Category: Thoughts

Sitting down to think about intelligence, and where you personally fit in the scale of human intelligence in the world is a really intersting thought.

For me this starts with my mind instantly going “ok sooooooo many people are wayyyyyy smarter than I am!”.

And then I slowly start to reason with myself “well ok I mean yes there is a huge swath of the world population that I would be more intelligent than” **

Ok so were at the real stopping point now, for me I realize “there are definitely tons of people smarter than me in the world. But realistically there is also a large amount of people that I am more intelligent than, or at the very least more street smart and book smart than”.

But then the real questions is how do you know where you fit? Am I right in the middle, 49% of people are smarter than me, and 49% of people are dumber than me? How would anyone actually figure this out? I’m aware of IQ tests but I’ve never taken one as they seem completely flawed. How would a hand written paper test truly tell the overall intelligence of a person?

What if the persons emotional intelligence is off the chart and they can build amazing advertisements than resonate with most people because they really know how to read people? Or on the flip side of that equation, what if the person is just amazingly knock your socks off good at Math, but they don’t have the emotional intelligence to interact well with other people? Who is more intelligent in that scenario? Sure raw horsepower intelligence the brilliant math mathematician scores higher. But who will live a more meaningful life?

The person who knows how to read and interact with people will most likely in my view end up leading the more enjoyable and “successful” life. I put the term successful in quotes because it’s such a loaded term, the definition changes for everyone. I do think however that we could agree upon a foundational definition of successful. One core pilliar of life seems to be about happiness.

How much happiness you can bring yourself, and how much happiness you can bring to other people that you love. Another core pillar, which really could probably be combined with happiness is “you must do some good in the world, add something of value to someone other than yourself”.

This differs for everyone, some people extended this circle all the way out to include entire countries, or even the entire population of the world. Other people keep their circle close and try to better their lives, their families lives, and the lives of all their friends and loved ones. In my mind there really is no moral high ground between those two scenarios. The person who wants to help the entire world, that is the way they get joy in their life. That is their calling, so really they are just helping everyone else because it makes them feel good, it stirs their soul. The same things goes for the person helping the people in their immediate circle.

This is also an argument to some degree of quality over quantity. If you dig in and find the proper way to leverage your intelligence and skills to improve your life and the life of people in your close circle of the world, you will most likely have a pretty big impact on those people and really improve their life.

It’s massively hard to try and improve the lives of strangers. It is also often the case seemingly in our society that the people who scream and shout that things are not fair and the government should provide more, those people are not successful. They are getting crushed by the weight of the capitalism “game”. They have not figured out how to play the game, because it is a sad but very true reality – you can take a rich person and make them poor and they will be rich again in 5 years. You can take a poor person and make them rich and they will “most likely” be poor again in 5 years.

So many people know so little about playing this game of capitalism that they scream and shout that the entire game needs to change. One very important caveat is that not everyone starts at the same starting line. If you are born white, and a man, in the US or any major developed country you will need the least amount of effort to win the game. White men are basically starting from the ladies tee’s in golf, it’s important to acknowledge that because we absolutely should be trying to even up that starting line. But beyond that, once the race starts and a person is around 12 years old and starting to form their own thoughts and opinions, that is when you really start taking over the wheel for yourself. And certainly by the time you move out of your parents house you are directly affecting the trajectory of your life with each decision you make.

Do you mistakenly have a child before you are financially stable and cause the rest of your life to be needlessly challenging? If someone wants to have a kid early in life by all means go for it! Just also do it while acknowledging that it is going to be so much harder for you, you are basically choosing to run a race on one leg against everyone else. If on the other hand you choose to get a job and save as much of your income as possible, and then put that income into something like a Vanguard index fund – you are setting your life up to be so much easier/happier/more rewarding and fun. You will also accumulate a surplus of resources that you can share with others and help try to boost them up the ladder of life.

Ok so we definitely rambled off of the main topic a bit there hahaha but the main question I had revolving around in my mind when I started writing this was: how would someone know where they stand in terms of intelligence of the entire population on earth? It seems to be a question that I do not have an answer for in my mind, maybe one will come to me in the future and I can write it down on this blog 🙂

** One thing that really skews this is how amazingly lucky my life has been. I was born in the USA, have 2 loving parents and close family. Went to public school that was at least decent, and then went to a college that was solid as well. But honestly it does feel like school never really had much to do with intelligence and or knowledge. I definitely learned things in school, but more social interactions than actual hard knowledge. I’ve figured out the vast majority of skills on my own or at least doing them my own way”.

From James Clear:

If you only do the work when it’s convenient or exciting then you’ll never be consistent enough to achieve results.
Professionals stick to the schedule, amatures let life get in the way.
Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose, amatures get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.
Professionals take action even when the motivation does not feel right
The only way to become excellent is to become endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.
The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom. 

I had a bit of a setback day today. Nothing major at all, just several small things on the project that I’m working on didn’t go smoothly. Just small stuff like having to make multiple trips to the hardware store to buy something I didn’t realize I would need (not properly going through doing the task mentally beforehand can cause these types of double trips). After a few of these types of things added up towards the end of the day I was feeling a little annoyed and felt like it wasn’t the best day. Combined with the fact that I was not able to workout it gave the day a not so great feeling.

But as I reflected on it tonight I realized that the line from starting a project through to the finish is not a 100% straight line upwards. Today was a little bit of a jaz down day on that line, but tomorrow will most likely end up being a zip back up and feeling great. In terms of project status we really are getting close to completing our 2nd story unit now, in 1 – 2 weeks I think we are going to be seriously considering when to move and how best to get settled in. Ultimately with Christmas coming up in about 14 days there might be a little bit of a delay in deciding to move, but I don’t think it will be due to the house not being ready it will be more due to us just being super busy with holiday and family stuff and not wanting to feel super rushed with the move.

I found this video today and really enjoyed it, wanted to save it so that I could easily come back and find it later

Watching this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBH2Mdvl9ik&list=RDtkb26vFEp94&index=1) almost makes me sad cause sometimes I think we are all decent singers but then you listen to a dude like this and you realize some people just have a completely different level, kinda like we all learned that playing sports where eventually we learned like oh shit – people are way better than me. I kinda realize that about our work sometimes too, as in some developers just have another gear mentally.  Dross approaches that I feel like, but even still there are just insane people out there, guys who have done shit like invent a crypto currency haha so its cool to listen to that song, but it makes me feel all of those thoughts/emotions, which really are not bad per say, I feel like its 100% great to live a solid – non famous – non rich life, but then for whatever reason I just have this deep seeding feeling that comes from like the back of my head deep down somewhere, that say’s I’m supposed to do something pretty big with my life.  I dunno what exactly, and its not necessarily correlated to money or fame, but a kind of goodness – or something that benefits the planet or a large enough amount of people that I’ll be talked about to some capacity after my death by more than just my close group of family and friends.

If I’m perfectly honest I’ve had this overall thought since I was about 15 years old. I’ve felt like I should find a church in St. Louis, one that is most likely has predominantly black members. And that I would really enjoy that church, maybe because we had an African American man at the church I went to as a kid who ran the choir, one day he ran the entire service and just played music the whole time. It was freaking awesome and I actually enjoyed it, so maybe I’m wronly picturing a church with predominately African American’s as being a place that would more “real” and fun/musical than the stiff fake ass church I went to in the county as a kid. Literally 90% of what that church did was have a cermon – talk about the need for donations – then use those donations to build a bigger church – then talk more about how expensive it was to run the new huge building so they needed more donations to operate it…. at a young age I added up all the money and asked my parents, why didn’t they just take that money and buy food for homeless people, or do some actual good with it instead of just building a huge new building? Basically they were so self serving and talked so fake about helping people, so it left me with a very bad taste in my mouth for organized religion. But in my vision the church I find in the city is awesome, and filled with really cool people. And I’m able to setup a program that helps young kid’s with Ellen’s mom. We meet with the kids once per week and make them a big ass awesome dinner, and just hang out with them and be a positive roll model and or influence in their lives. And we also offer to lend our knowledge to church members during this time window, so they have someone to talk to about life stuff. Between my mom (highly successful lawyer) Ellen’s dad (highly successful business man) My dad (extremely knowledgeable about cars and fixing almost anything that runs), Me (very knowledgeable with IT/website/computer stuff + finances and accounting/bookeeping).

I think with all that knowledge we could help people out, so they didn’t get taken advantage of, and we could help kids out with college applications and or Job applications ect… I dunno it just seems like we could make a big difference in people’s lives. And also once we get the sisters house paid down or off, we could rent 1 or 2 of the units out to really good people from the church, we could just talk to people and find some really deserving family and just totally change their life, let them live at the sisters house for super cheap, and have their kids go to a great school in Mason.

A friend who is in the restaurant industry recently shared a long article with me that outlined how the restaurant industry needs a bailout from congress, and how every individual consumer should shop directly with their favorite restaurants in order to help them survive.  While I understand the sentiment of both ideas, I have some major questions about why the restaurant industry is not changing quicker and I wanted to jot them down below. Additionally I was wondering if this type of situation is part of a larger move away from capitalism. On the surface I can see where people in the restaurant industry are coming from, over the past 10 – 15 years other industries have received bailouts. Which has had the unintended consequence of rich board members and CEO’s at these large companies realizing that they should operate the company’s close to the edge. Privatize all the gains to the select few in the upper management circle, and spread out all the risk/potential losses to the general public because if they operate their companies close to the edge when a disaster or hardships comes along (like in this case with COVID) then they can go running to the publicly elected officials for financial help. They often receive the help because they frame it as; if you don’t help our company and industry than XXX,XXX jobs will be lost because all the companies will quickly fail due to the poor financial situation they have been put in. The companies have typically been put in this precarious situation with large stock buy back programs and vastly inflated upper management salaries and bonuses. So on the surface I do see where everyone in the service and travel industry is coming from, but we are heading down a very dangerous path of privatizing gains and making losses public, which is not capitalism. And I am a huge fan of capitalism, its not perfect, its not 100% fair but its the best system that we have ever developed to equally reward effort. When the power to define winners and losers is concentrated into a small group of people (in this case of bailouts that small group is members of the congress and senate) it inevitably becomes corrupt and less fair than the system of capitalism. Additionally at some point we will devalue our currency enough to cause a huge disaster, its kind of like an earthquake in the since that we will never know exactly when the tipping point comes and our currency starts the unstoppable slide to ruin but if we keep our current trajectory up it definitely will come in our lifetime.

My friends post got me thinking about how much it would suck to live in a world with only fast food options and no cool restaurants. It seems many, many restaurants are in serious jeopardy or closing down during this pandemic and it seems strange that they are not adapting.  Asking for money from congress now, and or asking customers to order directly from restaurants that do not have a smooth or convenient process in place are not long term solutions.  They both could help stop the bleeding for a short period of time, but beyond that life will move on, in business efficiency will almost always win out over time and it would really suck to end up in a society with only fast food options.  The world is so much more fun when there is a unique and diverse set of food and entertainment options to enjoy.  It would really suck if every cool restaurant I enjoy just stuck their head in the sand and pretended like they could get back to business as usual in the next few months, and as a result closed down. Even beyond that, restaurants opening their doors and calling for people to come in to eat during the middle of a pandemic is irresponsible on their part.  It’s obviously a hard situation for them and I’m sure they are just stuck in the old frame of mind that they had, but asking for people to come in and eat and put themselves and everyone in the restaurant at risk just to eat some food is not good for anyone, and not something that we should encourage people to do.  I wanted to reach out and try to learn from your perspective to see if I can change my mind about this scenario.  I’m wondering if I am missing something because this is an industry and area I’m not familiar with, but from my vantage point I don’t understand why restaurants are not changing with the times faster.  We have tried ordering to-go from many different places and it’s probably about 30% of the time we have a good experience.  Obviously it’s hard for restaurants to pivot what their business does but it was very clear to see for the past 3 – 4 months that in a best case we would have to live with this virus and at least some form of open/lockdown/open/reduced capacity situation for at least the next year, so it’s confusing to me why restaurants have not gone to their landlords and renegotiated rent.  Every commercial landlord is literally facing a crisis of their own with an avalanche of people realizing they can work from home again might not need office space. Restaurants have leverage here. If restaurants can’t renegotiate with the landlord successfully, then its better for them to just default on rent because they are in a total emergency and literally don’t need in room dining capacity at all, for at least the next 6 – 8 months.  And even beyond that it’s very possible that business dinners and quick lunches are going to be greatly reduced moving forward as everyone works remotely.  The ground has moved underneath restaurants feet and it is more than likely never coming back 100% to what it had been.  Restaurants need to adapt now and greatly reduce their physical footprint and get an easy way for customers to order their food online. They need to completely avoid using a 3^rd party services like grubhub or uber eats, they just need a great simple to use website or app of their own.  Something like Chipotle, or another more local place I’ve seen do this well is Mission taco.  Ordering from Mission taco is a freaking snap, it works flawlessly.  10 minutes after you order you get a text saying your food is being bagged up and will be ready for pickup in 5 minutes.  They have a smooth food handoff process; it is honestly something that will work moving forward.  With this success its seems like they could take the slight risk of keeping their physical locations open even though that is currently a drag on their finances.  But if they are able to keep their in-room dining and we get a vaccine by next spring/summer and then within 4 months or so enough people take it to get us to herd immunity then they will be in great shape to see if in-room dining rebounds.  But more than likely with the current state of our country, not enough people will even trust the vaccine to take it, and we will stumble along in this state of 4 months open, then hot spots develop and we lock down again, then another 4 or 5 months open and back to lockdown in another area again, so in summary it seems like the restaurant industry needs to change their business model in order to survive for the long term.  Asking congress for handouts, and asking consumers to inconvenience themselves is not a long term solution to this major problem they face.