupid schemes. Buying jewelry and speakers from the backs of trucks and in parking lots, people do both of these things all the time. The speakers are never good, and the gold usually turns out to be fake. MLMs are the maximum amount of middlemen and the minimum amount of useful employees.

If you’ve heard of an item, but for some reason you can’t buy it in any stores, even though it’s not expensive, then you are likely looking at a pyramid scheme, or a niche item. Items that are affordable and useful, find their way onto shelves in normal stores, just like soap, and bread. They’re not hard to find, and they have the minimum number of middlemen. No one will spend time convincing you to come to their bread sales hype seminar, to buy your bread reseller package, because it’s already an efficient market, all you would be doing is jacking up prices to the end users, and getting in between them and the manufacturers.

If minions do all the work on your account, only minion quality labor will appear. Why not hire the minion in house, and save the middleman fee his boss is charging?

If they make more money when you have a problem, they are more likely to subconsciously, or purposely allow problems to occur for you, that you can pay them to fix. This is true of the up sellers of the auto mechanic franchises. You may go in for an oil change, and they “discover” ten other issues that need to be repaired. You leave with a receipt of worthless labor totaling a few hundred dollars or more.

As another example, real estate agents make more money the higher price the house sells for. Why would a real estate agent want to make less on the deal by getting you a better price, for the chance you establish a long term business relationship and purchase other houses to become a repeat client? How many houses are you buying anyway? Real estate agents should be obsolete by now.

Lawyers love troublesome clients; the more trouble you get in, the more money they make. Lawyers are people to whom you give your fortune in order to prevent someone else from getting it. You could say that their business is based on people trying to counter unlawful or immoral thievery.

Accountants—their first mission is to cover their ass, then maybe save you money, maybe. One may sometimes find dark patterns in their tactics. Giving money back to the client guarantees retention of the client. If the accountant runs into some unexplained good fortune, such as a shiny new Mercedes, he or she might claim that the income came from other investments.

Scammers are often charming, intelligent, motivated people. When their victims discover they have been scammed, they’d like to get their money back if they can. If the inventive and adventurous scammers spent less time figuring out new ways to victimize people, and put their skills towards honest work, both they and their victims would find more profit in it. The first thing you should care about when hiring someone is their honesty. Then their ability comes second. If someone that worked with you wanted to steal from you, you prefer they be ineffective. Thus ethics comes before ability.

If you want to avoid being scammed, it helps to know what scams look like. And it helps to see all the advanced fee fraud scams that exist.

Religion is one. Uh, this, what was the fraud you were describing?

Gas station – my wife lost her ring here, watch here, valuable thing here. I have to go. Just give me this small amount and she’ll come back and get it later. Right. Uh, all of those scammy things, they’re… the reason I know about them is because there’s a couple websites that just deal in calling out scamsters, and they’ve literally categorized all the different kinds of scams.

Someone had to come up with a term for this whole thing of, “I’m going to promise you a lot in the future, just give me this now. I’m going to promise you eternal life, just say a little bit of prayers. I’m going to promise you eternal life and ecstasy that lasts forever, just don’t eat any pork.” These promises could indicate that religion is a scam. Does that seem like a fair deal? Would anyone not accept that? If that were reality and you get eternal life and you just have to not eat pork, one would cut pork off the entire human menu.

But that’s the problem with advanced fee fraud—you don’t know anyone who’s ever gotten the reward. They never come back and tell you about it. You never see video. You never hear audio because it never happens. They want you to pay now thinking that you’re investing in your future, but in reality the future you’re investing in is theirs and the future you’re sacrificing is your own.

Sometime what seems stupid is actually pretty smart.

Scam emails are written in terrible fashion, because they only want less intelligent people to respond. They don’t have time to field timewaster phone calls, they evolved to be worse, in order to scam better.

What people name their businesses tells you more about the person naming it than it does the actual business strategy or product. Business names tell you more about what the person in charge of the name had in their mind space than they tell you anything about the business. If you are at a website that has the word millionaire in it, you for sure aren’t going to be talking to any millionaires. Basically you’re just going to be scammed. Penny stocks, binary options, gold, FX, Ponzi schemes, HYIP, you name it, it’s a scam.

The hypocrisy of giving money to “God” (it really goes to the people running the church or cult) and hoping he invests it for you, and gives you back more, because, you know, he needs your money.

Church scams are just an advance-fee fraud, at least the ones that tell you you’ll make more money in return if you send them money.

Donald D. Lapre was an American multi-level marketing and infomercial salesman. His work involved product packages such as “The Greatest Vitamin in the World” and “Making Money Secrets.” Lapre was criticized for selling fraudulent business plans that did not work for his clients.

In June 2011, A grand jury indicted Lapre in June on 41 counts of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud and promotional money laundering though his company, “The Greatest Vitamin in the World.” The company’s “customers” spent nearly $51.8 million to sell vitamins and recruit others to do the same. But only 5,000 people received about $6.4 million in commission, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Meanwhile, Lapre reaped at least $2.2 million from between 2004 to 2007, the department said.

Kevin Mark Trudeau was an American fraudster, author, salesman, and pool enthusiast, known for promotion of his books and resulting legal cases involving the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). His ubiquitous late-night infomercials, which promoted unsubstantiated health, diet, and financial advice, earned him a fortune but eventually resulted in civil and criminal penalties for fraud, larceny, and contempt of court.

In November 2013, Trudeau was convicted of criminal contempt, and was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and a $37.6 million fine. He will be eligible for release in 2022.

There are many, many more just like them….

Getting rich on low returns takes too long.

To get rich is a pretty stupid idea the way it’s normally suggested. You literally have to continually, nearly forever, never take money out of your account and experience any of the real world benefits of being rich (by being able to actually spend money on things you want), and then one day, after your life is nearly over, you finally get to be rich, because you deprived yourself so long. That’s not a good way to get rich at all! Live like a poor person forever, so you can try to make compounding interest make up for your low rates of return.

There was once a guide on how to get rich that you could save money by foraging for food and hunting. That’s a pretty funny suggestion to try and use if you live in a big city, because you’d have to forage in garbage cans.

Why would you put 100k into Bitcoin, when you could put 100k into a business that could capture even more value! If you speculate in Bitcoin you have to wait for it to go up. Let’s phrase this in a better way for you. Ready?

If you create a business for 100k, and in the first year it generates 100k of revenue, and nets 30k after costs. You can sell that business for 3 times net easy, no problems at all. Why? Because there is money out there that desperately needs a home, and if you can pay 99k (3 years of net) and make literally 33 percent a year return on investment, then who would turn down a 33 percent per year return on investment? Banks offer what? Like 0 percent, or negative percent? Make a business, any business, and you get to make all the future money that the business hasn’t even made yet. This is the principle of making future money that doesn’t even exist yet.

You can make 10 years of money in 3 years, easy. If you look at the multiples that publicly traded companies are looking at, you could maybe get a 20 times earnings exit.

Hence, you have two options: work, and work, and wait for the business to make the money, and then you have your profit; or, you can sell it for money that it has never and may never even make, and then go do it again, and again and again. So you could literally make 100’s of years of business profit in few years. You can’t do that just by speculating.

Investment advice from the best investor who’s ever lived—Warren Buffet’s instructions in his will:

“My money, I should add, is where my mouth is: What I advise here is essentially identical to certain instructions I’ve laid out in my will. One bequest provides that cash will be delivered to a trustee for my wife’s benefit. (I have to use cash for individual bequests, because all of my Berkshire shares will be fully distributed to certain philanthropic organizations over the ten years following the closing of my estate.) My advice to the trustee could not be more simple: Put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. (I suggest Vanguard’s.) I believe the trust’s long-term results from this policy will be superior to those attained by most investors – whether pension funds, institutions or individuals – who employ high-fee managers.” (2013 Berkshire Hathaway annual letter)

If Warren Buffet’s wealth has closely tracked the value of Berkshire Hathaway, then anyone in the world with access to the US stock market could have bought Berkshire Hathaway stock and made exactly the same return on investment as Buffet did without doing any work. That’s pretty insane. He made 94% of his wealth after turning 60 years of age.

BRK-A, IBB, SPY, GLD, AAPL

Berkshire Hathaway is insanely good, and recently biotech is even better. Perhaps Berkshire / S&P 500 for anti-volatility and safety, then overage gets put into IBB.

Take advice from Warren Buffett.

Warren Buffett and Sam Walton both drove ordinary cars and didn’t like wasting money on themselves, and so the thesis is that one lifestyle design is a different form of excellence than business design. Just because you have more money that someone else doesn’t mean you have better stuff or more time for a higher quality of life. If that’s the case and it’s likely that you’re going to get similar performance, then you should probably be careful on how many risks you’re willing to take to get something that doesn’t pay what you thought it paid.

If you like to always have increases, and rarely draw downs (great ideal), then your stock choices should be selected for not having drawdowns over any period longer than a couple of your sampling rates; Or, even a single sampling rate. It’s easy enough to just set a reference point some time far in the past, and then you’re almost always up, but that trick may not always, or ever, work.

It’s a little bit confusing, but this is part of the reason why people like to be long stocks instead of short stocks, because the short stock can’t go below zero but it can keep going up 10x, 10x - over and over again.

For the sake of knowing, is there any other entity out there trying to generate returns on investment? Like a fund so to speak, other than the sovereign wealth fund of Norway that does so with a mission focus. We focus on companies that do this type of good in the world. I would love to discover those people and find out how they were able to create and sustain and hopefully get results in this world.

Would you rather Google have more cash to do things, or that your neighbor Bob can buy more beer? To some degree it’s better for the world that Bob drinks less beer and some companies have more money. Now on the whole, the amount of useless crap that gets done so vastly outpaces the useful stuff, that it it’s probably still not a good idea for Bob to have to pay more taxes, or be deprived the fruits of his labor because some Mega Corp can afford millions in consulting fees to create or discover the newest loophole du jour.

Do you know the story that tells you that your income is the average of the five people you spend the most time with? That’s some correlation-causation bullshit right there. That’s a trailing indicator. Like when your income increases, your friends just change. It’s not the other way around. It’s not like your friends changed and then your income changed, everything doesn’t go that direction.

As the saying goes, only two things in life are guaranteed, death and taxes. Well, it’s not really true. Ingvar Kamprad started IKEA. He owns most of IKEA through INGKA Holding and Stitching INGKA Foundation. He took his share of IKEA, put it in a trust, and the trust pays no taxes, so he basically pays no taxes. Rich people do this all the time. They either move to a country where there is no tax on worldwide income, or no capital gains tax. The concept that you’ll always pay tax is a little overblown if you are a member of the capital class.

Even if you do pay taxes, you get a 50 percent discount! If you make a million dollars working a job, you are, depending on country of course, going to pay over 35 percent. If you make the same million dollars as appreciation on a property or stock that you haven’t sold, you pay 0 percent tax. Yes, you heard it right, 0 percent. You only pay a tax when it gets sold. And you never have to sell it! You can often take a loan against it, or trade it for something of like kind. This keeps the amount of tax that you pay at a very low rate compared to the poor bastards that actually have to work for a living. There is no life, there is only time. If you save a man’s life you have only bought him some time.

Let’s say, magically, that you’re lucky enough to have property and capital goods that generate revenue, and therefore have capital gains. Let’s say you’re lucky enough to be in that class, or fought your way up through the working class. If you are to fight your way through the working class to save up enough capital to become a member of the capital class, you still got to play the game hard, because they’re coming for your shit. You accidentally run into somebody with your car? Accident.

You’re civilly guilty, you lose all your money. Your kid allows a friend to sell some drugs out of your house. Civil forfeiture, you lose your house. You didn’t do anything wrong. Your kid’s friend did something illegal. Oh well, you lose your house. You’re driving to buy a car. You go to the bank, you take out the cash, you drive to buy the car, you get pulled over, they see the cash, they take the cash, they charge you cash for the crime. Now you have to get a lawyer and beg and plead that that was actually your money, and that your money didn’t commit a crime, so please give it back. Multi-billion dollar business. More money is seized from civil forfeiture and asset seizure in the United States than is stolen by criminals in robberies.

The likelihood of you getting killed in America by a cop is like five to ten times higher than you getting killed by a terrorist. The likelihood that your assets get seized by the government is higher than someone actually robbing you. The old days of the enemy being the non-government, for some people, it’s much more likely the government’s coming to get them. And obviously if you were actually a criminal or actually doing bad stuff, that number should increase, if law enforcement’s working well.

Even if you’re not doing those things, you are more likely to be killed by a cop than a terrorist, period. There’s lots of cops with guns, and lots of interaction, and catalysts to allow those things to occur, and there’s just not enough terrorists to go around. It’s a numbers thing. The intentions are probably a million times worse on the side of a terrorist, but the sheer numbers are against you.

Maybe you should want to defend your assets and you don’t want to pay a death tax. You’ve been taxed on the stuff before. Let’s say you worked, made your million, paid your $350,000 and are left over with $650,000. So then you bought a house. Now you sell the house, now you get taxed again, you get double taxed. Well that’s not fun. So what’s the trick? The trick is to not own your house. You let a trust own your house. Then, the trust doesn’t die, the trust doesn’t pay an estate tax. You become civilly liable for some stupid thing your kids did or for some civil forfeiture or for some running a person over or whatever the problem is, the trust didn’t run anybody over.

That’s the reason OJ Simpson could kill a bunch of people, be found civilly liable, financially liable and still live the life of a millionaire; because his trust didn’t kill anybody, and his trust has the money. Then when he dies, his trust will give his kids the money—no estate, no death tax.

Let’s imagine that you had a house, and you gave it to one kid, and then that kid gave it to somebody else, and then that kid gave it to somebody else, government takes a cut every single time. Now let’s imagine you have a trust. Trust lets one person live there, and then another person, and then another person. No taxes, no fees, no transactional costs. Just upkeep cost. You need to pay the trustees, and you need to pay to set it up. You also need to choose a jurisdiction that is run by the rule of law.

Apparently Bermuda’s great, because that’s where all the insurance companies have their billions of dollars, so it’s good enough for them, assuming that the insurance laws that cover that formation are similar in well covering family trusts. Maybe there’s four or five kinds of trusts. Well then, you should be as well protected. The magic here is, get out of the working class and into the capital class, and then get out of the capital class and into the “trust-using, estate planning, get loans against your profits instead of getting dividends” class.

Then, you basically can’t have your wealth taken from you and you never get taxed, and the money that you didn’t get taxed on grows faster and faster and larger, until the point where maybe you’re in the one percent. You get to help decide who gets to be president, and you get to help decide foreign policy, you get to help decide and what’s on curriculums in schools.

Well, you can go afford to go create those things now. You can join either side of whatever insane argument you’re on, all types of insane arguments. You know, free speech for Nazis pisses off a lot of people. You’ve got to be a pretty advanced thinking person to understand why that’s actually good. If you’re not an advanced thinking person, you got to say, “Hey, these people are saying bad things, I don’t like that, let’s beat them up however we can. Let’s make it illegal.” That’s your retaliatory response. “Oh, this guy committed a crime? Kill him!” And then you realize that that stuff’s been tried and it didn’t work out that well, and what we have today, with not just killing anyone that commits any offense, is better. We have already used Hammurabi’s “An eye for an eye,” and it worked until Gandhi famously said, “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

In summary, you wouldn’t have a chance to understand why it was better unless you had been aware of the fact the other stuff has been tried before. Debtors’ prisons have been tried before, right? Not separating church and state has been tried before. It didn’t work out that great. Not having a representative as a member of a nation, like taxation without representation, it’s not as good, is what the Americans did. That representative democracy is useful. So, class war. Get out of the working class. Get into the capital class, and then get out of the capital class and into the one percenters. Trust funds. Asset planning. Loans instead of distributions.

You could always use percentages, but you’ll find that it’s hard. The only two things you can think of that you can pay in percentages are taxes and divorces. That’s about it. It’s often much better to look at things in flat rate terms, because you can buy and sell things for flat rate prices.

What is a percentage anyway? It compares a thing with some other thing. Let’s say you want to look at how many dollars you made last year at work. Let’s say you made $50,000 and wanted to look at your dollars as some percentage instead. Hmm, what shall you compare these dollars to? How much you could’ve made? Or how much you made last year? And then what can you do with that percentage? You could try to show your boss that he was under or over paying you based on what other people were reporting their annual raises were, in percentage terms.

However, if you were going to go to them for that data anyway, wouldn’t it have been just as useful to just use the hard figure of what they were getting paid now, that you weren’t? Wouldn’t that real number figure that would have to come out of the companies’ real number bank account mean more to the person saying yes or no to your request for a raise, or since we’re in fantasy land, a pay cut?

Percentages can be useful, but more often than not, they can be misleading.

Beware of the unqualified percentage. “XYZ did P percent in T time.” From what to what? What was going on before and after T time? Were you delaying sales bookings, were you taking on debt, were you buying sales at negative profit? Were you spending two dollars to buy one dollar of sales? That cherry picking of times is a fun one.

I should make a chapter called lying with statistics. Cherry picking the date range, cherry picking the products, using the...?

In countries that have fluid and adventurous credit systems, the upside is that everything goes faster and stronger and better. The downside is that you have miss-investment and mal-investment into things that you shouldn’t have done. It’s an art. How do you maintain people kicking ass and staying at a five percent unemployment rate (which by the way is amazing)? If you had a family on an island and you tried to get 95% of your family to kick ass, five out of seven days a week, it wouldn’t happen.

It’s nearly a miracle that the economic systems of the planet that we’re now are able to extract such insane productivity out of the work forces, because if the assets that are in the world were even close to what you could call evenly distributed, lots of people would opt for more free time.

There’s a funny saying that if you get a day off work, it’s great. If you get two days off work, it’s great. If you have a long weekend, it’s great. Three days, Friday, Saturday, and the Sunday is an off day, that’s awesome. But if you have a second off day, if Tuesday is off, you stop being a human being. You forget how to wake up, you forget how to shower. You’re no longer an effective member of society. You just, on that fourth day, are eating chips and watching the game. It’s crazy how that’s like the tipping point for some people.