Adopt a Mindset of Abundance

Part III

Building the Future

To get lucky, you must first take a chance.

Believing

Adopt a Mindset of Abundance

As a guiding philosophy, “win and help win” will always outcompete “live and let live.”

You want a win-win mentality rather than a crabs-in-the-bucket mentality. A win-and-help-win mentality is even better. Your win helps you help me win, and vice versa. Win and help win is actually the profit maximizing strategy in the long term. When crabs-in-a-bucket don’t have enough resources, nobody ends up with resources because everybody is getting pinched. Win and help win is actually how technology and venture capital works.

We have bad metrics as a society. Rather than GDP, GDP-per-capita, or the stock market, perhaps we should have dashboards of life expectancy (health) and net worth (wealth). A good leader is one who improves these metrics for individuals and society as a whole.

Here is my reasoning: most people can't tell you how to compute GDP, but they can tell you what net worth and life expectancy are. They know what it means for those numbers to go up, and they know making them go up is valuable. If these numbers have gone up for you, your life has improved.

Good: Helping others without concern for yourself

Smart: Helping others while helping yourself

Evil: Harming others while helping yourself

Stupid: Harming others while harming yourself

On the internet, we see more upsides and more downsides in everything. Technologists focus on the upside, because the gains should compound, while the losses should be individual events. Once you find a winning formula, you can scale it quickly to make it cheap. This leads to even more net upsides over time, just like every past technological revolution has.

Without something to build, any intellectual movement degenerates into a status competition, where participants feel the righteousness of finding everyone else wanting without the responsibility of building what they actually want.