Don’t just change the world. Improve it as much as you possibly can.

A month ago I wrote a post titled “Don’t change the world. Improve it.” I talked about my frustration with the huge amount of talk about “changing the world”, and how I believe this focus on change rather than “improving the world” leads many people to feel satisfied and successful with mere change, rather than large improvement.

I now realize that what annoys me even more are the people who try to improve the world, but don’t improve it as much as they could have.

There are a huge amount of smart people on this planet. From engineers at Facebook to biologists discovering new forms of life, there are people who have the knowledge and skills to improve the world. Indeed, many of them do improve the world. They don’t just change it, they fundamentally improve it. This is good.

But too many people don’t improve the world as much as they could.

They’re satisfied once they have improved the world and have earned respect from other people for this improvement. And they stop right there.

Yes, Facebook improves the world. It enabled the Arab Spring, which is something that could not have occurred six years ago. Facebook also has many of the top engineers in the world. Can every single one of those engineers say that their skills are being used to their utmost potential to improve the world? I highly doubt that.

To entrepreneurs creating the huge numbers of mobile and web applications: Yes, many of these apps do improve the world. Yes, many of them make you a fortune. But are you spending your time creating the thing that would allow the biggest improvement in the world?

Math geniuses working at large Wall St. banks making fortunes, biologists, physicists, doctors: ask yourselves. Are you really improving the world as much as you possibly can with your skills?

In some cases, people will underutilize their skills but make a bigger impact. Salman Khan, the creator of the Khan Academy and someone who I admire hugely, for example. He is an incredible mathematician, and was working at a hedge fund before he left to start the Khan Academy full-time. The extent that he uses his skills now (at least publicly) is teaching advanced calculus to high school students. He isn’t fully utilizing his skills, no, but he is having an immense impact on the world of education, and I am sure he can feel satisfied knowing he is improving the world. Even still, perhaps he isn’t improving it as much as he possibly can – that I cannot answer.

If you’re a teenager starting a company, or in your forties and want to quit your job and start one, don’t just go and create a new mobile app. Think to yourself first whether you’ll have the biggest impact you can with your current circumstances.

It seems as though all the brains in the world these days are rushing off to Silicon Valley and starting mobile apps that “help you share your photos more easily with your friends”, and “make your nightlife better”. They may improve the world. But I beg the founders to think about whether they could be having a bigger impact.

When I wrote my last post, I had a few people commenting and asking how I’m improving the world. I gave this answer:

“I’m creating a library of experiences and advice through They Don’t Teach You This In School (http://tdtytis.com).

It’s helping people in over 120 countries [now 150] gain an emotional and social education that they otherwise couldn’t gain. Where Khan Academy provides an intellectual education, TDTYTIS is providing the other side to education – social intelligence.

I’m also helping people to remember their personal history and communication through Duo (http://duoboard.com). People are by nature nostalgic, but the Internet does not allow them to be because we lose the vast majority of our communication. Duo changes that.

These are not just changes – I’m not just creating a product because it’s cool to. They both fundamentally improve the world, because they solve clear problems.

This is just the start for me, but it’s a start that I believe in and will set me up to solve the huge problems that I see with the world.”

Before you ask, I can tell you that I am improving the world as much as I possibly can right now.

I started TDTYTIS and Duo without a minute of real-world business experience. I started them with hardly any money. I started them with my time very limited as I complete high school this year.

I feel proud knowing that TDTYTIS is helping thousands of people in over 150 countries learn life lessons that they couldn’t otherwise, and knowing that Duo is helping people be nostalgic – something which I believe the vast majority of humans fundamentally are. In thinking back, of course there are things I’d do differently, but I feel good knowing that at each step of the way I wouldn’t have done something entirely different.

In the process, I’m gaining experience and learning huge amounts. I’ll also have a lot more time later this year when I’m done with school. This means the amount that I’m able to improve the world will continually increase, and I will increase the amount that I’m improving the world along with that. Like I said in that quote, this is just the start for me – and I’ll be solving the biggest problems I can find going forward.

Think about it. Ask yourself whether you could be doing more to improve the world. And ask others the same thing. If more of us can gradually answer that question with a “no”, the world will be making leaps and bounds.

Some Advice On Taking Advice

Everybody on the planet is coming at life from a different angle. We’ve all had entirely different experiences and upbringings, and they have all contributed to making us entirely different people with different views on life. And yet despite our different views and situations, we try to help each other through offering advice. I fundamentally believe that receiving and acting on advice is one of the key reasons people make ineffective decisions.

From my experience, listening to a single individual’s advice has largely led me to make bad decisions. That doesn’t mean I was receiving bad advice – quite the contrary – but by taking advice from someone, and acting on it, I was subscribing to that person’s life situation and view.

Think about it. My experiences of life have been entirely different to yours, and as a result I have a different view on the world. Let’s say you’re trying to help me with a business decision. Fundamentally, the business decision that I’m trying to make will be a result of my life experiences and views – otherwise I wouldn’t be attempting to make that decision. I can only see things that are in line with my previous experiences and view of the world – we are all naturally blind to anything that isn’t in line with this.

If you try to offer me advice, that advice is coming from your experiences and view of the world, which is totally different to mine. If I act on your advice, it means that my decision – which is based on my experiences – will suddenly change course into a product of both my and your life experiences. The resulting decision will, in most scenarios, be less effective than if I’d made the decision on my own, because the decision would have been totally in line with my experiences, and the desired outcome of the decision. There would have been no other factors contributing to my view or decision making.

That’s the problem that I have with taking advice. My clear judgement will become shrouded with someone else’s perspective on life.

Does that mean I’ll never take advice? Not at all. I believe that humans fundamentally like receiving advice from others, for a multitude of reasons. It helps us to delegate some of the responsibility for if that decision turns out to be incorrect. It helps us to take our time with making a decision. It can help us to see things we otherwise wouldn’t have seen.

So no, I believe that we will always take advice.

What I try to do is ensure I take lots of advice from many different people, so that I can look objectively at all the advice and decide what best fits my individual scenario.

If I take advice from one person, I am inclined to think that their advice is good, because I can only see my perspective and theirs. If I take lots of advice, then all of a sudden I can see that some of these people are giving advice that is more relevant to me than others. I can then look objectively at all of that advice and decide what I should take and what I should leave.

In short, I believe that taking advice from one person will damage your decision making, but taking advice from lots of people will enhance it. The value in advice is gaining others’ experience that you don’t have. By taking lots of advice, you can gain all of that experience, and then decide what of that experience will actually help you in making your decision.

Sometimes getting advice from a huge number of people is hard to do. It’s not easy to ask people for advice, let alone a huge number of people. This is another reason I started They Don’t Teach You This In School.

I describe TDTYTIS as a library of experiences, lessons and advice. When you browse the videos on TDTYTIS, you can see a huge number of people’s perspectives on life, and the advice that they give as a result of it. No longer is it hard for people to get access to advice from a large number of people.

You can browse videos by what kind of advice you’re looking for, whether it’s on school or business. You can then see lessons and advice from a huge range of people – some famous, some not – and after listening to all their advice, you can decide what is the most useful to you.

I believe that TDTYTIS will democratize advice. No longer can you only receive advice from people you know personally. You can now get specific advice from the Prime Minister of New Zealand, or from hugely successful entrepreneurs such as Rod Drury and Dennis Crowley. You can get the same advice as anyone else in the world – the result being that you can make as good decisions as anyone else can.

This is another of the reasons why I fundamentally believe in TDTYTIS, and why I want to just go for it and built it into the platform that it should be.

Now I realize that I may have slightly contradicted myself here. I’m giving you advice, saying that you shouldn’t just listen to one person, but should take lots of advice and decide what advice is best for you. Well, I guess you have two options: trust me and hope it works out, or go get more advice.

I’m hoping you all do the latter, or this blog post has been in vain.

New Zealand In My Eyes

I love New Zealand.

I’ve lived here for about half my life. I was born in Washington DC, but moved before I can remember (and I’m not entitled to US citizenship). Since then, I’ve also lived in the Cook Islands, the Philippines, and Spain. I’m lucky in that I’ve seen enough of the world to know what makes New Zealand so great, and also what holds us back.

Whenever I’m overseas, I’ve always felt as though I’m a representative of the entire country. At the schools I’ve been to in other countries, I’ve always been the sole New Zealander (and these have been big schools). Everyone has known me as “the Kiwi”, and I’ve always been proud when called that.

Growing up as a representative of New Zealand – and being lucky enough to know what that means – has given me a truly huge respect for this country. Most of what people say is correct. We are a bloody inventive bunch. We’ve got values and a heart. We are friendly and happy. We have a stable and uncorrupt government, no matter who’s in power and what anyone says. And we’re lucky enough to have an abundance of the colours blue and green – some of the best and most beautiful natural resources in the world.

Going forward, it is of utmost importance to me that New Zealand not only remain relevant in the world, but emerges as a clear leader in the world.

It should be clear to everyone by now that the world is in a rough spot at the moment. Both Europe and America – long the leaders of the world – are clearly on unsustainable courses. Power is shifting. New leaders will emerge over the next decade. China is clearly one, but there is room for others.

I’m writing this post right now because: 1. New Zealand is heading in entirely the wrong direction and will decline in power and wealth over the next decades, and 2. I want New Zealand to be a wealthy world leader.

There are people far more experienced than me talking about these things. Sir Paul Callaghan explains why we’re going to become poorer and more irrelevant on our current course. Derek Handley shows us an alternative path, and inspires us to take action. Andy Hamilton tells us about the role of smart enterprises in a brighter New Zealand future.

New Zealand currently has two key sources of value that give us our place in the world: tourism and dairy. Let’s examine these going forward, drawing on the insights and statistics of Sir Paul Callaghan.

New Zealand has 1.3 million FTE (full-time equivalents, essentially the number of jobs available). We also have a per capita GDP of approximately $40,000. In order to maintain our current GDP of approx. $125billion, we need a GDP of $120,000 per job. Tourism in New Zealand produces around $80,000 per job. That’s two-thirds of the per-job GDP we need to sustain our current GDP, which means the more tourism we export, the poorer we become. We are immediately doomed if we at all try to increase tourism, which is what a large majority of people currently seem intent on doing.

Dairy, in contrast, produces $350,000 per job. Sir Paul Callaghan says it succinctly – “Without dairy, we would be desperately poor”. However, dairy is finite in capacity. We only have so much land to farm on, and we’re not too far off its capacity.

I’ll repeat: the current course that New Zealand is on will not allow us to even sustain our current GDP, let alone grow.

Countries like Singapore and Hong Kong didn’t grow through their natural resources (they don’t have any). And remember, thirty years ago New Zealand was providing aid to Singapore. Now they both have GDPs twice as large as ours. New Zealand will never become relevant in the world, as Singapore and Hong Kong are, if we continue to focus on growth through our natural resources.

Throughout New Zealand’s history, our key weakness has been our physical distance from the rest of the world. It costs huge amounts and takes a long time to export to other countries. It takes ages to travel anywhere. We’ve actually done remarkably well exporting dairy and tourism, considering this.

In the twenty-first century, New Zealand’s physical distance from the rest of the world became a competitive advantage. Well, it would have, if we’d pursued other sources of growth.

The Internet. You’ve heard it before. It breaks down physical barriers. That’s what it does best. No longer do we write physical letters, or need to travel across the world to see people. No longer do books and newspapers need to be printed and sent here. No longer is New Zealand restricted to growth through bringing people to the country or sending goods out.

The Internet is the biggest opportunity New Zealand has ever had, and ever will have. It allows us to achieve growth and sell products at absolutely no additional cost to what it costs other countries to produce. We can reach the rest of the world in milliseconds, compared to the previous days. Furthermore, our physical distance from the rest of the world becomes a competitive advantage to us because the smartest people in the world will want to come and live and work in a beautiful, pristine island.

And here New Zealand is building a national cycling track to encourage tourism, destroying areas of forestry to turn it into farming land, and then selling great chunks of our land to the Chinese.

The stars are aligned for us. Global power is shifting at the same time that the Internet gives us another path to growth. I refuse to let my country miss the biggest opportunity it will ever have. I refuse to let New Zealand become poor and irrelevant, when it could become a rich world leader.

This post marks my commitment to doing whatever I possibly can to create a rich and powerful New Zealand. This will be a core tenet of my life.

Watch Sir Paul Callaghan and Derek Handley’s talks. Follow Derek’s advice on what you can do right now. Think about the New Zealand that you want and how we might get there.

To finish, I’ll quote Derek, as he says it best:

“As we continue through the twenty-first century, New Zealand can choose to be an idle bystander, or it can choose to be a shaper of this century. The former path is a path to failure and irrelevance as a country – and those failures as a collective will cast a long black shadow over the Land of the Long White Cloud for many, many years to come”.

Respect for the Motor of the World

I ordered some clothes online on Tuesday from a British retailer. They arrived in the mail this afternoon (Friday). I haven’t thought about mail companies or courier services in the past – they’ve always seemed a bit boring and unimpressive. But for some reason today I started thinking about how it all works and became amazed by it.

For a little parcel to be sent from a warehouse in Maidstone in the UK to my home in Wellington in just three days is just incredible. It was sent by DHL, and I could track it every step of the way. From Maidstone, it was sent to London Heathrow, then to Leipzig, then to Singapore, then to Auckland, then to Wellington where my house is.

Think about it. At each of those places it had to be transported on the ground as well, and scanned so that they could track its progress and update it online for me. It likely passed through at least six ground transport vehicles and was presumably handled by a similar number of individual humans on the way. That’s on top of the five flights it made (two long-haul).

DHL probably has tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of parcels being sent simultaneously across the globe to an almost equal number of individual destinations. And DHL is just one of the courier companies in the world (albeit one of the biggest).

Companies like DHL literally make the world go around. Without them we wouldn’t have economies or really be considered a globe. It’s a huge feat to deliver a product from one building on the top of the world to another building at the bottom of the world in three days. For fifteen pounds. This happens every single day, with millions of items (and people) and I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never felt in awe of this machine before. In it’s broadest sense, that’s what the collection of global companies is – it’s a machine, or a motor, that makes the world function as we expect it to.

I’ll admit that I take most of the modern world for granted. Computers, mobile phones, skyscrapers, airplanes, supercars, and, yes, the ability to buy things from the other side of the world and receive it within three days. I’ve expected it without thinking about it in the past. Recently, however, I’ve been noticing how complex so many of these systems are and how great a feat they are.

There’s a couple of ways to look at all of these incredible things that the modern world gives us, in my opinion. The first is we can look at it all and say “It’s such an incredible world and individual humans are such a small part of it”. Or, the way I look at it, is we can say “It’s such an incredible world, and all of this incredible stuff was created by human beings”. Yes, it’s a machine that makes the world go around. But the machine was created, and is maintained, by humans. We’re pretty impressive creatures.

I’m gaining a healthy respect for most of the things I’ve previously taken for granted. If you take them for granted too – I hope you’re thinking about them in a slightly different way, like I now am.

Chronic Unemployment

Structural unemployment is a form of unemployment that occurs because worker’s skills are outdated, or not desired by employers. Technological unemployment is in some ways a type of structural unemployment caused specifically by advances in technology – as technology automates jobs, workers become unemployed with no skills to gain other employment.

Both of these types of unemployment are traditionally fixed through supply-side policies such as training and educating workers so that they have skills desired by employers. This fix is costly to taxpayers as it is not cheap to provide education. However, in most cases, it is a fix – workers will be able to find employment after being trained and educated. Structural and technological unemployment are in most cases temporary because of the government’s supply-side efforts.

But what if technology advances so much that employers simply don’t need as many workers, no matter what their skills?

I’m not just talking about manual labour here. Obviously manual jobs are being replaced by robots and others forms of technology. But again, these people can be up-skilled and subsequently find re-employment. I’m talking about when technology becomes so advanced that people cannot up-skill to a point above the capacity of the technology so as to become desirable to an employer.

Technology is starting to cause people with university degrees to become unemployed. Law firms don’t need as many lawyers because much of the research can be done in one-hundredth the time it previously took. R&D departments need less engineers and managers because the processes have been automated. Teachers are becoming irrelevant as we learn online. I’m talking to friends of mine who have masters degrees and cannot find a job. It’s a global problem that most people are blaming on the economic downturn. I don’t fully believe that. It may be a part of it, yes – but I believe the main cause of this unemployment is simply advances in technology.

It’s only going to get worse because technology will never stop advancing. We’re going to see technology continue to progress at faster rates every single year than it ever has previously. And the technology is going to become (already is becoming) so advanced that it will render people with masters degrees “unskilled”. No company will hire an individual whose skills can be done by a form of technology at a tenth of the cost. Technology also doesn’t require healthcare and stock options.

Where is this going to lead? If people simply are not needed and therefore cannot gain a form of income, what happens? How do they live?

In the short-term, governments won’t realize that the problem is advances in technology. They’ll keep paying benefits to more and more people, while funding supply-side efforts to train workers. They will subsidize university. They’ll focus on education to begin with. They also might try demand-side policies – by increasing government spending, they can fund more jobs. So we’ll see governments employing more people. But none of these solutions are long-term. They’ll simply lead to a waste of resources in every country.

And when governments do realize that the problem is advances in technology? Well, stopping advances in technology to save jobs is ludicrous. I hope that no government ever considers that.

I think this is a massive problem that will start to show just how serious it is in a couple of decades. This will be one of the major problems facing economies (excluding, ironically, developing economies) in this century. And I don’t have an answer to the problem.

Personally, I want to be at the forefront of developing these technologies. I guess it’s a kind of “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality. I also think that entrepreneurship is going to explode in societies as a result of this problem. People who can’t find jobs will simply create one for themselves. In this sense, this may be a blessing to modern societies.

After I began thinking about this issue, I tried to find more writing on the topic. I couldn’t find much, other than a book by one Martin Ford, called The Lights in the Tunnel. I’m reading it now, and will likely write another post once I’ve finished it. If you know of any other writing done on this topic, please share it with me – I want to find out as much as I can.

Don’t change the world. Improve it.

“How are you going to change the world”? This big question gets thrown around a lot. It seems as though everyone who wants to achieve something in their life is obsessed with trying to “change the world”. From Steve Jobs quotes to discussions about what you want to do in life, we hear a lot of talk about how we are going to, or should, change the world.

I don’t think anyone should ever grow up being focussed on changing the world.

If the system isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it. Not all change is good change. Indeed, some change is very harmful.

We see executives being brought into new companies and government departments who are focussed on “changing the company/department”. They subsequently screw it up. It happens all too often in too many industries and areas of life.

We should never focus on changing the world, or anything for that matter.

We should focus on improving it.

This distinction is critical.

If people believe that changing the world is the most virtuous thing they can do, they will likely achieve this quite easily. And they’ll stop at that, being satisfied that they’ve “changed the world”, regardless of the nature or consequences of the change they’ve made.

If people believe that improving the world is the highest goal they can aspire to, they’ll likely spend their whole life working towards achieving it. It’s harder to improve something than it is to merely change it. Anyone can change something. It takes a great mind to improve it. But the results of improvement are, by nature, positive. It’s not just a change for change’s sake.

Let’s stop talking about changing the world. Let’s demand that people improve it.

Selling Lifestyles

To use Jim Collins’ phrase, I believe that these days the difference between “good and great” companies is how they manage to sell the idea of a lifestyle. I’ll explain why I think this using two companies in two different industries.

Firstly, Abercrombie & Fitch. They died as a company two times before becoming the phenomenon that they are now. They’ve always been known to sell incredibly high-quality products made from good materials. But that didn’t stop them from filing for bankruptcy once and then being bought out. Abercrombie then brought in a new CEO, Mike Jeffries, who created the new concept for A&F. He wanted this new concept to allow people to think that they’re in a movie. He also wanted the brand to “sizzle with sex”. Abercrombie sells the lifestyle of sexy college students.

Look at the difference in approach. When the brand failed, it focussed on product first and foremost. It made a great product, but with no image or lifestyle, people didn’t buy it. After Jeffries came in, A&F put their lifestyle image first, backed up by a super high quality product. And now they’re smiling all the way to the bank (they’re a multi-billion dollar company).

Look at Apple, too. Apple has always made high-quality products. But it almost failed years ago, because it didn’t have a lifestyle with which people could buy into. Then Jobs came back, and created the “think different” lifestyle that creative people could buy their products to become a part of. I don’t need to explain their success since then.

The point is, you can’t be a great company with just a great product. There are thousands of companies with high-quality, functional products, that are on the verge of failing because no one will buy the product. To be a great company, you need to have a lifestyle that people want to buy into by buying your product. The more compelling the lifestyle that you sell, the more you can charge for your product and the more people will want it. Abercrombie raises its prices every single year, and yet demand for their products rises faster every single year – the Abercrombie lifestyle is so strong that it even makes the law of demand invalid (in economics, it’s called a Veblen Good). This is the situation you want to be in as a company. Think about it – you raise your prices and even more people want to buy your products!

I don’t think that selling a lifestyle is something that only physical-good companies can do. I believe that web apps can do it as well, and indeed many should think about it more seriously. One app that I believe should really focus on creating a lifestyle to sell is Path. The new version of their app is fantastic, and they’re seeing huge numbers of people begin to use it. But Path, to me, is about sharing my life with the people who are close to me. Path’s job, then, is to make me want to share more of my life. And I think the best way for them to do that is to create a broad lifestyle image for people to want to buy into. They should create an image that means when someone sees me using Path, it says something about me and my lifestyle – “I’m tech savvy, value my close friends and family, and want to share my life with them as well as see their lives”.

Every web app can sell a lifestyle of some sort. It might not be as elaborate as Abercrombie’s, as you don’t have a physical store for people to walk around in, but you can create it through your app and website.

I’ll repeat the key point I’m trying to make in this post – that it’s not enough to make a fantastic product. To make your company great, I believe you need to sell a lifestyle through a high-quality product.