Step 6 - Sculpture vs. The Lottery & The Anthropic Media Bias

This lesson is about the falsified perception of the process of success.

Our generation is influenced by a massive media and narrative bias, which repeatedly reports stories in shorter and fewer words to explain correlation on success, by oversimplificating the causalities of it.

Nobody wants to hear that Bill Gates never took a day of from his 20 to 30 and was just in his cubicle. This does not generate ratings for the media.

Thus the population gets the impression, that success is like a lottery. You just try it and boy, one day you'll be millionaire if the idea is good enough.

Those stories exist, but they are just as rare, as being eaten in the ocean at the beach by shark, which is the equivalent in probability of death by being hit by a piece of metal on the head, which had fallen from a plane.

But as long as media are repeating them (media bias) and portraying them in oversimplified ways (narrative bias), people tend to believe that it is true, if we hear it more often.

In essence, a lottery is not the way success works.

Success works by selecting a rock. And each day you chip away a part to make it a sculpture.

Chose your rock wisely according to your genetic predisposition and your strengths as examined by Peter Drucker. The rock represents the direction and it doesn't matter how long it takes, because the so called grind, is what life is made of.

If you hope the grind to go away some day, you better reconsider, because life is the grind. You will never for example reach optimal health, because this means living.

Be directional focused, if you want change. Don't be fooled by media bias. Every day skipping a chimp of the rock away.

Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out, one inch at a time, day by day. If by the end of the day you live long enough, most people get what they deserve.

Easy come, easy go. A fence that goes up fast, goes down fast. The trees that are slow to grow, bear the best fruits. Easy come, easy go.

"As a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool returns to his folly."

Happiness is not something you get, it is the fruition of a multitude of factors, that you are doing well.

"You want things easy, but not easier than they can't be." Einstein

Questions

1. What is the #1 area that you have taken the lottery approach? What was the result? What is your new sculpture plan?

Definitely in business. I had a business idea and the business background and I had the technical business partner to build the product. We executed on the plan and we attracted a lot of high quality leads who waited to get the product and we just needed to ship, to become millionaires (over a period of 2 years, while reinvesting revenue into our SAAS business model).

Turns out, that if you don't program it on your own, it is probably not going to happen. Now my approach is to become a master in web application development, so that in ten years I'll be able to bootstrap the worthiest ideas in sprints and in the scalable quality I want them to, which is I believe the right direction to take, because I programmed since I was 16 and was fascinated by it long before, thus choosing a rock, to which I have an affinity and which also represents my comparable strength.