‘What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’ said Oscar Wilde.
What is the value of value? Is noticing that chattering voice in your head a valuable insight? Do you pay a price for listening to the cerebral noise? Is money the defining technology of our time? Does money shape us, or is money simply a tool?
‘Create and capture value’ is the essence of business success.
With fast moving constant change, it’s not uncommon to find what was once a service or product with a price tag, is now available for free. Prime example would be WhatsApp, a platform providing the ability to communicate globally, for the cost of credit.
Ability to learn just about anything in business is there for free on YouTube. World-class, free online courses from top universities – like Harvard and Stanford – and organisations like, for instance, Google, Khan Academy, Deep Learning AI, and the World Bank are a few clicks away.
It’s no longer possible to whisper ‘sweet nothings’ and say, ‘look at me, aren’t I wonderful’ with a newly minted degree. Today, one has to be able to create tangible value from the beginning to grab an employer’s or buyer’s attention. Talking fluffy jargon and creating hype, no longer works.
Valuable business insights that in the past had a price tag, are now available at just about no cost, using the smartphone in your pocket. Catch is the ability to take the ideas – concepts and turn them into a profitable reality. ‘Make something people want.’
Too many entrepreneurs invest a lot of time and money in creating a product that buyers are not ready to pay for. Best to run tiny low cost experiments, constantly pivoting, evolving and adapting.
Thinking about thinking
One of the most valuable insights is in asking the question – Are you that little voice in your head? Which voice you ask? Well, that one that is talking to you right now. One of the most treasured age old insights is to realise that you are not that voice in your head.
Helps to consider that perhaps you are the observer, the listener, the consciousness that notices that voice, that noise. It’s impossible to shut off that ‘monkey mind’ that constantly leaps from one stand of thought to another.
‘Your brain, fundamentally, is a three-pound lump of meat, just another biological organ concerned with your survival. The product it produces to aid with that altruistic purpose is thought. Although, as a race, we humans have managed to push our brains to the point where they have created iPhones and built civilisation as we know it, the original function those brains were designed for is entirely focused on keeping us alive.
‘To do that, our brains analyse the world around us, turn our complex environment into simple concepts that we can grasp and then turn those concepts into words (the only building block of knowledge we can comprehend). With this knowledge, we can make the all-important decisions needed to survive, and then implement those in the form of orders given to the different parts of our bodies so we can remain safe. That’s it, really.
Your brain is your inner voice. It’s the one telling you what’s going on and suggesting how things should be. It is the one making all the noise,’ writes Mo Gawdat, the former chief business officer of Google X in his 2022 book: That Little Voice in Your Head.
Quieting the noise
Amid uncertainty and chaos, Ray Dalio who founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 has credited one daily practice giving him the ability to quiet the noise, and succeed in the face of relentless unpredictable change: meditation.
Bridgewater Associates, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, is known for its systematic global macro approach, and unique transparent corporate culture has roughly $124 billion of assets under management.
It’s not uncommon to find market leaders, across the spectrum practicing mindfulness. Essentially, the ability to create a sense of calm and space, just observing the constant chatter of the mind for what it is – noise.
We associate money with the longer term goal of getting wealthy – often based on a bright product idea. To do this, one has to ask ‘Is this authentic to me?’ And then, as Silicon Valley sage, Naval Ravikant points out, how can one turn the bright idea into a product in demand? How can it be scaled? What is the leverage being used? Is it labour, capital, code, or with media?
Money, a defining technology
‘Over the past 5,000 years, money has profoundly altered humanity and our relationships with each other and with the rest of the planet. It is arguably the defining technology of Homo Sapiens. We have co-evolved with money: we have shaped money, but money has also shaped us. Unlike other technologies, money is ephemeral. It resides in our heads, representing value, but it is intrinsically valuelessFor money to work, a leap of mental abstraction is required. Counter intuitively, money is valuable not when it is scarce but when it is abundant. In this sense, money resembles another wondrous human technology: language. Both money and language are crowd phenomena,’ writes David McWilliams in Money: A Story of Humanity that will have you thinking differently about the medium of exchange.
‘The central property of money – that of representing universal value, understood and accepted by everyone – is one of the foundation stones of organised societies today. Money has proved to be one of the most seductive enduring ideas of the past five millennia. Over time, all other ways of organising complex human societies – whether it be land-based feudal systems, aristocratic hierarchies or communist nirvanas – have ultimately been replaced by societies are based around money,’ writes McWilliams.
Who does not want to be a business success? But perhaps, we have it backwards? In the illusive search for wealth symbolised by money, with all those zeros on a screen — the first step is asking: How does one create value?
“Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value,” advised Albert Einstein.