Self Worth Nett Worth

This is a slogan of a training company, which I think is rather unfair and ungrateful to schools. It also has a very limited understanding of what being 'rich' is. While being rich mean having an abundance of desirable qualities and elements in general terms, it is common for many people to equate 'being rich' with one who merely has lots of money.

.

Even restricting our definition of 'being rich' into the narrow scope of money, schools actually do teach us how to make them. For instance, good language abilities enable me to communicate effectively with others and read up on the fine details of product specifications and commercial laws. Ultimately, having good language skills help me to make money.

.

Other subjects like maths, science, history and geography are obviously useful tools to make money with, and there are the more subtle ones that I have found even more useful. For instance, even the dreaded non-phonetic Chinese ideograms have helped to improve my pattern recognition abilities, alongside with the more congenial art lessons; and after all, business is but about recognising patterns and striking the opportunities at the right time! And what better way to be trained in precise timing than by learning music? Besides, music is also inherently highly structured and intuitive, which is among the traits of successful businessmen.

.

So schools do teach us how to make money, and it is just a matter putting all the skills together. More amazingly, schools not only teaches us how to make money but also the moral duties to society, family and self. It teaches us to serve society and that money is but the fuel to our lifestyles, not the source.

.

In highly urbanised cities, where its people are further and further removed from nature, it is easy to believe that money is the source of life. Yet, money is merely an invention by human beings to store value. The plants don't have money. The animals and the entire nature don't have money; and they live (until they are destroyed by humans). Nature, after all, is eternally regenerative and abundant. As Buckminster Fuller puts it, we are all multi-millionaires by the measures of what nature has already given us.

.

So why do business 'gurus' say that schools do not impart the skills to become 'rich'? It could be their own myopia that being rich is just merely having money and their own shortcoming of not recognising the business skills that are implicit in all the subjects in school. Perhaps they didn't really understand those subjects when they were in school and have missed the essence in their own education! If not, then they could be using those silly slogans to whip up the feeling of inadequacy among the audience. That is, break their confidence, make them feel that they need something that is missing in their education and that they have to get it fast in order to make money. In other words, they are selling fear. Sadly, that's also a way to become rich make money - by selling fear.

.

I have this video of Chris Gardner, the real life character in the movie "In the Pursuit of Happiness". He certainly did not attend any 'how to get rich" classes, but he got there to make lots of money and lots of good morals too! There is another post about him in this blog. For more of him, click here.

.

Finally, look around you and find out if those well-rounded fabulously ones needed a business guru?

.

If you are reading from facebook, click here

Revolutionary Wealth 2

I would like to share these paragraphs in the Epilogue of the book:

.

Waxing pessimistic is one of the easiest ways to masquerade as wise. And there is plenty to be pessimistic about. But permanent pessimism is no substitute for thought.

.

"No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed into an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit, " wrote Helen Keller, the remarkable blind and deaf author who traveled to thirty-nine countries, wrote eleven books, inspired two Oscar-winning movies and fought for the rights of the sightless until she died at the age of eighty-seven."

.

.

Tao 3 - Wealth and Love

The following is what I learned from a Tao lecture...

.

About Wealth

.

During the days of the legendary Emperors in China, successors to the throne were not chosen based on bloodlines, but rather that the person had attained Tao. In old China, an Emperor was one who had the mandate from Heaven to rule. Heavens will bestow all the wealth of the land to the man who has attained Tao, as he will have the compassion and wisdom to manage the wealth for his people.

.

However, as time went, due to the greed of humankind, successors to the throne became the sons of the Emperors, and sometimes the son who managed to survive the fights and assasinations.

.

So if we want to seek wealth, we should only seek the wealth that is within. When we have attained Tao within, wealth will come, as we will then be wise and responsible enough to manage the resources to the highest good of humankind.

.

In the Bible, it is said that "... those who have it, more will be added to you, and those who do not have it, more will be taken away from you...". This does correlate well with this Tao teaching.

About Motherly Love

Once upon a time in a village in Singapore where the Tao master used to live in, there was a mentally insane woman. Her husband had left her and she was alone to take care of her two kids. Her mind was so deranged that she would use the planks of her wall of her hut for the fire for cooking. Isn't that mad?

.

However, while she was mad, she remained a fantastic mother. She knew how to feed the kids, care for and protect her kids. This is because loving her children and motherly love is an instinct, and not an action for calculated returns. If it is one of calculated returns, then all mothers will be running at a huge loss, as such repayments can never be fulfilled no matter how much the children would want to pay.

.

The children of this mother were also teased in school. The other kids called them mad children, but that didn't upset them, because they were very young and at that age, their mother is the greatest person in the world - the one who love and cared for them most.

.

Babies and very young children also would not say that their mother is ugly, even if she is deformed, untidy and unpresentable to many people. To them, there is no such thing as an ugly mother. The mother they know of is the most beautiful person in the world. When they are bullied by other children, they will run to their mother, no matter how ugly other people would perceive her to be.

.

It is perhaps later when children 'grow up' and are subjected to external influences that they gradually feel ashame of their mother. Ashamed when they turn up in their college, or work place, since some mothers, by then, would have grown old and even haggard. By then, sadly, these children would have forgotten that it was their 'ugly mother' who loves them so much and brought them up. In short, these children have forgotten about their true nature, their instinct, which is to love their mother and love them unconditionally.

Revolutionary Wealth

Got this book "Revolutionary Wealth" by Alvin and Heidi Toffler as a present yesterday. I read his first book, "Future Shock" in 1977 and then went on to read his other book then, "The Third Wave". So impressed, I decided to take on the same route of working in other countries to learn about other cultures, technologies and the global economy for twenty years! And I did! It has been a wonderful and enlightening experience and it still feels like a dream.
.
Revolutionary wealth is about the ways in which tomorrow's wealth will be created and who will get it, and how. "Wealth" will no longer be measured with money and there will be many who would be volunteer workers, such as in the Open Source community in the IT world or for that matter - Blogging. Bloggers are volunteer writers, providing in many cases, useful information. YouTube is another example of a business that gets its content from voluntary contribution, which resulted it in being sold to Google for US$1.86b.

.

In other words, we have entered the era of the "prosumer" ("Producer" + "Consumer" in one), a term Toffler coined in 1980 and mentioned in "The Third Wave". That means, wittingly or unwittingly, these volunteer workers are contributing to wealth in our current economy. This phenomena of prosuming gets further mention in "Revolutionary Wealth".
.

The Bucky Group is in a way a Prosumer group, we organise Bucky book readings and discussions, as lifelong education. We also adopt learning materials from the Internet, like Youtube.

.

I have found two useful interviews on YouTube. See below.

.

Summary

• Wealth used to be only a matter of agriculture, then we came to the industrial revolution where people come to work in factories and assembly lines.
• Now, we have developed the knowledge economy. It is radically different and a new form of civilisation. More and more economical wealth created by the application of knowledge - medicine, technology, how to manage...etc
• Traditional economics is the science of allocation of scarce resources, but knowledge is not scarce - which is the central resource
• Obsoledge - absolute knowledge - pertinent in current society, unlike the agriculture and industrial age. How much we know are already obsolete?
• There are societies where the young learn from the old and there are societies where the old learn from the young
• Agriculture - some one planted the first seed - probably around Turkey. Then we did away from hunting and nomadic communities.
• Industry - invention of steam engine, then smoke stacks and assembly lines. More people leave the fields to work in factories.
• In agriculture era, workers or family members can be late, but not in factories, they discovered they must follow the clock.
• Toffler thinks both politcial parties in the US are parties of old ideas. When Newt Gingrich became the leader of Congress he gave everyone a reading list
• Economist magazine's projection of China being the economic superpower by 2020 is based on straight line extrapolation. Also, GDP not the only way to measure. Harmonious Society or harmonious development is the latest measure, as there are 80,000 violent protest every year

Current education system are out of synch with the times for the following reasons:

1. That it was designed to educate farm hands to work in factories. It was a time when industrial discipline needs to be educated.
2. That students need to learn how to make sense of our the media, to handle the avalanche of information they meet everyday, and sorting out what is reasonable and what is not.
3. That not only teachers teach and we do not only learn from teachers. We learn more from people from outside the school. Why not bring some of such people, like pilots, dentists,...etc outside into schools as teachers?
4. A system where everyone gets the same education and start at the same age assumes uniformity in education. Toffler got a letter from a kid in Asia who tells him he wants to quit school, but not stop learning. Kids are different and need to be treated as different.

How are our institutions coping up with the changes? Our education, pension, social structures...etc.

.

Why has it worked so well in (East) Asia and not so well in the Islamic world?

Seems that in Islam there is such an emphasis of the past and not enough on the future. When we (The US) gets to the Middle East, we think in terms of nation states, whilst they (the Muslims) are not.

.

Indian economic explosion - They have 2 advantages, which are democracy and also English speaking.

.

Chinese leadership is based on Marxism. If you hate everything you read about Marxism, like collectivism, etc, you will learn that there is something in Marxism that they understand very well, which is that technology is important to the development of societies. Many Communist leaders were engineers trained from Moscow. Contrastingly, in some other parts of the world, like Europe or France, you have people who have anti-technology point of view.

.

If all the finance ministers of the world are going to call US' debts, it will be in trouble, but so would the Chinese, because the US is a major market for Chinese goods. But economics doesn't run everything, there are the social and political aspects.

.

More transcripts later. Meanwhile enjoy listening to the interviews.