mweiss Posted February 1, 2007 Report Share Posted February 1, 2007 I am thinking about what creates wealth and the means to rise above poverty. One of my missions for this year is to discover the techniques used by wealthy people. I have some preliminary conclusions: Personality may be more of a determining factor than knowledge in a particular field. Wealthy people have a clear idea of the specific concrete steps it takes to achieve their money goal. Wealthy people (the sort that have earned it) have tremendous passion. Wealthy people seem to be doing the kind of work that they are passionate about and enjoying it. At present, I have put the Tony Robbins book aside and am reading Think and Grow Rich, by Napolean Hill. As I read this book, I am growing increasingly disappointed in it. It is filled with hyperbole, is based upon a philosophical “primacy of consciousness” premise, and just seems to be increasingly filled with fluff as I read on. The author keeps stressing faith and repetition of self-talk, as if telling one’s self some hollow self-affirming phrase will somehow make one positive and successful. What the author has so far not addressed is how to find the passion, if one lacks it. And the meaningful concrete steps to achieve specific goals, rather than just a generalized concept. What I am finding is that I can list some of the things that I am reasonably good at, but beyond that, I have no clue as to how to take the next step and turn my skills into money. What’s worse, I keep making the same mistakes over and over again, with each business venture I’ve started up since my retirement from the employment field some twenty years ago. I keep coming back to Media—my passion (what’s left of it) comes back to sound and video recording, production and editing. I’ve loved typography since the 1960s, and had an interest in uniting all the different still, motion and sound media. Perhaps some part of me wants to be a film director, but my “rational” mind tells me that this is an unrealistic goal. Now here’s where I sometimes think that my Objectivist slant on thinking is limiting me: Napolean Hill believed he could do anything he set his mind to—even teaching his deaf son to hear. I’ve noticed that a lot of successful people are not Objectivists. In fact, many of them are believers in primacy of consciousness. They truly belief that their thoughts stir things in the universe and make the otherwise impossible, possible. I have always rejected that premise, since my introduction to Objectivism in 1962. I suspect that my practical-mindedness leaves out the “flight of fancy” beliefs in the possible that is outside what I know to be practical. Perhaps this limits my belief in myself to achieve huge goals. So, left with a more limited frame of mind that that which Napolean Hill, a very famous wealthy person, teaches, how can I achieve more than mediocre subsistence? And, having long ago reached a stage of “burnout”, I no longer have the burning passion talked about in Hill’s book. I think the crux of my challenge boils down to two things: How to rekindle “passion”, to become obscessed with something to the point where I let nothing get in my way. To discover, understand and implement the concrete steps that are requireed in order to attain wealth. I think one of my “fun” exercises could be to sketch out and then 3D model my “dream home” (this would be about a $5 million home in today’s market, based on what I see comparable to my internal vision of what kind of home and land I want to live in/on.) I think if I could discover a path that was specific, and fulfilling to me, I would stand a chance of succeeding. The problem has been that I have never found out what the specific day to day tasks are that lead to wealth. My year with Primerica has only managed to achieve more negative reinforcement. I did many regimented things, taught to me by the RVP in weekly “classes”. I did those things but achieved zero results. I believe that part of the reason for failure was because this line of work was outside my circle of interest/passion. It’s quite well past the time when I needed to have accomplished great strides in the wealth-making process, as a Sword of Damocles now hangs over my home ownership with the tax situation being what it is. It’s pretty hard to think creatively when you start to realize that your next home could well be a cardboard box on a sidewalk. But I guess in some ironic way, I’m always an optimist and have hope that somehow I will “strike it rich” someday very soon, even though all I continue to get is tiny scraps of work every few months. It’s a shame that the public schools never teach how to build wealth. History and math and English are all well and good, but practical training in the actual process of creating lots of wealth is missing. And that is where I am stuck for the past half-century. I get the feeling that Objectivism lacks the focus on how to make money and great wealth. It’s benefits are on a broader scale, but when it comes to things like rekindling passion, setting the proper mindset for success, and executing a specific plan for making money, Ayn Rand did not seem to address that. In fact, I never knew any rich Objectivists. All of them seem to be struggling students, or regular folks with regular jobs, stuck in the same situation as most any mediocre person. Maybe Objectivism is so tied to reality that it precludes mental creativeness and believing that the mind is in tune with the universe in the ways that Hill describes. If I could only believe that, perhaps I could hypnotize myself into success. Sadly, I’m unable to benefit from Mr. Hill’s writing because it is incompatible with Objectivism. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
miseleigh Posted February 1, 2007 Report Share Posted February 1, 2007 In fact, I never knew any rich Objectivists. All of them seem to be struggling students, or regular folks with regular jobs, stuck in the same situation as most any mediocre person. Maybe Objectivism is so tied to reality that it precludes mental creativeness and believing that the mind is in tune with the universe in the ways that Hill describes. If I could only believe that, perhaps I could hypnotize myself into success. Sadly, I’m unable to benefit from Mr. Hill’s writing because it is incompatible with Objectivism. What about all the Objectivists that you know of? Peikoff can't be living on the poverty line, and Dr. Ellen Kenner has a popular radio show. And some of us may be struggling students, but I think we're happier students than the non-Objectivist ones. Doesn't that count for something? As for Objectivism not focusing on how to create wealth... maybe that's because it's trying to focus on happiness instead. How is being a film director an unrealistic goal? They exist, don't they? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Galileo Blogs Posted February 1, 2007 Report Share Posted February 1, 2007 I am thinking about what creates wealth... Mweiss, Could you use a regular font and regular paragraph spacing for your post? With all due respect, your post is virtually unreadable with that particular font and spacing. Kindly, GG Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inspector Posted February 1, 2007 Report Share Posted February 1, 2007 Okay, tough love time here. Mweiss, What is it with you and Objectivism? You claim to have read it, but you have clearly failed to grasp or remember Objectivist politics (I know because of your baffling positions on environmentalism, overpopulation, etc). I can only assume that your understanding of the rest of it must be similarly flawed. I say this because you keep posting up threads like this that posit "There must be something wrong with Objectivism because I am not rich and sucessful and happy." There is nothing wrong with Objectivism. There is, however, something wrong with your comprehension/understanding of it. And you also have, from your statements, problems with your psychological well-being. Would a full understanding of Objectivism solve these problems? I don't know but I think it is likely it would help. But you need to stop blaming Objectivism for your problems. You're not going to find a "magic fix" for your trouble in the slick salesmen of the "self-help" "industry," either. You need to heal, psychologically, and you need a better understanding of Objectivism. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobsponge Posted February 1, 2007 Report Share Posted February 1, 2007 There are plenty of wealthy objectivists, myself included. I make more money now than I know what to do with, and I think my level of nearly anarchist laissez-faireness would probably make Ayn Rand look a little more liberal We objectivist business owners just keep a low profile. As the old Japanese adage says, 'The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.' These days, if you make good money, never let it be known that you are, as society defines you, an evil capitalist. The lynch mob will show up with torches and pitchforks, and rob you blind. The problem I see with a lot of business startups is that the people simply assume that they will make money without having to work at it. Which is the antithesis of business. They think that they will somehow nebulously generate demand for their supply. And thus, they run out of money and the business collapses. One needs the nose for profit. One must find a demand and then supply it, but not supply it too much so as to render your product overinflated. One must also live by 'If you want it done right, you do it yourself'. I can run my business without anyone but myself, and judging by the chronic disappointment I suffer with my undereducated and overliberalized fellow men, it's a decision that has NEVER ONCE let me down. Besides, I have nobody to blame but myself if something goes wrong, and I prefer it that way. Long live personal responsibility. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
necrovore Posted February 2, 2007 Report Share Posted February 2, 2007 (edited) Mr. Weiss, I empathize with you in a lot of ways. Not only do I find myself generally frustrated a lot, I've read Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich and Wallace D. Wattles's The Science of Getting Rich (and I borrowed my sister's Anthony Robbins CDs once) and have also found all of them to be filled with primacy-of-consciousness bunk. However, consciousness is not completely powerless. Your attitude can affect how effectively you search for solutions to your problems, and it can affect how much drive and energy you put into solving them. Generally, optimists are energetic, pessimists are lethargic, and sometimes energy makes the difference between success and failure. If you're dealing with people, well, people are more attracted to confident, smiling faces. And if you're trying to be creative, you will find your subconscious more useful when you're generally confident and optimistic. Most endeavors, even creative ones, consist of following principles. And so they are like doing mathematics. You can do mathematics whether you're in a good mood or not -- and, in writing, "A professional can write even when he doesn't feel like it" -- and so if you know some of the principles to follow you should be able to say, "My mood be damned, I'm doing it." And go ahead. I've tried this and I've actually found my mood to improve as a result of my insistence on working creatively with whatever principles I had, even though the principles were incomplete and probably wrong. I started to make some progress. I prefer to think that even the production of a bad story can teach me something. (Selling stuff to people or gaining their cooperation works the same way -- there are principles you have to discover and follow.) As to "blaming Objectivism" -- I do not mean to disparage the importance of philosophy, or of Objectivism in particular, by saying this, but -- Objectivism is only a philosophy. No philosophy, whether Objectivism or Kantianism or any other, can assure success in the special sciences; if you want success in customer-finding or film-making or story-writing or computer programming or a variety of other things, there are details of that subject that you have to know and put into practice that are not properly the province of philosophy. Objectivism will, qua philosophy, be silent about them. Philosophy underlies everything but it leaves the all-important details to the special sciences. Many principles for success in a particular field are particular to that field. I read a book by the Objectivist Edwin Locke called The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators. It's on Amazon. The last chapter is called "How to Make a Billion Dollars." You might like that book. It shows how Objectivism relates to wealth creation. But I must note that I have not made a billion dollars yet, and that it, too, won't give you advice about how to succeed in anything in particular. Edited February 2, 2007 by necrovore Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mweiss Posted February 2, 2007 Author Report Share Posted February 2, 2007 I’ll try to consolodate my response to all posts thus far in one post to save on space. miseleigh: Naturally, the top Objectivists are going to have some degree of wealth. Ellen Kenner is a licensed clinical psychologist, is she not? I once had a date with the daughter of a Jewish clinical psychologist—their home was immense, it had servants and housekeepers, with a Steinway piano in a livingroom that was the size of a corporate boardroom and her father’s office had a 20’ ceiling and could probably fit my whole house inside of it, so these professionals make a lot of money, irregardless of philosophical affiliation. Peikoff is selling books and other materials, and as the intellectual heir to Ayn Rand, he’s quite a centrally-important individual with many responsibilities. They are not the most practical examples of wealthy Objectivists because they are either founders or earning in a profession that does not specifically owe its existence to Objectivism. I was talking about common people who practice Objectivism in daily living. Very few of them are above average in wealth. Many struggle financially, or are stuck in the same dead-end jobs as non-Objectivists. Galileo Blogs: I use the larger font because I can’t see the small print in most of the posts. I’ll turn your statement around and say “can you use a larger font? With all due respect, you reply is virtually unreadable with that tiny font.” Inspector: While Objectivism is a great philosophy in many ways, not everyone absorbs all aspects of it equally well. I found it easier to relate to the politics of Objectivism (the individual rights, man not being his brother’s keeper, etc.) but I didn’t grasp other aspects of it as well. Also, it has been thirty or more years since I read any Objectivist essays. I know I should get back into re-reading the books that are in my livingroom bookcases, and I fully intend to do so, one book at a time. I’m not faulting Objectivism for my lack of creativity, but I do get the sense that slightly mystical people have an easier time developing a positive outlook and a faith-based belief system that works effectively for them to create success for themselves. Objectivism, on the other hand, has made me painfully aware of the injustices I am facing, of what’s wrong with the world, and that negativity is painful to endure. How does one live happily in an irrational world? Ignorance truly IS bliss, on some levels. The more you know, the more flaws you see in the world, and the more unhappy you tend to be when you can’t control those things. I have nothing against Objectivism at all. I think it’s ideas are irrefutable. I just think that not enough, if anything, was written for the dunce like me who hasn’t a clue how to go beyond the dead end wage earning job. bobsponge: I’m glad to hear that there are some wealthy Objectivists out there. I can understand about the low profile. So then if all the wealthy Objectivists are out of sight, then to the casual observer, it looks like none of them are financially successful. I have a friend who is very intelligent and a good debater; he often questions my professed ideas of Objectivist origin, citing the fact that I am still living below poverty line. “What good is your philosophy if it doesn’t make you successful?” he asks. When I got involved in Primerica, I worked hard at it. I made many hundreds of telemarketing calls after I blew through my “warm market” (friends) who didn’t want to have anything to do with what I was offering. I spent afternoons prospectng at shopping malls and gas stations. I kept going for months, in the face of not a shred of success. But let me tell you, it wears on you after a few months. When you have spent all night inputting telephone numbers from small business ads in the paper and all afternoon calling those people and trying to interest them in the opportunity, and you get nowhere after months of this, without even one small success, it starts to wear down your enthusiasm. When I first started with Primerica, I thought I had access to the Holy Grail of financial services and that I could solve any family’s financial problems. I was utterly blindsided when I found that party after party had no interest whatsoever in what I could do for them. Well gradually, it becomes harder and harder to fake enthusiasm, and gradually, one’s inner disappointment becomes impossible to conceal when meeting the public. Now I am at a point where I feel that I have waisted half a year of my life on this stuff—while others in my home office have started up after me, and have built sizeable organizations and are enjoying success. It’s been the same thing for the past twenty years. In 1987, I started a typographic business. Grossed $1200 in income that year and worked my butt off for what worked out to an hourly wage of less than $1 on most projects. I closed that typography business and started a promotional services business that included video production and shooting. In two years, I produced one rough video on pinstriping automobiles for a client, for about $100, and another one that was an owner’s manual on video, for a replica car manufacturer (owned by a friend of mine), for about the same amount of money. Both projects involved travel, much of the day spent shooting, and a couple of days editing the tapes the old fashioned way. If I had asked for a higher rate, I would have had zero projects. I closed that business and later opened yet another as a color prepress designer. I got a few scraps from a NYC-based anime importer, but it seemed like they liked to spread their assignments across many designers, so I would see maybe one assignment every 6-9 months and starve in between. I had one client that looked real promising and for the first few weeks, I was raking in real income at 10X the hourly rate of my last full time employment job. Then that company went bankrupt and left me out $6400 in unpaid invoices. By the late 1990s, my pirate FM station had achieved quite a bit of notariety, and a local station broker, who was a Liberal and a real nice guy, who secretly admired freedom of the airwaves, was impressed with the technical excellence of my completely homebrew radio station. He said I was qualified to do radio engineering, so he acted as my agent and, using his good reputation, hooked me up with clients. I made a living for a few years, and then one day I met a consultant from Wisconsin who, upon seeing that I was driving an ancient, decrepit car, and had a wife to support, gave me some frank advice and told me I should be charging double what I was charging for my services. I gradually phased in his advice, raising my rates a little each year, until after four years, I had doubled my rates. But then the clients stopped calling. Work started to disappear. When I did work, the income was not bad. In fact, if I had that income five days a week, we could afford to live a typical lower middle class lifestyle. But I had more like 1 day per week of work from the radio biz. Then when I embarked on repairing the roof of my house, which involved demolition of parts of the house and a complete rebuild from the foundation upwards, I ended up spending all my time and energy in the spring, summer and fall since 2003, rebuilding one room of the house at a time. That, despite advancing age and declining health—because the situation here was so bad that no contractor wanted to “open Pandora’s box” as one contractor told me. I got a $170,000 estimate to rebuild my roof. That’s when I realized it was either me, doing the work by myself, slowly, or having the whole roof collapse on us and end up retreating and sealing off parts of the house as it collapses little by little. I’m making small progress on the repairs, but it’s been four years, with another four years estimated to completion of the roof rebuild, but the problem is that my unavailability for radio work exacerbated the decline of my radio business. One client has refused to pay the last four invoices since July, so now I am faced with suing them to get my money. And during the process of gathing my income totals, I see that this client provided 61% of my gross income last year. What I’m saying is that things are getting worse, rapidly. I often feel like a hampster on a treadmill, just peddling as hard as he can to barely keep up—and if I stop or slow down, I’ll fall off and incur critical injury. I owe a property tax bill, with liens, interest and late payment penalties, that is rapidly closing in on six figures. So right now I feel like the solving of my financial problems is about as likely as winning the jackpot in the lottery—virtually hopeless. Yet, I have no clue as to how to make REAL money. Working as a clerk at a gas station, or a greeter at Wal-Mart is clearly not the way. But I know no other ways to bring in income, however small. But no matter how hard I work at any of these throw-away wage jobs, I will never be able to catch up, financially, much less enjoy my dream lifestyle. I watched as my parents’ dreams faded away thirty years ago, despite their voracious appetite for Objectivist ideas, but sickness and medical expenses, coupled with the fact that neither of them had ever managed better than low-wage jobs, conspired to lead to their financial demise. I was talking with my friend, Bill, this evening and he pointed out something interesting: he said I have a “serial mind”. I replied, “what, you mean I’m like a serial killer?” He admonished me and explained that he meant that my mind processes on piece of data at a time. He went on to state that wealthy and creative people have an “associative mind”—they can integrate and process multiple streams of information in ways that the average populace does not. Therein, he says, lies their ability to be creative and to earn money. I have often been frustrated by the fact that I often take 10-20X as long to complete a task as most other people. Some say I’m more detail-oriented, or more meticulous. Or perhaps I get sidetracked a lot. That was always a problem in the workplace. Boss would say that my work output was too low and he wanted to see more volume of work completed per unit of time. Another boss wrote on my salary review: “Makes good first impression, but doesn’t wear well.” That was in response to the fact that I grow bored quickly with being a cog in someone else’s wheel. Another entrepreneur friend of mine, Pat, says that I’m definitely NOT employee material. And that he would never hire me, if he had the capacity to do so. He recognizes that I need to be in my own business, doing what I’m good at. Whatever that may be. The inequality that bothers me most is that all of the things I’m good at, seem to have no demand to support their vocational existence. The areas where people make a lot of money (stocks, investing, financial services, doctor, lawyer) are not areas where my natural interests and abilities lie. That’s part of the reason why I have been bashing my head into a brick wall with Primerica. There’s nothing wrong with the company, but with my attempting to force myself to do something that I’m not interested in nor good at. As things stand, I am finding that I really don’t know what I should focus my limited energy on at this point. Having that nose for profit is what makes people like YouTube’s founder a billionaire in just two years. But I don’t have a clue as to how he accomplished that wealth—especially when I try to start something on my own and it fails miserably and I lose money all the time, again and again. necrovore: Thank you for your compassionate reply. I think that your suggestion to read Edwin Locke’s book may be one of the best ones I’ve received to date. I will definitely order it, when I sell enough of my stuff on eBay to be able to come up with the purchase price (I don’t want to burden my wife further, as she’s already bought me some books this year). I do realize that my attitude can affect my success. The part I have not been able to master is how to maintain a positive, happy attitude in the face of 100% failure. One failure after another, with no success in between is wearing me down. It’s destroyed what’s left of my self-esteem, and my financial situation is dire as a result of my unbroken string of business failures. I’d like to be able to feel happy and positive in the face of all this, but I just can’t do it. Blessed is the man who, having been just thrown onto the street, penniless and homeless, is still able to smile and joke. I am not that man. I have tried the “my state of mind be damned, I’m going ahead” during my Primerica venture, but my enthusiasm faded after several months of nothing but one rejection after another. I spoke with my Sr. Rep who brought me on board today and he told me that if I have a problem that’s preventing me from success with Primerica, then it affects other aspects of my life as well—such as other business ventures. I think he’s right about that. What people here have interpreted as me blaming Objectivism for my failures is really me being too tied to reality to believe in flights of fancy. For instance, I really don’t believe that “wish for something and the universe will grant it” BS. But as has been noted here, many self help books are based on this mush. Although I will make one observation: if there is one thing that obscessed me throughout my life, it’s achieving better sound reproduction. I’ve devoted huge percentages of my waking day and my daydream time before sleep to planning, devising and realizing that goal. The problem is that I am not doing that with making money. I don’t know how to. Or I have some concrete-bound thought process that fails to understand that if I become interested in wealth and pursue it the way I did sound equipment, that all else would be added unto me. In other words, I can obscess myself with tangible, attainable goals (to me, that is), but goals that seem out of my reach, I don’t even try, because I believe it is futile and a waste of time. It took me from 1976 to the present to build my dream sound system. But I was totally obscessed with it. Now, some other things are not as well under my control, like dating, when I was a young man. Even though I would obscess myself about a girl, I was constantly rejected. In my diary, I counted 108 rejections, from age 16 to age 40, when I gave up on love. So obscession is not enough. There has to be more to the success formula. I sometimes feel that if I could be capable of having “faith” –something that my understanding of Objectivism has removed from my life—that somehow I could generate the positive attitude. Many of these successful people are mystical. Even my wife—she’s a Catholic, and she’s quite happy. She doesn’t worry about the future. In fact, she lives very much in the moment. I try to tell her to save money for retirement, but she insists on living for today, because we don’t know if tomorrow will come (citing that one can’t predict if one will live long enough to benefit from living austere in the now so we can have a future). It would really be helpful if I could talk to rich, successful people and learn how their mind works, and simply copy that. But that’s what Tony Robbins and Napolean Hill did. But I’d like to do it for myself, without the mystical slant, in a way that has meaning for me. If Objectivism is a “philosophy for living” then it seems reasonable to conclude that there would be some Objectivists working on solving that ever so important challenge of developing effective means to achieve wealth. Certainly Objectivism would be more powerful if it’s followers were all rich and powerful people, instead of impoverished people like my parents were. At any rate, I’ll eventually buy Locke’s book “How to Make a Billion Dollars”, because at least his writing will be consistent with my belief system. Unfortunately, Hill’s book has turned me off with his primacy of consciousness BS. I am the man in the rowboat, just five feet from the dropoff at Niagara Falls, the man who just uttered the words, “Oh, shit!” Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hunterrose Posted February 2, 2007 Report Share Posted February 2, 2007 I am the man in the rowboat, just five feet from the dropoff at Niagara Falls, the man who just uttered the words, “Oh, shit!”Fitting. I suspect the successful man you so often speak of (be he Objectivist or not) would not waste time berating his predicament. Nor would he bitch about the probability or consequences of failure. If you want something, you've got to take it. You aren't. Objectivism has made me painfully aware of the injustices I am facing, of what’s wrong with the world, and that negativity is painful to endure. How does one live happily in an irrational world? Ignorance truly IS bliss.You give up too easily. Man up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mweiss Posted February 2, 2007 Author Report Share Posted February 2, 2007 Fitting. I suspect the successful man you so often speak of (be he Objectivist or not) would not waste time berating his predicament. Nor would he bitch about the probability or consequences of failure. If you want something, you've got to take it. You aren't. You give up too easily. Man up. Here's the current problem: I don't know what to do now. Every means of making money that I can think of has reached a dead end. After six months of prospecting and telemarketing, with zero results, do you think I was mistaken to lose my ambition to continue beating what seems to be a 'dead horse'? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inspector Posted February 2, 2007 Report Share Posted February 2, 2007 Galileo Blogs: I use the larger font because I can’t see the small print in most of the posts. I’ll turn your statement around and say “can you use a larger font? With all due respect, you reply is virtually unreadable with that tiny font.” <IT guy hat> Did you know you can adjust the size of text in your browser? If you're using firefox or Internet Explorer, just go to view--->text size. Rather than making it annoying for everyone, you can make both your text and ours quite legible for yourself. </hat> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inspector Posted February 2, 2007 Report Share Posted February 2, 2007 (edited) After six months of prospecting and telemarketing, with zero results, do you think I was mistaken to lose my ambition to continue beating what seems to be a 'dead horse'? I told you before that Primerica stuff is flimflam. You're obviously too honest to be a flimflam man, so it doesn't work for you. How could it? But your big, huge, mistake here is to see the momentary financial success of a few flimflam men, as well as the appearance of contentment in the faithful, and conclude that you're getting a raw deal. Listen, A is A. They get theirs in the end. You shouldn't envy them. Can I give you a full explanation as to why faith-based "thinking" or flimflam is bad right here and now? No, I can't. Not near enough room or time. But you've read Objectivism: you should know this. It's just that you've spent so many years orphaned from it that you've forgotten. Listen, I have a friend who spends every day surrounded by morons. It drives him completely up the wall. He gets fired from jobs for being stubborn and cranky (mostly from the morons he has to work with) and he's up to his eyeballs in debt. He has a LOT of the same problems as you (he even tried to work for Primerica once, if you believe that!). Everything you're saying to me... it's not new. You sound just like him in so many ways that it's freaky (even though he is likely less than half your age). He works in electronics, too. My friend's main problem is that he is too busy wallowing in self-pity to get his nose to the grindstone and do what it takes to make his life right. He has a lot of flawed ideas floating around in his head that Objectivism fixed right up for me. I tell him this, and he has a few Objectivist books, but he hasn't even so much as read a few pages. He's always too busy playing video games or whatever it is he does. I know that if he removed the faulty ideas from his head that are making him so angry at the world, he would do much better in his work. He wouldn't keep getting fired. He wouldn't keep scaring the ladies off (he's a big guy, so big and angry only attracts women who are funny in the head). In short, his life would improve greatly. But he just won't do it. Hunterrose's advice is quite keen: MAN UP. (that's, in another striking coincidence, exactly what I think of when I think of this friend of mine. Weird, huh?) You have already identified the following: 1) Your understanding of the philosophy is incomplete/flawed 2) You have a damaged psychology that is causing you to have a whole host of problems. (this one is especially evident, since even your co-workers are telling you so) You need to fix these issues before you even attempt some other money-making scheme.* The solution to the first is obvious: get your nose to those books and start reading, dammit. After you've done that, you can see if #2 falls in line. This is at least likely. If not, then you have already been given the contact info for professional help. *On this point: moneymaking schemes are clearly a bad idea; especially for you. Again, you sound like my friend in this regard. If you're anything like him, you will do best as a technician. You need an honest job working with your technical skill-set. Not one where you run a technical business because you're a technician, not a business owner. Different skill-set. No, you won't be a billionaire, but you will make more than in a throw-away job and you will be doing what you love. And you don't need to have a self-help book to know how to have a technical career; you just need some good qualifications to throw on your resume. Just get the philosophy in your head fixed so that you're not so angry you get fired. Edited February 2, 2007 by Inspector Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
necrovore Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 The part I have not been able to master is how to maintain a positive, happy attitude in the face of 100% failure. One failure after another, with no success in between is wearing me down. Objectivism might have something relevant to say about this. I was listening to Leonard Peikoff's Induction in Physics and Philosophy lectures, and in the very first lecture he said that enumeration does not lead to valid generalizations. He says that a valid generalization is one that can extend to the totality of the universe, even into places you cannot observe, such as the past and the distant future. The laws of physics are such generalizations. Such sweeping generalizations cannot be reached by enumerating instances. Sometimes thousands of instances are not enough to establish the truth of a generalization, and sometimes (as in Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment which proved that lightning was electricity) the truth can be established from a single instance. Peikoff cites the famous philosophical problem of the swans, where a conventional philosopher sees a whole bunch of swans, and concludes, "All swans are white," and then one day he sees a black swan, and he says, "Oh, no! My generalization is ruined! Certainty is impossible to man!" It seems like you are suffering from the same thing except in reverse: you want to see a black swan (the "black swan of success" ) but you haven't seen it, and so you have concluded that, since you have only seen white swans so far, the black swan doesn't exist. But you're not comfortable with that, because it seems that other people can find the black swan. Does that sound right? Peikoff goes on to say that generalizations formed by enumeration are invalid because they are arbitrary (in the OPAR Chapter 5 sense). In order to prove that a generalization is valid you have to identify a causal relation; you have to identify what in the nature of the entities involved causes the generalization to be true. This means that if you do not know what about the nature of your business relations is causing them to fail, you cannot know with certainty that they will all fail. So if you encounter repeated failures, you should keep trying, and you should also active-mindedly look for the cause of the failures (which may involve changing things around just to see if it makes any difference). If you ever find the cause, then it will either be something you can correct, in which case you will know what to do, or something you cannot, in which case you will be able to abandon the effort with a clear conscience. Thomas Edison knew that something about the filaments in his light bulbs was causing them not to work. He kept changing the material that made up the filament. He tried thousands of materials before finally finding success. He did not have any reason to conclude that no effective material existed. Even though you probably can't afford the lecture courses, what I just said about them may be of some use to you. (It certainly is to me. It just occurred to me today. Thanks for prompting me to think of it!) (Also, it occurs to me just now, if the philosopher with the swans forms generalizations by enumeration, wouldn't thousands of generalizations have to be ruined before he could claim that certainty is impossible to man? Dr. Peikoff didn't mention that during the lectures. ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thales Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 I think the crux of my challenge boils down to two things: How to rekindle “passion”, to become obscessed with something to the point where I let nothing get in my way. To discover, understand and implement the concrete steps that are requireed in order to attain wealth. This is a very hard question, because it's personal to your talents and interests. But, here is one idea and it's just one idea. Determine what you would love doing. Presumably you have a knowledge base in some field that you can leverage so you aren't starting at ground zero. If its topology then I presume you have plenty of math, which is one of the best tools you can have in the technology field. Use that knowledge base as a jumping off point. Once you have decided on an area you want to pursue, take out a piece of paper and a pencil and spend a day, or a week writing down ten tentative inventions, i.e. come up with ideas for products or services you think will do well in the market, or that you would just love to create and see, depending on how much money is a factor in you goal. Then, spend a day or week (you have to have deadlines and goals, otherwise you'll never get anything done) deciding on which of the inventions you think you can make a go of and do best in. The longer range your goal, the more time you must spend in preparing to take it on and thinking through the implications. Try to anticipate the hard problems and tackle as many of those upfront as you can, so that you can more quickly decide if your path is the right one. After deciding on a goal, throw yourself at the project. Will yourself to work at it. Work at being passionate about it, by talking about it all the time, thinking about it all the time, drawing it out, and re-inventing the idea all the time. Dream about it, glorify it to yourself and find knowledgeable critics of it to give you insightful pointers. Read about it, write about it and work on it. Set out your goals to achieve it as best you can. Immerse yourself in it, and focus on what you love about it. Build up more and more inertia. Visualize your end, and take steps to achieve it. For a professional's advice, maybe Edwin Locke's book on goal seeking might be a good idea, along with his Prime Movers book mentioned above? Goal Setting I get the feeling that Objectivism lacks the focus on how to make money and great wealth. It’s benefits are on a broader scale, but when it comes to things like rekindling passion, setting the proper mindset for success, and executing a specific plan for making money, Ayn Rand did not seem to address that. In fact, I never knew any rich Objectivists. All of them seem to be struggling students, or regular folks with regular jobs, stuck in the same situation as most any mediocre person. Maybe Objectivism is so tied to reality that it precludes mental creativeness and believing that the mind is in tune with the universe in the ways that Hill describes. If I could only believe that, perhaps I could hypnotize myself into success. Sadly, I’m unable to benefit from Mr. Hill’s writing because it is incompatible with Objectivism. The guy who came up with the idea of Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales, is an Objectivist. The billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, was strongly influenced by The Fountainhead when he was making his fortune. It was the only book he was reading during the period, and he read it several times to inspire him. T.J. Rodgers, owners of Cypress Semiconductor, has been strongly influenced by Ayn Rand. Highly successful fantasy author Terry Goodkind is a big fan of Ayn Rand, and perhaps an Objectivist. The late Mike Mentzer, the world class body builder, was an Objectivist. Steve Ditko, the creator of Spiderman is an Objectivist. The last three included the ideas of Objectivism in their work. There are many more famous people I know of who have been strongly inspired by Ayn Rand. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inspector Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 Mweiss, After some thought on the matter, the central problem of yours seems to be the Malevolent Universe premise. I've dug up a few quotes: The only explanation I see is the "malevolent universe" idea. ... People nowadays think that the universe is malevolent, that reality is evil, that by the essential nature of the world, man is doomed to suffering and frustration; and therefore, if any fundamental principles could be discovered in objective reality, it would have to be the principles of evil. So these people prefer to avoid discovering such principles, and they think that to be practical one has to cheat reality in some way, that one can hope to survive only by fooling the laws of the universe (though how they expect to do that I can't imagine), since their natural fate should really be horror and destruction. Every code of ethics is based on and derived from a metaphysics, that is: from a theory about the fundamental nature of the universe in which man lives and acts. The altruist ethics is based on a "malevolent universe" metaphysics, on the theory that man, by his very nature, is helpless and doomed—that success, happiness, achievement are impossible to him—that emergencies, disasters, catastrophies are the norm of his life and that his primary goal is to combat them. Ayn Rand, ... advocating as she does an objective approach to ethics, holds that pleasure is moral. Happiness, therefore, is not only possible, but more: it is the normal condition of man. Ayn Rand calls this conclusion, which is essential to the Objectivist world view, the "benevolent universe" premise. "Benevolence" in this context is not a synonym for kindness; it does not mean that the universe cares about man or wishes to help him. The universe has no desires; it simply is. Man must care about and adapt to it, not the other way around. If he does adapt to it, however, then the universe is "benevolent" in another sense: "auspicious to human life." If a man does recognize and adhere to reality, then he can achieve his values in reality; he can and, other things being equal, he will. For the moral man, failures, though possible, are an exception to the rule. The rule is success. The state of consciousness to be fought for and expected is happiness. The rejection of this viewpoint is what Ayn Rand calls the "malevolent universe" premise (others have called it the "tragic sense of life"). This premise states that man cannot achieve his values; that successes, though possible, are an exception; that the rule of human life is failure and misery. Like any conscious creature, a man on the benevolent-universe premise is well acquainted with pain. His insignia, however, is his refusal to take pain seriously, his refusal to grant it metaphysical significance. To him, pleasure is a revelation of reality—the reality where life is possible. But pain is merely a stimulus to corrective action, and to the question <opar_343> such action presupposes. The question is not "What's the use?" but "What can I do?" We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster [explains a character in Atlas Shrugged]. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it—and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural.(19) This view of the world becomes in due course a self-fulfilling prophecy (as does its opposite). The man who refuses to blame his problems on reality thereby keeps alive his only means of solving them. The benevolent-universe premise has nothing to do with "optimism," if this means Leibniz's idea that "all is for the best." A great many things in the human realm are clearly for the worst. Nor does the premise mean that "the truth will prevail," unless one adds the critical word "ultimately." Nor is benevolence the attitude of a Pollyanna; it is not the pretense that there is always a chance of success, even in those situations where there isn't any. The corrective to all these errors, however, is not "pessimism," which is merely another form of pretense. The corrective is realism, i.e., the recognition of reality, along with the knowledge of life that this brings: the knowledge that happiness, though scarce, is no miracle. It is scarce because it is a culmination that only a demanding cause, moral and philosophical, can produce. It is no miracle because, when the cause is enacted, its effect follows naturally—and inevitably. Any of this sound familiar? Will you at least consider the idea that you need to once again study Objectivism, and this time more fully understand it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mweiss Posted February 3, 2007 Author Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 Another consolodated post: Starting with Inspector: I am aware that I can change the font size in Internet Explorer, however, the font used for composition remains tiny. And I’m reading on a 21” monitor (yeah, cataracts, it comes with old age). If the ability to use a font that suits the poster is an annoyance to readers, then why does the admin enable such features? It should be turned off so that everyone is using a common font size. I disagree that Primerica is a flim-flam operation. More likely, it is the Nicola Tesla of insurance/finance companies—heavily maligned by competing companies who have been running a non-stop smear campaign against Primerica. Even RipoffReport has ‘fessed up to drawing false reports on Primerica: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff10157.htm EDitor's Comment: Rip-off Report Investigation: Primerica gets a POSITIVE RATING in customer support from Rip-off Report and is fulfilling its commitment to provide excellent customer service. Primerica pledges to resolve complaints and address representative issues. For a long time this EDitor had concerns about Primerica because of the number of Reports about them. For many months Rip-off Report was looking into the company, even before they contacted us to resolve any issues and mostly misunderstandings being posted by competitors. With over 100,000 representatives and 6 million clients, Primerica is bound to be the subject of a certain number of complaints about improper agent conduct, as well as product and administrative complaints. Rip-Off's investigation found such complaints, but importantly also found that Primerica is committed to resolving such complaints quickly and doing everything possible to satisfy its clients. It also takes appropriate action against any of its representatives who are found to have conducted themselves improperly or unethically. We believe that the number of complaints against this company, whether through the Internet or other channels, is small when put into the context of its enormous size. Most big companies would never commit themselves like Primerica has. and http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff229393.htm SOME COMMENTS ABOUT PRIMERICA SEEM OBSESSIVE TO THE POINT OF BEING RIDICULOUS Another factor to consider is Rip-off Report has learned that, especially when a company is successful, some Internet and other complaints put forth as consumer complaints are, in fact, phony complaints planted by competitors to harm the reputation of the company. We have learned that a number of postings over time on Rip-off Report have indeed come from competitors of Primerica who wish to harm their reputation to gain a competitive advantage. Some have even become obsessive to the point of being ridiculous.. Any comments they make are made because of their own financial self interest and should be taken with a grain of salt when you read them. A BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY WORTH CONSIDERING Not everyone is a sales person - not every one is made for every business and your success depends entirely on the effort you put into it, but, the investment involved is very minimal in light of the training and licensing that it pays for - all this talk about $199 being a rip-off. I guess people are wondering "why do I have to pay to start a job?" But Primerica isn't a JOB, You're starting a business; how many other businesses can you start for less than $200? Life insurance pre-licensing education is provided at no additional cost to you. I myself have spent the better part of a year with this company and I have concluded that there is nothing shady or underhanded about their business operation. A good book that helped me to understand the “rah-rah” nature of their motivational seminars was “COACH” the Story of Art Williams. He was a football coach, and he retained the sports model of motivation when he moved into the insurance business because of a personal dissatisfaction with how his mother was taken advantage of by the insurance company that paid his father’s death claim. No, the problem is not the company… it is ME. Primerica is a great business if you LOVE people, genuinely enjoy striking up conversations with anyone you meet in public, and have a genuine concern for other people’s well-being (in that you can help them and earn money doing so). My problem is that I find most people repulsive and I have tried to avoid interacting with people—especially Americans—for much of my later years in life. I got into Primerica out of desparation, not desire to be in that field. The wrong reasons. I can see that now. Yes, I do have a problem with the sometimes religious bent of some of the trainers, but they do have one strong attribute the Ayn Rand approved of: the desire “to make money.” I’ll admit that I have much of the same problems as your friend. I get distracted. I have a wife and a daughter who bombards me every ten minutes. That’s why it takes me two hours to write this reply. I also have severe memory lapses. I set out to do a list of things, and halfway through, I forget the rest of the items. I’m forgetting things so frequently that it is becoming alarming. I keep telling myself it’s depression doing that, and that it’s nothing more, nothing physically wrong with my brain. I do have a great deal of “noise” going on and find it extremely hard to focus—even for five minutes—unless it’s solving an amplifier problem or designing a subwoofer. Funny how when my interest is piqued, my memory seems perfect, but for general things like grocery shopping, it’s practically useless… Yes, I’ve been away from Objectivist reading for far too long. 1976 was the last time I read an essay. My mind has “rusted” and I’ve been exposed to semi-mystical ideas quite a bit. In fact, my own father, who was an ardent student of Objectivism, after my mom died (just after Ayn Rand’s death) and a few years before my father’s passing, started to dabble in mystical ideas. He even watched Dr. Gene Scott on television in the mid 1980s and we used to meet at a diner and discuss the possibility of an afterlife, his own experiences with his mother’s ghost coming to visit him moments before she died, my mom’s “tunnel to the light” experience and so on. So I became more open to ideas about things we do not understand in conventional terms. The death of a loved one often does that to one. And as I get prepared to “meet my maker”, I too, am finding myself more open to considering (perhaps hoping) the afterlife and other things for which there is no sensory evidence. That said, I think there is much practical value in having non-contradictory premises, especially in a world political architecture. I consider Objectivism to be a philosophy for living in this world. But I am not convinced that there is nothing more beyond the here and now. I do, however, need to refresh my mind on the principles of Objectivism and see if I can regain the mental clarity I had 40 years ago. I know that I am a “technician” type. My friend, Bill, who is very perceptive, pointed that out to me. He said that I have a serial mind, not an associative mind, and that I am a “mechanic”. But “mechanics” never make a good living and live in beautiful homes. My parents instilled in me the belief that I could be anything I wanted, and as rich as I wanted to be. I have this stubborn belief and the refusal to accept “my lot in life” if that is to be a lowly bench technician. (Incidentally, I was a lowly bench technician for longer than many of you have even been alive.) The pay was low, the work repetious and I simply could not go on. I had periods of unemployment and switched jobs a lot. Then after retirement, I had no retirement benefits, so I went into businesses for myself, and failed multiple times. But I was free from the sense of confinement of a 9-5 job. My self-employed years have been the happiest, but the lack of money to pay property taxes, which are easily 500% larger than all my other expenses combined, soon started to create stress in my life. Otherwise… I would be quite happy today, even earning below poverty level. It’s the pressure that society has placed upon me to earn a large income which is depressing the hell out of me. I don’t want to become just another senior citizen on the street. My gosh, they evicted a 77 year old woman from her paid-for home because of back taxes, a few years ago and it made the newspaper. I was appalled at that. Now I’m facing the same fate. Damaged pychology indeed. It started when I was a child. I was ugly looking, big and out of place and that made me a target for cruel jokes and ridicule. From about 3rd grade on to high school that went on, and I suppose that instilled a hatred of people and made the conditions optimal for my xenophobia. When I began to have my first high school crushes, things only got worse. Here I was, this “creature” and socially inept as can be, trying to approach these girls, one by one throughout the high school years. Man, did I get shot down badly, over and over. Almost forty years would pass before the marvel of internet meeting caused me to meet my betrothed in the Philippines. Talk about mysticism—I thought the event was so extraordinary that it must have been devinely brought about! Even more perplexing was the fact that one of my clients bought a home brew piece of pirate radio gear that I invented, for $2100, which paid for my airline ticket costs for the first trip. Just as peculiar was the fact that I had FAITH that this lady wasn’t putting me up to a cruel joke, or worse, an abduction plot. I flew there with the belief that somehow, this was going to work out. I should note that at that time, my thinking was furthest from Objectivist thinking. As I started to spend more time around here on OOL, coincidentally, things got worse in my personal life, particularly finances. I am convinced that prescription drugs are not the solution to my problems. And since I can’t make the tax man go away, that won’t solve my problem either. So the solution is in earning a lot of money. But once you get past a certain age, society doesn’t want to have anything to do with you. I am relegated to the Home of the Old and the Useless. Employers don’t want to hire elderly because of the medical insurance issues. And requirements are stringent these days. This is a competitive workforce with employers demanding more and more education, even for simple jobs. I have to admit, I’m a dinosaur. This new world moves too fast for me to make heads or tails of it. What I love? Well, I can relate this: Two summers ago, when I did the videotaping of the Danbury Symphony, as hired by Leroy Anderson’s son, Kurt, I was in my element and had a terrific time. Setup, recording and tear down went perfectly; there were zero problems. I executed the entire process flawlessly. The recording came out beautifully, and I was personally very pleased with the technical excellence of the recording, and how my cost-effective choice of recording equipment performed second-to-none. I was paid $800 to do the session, plus edit and produce it onto a DVD. (For economic perspective, according to Ralph LaBarge’s book “DVD Authoring & Production” a project like this would cost over $56,000 and take six months to go from shoot to final DVD, if it were done commercially. I did it in less than two weeks and the result was the same, or better. So if I had my wish, I’d be recording classical concerts and getting paid the big bucks for being the one that can make recordings worthy of the $500,000 loudspeakers of rich audiophiles. I know that I love music. It is my passion. I am a music appreciator. But I love to compose music too. However, I’m not talented enough to become a notable artist. I doubt that I’ll ever be. But I’m content to dabble in it on the Kurzweils. I have a great deal of fun recreating a symphony on them and making it sound just like an acoustic orchestra. Unfortunately, there is no money in this, as far as I can determine. One think I’ve noted a while back: If I’m working on a project that I have a vested interest in, I’m into it. If it’s for someone like an employer, I’m not into it, but just doing it to put in my time and collect my pay. When I shoot video and record sound, in business for myself, I have a vested interest and desire to do the absolute best that is physically possible. And I can, quite frankly, make recordings that put even Telarc Records to shame. Too bad I haven’t the clout to become a recording label and get the big gigs. I’ve spent two years just begging the Bridgeport Symphony (a unionized professional orchestra) to let me record them at no charge. I’m their webmaster, and I spoke at length with their management staff and attended some of their rehearsals and took copious amounts of notes. What I’ve come to learn is that there is so much red tape involved with getting permission to record that it’s going nowhere so far. Such a gig would be my magnum opus and render the opportunity to show my abilities to potential clients. You know something else? When I’m engaged in this type of project, I feel young again, almost like I did when I was in my 20s and 30s and I have plenty of energy to get the equipment set up, to man the cameras and focus intently on shooting the video, as the audio takes care of itself, having been set up by me before the concert begins. The sweetest moment of all, is when I get home, unload the master tracks from the laptop and make a preliminary stereo mixdown to hear for the first time on my home brew sound system. That… is ecstacy for me. It definitely isn’t being stuck behind a workbench in some factory all day, repairing modems. necrovore: Leonard Peikoff does like to use a lot of birds in his analogies. I remember when I attended the last lecture I can remember, “Introduction to Objective Communication” in January 1980 at the Statler Hotel on 9th & 33rd St in NYC, he did his “crow epistomology” example. (There was also the atheist vs. theist debate in which there was this debater from the audience who argued the theist side, being a former Catholic, and since there was only a tiny lavelier mic for him to use, he was practically swallowing it during the debate and making the recording tech quite angry as a result. It was one of the humourous moments I recall from Peikoff’s lectures, but that’s another story.) I know that the “black swan of success,” as you put it, exists, but just not for me, in my current frame of mind. It seems as if my mental aura is pushing success away. But then, I look like a homicidal maniac, someone you’d expect to be the killer in a murder mystery film and not the type you’d want to meet on the street or place your trust in, unless you got to know me really well first. The problem here is that when met with an UNBROKEN line of failures, it becomes emotionally almost impossible to believe that success is possible. Once that happens, something in one’s body language radiates that lack of success, which breeds more rejection by client prospects. Now if I were successful recruiting and selling in the first weeks when I hit the streets fresh out of training classes, I’d show success in my body language and my confidence would be contagious and thus when I prospected, people would sense that “here is a successful man, maybe I can share in his success if I stick with him.” And I would probably be an effective recruiter and salesman. I’ve been an inventor, too. In the 1960s and 1970s, I was trying to invent some specialized broadcast equipment. It took me a couple of years to crack some modulation schemes and effectively design a modulator that met FCC Part 73.21 specifications. But I did it. I was obsessed with it for many years and I went on to invent a noise reduction system that would both get rid of most of the hiss in FM reception and also restore the impact of percussion sounds, the way the original CD sounded. The concept was pretty novel, and I went to many radio stations, promoting the idea, and finally went to several patent attornies, and investors, seeking to bring what could have made me a rich man, a la Ray Dolby’s Dolby Systems, today, but no one wanted to take a chance on something in a highly-regulated industry like broadcasting. The attornies and investors basically told me that it’s a good idea, but ‘by the time the FCC approves it, if it ever does, we’ll be dead and gone’. They were somewhat correct. I remember when Leonard Kahn was experimenting with AM stereo broadcast technology in 1962. It took him to 1976 to get a pilot test on WNBC Radio. Today, AM stereo is pretty common, but has been made obsolete by HD Radio (IBOC digital transmission). I spoke with Leonard Kahn a number of times over the years and he struck me as an arrogant person, later, somewhat of a bitterly-arrogant person. It takes a toll on one to have devoted one’s life to a singular goal, only to be outmoded by a massive shift in industry standards. I too, move too slowly. It can take me 3-10 years to perfect a technology, and by the time I do, the industry I targeted has completely obsoleted my invention. Successful people are able to react quickly to changing markets and have fertile minds which are constantly coming up with new ideas when obstacles are presented them. OTOH, when I encounter an obstacle, it brings me totally to an abrupt halt. I don’t just get a new idea pop into my head just like that and work around the obstacle—I get put out of the race entirely. I think the ability to rapidly think around obstacles is a talent. So my dilemma is, I’m not smart enough to be successful, but I will never be happy until I achieve the lifestyle of success. In reality, I live in poverty and am months, maybe weeks from a formal eviction from my own property… because I cannot pay the randsom fees that the town levied on my ramshackle abode. Thales: I think I know what I love doing. Problem is, there is little money in it and it’s a rarefied field that only respected engineers with credentials and reputation can get into. It’s a tied up field, IOW. Math? I flunked algebra multiple times. I can’t even balance my own checkbook! Yes, I am no good at math, but I can repair sophisticated broadcast equipment. Paradoxical, isn’t it? Just two weeks ago, one of my very expensive, very powerful QSC power amplifiers tripped a breaker and let out it’s magic smoke. Realizing I didn’t have $100 for round trip freight to send this boat anchor to Cali for repairs, which would have probably cost the better part of a grand, I spent the next five hours disassembling the amp. I was very concerned that the repair might be beyond my abilities because it uses sophisticated new switching power supply technology. How else would they get 7,000 watts into a box weighing just 59 lbs? So I disassembled with the intent of isolating the problem. I ended up, five hours later, getting to the power supply chopper MOSFETs, locating where the smoke had come from. I determined that one of the MOSFETs had shorted. And then I proceeded to identify the part and scour the internet looking for a replacement. Turned out very expensive, being $58 a piece with minimum order $300 and 21 day wait for next shipment! I then called QSC, as I discovered that they had a kit for just $157 that had all the MOSFETs and other components that typically fail, so I bought the parts kit and did the repair myself. I had the amp back up and running in another 5 hours after starting the replacement of parts. That encounter taught me that even newfangled technology, however complicated, may not always be beyond this dinosaur’s ability to figure out and repair. (Incidentally, it failed while I was playing the Ayn Rand/Mike Wallace interview…almost an ominous coincidence there.) As for ideas for inventions, I’m coming up dry. I really haven’t had any original idea pop into my head since 1985. Now I could decide on a goal of becoming the world’s best and most respected audio recording engineer, but I can’t even get a gig with the local unionize symphony that I already work for in capacity of a webmaster, so how could I break into the field of recording symphony orchestras in the New England area, the way Telarc records orchestras in Cleveland, Ohio? Jack Renner is making plenty of money at it, but I haven’t a clue where to start over here. I’ve put ads up in music stores, offering my recoring services, but not even one inquiry has resulted. The fact is, I’ve been trying to start a media-based business recording video and sound since I retired from the 9-5 world in the 1980s and it hasn’t worked yet. I am pretty much convinced that I just don’t have the right connections and the reputation to get the gigs. Working for Leroy Anderson’s son is one thing, but the man is pretty low-key and I’ve not gotten any work as a result of that concert (although he has asked me if I want to record another concert of his in March and I of course said “yes!”) But I can’t pay the bills making $800 every other year recording volunteer orchestras and a conductor who is trying to keep his father’s music alive in the public eye. You see, I have had goals in the past, and I’ve been passionate about them to the point of becoming myopic and stubborn, but to date, all I have is debts and a lot of hard knocks. I wish I were fifty years younger and still had energy and a lack of cynicism. I’m burned out from all these escapades. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thales Posted February 3, 2007 Report Share Posted February 3, 2007 Just two weeks ago, one of my very expensive, very powerful QSC power amplifiers tripped a breaker and let out it’s magic smoke. Realizing I didn’t have $100 for round trip freight to send this boat anchor to Cali for repairs, which would have probably cost the better part of a grand, I spent the next five hours disassembling the amp. I was very concerned that the repair might be beyond my abilities because it uses sophisticated new switching power supply technology. How else would they get 7,000 watts into a box weighing just 59 lbs? So I disassembled with the intent of isolating the problem. I ended up, five hours later, getting to the power supply chopper MOSFETs, locating where the smoke had come from. I determined that one of the MOSFETs had shorted. And then I proceeded to identify the part and scour the internet looking for a replacement. Turned out very expensive, being $58 a piece with minimum order $300 and 21 day wait for next shipment! I then called QSC, as I discovered that they had a kit for just $157 that had all the MOSFETs and other components that typically fail, so I bought the parts kit and did the repair myself. I had the amp back up and running in another 5 hours after starting the replacement of parts. That encounter taught me that even newfangled technology, however complicated, may not always be beyond this dinosaur’s ability to figure out and repair. (Incidentally, it failed while I was playing the Ayn Rand/Mike Wallace interview…almost an ominous coincidence there.) You're speaking my language. I have a EE degree myself, although I work as a programmer! The EE degree, however, comes in real handy because I know (and keep advancing) physics and math, and I find that most other programmers don't have this knowledge base. Have you thought of a repair business? If you can fix these things, put up an ad to repair amplifiers in the local paper. Who knows, by doing this you may come into contact with lots of people in the recording industry and get a better gig? I know a guy who repaired VCRs, when they were more common. He was a retired engineer, and did the work out of his home. He had more business than he could handle, but he gets really heavily into electronics, theory and all. So, he loves that sort of thing. Another of his big interests (like you) was music. He had all kinds of ideas for musical instruments to invent (using his knowledge of electronics), and actually built three I remember. As for ideas for inventions, I’m coming up dry. I really haven’t had any original idea pop into my head since 1985.Come on. Inventions usually don't just come to you; you've got to proactively seek them out. Granted, there is some luck involved, but if you put forth an effort (ala Edison), you are sure to come up with ideas. Just ten ideas to start with in areas of your interest could push you over the top. They don't have to be world beaters, and when I say invention, I include services as well as products. For instance, for repairing amplifiers, you could include some extra benefit, such as a noise filter addition to customers. If you were to design the noise filter, then maybe people would come to like it, and want it. You're telling me flat out you have real skills, and from what glean, you do. But, you're going to have to learn to like people, to look for the best in people, because dealing with people is part of life. That, frankly, may be your big problem! Now I could decide on a goal of becoming the world’s best and most respected audio recording engineer, but I can’t even get a gig with the local unionize symphony that I already work for in capacity of a webmaster, so how could I break into the field of recording symphony orchestras in the New England area, the way Telarc records orchestras in Cleveland, Ohio? Jack Renner is making plenty of money at it, but I haven’t a clue where to start over here. I’ve put ads up in music stores, offering my recoring services, but not even one inquiry has resulted. The fact is, I’ve been trying to start a media-based business recording video and sound since I retired from the 9-5 world in the 1980s and it hasn’t worked yet. I am pretty much convinced that I just don’t have the right connections and the reputation to get the gigs. Working for Leroy Anderson’s son is one thing, but the man is pretty low-key and I’ve not gotten any work as a result of that concert (although he has asked me if I want to record another concert of his in March and I of course said “yes!”) But I can’t pay the bills making $800 every other year recording volunteer orchestras and a conductor who is trying to keep his father’s music alive in the public eye. Here's the sad news about classical music, it makes very little money in comparison to most other genres. The same goes for jazz. The biggest sellers are country, rock, and rap, and you may have no interest in any of those. The point is, the whole area of classical music is not lucrative for any but a handful of people. I would guess Pavarotti makes good money, but I'm not sure many others do. You see, I have had goals in the past, and I’ve been passionate about them to the point of becoming myopic and stubborn, but to date, all I have is debts and a lot of hard knocks. I wish I were fifty years younger and still had energy and a lack of cynicism. I’m burned out from all these escapades. NEVER SAY DIE! Use your failures as motivation to come back and do better. Use them to learn so that you can advance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hunterrose Posted February 4, 2007 Report Share Posted February 4, 2007 Here's the current problem: I don't know what to do now. ...a project like this would cost over $56,000 and take six months to go from shoot to final DVD, if it were done commercially. I did it in less than two weeks and the result was the same, or better. If I had my wish, I’d be recording classical concerts and getting paid the big bucks for being the one that can make recordings worthy of the $500,000 loudspeakers of rich audiophiles. I know that I love music. It is my passion. What do you mean "you don't know what to do"? After six months of prospecting and telemarketing, with zero results, do you think I was mistaken to lose my ambition to continue beating what seems to be a 'dead horse'?I'm also wary of Primerica. But nevertheless, you've seen the successes firsthand. And you've seen what it takes. If you were physically/mentally incapable of becoming one of those Primerica "successes", then it would be a "dead horse" for you. But in your case, you could do what it takes to succeed... you just choose not to. I wish I were fifty years younger and still had energy and a lack of cynicism. I’m burned out from all these escapades.Excuses, excuses. You know what you have to do. Do it. Or don't. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thales Posted February 4, 2007 Report Share Posted February 4, 2007 What do you mean "you don't know what to do"? I'm also wary of Primerica. But nevertheless, you've seen the successes firsthand. And you've seen what it takes. If you were physically/mentally incapable of becoming one of those Primerica "successes", then it would be a "dead horse" for you. But in your case, you could do what it takes to succeed... you just choose not to. Excuses, excuses. You know what you have to do. Do it. Or don't. I agree, Hunteross. The guy is clearly intelligent and has talent. The Movie Shawshank Redemption had a great line it, and it always helped me: "Get busy living or get busy dying. That's god damned right"... Link to Audio File Another great example of a success story is One Red Paper Clip. The guy started with one red paper clip, and trade up over a years time and ended up with a house! Just an example of what can be done. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aequalsa Posted February 4, 2007 Report Share Posted February 4, 2007 The Movie Shawshank Redemption had a great line it, and it always helped me: "Get busy living or get busy dying. That's god damned right"... Link to Audio File Oh, thanks. I love that line. It still gives me chills. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inspector Posted February 4, 2007 Report Share Posted February 4, 2007 Another consolodated post: Starting with Inspector: I am aware that I can change the font size in Internet Explorer, however, the font used for composition remains tiny. I know in firefox, the font size of the composition changes when you alter the settings. You might also try lowering your screen resolution, or maybe just write the post in large fonts, then change it back before submitting it. As for Primerica, I'm not a competing insurance company. As I said, my friend worked for them. I heard about what he did and what he sold, and really it's about salesmanship and not substance. That, in my book, is flimflam. All sales of this kind, to me, is flimflam. Any place that asks you to sell to friends and family is a dishonest operation. The product should sell itself. And please don't come at me with that brainwashing they give you. It's friggin life insurance. I don't know how many people would actually benefit from such a thing, but it's far less than Primerica would have you (or the client) believe. I suspect your more mystical associates are more successful in this industry because they can delude themselves better into thinking that Primerica is a Miracle and can "sell" that delusion to the customer. You, being more honest, can't do that to a person. So you don't do well. You blame yourself, but I think wrongly. Yes, you also sabotage yourself with your negativity. It is, to that extent, your fault. But I think the larger issue is that you are in a dishonest business, a largely (though not necessarily) dishonest profession (i.e. sales), and you're doing something you hate. Now, as to your other points: By technician, I didn't mean to imply "line monkey." My friend worked in that, too. He didn't like it much and for the same reasons as you. He was more happy doing R&D, but he can't advance in that because he has convinced himself that if he became an engineer, that he would be doing drawings all day and he wouldn't be allowed to build things anymore. I don't know the intimate details of the industry, but he may be right. Or, he may just be pessimistic. (read: malevolent universe) For your business, it sounds like you have no problem getting the work done. What you need is a business partner. Someone to handle finding the work, knowing what to charge, etc. But before you can go there, you have to lose the negative attitude. And you've heard my advice on that. The Movie Shawshank Redemption had a great line it, and it always helped me: "Get busy living or get busy dying. That's god damned right"... Link to Audio File That's key here, too. Mweiss, you say that you're thinking about dying and are tempted away from Objectivism by "the afterlife." Listen, it's one or the other. Get busy living, or get busy dying. If you want to think about "the afterlife," then you may as well forget about this one. It's either or. Choose. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatdogs12 Posted February 4, 2007 Report Share Posted February 4, 2007 Wow mweiss you sound depressed. Are you getting enough exercise and eating a good diet? There was a point I felt pretty similar to that, but I changed my diet and started exercising a lot and it really changed how I felt. As far as making money, there are a couple things to consider. The first is WHY your business failed. What was the cause? Most people who I see start businesses fail because they just are not able to get the revenue by going out there and selling or driving in customers. If that is the case then maybe you just need a little education on that subject matter. There is a great book called "No Cash No Fear" which sounds awful tacky but isn't. It's actually written by a guy who started 20 something businesses and you get to read what he did as he successfully got clients almost over night and how simple it can be. Not that it's necessarily easy. Back in 2003 I was homeless, but I got myself out of that and after 2 or 3 months working a low level job I started my own company and it was pretty much successful from the start because I knew how to get business. Secondly, money really isn't all there is to life. When I wasn't feeling good I thought about my money situation 24/7, I thought I had to be a billionaire. But as I got healthier really that desire went away and I didn't even care. I felt great physically so I didn't need the money to comfort me. Not saying that it would apply in your case, just shooting out some suggestions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thales Posted February 4, 2007 Report Share Posted February 4, 2007 Mweiss, you say that you're thinking about dying and are tempted away from Objectivism by "the afterlife." Listen, it's one or the other. Get busy living, or get busy dying. If you want to think about "the afterlife," then you may as well forget about this one. It's either or. Choose. Whoa... the whole idea was to give him the spark!. Everyone needs a spark from time to time. The line is a positive, not a negative. It says to you, if you're half way in between, then you aren't really living. So, get out there and live. Weiss comes across as somewhat depressed, but he also comes across as full of life and ideas, which you can tell by the way he writes. He comes across as personable, which makes it hard to believe he doesn't like people. We probably don't know all of the parameters he's up against, and what it is he needs to conquer to push forward. He's the best judge for that. He may even need the help of a pro who can break down his situation and tell him what he needs to conquer. Sometimes it only takes one or two battles to open up a path to success. Just defeat one or two of your demons by a concerted effort. This makes things managable, and puts you in control right away. As much as I'm not a fan of Nathaniel Branden, his book "The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem" I thought was quite good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mweiss Posted February 5, 2007 Author Report Share Posted February 5, 2007 You're speaking my language. I have a EE degree myself, although I work as a programmer! The EE degree, however, comes in real handy because I know (and keep advancing) physics and math, and I find that most other programmers don't have this knowledge base. Have you thought of a repair business? If you can fix these things, put up an ad to repair amplifiers in the local paper. Who knows, by doing this you may come into contact with lots of people in the recording industry and get a better gig? I know a guy who repaired VCRs, when they were more common. He was a retired engineer, and did the work out of his home. He had more business than he could handle, but he gets really heavily into electronics, theory and all. So, he loves that sort of thing. Another of his big interests (like you) was music. He had all kinds of ideas for musical instruments to invent (using his knowledge of electronics), and actually built three I remember. Come on. Inventions usually don't just come to you; you've got to proactively seek them out. Granted, there is some luck involved, but if you put forth an effort (ala Edison), you are sure to come up with ideas. Just ten ideas to start with in areas of your interest could push you over the top. They don't have to be world beaters, and when I say invention, I include services as well as products. For instance, for repairing amplifiers, you could include some extra benefit, such as a noise filter addition to customers. If you were to design the noise filter, then maybe people would come to like it, and want it. You're telling me flat out you have real skills, and from what glean, you do. But, you're going to have to learn to like people, to look for the best in people, because dealing with people is part of life. That, frankly, may be your big problem! Here's the sad news about classical music, it makes very little money in comparison to most other genres. The same goes for jazz. The biggest sellers are country, rock, and rap, and you may have no interest in any of those. The point is, the whole area of classical music is not lucrative for any but a handful of people. I would guess Pavarotti makes good money, but I'm not sure many others do. NEVER SAY DIE! Use your failures as motivation to come back and do better. Use them to learn so that you can advance. Thales, it’s nice to know there is another electronics-minded person here on OOL. I could talk about this stuff for hours on end. In fact, put me in a room full of sound engineers and subwoofers and amps, and I’m in heaven. (Too bad I missed the big ProSoundWeb “subwoofer shootout” at Club Rebel in Manhattan this past week—from the pictures, I can see they had a lot of fun, and the Bassmaxx woofers were so far ahead of any of the competition that a noise complaint was made from a 5th floor apartment ACROSS the street. That’s incredible. I love bass like that. ) I have run a repair shop for a few years back in the mid 1970s, but then electronics got to be ‘throw away’ and it was cheaper to replace than to repair, plus, coupled with the hassles of waiting for parts and customers always asking “where’s my amp” or “where’s my TV”, it got to be a grind and wasn’t very profitable at all. I do make a few $$ here and there on unexpected events. Last year, the engineer from the local radio station down the road from my house showed up and my door to tell me that he’s got a dumpster coming the next day and to take what I want or it goes in the dump. So I rescued 7 reel to reel tape decks and fixed them up and sold them on eBay. I made enough money to buy four Bassmaxx subwoofers, used demo units, and that gave me immense pleasure. (My eBay money is my play money.) But those events are extremely rare. Now since I repaired this QSC amplifier, and have learned that it’s a common failure mode, I had the idea of offering to buy up the failed units for a song and repair them and resell them on eBay. Again, that may happen, but probably rarely. What I really need is steady income of a large nature. The average family income in this town is $150K. My closest neighbors are both millionaires—one’s a day trader on Wall St and the other is a politician, land developer and owns the largest marina on the east coast. No doubt, I have the lowest income in the whole town, including the local homeless bums. As much as I like to tinker with designing electronics, I’m more of a user. I love to use my Kurzweils to make music and I relax every evening by playing the “Steinway grand” patch. In day to day living, I don’t notice any needs that could be filled. Sure, I’d like to develop a subwoofer that has no moving parts and excites the air directly by ionization, but I realize that is way over my head. I really can’t imagine a way to come up with 10 invention ideas. Perhaps it was last year, but somewhere during my daily life, I encountered some situation where I got an idea for a possible invention, but I think at the time I deemed it impractical to develop and so I forgot about it. Oh yeah, I was interested in saving energy in the winter, and thinking about ways to make my oil burner more efficient, so I came up with a concept for a flue damper that was solenoid operated and would close after the burner shut off, to keep the cold air from coming down the flue and cooling down the boiler. I sketched a drawing, showing safety limit switches and the damper door in a section of flue pipe, but that’s as far as I went. As it turns out, there already is such a thing for gas furnaces, but not for oil furnaces. Some people I spoke with told me it was a bad idea because it would cause condensation in the chimney by letting the chimney cool down too much, but I disagree and think the benefits outweigh the negatives. But even if I took that to Invention Submission Corporation, I’d pay them a fee and then who knows whether they would just sit on my idea indefinately? Yes, I do have some skills. I have a refined and highly trained ear for audio and recording/mixing. I’m a pretty good video editor, but not very creative. I know how to use the tools and if someone tells me how they want a video to be sliced up and presented, I can do that. I know how to set up microphones to produce superb realism in a recording. I know how to author a DVD using Scenarist. I’m pretty good in PhotoShop and Premiere Pro. I’ve also designed printed circuit boards and made my own boards here in the shop. My skillset is all over the map, basically. I think they call it “jack of all trades, master of none,” or something like that. Yes, sadly, Classical music is dying. I was talking to my entrepreneur friend about that last night and he pointed out a possible opportunity of me finding a way to educate the masses and make Classical become popular and profitable again. I rolled my eyes, thinking of all the Tupac and Madonna fans and YouTube users with their “me, being stupid” videos. Some tell me that I should write books. Having read Rand’s “The Simplest Thing in the World”, I long ago realized that fiction writing was a very challenging task. I have, for fun, begun writing three different fiction novels, starting back in 1985, on an old IBM Selectric typewriter and up to 1993, in MS Word. I’m a fan of Michael Crichton’s writing and I’m continuously astounded by the depth of research that is behind his books. I’m not sure if I could pull off that quality of fiction. One has to choose a salient topic, one that has a reasonable probability of happening in our lifetime, and research it’s topic at great length. Then there is character development, bringing them to life, creating a clear picture of their physical appearance and their personality types, making each character unique, and the skillful flow of the plot, all the way through several “false leads” to keep the reader in suspense all the way to the shocking conclusion that makes the reader go “WOW!” In a way, being a writer is one of the nicest ways to make a living—no commutes, no dealing with inane traffic laws or drunk drivers hitting you, and no exposure to the public and their viruses spreading everywhere. Much of today’s writing can be done with scripts forwarded via the internet. Albeit, writers often travel, which expands their perspective on the places they may be writing about. I really don’t know how to go about choosing one of these directions without regretting my decision. It seems that I need other skills, in marketing, before any of these directions will be viable income-earners. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mweiss Posted February 5, 2007 Author Report Share Posted February 5, 2007 Mweiss, After some thought on the matter, the central problem of yours seems to be the Malevolent Universe premise. I've dug up a few quotes: Any of this sound familiar? Will you at least consider the idea that you need to once again study Objectivism, and this time more fully understand it? If there was such a thing as a "Malevolent Government" premise, I would be in full agreement that this is what ails me. I do not consider the universe itself to be malevolent. I consider it neither good nor evil. It just is. However, it is people--particularly those with Altruistic premises that they choose to force upon me--that I consider a plague which is overtaking this world. Since religion is so prevalent, and one of the primary pillars of religion is Altruism, this provides the so-called 'moral foundation' behind taxation. It is the biblical 'man is they brother's keeper' concept upon which the justification of taxation is rationalized. Since these blind followers of dogma, who lack the creative ability to see how any alternative to taxation can work, are in the majority, and since majority rules (Democracy is just two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner), folks like myself are going to face constant turmoil as long as we exist on this earth. That is the whole crux of my problem--my sense of morality is incompatible with Fascist socialist society. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mweiss Posted February 5, 2007 Author Report Share Posted February 5, 2007 :angry:What do you mean "you don't know what to do"? I'm also wary of Primerica. But nevertheless, you've seen the successes firsthand. And you've seen what it takes. If you were physically/mentally incapable of becoming one of those Primerica "successes", then it would be a "dead horse" for you. But in your case, you could do what it takes to succeed... you just choose not to. Excuses, excuses. You know what you have to do. Do it. Or don't. I don't know what to choose for a successful career because the things which I am good at, are the things which 10,000 other people in the local area are good at, or at least the public perceives as such and will buy the cheaper service at a price which I cannot compete against. It's fairly clear to me that the real money is in the commodities trading markets and financial services, and since I am not the founder of YouTube or Google, I'm not likely to make that kind of money doing something I enjoy. I'll admit that it was probably a mistake for me to go into financial services (Primerica) because it is against my grain (the selling methods are against my personality type) and the thought "what am I getting myself into?" kept echoing in my mind. But I believed I would have no trouble convincing my friends to get involved with this and my first mistake was making a bad judgement about my friends' interest in this. Thus, my warm market disappeared and I was now stuck with a vested investement and the need to reach a milestone in order to be reimbursed my initial training fees. I believe that you are correct, that I COULD do Primerica and succeed, which is why I didn't quit. I'm just backing off a bit so that I can recompose my mental state of mind, as the telemarketing rejections sent me hurtling into a deep depression over several months. I was cheerful and optimistic about this business before I got worn down with telemarketing and not just the hang ups, but the people who'd screw around with me and set appointments then never show up, just to waste my time. This is why I'm vascillating now. Because I tried this and I tried that and neither netted the results I wanted, or even a shadow of the results I wanted and, having exhausted so many options, I'm left thinking my mind is defective somehow. Hence, the inability to decide what to do next. As such, I've chosen to read books and try to see if I can make some important integrations that may change the way I feel about making money from the premises on up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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