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Aleksandar Malečić
463 days ago |
Among self-help books, those containing recipes for success in business are very popular. They contain different tricks and little secrets of rich people.
The starting point of this kind of literature is that only rich are fulfilled, happy and successful. I don't know why cocaine is so popular among rich youth. I suppose happiness and addictions go hand in hand, but I, as a person not really happy and rich, can't understand it. Anyway, the media saturate us with life/love stories of rich and successful people. I would call it brain-washing, but perhaps I just envy them.
After that starting point (being rich is good), those books move on with tricks and tools for becoming rich and worthy. The most common trick is to think out of the box and take risks. But, what about those people who try and fail? Well, there are more rules to obey. You must practice. The only way to assess how much good/trained/charming/innovative/brave/brilliant/worthy/sexy you are after the practice is to check your bank account. There are activities on one side and money on the other. If you try that self-help book and fail, you are the one to blame. If you fail, your story won't be interesting for a book.
Do those tricks for becoming a millionaire always work? If you really understand and follow them, according to those books they do. If you suddenly become rich, you are a story. If you fail, you are statistics. When economy grows, it means that people have finally found out how to be brilliant and sexy. When economy is in trouble, it's a crisis that will go away soon. If a crisis is stubborn and just doesn't want to go away, it can also be explained. There is a logical explanation for everything.
In my opinion, trust is more important in the long run than profit. In a highly competitive environment, you are afraid to be fired. You are still as good and capable as you used to be, but you may suddenly be fired. Profit and competition as we know them (and tend to globalize them) are unnatural. They work fine under very limited circumstances. Specialization is unnatural. Animals improvise and move across levels of hierarchy. In order to deal with increasingly complex problems, we should also be complex and flexible. We are building walls of specialization and indifference instead.
Is there anything to redefine in order to deal with new and emerging challenges or we can continue with business and hierarchies as usual? I think there should be a lot of improvisation, playfulness, experiments and ad-hoc teams and networks. In my opinion informal networks and collaboration are good and competition and silos are bad. But, I am not so rich, famous, successful and sexy, so I can't really judge about those things, right?
This generation, you and I, will either try or hesitate. There won't be another chance. Only things larger than life should be unquestionable. If the eternal growth and economy and population and new yachts are larger than life, so be it. We shall either succeed or fail with this attitude. Whatever the outcome, there will be a logical explanation. Things are obvious only after they have happened. We think that people who thought that the Earth is flat (they were even able to kill for this idea) were stupid and irrational. Are we less stupid and more rational? Nature doesn't understand the difference between hippies and business people or liberals and conservatives. It's funny that atheists tend to believe more in this kind of separations and unquestionable reality as something bigger and older than humans.
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