[Off-Topic] Comfort Zone: Taking to the Streets Isn't the Only Solution

First published on 2013-07-23T09:17:20+00:00

Taking to the streets isn’t the only solution.

"Never in the history of the world has anyone ever achieved anything good and valuable by means of prayers and supplications" – J.P. Morgan

I don’t want to judge or analyze the #vemprarua (“come to the streets”) movements that took over the country’s streets in the recent past. It’s a tangle I’ll leave for political scientists and historians to untangle. What I want to elaborate on is a mindset that comes out of this kind of movement and shows up in our day-to-day: “claiming,” the act of “complaining, demanding.”

It’s very common for this new generation to fall into the trap of thinking that demanding is the best solution to problems. They’re wrong. Barring extreme cases, that’s always the worst possible solution. In the daily life of the common man, demanding is just a declaration of your own incompetence.

Let’s consider our tech market in general:

• Demanding better working conditions: nobody works anymore in dirty, smoky factories, alongside rats and sewage. Come on, nobody even works 8 hours a day nonstop, at most 4 hours stretched over 8.
• Demanding better salaries: it’s a free market, with dozens of tech companies of all sizes and categories. Mobility is easy. Of course, only someone with the ability to do it manages to move from one company to another for more money. Whoever stays put, unhappy, and only knows how to “demand” a raise is already showing their low character.
• Demanding investments: it seems startup ’entrepreneurs’ today are turning into ‘professional beggars,’ convinced they can only move forward once an investor hands them money.

The “demanding” mindset leads to another one, the “cheap complainer,” the person who blames everyone but themselves.

• “What they’re asking is impossible to do in this time and cost.” The thinking behind it: “I can’t picture a way, so it must be impossible.”
• “The product’s users are stupid, the problem isn’t the product.” The thinking: “if I made it, it can only be good; if they’re complaining, they’re the stupid ones.”
• “The market is unfair: I know more and earn less than I should.” The thinking: “I know I’m really good, so why don’t they pay me what I want?”
• “They only criticize me, and what about the other guy who also didn’t do it?” Nobody likes being criticized, but without criticism there’s no progress. Worse still when the first reaction to criticism is to compare it with someone else’s mistake or to justify it by blaming others. That profile will never go far. Praise doesn’t help anyone evolve, cheap praise least of all.

The “Me me me” Generation is the most sensitive I’ve ever seen. It should be called the “Porcelain Generation,” because it breaks way too easily.

In the Industrial Revolution people were literally hard as iron. There was no option: many died in the factories, and the concept of “working conditions” didn’t even exist. In the agricultural era, people worked from sunrise to sunset, earning very little and carrying tons on their backs.

Now this digital era has a stereotypically Emo resilience (nothing to do with the origins of hardcore punk): scratch a fingernail and they panic. Adolescence is being stretched, and adulthood only shows up after 30 (back in the day, 16 was a good age to take on an adult role).

That should actually be a good thing, because it means we’ve raised comfort to a level never seen in millennia of human history. But there’s a side effect: the new generation grew up without understanding how hard it was to get here.

All of this can lead to a question: “so I’m supposed to swallow everything I don’t like?” Not at all. And here’s a hook back to my previous article “Constraints are Liberating: less is more”.

Always assume this premise: nobody is ever going to give you what you want or need, much less anything beyond that. If you haven’t earned it, you don’t deserve what you’re asking for, and nobody has any obligation even to listen to what you have to say. It’s on you, and only you, to solve your own problem, with your own sweat and your own tears.

To me, the difference between a child and an adult is simple: an adult solves their own problems with their own hands and never expects them to be solved for free. And “solving” means actually solving, without blaming others, without demanding, without sweeping the problem under the rug.

And when the problem looks “impossible” is exactly when you get the best chance to innovate. Innovation comes precisely out of an impossible situation. A thing is impossible when you can’t pull it off with what we know today. You can only solve it down a different path, one nobody knows yet.

The teenagers graduating from colleges today see this trendy “Startup” wave and want to be “entrepreneurs.” All they learn to do is put together PowerPoints for Demo Days. They believe their “education” (which is thin, no matter the MBA or PhD) and their “idea” are enough to crown themselves “entrepreneurs.” That’s little, extremely little.

An “entrepreneur” who takes low risk and makes low sacrifice is just an average employee with a fancy title. An “idea” and a possible investment solve very little.

First, go work in a real industry to learn how it works and, who knows, find a solution nobody has tried yet. Because here’s another truth: whatever idea you have, someone has probably had it before and already tried it in all sorts of ways. The odds of you having a truly original idea are low.

Only when you land in an impossible situation, where everything has already been tried, does the chance to try something new and maybe innovative show up. As you try to solve it, you might end up finding a solution that already existed and discover that your “impossible” was just not knowing what was already known. Then you move on to the next problem.

I was watching the History Channel series “The Men Who Built America”, which shows, in a romanticized way, part of the story of how the United States conquered and earned its place as the biggest economic power in the world. The story starts like ours: nobody gave them anything, everything had to be earned. It has some good examples I like to cite.

• It was impossible to transport goods across the entire country by horse or even by ship; it became more and more necessary to find ways to shorten that time. It was the railroads of Vanderbilt that connected all the states of the country.
• It was impossible to have a corporation as large and massive as Standard Oil once was, but Rockefeller innovated what we know today as corporate structures, many of his practices later deemed illegal. If you’ve ever filled your tank at an Esso station here in Brazil, it’s worth remembering where it all started.
• It was impossible to cross the great Mississippi River with an iron bridge. Connecting the East and West of the country seemed impossible. It took an Andrew Carnegie to execute the idea of an affordable steel industry at large scale to solve this problem. Carnegie Steel was formed, which would later become US Steel.
• It was impossible to have electricity distributed to every home in the country. It literally took the “blood” of geniuses like Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and Morgan to reach this goal. Today we don’t even think about it, because everyone assumes electricity is something “natural.” It wasn’t.
• It was impossible to improve the brutal working conditions in factories and have productivity at the same time. Henry Ford changed that with the refinement of his production line. By the way, remember the model that made him famous was the Ford Model T; to get to “T” he started at model “A.”

These and other “self-made men” changed the world one way only: by solving one problem at a time, without claiming, complaining, or demanding. And the more “impossible” the problem was, the more “revolutionary” the solution turned out to be. That’s how great entrepreneurs are made: solving their own problems with their own hands.

The opening quote of the article sums up its content, and the next one defines it:

"Vision without execution is hallucination" – Thomas Edison