The Maven Nation

 

Show Notes:

* Michael shared a chapter that did not make it to the Playbook – 0:18

* Give up something not sustainable sooner rather than later – 02:18

 

Good morning listeners! Today to talk about the Law of Sustainability. And then the chapter didn’t make it into the Efficiency playbook. Let me give it to you here real quick. The Law of Sustainability basically means that if you cannot be sustained indefinitely, you should look to make a change sooner rather than later.

I have a great friend in Utah, I’ve known her for 12 years. She is engaged, she keeps on getting engaged to this guy and breaking up over and over and over for different reasons. One example that I can talk about is she hadn’t known Hugh’s as a smoker. So they were dating and lo and behold now he’s smoking. She can smell it on him. “What is going on? I didn’t know you were a smoker!” He said ” Well, I had it for a while… blah blah blah… ” And they break up! In a month later, now they are back together. Something else happened, they break up. And now, they’re back together.

In my mind, when I hear the story, basically this is not sustainable. If in the honeymoon phase, you’re having problems like I talked about in the book, if you’re having all these problems like right before you get married, guess what, when you’re married to this guy, he is going to be a problem. What you are doing is prolonging your agony. It’s like having a rock in your shoe. Some rocks are more comfortable than others, if you’re walking 15 miles in a day without little teeny rock, if it’s cutting into your skin, it’s gonna be a pain and guess what, sooner or later you’re going to stop. Undo your shoelaces and take that rock out. Question is, if you are in a situation in your life, whether it’s work, home, school, if you do not think that you can finish it, this is something that you feel like there is no way in HELL that you’re going to be able to continue on, you need to quit now! Like earlier… I know and I told my friend this that her relationship with her guy is not going to work. I know this because they’re always fighting, they’re always breaking up, they’re always calling it off, they’re always getting back together. This has been going on for years. She is basically wasting her very valuable time with him. I kind of advice her to move on.

I’ve also used this in my own life. If I am in a situation that I cannot personally sustain and I hate to see that because I like that I can be able to do anything but it’s not true. I know, for example, a certain type of diets, I cannot sustain indefinitely. There’s just no way it will happen. I know there is certain kind of exercises or workout programs that I cannot do for more than a week or two because they’re sort of pre-contest training. If you are getting ready for a bodybuilding contest, leading up to that contest, it is very difficult to sustain that kind of workout indefinitely. It’s pretty much impossible. So I tried to go for routines, systems, relationships, opportunities that are all sustainable. That is basically the ruler that I used to measure how I spend my time. It’s what I’m doing indefinitely sustainable and I’m comfortable with it. I’m having success with it. It has been very useful weeding out people and opportunities that I know I cannot continue in a relationship with. In any event, that is the law of sustainability. If you cannot sustain it indefinitely, don’t do it. Most of the times. I know there are some exceptions but as a general rule, if you’re having friction with something,

 

Show Notes:

* Michael talks about one of the missing chapters in the book – 0:17

* Shared a very insightful experience doing Disaster Aid work – 0:41

* Bring assets with only when that commodity is no longer common – 03:59

* Lighten your load during disaster situations – 05:02

 

Good morning everybody! Today we are going to be talking about one of the missing chapters of the book. It’s called the Law of Existing Resources. In some ways, you probably already practice this, in other ways you have not consciously thought about it I’m guessing, because it’s something that is really obscure in niche like. And it’s something that I see time and again results. The first time I really started thinking about it, was Haiti, the first disaster trip that I have to travel to a foreign country. I did not know anybody and there were reports that there were shortages of water. So once I arrived in the Dominican Republic and started thinking about this bus ride over to Haiti, we bought a couple of cases of water. The problem with this was that we had to carry the water in our bags once we got off the bus. Thankfully, I wouldn’t have to go too far. But the following day, we had to travel a couple of miles. Carrying that water, became a real pain. Now, you may think that water is everywhere but we didn’t know how hard it was to get water in Haiti. Clean water. And the problem with not getting clean water is if you’re drinking sketchy water, you might get sick. So this becomes a real problem when you’re doing disaster aid work.

Happened again in Japan, as I was traveling into the devastated areas, I had heard reports that water was being rationed and I didn’t know if I was going to have access to water so I actually brought a little handcart.. 3 cases of water! I obviously not going to have any shortages of water. So I was carrying this water with me and it slowed me down.

In Haiti, we wanted to get clothing for all these orphanages that we were serving and clothing was getting harder and harder to find. And so we started looking at having Salvation Army ship clothing in from the United States and what I learned from somebody at the convoy of hope in a discussion with him… was very insightful! He said he always tries to get aid in the country instead of shipping it in from the United States. Number one reason is… it’s more expensive in the United States. Number two, you have to pay for the shipping to get it over there. And number three, it takes longer. And so while the devastated areas in the country may not have clothing if you travel just maybe 20 or 30 or 40 miles away to the part of the area of the country where typically you will be able to find it. This has happened to me many times in disaster situations.

I remember the time in the Philippines where we actually bought $35,000 worth of food. It had flown into the Philippines from Florida. It was very expensive. It was very time consuming. The costs bang for the buck was not very good. It turned out that that food has arrived just in time to the right places but it would have been smarter I think to go to the outer cities, the non-devastated areas in the Philippines to acquire that food. We would have been able to buy 3 or 4 times as much food. And the shipping would have been almost nothing.

This is the real theme for the Law of Existing Resources. When you are traveling to an area and you have a need for a certain to be used in that area. The only time you should bring assets with you is when that commodity is no longer common. When the demand is very high for something, that is when you should bring it. If you know for sure you can get it in the location you are traveling to, then you should definitely try not to bring it.

 

Shownotes:

* Michael’s take away on considering a partner when starting a business – 0:24

* What are the disadvantages of partnerships – 02:42

* Partnerships do not work! – 06:39

 

Good morning  everybody! Today we are going to be talking about one of the missing chapters of the book. I call it the Law of Imperfect Partnerships. Let’s pretend you are an entrepreneur getting ready to start a business. This can be super scary if you’ve never done it before. In some cases, you kind of feel that you want somebody to hold your hand, kind of guide you through the process, be there with you and split the risk with you. The idea of having a business partner becomes very attractive. Maybe they have some money, maybe they have resources or knowledge that would really contribute to the business. In some cases, it appears that there is no other way but to do it with a business partner. This is even more true if this partner is a friend or a relative. What I’m saying is.. “Do not start a business with a business partner.” if you can help it. I know there are some cases where there is no other way around it. But if you can help it especially if this is a close friend or a relative, you should ask yourself  “Am I willing to destroy this friendship, end this relationship to make money or to get an experience with this business because that is often going to be the case. I wish I can go into specific types and great stories about this that I’d love to tell you but I can’t so I kind of keep it in general.

One or two things are going to happen when we start a business. Number one, it’s going to fail. Number two, it is going to succeed. Sooner or later one of those two things is going to happen and this is kind of sad thing if you worked at something long enough, even if you are successful, usually at some point, that too is going to come to an end. That’s something I learned the hard way. 99%  of the time when you are very successful at something, usually sooner or later, that success will end. I think there is some psychology at work. We start having all this great fortune and what not, we just say “Hey, this is gonna last forever.” That can feel like it’s true if it goes for a couple of years. But sooner or later, whatever it is you’re doing, that is  unusually successful, it is going to come to an end. The reason I say this is that when business partnerships fail, there is a tendency to point fingers. So if you invest a lot of money into something and it fails, you are naturally going to be inclined to blame the other person. And that other person may feel naturally inclined to blame you. So a lot of times when the business fails, the friendship and the relationship fails as well.

Second, a really critical thing about partnerships is that when you bring in a partner, your decision making power is split. If you have one partner, you have 50% of the decision making power. If there is 3 total partners, you have 33% and if you bring in 4, you are at 25%. So the more people that you bring in, the harder it is and smaller it is to make decisions.

If you are a lone entrepreneur, you got to make all the decisions. You gonna make them fast. You will make mistakes but you could also learn from them. For me the ability to make quick, fast decisions is a competitive advantage versus a company that I might be competing against that might have 6 or 7 decision makers. They will not be able to come to a decision as fast as I can. That’s the law of will size that we talked about in the book.

When there is success in a business, let’s say the business just blows up, you’re making millions of dollars, what tends to happen is that the partners can also resent each other because they’re not making as much if the other partner wasn&#...

- How to stay objective when considering a new venture

- How can you calculate the probability of success when considering multiple variables

- Why statistic probability decreases with increasing variables

- Use this tool to help measure changes in a status quo

– Meet Michael The Maven

– Learn Michael’s background

– What Michael hopes to bring with this podcast

Ladies and gentleman, good morning! My name is Michael Andrew. I am also known as Michael the Maven online. I am a photography instructor and I sell training videos in terms of how to make great pictures with your Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Olympus Cameras. I have been doing camera gig for about 10 years but this is a new thing for me, the podcast thing. I’ve never done it before. I have no idea how it’s gonna go.

At the time of this recording, I think there are probably about 5 or 10 people who are genuinely interested in what I have to say. But I have a feeling that this is something I should try out. I’ve recently published a book called The Efficiency Playbook.(Update: Amazon is delaying my ability to post the book for sale for some unknown reason). In the beginning of the book, I basically made a promise to my readers that if I get certain number of reviews on Amazon, I would launch the podcasts. What I’m doing now is preemptively starting it prepare because I promised I would publish on a daily basis and sometimes my schedule wouldn’t allow me to do that.

The book at this time has not been popped out through the mainstream. It’s not even published on Amazon yet because we are getting some marketing materials ready. Probably within a couple of weeks.

The Efficiency Playbook is an accumulation of 25 years of observation, testing, measuring, study, and recording on the topic of efficiency. How to become more productive. In the book, I talked about the difference about effectiveness which is getting something done and efficiency which is getting something done at a cost savings. There is a very important distinction.

If you are not aware of your own personal efficiency, you are at a disadvantage those who are aware and are making changes on a regular daily basis to the personal workflow, how they earn their income, how they even travel or prepare for work or school. If you are not aware of the concept of efficiency, it will greatly benefit you to read the Efficiency Playbook as wells as listen to this podcasts.

The goal is to have the very short podcasts chapters. I’m really going to aim between 5 to 10 minutes for most of them. Sometimes less, sometimes more.

If in any event we have a guest and I do an interview, I would imagine it would be up to an hour. I have 1 guest committed to coming to the show for now. Let me give a little bit of a background about myself so you know who I am, where I come from and how I got to the place that I am now today.

To make the long story short, I was raised in Northern California, in a little town called Rohnert Park. My freshman year in high school, I spent in Oslo, Norway at a Norwegian speaking school. My mother is Norwegian so I lived with my grandparents there for a year. That was really a life shaping event. I was between the years of 13-14 years old.

When I came back, I started playing football. I played 3 years of football in high school. Graduated. I did very well in school after being in Norway because in Norway I was required to concentrate so much to understand to what people are saying. It really taught me concentration. Before Norway, I was an average student, talking Cs and Bs in school, I was really terrible. After Norway, everything was As, I think I only got one B in my Senior year. I was invited by the Brigham Young football team as a walk-on. That is the first time I went up the stairs that I talked about in the book.

So I was thinking how this is playing to efficiency?