Monthly Archives: September 2018

Rich Vs. Poor: Rich can focus their efforts, Poor have to diversify their investments

Rich vs. Poor Series

When you’re rich, the opportunities presented to you are of higher quality. You can buy a toy that can last a year because you can pay for the quality. When you’re poor, the toy you can afford is likely already broken, or will be broken within a few days of you playing with it.

This extrapolates into clothing, jobs, friends, etc.  Rich people have better options, so they need fewer of them to survive. If you know your knife is always going to cut through your food, and you can invest in a knife sharpening kit and a good knife cover and case, then you only need one knife.  If you don’t have a case, you don’t have a sharpener, and you don’t have a good knife that works all the time, then you need many knives so that if one doesn’t work you can try a different knife.

The same idea comes with friends.
If you have one friend who you know you can reliably count on to take care of you in any situation, then you just need that one friend.
If you have 5 situations and each friend can only take care of one situation, but they can reliably take care of the situation they are good at, then you just need 5 friends.
If your friend is not guaranteed to be available at all times, then you need back up friends in case you need help in a situation, but the friend you have for that situation is busy.

The less reliable your tools, the more tools you need.  The more tools you need, the more effort and energy you have to spend to buy and maintain those tools, and the less energy and time you have to invest in yourself or in growth or in other things.  As a result, the poor suffer from having to be inefficient in their investments, and they suffer from having to have huge redundancies and huge diversity in their portfolio that brings down their overall returns, and they suffer from not having to opportunity to focus their energies on a few things. That lack of focus basically ensures that they will never achieve something great, and will remain poor.
It is quite cruel for the rich to say that the poor are poor due to lack of focus, when the poor do not have the opportunity at all to choose focus without at the same time choosing risk.  Focus on one friend and if that one friend fails, there’s no-one else. Rich people don’t have this problem: their one friend (say health insurance with priority everything) is much more reliable and won’t fail (like a limited HMO health insurance that has no-doctors in network near you).

Read more about articles in the Rich vs. Poor Series here.

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Tools for Optimal Performance

Thoughts On Life

This post will be updated over time to be a list of resources for achieving optimal performance.

https://www.ted.com/talks/sian_leah_beilock_why_we_choke_under_pressure_and_how_to_avoid_it

  • over focus and over concentration causes worse performance. So focus less and go on autopilot for the things you normally do and should autopilot
  • write things down so that they exit your mind rather than stick inside
  • Anxiousness is contagious: if you run into other people who are anxious, you are likely to mirror it
    • Systematic Culture like “math is hard” causes us to associate emotions that hold our performance back
    • Change your attitude to change your performance

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Help Emotionally Troubled Loved Ones by Sitting with Them in Their Emotions

Life Skills, Mental Health
If you have someone you care about who is going through a difficult time and you don’t know how to get through to them, here’s how: Be present with them and spend time with them.  Don’t spend brain power solving their issues. Don’t spend energy telling them what they should do without them asking you for that.  Don’t take the initiative, the free will, the power to control their own life away from them.
What someone needs when they’re in an emotionally charged state is for someone else to absorb that emotional energy through active listening.
A friend recently showed me a South Park Episode about suicide (Season 21 Episode 2: Put It Down) and in it, near the end of the show, there’s two scenes that are really educational on how to help a friend.
A good friend doesn’t judge, doesn’t criticize, doesn’t problem solve. A good friend just sits with the person and listens and feels the emotions that the other person is feeling so that the person doesn’t feel alone and scared anymore because there’s someone else together with that person.  Sit in the emotions with the other person, ask them “how do you feel.” “How else do you feel?” “Wow, that sounds scary, how do you cope?” “That sounds hard, I can understand why you’re feeling this way.”  Let them express to you all that they are feeling, and listen. Sit and listen. Feel bad with them.  Keep feeling bad with them until they have said all they want to say about the topic (it may take a very long time) but only after they have been allowed to discharge all of their emotions will they be able to calm down, relax, and think clearly again.
The order of health priority in all situations is:
Emotional -> Mental/Logic -> Beliefs/Spiritual/Psychological -> THEN Physical Health -> Society (Finances/Career/Relationships).
First help your loved one with their emotions.
Then you can discuss the logical solutions and actions you can take to problem solve.
Then ensure that they can accept the logic you discussed, and have alignment between their Beliefs and the Logic. If they don’t, they may revert back to an Emotional state.
Only after all 3 Healths (Emotional, Mental, Beliefs) are healed can you then focus on Physical Health or Society Health.  This is why when you say “Go get some sleep” or “Go exercise” or “Take better care of yourself” to someone who is emotionally uncomfortable, they get mad at you. It’s because those statements do not help until you have discharged them emotionally for your loved one. .
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