Chris Rushton .com

Mathematics is important in day to day life, no matter what people tell you. Even shopping involves numbers and a basic grip on how they work will stop you getting screwed by unscrupulous shop keepers (to add a bit of fear to the post) or simply allow you to make better choices about value for money.

The important thing about maths for day to day use is that the feel is more important than the actual number.  It is less important how much cheaper something is than which is cheaper.

Most maths, at least when I was taught it at school revolved around learning a bunch of laws and then picking the right law to solve a question.  A typical maths question at high school might look like this:  D = (C + B) / A where A = 1, B = 4, C = 12 (in this case D = 16) and at University the game doesn’t change much.  The question now becomes prove the statement and then put some numbers in (also the statements become a lot harder).  This ‘filling in the pieces’ method to mathematics is not a good way to learn maths for the real world.  It’s rare that you get a problem where you know all the information and nothing else.  Often you have an information overload and even more often you don’t know everything you need to.  What is important is the ability to deconstruct the problems.  In computer programming, for example, this is called abstraction.  The process of breaking down a complex problem into a series of smaller problems.  For the rest of this post, I will show you how you can deconstruct mathematical problems and make them easier.  By being able to deconstruct maths into manageable chunks, you get a better idea of the underlying principles rather than simply learning a load of laws and cherry picking the right one at any given time. continue reading…

This post is about goal setting and how to get the most out of the goals which you decide to set.  It is the second part of my series on improving your productivity and liberating your life.  Freeing yourself from the 9 – 5 grind.  The first part can be found here.

Goal setting is important.  Very important.  Everyone should set goals in their life or they will just wander around aimlessly.  It is far better to set out to achieve something and achieve it rather than muddle around aimlessly and maybe eventually bump into something meaningful.

Goal setting isn’t really that difficult.  All you have to do is sit down and say “I want to achieve…” and then do it.  The key is to setting effective goals.  For me, I like to have 1 main goal in each area of my life that I am working towards.  I can’t tell you what your goal is or should be.  I don’t know you and it would take the fun of discovering it away from you.  I don’t like the timescale to be much more than 6 months for any long term goal.  On a daily basis I like to give myself no more than five goals.  Five goals a day is really pushing it too.  I ideally have one, two or three goals on any given day.

I decide my goals before I even get out of bed in the morning.  I try and figure out how I want to do each thing and then I get up and do it.  So, out of all the things I can get done, how do I decide what three things I want to do in the morning? continue reading…

Ever thought that you’re putting way too much effort into life but not getting anything back in return?  I’d imagine it’s a common problem.  I’ve certainly been there and so many people I talk to have similar stories to tell me.  Is it possible to break this cycle?  Is it possible to be rewarded for the effort you put into life?  Why do some people get rewarded and others not?

Here are my thoughts.

You Make What You’re Worth

Generally, people make as much money as they are worth to society in general.  If you’re not making as much money as you’d like, it’s probably because you’re not providing much value to the world.  Even investment bankers provide value to the world by getting money from the financially idle people (you and me, well not really me but you and your friends) into the hands of people who can make it work.  Sometimes they make mistakes, but they are human.  They’re certainly providing value to the company they work for and the company, in return, is paying them plenty of money.

So if you’re stuck stacking shelves and being bitter that you’re not making much money, the answer is that you need to do more.  More specifically, you need to provide more value to the world.  This is a wake up call.  Anyone can stack shelves.  Anyone can work in a call centre and anyone can be a labourer on a building site.  That’s not to say that these professions are pointless, they definitely serve a purpose.  On the scale of value, if you think they are high you are kidding yourself.

The reason these are low value is because they are very easy to do well enough not to get fired.  You might be excellent at what you do, the best shelf stacker in the world.  However, if you were to leave your job, they could easily find someone to stack the shelves in your place.  They might not be as good as you but they don’t need to be.  All they need to do is get the stuff on the shelves, in the right place.  It’s not hard, I used to do it.  I certainly wasn’t providing anything that couldn’t easily be found in any 16 year old that happened to walk through the door for an interview.

Finding Your Unique Selling Point

I’ve given you the mental shock.  I’ve kicked you in the teeth.  Now I’m ready to help you.  To be truly valuable, you need to do something that few, if any, other people can do. Something that makes you unique.  Something that makes you valuable. Something that will, if done well, make you rich. What this is, I can’t say.  I know where my strengths are and I’m just as aware of my weaknesses.  I play to my strengths and work to strengthen my weaknesses.  You should do the same if your goal is to be rich.

Some people are excellent speakers.  They could provide others with a script but the person could not hold the audience in the same way.  Have you ever tried to tell a joke you saw on the TV?  How did it go?  Not as well as it did when you saw it I’d bet.  The reason is the person who said it is providing something totally unique to them.  Their personality.  Not everyone has a sufficiently unique personality though, so if you consider yourself ‘one of the guys / girls’  you might want to either work on your personality or look somewhere else for your own unique selling point.

Some people are great writers.  I love writing, hence my blog.  I consider my opinions sufficiently different that they are worth sharing with the world.  If I write well enough that people want to read, I should be able to make money from it.  My initial plan for making money was screwed up by some bad decisions, partly but not totally by me.  I’ve worked on new ways since then and have a better system now.

There are many other traits that people may have that can make them unique.  These are the bricks (if you want to think of being wealthy as a metaphorical wall) but you need the cement / mortar too.  The mortar is smart financial and business decisions.  A musician makes a lot of money by signing a contract with a record label.  The really smart musician invests that money and might start (for example) a record label of their own.  They can sign new artists and create their own wealth.  They may start clothing lines.  The kids who buy their music are also likely to buy their clothes too.  I believe one popular artist has his own chain of restaurants.  This is a very smart move because the restaurants exist totally outside of his music career.  That will eventually end but the restaurants will continue making him money until he decides to sell them, if they have a good reputation.

Create Value

The single most important thing here is to create value.  My test is, if I’m about to start doing something that will take some time is this:

Would a sufficiently trained monkey be able to do what I’m about to do?  Are there any decisions that need to be made that a machine couldn’t do?  Am I likely to have to do this again in the future?  Is there ANY POSSIBLE way to streamline this?

That’s my thought process.  It helps me figure out where the value is.  If the answer is yes, especially to the first 2, the task is usually value-less and worth trying to find a way around.  If no, then I’ve just got to get my head down and do it.  It’ll probably be a valuable use of my time anyway.

I use a monkey since they don’t have (I’m assuming here) the same capacity for bilateral thinking and dealing with abstract concepts that I do.  I use a machine because machines are designed for doing repetitive tasks.  If I’m likely to need to do this again, it makes sense to try and find a way to automate it.  If a machine or a monkey could do the task, it is usually possible to automate it.  Streamlining is good.  Streamlining where you do a worse job is bad.  If and only if a task can be streamlined, it should be.

What I’ve done here is isolate a problem which needs to be solved and found a way to fix it.  Not only have I done that but I’ve started to find a valuable way to fix it.  By valuable, I mean I can give it (or sell it) to someone else to use and they can do it too. When I write computer code, I think about this extensively.  I take the time to make a valuable solution to the problem, rather than just a solution.  This may take a little longer in the short term, but it most definitely saves time, effort and my own mind in the long run.  There have been times when I’ve spotted mistakes in routines I’ve written for data processing.  If I’d done it by hand, which would have been totally possible, I’d have wasted days of my life.  Instead, a simple line of code, about 1 minutes worth of coding, was all that was needed.  That works for me.

Work Smart

Most people work hard.  They grind away doing boring jobs that could easily be done by machines or monkeys.  They aren’t working smart.  As such, they are not providing any real value to the world.  The people they’re working for are.  The people they’re working for are making much more money too. Those people are working smart.  See the difference?  Not convinced?  Why not?  I was brought up believing hard work was a virtue.  I’ve since realised that that attitude is the mating call of the perennially poor and frustrated.

WORK SMART NOT HARD!  Make it happen, you can but only you can.