Many of us see those building large businesses and desire it. We see those earning money from “their passion” and we want it. We also see those who flaunt their wealth on social media with the caption “working from XX Island” and we crave it.
It’s not bad to desire, want, and crave those things. However, I have a message for you about that lifestyle. Yes, you. Before you overly punish yourself for not having the same lifestyle.
Firstly, let’s agree on one thing. That there’s a wide range of distance between how the world works and how you would like the world to work. And wisdom requires that you find a sustainable balance between these two and enjoy your moments while they last.
Many of us are troubled because the world doesn’t work as we want it to work (having a similar lifestyle to those who flaunt there’s on social media). That’s unfortunate because it rarely will. You have to see the world for what it is many times.
Sure, you can set out to bend the world to your ideals. But you must be equally prepared to pay the price. And paying the price is not a guarantee that the world will still bend. It just means you have tried your best to bend it to your ideals. That’s it, nothing more.
And your attempt may be worth it. Jeff Bezos in his last annual letter to Amazon shareholders wrote:
“The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously… You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it.”
Did you notice that out of all that I mentioned earlier that we may desire, there’s not one person there who took the traditional career route. It is hard for them to be heard about. And if you can’t hear about them, how can you covet their lifestyle? It is the outliers that are easy to notice and outliers are called that name for a reason.
Unfortunately, that’s what we all desire. We all want to be the outlier. But we won’t all get it. What we can all get is something around the mean with some standard deviations.
Scaleable vs Non-Scalable Career
In his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Taleb explained the difference between that kind of career (scalable) we all wish for and what we should mostly be embracing (non-scalable).
Scalable careers are careers where your output is highly disproportionate to your input. Non-scalable careers are careers where your output is capped based on your input. The surprising detail: we all want the scalable option.
Scalable careers allow you to make more money without an equivalent increase in labour/time. An author writes a book one time and his effort is (basically) the same whether he sells 500 or 500,000 copies. A Hollywood actress need not show up at every screening of her movie to make money off it. If you have created a digital product before, you can relate well, it’s the easiest example.
We all like that but here’s also a surprising feature of such careers as Taleb noted.
“A scalable profession is good only if you are successful; they are more competitive, produce monstrous inequalities, and are far more random with huge disparities between efforts and rewards — a few can take a large share of the pie, leaving others out entirely at no fault of their own.”
Going for a scalable career is betting on yourself to become an outlier. Because results in such a space are random with a huge disparity between those who succeed and those who don’t. Unfortunately, we don’t hear a lot about those who don’t for us to learn that those who succeed are indeed outliers.
Taleb advises an average person to settle with non-scalable careers because so much of one’s success in scalable careers can be credited to randomness and luck. Remember that in a scalable career, “a few can take a large share of the pie, leaving others out entirely at no fault of their own.”
And I do advise a Non-Scalable career as well. Of course, the choice is yours to choose from. Depending on if you want to bet on yourself to emerge as the outlier.
Like I said from the start, it’s about how the world works. Where extreme success exists for a lot to covet, a lot of uncertainty also lies in there. You can’t have it all.
Non-scalable careers on the other hand are different. Every doctor for instance will be able to buy a car, build a house, and pay their children’s school fees. So will an average employee from a well-paying 9-5 job.
There is little variance in the outcome of the life of those in the non-scalable career. And the choice is largely yours.
Do you still desire that glamorous life you see of “successful” people? Know what you desire.
Because a scalable career introduces extra uncertainty to our life…
And if there is one thing I know very well that humans do not want, it’s the presence of uncertainty in them. And they will naturally do all things within their grasp to eliminate the uncertainty.
Why have I shared this with you? It’s simple. I want you to be aware of the trade-offs between both worlds. So that you can choose what you think is good for you once you become aware of the features of both worlds.
Once you do, you need to purge yourself of jealousy and anguish that may come with your choice. Because you are fully aware of it before choosing it.
That’s how the world works. And you must embrace that.
I think God deliberately put in us the undying desire to know the future.
We wonder about life, taking each step with the hope that somehow, we will become better at predicting the future.
A lot of us don’t realize or notice this subtle tendency.
Our parents “forced” us to go to school because doing so will ‘guarantee’ a future. We strive for a first class in school because having it will ‘guarantee’ us a good job.
We optimize for a good job because having one means we have a good income and a somewhat easy life in the future and now.
We do all these in the present with the hope of an expected outcome in the future. And we are not wrong to do that. How else can we make sense of this highly bumpy world and exist in it without the sense of control?
And when we act in those ways, we do so because we could see it all around that those who did “x” get “y” as an outcome. So we also work to do x because we want a “y’ outcome. Sometimes as we journey on in life though, we quickly learn that doing x is often not enough to guarantee a “y” outcome.
At this point, we get confused and wonder what the heck is going on with us.
Are we wrong in our forecast? Did we miss a step while doing x or why on earth will I graduate with a first-class and someone with a 2:2 will be moving far ahead of me in life?
Simply, we have been exposed to live’s cruel reality. Life is saying I am not linear. You can’t write an equation of Y = a + bX to predict me.
The desire to know the future is innate in us. We crave it. We want to know what tomorrow will be like for us.
Unfortunately, despite all of our attempts at that, we have been grossly deprived of such knowledge. Although that hasn’t stopped us from searching. Our AI systems are so advanced today that some aspects of them can be deemed a god. Yes, god. Because it knows “tomorrow”.
We know the future, the path to the future is what we don’t know
The future is not as hidden from us as it seems. What’s mainly hidden from us is the path to the future. But we confused both to mean the same.
There’s a difference between knowing with certainty that you will earn $10,000 in a month and knowing what you have to do to earn the sum. One is comforting and the other leaves us with a lot of unknowns.
Not knowing the latter puts us in disarray and blinds us to the fact that we know the former.
Why I rely on the Bible for directions
And that brings us to the Bible.
The Bible is full of abstractions, a map of reality and principles. Following its map could reliably lead us to an expected end. In so doing, we would have solved one of humanity’s greatest challenges.
Humans have all sorts of problems. But the most unsettling one is their inability to predict the future.
Nearly all humans will withstand all forms of adversity. If they know with certainty that at the end of the adversity, they will have the kind of end they desire.
From the beginning of the Bible to the end of it, God through various means attempted to show us the end of different paths. In other words, He showed us the outcome of the predictions. “This is the end, I know it”, He said. And the pages of the Bible are full of it.
The thing about relying on the maps of reality in the Bible is that they have been tested across space and time. And in all of those test areas, the maps have reliably led faithful followers to their desired end. That is to say, the map is reliable.
The alternative to following such maps (in the Bible) is what I call following your “worldly wisdom”.
Worldly wisdom is good. I don’t use the word “worldly” here to mean something anti-bible.
Rather, it is the wisdom that you have gotten in your short existence on earth that is yet to be tested in the fire of time and across space.
And to that I’d like to say, “lean not on your understanding, it has not been tested across space and time.”
Worldly wisdom makes us look smart about ourselves, we think we have figured it out, it gives us the illusion of control and we like that. But the illusion is not what we want. An assured future is what we crave deep within us.
Because our worldly wisdom is not tested yet, they cannot reliably predict the end, let alone the path that leads to the end. That’s why the Bible admonished us not to lean mainly on our understanding. But trust in the Lord (his words that are time tested).
However, it is not forced. It’s a choice you have to make.
The Bible offers maps of reality that you can rely on to lead you to a promised destination. You just need to search for the map relevant to you. And your worldly wisdom can’t reliably promise that.
Note that the main reason the Bible is superior is that its map has been tested again and again. So if you can acquire such map(s) from other sources, with equal features, then you can expect it to also lead you to a known end.
The choice, in the end, is yours. You can lean on your understanding (your map of reality) which is so far short-lived or you can lean on the map of reality provided by the Bible that has been tested across space and time.
I’ve grown to know that it is great folly for me to lean on my short-lived map. So I’ve sorted wisdom from the Bible. It’s a reliable map.
Reading is about gaining knowledge. Sometimes, it’s about gaining new knowledge, other times about confirming old knowledge.
When we try to read, confirming old knowledge is easier. The brain has pre-existing ideas about what we are reading and so it is easier for it to add a new dimension to the existing knowledge.
New knowledge on the other hand is harder to add. But that’s where growth comes from and that’s where most of us fail.
When you start to read something new in an attempt to add new knowledge, your brain finds it difficult to retain, recall and even make use of. And that’s because your brain is not familiar with the new thing. Due to this, you tend to be drained and dissuaded from continuing to read the material or read anything new. Then you stop.
But when you stop, you deprive yourself of the most important way of growing.
Knowledge compounds much like how your money does. The rate at which knowledge compounds is directly proportional to how often you did not stop reading. Even though stopping is the most appealing cause of action.
While your brain finds it hard to retain and recall new things, it doesn’t discard them entirely.
New things are like cues to the brain. When learning something new, the brain forms a stand-alone cue. The cues will remain so for some time until it finds another cue it can connect with. Once it finds the connection(s), that’s when learning happens.
So the more new cues find an existing cue to connect with the more your knowledge compounds.
When building a new knowledge that has nothing in your existing cues to connect with, the only way to ensure it doesn’t disappear is to add more related new knowledge as soon as possible so that they can at least connect. But then again, instead of doing this, we stop reading because “we don’t seem to get it”. Unbeknownst to us that that’s the brain simply communicating to us that I need more cues.
To get the maximum out of what we are reading then, we must continue to read (not stop) and find time to think about what we read so that the connection can happen.
One of the ways I do mine is to write about what I’m learning. As it turns out, it’s one of the most efficient ways to get the maximum out of what you are reading. A teacher learns twice… they say.
Here’s the conclusion.
Don’t stop reading because it is difficult. The brain is simply just trying to familiarize itself with the new knowledge. It’s creating cues and trying to connect them with what it knows before. The more you give it room to do that, the more you will get out of your reading.
Investing is for all but investing in a volatile asset is not for all.
Markets don’t go up perpetually. If it does, everyone will be an investing genius right now.
In a market where a 100% gain is possible within a year, don’t be surprised to see a 50-70% decline as well. That’s the way it works. That’s the meaning of volatility, the price for high returns.
There is self-reinforcing psychology in the market of volatile assets. The more assured the public is that the market will keep going up, the higher the probability that a crash is imminent.
The general public here is often new adopters who came into the market of a volatile asset mainly for the gains. They are also quick to suffer most losses. They came for the euphoria, not the underline value. So when crashes happen, they have no idea what’s going on or how to deal with and run away from the market.
Again, these are self-inflicted and it’s the same story across centuries. I noted in another article that those who make the most gains, in the end, tend to be those who build on the value and not those who came for the euphoria.
Markets across the globe are down. From stock to commodities and from cryptocurrency to fiat currencies. It’s a global tsunami.
However, crypto has gotten hit the hardest. A lot of assets in that world are down up to 90% as of now and it’s like they are not done yet.
Crypto is a case in point for me at the moment because it’s the grandpa of the ongoing tsunami.
You know you have gotten to the height of a bubble when almost everything you buy goes up. Then the slogan “just buying anything, they will go up” prevails. Another sign of the height is when both the uninitiated and initiated throw asset names around here and there of what you should buy and what you shouldn’t. Twitter is taking a rest from this behaviour as of now.
The truth is that this is no new knowledge. Those who were around in 2017 warned us, same for those who were around in the 2008 financial crisis and the internet bubble of 1999.
But you see, human behaviour will not let us learn and cycles are self-reinforcing.
This is my first time experiencing this kind of event as well and I like it. Not because I am not affected but because I’m learning it early in my journey.
Yet I must say that there is a strategy to invest in volatile assets in a way that you are not materially impacted when dips as deep as this happens. And still benefit significantly when the massive gains come along.
That strategy is the reason I can write this article and I’m not calling you all to solicit financial help. Lol.
Before I talk about the strategy, let me say that it pains me that the retail investor more than those already rich are those who suffer the most from dips in a volatile asset. It’s not easy to desire and optimize for alpha.
Alright, the strategy is about “Efficient Capital Allocation” (ECA).
There are two underlying principles to this strategy. And you can employ it for investing generally, not just for investing in volatile assets.
The higher the potential return, the lower the percentage of your capital you should invest in it. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.
Patient (long-term) capital alone can be invested in a volatile asset. Short-term capital should be allocated to fixed income or other less volatile assets.
I’ve unpacked the second point in a Twitter thread earlier. See below:
In corporate finance, there is a fundamental way in which we were taught never to allocate capital.
1. Don’t use short term capital to finance long term projects.
2. Long term capital is best used to finance long term projects.
So let’s talk about the first; High return, lesser allocation.
The logic here is simple. Assets with potentially high returns are somewhat high risk as well. Meaning you can lose a lot of your money just as you can make a lot of it.
In such a case, covering your downside is more important than optimizing for the highest gain possible. Ensuring you don’t have more than 10% of your ‘life savings’ is important. 10% is like the maximum.
Let’s assume your life savings is N1m. N100k will be the maximum allowable to be invested in Crypto.
If that 100k goes to zero, the real loss you suffered on your net worth is just 10%. And that’s even assuming that your 900k that’s left didn’t make any money at all. In the case that it made some gains, you might even offset your loss. Also, you would have learned an invaluable lesson if you lose all the amount that you invested in the volatile asset.
However, if you happen to make your expected 100% gain from the volatile asset, your whole portfolio would have increased 10%. This kind of allocation will allow you to have great sleep at night.
Now, that’s a good simplification but there are nuances. I won’t deal with that now. One of them is how easy is it for you to make the N1 Million again if you lose it all? If it is very easy, you have more room for risks and if it’s hard, you may even not have room for up to a 10% allocation in a risky asset. These nuances have a way of informing your allocation. Well, you must have gotten the main lesson here.
Okay, I started this by saying investing is for all, but investing in a volatile asset is not for all.
To make wealth, you must invest. You must make your money work for you and earn while you sleep. No one should ever doubt that.
But investing in a volatile asset requires more effort than the majority of us can give it. And that’s why there is trepidation in the heart of a lot right now. You have bitten more than you can chew.
There’s comfort though. A lot of us still have our best years ahead of us. The whole that we lost in the crypto dip, we will probably recover once the market gets back on an uptrend or in the future it will be money that we can make within a few hours. So despair not. Be glad you are learning this early.
Most importantly, always seek education/knowledge about the assets you are investing in. Also, read my blog, I have a lot here for you.
The advent of the internet changed the way we fundamentally organize and conduct ourselves both as a business and a society. This fundamental shift gave us a new definition of value. The new definition of value motivated Kevin Kelly in 2008 to write a 6,000 words (estimate) essay, 1,000 True Fans. The essay became a template for the knowledge workers to monetize their knowledge.
In the essay, Kevin argued that all that a creator needs to make a good and sustainable living is 1,000 true fans who are ready to pay him/her an average of $100 per year. He argued with an income of $100,000 (1000 * $100), anyone would be fine financially. Stressing the point that you don’t need to build a product that will be used by billions of people or even millions. In so doing, he provided a reasonable expectation for all creators.
In the intervening years between 2008 and now, 100s of companies have been created with a combined value of more than $300 Billion (back of the hand calculation). All working to make sure that the creators that Kevin talked about can properly capture value at different levels of their content life cycle.
Companies built to help creators
Because of all these tools, creators like Ben Thompson, Packy McCormick, Li Jin, David Perell and countless names have been able to make a living from their work/creation. How? By charging their (1,000 true) fans some amount of money for what they create for them.
Innovation to help creators have not slowed down. In recent months, we’ve seen a new level of products and features, from NFTs to Tip Jar. Society is still looking for ways to help the creator monetize their work. And the data so far confirms that the world welcomes this and that we are in for a long haul on this trajectory. Li Jin is at the forefront of this. Read her thoughts here.
As the world moves towards this trajectory, wo/men of my country (Nigeria) are also not left behind. We are also innovating and looking for ways to help the creators’ capture value from their work. Out of that effort, we have Disha that provides a basic website to help creators showcase their work on a one-page website. We also have Publiseer, a distribution and monetization platform for creators. That’s just to name a few, we have more.
However, it appears that within all these, some people don’t want these creators to get paid. Forgive my seemingly early conclusion on this, as I’ve said, this is an attempt in defence of creators to charge for their work.
A common trend
It appears that often on the internet (social media) when someone puts out that they are charging for their knowledge, there’s always someone somewhere who will question them of charging. The argument always goes, “if you are making that much money from your hustle, why would you care to charge others to learn the same thing?” Thereby positing that everyone should give out their knowledge for free. Since an average person is in a way expected to have made money off their knowledge that is independent of teaching others.
The logic, when first assessed may appeal to you. However, it doesn’t add up. Also, it is counter to the direction in which the world is headed, a more inclusive, value-added and creator-paid one.
This argument surfaced on Twitter again today.
Taking on the issues one after the other:
Freely have you received, freely should you give
One of the common arguments is that since you got it for free, you should also give it for free. While that is logical, there is no binding law to support it. It’s left to the individual who got it to choose if they would give it for free or not.
Of course, inferred from that argument is that if you paid to receive, it is also only fair to charge for it. Again, there is no binding law about that. Although you might have paid, you are free to give it out for free if you so wish.
Creators – people who create content, are free to decide if they want to make money from their knowledge or not. As long as they are not forcing anyone to pay. That’s what I think. But that quickly takes me to the next issue.
The knowledge is freely available “online”. Why should you charge for it? You are preying on people’s ignorance
A few years ago, I discovered the browser newsletter. I subscribed immediately because I liked the content. Then The Browser introduced a paid plan, I didn’t have the money to pay, so I didn’t pay. But what does that have to do with this point you wonder?
The browser doesn’t create any new knowledge. It simply curates the best articles around the internet and delivers them to their subscribers’ email. They charge $5/month for information that is absolutely freely available on the internet.
Th Browser Subscription Plan
And I’ve not seen anyone person come out calling the folks at The Browser a charlatan or a fraud. And even if they did, Paul Graham’s counsel will fit in here well.
“Don’t pay attention to the mainstream’s opinion of what you’re doing—whether it’s your skills, your idea or whatever. Unless they’re your users, their opinion doesn’t matter. (Pay a lot of attention to your users’ opinions though!)”Paul Graham also highlighted the quote from an article by Jessica Livingstone, his partner at YC and wife.
Even if the Browser teams had faced similar criticism as folks from Nigeria may be facing, then I will assume they’ve heeded Paul’s highlight. They have overlooked the mainstream opinions and prioritize the opinions of their paying users.
You should get where I’m headed with my pint by now. The simple argument that the resources to learn a skill or craft is freely available on the internet therefore no one should charge for it is flawed. Note that even the so-called freely available have what they are optimizing for. Sometimes they want to build something that can be monetized out of the freely available.
Even beyond creators’ desire to monetize, others are building tools to enable the monetization as well. Simply, society is telling them we value your work and would like to pay for it. That’s what Patreon and Tip Jar are meant for, to help monetize those free information.
As I noted in this thread, the internet has expanded the definition of value and we need to come to that reality. Yes, the information is freely available on the internet but anyone that can help filter through the sea of information is creating value and should be allowed to get paid for such value creation. It’s fine if you don’t want to pay. 7 billion people exist on this green planet and creators only need “1,000 true fans” to get enough for their sustenance.
But is it preying on people’s ignorance? Let’s explore that.
I belong to Chris Ani’s CryptoHub community. To gain access to the community, he will give you access to a course on crypto he created. The course is so loaded with a lot of information that after completing it, you will be good to start your journey. And to access the course you have to pay.
Here’s the interesting twist, folks who paid for the well-curated course will still come to the group and ask the most basic questions. Signalling they have not taken the course. Of course, the community is friendly enough. So there will always be at least one person that will not only answer such questions but will also point them back to a section of the course that answered their question already.
Now, that’s someone who paid for a course to move from being ignorant to being enlightened. Yet, they refuse to sap in the knowledge. How much more someone that has been left to wonder in the sea of information that is Crypto?
It is very easy to get lost in the sea of information when reading about crypto.
Before you move one more sentence there's a new terminology or concept you've not heard of before.
For slow learners like me, that's a challenge. Yes, I'm a slow learner. 😌😉
My point here is that it is not as black and white as some may think. Why did I pay for the course myself? I wanted the upside in the crypto economy but don’t have the luxury of time to research it. And I am not the type that takes decisions just becomes some random person on Twitter or YouTube said: “buy this or that”. Chris and his team appear to me to have a track record that I can trust and that’s it.
So it is never about preying on people’s ignorance. Even the best of us knows that we struggle to do what we know to be best for us.
Well, this point will again lead to the next.
Do we have different kinds of knowledge?
One of the responses to the discussion today posited that if the creator had compiled the content, made it a course, and chosen to charge for it, that would have been a different story. I found that argument not well thought out as well.
And that’s why I asked if we have different kinds of knowledge – one that can be charged for and the other that cannot. Since the argument here is hinged on the mode of delivery.
Globally, the model of creating a course (or ebooks) and making it self-paced is facing a lot of challenges. Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are at the forefront of this. They brought the education from the world’s best universities and individuals to us for a token, yet only a paltry 10% of us bother to complete the courses. MOOCs may be a far-fetched example. If I ask Chris to send me the percentage of completion on his crypto course, I doubt if it will be any better completion rate. Does that then mean we can’t have education just because we can’t complete self-paced courses? No!
That’s why a new model is being invented and it appears to be working much better than the self-paced model. A variant of this new model is what Jesse is adopting that got him a lot of criticism today.
It’s called the cohort-based education model. Read Gad’s explainer article to understand it. In summary, it is about admitting just a few people per time, bringing them together under a common course and helping them to learn new knowledge with a set date of completion.
A lot is unique about the model but they aren’t important for this article. What’s important is that this model has proven to be more effective than the self-paced modules.
My bad, I have also added to the statistics. I have started a lot of courses that I didn’t complete. Including the CryptoHub course. But you know what, I’ve attended one cohort-based course with Professor Galloway, and it is my best online course so far. And recently, I have another one I will be attending with the On Deck team. Well, maybe I digressed.
So the argument that a form of knowledge is worth charging for and another is not worth charging for doesn’t hold much water. What is worth charging for can only be determined by those who paid for it. And even that is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.
I attended an Advanced Excel training once and after the class, I had to call the coordinator that I didn’t learn anything new, yet they called it an advanced training. I was so angry with myself that I’d paid that much to learn nothing. But we moved on. While we were in class though, other participants were so happy with the training and believed they’ve gotten value for their money. When I lodged my complaints they were just looking at me.
In that, I pick an important lesson, especially for the creator. Your student may not find new knowledge from you, offer them a refund. Have a refund policy expressly stated. And also, make your course content known to all to avoid non-alignment of expectations.
I had to bring this point up because even if a customer (not a fan) of the creator had come on Twitter to say they didn’t get any value, just like I didn’t get, that won’t still be enough to cancel someone’s hustle. I didn’t learn anything new in my excel class but others learnt. Refunds will solve this problem.
And creators who believe themselves to be offering value should not be afraid to offer refunds. I can’t find the statistics now, but I know very few people (less than 5%) claim refunds. Not because they don’t want to, but because they did get value. My Excel guy then is still in his business helping others. I was just an exception to the rule, not the norm. He also called to apologize.
Knowledge is not different. Any form of it can have a price tag. And all the free available information is also optimizing for something. My Website is free and a lot of people have been helped by it. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to or can’t charge for it. And I know all my active readers won’t pay if I choose to charge. But who said I need everyone on earth to pay me? I only need my 1,000 true fans and I’m good to go.
Should you pay someone for their knowledge?
This is another interesting point and it is not difficult to answer. Ambiguity however comes when you want to impose your judgment on others.
What do I mean? Should you pay someone for their knowledge is highly dependent on you. Do you trust the person enough to give you what you are paying him for? If so, then go ahead and pay if you can afford it. Otherwise, wait until you find someone else or go to where the free resources are and get your knowledge from there. Dr Ola Brown once shared a YouTube University content. I am sure only a few utilized it.
The ambiguity comes when you think because you can’t pay someone, others should not also pay or those who are paying are foolish or lazy to be doing so. You stand on a high moral ground if you see it that way. We are not really good at being such a judge. Stop it!
This comment is an example of “I don’t trust his judgement enough to deliver”. And that’s fine. However, what’s not fair is to assume because you don’t trust the judgement, others shouldn’t as well. No, it doesn’t work that way. Even in the same class where I didn’t get value, others got value for their money. Life is more contextual than being that general while “scolding” someone (a stranger) on the internet.
Like I mentioned about “The Browser”, I couldn’t afford to become a paid reader and it stayed that way. Many people won’t even see the value of such curation. But those who see it and can afford it pay for it. That’s all that matters to the creators and I hope a lot more creators will have the muscle to focus on those who matter, those who choose to trust us.
“Don’t pay attention to the mainstream’s opinion of what you’re doing—whether it’s your skills, your idea or whatever. Unless they’re your users, their opinion doesn’t matter. (Pay a lot of attention to your users’ opinions though!)” – Jessica Livingstone
But why don’t we want people to get paid?
I think that’s a wrong question. From all the comments that I saw, nothing pointed to the fact that we don’t want others to get paid, rather we want to choose what they can get paid for. They are not the ones to choose what they want to get paid for. Some of us must approve it.
I understand where this logic is coming from. Some of us want to protect the innocent who could have gotten the information for free online and some of us just wish the community spirit of “freely have you received, freely you should give” to continue.
But deep down, I see two other factors at play. Mimetic desires and economic hardship.
Mimetic was a concept developed by René Girard and popularized by Peter Thiel. “We desire things not because we want them, but because others have them”. We feel the exclusion. We wonder what’s this person saying that he’s charging this much for? Can’t he just make it available to everyone with no one excluded? This gets intensified as often as the creator shares success stories and makes more sales.
PS: This a theory and since it’s not backed by any fact, it can be freely dismissed without facts as well. So just take it as a conjecture from me.
The other is economic hardship. I don’t think we don’t want to pay $150 for a course. I think we cannot just afford it and wonder if anyone ever could. How can you pay N100k for just a course some of us think.
I also think the same. But it is not for the $100 – $200 courses. It’s for the $1,000 courses. I was talking about how some Americans charge $1,000 for online courses. That’s like N500k in Naira. I wouldn’t pay for that (now). But what I won’t also do is to cancel them. Simple, my problem is that I can’t afford it. For the creator of the course, that’s the value they have attached to their work. So I simply just “park well” and face my business and aspire to someday be able to afford it. Don’t cancel.
As the reply to my tweet noted. They are sometimes worth the value. If they are, then my economic situation is the problem, not the course creators.
These few points I have concluded as the reason why we sometimes come at people who choose to charge for their knowledge.
A word for the creator
I really want the words of Jessica to sink into your ears. Although she said those word while talking about startups, it is just as much applicable to you.
“Don’t pay attention to the mainstream’s opinion of what you’re doing—whether it’s your skills, your idea or whatever. Unless they’re your users, their opinion doesn’t matter. (Pay a lot of attention to your users’ opinions though!)” – Jessica Livingstone
Focus on those who trust you, don’t assume because you’ve read this, the criticism will stop. These are merely my thoughts not that of 7 billion people on earth. So expect more people to question you including those that you’ve provided value to. But don’t be swayed. You are doing important work and you deserve all that you get from it and even more. Focus exclusively on creating value. You will arrive.
Also, seek more innovative ways to capture all the value that you are creating. Don’t be like Clubhouse. You have written a book, create a course out of it, set up a community around the book, create a consulting practice of it. Do all that you can to capture as much value. It’s your hustle and your responsibility is to your “1,000 true fans”, not to those who criticize you. Respond to them if you wish, but don’t let them cancel you.
The knowledge worker is meant (by design) to monetize at different value chains of his knowledge.
Don't stop them from doing so. They are not building a charitable entity, they are building a business.
Many times, this is what life feels like going in circles when what is actually happening is progress. So on that feeling, I have something to tell you. It’s about principles and how they can help you forge ahead in life.
Life is largely unpredictable and that’s why sometimes we doubt ourselves and think we are going in circles when in reality, we are actually growing.
If life was easily predictable, we would have seen that what we are doing matters. We would have seen the end of the tunnel just over there. We wouldn’t have doubted our progress. Just like you I sometimes also feel like going in circles. It’s a universal feeling and stems from our inability to predict the future.
But here are things that have helped me to navigate that unpredictability. And empower me to do things with a good knowledge that I’m progressing and that I will end up in an expected destination.
1. Act based on principles.
2. Then put your trust in the principles.
3. Given that the principle is tested across space and time,
4. very often, you will end up in your expected end.
It looks simple but the biggest challenge you will have is in choosing what principle you want to act on and which you want to discard. So I will expand on the points.
The work, the real work is in finding principles (1) that fulfil conditions 2 and 3 to guarantee point 4. Thereby, we eliminate uncertainty and stop feeling like we are moving in circles. You see, once you figure the principles out, your life is almost as it is on autopilot, it will end in your expected destination.
Okay, so this is how this will go. I will share some of my principles with you. They aren’t new. But the goal is that you learn from my example which is more relevant than just talking generally.
3 principles I’ve been operating with
Curiosity: follow the impulses of the heart if they are good.
You who are young, make the most of your youth. Relish your youthful vigor. Follow the impulses of your heart. If something looks good to you, pursue it. But know also that not just anything goes; You have to answer to God for every last bit of it.
Ecclesiastes 11:9 (MSG)
Diligent Work: a man who is diligent in his work will stand before Kings and not mean men.
Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men
Proverbs 22:29
Because I follow these two principles, I’m convinced beyond any shadow of doubt in me that my place is with kings and queens. I don’t need anyone to assure me of it. It’s a principle.
And if you study history well, you will realize that this principle has held for centuries. I also picked them from the Bible because they’ve been true from the time of the Bible until today. However, don’t be pulled away because it comes from the Bible, they are fundamental principles of life and apply to anyone who follows it.
I have other principles from other aspects of life that I abide by as well. Combined, they give me assurances in this highly unpredictable world.
Before I talk about others, note that one of the fundamental criteria when choosing a principle is its applicability across space and time. They should always hold. It does matter who is applying it, when they are applying it and where they are applying it.
They always hold. They are hard to come by but if you find one that will lead you to your chosen destination, please grab it and don’t let go.
Principles are fundamental statement
All the things we desire in life have principles that guide them. Note that principles are foundational statements. Meaning, you can interpret as you deem fit. When one says “if a thing looks good to you, pursue it”, it means what I will pursue in the end will be different from what you will pursue. However, we must both be driven by curiosity.
That’s the nature of true principles. They are guiding lights leading you to a destination. It won’t however specify the vehicle that you must take. Note that.
So here’s the 3rd principle: on wealth
On wealth, here’s a principle I’ve learnt as well. To make any measure of wealth, you need leverage and judgement skills.
Judgement is about what decisions you make and how you make the decisions. And leverage is a multiplier factor of your judgement.
I’ll explain that with a real-life example. Take wealth to mean money here.
I can learn how to invest and make a decision to invest $1,000. The decision to invest is judgement and the $1,000 is my (capital) leverage.
Judgement without leverage is barren. Because no matter how good I am with investing, if there is no capital to apply it to, it amounts to nothing. On the other hand, leverage without the judgement skill is blind.
You can burn all your leverage if you make senseless judgements. That’s the equivalent of ending up in a ditch if you are blind.
You see how both work together now.
So to make wealth, you need to start looking for ways to improve your judgement skill. That’s one. Then two, you need to build leverage.
Leverage is of two forms. Oh, before I say the two forms, I should mention that the same skill it requires to make 40% on your $1,000 is what you will need to also make 40% on $100,000. The same judgement, the better outcome just because leverage is present.
Alright, so types of leverage.
One is permissioned (capital and labour), the other is permissionless (code and media).
I won’t be deep-diving into this. However, note that permissioned means you need someone to give it up for you to use. Someone needs to pay or give you the $9k to increase your $1k to $10k. And when it comes to labour, someone must agree to work with/for you before you can multiply your output.
Permissionless on the other hand is freely available. If I knew how to code, I could have created Paystack or Airbnb. I don’t need anyone’s permission for that. And I could build the next Ethereum with no one’s permission.
It’s the same with the media. On the internet, I can build a media juggernaut with no one’s permission, just my hard work and creativity.
That’s the nature of permissionless leverage.
However, it will help you if you don’t view them all as mutually exclusive. You need a mix of all to make wealth.
The purpose of separation is mainly to help you see clearly from the place of principles. You are free to build on that. You can mix the four forms of leverage as you like.
Operating based on principles is the best that we have at reducing the uncertainty that clouds our daily life.
Basing your actions on principles that are true across space and time is important in this process. Such principles offer the best path to your destination.
And yes, I have got a lot more other principles that have been guiding me in this highly unpredictable world.
But I think it’s important that we all find ours. You must determine what’s important to you and find principles that will take you to that destination.
I grew up understanding the language of money and my curiosity led me to the art of investing early as well. I started investing (in the stock market) in 2017. Between then and now I’ve learned several things. Among them, I want to share with you some things that we pay attention to but doesn’t matter in the scheme of things. Like they are things that don’t count at all. And you should stop paying attention to them once you learn them from today onward.
I laugh as I write this because I know you won’t stop. I must confess I’ve not been able to stop all myself as well. But I’m working towards it.
So let’s dig in.
1. What return you would have made if you invested in a thing 5 years ago
I called a friend some weeks ago about the need for us to change how we invest (in crypto). Before I tell you what we changed it to, let me tell you what had occurred to me.
I looked at the historical price of the DOGE coin and realized what a kill of money we would have made had we invested in it 5 years ago and hold until today. Never mind that majority of those who are aware of crypto 5 years and that invested either lose their money or find it untraceable (humans don’t think about that just the part alone).
Well, for context, $1,000 invested in DOGE on January 1st would be $121k at the peak price of $0.65.
But you know the kind of story people have to tell? Here’s one:
This is not an attempt to deny the fact that a lot more people have made money on the same asset. Rather it is to point to you that it is useless to pay much attention to “what you would have gained had you done this or that.” You are currently living in the same period and obviously, you didn’t do it. There’s no assurance that you would have done it 5 years ago as well.
And then again, there are some opportunities available to you now but you can’t see them or you are not patient enough for them to materialise. However, 5 years down the line, someone will say things like this again…
“If you bought this so and so and hold it till today, you will be a millionaire now.”
That’s very easy to say and see. Implementing it now and immediately is tougher. And that’s where your attention should be on.
So when I called my friend, I told him “enough of fantasies.” We have both fantasized a lot about what gain we would have made had we done this or that. We agreed to start working and concentrating our energy on recognizing opportunities that could give us similar returns over a similar horizon. But then again, it’s easier said than done.
Let me tell you another thing that is at play anytime we say statements like that.
Our brain is poor at conceptualising how long 3 months can be let alone a year. And definitely not to talk of 5 years. The brain can’t grasp. So whenever we say things like that, more often than not, our brain interprets it as something that could happen in a rather shorter term (like overnight) not the actual 1,825 days. 1,825 days of up and downs. Some downs as much as 50% from the earliest highs. The brain doesn’t grasp. This is a conclusion I made from observation and extrapolation on Professor Hershfield work.
Brian said it well here: you can’t teach anyone what a 20% decline feels like.
This is the research from Professor Hershfield that explains deeply how bad the brain is at grasping long term decisions that may hurt in the short term.
With all these learnings, I will say again, that your time and attention will be better spent if you spend it on finding opportunities lurking in front of you over an obsession with what could have happened.
This CNBC article is an example of things you should never read as it relates to this.
Knowing what to invest in today that will give you similar returns is infinitely more important than this retrospective knowledge. Even more important is building your mental muscles to be strong enough to hold for the period.
2. Your daily, weekly, monthly and even yearly return is not your focus
By the time I mentioned yearly, I’m pretty sure you probably raised your eyes and wondered what’s he saying. But that’s not a mistake none of those deserves your attention and time.
At the end of the day, what will count is your average return over time. A 50% gain within a month is pointless. You could wake up and the gain has been eroded. Or you could even be at a loss.
So to what end and benefit is the 50% gain of yesterday? Did it make you feel like a genius? Like someone who’s mastered the art and science of investing? Such euphoria and sense of accomplishment are soon wiped away by Mr Market who have no regards for anyone or their feelings.
Average return over time takes into account your capital and the return you have made over time. “Over time” is important here because it makes all the difference.
Something I learnt from statistics as I do my work is the importance of not paying much emphasis on a point estimate. Rather, attention should be paid to interval estimation.
As you can see from the image above, the point estimate is a replica of logging in to your brokerage account and seeing a 100% return and make your judgment based on that. While the interval is a replica of looking at your return over time.
One is more reliable and reflects reality. The other is just a fad.
Your performance today or tomorrow or even this year is not what matters. It’s the sum of all performances that is your reality and that’s what you should optimize for. Your reality could off course be a year or a month or a decade. The point is that it is the end that matters, not the in-betweens.
Optimising for “the end” oftentimes may mean, accepting short term underperformance. And let me quickly cheep this in that, no one goes on and on in the market of investing without experiencing some periods of loss. There will be years of 50% gain but there will also be years of 30% loss. In the end, it’s the average that matters.
3. Stop chasing Alpha, at the end of the day, alpha won’t matter
What would matter instead is “do you have enough to cater for yourself?”
Alpha is any return above the market return. That is a return above the S&P 500 return.
Jason Zweig in this article told a story about interviewing dozens of residents in a choice neighbourhood, Boca Raton, FL. It’s one of the wealthiest retirement and communities in the US:
Amid the elegant stucco homes, the manicured lawns, the swaying palm trees, the sun and the sea breezes, I asked these folks — mostly in their seventies — if they’d beaten the market throughout their investing lifetimes. Some said yes, some said no. Then one man said, “Who cares? All I know is, my investments earned enough for me to end up in Boca.”
At the end of the day, what matters is always “earned enough” to afford your lifestyle. It doesn’t even matter if you made no returns at all or made something less the historical market return or even more. Who cares, sure you won’t. Just “enough” is all that counts at the end of the day.
While you have the time and energy, it’s okay to catch the fun and cruise of chasing alpha. My point is to redirect you and remind you of what really matters.
As Ben Carlson noted while recounting a similar story, “the whole point of investing in the first place is achieving your financial goals, not beating the market.”
4. The amount of time and effort you put into your investments is a needless statistics
This point is equally interesting and unpleasant. Unlike other activities in life where time spent on them may determine how good you may get at it, investing is different.
In investing, the less time you spend worrying about it and “unlooking” it, the better you tend to perform. Investing rewards passive people over active people.
So it will be ill-fated, to imagine because you spend a lot of time “investing” you will do better than those who spend significantly lesser time. It doesn’t work that way.
If I were you then, I will be optimizing for spending lesser and lesser time “investing”. Going back to the example of DOGE from an earlier point, the one who bought and forgot about it will currently be outperforming the active (in and out) guy. However, note that DOGE could also have gone to zero and the same person loses all their money.
It’s this point that makes me favour index investing over, stock picking. Note that as it applies in crypto so does it in stocks. The principle is the same. The passive “HODLers” eats the fastest meat. Optimise for lesser activities. There’s no virtue in spending an enormous amount of time on “investing”. Except, of course, you are in the business of investing like Cathie Wood or Warren Buffet.
5. If you are investing for the long term, you have no business timing the market
Watch this video to understand how pointless it could be trying to time the market.
And if you give up trying to time the market, I bet it will buy you more time. And it will also help the point above of optimizing for lesser time investing.
Bitcoin is currently an asset with $1 trillion in value and still growing. Some even say we can expect $9 trillion on the horizon. However, the only veritable use case for this asset class has been as a store value. Because of trade-offs in the design of Bitcoin, it can’t handle the frequency and speed of decentralised finance and we can’t build smart contracts on it.
However, a layer 2 protocol can be built on it to make it more useful than just being a store of value assets. That is easier said than done though.
To get this done, Dr Muneed Ali and his team started working on what we now know as Stacks (formerly Blockstacks) in 2013. The goal was to build a protocol on the Bitcoin blockchain that will allow decentralised application and smart contract of any kind to be built on Bitcoin, leveraging its security and network value. Stacks was launched in 2017 and then Stacks 2.0 was launched in early 2021 which is more robust and may even be seen as an entirely new application instead of an improvement to its 1.0 version.
Below, I bring you resources that can help you learn more about the Stacks ecosystem.
Largely, I am optimistic about the future of this project because it fits into my model of the inevitable future.
The concept of the inevitable future is premised on the fact that a kind of future will become mainstream no matter what. And it is only a question of when and by who. The team at Stacks has shown enough capability to usher in this future.
This is only the first of the kind of article I will be writing about Stacks Blockchain and its ecosystem. Make sure to check again or subscribe to my newsletter so you don’t miss future updates.
There’s been a lot said about the Crypto economy lately. Especially as it has presented itself as an opportunity to make trading gains never before seen by our generation. You could by DOGE and make 300% gains in 3 days or by CAKE and make 10x in under a year.
But the story of Crypto didn’t start with money-making not did it start with DOGE. It started from the beginning of human civilization. Yes, humanity follows an arrow of progress and it has been leading us up to this point.
However, I won’t start this from the beginning of civilization. We will assume this beginning to be a different time. A time that serves as the catalyst for everything that’s have been created in the last 11 years and more that will be created.
The year was 2008, financial crisis broke out in the US that affected the whole world. The effect was devastating and it wiped out a lot of wealth. To cushion the effect and ensure a quick part to recovery, the government had to bail out many of the failing institutions.
This bailout was seen in some quarters as the government meddling in the affairs of the “invisible hand” of the market. This category of people believes companies that will die should have been allowed to die and well-capitalized companies can remain. The argument is also premised on the fact that it was government over participation that led to this situation to start with.
Government overparticipate through the federal reserve bank who has the function of price stability, and employment. And to achieve this, they maintain a level of inflation in the economy.
Inflation is the increase in the money supply of an economy. What inflation does per time is to reduce the value of the money in your hand. How?
This article explains how – deflation is the natural order of the world.
But not a lot of people understand that. And some who do believes it’s the most efficient way in which economic activity can be coordinated.
While all this was ongoing, a man (Satoshi Nakamoto) made a breakthrough in the development of a technology that will later become the Blockchain.
See the history of Blockchain here – https://academy.binance.com/en/articles/history-of-blockchain
Here’s the problem the Blockchain technology solves:
On the internet, you can send the same thing 1 million times and there won’t be any regard for the original. With blockchain technology, that problem was solved. Now you can have a unique item on the internet. So unique that once you send it to someone else (pass ownership) it becomes the property of that person and never again yours. The only way it remains connected to you is that it will remain on an (immutable) record that you once owned it.
This technological breakthrough made it possible for Satoshi to create (scarce and sound) money on the internet. That money is what is now called Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the internet’s money. The first unit of Bitcoin was created (mined) by Satoshi on January 9, 2009, with the note signalling Bitcoin’s fundamental disdain for inflation (bank bailouts).
In the beginning, Bitcoin has zero value in USD. But from Zero till today, Bitcoin now commands a net worth of above $1T. It became the best performing investment in the last decade.
Through thick and thin with much criticism and antagonism, Bitcoin emerged as a dominant store of value asset.
This interesting image will give you an idea of all Bitcoin had to go through.
In the process of Bitcoin evolution, a new innovation was given birth to called Ethereum. Before we talk about that, let’s explore something.
For the Bitcoin technology to work flawlessly, trade-offs had to be made. The trade-off means less flexibility to build on the Bitcoin blockchain. However, as innovators understood more about the blockchain technology, they realized that more can be done with the blockchain technology. Albeit not on that of Bitcoin in order not to compromise the integrity of Bitcoin from its primary use case (sound internet money).
So the new innovation was given birth to in 2013 when Vitalik Buterin proposed it in a paper he wrote. The innovation is simple as an idea but programmatically complex.
It’s called Smart Contract. The idea is that you write a computer program that can execute on its own once certain conditions are fulfilled. For example, a smart contract could be programmed to release funds for someone’s birthday each year. It could also be programmed to release payment once someone confirms receipt of delivered goods.
Read this for more – https://blockgeeks.com/guides/smart-contracts/
Vitalik pursued the idea and in 2015, Ethereum went mainstream to become the first blockchain on which one can build a smart contract.
Like I said earlier, the idea is simple but programmatically complex. So Ethereum happened to have a lot of inefficiencies as well, the major ones being gas fees and scalability.
Read this – https://zycrypto.com/scalability-and-high-gas-fees-behind-ethereums-failure-to-double-all-time-high-price-like-bitcoin/
These limitations have invited competition in the cryptoeconomy who are also building something similar to Ethereum but without the limitations of Ethereum. Among them are Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain, and Cardano.
This thread on Reddit is one interesting to look at on Ethereum competition: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/kjo6a4/what_are_strongest_competitors_to_eth/
What’s interesting though is that because of smart contracts and other innovations on the blockchain network, the combined market value of the cryptoeconomy is now north of $2T. That is, aside from Bitcoin, other things that innovators have been creating since Ethereum was launched in 2015 now command a combined value of > $1T. And Ethereum has more than $300B of that value.
That’s where it all started from up to where we are. In the coming threads, I will share with you the interesting journey that got us here and where we could probably head in the future.
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As society evolves, so does their God. And so does their type of request changes.
In the past, we prayed to God for rain, now we can do irrigation and we ask God to only give us skill for irrigation not necessarily rain anymore. In the past, we prayed for healing from Malaria. Now we pray for money to afford Chloroquine.
One thing is apparent though, science is what advances humans and thereafter changes their God and or their request to their God.
No matter what though, humans are conditioned to always seek the supernatural. No matter how glamorous or gloomy their life maybe, they’ll have reason(s) to seek the supernatural.
Which supernatural are you seeking?
Here’s a thing I learned about science though, science is always inconclusive. It’s always subject to scrutiny and it is only true per time until otherwise proven.
To take any science as an indisputable universal truth is to lose touch with the essence of science itself.
To assume a position is irrefutable and absolute certainty is to be unaware of what science is.
In science, strong opinions are held loosely.
And you know what?
All things in life can be reduced to Science.
If that’s the case, then it’s naive of anyone to hold a strong opinion strongly.
Holding an opinion is not bad, attaching your identity to your opinion is terrible because it makes changing such opinion difficult. And which invariably makes you hold on to a strong opinion strongly.
Be careful what you attach to your identity. You should optimize to attach as little as possible. That’s the best way about life. You tend to be less angry at situations and less attached to fluid events of life when you approach it that way.
Anytime I share this idea with people, the common question I get are these:
Does this apply to opinions on religion, heaven, paradise, and hellfire as well? Some people believe that these things exist and some don’t agree.
Some people believe that success (financial or otherwise) comes from GOD but some believe that this is just a direct consequence of your hard work, determination, and preparation.
It’s an interesting question and here’s my answer:
There is no identity without “strong opinion held strongly.”
But the more of such opinions that we add to make our identity, the less flexible we become and the more we hinder our growth tendency.
Growth tendency in the sense that only a mind that is ready to accept the new reality in the light of superior evidence is growing. Otherwise such is fixed in a spot.
The goal is to ensure that we have a few such opinions as possible. And I’m really less concerned about where those strong opinions come from. For some people, it comes from religion, for other scientific interpretations, and for others, it comes from something else. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is the knowledge of what’s going on and how it affects you.
Another thing that most matters is even the readiness to shed off “strong opinions held strongly” when new information that is irrefutable presents itself.
Still, on strong opinions, the Jews in Jesus era got it wrong because they couldn’t shed off old identity. They were not wrong to be Jews when they didn’t have Jesus. They were only wrong when they rejected Jesus for their existing identity.
It was easier on the hand for the likes of Peter and Matthew to embrace Jesus and his teachings because they didn’t have so many strong opinions or if they did, they held it loosely.
Down the line, they also got it wrong. Peter wouldn’t preach to the Gentiles because “that’s not their way.” But he was instructed to not be that way, to not hold strong opinions strongly. “Things are fluid Peter”, Jesus told Peter and he went on to preach to Cornelius, a Gentile. And because of that, many outside of the tribe of Israel today proclaim Jesus as their saviour with far-reaching influence. Just imagine if Peter had not changed his mind.
Strong opinions are needed to form our identity. We can’t exist without them. The goal is to recognize when we are having too many of it and which one is not necessary. Understanding when to shed off on those opinions are even more important and their effect can be far-reaching.
To record any significant growth as individuals, the readiness to change our minds in the light of superior evidence is important. This doesn’t mean we should leave an unstable life and without a backbone like a jellyfish. No! Rather it means we should not hold opinions dogmatically when we are presented with enough information with which we can update our existing opinions.
Think of the repercussions of Peter refusing to change his mind. Think of the repercussion of the world refusing to admit that it is the earth that rotates around the sun and not otherwise as we’ve always believed. Those are higher-level repercussions, take a step backward and think of times when you have refused to change your mind for whatever reason even though it was obvious changing your mind is the best cause of action.
Strong opinions are best held loosely if you even care to have any strong opinions at all.
