Our Planet is so gosh-dangly fragmentalized. Unless I want to become a robot (not saying I don’t but let’s ride on the pretense that being a robot is not on the to-do list), pursuing 1 clear cut goal is really obnoxiously difficult. Why is that?… I am yet again so glad you have asked.
It all restarted this year, in this post, culminating in an approach that I attempted to follow for several months. Each time I would try to make progress, I found myself clicking on the little magnifying glass and drawing a zoom box so I could get to a quantifiable set of tasks. But each time I drew a zoom box I kept finding more questions and options and little informational sidebars that kept fragmenting the vision…. by the time I had zoomed in enough to DO something, it wasn’t anything I was interested in doing.
So, here I am on Hallow’s eve with a metaphorical zoom box, a primed legal container, and having to revisit my entire approach. It’s been a fascinating journey, but something still hain’t quite right.
To help correct this, I have to come to terms with a couple core concepts: 1) I am not a detail person and 2) that first statement is a lie. If I can figure that out, then I will have $10,000,000 of net worth by the end of this calendar year. There’s my vested interest in figuring this out.
Let’s go over some of the fun to be had, here… for example, I have an interest in natural resources. Now, before I get into natural resources, I tell myself,”self, the first question to ask is ‘how much do we have’ and the next question to ask is ‘what’s our current and projected burn rate?’ Try Googling that… my search on global natural resources lead me to a list of oil companies, a list of government agencies, several wikipedia articles, to some outdated EDU site with a list of resources that was a 404 landmine. There’s a TON of information, but it isn’t aggregated how I want to look at it. In fact, this takes me back to the TED talk (yeah, do I get royalties for that? lol) about web 3.0 – if we could get at the data of the internet in a useful way, I might be able to visualize at least SOME of what I am looking for… I say some, because there are entities who have spent a LOT of money cataloging what I want to research, and, well, what’s in it for them if they share? I’ll tell you – the competition will come in and, with lower R&D costs caused by the release of the initial company’s intellectual property, they will wipe the initial company off the financial map.
Maybe then, my data won’t be out there…because that’s just the FIRST set of questions. Anywho, if you know of an entity that compiles natural resource statistics such as quantity, location, burn rates, that might come in handy for me… or somebody I will employ. Just throwing that out there – my core interests are water, power, fiber, farm land, and sanitation.
There – that was an example of a “zoom box”… I had to zoom in to do the research, and I have had that happen over and over. The result is, it fragments my time and progress slows to a crawl on my goals because while I am zoomed in, there is no progress on the other fronts.
Robert Kiyosaki, as part of his cashflow quadrant concept, mentioned this issue of going from an employee to a specialist… it could be a trap, and the way out of a trap is a business model so I can get from business owner to investor, because until I have a portfolio of crazy ventures cranking out results, I am not going to make the kind of progress needed to fix the entire planet and launch a viable space exploration venture using giant robots shaped like our founding fathers. Can you imagine that…on some distant world, the receiving civilization sees a giant Teddy Roosevelt flying through space towards their planet. Hey, it could happen!!
I have no interest in being the specialist anymore…I’ve been there, bought the t-shirt, scraped off the bumper sticker, and moved on. There’s a lot of talented people who want to be the specialist, and I am OK with that! My goal is to hire a team of those and put them to work solving all kinds of cool challenges.
Of course, while doing that I am still working on a video project, a web service architecture, a mobile app and a couple other side projects… but hey, stay tuned.