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== The | == The third drop. Essence. == | ||
Share ideas. | |||
Own. | |||
Think in generations. | |||
Live beyond judgment. | |||
Become your own nation. | |||
Our third drop now offers five values for you. In addition to the thumb and index finger, you now take the middle finger as well and proudly stretch your hand into the air. | |||
=== Share ideas. === | |||
Perhaps after the first drop, new perspectives have opened up for you, new ideas have dawned on your horizon and you have noted down good ideas. Ideas are like dreams and also like plants. As soon as you give them attention, they grow all the better. Once you jot down ideas, your subconscious realizes what it has to do and rewards you with more and better ideas. This is also the commonality with dreams: As soon as you record your dreams and, even better, share them with others, it’s a true celebration for your subconscious. You will be able to remember your dreams better and more often realize that you are dreaming. | |||
However, sharing ideas has a number of other advantages for you. | |||
Linus Pauling, who, next to Marie Curie, was the only person to receive Nobel Prizes in different categories and who made many of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century in chemistry, once said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas". | |||
Sharing ideas magically enriches you. As soon as you voice an idea and this idea then meets the attention of another person, so that two attentions kiss, brilliant sparks of inspiration can fly. Both the other person and you can then build and build upon what was spoken or written. Thus, much more can emerge than was originally there. You gift yourself and you gift others. | |||
You have surely noticed, if you have read attentively between our lines, that much of what we write does not correspond to what is commonly thought. It is the same with the imperative Share ideas. A widespread and false view is that ideas can be stolen. Let's take a closer look at this image. Lawyers know that the criminal offense of theft requires two people and an object: an owner who has something valuable and a thief who takes something valuable away. But with ideas, it's the exact opposite. There is still an owner who initially has something valuable, but as soon as the idea thief comes and steals it, it remains - magically - also with the original owner. Thus, the thief is happy about his loot and the one who birthed the idea is happy that now another has his idea. Professionals who professionally assess ideas, such as investors who invest in startups, have long seen through the fairy tale of idea theft and only smile wearily when asked to treat a business idea confidentially or even sign a non-disclosure agreement. | |||
=== Own. === | |||
As soon as two cells join, it begins. After we enter the world naked, we start full throttle with the game of life. In the sandbox, we mark our territory. Whoever builds the biggest castle receives the greatest respect. Possession can later take on various forms: possession in the form of money, contacts, reputation, or knowledge. Possession is utterly polymorphic. One form can be exchanged for another. We can describe this exchange mechanism also as a game and thus ascertain that the objective is to trade as skillfully as possible and gain the most from it. | |||
But modern thinking teaches us that possession makes us obsessed, and common wisdom teaches us that money stinks and does not bring happiness. As we have seen, this model can only persist if the expression of possession takes a special form and it is further assumed that there is no possibility of exchanging for a different form. | |||
Possession, however, can take on a variety of forms and can be magically exchanged. Let's say you feel like dancing and decide to go to a club of your choice. Now it's up to the doorman to grant you access. If he denies you this, then you can either look for another club or dance in your room at home. You don't need to become the owner of a club just because you want to dance. But if you had that role, then you would have guaranteed access. | |||
As soon as you realize that it's all about possibilities, the behavior of your fellow players becomes much clearer to you and it's much more fun to play this game. | |||
Our imperative Possess is underpinned by a polymorphic connotation of freedom. To possess means to be able to determine and to want. | |||
=== Think in generations. === | |||
Our mind is a thoroughly ambivalent companion. This is both a curse, as it is therefore quite susceptible to a host of cognitive biases and often interferes in matters to which it can contribute little. But it is also a blessing as it allows us to juggle thoughts and thus has given us imagination. As in the previous sentences of this drop, we open up horizons that contradict the familiar and known. | |||
Thinking can be sorted by the time horizon it touches. This can range from plans for the next hour to plans for the next decade. Depending on the stage of life you are in today, your thinking may revolve around career choice or retirement planning. So what does a thought that goes far beyond this time horizon promise? What does thinking in generations bring, which goes beyond a decade and looks far into the future? | |||
Thinking is strongest in planning. Another advantage of thinking is that, in addition to mental energy freely available to us, it only costs time. So let's flip the view now and take up the ensuing question: | |||
What's stopping you from thinking in generations? | |||
Long-term thinking, as you will see immediately if you don't already see it, has a multitude of advantages! | |||
If you take the perspective from the Create imperative and see your life as a game, then long-term thinking gives you a huge competitive advantage: almost none of your fellow players practice this strategy. Imagine playing chess where your opponent is only allowed to plan two moves ahead, and here you come thinking five moves forward. You will win every game. | |||
In this discipline, of course, professionals have long had the insight, while in the general public people only think from twelve o'clock until noon. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two of the most successful contemporary entrepreneurs, live and explain long-term thinking as the number one success factor. | |||
Okay, so now the question is: how do you think in generations? | |||
When we think about the future, a host of neurons is activated in ever-new groupings in our brains. We experience this on the side when images and an inner voice appear. For most people, images of the future appear on the upper right. If an image is attractive - big and colorful - we try to reach it. Attractive images may also appear alternately. Then life is on the brink and the question can arise for us: Should I now study law or business administration? We then call this decision-making. Then we gather information, review the information at hand, and eventually one image appears more attractive than the other: We have made a decision and thus made a forecast about the future. Planning thinking, therefore, is making forecasts. | |||
But making good forecasts is notoriously difficult. Louis Armstrong was once asked by a journalist before a concert how jazz will develop over the next few years. He replied, "If I knew that, I would be playing it tonight." We simply do not have all the information and not an unlimited amount of time to make a decision. Therefore, we make decisions based on simple heuristics such as trial and error, random sampling, or the process of elimination and accept inaccurate forecasts. | |||
However, these methods are based on experiences that can only represent reality in a distorted way. Psychology knows hundreds of cognitive biases that impede our ability to make good forecasts. The following biases illustrate this: | |||
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the systematic and faulty tendency in the self-understanding of incompetent people to overestimate their own knowledge and abilities. If someone is incompetent, then they cannot know that they are incompetent. | |||
The Barnum effect describes the tendency of people to interpret generic statements about themselves so that they are perceived as accurate descriptions. | |||
The peak-end rule describes how people assess an event largely based on the most beautiful and the final moment. That's why, after a doctor's visit, children always receive a small gift. | |||
Loss aversion refers to the tendency to weigh losses more heavily than gains. This explains why investors sell stocks too early when they gain but tolerate losses too long. | |||
Besides cognitive biases, the so-called time preference also plays against our ability to make good decisions: Time preference or present bias is a concept in economics that describes consumers' preference to prefer consumption in the present over future consumption. | |||
Thus, we are naturally very poor decision-makers. But exactly this disadvantage can be transformed into a tremendous advantage with knowledge and practice. One only needs to look again at the professionals. | |||
Warren Buffett describes his success like a snowball; you just have to find a long slope. He refers to the effects of compounding interest, which Albert Einstein once called the eighth wonder of the world. "He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn't, pays it," Einstein once realized. | |||
If a 20-year-old invests 10,000 euros at 10%, he becomes a millionaire at 70 years old and has a fortune of 1,173,909 euros, without having worked a single minute for it. | |||
That's it, and we can now turn to our next sentence from the third drop. | |||
= Live beyond others norms. === | |||
What do you associate with your home? In the place where you live, you set things up so that it is good for you. You might move the armchair to this or that corner because you weren't quite satisfied with its current location. You are, however, still in your home and in your house. As soon as you - to stick with the image - leave home and go out on the street, something fundamental changes. On the street, there are rules that do not apply to your home. | |||
Live beyond judgment is intended to encourage you, first, to recognize what judgments are, and Live beyond judgment also encourages you to question these judgments, to experiment with what it's like to live beyond these evaluations. | |||
Evaluations can be good. If the temperature of a stove top exceeds a certain value, then this temperature is no longer good for your hand. The evaluation of the temperature is good in this particular case. | |||
However, many evaluations are inherently bad. One thinks here of the unspecific evaluations of others that restrict our actions and thus our possibilities. Think of some teachers at school. Many evaluations that are brought to us from the outside - whatever outside may be - then sneak in and thus transform into evaluations from within unquestioned. | |||
Unlike traffic rules, evaluations can be ignored. Live beyond judgment is, therefore, an encouragement to focus your attention on evaluations and to question, check, understand, and improve them according to the revelations of the first drop. | |||
=== Become your own nation. === | |||
The word nation, like so many words, comes from the Latin, is derived from nasci, and means to be born. We have all been born into a nation characterized by a common language, common traditions, and common customs. | |||
But after we were delivered from our mother, many of us have learned languages, traditions, and customs that go far beyond the languages, traditions, and customs of the respective nation-state into which we were born. | |||
If you take a peacefully dozing cat and throw it into the garden pond, the cat will flee from it immediately and seek out a cozy spot behind the stove again to dry off. | |||
Become your own nation, because you can become your own nation, is what our imperative wants to convey. A cat does not belong in the pond, and you can transcend your nation. | |||
The insights of the first drop are helpful here as well. | |||
Nation-states do much more than supply us with a language, with traditions, and with customs. | |||
Become your own nation is now the imperative for a process. It's about questioning, examining, understanding, and improving the metaphorical air that constantly surrounds us, just as we did in the first drop. | |||