Archive for the ‘Family’ Category
Dec
19
Posted under
Family SHOCKING. How do we start looking at problems like this Biblically?
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/11/13/advice-to-young-men-do-not-marry-do-not-have-children/
EXCERPT:
Spreading this message may be the most effective method of saving marriage as an institution.
Marriage is a foundation of civilized life. No advanced civilization has ever existed without the married, two-parent family. Those who argue that our civilization needs healthy marriages to survive are not exaggerating.
And yet I cannot, in good conscience, urge young men to marry today. For many men (and some women), marriage has become nothing less than a one-way ticket to jail. Even the New York Times has reported on how easily “the divorce court leads to a jail cell,” mostly for men. In fact, if I have one urgent piece of practical advice for young men today it is this: Do not marry and do not have children.
Dec
13
Posted under
Family On a recently-concluded HBO series, “Tell Me You Love Me,” a married couple in their 30s saw their relationship fall apart because, after a year of trying, the wife finally became pregnant, but then the husband decided that he did not want to be a father.
http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071123/LIFE/711230362/-1/NEWS11&sfad=1
A woman focuses on her career and marries in her thirties and then finds that it will be hard for her to have a child. A man gets into a relationship and stays with the woman for years but is scared of commitment and responsibility.
And we wonder why our current liberated society has a lower birth rate.
It seems that as our standard of living goes up and we have the resources to support more children, we have fewer of them.
Does technological development inevitably lead to a lower birth rate? What light does Scripture bring to bear on this subject? I’d be interested in looking at any resources y’all can point me to on this subject.
Nov
08
Posted under
Echo Boomers,
Family Peter Duffy claims men have traded their traditional desires for a job, a wife, and a house for loans and a fear of commitment.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0451,duffy,59417,6.html
EXCERPT:
As I morphed from a twentysomething into a thirty-nothing, the realization began to dawn: Will the supersized student loans and maxed-out credit cards stay with me until the bitter end? Will I spend the rest of my life barely making rent, forever beholden to myriad creditors? Will I be able to purchase a home? Will I be solvent enough to provide, God help me, for a family? Will, in other words, there be consequences to an early life of profligate borrowing?
Nov
05
Posted under
Christianity,
Family,
Government Even people who don’t want the influence of Christianity to grow recognize the influence on religion on birth rates children’s church attendance. Beautiful!
http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/news/online_clips/070820_brooks_wsj_9.asp
EXCERPT:
In all likelihood religion will grow as a social force in American culture and politics over the coming decades. The reason: A secular nation needs secular citizens. And nonreligious Americans are outstandingly weak when it comes to the most efficacious way to achieve this: by having kids.
If you picked 100 adults out of the population who attended their house of worship nearly every week or more often, they would have 223 children among them, on average, according to the 2006 General Social Survey. Among 100 people who attended less than once per year or never, you would find just 158 kids. This 41% fertility gap between religious and secular people is especially meaningful because people tend to worship more or less like their parents. According to data collected in 1999 by Gallup, 60% of adults who were taken to church at least once per month as children grew up to attend at least this often; only 15% stopped attending as adults.
The demographic implications are even more profound for the political left, where a disproportionate number of secularists are located. Religious people who call themselves politically “conservative” or “very conservative” are having, on average, an astounding 78% more kids than secular liberals. Studies show that people are even more likely to vote like their parents than they are to worship like them. The secular left, therefore, has to rely on the tough slog of bringing people from the political and religious middle over to their views. The religious right simply has to keep having lots of babies.
Apr
28
Posted under
Christianity,
Economics,
Family,
Investing Strategies,
Personal Finances,
Real Estate IT IS THE CRY OF MY HEART
I started my first day of work at Kaplan today. They’re giving me an SAT class. I’m excited to be teaching again, but my eventual long-term goal is to work on curriculum development.
We can help transform homeschooling and Christian education in Oklahoma City. We can also provide easy-to-understand books on apologetics to a wide audience.
I have a big, broad vision. I want to see Oklahoma City become the center of a movement where God’s Word becomes central to family life.
It’s the family unit that will accumulate cultural and material wealth. Material wealth will allow us to have more free time to influence the city. Cultural wealth will provide values which will make the transformation permanent and positive.
Just look at the results of the Puritans’ work hundreds of years ago. They built a Protestant culture friendly toward economic growth.
Now we have the largest economy in the world. Even though we have problems with borrowing too much money, we still have more economic freedom than most European countries.
Talk about a city on a hill.
Rich vs. Poor: Not a Very Helpful Way to Think
And no, you becoming richer doesn’t necessarily make other people poorer. The invention of the light bulb helped almost everyone. Thomas Edison got richer faster than the poor did: if you look purely at dollar signs. But the standard of living went up much more for the poor than it did for Edison.
Light bulbs cost the same whether you’re poor or rich. So does electricity. Yes, Thomas Edison got rich in dollar signs faster than poor people did. But being able to buy 10,000 light bulbs instead of one doesn’t increase Edison’s standard of living 10,000 times. This is an example of the law of diminishing returns.
So even though the gap between the rich and the poor widens in terms of dollar signs, the productive inventions created by rich people make both the poor and the rich richer. And the standard of living goes up for everyone, but it goes up for the poor faster than it does for the rich.
If there were no rich people, we’d have no light bulbs. Or cars. Or transistors. Or computers. So in what way is the growing gap in dollar signs between the rich and the poor a bad thing, when the standard of living gap is actually shrinking?
If you doubt this, pretend that you’re poor. You want a more comfortable life. Pick any period in American history prior to this one that you’d rather live in. Can’t think of one? Didn’t think so.
You’re poor today. Would you switch places with a rich person from 1907? 1807? 1707? Why or why not?
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Exodus 20:17
Ministry Vision and Business Vision Are Connected
There are lots of people more qualified than I am to do curriculum development. I met one of them: he teaches worldview and history at Community Christian School in Norman, OK.
So why aren’t they doing it? It’s usually lack of time, lack of vision, or both.
That’s why I’m so big on Christians starting their own businesses and teaching their children how to run them. If children inherit pre-built businesses and don’t have to start from scratch, they’ll have more free time to develop an all-encompassing vision for their community. They’ll have time to apply their gifts toward specific needs like curriculum development.
People may think I’m weird for posting on so many money-related topics. They know I’m not very materialistic, so why do I do it?
I want America to be friendly toward a culture that produces wealth, a standard of living high enough for people to devote their excess time and income to re-investment and ministry, not consumer spending.
A Society That Accumulates Wealth
What conditions must exist for a society that accumulates wealth? Here are some:
(1) A large population. The larger the population, the more people can specialize on jobs they’re good at. I can teach at Kaplan and trust farmers, truck drivers, real estate investors, commercial banks, supermarket employees, auto manufacturers, and gas stations to help me get my food. This is the division of labor.
(2) A society where people cooperate in peace. Violent racism, fear of nuclear war, and religious isolationism all have the effect of separating the population out into little pockets, reducing the division of labor. I met Gary North at South San Francisco OPC about a year and a half ago, and he told me that India’s caste system reduces their division of labor and prevents them from achieving the kind of economic growth seen in other Asian countries. I became convinced that he was a genius and signed up for his e-mail list.
(3) Values that emphasize free trade. Free trade allows buyers and sellers to set prices so that both parties are satisfied with what they’re getting. There’s no such thing as an equal exchange: when I buy a pair of sneakers, I do so because I think I’m getting a price that makes the shoes worth buying. The store thinks they’re getting enough money that makes the shoes worth selling. When we allow buyers and sellers to determine prices on the free market, the market automatically urges sellers to be competitive with prices and quality.
(4) Laws that reward honesty and punish dishonesty. Don’t you go trying to weigh me two pounds of bananas when I think I’m getting three, or the sword of the government will come and get you. Don’t you go counterfeiting money, especially when there are unbiblical legal tender laws in place saying that we can only use paper dollars to repay debt.
Today’s unbiblical laws put the government and central banks, the greatest counterfeiters, in control of everyone’s wealth. They allow central banks to devalue the dollar and take wealth away from people who have dollars stored up (savers and productive people) and people who are expecting future dollars (retirees and others on fixed incomes).
(5) Individual people who want to save and re-invest rather than spend all the money today. They are future-oriented and think about what their grandchildren’s lives will be like.
Theonomy
Hm. A large population of people who work together in peace. Free trade. Fair laws. Small government. Future-oriented families.
These are things we’d have if we only followed the guidelines for government found in the book of Deuteronomy.
I’m excited. People at Oklahoma City, and especially at my church, are already inclined to think this way. A lot of people would become theonomic if the theology were only explained to them clearly.
Buy One House a Year
Buy one house a year to rent out. If you’re in an undervalued region of the country, the rents will pay off the loan and all other expenses. Each year, you can raise rents to keep pace with inflation.
(Rent goes up, but you don’t get a raise every year? That’s the reason why inflation lowers unemployment. You’re getting paid with money that is worth less every year, yet you get little or no raise. Since employees are effectively getting paid less, companies can hire more of them. Don’t blame the companies. It’s the Congressmen and President who want this inflation so we can lower unemployment and “boost the economy.” Ha, ha. And we’re the ones who vote for them.
And if you’re eventually given a pay raise to compensate for inflation, that’s also good for our politicians. It means you’ve been inflated into higher tax brackets, ones meant originally for those oppressive rich people. Now we get a taste of our own medicine.)
I’ll Say It Again
Buy one house a year. After twenty years, if not sooner, you’ll have enough rent coming in so you’ll be able to leave your job and do more ministry. Have your children manage the properties: pay them 10% of the rents. They’ll have a head start on the business when they inherit your houses.
May our children make a huge impact on this world for God’s glory.
—
Me tired today, too tired to answer Min’s response to my Government Schools post. But don’t worry, Min, I haven’t forgotten. 
to follow You all of the days of my life
Apr
16
Posted under
Entrepreneurship,
Family 
THERE IS NONE BESIDE THEE
I’ve got a new hypothesis for you to consider:
Love and godly ambition, when deeply intertwined, cause each other to grow.
It snowed a little bit in Oklahoma City this week, unusual weather for April. As I watched the flakes drift down, I started
dreaming about what it would be like if only I could be
home for Christmas.
But my dreaming of late has been of the future, not the past. Home for me has less and less meant my parents’ home, the mission base in New Mexico, or my wonderful students at Highlands. I’m dreaming about my future home and the warmth and love that will exist there.
Something has happened to me since I moved to Oklahoma. I’ve become rich. Not financially, but wealthy in love.
EDIT: One way distinguish between the upper and lower classes is to look at a person’s orientation toward money. Is he future-oriented, saving to invest, or is he more present-oriented, spending his money instead? Some people like to call the first view money-preference and the second time-preference, but I prefer future- and present- orientation, since wealth is actually about a lot more than money. It’s about a person’s perspective in life.
EDIT: See Gary North’s article about the relationship between class and perspective on time for more detailed information. I thought I was going to get away with writing a post without mentioning Dr. North. I guess not.
Wealth is about one’s perspective on time. It exists in the heart and mind before it exists in material things.
An entrepreneur is very future-oriented. He’s willing to give up a lot of money and time in the present and take tremendous risks in order to build a business. He’s ambitious. He’s a dreamer.
Wealth Is Not Mainly About Money
The song
Imagine uses the word
dreamer. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.” John Lennon imagined a world with no possessions, no countries, and no religion, a socialist utopia. He believed in saving the world through unbiblical ideals.
While I disagree with his goals, look at his perspective on time. Lennon was future-oriented, and this drove most of his songwriting. He was rich. (Socialist agenda notwithstanding.) Too bad he was wealthy toward the wrong things.
“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:20-21)
Consider the contrast Jesus is drawing. If we store things up to hedge the future for ourselves in this life only, we are fools. This is rational: there’s more to life than this life.
But what could He mean by being rich toward God? How do we store things up for God instead of for this life?
“For the pagan world runs after all such things, and your Father knows that you need them. But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.” (Luke 12:30-31)
We’re supposed to seek the Kingdom. This is a form of ambition, a form of wealth. Wealth is in the heart and mind. A person who is rich toward God has the ultimate kind of future-orientation: treasure in heaven. And he gets everything else he needs in this life to boot.
So when I dream of a future family and all the Christmases we will enjoy together, I’m one of the richest men on earth. It’s not just because I personally want a family. I believe that families are one of God’s main tools for transforming society. This value expresses generations’ worth, centuries’ worth, of future-orientation.
I believe that if I dream this way, most of the other things will be given to me as well. What involves more future-orientation: starting a business that should cash flow well in a few years, or serving God by trying to transform society over the course of several generations?
Because I’ve sought the harder and more valuable object first (God’s Kingdom), the easier and more obviously beneficial object (a business to support my family) will likely be granted as a stepping-stone along the path God wants my family to travel.
Love and Ambition
Love, being a Kingdom value, grows when it’s spurred on by godly ambition.
But godly ambition is still ambition. It continues to seek and draw closer to the ideal.
I lost a lot when I left my Highlands students to move to Oklahoma. This expressed future-orientation. I expect to see a return by being able to provide for a family and serve God more effectively. That will compensate me many times over for my loss.
It’s already started to happen. I’ve found almost as much love at OLCC, my new church, as I left behind in my wonderful students. And I’m not even a member yet.
But it’s not enough! Why do I keep singing Christmas songs in the car and dreaming about future love? It seems that the more love I have, the more love I long for. Why?
Maybe this is because love is such a wonderful treasure. Once I had experienced love, its perceived value rose, and I wanted it more.
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” (Proverbs 13:12)
Receiving Giving Love
Love is a two-way street. It is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35). When I was at a school that allowed me to give love, and now at a church that allows me to serve and bless others, love blossomed into a more wonderful thing.
When love’s value rises in our eyes, we want more opportunities to receive and give it. Those opportunities lie in the future. This makes us future-oriented toward love. Another way to say this: We are rich toward love. We are ambitious, entrepreneurs, risk-takers.
If love makes us ambitious for more opportunities to love, we’ll enter a self-reinforcing cycle. When we find opportunities to love, we grow to appreciate love more, which spurs us on to find even greater opportunities to love. By God’s grace, love will become a deeper and deeper part of our lives.
That’s why I spend so much time with widows at my church. They have a deep longing for love and companionship, and I have a deep longing to give. Like most men, I’m not as naturally inclined to give love as most women are. But this makes the blessing of giving love something newer and more wonderful for me. And as long as I’m willing to experience the wonder of giving love, my natural masculine assertiveness will make me want to find ways to give love all the more.
My hypothesis also explains why married people are often perceived to be so generous and caring. When two people marry who are risk-takers regarding love, their experience of love will make them more capable of it. The self-reinforcing cycle will make them better and better lovers, not only toward each other, but toward God and the rest of the world.
God First
This all assumes that people facing challenges regarding love will be willing to take risks and choose love over convenience. The model I’ve built here would fall apart if we didn’t seek His kingdom first, just as those who store up riches for themselves for this life will end up losing everything in the end.
It’s richness toward God, future-orientation toward His Kingdom, that makes all the smaller risks worth taking. We know that no matter how many risks we take in the smaller matters, no matter how much we fail, we won’t fail ultimately if those smaller failures move us closer in our ultimate ambition toward God.
And someday, that longing fulfilled will be our tree of life.
My hypothesis not set in stone. Please feel free to comment with suggestions or improvements. You may want to check out what I wrote before on
men and risk, as I may have written something there that partly addresses your comment. Thanks for reading!
Perfect in power, love, and purity.
Apr
03
Posted under
Christianity,
Concepts,
Economics,
Education,
Entrepreneurship,
Family I WILL LIFT MY HANDS TO YOU
When I was a middle school teacher, students would sometimes come to me and ask, “Why do I have to learn this stuff?” It didn’t seem to matter much whether the subject was math, science, or Bible. The standard response runs something like, “This stuff will be useful to you later in life. You don’t really understand now, but you will.”
While there’s some validity to that answer, I wonder if we answer that way partly because we ourselves don’t know the answers. Most teachers don’t have a worldview that is as unified and full of interconnections as we think we do.
To see what I’m getting at, try writing down a list of what topics students study in school. Then choose two at random and combine them to make a subject. Here are some examples:
History of technology
Mathematics of music
Philosophy of computer programming
Biblical psychology
Economics of geology
Biology of music
Theology of philosophy
Languages in home economics
Science of physical fitness
Apologetics in economics
Language of counseling
Business of art
How many science teachers teach the history of technology or the economics of geology? Phrases like this sound strange to us, but they’re actually very practical fields.
It would be an interesting experiment to ask Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computers, whether he would have introduced as many innovative ideas if he hadn’t been aware of the effect of other such innovations in the history of technology, such as Henry Ford’s invention of the assembly line.
Maybe we should also ask petroleum companies who are working on the oil sands of Alberta whether economics, geology, and current events are connected.
Is It the Teachers’ Fault?
Should we blame teachers for our lack of a comprehensive worldview? This is tempting, but think about what we’re asking of our educational system. If teachers knew enough about the history of technology to start their own companies and become rich, how many would have the motivation or free time to be teachers?
Look at what happened to me. For the past year and a half, I’ve been determined to have enough income to support a family and be involved in ministry, and that’s taken me temporarily away from the classroom. If I had five kids, I might never return. And who could blame me for putting my family, calling, and business first?
Even if we could blame our teachers, I don’t think it would be very productive to do so. If a student had a worldview comprehensive enough to recognize what was wrong with the school system, in what way would it benefit him to get teachers to teach him what he could learn for himself?
We have a tendency to place blame where we don’t want to take responsibility. Are you, as a student, willing to learn what your teachers don’t know and eventually work as a teacher yourself? More to the point, are you willing to fill the education gap that exists in your own life rather than just complaining about it?
Take Responsibility for Learning
I’m going to take a radical step and say that it’s your responsibility to learn what teachers aren’t able to show you. The fact that you’re reading this means you’re probably enough of an adult to do this own your own.
If your worldview is broader and deeper than what schools are teaching you, then you may also realize that your life doesn’t have to follow the path that others have laid out for you. Maybe you don’t need to get a job and work 9-to-5. Maybe the world isn’t even headed in that direction any more.
Think of what technology has done to snail mail and long-distance phone bills. Who’s to say that it won’t eventually make equally radical changes to our work environments? When Californians call a big company’s customer service line, they get a voice from India or Oklahoma. It’s more economical to outsource customer support to places where the cost of living is low.
Now combine what you’ve learned about economics, science, math, and current events. What will these companies do to eliminate gasoline costs and commute time as the price of oil rises? Perhaps someday, customer service employees will work from their living rooms or bedsides. They could be paid per call or per telephone minute.
Don’t Be Like Us, Okay?
We teachers generally live in the past. We make the same amount of money regardless of what we teach or how successful our high school graduates are. There’s no incentive for us to try to forecast the future like a businessperson would. But if America’s past history of technology and economic growth are any indication, we should be prepared for things to change, not stay the same.
Just to be clear, I’m not encouraging you to rebel against your teachers or parents. I’m not suggesting that you stop going to school. Not only would that be disrespectful (Hebrews 13:7, 17), you won’t be able to help anyone if you’re sitting in the school office half the week.
I’m suggesting that you give yourself the education that schools can’t help you with. A good place to start would be to sign up for Gary North’s e-mail list and read some of Paul Graham’s essays.
I’m confident that if you do this, you can learn what you need to free yourself from dependence on a 9-to-5 job. But you may choose to keep that job because you love working so much, perhaps becoming the school teacher that you never had.
Here are some excerpts from Paul Graham’s latest essay on beginning your own technology startup. His principles also apply to starting your own business in other areas.
Paul Graham: Why to Not Not Start a Startup (excerpts)
You need a lot of determination to succeed as a startup founder. It’s probably the single best predictor of success.
…
How can you tell if you’re determined enough…? I’m guessing here, but I’d say the test is whether you’re sufficiently driven to work on your own projects. Though they may have been unsure whether they wanted to start a company, it doesn’t seem as if Larry and Sergey [the founders of Google] were meek little research assistants, obediently doing their advisors’ bidding. They started projects of their own.
…
How do you tell if you’re independent-minded enough to start a startup? If you’d bristle at the suggestion that you aren’t, then you probably are.
…
One reason people who’ve been out in the world for a year or two make better founders than people straight from college is that they know what they’re avoiding. If their startup fails, they’ll have to get a job, and they know how much jobs suck.
If you’ve had summer jobs in college, you may think you know what jobs are like, but you probably don’t. Summer jobs at technology companies are not real jobs. If you get a summer job as a waiter, that’s a real job. Then you have to carry your weight. But software companies don’t hire students for the summer as a source of cheap labor. They do it in the hope of recruiting them when they graduate. So while they’re happy if you produce, they don’t expect you to.
That will change if you get a real job after you graduate. Then you’ll have to earn your keep. And since most of what big companies do is boring, you’re going to have to work on boring stuff. Easy, compared to college, but boring. At first it may seem cool to get paid for doing easy stuff, after paying to do hard stuff in college. But that wears off after a few months. Eventually it gets demoralizing to work on dumb stuff, even if it’s easy and you get paid a lot.
And that’s not the worst of it. The thing that really sucks about having a regular job is the expectation that you’re supposed to be there at certain times. Even Google is afflicted with this, apparently. And what this means, as everyone who’s had a regular job can tell you, is that there are going to be times when you have absolutely no desire to work on anything, and you’re going to have to go to work anyway and sit in front of your screen and pretend to. To someone who likes work, as most good hackers do, this is torture.
In a startup, you skip all that. There’s no concept of office hours in most startups. Work and life just get mixed together. But the good thing about that is that no one minds if you have a life at work. In a startup you can do whatever you want most of the time. If you’re a founder, what you want to do most of the time is work. But you never have to pretend to.
…
A significant number of would-be startup founders are probably dissuaded from doing it by their parents. I’m not going to say you shouldn’t listen to them. Families are entitled to their own traditions, and who am I to argue with them? But I will give you a couple reasons why a safe career might not be what your parents really want for you.
One is that parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would be for themselves. This is actually a rational response to their situation. Parents end up sharing more of their kids’ ill fortune than good fortune. Most parents don’t mind this; it’s part of the job; but it does tend to make them excessively conservative. And erring on the side of conservatism is still erring. In almost everything, reward is proportionate to risk. So by protecting their kids from risk, parents are, without realizing it, also protecting them from rewards. If they saw that, they’d want you to take more risks.
The other reason parents may be mistaken is that, like generals, they’re always fighting the last war. If they want you to be a doctor, odds are it’s not just because they want you to help the sick, but also because it’s a prestigious and lucrative career. But not so lucrative or prestigious as it was when their opinions were formed. When I was a kid in the seventies, a doctor was the thing to be. There was a sort of golden triangle involving doctors, Mercedes 450SLs, and tennis. All three vertices now seem pretty dated.
The parents who want you to be a doctor may simply not realize how much things have changed. Would they be that unhappy if you were Steve Jobs instead? So I think the way to deal with your parents’ opinions about what you should do is to treat them like feature requests. Even if your only goal is to please them, the way to do that is not simply to give them what they ask for. Instead think about why they’re asking for something, and see if there’s a better way to give them what they need.
…
This leads us to the last and probably most powerful reason people get regular jobs: it’s the default thing to do. Defaults are enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any conscious choice.
To almost everyone except criminals, it seems an axiom that if you need money, you should get a job. Actually this tradition is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, the default way to make a living was by farming. It’s a bad plan to treat something only a hundred years old as an axiom. By historical standards, that’s something that’s changing pretty rapidly.
We may be seeing another such change right now. I’ve read a lot of economic history, and I understand the startup world pretty well, and it now seems to me fairly likely that we’re seeing the beginning of a change like the one from farming to manufacturing.
And you know what? If you’d been around when that change began (around 1000 in Europe) it would have seemed to nearly everyone that running off to the city to make your fortune was a crazy thing to do. Though serfs were in principle forbidden to leave their manors, it can’t have been that hard to run away to a city. There were no guards patrolling the perimeter of the village. What prevented most serfs from leaving was that it seemed insanely risky. Leave one’s plot of land? Leave the people you’d spent your whole life with, to live in a giant city of three or four thousand complete strangers? How would you live? How would you get food, if you didn’t grow it?
Frightening as it seemed to them, it’s now the default with us to live by our wits. So if it seems risky to you to start a startup, think how risky it once seemed to your ancestors to live as we do now. Oddly enough, the people who know this best are the very ones trying to get you to stick to the old model. How can Larry and Sergey say you should come work as their employee, when they didn’t get jobs themselves?
Now we look back on medieval peasants and wonder how they stood it. How grim it must have been to till the same fields your whole life with no hope of anything better, under the thumb of lords and priests you had to give all your surplus to and acknowledge as your masters. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day people look back on what we consider a normal job in the same way. How grim it would be to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and be told what to do by someone you had to acknowledge as a boss—someone who could call you into their office and say “take a seat,” and you’d sit! Imagine having to ask permission to release software to users. Imagine being sad on Sunday afternoons because the weekend was almost over, and tomorrow you’d have to get up and go to work. How did they stand it?
It’s exciting to think we may be on the cusp of another shift like the one from farming to manufacturing. That’s why I care about startups. Startups aren’t interesting just because they’re a way to make a lot of money. I couldn’t care less about other ways to do that, like speculating in securities. At most those are interesting the way puzzles are. There’s more going on with startups. They may represent one of those rare, historic shifts in the way wealth is created.
That’s ultimately what drives us to work on Y Combinator [helping people start startups]. We want to make money, if only so we don’t have to stop doing it, but that’s not the main goal. There have only been a handful of these great economic shifts in human history. It would be an amazing hack to make one happen faster.
You can read Paul Graham’s article in its entirety
here.
I will lift my voice and sing. I will sing of Your glory, the glory of my King.
Jan
15
Posted under
Christianity,
Entrepreneurship,
Family YOUR JUSTICE FLOWS LIKE THE OCEAN’S TIDES
Here’s an unusual idea I want your comments on.
Men’s qualifications as suitors and husbands are linked to the amount of risk they’re willing to take in their careers.
I’ll explain that opinion in a bit, but to do that, I need to give you my two cents about the working world.
Trapped By Your Job?
Imagine if you could take the salary you’re earning right now and double it. You’d have to work harder, but you wouldn’t need a boss telling you what to do all the time. There would be no glass ceiling. You could give yourself a promotion whenever you wanted. And if you planned ahead, you might even sell your job to someone else for a significant amount of money.
What kind of job is this? It’s one you create for yourself. It’s your own business.
It’s popular these days to categorize people as either capitalists or exploited workers. And yes, there are many business owners who treat their employees unfairly. But in America, no one forces these employees to stay. They can leave whenever they want for other jobs. They can even start their own businesses and compete with their former employers. Because we have so much freedom, I don’t like describing these people as exploited.
You don’t need to fill out a lot of paperwork to start a business in America. All you have to do is start selling your services to others, keep accurate records, and file some forms with the IRS at tax time.
People Trap Themselves
Why don’t more people do this? I think it’s the same thing that keeps men from courting women and then leading lovingly during marriage. They’re afraid of one thing. What is it?
Your company makes a lot more money than you do for your day’s work. They couldn’t afford to hire you otherwise. You can sit and complain about it all you want, but the next morning, you get up and go back. There’s one thing you want to avoid. What is it?
Risk.
I don’t think it’s really fair to say that companies exploit workers. Workers subject themselves willingly because they’re allowing the companies to shield them from risk. If companies go bankrupt, the employees may lose their jobs, but no lawyers will come after them for their houses and cars. They buy safety by allowing their employers to have the most lucrative and risky business opportunities.
Someone who’s a good small business owner will have learned how to manage risk. One good way to do this is to do a lot of research and then practice making reasonable decisions with the limited amount of information available.
EDIT: Many employees also have good risk-reward opportunities and can grow without leaving their jobs. It takes courage to climb the corporate ladder. Others can start side businesses without leaving their jobs. Professionals like doctors, lawyers, accountants, and IT experts have an advantage here because they can earn high salaries while they make plans to start their own practices (read: their own businesses).
An Example
Think back the the four-unit apartment building I wrote about yesterday. It should be clear from the post that I did quite a bit of research before buying the building. Most of it you can’t see, like running spreadsheets and looking up property data online. And I wouldn’t have been able to do most of that research without being mentally prepared beforehand.
How prepared? Well, I’m about halfway through this stack of books:
And that doesn’t count the dozen or so books that I’ve read and given away. It also doesn’t count the hundreds of hours I’ve spent doing research on the Web.
That’s a couple of semesters worth of material, yet I have no formal education in business or economics. Doing it this way is a lot less work and a lot more fun than going back to school would be, since I get to make my own decisions about what and when to study. Grades and final exams don’t have much meaning in this context.
The self-motivation and initiative come because I have to love knowledge in order to take big steps in life. I love to picture myself supporting my family and having a lot of free time for ministry in the future. I hate the idea of being stuck at the same stage of life forever, not only because I’d be single, but because I want to serve God as effectively as possible. Big dreams, big rewards, and careful research make the stress of taking risks bearable. Well, usually, anwyay. 
(EDIT: You can do this too. Start at Gary North’s Web site. Sign up for his e-mail lists and read the publicly accessible free articles. The subscription, at $10/month, gets you full access to the site with hundreds more articles and a discussion forum where you can interact with Dr. North and other Christian businesspeople. I wouldn’t have moved to Oklahoma without first Paul Graham’s and then Dr. North’s influence. They’ll probably never understand how thankful I am.)
People Are Scared
Diligent study and risk-taking go hand in hand. Many people are scared to make big decisions because they don’t know how to evaluate and manage the risks involved. They go through life making one small change after another but never take steps necessary to go for what they really want.
Now jump a decade into the future. If you’ve had success in your decision-making, others will say what a good economic forecaster you were. They’ll say that they should have done the same thing earlier in life, but they never had the opportunity.
At the time, they were unwilling to take the risks. You were. So today, you reap the profits. Most people don’t have to be “exploited workers”. They choose that existence.
Risk and Family Leadership
What does all this have to do with courtship and marriage?
My theory is that these business-related character traits also make men good family leaders. A man has to demonstrate preparedness, foresight, and a willingness to take risks in order to find and court a woman. He has to see all kinds of problems in advance and try to solve them in order to guard his family from risk, since it’s his job to love and protect them.
A leader who always tries to deal with life’s issues “as they come up” will procrastinate and allow problems to build up, not just for himself, but for those he leads. A man who’s used to passing risk on to someone else is going to be uncomfortable shielding his family and allowing the bullets to hit him when things get tough. He won’t be used to managing the stress and fear that uncertainty brings, and this will affect his relationships with other people.
What is courage, after all? Is it the absence of fear? Or the ability to manage the fear and still be able to lead others?
They came to a place named Gethsemane; and He said to His disciples, “Sit here until I have prayed.” And He took with Him Peter and James and John, and began to be very distressed and troubled. And He said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved to the point of death; remain here and keep watch.” And He went a little beyond them, and fell to the ground and began to pray that if it were possible, the hour might pass Him by. And He was saying, “Abba! Father! All things are possible for You; remove this cup from Me; yet not what I will, but what You will.” And He came and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour? Keep watching and praying that you may not come into temptation; the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Mark 14:32-38 NASB)
God, please forgive me for living a life of uncontrolled fear. Please help me to trust You so I can be Your instrument of blessing to others.
Improve This
What I’ve written is just a theory based on observations I’ve had from my business experiences. Please critique it and make it better.
Don’t have a Xanga? You can still comment. After you type your comment in and click the Submit button, log in with the username DarrensGuest and the password darrensguest.