Tag: business

A Lack Of Planning On Your Part Is Not An Emergency On Mine

The title of this blog post is brought to you by a chief I had in the Navy. This was one of his favorite things to remind people as he instructed us in the art of becoming pharmacy technicians. I, personally, never heard him drop it when someone was actually panicking, but I do like to keep this phrase in mind.

The reason it comes up today, though, was because of a TV show I recently binge-watched when I had time. It’s on the Discovery Channel and it’s called Homestead Rescue.

On the show, a man and his son and daughter travel around the country to bail out modern homesteaders who are in over their heads and are about to lose their homesteads.

Much of the time, the problem is that they’re not utilizing the land correctly or they lack certain skills or something, but for the most part, these are people who jumped feet first into something they didn’t really understand.

And then they need someone to bail them out.

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Wealth Is Power, And That’s Not A Bad Thing

Something that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while is the idea of wealth. In particular, the accumulation of wealth for the sake of accumulating wealth.

Over the years, there’s been a lot of words spilled over the topic, and most of it seems to be pretty negative. We hear that money is the root of all evil, that greed is bad, that any desire to have more than what you need betrays your lack of moral character.

But honestly, I’ve never bought that.

Instead, I see wealth as power. While it has also been said that power corrupts, that’s not necessarily true either. Power is just attractive to the corruptible. Wealth is no different. Sure, we can find plenty of rich jackasses, they’re jackasses for reason that have little to do with wealth and the power that’s associated with it.

No, wealth is power, but it’s power that you can also use for good in your life and the life of others.

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Why Do People Want To Be Told What To Do?

I remember being in school and studying Islam (no, this isn’t about Islam per se, just bear with me) and how Muhammed wanted to both attract Jews and Christians to the faith and lay down all these new restrictions on those who converted.

At the time, I started thinking, “So you’re going to tell them to stop doing stuff they might like to do, make them pray a good chunk of the day, and this will convert people?” I thought it was a miracle Islam didn’t die right then and there.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed something. People seem to actually like being told what to do.

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You Can’t Control Your Luck, So Control What You Can

Very recently, the lottery jackpot was insane. Something like $1.6 billion dollars was set to go to just one person.

Like everyone else, I spent a fair bit of time daydreaming about what I could do with that kind of money. Yes, even knowing that you’d only ever really see a portion of it, I had lofty plans for so much of it, plans that I’m still kind of impressed with, to be fair.

But alas, I didn’t win. My guess is that you didn’t either. Unsurprisingly, the lottery tickets of everyone I knew came up depressingly short of even a nice fraction of that jackpot.

It’s unsurprising because the odds of winning a jackpot is so astronomical. I probably have a better chance of being drafted into the NBA while accepting an Oscar and being struck by lightning simultaneously. It’s just not realistic to place your bets on something that relies on pure luck.

You can’t control your luck, so it makes more sense to control what you can, like how hard you work.

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