Great Life Path

You don’t exciting new ways to lose all your money, the old ways to lose all your money still work fine. Warren Buffett said that you can’t make a good deal with a bad person. When a new technology like cryptocurrency emerges, you see the same pattern that exists when other exciting new technologies like solar energy, electric cars, the internet, and gene splicing emerge. Investors want something that will make them rich in a hurry, and scammers and grifters slip in among the legitimate businesses and try to make a quick buck fleecing the sheep.

If I had offered you an opportunity to invest in a company that was constructing apartment buildings, and the chief financial officer was formerly the head of a software piracy ring, and their legal officer had worked for an online poker company that allowed insiders at the website to scam millions from players by rigging the software to allow them to look at player’s cards, would you be interested? If you’re not interested when it’s an apartment building, why are you interested when it’s crypto? This rogue’s gallery at Tether, a cryptocurrency stable coin, would never pass scrutiny at an established industry, but the promise of instant riches is so alluring, that people are willing to overlook their past.

If you ask Buffett about his rules, of investing, there are only two. Rule number one is don’t lose money, rule number two is don’t forget rule number one. It’s hard to recover from a total loss. When thinking about investing, your first thought shouldn’t be “how much can I make?” Your first thought should be “how much can I lose?” If someone offered you a million dollars to play Russian Roulette, the odds are in your favor, but you still shouldn’t play because the outcome if you lost is so great that you shouldn’t do it.

@eastern1
Ben McKenzie on Tether, the potential danger at the center of the crypto economy.]

Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer. In the early years of computing, most programmers were women. When computers became important, men wanted in on it. Now most computer programmers are men, and they make a lot more at it than school teachers.

In the 1820s 90 percent of teachers were male, but now 76 percent of teachers are female. Teaching used to be a well-respected, well-paid, profession when men did it. Horace Mann came up with the idea of universal education for all children. It was a controversial idea at the time. You would need to raise a lot of tax money to pay for all those well paid male teachers. Politicians hated raising taxes back then too, and voters hated paying them. So they followed Horace’s suggestion and focused on women teachers. The schools could pay them half as much as men. Now teaching is a profession dominated by women, and the pay and respect they get reflects how society views women in the workplace.

If you’ve ever worked in any of the thousands of restaurants in NYC, you’d quickly notice that most of the people who work in the front, where it’s nice and air conditioned, are young and white. If you walk 10 feet into the kitchen, it’s hot and cramped, and most of the people there are people of color, many of them are immigrants. Until recently it was illegal for the restaurant to share the tips from the people in the front with the people in the back. Guess who went home with more money? The wages reflect society’s attitudes towards immigrants and people of color.

If you were applying to colleges and told your parents you want to be a doctor, they would be so proud that they would tell everyone they know. If you wanted to be a nurse, they might try to talk you out of it. Nurses were on the front of the Covid-19 battle and they were saving lives along with doctors, but at a fraction of the salary. Most Doctors are men, most nurses are women. When they can’t find enough nurses to do the job, they don’t raise their salaries to get more people to want to be nurses, they keep the salaries low and fly new ones in from the Philippines. Is that a problem with the profession, or does it just reflect how society values the labor of women and immigrants?

Even among doctors, the pay is highest in male-dominated specialties like Orthopedic surgery (85% male). Specialties where there are more women (like psychiatry) have much lower salaries.

There is not much that you can do to change society, but you can do what’s best for yourself. If you don’t want to change professions, change employers. Studies show that people who switch jobs are more likely to report higher salaries than people who stay put. Employers, like your cable company, don’t reward loyalty, they want people who jump ship.

Get better at negotiating your salary. Know what salaries are in your industry and negotiate for the top of the range when you are offered a job. Your starting salary will be the basis for all your future raises, so even an extra $1000 negotiated will mean tens of thousands of dollars in extra salary over the course of your career.

Get training to improve your skills. Some employers will pay for training that will help you perform well at your job. If they don’t, consider paying for it yourself. Those skills will make you more marketable when you look for a new job and you take those skills with you when you leave. If your skills stagnate, then you won’t be able to leave and your pay raises will get fewer and far between because you’ve lost your negotiation leverage.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/the-big-number-women-now-outnumber-men-in-medical-schools/2019/12/20/8b9eddea-2277-11ea-bed5-880264cc91a9_story.html]
[How Filipino Nurses Propped Up America’s Medical System | Time

[Danny Meyer to Reintroduce Tipping at His Restaurants | Food & Wine
[Tips Can Now Be Shared Between Servers and Cooks – Eater]
[ cite for teacher stats A Lesson In How Teachers Became ‘Resented And Idealized’ : NPR]

You often see toothpaste commercials talk about dental hygiene, but no one talks about mental hygiene. If I eat salads and broiled chicken breast and drink water, I will look and feel different from a person who eats deep fried foods, has ice cream for desert and washes it all down with a giant coke. If I read paper books that inspire me, and avoid social media, my mind will be different from someone who argues with trolls on Twitter, spends hours scrolling on Tik Tok and watches TV shows about celebrities who are famous for being famous. You can ingest harmful things with your eyes and ears, just like you can with your mouth. You can get feedback from the scale when you eat things that are bad for you. If you eat something poisonous, it can kill you.

You can take in things that are just as bad for your mental state, but just because there is no device that will measure that like a weight scale, it doesn’t mean that it’s not damaging you. The reason we work jobs, get an education, get married, have kids, and go on vacations is because we think those things will lead us to happiness. Practice good mental hygiene so that you don’t undermine your own efforts by ingesting harmful substances. Think before you read, think before you click.

There’s a trite question that people sometimes ask “what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” It’s a silly question because if you said “I will start a car company that is better than Tesla” or “I will raise an army and conquer Europe”, what does that tell you?  If you pursued either of those things, they would likely fail and you will have followed your passion, but in the first example you would be bankrupt and in the second you would be dead or on trial in the Hague.  

But what if you inverted the question and asked “What would you do if you knew you would fail?”  In other words, what is so important to you or so rewarding that you would do it even if you knew you couldn’t win.  

Every year about 30,000 people compete in the Boston Marathon.  About 29,000 of them cross the finish line. Outside of 10 people, none of those 30,000 people think that they have any chance of winning.  Many of those runners are from out of town and they train all year, buy plane tickets and rent hotels in a very expensive city to compete in an event where they have no chance at all of winning.  Why?  Because they are runners.  And runners run.  Competing in a marathon is just a marker, but being a runner is what is rewarding.  Even if they never win, by signing up for a marathon and competing in it, they become the type of person who gets up every morning and laces up their sneakers and runs even if it’s snowing or raining. 

For every Boston Marathon runner, there are about 20 spectators. What makes them different than the 30,000 people running with no hope of winning is that they don’t lace up their sneakers every morning.  

If you practice meditation, you will be exposed to Buddhist teachings.  One of the things that Buddhists encourage you to think about is that everyone you love will die.  Maybe not soon, but no matter how much you love your parents or your grandparents or your children or grandchildren, your love won’t save them.  You will die, and so will they.  

Look around the room.  All your possessions that you are so attached to, will one day end up in a landfill.  It will take longer to breakdown than your body, but eventually it will all go and will eventually return to the earth, just like you. 

Rather than be depressed at the thought of the eventual doom of you and your loved ones, you could realize that this moment is temporary and magical and you should enjoy it as much as you can.  

If a genie offered you a free car, what would you pick?  Here are the terms, you can pick any car that you want, it can be a Ferrari, a Mercedes SUV, a Tesla, a school bus, but there’s a catch.  The catch is that it will be the only car that you have for the rest of your life. Knowing that, you might pick a Toyota (known for their reliability) instead of a Ferrari.  You would also take extremely good care of it.  If a piece of paint chipped off, you would fix it instead of letting rust form. If you heard some strange sound from the engine, you would take it to the mechanic. You would do regular oil changes and maintenance, because you only get one car.

Well, you’ve already got the deal.  But you didn’t get a car, you got a body.  And whether you’re rich or poor, you only get one.  Elon Musk has over $200 billion but he only has one body, just like the guy in rural India surviving on $2 a day.  And if something went wrong his, he would die, just like the guy in India. Musk has better access to human mechanics (aka doctors) but he still only gets one body and when it wears out he will die like the rest of us.  If he doesn’t take care of his body, that ending will come sooner than if he does take care of himself. 

Wellness is more important than wealth.  An Armani suit is expensive, but being lean and fit in a jeans and t-shirt looks better than being out of shape in an Armani suit.  As of this writing, we’re almost two years into the pandemic and the world hasn’t returned to normal.  Those expensive suits have probably been sitting in your closet gathering dust.  I don’t see people dressed up for Zoom calls.  But what about your health?  Your weight is a co-morbidity that you have control over, so control it.  Yeah, but the gyms are closed.  How about a long walk?  There’s no way you can lose 50 pounds. How about 1 pound this week, then one pound next week? After a year, that’s more than 50 pounds.  And if you have less to lose than that, it will take less than a year.  

Be a better friend to yourself.  Take care of your body and mind.  You only have one of each to last you for your entire human existence, so treat it with the importance that it deserves. 

The Great British Baking Show and Iron Chef are competitions based on cooking.  Our society is very competitive and we don’t stop at competing at things like a foot race.  We find ways to make everything competitive.  Cooking isn’t supposed to be a competition.  It’s for killing the bacteria so you don’t die of food poisoning. 

Are you a good computer coder?  You can compete in a hack a thon. Are you good at putting groceries in a shopping bag? There’s a competition for that too.  Do you like hot dogs?  There’s a hot dog eating contest you can compete in. You can also join a pizza tossing contest. 

What about spiritual pursuits?  Yes, you can do competitive Yoga too.  What about meditation? Yes, now you can compete against your friends to see who is better at meditating.  

https://mashable.com/article/competitive-meditation-how-to#:~:text=What%20is%20Competitive%20Meditation%3F,of%20electrodes%20to%20the%20forehead.

How about instead doing things to win, we go back to doing things for fun?  

We visited the liberty bell. It’s not just a bell, it’s The Liberty Bell. If you bother to read the many displays where it’s on display you will find out that most of what you know about the liberty bell is wrong. It wasn’t rung on July 4, 1776. It was a big bell in a small church and the vibrations damaged the building so they stopped ringing it before the declaration of independence was signed. That giant crack isn’t the original crack. The tried to repair a hairline crack in it in the 1800s, and when they rang it to test it, the giant crack that is instantly recognizable as THE Liberty Bell appeared.

People didn’t stop visiting the liberty bell after they found out it wasn’t true. We just kept telling the original story even story even though it wasn’t true. We kept telling it because it was more than true. As Neil Gaiman says we don’t tell children fairy tales “because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” Maybe we tell stories about ringing the liberty bell so hard that it broke is because we want to teach children that standing up to tyranny is something that we should not only dare to do, but celebrate with all our might. And maybe they stood up to tyranny because they were told that dragons can be beaten.