Episode 17:Swimming Up the Entropy Chute
What would your job look like if you didn’t have computers?
Summary
Nick and Kai use a thought experiment, what would your job look like the day before ENIAC, to trace how completely their consulting work depends on computers and specific platforms. The conversation turns practical: what happens when any tool, channel, or market position disappears overnight, and what assets actually survive that kind of disruption.
Highlights
- Nick says stripping computers from his work leaves something closest to service design, but notes that in 1946 nobody called it that. Considerate service was just table stakes for running a business, not a consultancy.
- Kai says without computers he’d likely have followed his attorney father into law, using family institutional knowledge the way he now uses the internet.
- Kai cites affiliate marketers like Shoe Money, who built businesses running Google Ads direct to affiliate pages. When Google changed its rules, they had no long-term assets and were left at zero.
- Both point to mailing lists, books, and hard-won domain knowledge as assets that survive a platform collapse. Kai quotes Amy Hoy: ‘stack the bricks.’
- Nick says build two years of cash reserves. Kai’s floor for employees changing jobs is six months; for consultants who need to rebuild a positioning from scratch, two years.
- Kai says every tool added to a workflow is another point of failure outside your control. He has 13 days to migrate off Mandrill before Mailchimp’s new paid-account requirement breaks his transactional email.
- Nick mails $50 checks to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple for their free services. Nobody has ever cashed one. His conclusion: if you won’t take money, you’re running something business-ish, not a business, and you’ll be first under the axe.
Read the transcript
So I asked, I asked Kai this like in the B-roll before an episode. And I was serious about recording it. And I’m very curious about what this would look like because I think a lot about how we do a lot of very tried and true marketing techniques. And business techniques, things that have lasted for hundreds of years. So I asked Kai, what would your job look like if there weren’t computers? And that’s that’s a little bit some people that I proposed that question to, they were like So before technology, are we talking like Amish level? Are we talking like light bulb level? Are we talking like industrial revolution level? And I just said, what would your job look like if you didn’t have computers? So I think for this, let’s just set some ground rules. ENIAC, day before ENIAC, okay? You have to have a job.
Day before ENIAC?
Yeah, ENIAC is the first computer, right? Yeah, the first electronic general purpose computer. It was Turing complete. It was digital. It could solve a lot of problems through pre-programming. It filled up an entire room in Philadelphia. And it was announced in 1946. So this is the the day after not the day after the year after World War II. You had a couple of predecessors, right? You had like cryptography machines that were in use during World War II, and you had what was called UNIVAC, which was I don’t think that was Turing complete. But ENIAC was the beginning, right? And it’s not like you and I would be computer scientists using ENIAC anyway. Keeping in mind, you’re probably you don’t have an iPhone in your pocket, you don’t have a mailing list, you don’t have a computer, we’re not recording a podcast, you have radio. Radio existed. You have communications media. You have newspapers. You have the printing press. Those are forms of technology. How do you do your job?
Oh gosh. The give me answer to me feels like I’d work in direct response marketing. And like that, but that’s me just like taking what I do right now and rolling back the clock and saying, like, oh, what’s similar to it, you know, X years ago that I could sort of jump into and leverage the same tactics. But. You know, like growing up in that world, I wouldn’t have been exposed to marketing in the same way I had been or have been. I wouldn’t. Have the corpus of knowledge that I do that lets me be a business owner in the way I am. Most likely, I think I would have ended up getting a degree in Either creative writing or music or business from the University of Oregon, and probably be working a day job somewhere. Probably related to business. Maybe I’d be a small business owner. Like, let’s say my dad’s still an attorney. There’d be a strong incentive for me to follow in his footsteps and leverage his knowledge, just like I leverage the knowledge of the world through the internet now. So. Oh gosh, the answer is probably honestly like I’d be a junior attorney somewhere angling for partner status. That’s not necessarily what I’d want to be doing, but that’s. Just role-playing out quickly, like the direction life could take. That’s where I think I’d end up being.
Yeah. I think about like what would my job look like today if all of a sudden like an MP happened and all computers were destroyed. But that’s assuming that I had computers for thirty-four years, and then all of a sudden computers went away. This is how would you go about living your life and getting the education that you want if you never had computers in the first place? I think a lawyer is going down that road. Because when I first had this conversation with you, what I thought was service design, right? So, for those in the audience who have no idea what service design is, it’s basically a practice of user experience design that involves crafting IRL services for people. So what is the flow of traffic as you go in and out of an Apple store? How do you go from being greeted to being asked about your problem that day, to being serviced, to being sold a computer, to paying for that computer to going out of the store? How does a customer feel good throughout every part of that? That is a user experience problem, absolutely. But it’s a very meat, spacey user experience problem, and it involves very few computers. The only computer that’s involved is probably either the computer you’re buying or the computer that’s taking your money. Even then, it’s still a you know, that’s optional, right? Like You could be going to the general store and paying with a physical cash register. So I think that if I had to remove all the computers from my gig that I have right now in draft, it would look like service design. However, and here’s the thing: service design did not exist in World War II. Nobody gave a shit. They just did it. They just practiced. respectful, accommodating service design because that’s what you did as a business.
Aaron Ross Powell, it wasn’t even something you’d think about. It just was sort of the accepted baseline.
Yeah, I think there were precious few consultants who went into a business and was like, here’s how you do business better through service design. Because people just intuited it. And it was table stakes to be considerate. But the world is horrible now, and that’s why you pay me.
Is that your new tagline?
Pretty much. I mean, the tagline on draft reads: making technology slightly less crappy, which assumes technology is crappy, and I’m not going to make it fully uncrappy. Right.
I think it’s a fascinating question to ask. Like, the premise of this episode, what would your job look like if you don’t have computers? Because, well, I think a conceit is For both of us, and for probably a majority of the audience, your job is so entwined with the computer. We are knowledge workers. We are people who sit down and we are black boxes, and information comes in, and output comes out. We use computers to do that, but there’s some non-computer aspect of it. There’s a uniqueness to the Nick de Sabato that lets you. Create what you do. And there’s a uniqueness of the Kai Davis that lets me create what I do. And I use the computer as an instrument there, but the computer isn’t all that’s required. It’s not as if somebody else sits down in front of the computer and they could spit out the same things we do. So, there’s an incredibly important human component there, but I hesitate to call it a symbiotic relationship, but there is this relationship with technology that allows us to do our jobs, and if that technological component is removed. We can’t do the same things anymore. And I think that’s an interesting thought experiment for the listener. Like, how does your world change if suddenly you aren’t? Able to access the computer, or if you aren’t using a computer, what does your job look like? What do your skills translate to?
Part of why I wanted to record this episode was to think about what happens when The thing that feeds you goes away, right? Saying there’s no computers, I’m in the exact same boat as you, right? I do my job on a computer. I communicate with my community with a computer. I send my mailing list through a computer, all of the data of which goes through many different interconnected computers that receives by a computer, and I can communicate with my clients using a computer. All of it requires, I cannot do anything, anything without a computer. I say I write for a living, fuck that. I write on a computer and send it with computers. I computers for a living, okay? So keeping that in mind, what happens if all of a sudden A B testing is ex somehow exposed as this like fraudulent horror overnight? And I don’t have a positioning anymore. Because I deleted everything that wasn’t related to A-B testing off my website last weekend. I’m going all in on it. I waffled about it on this podcast a lot, and now I’m that’s it. So, what happens when the hand that feeds me goes away? It’s gonna happen. Given infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters, I will not have a job anymore. I look at my brother-in-law, who is 18, I’m 34, and he uses an iPhone faster and more efficiently than I ever could. He’s going to take my job in five years. So, what is my next job going to look like?
Yeah. And how do we? And I think it’s fun to flip the question around, just as you’re doing right now, and say, well, projecting forward. It’s a given that technology and the industry and the world around us is going to change in such a way that the skills we practice are going to be obsoleted in some way or another. What does that lead to? How do our skills evolve? I mean, we could look at, I think, any industry and see small, subtle paradigm shifts that result in Oh, like you used to do this thing. Well, you know, we have computers to do that now. We have a robot to do that now. We have a bash script that does that now. We have a thing that checks email every 15 minutes and resp and declines meeting requests. What exactly do you do around here now? And how do you translate those skills into something new? How do you look forward to not in the positive way, but in the forward thinking way, to where your job is going to evolve to? And how do you sort of get ahead of the puck to make sure you’re there on time?
Man, I gotta say, as a millennial, an entitled millennial, I’m used to getting fucked every day by a system that is fundamentally rigged against me and everyone I know. And so I can’t not think about all the ways I’m going to be screwed constantly. Right? It’s never thinking, oh, how am I going to get professional success? It’s how am I defending against the inevitable? Like, I’m just swimming up the entropy chute in an attempt to actually Have a life that I want to enjoy until I die. That’s it. Because that’s the table stakes for being in this career at the age I’m at. And I know it’s so funny saying this as like a reasonably successful consultant white dude, but I feel Again, like everything is rigged against me. And I’m sure I’m not alone. And I’m sure it’s a million times worse for people in underprivileged segments of the world. But again, the computers going away question is. A way of framing the what happens if all of a sudden podcasting ceases to be a thing. I spent an entire weekend telling you, Kai, you should go all in on podcast tours. You should make your outreach about podcast tours. You should start a podcast and talk about podcast tours. You do podcasts. You’ve done more podcasts than I probably ever will in my lifetime. And you have more experience around it. But what happens if everyone stops listening to podcasts? Or a new streaming medium comes up where you have to pay and it becomes this very haves against have-nots like it has with music. Or with advertising where there’s only two incumbent players and you can’t actually compete. That landscape is going to change in a way that doesn’t favor consultants someday. So, I’m basically by saying you should go all in for podcasts. I’m setting you up for a tremendous amount of success in 2015 and 16. You’re going to be fucked in 2022, dude.
And I think that’s a given. I think that. For any consultant or any business owner, there comes a point where you have to make a decision on a sh not a short term, isn’t the right term, a medium-term bet on a strategy or a system. And when you position yourself correctly, you’re going to reap the benefits of it. But you also have to have that long-term game plan in mind. I think back to like The in the air quotes here, the glory days of affiliate marketing, where you could run like Google Ads direct to affiliate pages, and people like uh, oh, I can’t remember his name, uh, Shoe Money, were making Millions of dollars off of affiliate marketing. And then the game changed. Google changed how you could advertise. Affiliate programs changed what was permissible and what was not. And suddenly people were like, well, We had a river of money coming at us, and the river suddenly stopped, and we had built no long-term assets to let us You know, continue a business. We just like we hit the business reset button, unfortunately, or Google hit it for us, and well, there’s no business anymore. I’ve always taken away from that and thinking about like us both doubling down on our respective practice areas. Well, how do we simultaneously double down on these areas to To let people know, like, well, if you want to get on a podcast, like, talk to Kai, or if you want A-B testing done extremely well, talk to Nick without shooting ourselves in the foot in 2020 or 2022. And I think it comes down to. Focusing on building long-term business assets that will survive any transition in the industry. So, you’ve written a number of books. I’ve written two books. We’re both very focused on building a mailing list. These are long-term assets that, even if the industry changes out from underneath us, if In two years A B testing is declared illegal and we can’t do data driven design anymore. Well, you’re still able to leverage the strength of that mailing list for whatever comes next. You’re still able to leverage the institutional knowledge you’ve developed. You’re still able to leverage your cachet as an author. And that will lead to the next opportunity. What that next opportunity is might not be inherently clear from where we stand right now. But what we can do, in the words of Amy Hoy, is stack the bricks so we have a stronger platform. So when that change does happen, We’re not left saying, oh shit, what do we do now? I have so many friends who have built businesses on one platform or one channel, either relying entirely on Facebook ads or Google ads or a marketplace platform. And then those platforms change. Suddenly, Facebook says, Well, you built a very successful business here. You can’t do that anymore. Good luck and have fun. And they’re just left there sitting there saying, what do we do now? But if we focus in the short term on doubling down in positioning and in the long term on building something that’s durable, something that will follow us from business to business, I think that’s how we avoid Any fluctuation, and let’s say in five or seven years, you know, I have 10,000 people on my mailing list. Well, if podcasting suddenly is You know, drops off the face of the earth. I still have 10,000 folks there that I could reach, that I could talk to, that I could study, that I could safari, that I could say, what pains and problems are you running into your business with today? and build new services or new products or new businesses on the back of understanding how to solve those specific pains. Same for you and your audience and our listeners’ audience.
Build up two years of cash reserves. Everything Kai said is valuable. Also, build up two years of cash reserves. I have not done that yet because I’m preparing for a major purchase soon. Once that’s done, two years of cash reserves.
Yeah, I can’t.
That’s probably the only thing that will matter for you after society collapses in a way you don’t have a mental framework for. Build up two years of cash reserves. I know that sounds totally batshit, but that’s how long it’s going to take you to refactor your positioning if you’re seismically priced out.
Yep. Yeah, yeah. Whenever I have a friend transition jobs or think about transition jobs, my advice to them is always expect for it to take six months. have six months of cash on hand, cut your expenses as much as you can, but make sure you could weather the storm for six months. And I don’t think it’s illogical to say for somebody who owns their own business, for somebody who is focused on building a brand or building a consulting agency, well, Plan on it taking, you know, two years to re-establish from where you were to where you are now, and or from where you are now to where you are now again. So, yeah, I think that’s probably the most valuable advice. That a listener could take away, focus on building up that war chest. So, if suddenly your revenue goes to zero and you have to start over, Well, you could survive. You’ve got the cash on hand and you don’t have to make choices you wouldn’t otherwise, work with clients you wouldn’t otherwise, or Do things that would harm your business. Instead, you’re able to say, okay, I could weather the storm. I’m in it for the long game. I don’t have to stress because I have this financial asset I could draw on.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You want fuck you money. Again, the world is rigged against you. There’s an amazing article I read a little while ago about, and it’s fiction, but it’s not really. I mean. It’s basically you’re in a bad relationship with somebody. You need to get out. You have fuck you money in order to buy a new apartment and move out quickly and hire movers to do it. Or you’re in a really bad job and your boss harasses you. You have fuck you money to tell them to sod off and get a new job and spend two months being unemployed. And there were other examples of this, but I would love, love to sit on a pile of fuck you money. Because I know I deserve better, and no one agrees. No one.
I love the concept of fucking money and It’s really the only thing that let me escape from day jobs to building my own business. And I really was in a terrible position when I made the leap to full-time consulting. Like I had. About three to four months of cash on hand, but and I had like $1,000 to $1,500 a month in recurring revenue from small contracts and the iPhone hustle I was doing. But I also had $10,000 of credit card debt. So while I did have like three months of living expenses, it was also like, well, when we look at the cash sheet, the balance sheet, Kayate really has no money here. This is a risky bet to be making. And thank God it paid off for me. It would have been such a stronger position to wait a few extra months, sock away a little extra cash, pay down that credit card debt, and suddenly being able to say, okay. Uh, worst case scenario, I cut expenses to the bone and move into a cheaper space, but I don’t have crazy outstanding expenses. I’m able to get to that next level thanks to this fuck you money.
Right, right.
This is now the episode where we have cursed the most.
There’s a lot of curses. They really don’t know which ones to flag as explicit. Should be all of them. Anyway, yeah, you need to weather those changes. Because if an MP happens overnight and there are no computers, to bring it back to the original topic here. How fucked are you going to be? Right. Will you die of cholera in a week? This is an actual question.
But yeah, if your if your business disappeared out from under you. What happens next? What is step one? What direction do you head in? And I think that’s a question we never ask. And a question like I never asked as an employee, but I ask all my friends who have day jobs to ask, like, What happens if the company you work for suddenly goes under? What happens if you wake up tomorrow and due to no fault of your own, you’re fired? What do you do? Well, my company wouldn’t do that. Well, a lot of companies suddenly go out of business. Do you know what the CEO is planning? Do you know what the budget is? Do you know if they’re planning on shrinking headcount by 30%? Like, we both used the platform Gumbroad in the past, and they’d laid off all employees except three. Did those employees see that coming? Were those employees ready for a future without that job and like extending it forward in the world without computers? Like, what do you do? How do you weather that storm? How do you prepare for that?
Yeah, that’s huge. What happens when the tool that you hinged on for a long time suddenly goes away or gets sunsetted and you have to migrate all of your data? That’s what we’re talking about, but for business. Everybody who does computers and is listening to this podcast is probably thinking, like, oh God, I remember when they got rid of Google Reader. Well, what did you do to replace Google Reader? You know, I. Downloaded a Fever installation and installed it myself and configured it on reader on my iPhone. I did all these things. I did the neck beardiest option, and I own it. And now there’s very little likelihood that I’m going to be prone anymore, even though it’s just kind of this plodding along stable thing. there are a lot of things that you probably use. We’re using Skype to record this episode. Skype is owned by Microsoft and aggressively loses money for them. If they want to make their shareholders happy in any capacity, they would shut down Skype immediately. What will we do instead? Go on hangouts? Get a phone call? I don’t know. FaceTime? There are a million other zero toller alternatives that we can use out there. It’s bad business to be in the messaging and calling service without aggressively advertising against us, which I never see. On Skype. So, you know, at some point the other shoe’s going to drop. We’re not going to be Skyping anymore, Kai. It’s going to be sad. I miss the dulcet tones of your lovely voice. But you know, we’ll find a way, right? We use Simplecast to post the episodes of this. What happens if Simplecast gets bought by Google and shut down? Or bought by Apple and folded into iTunes and turned into a piece of shit like the rest of iTunes. Right?
Yeah. Now every time we you and like extending this forward from computers to like specific bits of technology I think is really, really helpful. Anytime we add a tool to our tool chain for doing work, we’re increasing our vulnerability because there’s now one more point of failure that’s outside of our control. And, like, I’m staring down the gun at this. There’s a whole Mandrill, Mandrill. Mailchimp thing going on where you can’t use a Mandrail to send notification emails unless you have a paid MailChimp account. Well, for all the credit card processing I do through my site, I use Mandrel and I do not use MailChimp as my email service provider. And I’m just sitting here like Counting down the days. I think I have 13 days left to figure this thing out. And I’m like, I don’t know what to do. This sucks.
We use the same system. I already switched over to Postmark. I’ll show you how to do it.
I love you.
I love you too.
But yeah, when a tool suddenly disappears from, let’s say, lexicon, your lexicon of available tools. What do you do? How can you handle that? And if computers suddenly disappear and your job suddenly has to transform, or you’re fired and your job suddenly has to transform. What do you do then? I think back to I’ve never been fired from a gig, but I have left before I may have been fired And each time it was a process of, like, okay, I have to take like this one basket of skills and figure out how to apply it to a different set of needs and position myself differently to get this job. And I think that’s table stakes when it comes to finding a new job, but we don’t often think about that when it comes to consulting. Like we built a business doing specific things. You do A-B testing, I help people get on podcasts. Well, what happens when podcasts change or A-B testing changes, or the tools we use? Like, what happens if VWO are optimizedly like either one of them gets shut down, or one of them gets acquired, and the other gets shut down? What do we do then? What happens if, like, I talk heavily about how I use like Yesware and Streak and Trello to manage the entire and Quickmail to manage my entire outreach system. What happens if one of those tools disappears? Suddenly, I’m going to have a gigantic hole in my business, and I don’t know what the solution is to that. Like, it kind of gets scary when you think about How reliant we are as business owners on specific tools and what happens if they disappear, let alone the entire question that started this episode: what’s your job going to be if you don’t have computers?
Man. Yeah. It’s like arbitrary. You build up a tool box and a tool shop in your garage, and every night a thief comes in and steals some random arbitrary tool. Eventually you’re going to notice and eventually you’re going to feel plundered and vulnerable and afraid. Now with business, It’s like having nine bosses and one or more of them randomly fire you every week. Have fun with that. You know, that’s what running a business is like, and it’s terrifying.
And at first, like you might not notice that a tool has disappeared. You’re like, oh, you know, I didn’t use Google Reader that much. Okay, whatever, that’s fine. And the second time, you’re like, huh. And the third time you’re like, oh. And the fourth time you’re like, oh shit. And slowly, like, what do you do? Constantly iterate against the curve? Constantly try to stay ahead of these tool shutdowns and be migrating forward? Like. This is why I’ve started to agree with you more and more. If a service isn’t a paid service, if I’m not able to throw money at them I’m so afraid to use it because like what’s the outcome? Like they’re either trying to get a ton of users to then start charging, which may not work. They’re trying to get a ton of users to get VC backing, and well, then they aren’t serving me as the customer, they’re serving the venture capitalists, or they’re just going to shut down because they couldn’t make money. I love so many of the tools that we just caught out as using, like Simplecast. I adore Simplecast. It makes hosting a podcast so stupid and easy that Ugh, I am in love with it as a tool. I wish to God I could pay them more than $12 a month. I would pay them $50 a month. I would pay them $100 a month. Because they make this pain go away. If I had to figure out how to host, make money on it, if we had to figure out how to host this podcast ourselves, it probably wouldn’t be happening because we’d be like, oh, this is really complex and hard. I wish there was somebody who would do this for us. And, like, yes, there’s competitors out there, but gosh, it just makes me so sad when I see services that are incredibly valuable, that I use day in and day out. like like Skype, like we called out, not accept money or accept such a tiny fraction of money. And I’m like, really? You’re charging me like I I pay for Skype and I char and I pay $299 a month. And I’m like, I use this tool like five times a day. How do I pay you more money? Why aren’t you charging more money? This is valuable. What’s going on here? And it just feels so. So weird and so wrong to be reliant on tools that I can’t pay for. Like, I love Twitter. I wish I could pay money for Twitter. I think Twitter would be an infinitely more valuable product if they charged Customers for accounts, and suddenly it’s not, oh, how do we like maximize active users? It’s how do we make a better product that solves the pains for our customers.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, kind of two points around this. One of them is there are a lot of products out there that are just kind of a race to the bottom price wise. I look at email clients. Like most email clients are like five bucks or they’re free. They come with Gmail or Apple Mail or whatever have you. And so you’re competing against free. But how much is email worth to you, Kai?
Oh, gosh.
Right? You don’t even have to answer that question. Just say, oh gosh, right? I would pay personally $500 a year for excellent email service. Right. And that would be cloud synced across all of my devices. It would fill all of the different protocols that are necessary and work like in real time. It would act I would pay $500 a year for that. Any knowledge worker listening to this, you depend on it. Fuck Slack. You still depend on email. Don’t tell me that. You know, you have less email because of Slack, but then Slack emails you when you forget it. That’s the only way it can get a hold of you is by emailing. So it still emails you, right?
As a Slack subthread, I have a. To argue against the Slack replaces your inbox, I have 110 unread message notifications in Slack right now. And that is actually more notifications than I have emails in my inbox, and I get a lot of email. So, no, I’m sorry, I have 111 emails, so we’re almost at parity. Let me archive one quickly. There we go. Perfect. We’re equal.
Right, right. The second thing, sorry?
No, no, you, you.
Okay. The second thing is, I don’t sign up for free services. I really try to avoid it. I mean, Skype’s an exception because it’s literally the only option out there that’ll let you do podcasts easily. But by and large, And so, if I have to sign up for your service, I’ve done this with Skype. I mail you a $50 check, and I say, I write this heartfelt handwritten letter, and I say. Thank you so much for making this amazing service. I’m so grateful to use it every day. It’s really wonderful. And I want you to keep making it. So I wanted to I couldn’t find a checkout form on your website, and I found that to be a severe oversight that might really harm your business. And so I wanted to contribute. And so here’s a check for $50. Let me know if you need any more. I’m happy to give you more money. I don’t know what you’re pricing yourself at. Because I couldn’t find a pricing page either. But, you know, please, please just let me know. And no one has ever cashed a check. In the history of my doing this, I’ve sent it to Google, to Facebook, to Twitter, to Apple for iCloud, which is free, by and large. But it’s also like a giant pain in the ass to find the right address. Like, it actually takes a lot of effort to try and figure out where to send the check. Like, I can’t fax the check and I can’t email the check. I can’t Venmo your like info at twitter. com email, even though I would really like to. But you’re not running a business if you’re not cashing that check. You’re running a weird passion project that’s doing something business-ish. You’re business-ish. You’re not a business. Businesses take money. That’s it. And so they’re going to be first under the axe when the apocalypse comes. And we’re going to be like 20th. And I’m really proud of that. Yeah. But yeah, that’s that’s. That’s about it.
Yeah, I mean, it’s so important to, I think, think about like zooming out a bit from the idea of these services. Thinking about how you provide value and how you charge for that value. And I think that’s a recurring topic across a lot of these episodes because, as consultants, that’s what we do. And so If that electromagnetic pulse hits, that EMP hits, and all computers and technology are wiped out, well, is one of the long-term assets, and this is just an open question, is one of the long-term assets we’ve cultivated as business owners and consultants that ability to look at people, look at businesses, look at different issues and say, oh, there’s a problem here. I see how that problem is impacting value. Let me put together a solution, me doing something, me selling a service, whatever it is, me selling information that will help solve that problem and increase their value and charge for it accordingly. And get to the next level that way. And so, is the resilience against, oh, hey, what about a world without computers? Well, Are you practicing skills that are transferable? Are you practicing skills that are the meta-skill of business that you will be able to use day in and day out, no matter what direction you take or what direction the world takes?
The skill is building up a pile of cash and waiting for the other shoe. Happy birthday.