Thinking Hard or Hardly Thinking

A bonus episode after Season 1! Thanks for listening. Recapping the most popular episodes of Season 1 and previewing a few of the topics coming up in Season 2. What are your favorite episodes of Season 1? Reach out and let me know! @aaronjmarx https://m.facebook.com/Aaron-Marx-104819877884771/ www.aaronjmarx.com

How do you decide how hard to work, how aggressively to push toward your goals, what projects to start at what times? Are the results of these decisions in our hands at all, or do they spring from an intricate and ever-shifting collaborative dance with the universe? Where do you look to know what to pursue? Is it the needs of the market? Your friends? Trusted coaches and advisors? Trendy industry leaders? Your intuition? Is success in business or creative endeavors a matter of our own free will, or are there barriers against which we will inevitably become stuck if we push too hard, ignoring the flow of the universe, Source, God, whatever you want to call it? When someone honestly tells you they are wildly successful are they ever really able to tell you why, or did they instinctively nail that delicate give-and-take between personal effort and gentle yielding to the essence of all that is? Can anyone who truly finds this balance ever completely communicate its recipe? Does yielding to the flow of life, the universe, and everything guarantee one’s material success, or do we need to be prepared to push through resistance? How do we even know the right impulse at the right time? We’ll be exploring all of that and more today on Thinking Hard, or Hardly Thinking. Learn more about Aaron at www.aaronjmarx.com Read/listen to the Entrepreneurial Manifesto: https://www.aaronjmarx.com/manifesto

Art is a human instinct. We seek to beautify our existence, our lives, our worlds. We strive to perform actions, produce goods, in such a manner by which they simply become inspiring by the very level of craft and refinement that they reach. For as long as the human spirit has animated our outlook and motivated our choices we have striven for beauty, inspiration, idealism, the purview of artistry. I realized not long ago that the arts we revere have certain origins and are not distributed equally across cultures. If I were to ask you which art is most distinctive in American culture, you might give me a few answers. Jazz, musical theater, cinema, the elusive great American novel. But I think there is an American artform far more pervasive and influential in our modern world than any of those, with all other cultures and nations looking to American for its artistic models and trendsetters, and it’s perhaps something you do not even think of as a form of art. The art is entrepreneurship, and while America is often imitated, its spirit is never duplicated. From the very beginning this was American’s art, and remains so to this day. We don’t stand out in the others nearly to this extent, but entrepreneurship is what America was made for, and that is where we shine. In my opinion, we have elevated entrepreneurship to an art in a way no other nation has, and in a way we have not attained with any other medium.

We’ll be exploring all of that and more today on Thinking Hard, or Hardly Thinking. Learn more about Aaron at www.aaronjmarx.com Read/listen to the Entrepreneurial Manifesto: https://www.aaronjmarx.com/manifesto

There is a nickname for the human species that is often invoked in models of exchange and rational decision making. The nickname is “homo economicus”. This implies a simple yet profound truth about the nature of being human and participating in the human experience: we are creatures driven by economic calculations, perhaps at our very deepest and most essential levels. Even if we do not consciously observe this process, or even ever become aware of it, it is always there, working behind the scenes of every interaction we have and decision we make. More fundamental still is the elusive concept of value, the often nebulous but deeply compelling sense of whether things are worth having or experiences worth doing. We are driven by this sense at all times and yet, when you drill down to its essence, its ultimate source and nature becomes elusive, ineffable, protean, and just plain mysterious. And yet, it is always there, forcing evaluations, compromises, monumental decisions at every level. What is it? Where does it come from? How is it created? And what is a definition we can ultimately agree on if indeed this is even possible?

We’ll be exploring all of that and more today on Thinking Hard, or Hardly Thinking. Learn more about Aaron at www.aaronjmarx.com Read/listen to the Entrepreneurial Manifesto: https://www.aaronjmarx.com/manifesto

If you challenge yourself to truly examine your deeply held and subconscious beliefs about the nature of economics I suspect you will find a tension, perhaps a number of them. And I think these tensions boil down to the competing sense that money, value, currency, compensation, whatever you want to call it, is either abundant and ever-expanding, or limited, scarce and zero-sum. If you are truly able to observe what you actually believe about money in all sorts of situations, and at different levels in your thought patterns, I can almost guarantee you will find scarcity in some places, and abundance in others. The fact is it’s a complicated question, and might have a few twists and turns that you haven’t yet thought about. To me there are few questions more fascinating than whether economics is a matter of abundance or if it’s really just a zero-sum game. Indeed, every conviction hold and prescription we offer about work ethic, policy, and international relations hinges on this very question at their very heart.

We’ll be exploring all of that and more today on Thinking Hard, or Hardly Thinking. Learn more about Aaron at www.aaronjmarx.com Read/listen to the Entrepreneurial Manifesto: https://www.aaronjmarx.com/manifesto

Certain divisive areas of human life, most especially politics and religion I tend to notice, often create sharply polarized and even tribal divisions between groups of people who seem to desire and pursue highly dissimilar visions of society, culture, morality, economics, character, attitude, and much else. A tension immediately arises between the impulse to unify these disparate and often antagonistic groups around shared values, and the opposing impulse to vilify and denounce the other. The unifying impulse is often associated with and justified by rhetoric resembling some version of “we all ultimately want the same thing”, the implication being that the ultimate vision is the same, whereas the differences lie within the more superficial components of approach and technique, being that if we zoom out far enough we will behold a highly unifying bigger picture of the grand vision we all ultimately seek. But, is this actually true, coherent, or even possible to discern? How vague and abstract a vision must we reduce in order to reconcile this? Does anyone actually know what they want? Are certain political philosophies merely a means to an end which will eventually give way to some kind of utopia that is as practically attained through putting an opposing ideology into practice? Is this a tension we even want resolved, or is the very push and pull that generates so much energy and reactive momentum in politics largely dependent on this dynamic?

We’ll be exploring all of that and more today on Thinking Hard, or Hardly Thinking. Learn more about Aaron at www.aaronjmarx.com Read/listen to the Entrepreneurial Manifesto: https://www.aaronjmarx.com/manifesto

Have you ever had anyone tell you their magic formula for success? I’ll bet you have. We go through life with so many mentors, sages, counselors, coaches, teachers, and others offering us their time-tested advice to create the best life possible. Many of us have made something of a second career from personal development, devoting a significant amount of our time and mental energy to learning and putting into practice as many mindsets and techniques as possible to make our success effortless and complete, and this generally yields a positive result of some kind, even if not entirely what it promises. The fact is, everyone has some theory of success that they teach, or would if asked, an approach to life that has gotten them to where they are. And you might expect that the most successful among us would teach a theory and method for success of great integrity that is unusually well thought-through. I notice however this is often not the case, and there is enough about the very concept of a success theory that should cause us to hesitate and ask questions before we attempt to assimilate and apply it. Furthermore, there is something about the nature of success that resists being captured by a theory in the first place, and perhaps this is the only way it could ever be. We’ll be exploring all of that and more today on Thinking Hard, or Hardly Thinking. Learn more about Aaron at www.aaronjmarx.com Read/listen to the Entrepreneurial Manifesto: https://www.aaronjmarx.com/manifesto

A surprising but reliable mathematical relationship that seems to govern nature and human dynamics is the Pareto Principle.  Variously known as the 80/20 principle, or the law of the vital few, it is essentially a dictum that states we will always find some kind of gross inequality when examining naturally occurring systems of any kind, with the vast majority of the results owing to the efforts of an extreme minority of factors.  While natural phenomena which exhibit this trait are allowed to be free of moral judgement, the Pareto Principle as it describes human interactions in terms of business, governance, politics, and other realms creates one murky ethical dilemma after another as we are faced over and over with the question of how best to control, distribute, or redistribute the inevitable result of its effects in our world of social and economic interactions.  The Pareto Distribution is inevitable, but proposed solutions to the problems it can create are diverse and fraught.  What effect does this have on our moral outlook and the vitality of our human spirit?

We’ll be exploring all of that and more today on Thinking Hard, or Hardly Thinking. Learn more about Aaron at www.aaronjmarx.com Read/listen to the Entrepreneurial Manifesto: https://www.aaronjmarx.com/manifesto

Do you long for a utopia of some kind? Are you even aware that you do? Is it possible not to? So many of our hidden motivations are driven by the often subconscious desire to create some kind of utopia in the real world. But when we really ask what it looks like so often we are confronted with unexpected inconsistencies and self-defeating contradictions. And yet we need to stay motivated to create real, positive change in our world. How do we work through these tensions and best make decisions regarding how to spend our minutes, hours, and days? We’ll be exploring all of that and more today on Thinking Hard, or Hardly Thinking.

Learn more about Aaron at www.aaronjmarx.com Read/listen to the Entrepreneurial Manifesto: https://www.aaronjmarx.com/manifesto

Do you make free choices?  When you make decisions, do you have a soul evaluating which course to take?  Or, are our thoughts and actions governed strictly and exclusively by the laws of the universe playing out in the physical matter of our bodily systems, with the mere illusion of choice?  What implications does this question have on the way we approach life, morality, reward and punishment?  What meaning can we find in any of it?

We’ll be exploring all of that and more in this episode of Thinking Hard, or Hardly Thinking.

Learn more about Aaron at www.aaronjmarx.com Read/listen to the Entrepreneurial Manifesto: https://www.aaronjmarx.com/manifesto