[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 try to analyze the #vemprarua (“come to the streets”) movements that happened in the country in the recent past. It’s a tangle I’ll leave for political scientists and historians to unravel. But I want to elaborate on a thought that derives from this type of movement and that we see in our day-to-day: “claiming,” the act of “complaining, demanding.”

It’s very common for this new generation to constantly fall into the error of thinking that demanding is the best solution to problems. They’re wrong. Excluding extreme cases, that’s always the worst possible solution. In the daily life of the common man, it only demonstrates the declaration of their 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, there are dozens of tech companies of all sizes and categories. Mobility is simple. Of course, only those with the capacity to do so manage to move from one company to another earning more. Those who stay in the same place, discontented, and only know how to “demand” to earn more already demonstrate their low character.
• Demanding investments: it seems that startup ’entrepreneurs’ today are turning only into ‘professional beggars’ who think they can only move forward when an investor gives them money.

The thinking of “demanding” leads to the other thinking of the “cheap complainer,” the one who blames everyone but themselves.

• “What they’re asking is impossible to do in this time and cost” — thinking: “I can’t think of a way, so it must be impossible.”
• “The product’s users are stupid, it’s not the product that’s bad” — thinking: “if I made it, it can only be good — if they’re complaining, they’re the stupid ones.”
• “The market is unfair because I know more, but I earn less than I should” — thinking: “I know I’m really good, 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. Even worse when, upon receiving criticism, the first reaction is to want to compare with someone else’s mistake or even to want to justify by blaming others. This profile will never amount to much. Compliments don’t contribute to anyone’s evolution, especially cheap compliments.

The “Me me me” Generation is the most sensitive I’ve ever seen — it should be called the “Porcelain Generation” because they break very easily. In the Industrial Revolution people were literally hard as iron. There was no option — many died in the factories, there was no concept of “working conditions.” In the agricultural era, people were tough, worked from sunrise to sunset, earning very little, carrying tons on their backs.

Now this digital era has a stereotypically Emo resilience (nothing to do with the origin of hardcore punk): scratch a fingernail and they freak out. Adolescence is being stretched, adulthood is manifesting late after age 30 (back then, 16 was a good age to take on an adult position). It should be a good thing, because it means we’ve raised the levels of comfort to a level never seen in the millennia of human history. But a side effect has emerged: the new generation was raised without understanding the difficulty of reaching this evolutionary point.

All of this may make you think: “does that mean I should swallow everything I don’t like?” Not at all! And here’s a hook with my previous article “Constraints are Liberating: less is more”.

Always assume the following premise: nobody will ever give you what you want or need, or more than that. If you haven’t conquered it, then you don’t deserve what you’re asking for, and nobody has any obligation even to listen to what you have to say. So it’s up to you, and exclusively you, to solve your own problem, with your own sweat and tears.

I say that the difference between a child and an adult is that an adult solves their own problems with their own hands and never expects them to be solved for free. And “solving” isn’t blaming others, isn’t demanding, isn’t hiding the problem — it’s actually solving.

And when the problem seems “impossible” is when you have the best opportunity to innovate. Innovation only appears from an impossible situation. A thing is impossible precisely when it’s not possible to do it with what we know to this day. That is, it’s only possible to do it using a different path, one we don’t know yet.

Teenagers graduating from colleges today see this trendy movement of “Startups” and want to be “entrepreneurs.” All they’re learning to do is create PowerPoints for Demo Days. They believe their “education” (which is little, no matter the MBA or PhD they got) and their “idea” are enough to title themselves “entrepreneurs.” That’s little, extremely little.

An “entrepreneur” who takes low risk and makes low sacrifice isn’t an entrepreneur — they’re an average employee. An “idea” and a possible investment won’t solve much.

First work in a real industry to learn how it works and, maybe, find a solution that hasn’t been tried yet. That’s another truth: any idea you have, someone has probably had it before and already tried it in various ways. The chances of having an idea nobody has tried are low. Only when you fall into an impossible situation, where everything has already been tried, does the chance to try something new and possibly innovative appear. When trying to solve it, however, you may find the solution that already existed and discover that what you called “impossible” was just “not knowing” what was already known. 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 of America conquered and earned their place as the biggest economic power in the world. The story starts like ours — nobody gave them anything, everything had to be conquered. There are some good examples I like to cite.

• It was impossible to transport goods throughout the entire country by horse or even by ship — it was increasingly 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 was in the past, but Rockefeller innovated what we know today as corporate structures, many of his practices later considered illegal. But if you’ve ever filled your tank at an Esso station here in Brazil, you have to remember where it all started.
• It was impossible to cross the great Mississippi River by making an iron bridge. Connecting the East and West of the country seemed impossible. It took an Andrew Carnegie to execute the idea of an accessible steel industry at large scale to solve this problem. Carnegie Steel was formed, which later became 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 conditions of work in factories and at the same time have productivity. Henry Ford changed this concept with the refinement of his production line. By the way, remember that the model that made him famous was the Ford Model T — to get to “T” he started at model “A.”

It wasn’t by demanding, complaining, or claiming that these and other “self-made men” changed the world. It was by solving one problem at a time. And the more “impossible” the problem was, the more “revolutionary” their solution was. That’s how great entrepreneurs are made: solving their own problems with their own hands.

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

"Vision without execution is hallucination" – Thomas Edison