Most guys income would really benefit by having kids.
Doing The Work isn’t an option anymore, it’s a constant.
Most ppl don’t grow because the operating from a place if “wanting” or “needing” to become successful.
When you have kids, you HAVE to become successful.
I HAVE to provide for my kids.
I HAVE to pay health insurance.
I HAVE to buy a house.
I HAVE to pay for their college.
I HAVE TO MAKE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
Which means
I HAVE to work 9-10 hours per day.
I HAVE to retain my clients.
I HAVE to book qualified sales meetings.
I HAVE to market my business.
I HAVE to retain my employees.
I HAVE to always continue growing.
Failure is genuinely not an option.
Don’t feel like working?
Adding more time until my kids get to live in the house they deserve. Adding more time until my wife gets to live the life of her dreams. Etc.
Operate from a place of “have to” and you have NO option but to grow.
Nobody told you this about success: Rent is due every single day. A lot of people seem to think that after you make it you can coast in the idyllic land of success. This is wrong. Every single day, you have to fight to earn your seat at the table. And that fight gets more intense as you have more success. You have more to lose. More mouths to feed. More people counting on you. More expectations. There's an old saying that I love: Every morning in the savannah, the gazelle wakes up and knows it must outrun the lion or be killed. The lion wakes up and knows it must outrun the gazelle or starve. Whether you're the gazelle or the lion, when you wake up in the morning, you'd better start running. Rent is due daily. Pay it with pride.
AI will create more jobs than any other technology in history.
The doomers' fundamental error isn't just the lump of labor fallacy. It's deeper than that.
They assume a finite problem space.
This is the fundamental error of AI and job doomers. They look at the economy and see a fixed amount of work to be done, a pie that can only be sliced thinner as machines take bigger bites. They see humans a competitive resource for a finite amount of work and a finite amount of problems to solve that must be eliminated.
This is fundamentally, totally and completely wrong.
The pie isn't fixed. It never was. And the reason it isn't fixed is baked into the very nature of technology itself.
Technology is nothing but abstraction stacking. And abstraction stacking is infinite. Therefore the work is infinite.
The hammer didn't reduce the amount of work. It moved the work up the stack. And the new work was more complex, more varied, and more interesting than the old work.
Complexity breeds more complexity and more variety.
Once you have houses instead of mud huts, you have a cascade of new problems that didn't exist before. Plumbing. Wiring. Insulation. Roofing materials that don't rot. Drainage systems so the foundation doesn't flood. Fire codes so your neighbor's bad wiring doesn't burn down the whole block.
Each of those problems becomes a job. A plumber. An electrician. An insulator. A roofer. A civil engineer. A building inspector. None of those jobs existed when we lived in mud huts.
They exist because we solved the mud hut problem.
Think of all of human technological development as a stack of abstraction layers, each one built on top of the ones below it.
At the bottom: raw survival. Finding food. Building shelter. Making fire. These are the base-layer problems.
Each major technology wave solved a base-layer problem and in doing so created an entirely new layer of problems above it:
Agriculture solved "how do we reliably eat?" — and created problems of land ownership, irrigation, crop rotation, storage, trade, taxation, and governance.
Writing solved "how do we remember things across generations?" — and created problems of literacy, education, record-keeping, law, bureaucracy, and literature.
The printing press solved "how do we spread knowledge at scale?" — and created problems of intellectual property, censorship, journalism, publishing, public opinion, and democratic discourse.
The steam engine solved "how do we generate mechanical power without muscles?" — and created problems of factory design, worker safety, urban planning, railroad engineering, coal mining, labor relations, and environmental pollution.
Electricity solved "how do we deliver energy anywhere?" — and created problems of grid design, power generation, appliance manufacturing, electrical safety codes, utility regulation, and an entire consumer electronics industry.
The Internet solved "how do we connect all human knowledge?" — and created problems of cybersecurity, digital privacy, online commerce, content moderation, network infrastructure, cloud computing, social media dynamics, and an entire digital economy that employs tens of millions.
Notice the pattern?
Each solution didn't just solve a problem.
It created an entirely new problem space that was larger, more complex, and more varied than the one it replaced.
The stack grows. It never shrinks.
It's turtles all the way down and all the way up.
A surprising amount of adulthood is just finally accepting that no one is coming to impose the structure you need. You either build it, or you drift inside the structures other people built for you.
Every single thing you want in life is on the other side of something that sucks. That suck might be 100 workouts, 100 bland meals, 100 hours of work, or 100 hard conversations. Embrace it as the cost of entry. The answers you seek are found in the actions you avoid.
my life changed the moment an old mentor told me this:
“stopping your worst habit would change your life way faster than starting your best habit…
fix the leak before filling the bucket.”
the best thing you can do for yourself is actively increase your surface area for luck to hit you. go outside, try new cafes, museums, events, take a new route home, speak to people, ask questions, side quest.
the more you do, the more serendipity and synchronicity will find you.
You think you're unhappy because life is hard.
Wrong.
You're unhappy because you're still operating at infant-level selfishness with adult-level expectations.
Happiness isn't found in gratitude journals or positive thinking.
It's found in the INVERSE relationship between your talent stack and your need to be selfish.
When you're born, you're 100% selfish, 0% capable. Perfect equilibrium. Society expects nothing from you.
They age chronologically but not competency-wise. They hit 30, 40, 50...still operating from scarcity, still locked in survival mode, still taking more than they give.
The stress you feel?
That's the cognitive dissonance between where you ARE (high selfishness, low talent) and where you SHOULD BE on the developmental curve.
Your path to meaning is mathematical:
Accumulate talents → Eliminate personal scarcity → Reduce selfish need → Turn outward → Experience meaning
Every moment you stay below the curve...high selfishness, low capability....you're in psychological debt. The interest compounds as stress, anxiety, emptiness.
The solution isn't to "be less selfish." That's premature morality.
The solution is to BUILD POWER through talent acquisition until selfishness becomes *optional*, not necessary.
Only then does happiness become accessible. Only then does meaning emerge.
You can't transcend selfishness through willpower.
You transcend it through competence.
There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.
He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.
When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.
Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.
The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.
Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.
The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.
That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.
I hope by now you see why your aunt was unmarried by 30 & why your uncle ditched the family
I hope you see why your parents were always broke & why they were so protective of you
I hope by now you see why your girl left for a rich guy
People just don't do things
Life is hard
I hope now you see why your big brother started a hustling after high school and why his certificate did nothing for him,why his life had no direction.
I hope by now you understand why being broke at 25 isn't about laziness.
I hope you see why people do anything to survive.
I hope by now you realise how bad tribalism is. Why the oppressed always complain and riot.
I hope by now you see that tattoos and dreadlocks aren't a measure of character
I hope by now you see that nobody choses to get raped based on their dressing
Life is very complex.
I hope by now you see that life can be unfair & not all failure is due to laziness
I hope by now you see that your parents had it tough but tried to protect you from it
I hope by now you relate to the pain that leads people to drugs
People don't just do things. Life is HARD.
#copied
i'm re-reading D'Angelo's 1998 XXL profile & this part made my heart hurt:
the mantle of soul stardom is sobering. Marvin Gaye was dead by 44, shot to death by his own father. Sam Cooke: dead at 33, shot by a hotel manager who alleged that he tried to attack her. Otis Redding: dead at 26 in a plane crash. Sly Stone and Ike Turner? Enormous talents demoralized by drugs. Should D'Angelo recover the throne that now lies dormant, is the pain, insanity and self-destruction that seem to infuse soul music with its intensity part of his inheritance? As Ahmir puts it, all the greats seem to either die or fall off.
"I don't know his fate or his destiny," says Erykah Badu, D's Tammi Terrell for their remake of "Your Precious Love." "I don't know where he'll land on that particular chart, but I already can see right now that he's a living legend. Whether he'll fall off is up to him. D just floats about everything. He couldn't fall off because he can fly."
This is how class and the bourgeoisie actually live in Kenya.
Category One:
They leave.
They move abroad where systems work, raise their children there, then spend their lives pitying and praying for Kenya from a distance.
Category Two: The Rich
Corporate executives and big businessmen.
They have networks with politicians.
They only pretend to be “with the mwananchi” when their own deals are threatened.
In Eldoret they live in Elgon View, Kapseret and other leafy suburbs.
In Nakuru it’s Milimani.
In Nairobi it’s Karen, Kitisuru, etc.
Category Three: The Political Class
They have main homes in cities.
They also keep rural homes to influence voters and run handout headquarters.
Then there’s the majority:
People in villages and bedsitters in towns.
Begging politicians at church fundraisers.
Abusing each other on social media on behalf of those same politicians.
Talking about “unseating leaders” three months after elections.
Celebrating Nyota Fund like it’s economic liberation.
Nobody has anyone’s interests at heart in Kenya.
If they care about you at all, it’s only because keeping you where you are is convenient for them.
You are not poor. You are made poor