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So I had an interesting conversation with a young man yesterday. His dad asked me to have a call with him, talk a little bit about some career plans. He's a junior in high school, uh pretty impressive young dude and I enjoyed it quite a bit. So I made some notes thinking a little bit about a situation before the call. And uh I took some time to reprocess those this morning and I wanted to share those with other people in case it's beneficial. I think there's some good little tidbits in here, but your mileage may vary. So the bottom line up front is that we live in a really complex situation and the advice, it, it's just not possible to give rules based advice. One size fits all as things become more complex. It's harder and harder to do that. And that's a feature of complex systems. Solutions tend to be more and more specific, the more complex the system becomes, they also tend to be subject to change, um greater magnitude of change and greater frequency of change. And that as we will see, imposes some significant constraints in solving this puzzle. So I hope this is interesting and, and useful. Um So let's shuffle through some properties of good jobs so that we can expose some of these paradoxes that exist. And what I mean by a paradox is something that uh uh set two or more properties that work against each other. So these are criteria for optimization that, that seem to be mutually exclusive and that's what makes it a real puzzle. So let's talk about the growth paradox. So as you become older , and I invite you to talk to some older people about this, this factor, what you're going to find is you'll be wishing you had gotten into a career because you'll see some that ends up being easier for you as you gain experience as you grow older, those are overlapping but not um exactly the same. So for example, if you're a carpenter, as you get older, that job is going to become a lot harder because you get, you get uh injured a lot, a lot more easily, you get tired a lot faster. Um Now the good news is it, it, it does get better over time in the sense that you'll obviously have tons of experience and hopefully you'll be able to do the job better and faster than someone with less experience than you. But you have to offset offset that by the limitations of aging. So that's just one specific example, there are many others. So I'll give you one job that's terrible in this is programming. So if you're a programmer as you ascend in the career ladder, your job gets harder and harder and harder. So it's easiest when you start, which seems crazy because you're, you're just lost in the sauce when you start as a programmer, even if you have a degree or two, you have no idea what you're doing. And so you're just in the deep end and you have to learn how to do what you're doing. But because of that and because of the, the demand, at least until now, this will probably change. Uh entry level developers are in such high demand that you're guaranteed to get paid way more than you deserve. And so the inputs to outputs ratio is excellent. You're given the easiest jobs and per unit of production, you're paid more than you will ever make at all for the rest of your career. So as you get better at what you do, your, your wages will go up, but the amount of stress and time and effort will all go up too, you get harder and harder problems. So if you're the highest paid developer odds are you're doing things that no one else can do and you work longer hours and you crank out more per minute than other people do significantly more. The problem is that that ratio will not track your, your, your salary and your production, that ratio will not stay the same over your career. It will actually fall significantly. It will make much less per unit of contribution as a senior developer than you will as an entry level developer. So that's kind of terrible, right? It's kind of terrible. And this is well known. Um it's not frequently discussed, but the knowledge is out there, people have talked about it. It's a real problem. So, I mean, it is and it isn't but, but it is kind of slavery in a way. I mean, it's messed up to complain about a high paying job that's in demand of slavery. But as far as justice goes, it's not very just um because those entry level folks should be making a lot less than they do and the senior level people should be making a lot more than they do again, highly unpopular opinion. But uh just based on justice, it's true. It's true. Now, it can't get fixed in the current system because if you try to pay entry level developers of the work, no one will apply for your jobs. So, and that's the only way to free up the cash to pay the senior folks what they're really worth. So what people end up doing, who figure this out uh business owners if they have the luxury of having a small business , which most tech companies can't really survive as a small business. But just because of the complexity, you need the resources, you have to really build a big machine to solve the problem. But if you, if you find that niche, what you end up doing is you have a really small team of super high speed awesome developers and you pay them exorbitant sums of money. You don't have any junior people anytime somebody wants to leave, you say, what do I need to pay you to say? And you just pay it whatever it takes, you give everybody a raise, you just dump money on these people and, you know, I'll, I'll give you a specific example of this. I know a guy, well, who's been working in the same exact team of five people for 20 years, 20 years in tech. That's insane. So, they're all paid crazy amounts of money. There were six people and one left and they couldn't keep them. They tried to hire people. They tried , I think three people they hired to just see what would work and they were juniors. So they had to hire a couple to replace the senior guy was thinking and it was so terrible that they all decided they went to the, the boss and said, you know, can you just get rid of these three people and pay us all more? We'll just work longer hours to make up for the lost guy because our lives, our lives are better that way and the boss is like, yeah, sure, I'll get more out of it that way. So let's do it. That's what they did anyway, not to drone on about that. It's really hard to find a job. Um, that's less stress, less effort and less time over time. Those, those are three different things that they can overlap. But you want a job that you get better at and that you can do better in less time or with less effort over time. So, so one way this goes in the trades is usually you become the boss and that's a lot more stress. But that's one way people transition out as their bodies give out and they can't swing the hammer anymore or whatever they're doing. Um Or you'll see roofers as they ascend in their career. They, they go out and do estimates for the jobs and they organize the materials. They oversee the crews because they can't be on the roof anymore. Uh As much, they can't haul the shingles up the roof because they have herniated disks and bad knees and stuff. So, um and then the other side of this paradox is you also want to make more money over time as you get older, you wanna make more money and most men do, by the way till their, till their sixties. And this is interesting. It's not true for women. They cap out in the early thirties. That's because they increasingly opt for easier jobs, whether it's because they have kids and they want more time with their kids or more flexibility or they're just avoiding responsibility. They start, they get to the point where they prefer less responsibility and less time and less difficulty to more money. But then they just keep going down the tube getting more money until the sixties usually. And then it kind of flat lines until they keel over because that's how we're designed. So this is a paradox. You want things to get easier over time, but you also want to make more money over time and those things conflict with each other. Then there's the complexity paradox which is related. You want a job with low or no complexity. Why? The qualitative difference between a job where every single day you have to solve a problem that no human being has ever solved before and a job that's perfectly well defined and predictable. Those are universes apart, they're universes apart. Now, if you're a young buck, you might be snookered into the illusion that a complex job is an exciting job and I can see where you're coming from. I've been there too. Trust me many times. But here's the thing. This is a lot like women. You might also fall to the illusion that a complex woman is, is an exciting woman. She's unpredictable. Therefore exciting. Let me tell you something . First off, all women are unpredictable. But second, um if you go down that path, I promise you one outcome and that's that you will learn the value of the other path. There are Proverbs galore about this, with women. Uh, I'm not sure Solomon wrote too much comparatively about work. He did write some things. Um, most of them have to do with righteousness and how it's better to have a little with righteousness than a lot with everything else. Um, it's better to have a job that's predictable than it is to have a job that's exciting. And if you don't believe that then you go to the other extreme and , and come back to me once you figured it out because you will, um here's the problem with that though. The problem is, well, I could go deep into why that is, but I'd rather not. Uh there's some deep stuff there. So what's the problem with a low complexity job? Well, a I is going to take your job. That's the problem. If it's, if it's not a complex job, then the tension against that is what's to stop a robot or a computer from doing your job or someone in India, right? So there are solutions for these paradoxes. In this case, the complexity paradox, you look for things other than the complexity of the job that prevents it from being taken over by robots. Like for example, it's really, really, really hard to build a robot that replaces a plumber or an electrician. So, um you find fields or subfields where the technology is very far from coming to fruition. Um That's how you solve this, this paradox . And then you can still have something that's predictable that, you know, back to front and, you know, 100% what's going to happen every day at work, give or take and yet you're not going to lose your job to a computer. Um Similarly, there are solutions to the growth paradox. Um They're a little bit more specific. So you kind of have to be looking at a specific field to generate those solutions. Here's another paradox. I call it the lifestyle paradox. Um, I would wage your money that the older you get, the more you're gonna wish you lived in a rural area unless you don't know what that's like. So if you're ignorant of something, it's kind of hard to desire it. But, um, if you experience it, you, your value for it will explode. Now I've given lots of reasons on this channel for why this is a valuable thing. Um, so just a quick, quick, quick inclusion of some of these aspects we've talked in no particular order just in the order that come to my mind. So I don't forget. Uh, well, a well, is really important. Um, city water's got all kinds of nasty stuff in it and it has ginormous effects on you and your family. So there are all kinds of hormone disrupting chemicals in those waters, the waters in that water. Um, that, that enough that's enough on its own. Uh, it'll cause weird things in, in, you know, obviously every place is different, but depending on what's in there, it could cause declining testosterone in the men in your house. It can cause early puberty, it can cause, uh, all kinds of issues. I mean, even with cancer and, and stuff like that, just depending on what is in there while water tends to be free of most of those things. Um, it's also independent. So if the water shuts down, the municipality doesn't shut down and your well, uh Furthermore, while you're still dependent on electricity, and unless you have a shallow well, that's hand pumped, um you can generate that with a generator or wind or solar or whatever. Um And so even if the power goes out, you can get water out of the ground. That's not so in a city because everything's run off of electricity and also you're not subject to crazy, insane, unpredictable rate hikes. So, and that's just water. So we haven't talked about schools, we haven't talked about crime, we haven't talked about the benefit of your kids being able to go outside and play, which is something almost no kids do today and it has enormous negative effects. Um One thing that's very hard to describe is jeez, how, how could I even simplify this? God is the source of all that's good and it flows from and is found in its fullness in him. Um But his creation is full of his light and it shows up you know, Jesus said that the light shines in the darkness and in the darkness doesn't perceive it. You can be exposed to this light and be affected by it without noticing just like the same thing can happen with darkness. Generally, if you're in an institution, uh you know, work, church school, something else where you're surrounded by a bunch of people who are rather wicked or maybe just not very good. Uh You won't notice what an effect that has on you until you're out of it and into something better and you'll, you'll be astonished by how much it weighed you down and you didn't even know. So likewise, um being in a rural area and being able to go outside and just at your own house, go outside and not be surrounded by knuckleheads and instead be surrounded by the beauty of nature. You would be absolutely amazed at the difference this makes in your quality of life. If people knew there'd be a revolution, I'm telling you, there'd be a revolution because there aren't enough rural areas to go around. If people had any idea of the worth that, it would be a violent uprising to, to, to fight over the spots that are available. And we, you know, because it's kind of a well kept secret, all it takes is a little more money than alternative options and people aren't willing to pay the price. It's kind of shocking. So anyway, as the end times roll forward. One thing you're going to see is that God will make more obvious the true value of things. And as he does that it might be too late to get into one of these rural areas because the cost is gonna keep going up, uh, money and otherwise, so rural areas is something that you're going to want if you don't already. And even if you do, you'll probably see it as, even more valuable later as all these things come to prominence in your life. Now, the paradox here is that rural areas are particularly depleted of high income work opportunities. You'll find many more in suburbs sometimes in cities. So some, some jobs are absolutely tied to cities. They don't exist elsewhere. Uh I knew a guy who came to work at the university and his wife was a prominent green whatever consultant and she had very high paying contracts with companies that you would recognize in the place they used to live. And then in moving out to the middle of nowhere, she was unemployed and there was nothing she could do that was even close to what she was earning before. Uh That's a city job. It's not going to exist in places where there aren't cities. So there are many other examples of this and there are a lot of other jobs that do cross over. You could be a doctor in a rural area. You have to do your training in a city. But once you're through the Gauntlet, you could practice in a rural area. Um, of course, that job like any other has its pros and cons and not recommending it. But anyway, um, you'll, you'll want to be making enough money to support a wife and as many kids as she wants to have and can handle, that's an important caveat. Um, she might want more kids than she can handle. Uh, so that's a challenge to find the money to live in a place like that. While also living in a place like that, there are ways to solve this problem. There's another one that I call the suffer no fools paradox. This is an idea that the Lord beat into my head as he does most things because I guess I have a particularly hard head. Um So here's the problem , your boss is going to have an enormous influence on your career on what you make now and in the future, whether you have a job now or in the future and what that job is, whether it's for him or someone else in terms of skills that you gain and the reputation you develop, et cetera and your customers are gonna have an enormous impact on your work. And this is something that people who aren't in entrepreneurial fields don't really think about. I mean, like, like I, I live in this hybrid world in terms of my job experience um crossing over many fields but compared to typical, but most normal programmers , for instance, they have no idea about a customer. They have no idea. It's just, they write code, that's all they do. So, and, and it's not easy. But I'm saying they, they're staring at a very small slice of the pie and, um, but these customers are real and they matter a whole lot because that's where your money comes from at the end of the day. But the problem is you, you're, you're highly dependent on all these people. I didn't put coworkers. I should have. In fact, let's take advantage at this to correct the slide. Coworkers also matter an awful lot, an awful lot. So let's say that you're the whiz bang greatest person in the world at the job that you do, but you work on a team of five people and they're all morons. They're gonna suck away all the good that you could do. They're gonna prevent the good that you could do. And in the end you'll get paid way less than you should be because you're going to be babysitting a bunch of idiots. So that can certainly affect you not to men. If you work for a company that is full of idiots full of coworker idiots, the company is gonna go out of business even if you're the whiz bang, greatest person ever at what you do. So, and that, that's true. Whether you're an employee or the employer by the way if you can't find enough good people to work for you, you're going to go out of business because it's a good people to make it happen. So, the, the paradox here is that you rely on people to be successful in business and yet the average person is an idiot and half the people are dumber than that. So as far as advanced people go, there are two types and one is much more prominent than the other. They're the kinds of people that will expend their lives for the benefit of others. And they are the kinds of people that will manipulate the less capable majority for their own benefit. And I'll leave it to you to figure out which one is more numerous. So most businesses exist and succeed because or through uh through taking advantage of the fact that the average person is an idiot and half of people are dumber than that to find a business that succeeds because it's actually good is really difficult. This is, you know, sales is a great job, but you have to find a product that's worth selling because otherwise you're just selling your soul for a couple shekel. That's not so great. It will kill you inside, it will rot you out. So um how do you, how do you leverage this? How do you solve this problem? Not leverage it? But how do you resolve this, this conflict? Again, the solutions are specific to the situation However, if we had to squeeze everything into a generic solution, it would probably be, find small businesses or start them yourself. That's so many, um , I'll say advanced people. I don't like the word gifted. So many advanced people better than average people are downsizing. They're either quitting larger companies and spinning up their own thing or going to work for smaller companies or they're, um, just starting up their own thing. Now, the thing is you can't address all problems that way. The there's actually a shrinking set of problems that can be solved by small teams. Why? Because the ones that can be be solved are being solved or have been so that, that inserts its own constraints. But there are ways to hack that as well. And a recurring theme in these solutions again as we started, I think it was this slide. Yeah, solutions will be local so specific and subject to change those are different. But the local part of this, a recurring aspect of solutions to these paradoxes is to find specific places, geographic locations where the paradox does not exist or where it has a a solution. It's probably better to say where the general paradox has a local solution. So suppose, you know, you're not going to be the next John Deere company with a huge multinational base doing all kinds of high tech manufacturing, whatever complicated stuff. But maybe you can set up in a small town and be a machinist that works on tractors because you're the only game in town everyone comes to you. So one of this is you don't have to be creative to solve these problems. That's the good news. Go to a place that's like the place you want to live, rent out a hotel for two nights before you go look up all the companies in the area and what they do and try to go and visit with these people and talk to them. This is a crazy thing that no one would ever do. So you talk about, you know, barriers of entry are great when they're psychological, not resource based. I should write that out too. Sorry, I take a note. So most barriers of entry that we think of they're resource based. Oh, I don't have a phd, oh, I don't have $10 million to start a company that requires $10 million. I don't have a giant factory. You know, I don't have a, a commercial driver's license, whatever those are resource based barriers of entry. And so you have faith that the opportunity exists because it's hard to, for a lot of people to get into it. But there are many, many barriers of entry that are purely psychological. Like why aren't there more trash men? It, it turns out there's actually some government enforced monopoly going on there. But let's pretend that's not the case. Why aren't there more trash man? Because people don't want to pick up trash psychologically. Right. It's, it's kind of a well known secret that it's not that difficult to start a business. Uh renting out porta potties . We're doing septic pumping. Why don't people do it because they don't want to. That's the greatest barrier of entry because human nature doesn't change. People will always be lazy, greedy, et cetera, et cetera. So, I mean, poop is always gonna stink. It's funny because people make jokes about job demand like, well, this job will always be in demand. Poop is always going to stink folks. So um that doesn't mean it's gonna be lucrative, but the demand will be there, right? Because there just will never be sufficient. People who say, you know what, every single day I wanna smell poop all day and it will smell like it, you know, so psychological barriers of entry are great uh for a while, computer science had a psychological barrier of entry and then through a lot of intentional work that was brought down and people started figuring out it's actually at least it's hard to get a degree in painting as it is computer science, it's a different kind of challenge. But if you're willing to put in that kind of time, commitment and intensity, you can absolutely succeed in computer science. And people figured that out. So now that barrier of entry is gone, plus all these uh wonderful free training materials are online now. And so it's really accessible to people. You don't have to appeal to the gatekeepers, which is good. OK. So that's kind of the, the long and short of the paradoxes I wanted to introduce, but here's, here's another thing to think about and these are opposites, but I wouldn't call them a paradox. Um You, you have the choice between multiple little gigs or one big gig. So lately, uh side gigs have become a thing, I guess with the advent of Uber and some other apps, it's become a common thing for people to, to pick up a side hustle. Uh It used to be more typical to just go get a part time job somewhere uh which is also still on the table. So if you have the choice between multiple part time things and one big full time thing, what should you go for? The answer is it depends on an awful lot of things. Um Maybe the best thing to do is just to know that these options exist and to be open to them and see what develops, look into it and see what options exist specifically for you. So um one, I guess the principle um that suggests that that multiple small independent gigs or opportunities, they don't have to be jobs per se but looking into and developing multiple independent revenue streams, why that might be a good idea is that in general, in a complex system, um a safe, a safe strategy is to make many small bets and then double down on what works. I will give you an example. That's far a field of what we're talking about. If you have a nation like ours composed of states and local governments within the states, sometimes the, the, the way to get the best ideas is to, to maximize the, the autonomous self direction of individuals. And then what happens is good ideas. They occur sort of spontaneously in a sea of bad ideas and then they bubble up. This is in, in the opinion of some , this is how the allies won World War two. And, and uh some people have, have claimed that the culture of the United States at the time was so inclined towards individual innovation and not just the creation of new ideas, but the respect of those new ideas by others. So the ability to recognize and value those ideas and adopt them. So if you look into how the, how the US took France retook France from the Nazis, there's some really interesting stories of some improvisation to bust through the hedgerows or even just to get off the beach, the equipment they had wasn't actually sufficient for the job even though it was designed to be. But these folks, they were a different caliber of people, or at least they had some among them because of the way the system worked back then. And they quickly surrounded these innovative ideas that happened to work and they double down on them and they adopted them very quickly. It was just a little bit of time until they had welded these new improvised rake things onto the front of all the tanks and they were plowing through the hedgerows, taking them out, um, or blowing them up with some other devices. So the, the, the point here is that when you're in an unpredictable ever changing, crazy situation, sometimes the best thing to do is to roll the dice a bunch of times and every time you get a win, double down on that. So make many small bets and double down on what works. This is great dating advice too. By the way, have an extremely low threshold for a first date and an extremely high threshold for a second date. That's good advice for men and women. A for women. There are more red flags from day one to avoid the first date over, but make many small bets and double down on what works. So the benefit of this strategy, whether it's in jobs or dating or whatever else is that it's particularly low risk. Um You, you gain maximal exposure to hidden opportunity because you're not burning out all your resources on one bet. You, you, by definition, you will be exposed to many more options. So that sounds great. What's the downside? Well, it's low risk something you have to figure out early in life is that risk is a compound that's comprised of opportunity and danger. So there's a quote that I found in a book somewhere. The book was terrible. I literally ripped out the first chapter and threw away the book. I literally did that. So I have the first chapter stapled somewhere around here. It was actually, it was the forward. It wasn't even in the book. It was the forward to the book written by someone else. And I was like, wow, if the forward is this good, the book is gonna be great. The book was garbage. I threw the whole thing away so bad. I didn't even want to see it again. So, but it, the title of the forward said, I think it was the title, it said Run Toward Risk, run Toward Risk. And that's such a good quote. And the, the point made in that foreword, which when I read it was mind blowing, uh for where I was in life. But it said, I, I, I've never heard anyone talk about risk being the composite of danger and opportunity. Although some smart person may have, I just haven't come across it. Um But their point was, was sort of a very, very early seed of this. They, they hadn't fully formulated the, the rest of the path to the, the, you know , the mouse didn't quite get the cheese, but it was on its way in the maze. Um But they, they, the author of that forward had figured out that all good things come out of risk. And uh because of that, if you avoid risk, you avoid reward. They always cour now the name of the game, which I'm going to show you a little bit of later with this uh impact feasibility divide idea, the name of the game is to try to mitigate the danger while maximizing the opportunity. And so um that that's hard to do. But anyway, back to the many small bets, anything that is low risk will also be low reward. So the reward of this strategy has to come through successive increases in risk. And so the whole thing presupposes that better opportunities come from lesser opportunities and at a global level like a gospel universal level, that is true. But in specifics, I'm not convinced that that's always true. In fact, I'm quite sure that there are what in um in statistics or data mining or machine learning or math, we will call local minima or maxima depending on whether you're trying to maximize or minimize something. But there are things that look really good right now. It turns out they're not the best for later. There's something else that's better that you cannot see while you stay where you are, you have to move on first. So um this might in fact be a really good path to take and it could be not so great. Here's some costs um right off the bat, you're excluding from the set of options any path that has a high start up cost. Because by definition, that's not what you're doing. You have to make many small bets. You're not gonna make one of those bets, $10 million on some specific idea or 10 years of your life. On some specific track, you're not going to go get a phd in some field on this, uh, on this track, you're not going to start up a company that, you know, it is gonna take five years to test whether it's gonna work or not. That's not a little bet. That's a huge bet. Five years of the prime of your life is a huge bet also because there's a low barrier of entry. It means that there's a lot of competition. It means anybody can come in and do this. So around here it's really difficult to get firewood reliably. And the reason is because people, like any old person with a chainsaw can cut firewood and sell it. And there are a lot of people who would do that, but they tend to be transient people and unstable people. And so there is a lot of supply but it's not consistent supply. The guy you called last year, you know, he's in jail for meth or something this year. Um, or he's moved on to some other state or now he's whatever, doing some other crazy low start up cost job or he cut his legs off. Who knows? Right. So that's not a great company to try to start to say, well, I'm going to be the reliable source of firewood because you're going to have to charge way more than these guys do because they basically do it at a loss. They're not doing math to figure out what their actual costs are and they're, you know, half the time they're stealing the wood from somebody's land anyway, around here. This is what happens. It's like where does this foot come from? Don't ask. Ok. Or oh, I got it from my friend's property. Uh huh. You're right. So, um so those people will always be your competition. And if all it takes is a chainsaw to get into the business. You know, like if you have a pressure washing company, if your, if your keys to the kingdom are a pressure washer, that is not a secure kingdom, it's an easy key to get if it's because you found out some super clever way of running your business, that happens to be a pressure washing business, but that actually doesn't matter. That's a different story, right? That's a different story. So, um if it ends up being a low barrier of entry and a super good idea, you have to remember there's 7 billion people on this planet and if a whole bunch of people aren't doing it, there's probably a reason that also will get to this idea of the impact feasibility divide. The question is with. So many people trying just about anything they can do to make money if it hasn't been done, what is it about the way you're going to do it that suggests it can be done profitably? Right . So another cost is that, as I mentioned, it's not necessarily the case that great jobs come from small jobs that there's not necessarily this relationship, that one leads to the other. Something good and small might not be good when it's big. All right. So, but, but theoretically what you do is you make a bunch of small bets, you double down on what works. And then in the end, you have say free income streams that are uh basically independent from one another, each of which is making pretty decent money with less than your full time effort. Um What's not on the slide is another benefit is that long term. If these things work out independent streams of income, that's a powerful, powerful thing because if something goes crazy and it totally takes out one of those streams, whether that's a business reversal or you know, lockdowns happen and uh uh oh you had a restaurant, right? Or you have rentals . I know a guy who's a self made man. I I consider him a mentor. Um And he's a good dude as far as dudes go, he's pretty good. So I've asked him all. He's been so nice to me answering my questions about life. I met him through a professional uh interaction. I was a client of his and what he does. And then I asked him if he minded if I asked him some questions about some things related to real estate investment. And because he had indicated he had a rental and he was kind enough to talk to me about it. And he said anytime. So I've just peppered him with questions over the probably seven years I've known him. He's, he's probably quite sick of me. But, um, anyway, uh uh over the years, I found out more about the depth of his investment. And I told him once I said, look, aren't you worried about this? I mean, what if rent controls come? What if there's a special tax on your second property? All these things that could happen, the writings on the wall, not to mention the suspension of property rights for landlords during COVID because they couldn't evict people who were paying rent. And that was abused widely. I said, aren't you worried about this? All your eggs are in this basket? And he was telling me that he was going to double down on that investment and buy even more houses where he's already set for life. I said, should you diversify a little bit? Get into something different and that way if this goes belly up, you've got something to show for it. And he's like, no, this is what I know. I'm just gonna keep doing it. I don't really feel like branching out into something new and having to worry about learning another area. It's like, all right. Um, so that's really dangerous and, and the, what's worse than never succeeding is getting to a place where you enjoy a high degree of success and then losing it all that. That feels terrible. It's, it's so much worse than remaining poor, which is probably why so many people don't even bother trying. But I digress. Ok. Uh, now it can be very valuable. If you learn what you can learn from it, it's worth any price. But that's a sort of different story. Ok. So what about the alternative, which is going deep into one opportunity? So, um, even when you come at it from the multiple small bets, you might hit a point where what is required is to go all in on something. What I have found is the greatest opportunities. Don't play well with others. They , they take everything and if you're not willing to go all in, it's not gonna work guaranteed. I found that to be the case, the things of greatest value required, um, require total sacrifice, scary stuff. Right. Well, you know, if you, if you say I'm gonna dedicate my life from 20 to 32 on this one thing , if it goes south, the question is, what are you gonna have to show for it? Which is actually a secret to success because if your answer is, well, what I'm gonna get out of, this is money. And if I fail, what I won't have is money, then you've already failed because go find yourself. Some people that have lots of money and ask if they're happy or not and most of them won't be because their goal was not what brings joy and meaning, it was what brings money. And they just assumed that once they had money, they'd be able to buy whatever brought the meaning they could have been buying the meaning the whole time. Some do. Those are very valuable people for the resources they provide in terms of money. But in terms of the deeper wisdom, which makes all the difference, makes all the difference. So if it all goes belly up and you're so if someone says, if, if it all goes south, you're gonna dedicate 12 years of your life or every penny you have or whatever it all goes south. What do you have to show for it? If you can say something crazy like I know the value of and then you're able to say things that are readily accessible to all people, you know, I'm trying hard not to get choked up here. You know, what, what sorts of things could you say? You could say, I know that any price you can pay to help another person is worth it. We can say I know what it's like to be able to be in any place and feel overflowing satisfaction and it doesn't matter what I have or I don't have what's given to me or taken away this, it, what Paul said when he, he said, I know how to abound and I know how to obese. I know how to be abased and I know how to be exalted and I can have full peace in the full range. What is that worth? No, the price that God, uh I don't know how to phrase this. I don't wanna say asked of me, but the way he set it up for me learning these things and many, many other crazy things I could say with full sincerity, it costs it costs more than I ever thought. I'd have to give more than I ever thought a person could give. But as is the case with everything God asks for and gives, it's always worth it. It's what you get from the Lord is always worth anything. He asks as a price because he always gives you more than he asks that there is no other alternative with Him. It is impossible to put him into your debt because no matter what he asks from you, he will absolutely give you more in return . But I don't want to get too off topic there. My point is have a better answer. If everything goes south, have a better answer for what you will retain than well, whatever money I have left. So when you're looking at a single gig, that's a high or a high investment, high, high sacrifice investment. It's gonna take everything you've got to give or close to it. Um That's necessary. So, benefits here are, these are the opportunities that tend to pay more. Uh I should say provide more. It's not just money. So you're not gonna be able to employ a bunch of people if you just, you know, do Uber eats or something, that's just you and what you can do with the money. So, uh, if you start a business and you're able to employ 20 people, those are 20 people who might not have a job without you or maybe they would, but hopefully you're a better boss than they'd have otherwise you give them greater opportunities . Um, and that counts for something. So at the end of the day, you know, I hear all the time, I hear people saying men, you know, I got into this thing and I made some money or I didn't but whatever. But, uh, at the end of the day, I just don't see the meaning in it and it's like, well, you, you haven't looked for the right kind of meaning yet because the good meaning, the good meaning is not, it's not a question of presence or absence, it's a question of abundance. It's found in everything. The question is just how much. But people look at jobs and they say, where will I find the meaning if that's your question, you haven't defined meaning very well. If you don't find it, you're not going to find it. You have to define it well, first and then you can find it and the secret is, it's a question of maximization, not presence or absence. If you see absence of meaning, if you think it's possible to do anything in life and not gain meaning, you haven't defined meaning very well yet. So if you figure out that secret, all of a sudden, every single thing in life, every option in life becomes a very visible upward ramp and it will be very visible to you. What yields greater meaning or yields less meaning , but it will all go up, it will all go up. So if, if I quit everything in my life right now and I just disappeared and I went off and lived in a cave in Tibet and I didn't tell anyone where I was going. They all just thought a bear ate me and I stayed there for the rest of my life, which I'm not sure anyone would believe that a bear ate me if there wasn't a blood trail because knowing me, they'd know I'd mess up that bear before he got me. But let's suppose that they suppose that and I live the rest of my life in isolation in a cave in Tibet that entire time, I would be accumulating massive treasures of mean, that's the least meaning I can think of because I'd be by myself with no flow to other people. So you tell me like being a garbage man working for other people. I just go to that one because I think a lot of people see it as a negative thing. Whereas for me, I mean, I don't know how it's possible to say this without sounding flippant and I mean, it, in the deepest way, it would be a level of heaven, be a level of heaven. And I, I don't, I don't, I, I'd rather not say that because I don't think anyone can take me seriously. And it's, it's a, it's quite a gem to just throw out there anyway. So the barrier of entry with an all end opportunity, it reduces the competition. Some of these are going to have a high start up cost of money. You'll either have to find the money somewhere or, or persuade people, you know, who have it to lend it to you, to do it or to come into business with you, which obviously increases the danger because every person you rely on is another point of failure, possible point of failure. But uh e even if it's just time you say like, well, I have to get into this thing and it takes 10 years to get into great. So that reduces competition. Um So that increases the likelihood that it's going to be beneficial. But at the same time, high start up costs those will create additional difficulties if things go south. So if it takes your life savings to get into something and it goes south, you just lost your life savings. And one unfortunately, easy way to frame that in your mind is I just lost everything I had to work for, to get that life savings in the first place. And that isn't the right way to think about it. It's that you just paid that price to learn something that required that price and is therefore worth that price. That's a very, I mean, that, that calls for a lot of maturity, but that is a better way of thinking about it. Another cost of these kinds of jobs is that they tend to not be robust to change something that is more specialized is also more subject to change, meaning it, it will not be optimal if things change. So, you know, you work your butt off your whole life to get into med school and become a surgeon. Well, guess what's going to happen if the federal government makes some sweeping change to how they pay for socialized medicine. And then all of a sudden you have a salary cap because they decided that that's the way to make the world a better place or that you have to get some potentially life threatening medical experiment injected into your arm and you die or you're handicapped for the rest of your life and you can't practice surgery and you just spent your whole life doing things that normal people aren't willing to do as far as sacrifice and you get nothing from it. It's the Willy Wonka ending where you get nothing. So don't get Willy Wonka. All right. Another piece of general advice is to think outside the box. One, we just keep hammering this idea from different angles. But one aspect of it is, um if you're listening to this and start watching in complex systems, solutions will be local specific and subject to change. So we're hammering that from other, from different angles. Um If that's the case, then the last place you're gonna look is at what everyone else does. But there are two ways of looking at this. OK? One is, don't do what everyone else does because they think it's going to be the best thing because odds are in a complex system, it won't be what the majority of people do will not be the optimal thing. But on the flip side of that, if a whole ton of people do a certain thing and on average, get a certain result in a complex system, you might get a much different result. Now this is dangerous because it, it, it walks close to the edge of I'm going to do the same exact things to get a different result. That's not what I'm saying. On average, you're dealing with average people. No specific person is average. It's a crazy thing . I don't care who you put in front of me in a minute and a half, we can establish a chain of properties, none of which seem special on their own. That combined in this one person makes them an extraordinarily unusual person. Ridiculously low probability of finding all those qualities. It's actually a really fun exercise. So it goes something like this. Uh Of course, there are many ways to approach this. What state are you from? They tell you how many people were born or live in that state they tell you. Ok, so you're one in that number, that's a fraction. You write it down a decimal. Ok. Um, how tall are you? What percentage of the population is around that height? What color your eyes do you have any hobbies? How many people do that? How many people do those specific things? And they're the same person, you chain together enough of these probabilities? The, the joint probability of all those things being true is pretty dang close to zero. And so being a completely normal person in each of these facets, the combination of completely normal qualities makes you an abnormal, exceptional person automatically. You don't have to choose anything. You don't have to be different in any way. The question is, are you doing anything with that uniqueness? And the answer is probably not. So, taking your unique qualities or willingness or character or character, you could develop your potential character and applying it in a specific situation might yield dramatically different results than the average. So uh as a University of Montana Computer Science professor, I made a lot more money than the average University of Montana professor. And then they all made more money because of that, I changed the the mold. So uh and then because the things I did outside of that job, I made way more money than those other guys during that time. So by definition, if I was just the average, you know, second tier state school professor, well, even that among professors at the university, our, our department was paid more than most because we were a liberal arts field and we actually had career options outside of the university. But um you know, within that subset there, there's just a fretto distribution. So if something is patto and most things tend to be surprisingly that one should be called the normal distribution, um then, then this property should be something that you expect, not something that surprises you. But anyway, the more complex the situation, the more differences there can be, the more variants they can, there can be uh in the population. And so one example I like to point to is I know a gentleman. So I know it's really weird, but I know several people in one field where I live. And among them , there is huge variance in how much money they make even though they all do the same thing under very similar circumstances. And so the difference in how this one guy does it, he probably makes twice as much as the others. That's insane for something that on its face is the same and that's the kind of differences that can exist. Mm If you do, if you, if you use your brain and you pay attention to what's going on and you optimize you can be way, way, way better than the average. So on the one hand, don't gravitate towards things that everyone else does because you think that it will be that good . Now, the tool there is just to look at how good it actually is and you'll see that the average isn't very good. Most of the time on the other hand, don't shy away from things that look bad because the average is bad and that, that's where you got to make sure it's a complex system and you have to have an answer to the question. Why are you going to be different? We, we're going to get to that later in this presentation. OK. Another thing, another way you can think outside the box is taxes. Everybody is getting a little uptight. I promise I'm not going to encourage you to break any laws, uh, intentionally . Um, not right now anyway, who knows what the future holds? Um So one thing you might not realize is there's this old saying a penny saved is a penny earned. That's false because of taxes a penny that you save is worth much more than a penny. And your tax rate is what, what determines how much more , but it's probably worth a penny and a half. The, the, the easiest way to lose weight is to not eat, not to exercise. Everyone thinks it's exercising, it's not eating. That's the easiest way to lose weight. It's fastest and it's easiest, the easiest way to make money is to spend less money. So, uh because it's locked in, there's no risk. You immediately get that money and you get uh an increment over it because you're not paying the taxes on the money. It's perfectly legal. Anyone can do it. So here's where you get into some fun activities. So, so when writing code or text one exercise to do is to see if you can express the same idea in fewer words with greater clarity and a variant of this, its second cousin is to see just how little you can get by on. It's a fun game. Some people have to play this game for real and it's not so fun. They don't have an option. But as my older brother said once and I'll never forget it. He said, you know, Rob, he calls me Robbie. That's my family name. He says, uh he said, I think that he said this more than once. It's definitely an axiom of his. He said, well, the worst thing that could happen is I could be poor again. And I've got lots of practice with that. He said we grew up poor. We know how to do that. We can do that with both hands tied behind her back. And I just laughed and it's true. And this is a wonderful thing about experiences that once you've been there, the worst thing that could happen is you go there again. It's once you're, once you're at the worst things can go, which being poor is not the worst by a long shot. But even if you stratify this, we chop it into, into dimensions. Once you're at the bottom of something, it can't get any worse. The worst that could happen is that you do it again. And if you already overcame it once, guess what , all you gotta do is do it again. The biggie anyway. So this gamifying this and saying exactly how little can I live off of? It's kind of a fun thing. Um, so when I was living on my own single man and working and I was, I was actually, I had laddered up a bit in the career. I was making good money, but I wanted to pay off. I had purchased a truck for business opportunity and I wanted to pay it off as fast as I possibly could. And I was already living pretty spartan in my apartment. And, um, I think I set a goal of living on $2 a day or $1 a day or some insane thing like that. And so I just experimented with different ways that I could get by on next to nothing. And I had years and years of practice with this because I had to do it when I was a missionary in Chile. We did not have enough food to eat as much as we needed to. Um But uh I practiced that out of option when I got home and finished college . Um, and so I had a lot of experience with it. I saved massive amounts of money by doing this and I, I wasn't depriving myself nutritionally. I was just taking away the frills. It worked out really well. So, um, there are things you can do and this is, this is where you start to see some of the advantages that men have over women. They have advantages too in some things. But it seems like guys are just have a much easier time of roughing it. I've seen that across many, many situations. Um, so rough it and see how frugally you can live. Um, and think outside the box, you know, take advantage of those $5 Costco chickens that are basically free and, uh, take advantage of things on clearance even when you don't need them yet. Think about maybe living in a van or having way more than the normal number of roommates once I split a basement with two other guys, one of which was a recently released ex con who we were letting live there for free out of charities. Sharing are already literally the bottom of the rung living situation. There were guys living in the rooms upstairs and we were renting the the basement and uh I had convinced the guy who was renting the basement to sublet half of it to me. And then we brought in this, this basically homeless guy. Um But you know, it was crazy. We were just sort of making that work. Um And there anyway, so there are things you can think about there and, and then every penny you save, it becomes a future opportunity. So you're making the most out of what you've got . And then another tip to think outside the box is, well, one thing that's not on this list is don't limit yourself to jobs that you already know about or even that already exists. There's nothing that says you can't invent your own career and you just pay attention opportunities. If you can find somebody with a need, it's something they're willing to pay for. You got yourself a job. So these tend to be things that people want, but don't have things that you can make or provide less expensively that they, than they can or things they really don't want to do for themselves. And with that, you can just open your eyes and find things to do, can find resources that people aren't taking advantage of and use them to, to create something that doesn't exist that people want anyway. But don't limit yourself to thinking about a career. Don't think in terms of what job am I going to do because I need to make money. Think in terms of how do you become a more valuable person holistically, not just career title and hourly rate, although of the two hourly rate matters more. Who cares about your title? It's actually a red flag of a place. You probably don't wanna work if they're all about titles. Um But think about your personal development because at the end of the the 40 year slog, if the world lasts that long, hopefully you have more to show for it than just money. But also if you're focused on becoming a more valuable person, it might help you pick up opportunities that aren't the most lucrative in the short term, but actually lead to a much greater outcome, long term, even if it's just financially. So sometimes the things that don't pay well right now pay the best later. It's not always the case, but sometimes it is so have a, a holistic view, a long term view. That's not just limited to what am I making? What's my title? It's what value do you have as a person? And that certainly includes the value you add, but not just in your particular role right now, I'll give you an example. So instead of thinking like, oh Well, I'm going to be this or that and that's gonna be my job. What? OK, fine. That , that conveys specific skills. But what's it gonna do for your ability to think critically? And maybe you're in a job that doesn't seem terribly good, but it actually helps you become a much better person in terms of your patience with others or maybe um it subjects you to the challenges that are mental , emotional or physical. It cause you to develop and maintain endurance, strength and power that's worth something. Now, all of these things become much more complicated than they seem. So a job that pushes you physically is going to break you eventually, right? So that's great when you're a young man and no accidents have happened, it tends to be less great over time. So hopefully it's a temporary situation. And then in 10 years you transition to something where it's not so physical, but you know, everything is gonna be specific. It, the best thing for you might be to hop on a fishing boat in Alaska , six months of the year, make gobs of money and then do something completely unrelated for the rest of the year to use that capital towards something that's more long term or can build or whatever you really have to think outside the box. Another tip is that you optimize for harder times. Here's a set of questions you can ask when things get bad. What will normal people still find a way to buy. I had a neighbor who's totally broke and a septic, completely broke and they found somehow they scraped together $2500 to fix it, which broke my heart because if they called me, I could have helped them with certain things to save them. At least 1000 bucks, I would have been happy to do it. But, um, they found a way to get the money. who knows where it came from? Maybe they sold a kidney. I don't know. But if you can find things that normal people will find a way to pay for, even when they're broke, that might be a good field to get into another facet of this is not the normal people but rich people. So back in the gold rush, it said that the people that sold the equipment to the miners made a lot more money than the miners because most of the miners didn't find enough gold to pay their expenses. They lost money if not something else in the ordeal. But the suppliers made money on everybody whether they found gold or not. So they were the real winners in the gold rush. Well, that was a safe bet. At least, obviously people that had huge payloads made more, but the risk was enormous. So a distant application of this idea is um what I call, sell at the finish line. So instead of trying to sell to many people who may or may not have tons of money. Why don't you find something that people with tons of money are willing to pay any amount for? Like, if you can find a way to make people younger, you, you've won that race for sure. Ok. That you solve that problem. They will pay any amount of money for more life. Um, but you know, closer to practicality, wealthy people will pay any price to keep their air conditioning going. They'll pay any price to keep the car running, but pay any price to keep their toilets flushing. So these are good things because you can live in a rural place and do all that stuff. And if things are less available that just makes your product or service, in this case, service, you can charge more for it and they'll happily pay it, they'll happily pay it. If the choice is paying tons of money or not getting it, they will happily pay tons of money. So, um, this is kind of like how young women ought to choose from men who are already successful instead of rolling the dice on those who might not be. And that's called waiting at the finish line. So these ideas are all related. But the application here is if you can find a service or product that wealthy people will pay any price for, even if the economy has tanked, you're in business. And a lot of those jobs actually become even more valuable when the economy has tanked because you can't find people to do it because they've moved on or if you're in a place with a high cost of living or whatever another tip is to maximize your flexibility. And this is kind of an oddball. But I wanted to throw it in here opportunities. They, they don't like to share and they usually aren't very patient. They're kind of like toddlers, in fact. Yeah , because sometimes they're surprised too. Right. Sometimes they're surprised and most of the time people ignore them and they miss out on life's greatest gifts when they do. So, that's all really valuable. So, opportunities are like toddlers. They don't share. Well, they aren't patient often their surprise and most of the time they're ignored and that's a real shame because you lose out on life's greatest rewards. Um, so to make use of that, pay attention, keep your eyes open, don't, don't get so locked into what you're doing on a daily basis that you can't see what's going on around. You, talk to people who are outside your comfort zone, do things that are outside your comfort zone, do things from time to time that have nothing to do with, uh, your job. I'm not saying you do random things, but this is, this is one way you can sharpen the saw is you gotta have your, your ear to the ground, seeing what's going on and, and be looking out at the horizon seeing what's going on, build up cash reserves. I know, you know, talking about what am I going to do for a living? The last thing you want to hear is who knows? But whatever you do make lots of money. Right. You're like, that's why I'm here. I'm trying to figure out how to do that. But what I'm saying is whatever you do, make sure what you're bringing in is more than what you're paying out. Because a lot of times when opportunities come, there's no time to find the money. You got to do it now or else you miss out. This is true in things small and great . My wife teases me all the time. Maybe she stopped teasing me because the benefits, it rolled in so thoroughly over the years. But who knows? Maybe she still teases me, but I will always take advantage of things that are on clearance or deeply discounted that I know we will use. It's not random stuff that we don't need. Well, it's always something we don't need, but it's not random. We will use it, we will need it. It's just, we're not out of it yet. So, um, it saves enormous amounts of money over the long term. You probably hear my dog whining. I'm sorry. Bunch of factors this morning, we try to help people stay asleep in the middle of the night. This knucklehead psychopath dog. All right. So build up some cash reserves and that's the small things and the large things, you know, if your car breaks down suddenly or gets totaled, if you're sitting on a pile of cash, it's much easier to use that as an opportunity to get in a better situation rather than having to react to something in a way that puts you in a worse situation. It opens doors. Um, on that note, keep debt rational. So I don't say avoid debt. That might be a really good idea, but it just depends on the cost benefit and you have to keep in mind, keep those calculations in mind and stick to them. Um Once, not terribly long ago, I had a loan out is a small loan and I don't remember if his business person or what uh it was for like $25,000 which probably doesn't seem like a small loan to some people. But um at the time and the , the things, the deals I had going, that was just a little tiny bit of money and the interest rate was super low and I was investing in making something like six times that and it irritated me because it was just another thing to have to worry about make payments on, you know, run the risk of forgetting the payment, uh et cetera. But I kept the loan because I was making more money on the interest. And then something changed, trying to remember this accurately, something changed and then the risk increased, the risk of the loss of the money. And so even though I could keep making more interest, the risk profile changed, and so I cashed out the loan or, or the investment, I sold the investment and then paid off the loan and that's just keeping the debt rational. Sometimes it makes sense. You know, you might be in a position where you have the ability to pay down a mortgage. But if you locked in a super sweet interest rate, again, putting the money into t bills, you might be getting twice as much of a return. So it just depends, you got to be rational about it and get away from emotional decisions. Those are not good. Uh and then maintain high geographical mobility. A lot of opportunities are geographically local as we've gone over in this presentation. So try to minimize, I say no here. But that's a little too strong. Ju just include, just include unforeseen opportunity that requires geographical movement in your cost benefit calculations. So be careful about things. It doesn't matter if it's a gym membership or a lease or anything that's gonna tie you down to a specific place even having, I'd always laugh when people asked for help moving pianos because I thought why would you have a piano if you don't have the means of moving it, whether you've got some bulky sons or money to pay piano movers? Like how crazy is it to get a piano. If you don't have the means to move it, you're just expecting other people to take care of it for you. That's insane. I mean, you may as well hold a gun to somebody's head and maybe you think that's extreme, whatever. But if you've lifted a piano, maybe not, you just assume that your neighbors are gonna help you move your piano every time you have to move. It's crazy. Now, if you don't move, it's sort of a different story. But jeez anyway, OK. Now, finally we get to the good stuff, the impact feasibility divide. This is one of many ideas, actually, one such idea I already mentioned earlier in this presentation that I've been amused to notice that I've somehow independently contrived and then I found out that some high paid Harvard Business review type person has already discovered this sort of thing and named it something else. Um Usually I stick with my version because I think it makes more sense. Sometimes there are little pieces that are different. But um it's interesting and not surprising. All good things come from God and at the end of the day, any discovery is just stolen from him. Anyway. So um it is amusing though. OK. So let's talk about the impact feasibility divide. So, on this graph, we've got more feasible down here, less feasible over here. This is definitely something you wanna look at. If you're listening to this higher impact and lower impact. So what happens is what, what we want to try to do is hack this equation because things that are highly feasible are usually very low impact and things that tend to be high impact tend to be very low feasibility. And so if you want to really change the world, the question is how the heck are you going to do that? Cause it's whatever you come up with, it's probably the longest shot of the longest shot. So in order to be, to achieve something, you need to hack this equation and that's hopping over this divide, you have to somehow find a way to make it both high impact and highly feasible. And that's like oil and water. It's very unnatural for those things to go together. There's tension between them. So begs the question, whatever your idea is, how is it that you're going to be able to do this even though no one else can. So closer to the year 2000, there were a lot of new ideas that were jumping over this divide thanks to technology, but that horse has been beaten most ideas that so back then you could start a multimillion dollar even multibillion dollar company with an idea. Yourself, a computer in three months, maybe you need four people, same situation. So you all quit your jobs for two months. And all of a sudden you've got a company and quickly you're making more money than you were at your old job . Those ideas are pretty much gone. Now, if you find one good for you, I'm not saying it's impossible, but this is a great example of why can you do this even though no one else can. So how is it that you're going to come up with the idea that 7 billion people have not already tried or know about or could and, and maybe the answer is no one likes the smell of poop. That would be one way to hack this divide. You say, well, I don't care about the smell of poop. Then all of a sudden you're over it, right? So there are many things out there like that like, oh, I was raised by wolves. Therefore, this thing isn't a challenge to me. Some crazy situation that you've had in life that no one else has had and all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah. You know, I volunteered at a, a monastery in Italy and uh I've noticed this fungus growing there that I don't know, no one else has this and I have it. Right. Great . Um So those sorts of things, that's your uniqueness, whether it's the actual uniqueness or just the fact that you're aware of it that can get you over, you can say I'm willing to work harder and smarter than anyone I've ever met. Well, that's something, right. So what tends to happen is there are a lot of ideas that are down here and they're not very feasible and they have terribly low impact. That's sort of the default in reality. That's, that's if you throw a dart, you're gonna hit something that is low impact and is basically impossible anyway, then the next most common thing is things that are extremely feasible. But who cares? It's like we could fold paper airplanes. Fantastic. 7 billion people can do that. Minus those that don't have arms. Right. Congratulations. It's worthless. So, what you really want is this gold star, very unique opportunity that has high impact and high feasibility . So, good luck with that. But that's what success takes and increasingly so in a complex system because everything loses feasibility in a complex system. You could have the greatest idea in the world and maybe it's only profitable for like two years because situations change, maybe it takes 10 years to get there because it's so damn complicated. You're so specialized to solve this problem and then you only get to milk it for two years and then it goes belly up. So that's the way things work. It's challenging. So what you'll find, there's a lot of bad news in this presentation. I think it's practical news, but some people will see it as bad news. What you'll find is, is things devolve in the world. You're going to notice that good people are worth a lot more than good jobs. What does that mean? You as a person becoming the best person, you can be, you will be worth a lot more than a normal person at a good job. As things change, you can read about this in Malachi three, as things change, the value of good people is going to go up, up, up, up, up relative to people in good opportunities or who are lucky so called. When God makes his jewels, quote unquote, you'll be able to discern what's good from what's not so good. Until then there's a lot of false signals out there. What's another application of this principle that good people are worth much more than a good job as things degrade. And this is already true and it'll become even more true. It will be much more important to find a good boss than it will to find a good company. And it will be the case that good companies will tend to be, have good bosses because they won't be good without a good boss. You'll see that be true. And, and it's already, I know many people who have left large companies to work for smaller entities because they are working around people that are actually decent people and they have figured out that these things are correlated and that working for a giant company is great as the paychecks are coming in and not so great when they start pushing the nonsense on you and trying to get you to do things, you know, aren't right. So, and those companies will absolutely fail in the long term because God's justice will take over eventually. So, as things degrade, you're gonna see the things that used to be sufficient are no longer sufficient and it won't be enough to just say, well, this is an established company that's making money. Ok. Well, tomorrow it will be bankrupt, you'll see that happen because everything that's good comes from God doesn't matter if we're talking about value, power, improvement, blessing, beauty, joy, whatever good thing it comes from and it's concentrated in God and it echoes out through His creation. And so through his creation, humans have the highest potential to be most like God by a long shot. Nothing else is even close. Comparatively. Now, most people run about as far from that potential as you can go, some few take it up a little. But as the world becomes more difficult, the solutions to problems will increasingly be found in people that are more like God and not in lower things like jobs. Do you see the difference? And maybe what I'm saying sounds crazy to you. But I'm telling you, you're going to see it. Think about Abraham now. He lived in a different time and the system at that time was much more aligned with the justice of God than ours is or, or than many others were in time. His time is a lot different than the time of Jesus. But those 300 men in His house plus all of the women and Children. They had, they didn't come to him because they went on indeed. Or monster.com. They were like, you know, I'd like a job as a shepherd because I hear that's a pretty good career. It's got some upward mobility. Let's see, Abraham, let's look at uh, the requirements. Let's look at the about us, part of his web page. That's not what these people did some how or another they met him and they said, you know, I'm gonna hitch my cart to this operation because it's gonna be better for me than any alternative. And it just so happened, he was a shepherd. So when the messengers visited Abraham on their way to Saddam to destroy it, Abraham did everything he could to get them to stay, which is a good practice when messengers come to you. And as part of that to convince them, he showed them the fruits of his enterprise. He went around to every little facet of his enterprise and brought forth the best that they had to take it to these messengers and say, see what I've done with the Lord, what the Lord gave me to see what kind of uh um oh gosh, what's the word? I'm looking at the screen and see shepherd. That's not the word I want. Um steward. I've been over the Lord's resources and it wasn't just the product, you know, he brought him cheese and cakes and things it wasn't just the product and, you know, making nice cheese in a primitive situation. That's a hard thing to do if you're a nomad to have nice cheese. That's not easy. Ok. But the more important part was the people. And so he goes to, it says a young man to have him, uh, dress an animal, prepare an animal to cook it. Why did Abraham do that himself? If he was really worried about what the people would think, wouldn't you take it into your own hands if everything was riding on this? But he didn't because he wanted to show the development of the people because Abraham had cattle, but he wasn't a shepherd over animals. He was a shepherd over people. He wasn't just a shepherd of animals. And if you want to serve the Lord, you got to be the same way. So why did these people gravitate towards Abraham? It was more than just the job. It is the interpersonal opportunity. And so as you're looking at career options, don't make all of your search about the job, include the search people. Maybe you start from the career and you whittle it down, you winnow the options based on the people who knows, maybe a lot of the winnowing comes because of the person you want to be. And if that's your takeaway from this, it makes me happy. You say, you know, I want to be a plumber, but it's not because of the income opportunities a plumber can have. You know, the primary reason is I want to set up shop in some rural area and be an anchor so that other people who couldn't live there could come and live there. And once I get my masters license or whatever, they can intern, they can apprentice under me and now have a viable career in this place that they couldn't live otherwise because you have to be a master plumber to set up shop somewhere or whatever the rules are. I don't actually know. That's my very vague understanding of it. So that is because you want to become the good person and be an anchor for other good people to come. You see, and that's a much better reason than just, oh, I, I found a good job and the thing is that we didn't go into in this if you want God's prosperity, which is a topic I haven't really thought about. It's not the world's prosperity, it's not the same. God's abundance consists of much more than just money. But if you want it and it's better than anything else, you have to align yourself with the way He does things. So for shorthand, I call this aligning yourself with the mountain. It's the Lord's mountain Abraham himself. He said in the mountain, God will provide, that is such an important principle in the mountain God will provide. So if you want to help people, you gotta climb your butt up that mountain because you can't do jack squat on the ground. You're just like them. There's nothing you have to offer. If you want to help them, you got to go up. So if you want God to prosper, you put yourself in places where your purpose is to prosper others. Now, you can't cheat that system. You can't say like, well, I'm doing this but I'm actually just doing it for myself. And I want to be rich or famous or powerful or whatever in the world's use of the word power. You can't cheat God, it's not gonna work. There's no cheat codes for God. So last slide here, I want to have a pre emptive rebuttal because I can imagine there's going to be someone says, well, if that's the case, then why was Jesus dependent on donations again? I, I don't want to lay out the whole idea of God's prosperity. But compared to Abraham Jesus lived in a very different time. So Jesus could barely get 12 people to follow him. He managed 11. Sort of, you could say, well, there were ladies who followed him to that were at the cross . They still hadn't turned away. Ok. Ok. Ok. But he didn't have 300. In fact, in the book of Acts, it says how many people he appeared to. It's less than that. I think it's 100 and 50. I don't remember, which is kind of scary to think of that many people in an upper room in a primitive house. But um somehow the pillars held, maybe that's an object lesson. I don't know. They were founded on the rock. I don't know. Um I'm joking a little bit there but I would consider that a miracle. That's some house anyway. So Jesus did rely on donations during his public ministry. It's the money he had. But would he have done that if he made scads of money as a carpenter? No, he would have self funded. So, why didn't he, why didn't you? Well, we know something about the village he grew up in. Don't we? These people had so little faith that he couldn't do any m miracle. There is what it says when he revealed his ministry, they tried to kill him. That was their response. They tried to run him off a cliff and he had to use a miracle to escape the second time he came back, it didn't go terribly better. Right. So, that's one reason why he was not uh a wealthy carpenter. He didn't, he didn't amass enough money in 30 years to fund three years of ministry. But there are other reasons too, not all of them that I'll go into, but one of them is limits in technology and that might leave your head scratching. But I'll put it to you this way. If Napoleon didn't have the opportunity to be a general, he would have been a nobody. I'm not saying he was a great person, but he certainly did accomplish some things that are surprising. So he, he started life as a nobody as far as it seemed. But he became one of the most powerful people in the world and he was in the right place at the right time for who he was and all of those things were necessary. If Jesus had had more advanced technology, his story would have been a lot different, which in the world would have been a lot different. And that's one reason he came when he did. But I guess this is getting into deeper things than I want to go into. Um And then you might fight against this idea that good people are more important than a good job by bringing up the example of Joseph Smith's various business failures, some of which were disastrous, you'd say, well, if this is a true principle, why didn't Joseph Smith's business enterprises succeed? And I'll give you three reasons. There might be more first off, it's very clear that the people in his time did not adopt his purpose. They were very much a loaves and fishes kind of people not a uh eat my flesh and drink my blood kind of people. So there are only three motives. One is get all you can, two is get and give what is deserved. And three is give all you can. Those people almost to a person. We all get all you can people. He was surrounded by, get all you can people. And this is unfortunate. Unfortunately, this is AAA hard to escape facet of ministry when you show up and you start giving out goodies, better things than what people have. You're going to attract to you people who want to get all they can. That's gonna predominantly be the crowd that comes is people who want goodies. And so when you're multiplying loaves and fishes, that's the kind of person that shows up when you're doing miracles and healing the sick and raising the dead. That's the kind of people that show up. So you kind of have to do what you do and filter out those people. And that filtering never happened with um early Mormons. Another problem is that he was told explicitly by the Lord that his labor would not be in temporal things and I'm not criticizing him in this. But for one reason or another, he didn't seem to get that. And he kept launching these business enterprises which clearly were not the greatest benefit he could provide if you're the kind of person that can receive tons and tons of revelations from God. Many of which consist of gems that no one knows. The last thing you should be doing is operating some store that any old person could operate or you know, digging a ditch that any old person could dig. Why on earth would you use your time that way. How does that benefit the world? It doesn't right. Now. The the last reason is, again, there are probably more, it's very clear that he never overcame the limitation of projecting his own character to other people. He was constantly surrounded by scoundrels. Now, opponents Joseph Smith would say that he did surround himself with people just like himself, right? But that's not my position on this. And I think I have some very good reasons for it, but he was always surrounded by um not so great people. And so of course, this is an important lesson very much germane to the conversation. Here it goes back to suffer, no fools. How can you ask God to bless you when you're in an organization filled with wicked people? Because any way he blesses you is going to give blessings to wicked people, which is contrary to his justice. So if you are in an institution that's full of wicked people and you're asking for his blessings, you're asking him to contradict his character in blessing you, that's not gonna work. So be careful because when you're asking for God to bless you and you're in a wicked institution, what you're actually asking for him to do is forcefully remove you from that institution. So it's always a good idea to know what you're asking for and to be careful about it . Um And that's another reason to have a smaller organization, what whether you're still working for someone else or you try to start your own company, which is not for everyone. By the way, it's quite challenging in ways that most people aren't prepared to handle. So anyway, I hope this is helpful. I hope this is additional uh but also helpful compared to the things we've talked about before. As far as career advice for young men, take care.