Adventure Capitalist

I came across this post on Y-Combinator and was quite appaled by the expectation of some people on a supposedly entrepreneurial forum to have a “right” to a job.
Let’s make a few things clear: no one owes you anything. You don’t have a right to a job anymore than you have a right to stay indefinitely for free at a friends place. A business is private property, just like your friends home. The owner decides what they want to do with the property, and who they will allow to reap benefits from it. If they so don’t like your face it’s their right to throw you out of their home, in the same way it is a businesses right to fire you (though getting rid of someone because of personal dislike would be irrational, stupid and likely their loss).
Being employed is not the same thing as getting adoptive parents - you are there because the business owner thinks you can be a net contributor to the business, not because you have a right to anything, least of all being cared for by an employer as some sort of surrogate parent.

Considering private businesses are private property, just as private homes are, the concept of a “safe” job, or a “right” to a job is as preposterous as having a right to stay however long you want at a friends place despite their wishes for you to leave. There is no difference, apart from the ones that some governments foists upon business owners under threat of violence and duress.

This brings me to my second point: If you think employment is a “safe” option, one where you can finally become complacent and sit back, you will be sourly disappointed. On the basis of what I just said, you are there because the business thinks you can be a net contributor to the businesses success.
In other words, the only “job safety” you have in this world is your wits, your skills and the value you can create with them. At which point you might as well be in business for yourself.

The fact is, everyone is the CEO of “Me Inc.” - you are in business for yourself, it’s just that most people don’t get it.

Week two of my promise to clean out at least five things a week for ten weeks in a row resulted in the following stuff being passed on/away:

• Bundle of three things: XBox360, XBox games and 20” TFT screen sold for £120
• 6 (good) books given away to a good friend who was visiting and just had his birthday
• Various junk things simply thrown in the bin because they had been in storage for over a year and never looked at or being close to being used.

The existence of most men are a paradox of absurdity - people spend their lives in search of purpose, yet they will react aggressively and violently towards anyone who refuses to conform to the standard lifestyle set out by most of society.

Existential angst is one of modern mans favourite past times, yet anyone who doesn’t strive for having a “safe” (hah!) job, normal  and age appropriate spouse, 1.8 children and a house with an overwhelming mortgage is ostracised as an oddity, an aberration that should be ignored at best, destroyed at worst.

It is as if most people struggle to break free of lives scarcely more meaningful than that of a mayfly living for a day only to reproduce, let alone understand the ways in which they limit the experience of their short lives by living an instinctual existence thrust upon them by society’s demands for conformity.

You only get one life, one shot. Enjoy it and don’t give a flying f*** about seeking the approval of other people, be it your “friends”, family, parents or others who are supposedly close to you.
Living the pointless existence of a mayfly, conforming to every whim of modern society will not make for happy memories the day you are on your death bed.
Live life without regrets, and most important of all, live life unapologetically.

As I promised earlier, I’ve started to cut down on the amount of junk I own. This is what went out this week:

Assorted magazines and books with no resale value.

• An old mat that was destroyet that I held onto in vain of wanting to clean it (cleaning would be costlier than buying a new one).
• Some sort of cleaning gadget I’ve never used.
• Clothes that are worn out.
• Some IKEA junk I never unpackaged in two years.
• Toilette wall hanger containers that I haven’t used since I moved into my current place.

Finding stuff to throw out couldn’t have been easier, and my storage area thanks me for it..

Over the last 4-5 years, I’ve amassed an impressive amount of junk: books, electronic gadgets and other assorted trophies of consumerism. I live in a two bedroom flat, yet I’m low on storage space.

Furthermore, I realised when I was in Argentina for two months earlier this year that all I actually needed in life fit into the carry-on backpack and checked luggage I had with me. In other words, there is a massive discrepancy between the amount of things I have and the amount of things I actually need.

For this very reason, I will start to downsize - unless essential clothes are in need of replacement, or my computer/mobile phone gives up the ghost, I’m imposing a strict embargo on any purchases that I don’t need.

But most importantly of all, over the next ten weeks I will commit to throwing, giving or selling away at least 10kg or five things that I do not need, and I will post the pictures on this blog.

I already took a start this past weekend, when I cleaned out my kitchen/living room and filled up two big garbage sacks with stuff - it was probably a good 30kg/65lbs worth of pure junk!

I came across a short anecdote the other day that I found very revealing:

Three men of a tribe need travel an hour to the river each morning to get their water. Then one has a good idea, he digs a well in the centre of the village, now no man need travel any morning and they all have their drinking water. The men are now happily unemployed.

Were the men better served when they had the jobs of traveling several hours a day to get water? Of course they were not - they are now much better of being “unemployed”. This is why the orthodoxy of working a set numbers a day, five days a week is actually damaging to both our happiness and future prosperity: people get rewarded for being busy, not valuable.

Of course there are few limits on human wants, thus ensuring we can stay busy if we want to, for instance the men in the short anecdote above could have moved on to build better huts for themselves, or whatever else they wanted and now had time for once they no longer needed to carry water.
But the key take-away here is that their prosperity was not based upon them simply being busy, it was based on finding short-cuts and more effective ways of getting what they wanted with less time and effort spent to get it.

In this day and age political correctness is the norm - you can’t make jokes that could even remotely be considered “sexist”, you can’t use certain words and you have to behave a certain way around the opposite sex in public spaces and in the workplace.

Personally, I find the political correctness around gender sensitivity condescending to women: behaving in a restrained manner, not being able to have banter between the sexes and generally treating women as if they where some delicate flowers who can’t take jokes the way men do is nothing short of condescending. It is actually accentuating and implying that there are differences between what men and women can take in terms of verbal discourse.

Puh-leese. People take the mickey out of each other all the time, I do it with my friends, I do it with my colleagues. If it is done in a good hearted way, why should “gender sensitivities” come into play between men and women?

I call bullshit. Treat people like people and stop seeing peoples mental fortitude as an extension of what they received in the genitalia lottery. It’s the politically correct, gender sensitive people who are the real sexists - they think modern women aren’t strong enough to take a good joke at their own expense just like their male counterparts.

Tomorrow is Midsummer, arguably the largest festivity of the year in Sweden (also the booziest, most heathen and hedonistic as well). The video above is fairly accurate of what can happen on Midsummer, so if you are in Sweden, or know Swedes, try to join in on the fun!

There is often talk of “customer lock-in” or “switching costs” in entrepreneurial circles, basically implying that it should be hard for a customer to change supplier from your business to someone else’s. In IT, this is every day stuff, in my consultancy work I even came across an enterprise software vendor once who refused to be helpful in integrating other software with their software, because making my client knowledgeable about their API’s was, and I quote, “not their strategy”.

I feel the concept of customer lock-in to be outdated and counterproductive. Do you really want to have customers who may be slightly disgruntled and are sticking with you mostly out of necessity? Even if it might be profitable in the short term, it doesn’t seem like good long-term business sense to me..

I’d rather have customers who are delighted with my business, who are eager to tell others about my services and products, who basically help me attract new customers due to the simple fact that I’ve made them happy.

Customer lock-in is lame and outdated, I’d rather strive for making my customers so delighted that they help evangelize my cause.
I would rather take customer loyalty based on satisfaction than customer lock-in based on necessity.

Listening to the economical discourse of politicians and economists, you’d be forgiven for believing that employment is more important than anything for an economy. Just today, Barack Obama has gone to congress to ask for $50bn to “safeguard government jobs”.

Let me call bullshit: employment is irrelevant to the prosperity of a country, or a person for that matter. If employment was a desirable end in itself, why don’t we all give up all the technological progress of the last few hundred years and get busy digging ditches, filling them in, then digging them up again?
If we really want to make sure people stay busy for a long time, we can make them dig the ditches with toothpicks instead than shovels.

That sounds preposterous, yet it is exactly the argument underpinning the idea that you must be busy and stay busy to create wealth.
In actuality, creating wealth and prosperity is much simpler than just being busy: prosperity is created by underconsuming and overproducing, living within your means, creating more than you use/spend (though try telling this to a Keynesian speaking of “aggregate demand”). If you can cover your wants with 5 hours work a week, you are in essence a lot richer than someone who is struggling to make ends meet at 80 hours a week. Creating wealth is about maximising your outputs, not your inputs (time/labour).

Unfortunately, we live in a world that is upside down, where politicians and many economists alike are completely oblivious about what truly creates prosperity, in a world where most people are paid for their inputs rather than outputs, where looking like a busy-body gets rewarded better than doing the bare minimum to achieve what you want.

Next time someone starts talking about employment, be it on a personal level or macro-economic level, please call “bullshit” on the concept that being busy will somehow magically create prosperity, because it simply isn’t true.