MM#256--Are You Willing To Improve? To Flourish...Says Yes Every Time

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute and getting back to our tradition of coming out of the gate like Mike Tyson, throwing jabs and punches right in the beginning of the round. Let's go to our first pull quote from our book of the day, and that book of the day is talent is overrated, which we've already covered, but we'll talk about that later. Going to the book, it isn't just companies that have to keep kicking up their performance more than they ever did before. It's each of us individually. The pressure on us to keep getting better is greater than it used to be because of a historic change in the economy. To understand what's going on, we need to take a step back. How many offers of credit cards do you get in the mail every day? Do you get? Do your kids get them? How about your pet? It has happened. Maybe you also received unsolicited checks with your name and address printed in the corner in a letter urging you to write out those checks to pay some bills. It's happening because the world's financial institutions are awash in money. They literally have more than they know what to do with and they're saying take some, please. Those financial institutions aren't alone. Companies of all kinds have far more money than they need. The cash held by US companies is hitting all time records. Companies are using some of this money to buy back their own stock at record rates. When a company does this, it's saying to its investors we don't have any good ideas for what to do with this, so here, maybe you do. These are all manifestations of a much larger phenomenon. For roughly 500 years, from the explosion of commerce and wealth that accompanied the Renaissance into the late 20th century, the scarce resource in business was financial capital. If you had it, you had the means to create more wealth, and if you didn't, you didn't. That world is now gone. Today and a change that is historically quite sudden financial capital is abundant. The scarce resource is no longer money, it's human ability, and that quote comes to us from the book titled Talent is Overrated by Jeff Colvin. We have already covered this book before. It's a fantastic book, covered in mojo minutes 32 and 72. I will put links in the show notes for both of these episodes. Now I came back to this book because there's tons of little nuggets of wisdom in this little book, but that quote might throw you off, because the book was written in 2008, at the peak of the big and mid-sized companies awash with money, and if you know your financial history, then you will know that the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008 was coming, and boy did it hit hard, and the reason part of that reason for the crisis was mainly a terrible housing crisis brought on by, of all people, the federal government Thank you, freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and, by the way, they never reformed those agencies and no one paid the price for those debacles. But getting back to our point, cheap credit was another reason for that financial crisis of 2007-2008. But if you were not a trained professional looking for these nuggets of wisdom, you might very well have missed the really big nugget in that quote. Now, however, I did not. As the great cartoon character Garfield used to say, it's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am. Seriously, though, let's go back and pull those most important sentences from our last quote. These are all manifestations of a much larger phenomenon. For roughly 500 years, from the explosion of commerce and wealth that accompanied the renaissance into the late 20th century, the scarce resource in business was financial capital. If you had it, you had the means to create more wealth, and if you didn't, you didn't. That world is now gone Today, in a change that is historically quite sudden. Financial capital is abundant. The scarce resource is no longer money, it's human ability. Now ask yourself is that true? Is financial capital still abundant? Yes, financial capital is being thrown around like it's growing on trees. Just look at our federal congress Today. We'll spend some $7 trillion in the next fiscal year. Do you know how long it takes to count to just $1 trillion, let alone $7 trillion? There are 60 seconds in a minute. So if you were to start counting right now, you would get in one minute. You would get to $60. There are 60 minutes in an hour, and if you were to start counting 60 times 6, that's $300, $3,600 in one hour, 24 hours in a day. My public school education tells me 24 times 60 times 60 is $86,400 in one day, and there are 365 days in a year. So if you count 24 hours a day times 60 minutes per day 60 minutes in an hour, rather and you were to count 24 hours a day, 60 seconds in a minute, by those 365 days, you would get $31,536,000 in one year. To find out how long it would take to count to a trillion dollars. Divide one trillion by $31,536,000. So that is $1,000,000,000,000,000, and $0,000,000. It would take you 31,709 years to be able to count to $1 trillion. Holy smokes, I overwhelmingly think it is. We learned this from Cal Newport in his wonderful book Deep Work, which we covered in several mojo minutes here, and we also feature in the Mojo Academy as part of our first season of books. Check that out. And if you're not a member of the Academy, what are you waiting for? Fantastic stuff there if you want to go deeper into living the flourishing lifestyle, we have over 26 books waiting on you to just read those reviews, so you don't have to read the whole book and then you can take action on those nuggets of wisdom. Plus, we have the reduced price on the membership, so be sure to click on the Become a Member link in the show notes. Oh, that's right, I stay incorrect. It's not 26 books, it's 27 books we now have in the library. We just released Stephen Sears' incredible book on appreciating history, in, more specifically, the Battle of Gettysburg. So yes, 27 books in the Academy Library, with more coming each and every month. So back to our larger point. Human ability is the real challenge we face now and the willingness of folks to want to get better. Do most human beings want to get better? I'm not sure. We are in the middle of another revolution, and that is a digital revolution. So we have a technology revolution going on. We have a cultural revolution going on and now, all of a sudden, with the wave of artificial intelligence, ai, we have a digital revolution going on. Things are changing and they're changing fast. In fact, in our next Mojo Minute, we will check into how leadership at big and mid-sized companies are dealing with these changes from their leadership perspective. So be sure to come back for that episode. So in this Mojo Minute, let us fall back on what has always worked for most businesses and for most employees such as ourselves, for over the last 1,000 years, since the mercantile days of a somewhat free economy around the world. If there is one virtue that has always kept us flourishing, it is hard work. Human beings who work hard almost always see that hard work rewarded. Not all the time life isn't fair, the more often than not hard work will be rewarded. It will ensure you are always staying ahead of the game and, especially during these tense times and these revolutions, to increase your value at work. Always be the person willing to improve and your abilities, as Jeff Colvin reminds us in this timeless treasure of a book time and time again, and especially on this universal principle that hard work beats talent.

Each and every time, Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.