Sam Muchai

If every building in the shopping district in a big city was owned by one landlord, rents would go up. So would the prices of everything sold. The landlord would keep a significant percentage of each store’s profits and innovation would suffer as well.

Google’s monopoly is real.

They pay Apple more than a million dollars an hour to be the default search engine on phones. It’s more profitable for Apple to threaten to build a search engine than it is for them to actually run one. Google overpays for the default status because their hegemony gives advertisers fewer options. And by controlling the flow of attention across the web, they can dictate how websites work and what our experience is online.

Ever since Adam Smith began writing about capitalism, it’s been understood that monopolies are a defect in the structure of free markets. Locking in an advantage gives the monopolist the power to ignore its customers and we all suffer as a result.

A company grows by getting ever better at serving its customers, its vendors and its employees.

A company becomes a monopoly by becoming ever better at becoming a monopoly.

Few companies have done a better job of marketing the benefits of their monopoly than Google. They rarely charge their users, but offer free software and engaging stories instead. But they have relentlessly grabbed more and more of our attention, and used it to create a sinecure that costs all of us. It’s not just ecosia, duckduckgo and kagi that are paying for this monopoly. When a company can shift the rules and focus on more instead of better, we all pay.

Almost every element of good bread happens long before it goes into the oven.

Too often, we spend our time and effort on the exciting last step. And too often, we forget to spend our time and attention on the preparation that’s a lot less urgent or glamorous, but far more important.

Poor preparation is a lousy excuse for a last-minute selfish frenzy. That frenzy distracts us from doing it right the next time.

If you want to understand where mastery and success come from, take a look at the inputs and the journey, not simply the outputs.

…then having a tool isn’t much of an advantage.

The industrial age, the age of scarcity, depended in part on the advantages that came with owning tools others didn’t own.

Time for a new advantage. It might be your network, the connections that trust you. And it might be your expertise. But most of all, I’m betting it’s your attitude.

The scientific rule of thumb is simple: When you make a bold claim, you need significant research to back it up.

Telling us that eating vegetables is healthy can be justified by a fairly simple high school science paper. But if you want to claim that the moon is made of celery and Elmer’s Glue, we’re going to need more than your back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Lately, we’re seeing two things begin to take the place of good research when making outrageous claims:

Lots of online celebrity.

Particularly bold and noxious claims.

Being angry or a famous podcaster (or both) doesn’t excuse you from the burden of proof.

All successful cultural change (books, movies, public health), has a super-simple two-step loop:

AWARENESS
TENSION
–>Loop<–

It’s easy to focus on awareness. Get the word out. Hype. Promo.

I think that’s a mistake.

Because awareness without tension is useless.

The tension is like pulling back a rubber band.

WHY would someone who becomes aware take action?

Is the action to buy the book? To change one’s diet? To vote?

And then the third step, so important it’s often ignored, is:

Why would the person who became aware and then experienced the tension and release… tell someone else?

So, to recap:

Tell 10 people.
Create tension among the 10 so they take action.
The action causes each of them to tell 10 people.

Debt is a financial miracle.

If you buy a property for 20% down, with the bank financing the rest, and it goes up in value by just 10%, your profit is 50%. (I’ll wait while you do the math.)

If you have a factory and can buy a machine that increases productivity, the money you borrow to pay for that machine creates enough profit that you get to do it again. And again.

Alas, the ratchet can also go the other way.

If that property goes down in value a little bit, you lose everything.

If your competitors buy better and more expensive machinery than you have, they can sell for less than you can, and your investment disappears.

Farming is difficult. It always has been. But leverage and debt make it a persistent challenge. If the weather is better than anyone expects and the markets are just right, you do really well for a season. But if conditions change, if fertilizer is hard to get, if there’s a glut–well, the bank still does fine, but the farmer can get wiped out.

The reason that supply chain issues were so bad is that leveraged organizations needed to figure out how to extract every penny from their cash flow, and having less inventory on hand seemed like a smart way to eke out a bit more leverage. Until a shipment is late and then it all grinds to a halt.

And… when a bank or an investor is considering two power plants, and they discover that the coal plant is 1% more profitable in the short run but 100x worse for the community, they go for pennies instead of resilience. Because leverage multiplies the value of a short-term penny so much that they feel as if they have no choice but to choose the fragile, selfish, short-term path.

Leverage accelerates everything. Learning to see it is a key step in understanding how to fix it.

The purpose of an Asset is to create or generate income or reduce certain expense.

The purpose of any expense is to create income.

The purpose of an income is to generate cash flow.Real cash not invoice amount.

The purpose of a debt is to produce or fund an asset which will eventually generate income.

One more thing;if you trust an asset to generate income then you can get a debt over it.If you don’t trust the asset to generate income don’t and I repeat don’t get a debt over it.

If you want reach and engagement, optimizing for small screens is usually the way to go. There are more mobile devices in the world than we can count, and large numbers of people spend their days consuming content from the palm of their hand.

But productivity? In just about every context I’m aware of, important work doesn’t come from large numbers of people looking for convenience, connection or a smile. It comes from committed individuals who are willing to sit and do the work.

As soon as you stop using a keyboard, you’re sending a signal about the focus you’re prepared to give to the work at hand.