You work endlessly night and day for money.
Working is stressful, but not having money is more stressful.
You spend your money on a therapist, hoping they might cure your stress.
And pass or fail, the alcohol will always help. Or the meds. The drugs.
Stacking resource after resource, growing, and spending it on all on becoming smaller, tamed.
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A research study asked students of user experience (UX) design to improve the functionality of their app. I forget the specific number, but almost the entirety of the group decided to add a feature.
That’s the thing about competition: it’s an arms race. And played at low stakes, by the incapable, the competition is mastered by: envy.
As soon as one student comes up with any additive feature, however impossible to implement it may be, the game begins: you begin to at least think in the additive.
Don’t get me wrong, you’ll be subtractive — you’ll think of great ways to tear down the opponents addition — but never fully down unless you have a better one. Until and unless your additive ideas shows up, you will strip their idea; you will only subtract their idea until you arrive at a comfortable point to work with it, then, maybe, do some addition of your own.
If a new idea gets interjected — it’s stripped, added to, and blended with the others as needed. But it’s another idea out there still — the entropy grows. Next time you decide to do any “math” in this area: since you arrived at your idea by subtracting the individual assumption/premises of the idea, those same assumptions/premises become valid [to you] to be used in addition. Just because you can reduce something until you get where you want does not mean those pieces can be built back up a different way.
For most of the students, the math becomes complicated addition (complicated: the addition is actually weighted multiplication of the factors involved — maybe for you it ideally looks Bayesian — and maybe we both then agree that negatives are important). Most don’t even consider the subtraction.
Why the ignorance: I propose it is a fundamental misunderstanding of subtraction. Another market failure because of math fear.
This is easy enough to say: subtraction is just addition of negatives.
And, with really big numbers you might lay it out on paper that way to solve it, but your brain doesn’t work on paper unless your hand does — you work in snaps so try it with something you can snap to: 4 sheep are in the barn, you have 10 sheep, all of your sheep are either in the barn or the field, how many sheep are in the field?
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So did you do 10 + (-4) or did you do 10 - 4?
Obviously, it’s so small… you didn’t really do anything — it came to you. But which order did you care about the numbers? 10 is more important somehow; even though 6 was given to you first, and knowing the total will ultimately be necessary for the subtraction, the 10 is more important because it is composed of the 6 and something else too.
Talking sheep is easy and puts me to sleep. Let’s talk about the only resources you understand: money (and maybe land… we’re going to ignore land because it is too intertwined with money — the connection misunderstood for almost everyone1).
Money! Easy enough, you’ve probably heard it by now, and you might assume it was to be said next: becoming rich is just as much putting money in as not taking money out. Well, that’s wrong, they’re not even close. This is the game of capitalism after all, and the richest get there by using capital. If you know nothing about money then making a budget and really focusing on the OUT column is going to provide great returns but that is because if you know that little, you were never going to properly use your capital.
Let’s think of money in a slightly different way: it is, by definition, what separates you from the billionaires.
What is the difference between you and Jeff Bezos? He is a billionaire! Good, what else? He is CEO of Amazon! Good, what else? He’s bald? Exactly.
Those thoughts are: things he is versus things you are not (subtraction).
The next step of thinking is: things you do versus things he does better (addition). He invests money! He runs Amazon! He’s bald!
Next, you will bounce between the two to no end, adding and subtracting as much as you want — your equation for becoming a billionaire is going to be addition; the components of your addition are all going to be gathered from subtracting pieces of what you take from billionaires.
What are you missing?
In this case: the things he sacrifices, the things he doesn’t do versus the things you do.
What if I told you: the only reason that Mr. Bezos is worth that much money is: because he applied his capital, maximizing his IN, probably spending a long time not caring too much about his OUT? Sounds fun, right? It sounds like something additive, something he does better than you.
What if told you: for 16 years he never saw sunlight. Does he not-see-sunlight better than you too? If you think: he stayed inside, while I went outside OR he used his time inside better than I did even though we both stayed inside — you’re still thinking subtractive OR additive.
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Is the trade worth it? Did you consider that you had to make a trade at all?
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“To get rid of the hum, turn up the volume.”
--After-commentary2
Well you can obviously use money to buy land. Less obviously, your land can produce money… maybe you farm, do commercial business, or own factories… maybe you treat your house as an investment asset: land values are bound to go up, the house will be worth more to sell for retirement — housing is always a good investment. All of these uses of your house — (of course, living in one is a necessity, the value may be this alone, if you think so) — are means to money.
At some point in time, man would never trade land for money: no one could reliably promise him a tomorrow through money alone; his only hope would be what he knows is cultivated, on familiar lands, and not what could be bought or promised from other lands.
Read this after you’ve digested the whole thing and it still doesn’t make any sense.
The reason you won’t become a billionaire is because you always start with 10 sheep instead of the 4; you start with the idea of billionaire in mind, and it is a given.
The only thing ever self-evident is if you see 4 sheep in the barn or 6 sheep in the field. The presumption that you have 10 sheep comes with along with the one that they must only be in your field or your barn.
Why do they know how many sheep you have better than you do? If you were really free, then you would be adding the 4 + 6 to let them know the total of 10… and in the case that you only ever had 4, you would never know what 10 really looks like beyond speculation or math.