Sam Muchai

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.

You may have noticed that when you eventually find something, it’s in the last place you looked. Mostly because after that, you stop looking.

And when a long-awaited moment finally arrives, the respite comes just in time, when we’re at the end of our rope. That’s largely because if we give up before then, it never arrives, and because we can probably stick things out longer than we’d like to believe.

Waiting for the hero to save us just in time isn’t nearly as productive as realizing that we have agency. We have the agency to quit when it makes sense to quit (ignoring sunk costs) and we have the agency to dig in deeper when it really matters (acknowledging that it might not work).

When help does arrive, just in time, it’s worth celebrating.

It’s easy to imagine that they are, as it lets us off the hook as habits become negative, or even addictions.

If someone else is thriving without the habit we seem to need, then it’s likely a desire pretending to be a need.

For example: You can be a successful professional without spending time on social media.

Starting at the top seems like great advice. Deal with the people with power and authority.

Except…

Power and authority aren’t often in the same place.

The real power is usually foundational. What happens when humans interact. The way things are around here. Often, the people who are ostensibly in charge are simply choosing from a few culturally acceptable choices, and those choices are dictated by the foundation.

It might seem like a detour, but it’s actually the cause of change.

It’s normal to feel it. It changes our careers, our dress and even the way we live our lives.

The question is: is it caused by external or internal forces?

More often than not, it’s simply something we invent. The people we imagine are busy watching and judging us might not even know we exist.

Social pressure is something we make up to simplify our decisions.