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xranker · 5 years ago

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Questions About Hell I Never Thought to Ask When I Was Christian

0 Comments Questions About Hell I Never Thought to Ask When I Was Christian June 4, Hi and welcome back! As y’all know, I grew up as a very fervent Christian before deconverting around 1994 I deconverted because I found out the religion’s main claims simply aren’t true That said, for years afterward I kept finding more and more Christian claims that turned out to be equally untrue! Deconversion opened up a whole new capacity to make observations and ask questions that I’d never imagined while I was Christian And a lot of those observations and questions came up around the topic of Hell Join me today for a romp through the stuff about Hell I never even thought about till after leaving Christianity! ( James Lee ) The photographer isn’t kidding! — See here for a list of cities named for some variant of Hell This one’s in the Cayman Islands (I decided we’ll need a second part to this post about similar questions about Heaven Stay tuned for that one on Saturday. Also, it is very important to me to note that most of the following questions have hand-waving answers I guarantee any Christians reading this post that I’ve heard these false answers since deconverting. I consider them unsatisfactory Yes, even that one And that one) The Most Sickening, Cruel, and Evil Doctrine in a Religion Full of Contenders for the Title A lot of the really disgusting, grotesque, evil, cruel, stomach-churning gruesomeness in Christianity gets glossed over with centuries of iconography, re-framing, and very fine art and architecture Nonetheless, Christianity remains a very ugly ideology containing largely very ugly foundations Some Christians these days seek to de-fang and redeem this dreadful religion I don’t think it’s possible, but it’s their one lifetime to spend however they wish ( an it harm none ) And usually, they zero in quickly on Christianity’s most repulsive, sickening, and evil doctrine of all: the idea that a good and loving god who cherishes justice and compassion could ever send anybody to the afterlife commonly known by Christians as “Hell” Out of every evil doctrine contained in Christianity, Hell stands supreme as the worst of all of them The moment I know that a particular Christian believes in Hell as a destination for noncompliant humans, I know quite a bit about that person that they really shouldn’t ever want anyone to know Belief in Hell drives humans to do and accept evildoing that chills good people to the bone–and not only to excuse it in their own god, but to revel in the idea of him doing this to their enemies It also cows good people and terrorizes them into bending knee to this evil ideology and those who promote it No wonder early Christian evangelists pushed the idea of Hell so hard No wonder at all It allowed them to work all the dark deeds they craved, to brutally control those who might otherwise oppose them, and to gain power they did not otherwise deserve to wield Oh yes Hell, as a concept, has been most useful to Christian leaders–most useful indeed That’s why they push it hard even today– like John Piper recently did to parents , hoping they’ll impress their young children with the horrors he imagines exist in Hell (Check out his herpy-derp Jesus smile in the pic at that link Sick!) And Yet Hell-belief isn’t universal among Christians–even among the most extremist of them You’d think that evangelicals, having fused completely with fundamentalists by now, would be nearly-unanimous there However, according to the 2015 Pew Religious Landscape Study , only about 82% of them hold that belief The demographics involved are interesting, to say the least In 2016, LifeWay put out their own ( poor-quality ) survey about general Americans’ Hell-belief In it, they discovered that only 40% of survey respondents agreed with their official party line about Hell I don’t take this survey nearly as seriously as I do Pew’s, but it’s useful to gain an idea of general trends Chances are good that America is heading in the same direction as Western Europe in terms of beliefs It all makes me wonder if maybe people are starting to ask some serious questions about a belief that back in my day seemed as universally accepted as, say, belief in Germ Theory Back then, I didn’t even think about some of this stuff I didn’t even know how to formulate these concerns, much less ask serious questions about them First Off, Which Hell? First and foremost, I had no idea how many visions of Hell there are in religions from humanity’s past and present I thought only Christianity had a real Hell As it turns out, however, plenty of religions divide their afterlife into pleasant and unpleasant sections, sending the deserving to the pleasant one after death–and everyone else to the other Wikipedia presents us with a list of some of these Hells: Kur: the Sumerian afterlife Dark, dreary, and unpleasant A lavish burial and libations from family members could alleviate the unpleasantness A lake of fire: Egyptians believed that people who misbehaved in life were thrown there Ammit, a demon goddess called “the devourer of the dead,” ruled it Tartarus: the Greek religion’s place of torment for immoral people Anaon: a sort of Hellish place in old Breton folk religion , where the damned do penance Peklo: an old pagan Slavic Hell where souls atoned for their crimes Rotaimo: the realm of the dead of Sámi shamanism , ruled over by the god Ruohtta Anyone who didn’t live according to the religion’s principles ended up there forever Naraka: in Hinduism, where souls go for expiation of sins Hetgwauge: in the First Nations’ Haida mythology , bad people go to this dismal, unpleasant place to be tortured Among other punishments, souls there get to watch the lord of that realm eating their dead body. I could go on and on and on With so many hells to choose from, why would someone fear Christians’ Hell but none of the others? What makes Christianity’s Hell correct, and all these other Hells incorrect? And I should have wondered this I read mythology voraciously as a child–my family had books around like Bullfinch’s Mythology and the like Somehow, though, it never occurred to me to wonder why the Hell that my society overwhelmingly believed was real just happened to be the one worth fearing over all others How Does Eternal Torture Work Out to Justice? Most Christians who buy into the idea of Hell consider it to be an eternal destination full of absolutely nothing but torture . These same exact Christians also tend to think that when children die young or get born with catastrophic congenital conditions that are completely incompatible with life, all that horrific stuff happens for a reason–even if they don’t know what that reason might be Some of them punt to mystery Others default to sin nature (the idea that the supposed wrongdoing of Adam and Eve passed down to their children for all time; we’ll cover this bizarre, crazymaking notion in more detail soon) What Christians don’t tend to do is insist that these children deserved to suffer and have brief, horrific lives of pain. Such an idea is monstrous, even to them They also don’t tend to believe that these infants and children who die so young end up in Hell There’s a reason why so many Hell-believing Christians issue children a get-out-of-eternal-torture-free card Hell, as it stands, represents the most obscene injustice imaginable It lasts forever Those stuck there can never expect pardons Its pain is purely punitive, not rehabilitative, so it exists purely as a form of vengeance for what largely exist in Christian mythology as thought crimes (such as disbelief in the mythology itself ); going there hinges surprisingly little on how good and decent a person is during life Christians want the people who go to such a cruel fate to deserve it somehow –otherwise their god is unjust And even the TRUEST of TRUE CHRISTIANS™ know that infants did nothing to deserve such a fate Even to suggest such a thing around a dead child’s grieving family would likely provoke a reaction that’d end up on the evening news Why did I never wonder how an eternity of punishment for a finite lifetime’s offenses works out to divine, ultimate justice? Tasting Without a Tongue Of course, I’m getting ahead of myself bigtime. Nobody has ever found any objective support for the idea of any afterlife, much less the Christian conceptualization of it Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) remain subjective and highly-dependent upon their experiencers’ cultural beliefs about the afterlife The fact that finally broke me of the notions of Heaven and Hell is simply this: everything we think, feel, sense with our five senses (or six, as some scientists reckon it, adding in proprioception ) comes from the physical nature of our bodies These bodies, specifically The pleasure we feel from sex, eating, dancing, sleeping in, partying, cuddling our pets, running ultra-marathons, you name it: it derives from pleasant sensations striking our nerve endings, taste buds, visual cortex, and whatnot By stimulating our brains or feeding them chemicals of various sorts, we can be made to feel very strong and pleasant emotions We can do the same to alleviate many unpleasant emotional states. But our bodies die–and what makes us us no longer occupies them afterward In many old religions– like that of the ancient Egyptians –eternal life depended absolutely on the preservation of the body, because the soul reunited with it after death Christians generally believe that they’ll get all-new bodies upon reaching Heaven (though they can’t explain what age, gender, or appearance that body will have without making wild guesses) The problem with that idea is that a lot of what makes us us comes from quirks of DNA and conditioning of the bodies we possess right now And a lot of what many people like in this life, like sex, is stuff that the Bible tells us won’t happen in the afterlife The facts remain: we know of no way for people to sense things without a body We remain unable to demonstrate any human sensory perceptions that exist independently of our bodies Why did I not wonder how I’d feel anything without a body to provide the sensations to me? And why did I not wonder how losing this body I occupy now would radically change who I am as a person? Why Were the Christians Around Me So Sure About Who Was Going to Hell? Speaking of a dead child’s grieving family … When powerhouse Christian evangelist Billy Graham died , all kinds of other Christians knew exactly where his soul went afterward Most felt positive that he’d ascended to Heaven A few others, seeking notoriety, loudly insisted that he’d landed in Hell Ask Christians if a truly evil person is in Heaven or Hell, and usually they insist that this person went to Hell They do this even if that person experienced a miraculous conversion before death, like Jeffrey Dahmer did They don’t like imagining themselves sharing Heaven with serial killers, any more than they like imagining a Hell filled with the souls of those who died all too young Christians all appear to have very strong opinions about who is and isn’t in Hell When it’s the fate of someone they love, they’ll generally abstain from judgment or hope for the best Otherwise, they seem quite certain Indeed, I saw many of my peers gloating about the idea of people going to Hell They still do gloat about it , just like they have for many centuries Why didn’t I notice just how self-serving Christians’ opinions were when it came to who was heading for Hell? Why didn’t I notice how often their opinions meshed with their own desires and worldview? Not Without My Mother Now we arrive at possibly my biggest sticking point with Hell-belief This is the one I truly wish had driven me from Christianity, the one I wish had been my dealbreaker I wish it’d been my line crossed–my stentorian roar, my barked-out this far and no further It wasn’t But I wish I’d had the integrity, strength, and compassion back then for it to have been so Why did I not value my loved ones more than I did? Why was I willing to allow Christians to use my fear to separate me from those I loved most? These questions represent a regret that drives me to tears sometimes Every so often, it makes me bite my knuckles, moan fitfully to myself in near-sleep, shake my head as if doing any of this could ever deny those thoughts access to my mind Sometimes, it even works I was just a kid , FFS , so I try to be as gentle as I can with myself Immediately and always and at the end, Mom forgave me The least I can do is try to forgive myself Still, it gets to me sometimes I know damned well what she would have said if someone had tried telling her to abandon her daughters to Hell and enter Heaven without us She’d’a told ’em to stick it! But I folded immediately Why didn’t I notice anything weird about the way so many Christians utilize terror to sell a god of love? Seriously, THIS Is the Best This God Could Do? Part of what I’m talking about today is the Problem of Hell Christians named it that because they can’t satisfactorily answer it So they capitalized it and largely declared the whole shebang too mysterious to answer. Basically, it runs like this: Given that Hell is monstrous, evil, unjust, and in every way antithetical to the values of love, mercy, justice, and compassion, how in the world can any god who values that stuff allow anyone to go to such a realm? I can really see why some Christians opt out of the whole mess by renouncing the entire concept But Jesus clearly believed that Hell was a real place He also taught that it was somewhere people could end up going –even if they were positive they were going to Heaven But the idea of Hell gets even worse than that when we start wondering how an omnimax god could even have designed a cosmology involving Hell I’m not even a god and I could do a lot better than what Christianity has evolved over the centuries It’s beyond painfully obvious to me now that Hell exists in Christianity because its hucksters couldn’t sell the religion without it They still can’t. Hell: The Cage of Feral Rats, Lowered Over Christians’ Heads It hurts to think that anything could have terrorized me so much that I would ever forget what is most important I forgot every single value important to me: objective truth, compassion, kindness, community, integrity, all of it No more Not ever again Christians can keep their evil god and their disgustingly perverse doctrine of eternal torture for noncompliance They can use it to sever ties of their own–to rend mother from child, brother from sister, and lovers from each other But I know the tactic for what it is now Woe betide the next charlatans seeking to induce terror in me, hoping that fear will ensure an easier sale of whatever snake oil they’re selling See, thanks to Christianity, I now know exactly what questions to ask about whatever pitch they try NEXT UP: A quirky little 80s cartoon becomes relevant again–somehow What in the world?!? Join me next time and find out! Then we ask the big questions wondered about when I was Christian Read the full article

#Adam #America #basicchristianmaturityseminartopics #christiantopics #christiantopicsfordiscussion #christiantopicsforelocution #christiantopicsforyouth #JamesLee #youthdiscussiontopicschristian

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bettydgunter90 · 4 years ago

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070: The 10X Rule vs. 80/20 Principle – What’s the Right Way to Run Your Business?

In today’s episode, Jaren and I are going to talk about two competing ideologies about how to handle work.

The 10X Rule and the 80/20 Principle. Guys like Grant Cardone and Gary Vaynerchuk love to talk about the importance of hustle, while other guys like Tim Ferriss and Perry Marshall focus more on the importance of working smarter instead of harder.

They can’t all be right, can they?

Does it make more sense to massively increase your outputs or to selectively work harder on the very few things that produce better results than everything else?

In this conversation, we’ll talk about the merits of both, and the areas where each philosophy falls short.

Links and Resources

What is the 80/20 Rule?

What is the Pareto Principle?

Book Summary of The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone by James Clear

80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall

033: How to Build an Empire with the 80/20 Principle – Interview with Perry Marshall

Overview on Fractals

The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone

The Perfect Kettlebell Swing by Tim Ferriss

Everything You Need to Know About Getting Your County’s Delinquent Tax List

The One Thing by Gary Keller

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30)

Diminishing Returns

Perry Marshall’s Evolution 2.0 Project

Seth’s Best Audiobooks

Seth’s Best Books

Share Your Thoughts

Leave a note in the comments section below!

Share this episode on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn (social sharing buttons below!)

Help out the show:

Leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts Your ratings and reviews really help (and I read each one).

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe on Spotify

Subscribe on Stitcher

Thanks again for joining me this week. Until next time!

Right-click here and “Save As” to download this episode to your computer.

Episode 70 Transcription

Seth: Hey everybody, how’s it going? This is Seth Williams and Jaren Barnes with the REtipster podcast. Today, Jaren and I are going to just sit down and talk about two competing ideologies, things that a lot of people talk about as one being better than the other. And we’re going to compare these two and try to hash out which one actually makes the most sense. The two ideologies I’m talking about, the first one is the 10X rule. The second one is something called the 80/20 principle, otherwise known as the Pareto principle.

So just to give a quick summary of what these two things are, in case you’re not familiar with one or both of them. The 10X Rule, this was originally coined by I think Grant Cardone. He’s got a book called “The 10X Rule”. I actually found this really helpful overview from jamesclear.com. I will link to this in the show notes if you want to check it out. But he explains the book “The 10X Rule” in three sentences.

The 10X rule says that you should set targets for yourself that are 10 times greater than what you believe you can achieve and you should take actions that are 10 times greater than what you believe is necessary to achieve your goals. The biggest mistake most people make in life is not setting goals high enough. Taking massive action is the only way to fulfill your true potential. There you go. That’s the 10X rule.

Now, the 80/20 rule or the Pareto principle, I’m reading this from Wikipedia here. I’ll link to this in the show notes as well. The Pareto principle also is known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few or the principle of factor sparsity states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Perry Marshall actually has a great book, a very well-known book about this. We’ve had him on the podcast before, episode 33. I’ll link to that in the show notes as well. But it’s this idea that, and you can see it really like everywhere in nature, in business, in your personal life, like it’s all over the place where 80% of outcomes or outputs result from 20% of all causes or inputs for any given event. And that is from Investopedia’s definition.

Just think about anything you do in business, like the deals you get or where your biggest profits come from or really generally anything that produces the desired result, chances are a lot of your efforts toward that end, the 80% is going to either be wasted or it’s not really going to account for the things you really after, but 20% is going to account for the bulk of that.

Obviously, the power behind understanding this is once you know where your 80% and your 20% are coming from, you can intentionally redirect your efforts toward that 20% so you can get further with less effort. Jaren, I know particular has spent a lot of time going through, especially the 80/20 principle because he used to work for Perry Marshall, right? Jaren?

Jaren: Yeah. I worked on his Evolution 2.0 project for a nano minute probably, I don’t know, three months or something, but we actually used to go to church together for a while, which is super random. That’s actually how I met him. I wanted to talk about these two opposing ideologies for a while. I thought about maybe writing a blog post. I’m glad that we’re doing this today because here’s the thing.

The 10X rule pretty much tells you that the solution to you getting the results that you want to get in whatever it is that you want to do, whether it’s business, your personal life, you just have to put more effort into it. If you do 10 times the amount of effort, so in the example of sales calls, if you want to make more sales, you just have to call 10X the number of people that you normally would call. If your normal call volume in a day is 10, instead of doing 10 calls, you want to make 100. If your normal day is 100 calls, you want to make 500 calls. You want to 10X it.

Seth: And that applies in like things like direct mail too, which I don’t know, it’s easy to say, “Yeah, just do more”, but it’s like, “Hey, there’s real costs here both with time and money”. It’s like, where does it stop?

Jaren: And I used to be a very strong proponent of the 10X rule and it got me into a world of hurt in a lot of ways because it falls short. I do think there’s a place for it, and this is where the 80/20 principle comes in. The 80/20 principle is this law of nature. It’s everywhere. That 80% of your desired results come from 20% of your effort. You can apply that in a number of different areas.

Actually, Pareto was an economist, and what he recognized was kind of the underlying principle behind communism. He said, if you look at a nation’s economy, 80% of the wealth of that nation is owned by 20% of the population. And his whole ideology was founded in like that’s unjust. It’s not okay that a bunch of small elite group of rich people have all the world’s wealth. Whereas the majority of people in the nation are poor or struggling or subpar, they don’t have the same amount of wealth.

But the reality is no matter what you do, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s time, no matter the context, this is a law that is in place. It might not break out to exactly 80/20. It might be 70/30. It might be 10/90. The reality is there is this ratio that life inherently is skewed. It’s not fair. It’s not 50/50, it’s 80/20.

Seth: One thing that stuck out to me about Perry Marshall when I was reading his book is that, and I’d never heard anybody else say this, but this idea that there is an 80/20 within an 80/20. Even within that 20%, you can boil it down even further to the top. Is it 6%? 4% And even beyond that, you can boil that down in further. And I think that’s where the fractals thing comes into play.

Jaren: Yeah, and I don’t pretend to understand what fractals are, but if you guys do a Google search on YouTube and look up fractals, there are these like fractal videos that essentially just zoom in to a certain moving pattern and then the pattern repeats itself. So that’s the concept of a fractal is that like 80/20 is fractal in nature. No matter how much you break it down, the 80/20 principle continues to apply to infinity. That’s what a fractal is. It’s that concept that you were just talking about where it’s not just 80/20. It’s also the 80/20 of the 80/20 and it can break down from there.

When I first started getting introduced to the 80/20 principle, it really changed the game for me because I realized, “Wait a second, it’s not about massive action. It’s not about the ‘grind’. It’s about the right amount of action and the right leverage point”.

So, let me give you a really good example of this. Let’s take the 10X rule for an example and talk about working out. If I want to lose weight, if I apply the 10X rule to losing weight, if I’m working out one hour a day, 10X literally means for me to work out 10 hours a day. Is it feasible for me to work out 10 hours a day and have a life and have work? I don’t even know if that would be healthy for your body to be honest. No, it’s not healthy and it’s definitely not the way that you want to go. But yes, there’s a principle there that if you increase one hour or two, I don’t know, say three hours. Yeah, that’s true. You’re going to have a compound effect, but it’s like shotgun blasting versus being a sniper.

Whereas if instead of doing that, I borrow from let’s say Tim Ferriss’s four-hour body where he actually broke down a kettlebell workout where he got a massive amount of gains for a 30-minute workout once a week, or maybe it was an hour workout once a week. He did one little thing that was such a powerful leverage point that it yielded him the results that he wanted for one hour’s worth of effort versus three, four, five, ten hours a day of working out.

When we look at business, when you look at life and we looking at real estate, I think that the 10X rule really falls short unless you couple it with the 80/20 principle. Because if you know what leverage point to pull and then you 10X that, that’s when you’re going to hit a home run. But if you just are a shotgun blast, and you say, “All right, I just want to become successful, so I’m just going to do tons of mail”. Well, you might be just literally, if you took all of the money in your bank account to “10X” on direct mail and your squadron it all on a direct mail campaign, let’s say you did blind offers and your offers were all wrong. Now all your money’s gone and you’re done. No more business. It doesn’t work.

The 10X rule, it falls short unless you know “Okay, I’m going to narrow in and have this particular. I’m only going to mail to 55 and older and have access to a deceased database that’s super accurate. I am going to put all my money on this thing that I know is for sure return on investment”. Then it makes sense.

Seth: I think the tricky thing about that approach is you really have to be sure about what you’re doing. Like it is possible to zero in on the wrong 20 from the overall 100%. You can think that it’s going to work, but unless you really have verifiable data to know what’s going to pan out or be at least very, very confident of that, narrowing in doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to succeed. But in a perfect world, if you really knew it, yeah, you could basically leverage that in a big way.

Jaren: Yeah. I think there was a story that Perry Marshall talks about in his book, his “80/20 Sales and Marketing” book. If it didn’t come from him, I don’t know exactly where it came from, but I’m going to butcher this story. But it really brings the point home.

Back in Egypt, this is an ancient parable or nature story of how the pyramids were made. That there was the Pharaoh commissioned two people to build the pyramids. And one guy’s approach was essentially to just get to work and just like go and grab these huge stones and like go hard on trying to force himself to get it done. And the other guy dedicated his time to studying. Both of them had something like five years or something to get the pyramid done. The guy that just got to work and just started “10X” it, he ended up having a big problem on his hands because I think it was coming up to the last two years or whatever. The way he went about structuring the pyramids, they weren’t adequate. They fell apart. It wasn’t working. Even though he had moved all these stones and had done all this effort.

Whereas the guy that studied, he figured out a particular way to create a lever. What he did was it so surpassed his competitor’s ability to build that within two years remaining of the five-year period, he was able to build his entire pyramid like that. So, I know that I kind of butchered that a little bit and paraphrase that, but I hope that, stories always kind of hit home. That’s the difference between 10X and 80/20.

When you just have brute force with no direction, you can very, very easily waste your time and it can be very costly. Whereas if you narrow in on 80/20 and then find the leverage point and 10X that, that’s where you’re going to become successful.

Seth: Yeah. When I think about examples of that in my own life, like when I was first getting into real estate, I knew nothing about direct mail, I knew nothing about the delinquent tax list idea, which is one of many different ways to zero in on a subset of people to go after with direct mail. But yeah, when I was just looking for everybody who had the property listed for sale on the MLS, it did not go well. It resulted in just hundreds of wasted hours with literally nothing to show for it. But the first time I discovered the right type of person to go after, a very specific kind of property owner and how to contact them, it totally changed everything.

And even within that, say if you were going to send direct mail to only vacant landowners, even within that, there are certain types of owners who live in certain places and certain proximities away from their property, certain property sizes, certain markets. Like there’s all kinds of ways you can drill down even further. So that’s why I’ve always sort of thought, especially when you’re breaking into a new market and you’ve never worked there before, you don’t really know what’s going to go down. You have a theoretical idea but you’ve never actually done it. It’s not a bad idea to start off with maybe 500 mailers or something.

Don’t spend thousands on it yet, but get a feel for, “Are people responding to this? Is the message right? Are the offer prices right? Am I even sending this to the right people?” And if it falls flat, you can figure that out before you have dumped tons of money into doing it the wrong way. I remember when we were talking to Perry Marshall, that was one of the things because I had talked to him about, I’ve got two duplexes, but I don’t know if these two are a good representation of the market. Maybe they’re both terrible deals. Maybe they’re both awesome deals. But I don’t have enough data to see am I sitting at a good spot? Should I keep this strategy? Or I should I start looking for other types of properties and other areas?

And his response was basically, you need to find out what works before you want to jump in with both feet. Figure out what is really getting results. If you’re lacking data, get more data. Try other things first and then once you really know, then you can dive in.

Jaren: Yeah. And I really wanted to share these insights with you guys today because this is years of struggle and years of me spinning my wheels and wasting a lot of energy and effort on things that haven’t panned out that you’re going to be able to leverage and learn from. So, I hope that you guys really pay attention here because the 80/20 principle is one of the most crucial principles of success on the planet. It gives you insight, even into how to do marriage and how to spend time with your kids. It’s not just quantity, it’s quality. That’s directly out of the 80/20 principle.

Seth: I think what kind of bugs me about the 10X rule, especially from people who just push that and nothing else, like they pay no lip service to other ways of doing things like the 80/20 principle. I understand why they do it. It’s a very compelling message. It’s something you can really get up on a pedestal and do these raw speeches about just “Work harder, work harder and you’ll find success”. You can’t totally discount that. There is totally truth to that, but it’s not the whole story. And it bugs me when I don’t hear the whole story. When I don’t hear other ways of looking at things. Man, lots of books have been sold off just pushing that one mindset. I don’t know, it doesn’t always go well for people.

Jaren: I mean you think about even lighting a candle as an example. If I 10X lighting a candle, I’m going to bring like a blow torch or like a fire gun or whatever those huge fire blasters. And my candle is going to melt before I can even light it. That’s the 10X rule in effect. Whereas the 80/20 principle says, listen, I just want to candlelit so I just need to apply the right amount of flame in order to get my candlelit to reach my goal. It’s just much more efficient and you have to approach life that way, especially in business because it’s really easy to waste money on marketing. It’s really easy to waste money and waste energy and waste effort on a bunch of things that don’t actually move the needle. You have to get really focused on what’s going to move the needle today and do that one thing. Even the one thing, the whole concept from Gary Keller, that whole idea is based on the 80/20 ideology.

Seth: It seems like we both agree there is a time and a place for the 10X rule. What is that time and place like? When is it appropriate to just put 150 million % into what you’re doing and just work yourself to death? When is that logically the correct path?

Jaren: I think it’s when you have a very clear leverage point that you’ve proven. For example, in my land business, I exclusively sell land through land specialized real estate agents. I didn’t do that at first and when I first started working with land agents, I didn’t put all my eggs in that one basket. I did it over time to see, “Hey, is this working? How’s it going?” But that is for me, a very clear example of an 80/20 principle I play that I 10X. Instead of having the whole 10X concept of doing what everybody else is doing, just do 10 times more of the ads on Craigslist, 10 times the listings on Facebook marketplace being 10 times the amount of groups.

Sure, that would probably kind of sort of getting me there, but I work at REtipster full time. This is my full-time job. I don’t have the time to be sitting there answering is it available from a Facebook buy-sell-trade group. So, me finding, well, really my wife, but us finding these land specialized real estate agents that I can learn how to vet properly and line up, now the bottleneck of my business that was the bulk of activity is now a hundred percent outsource. Sure, there are some drawbacks just like with everything. One of the things is if I am in a county where I can’t find an agent and I hit a new county, I’ve kind of screwed there. Another thing too is if something happens to my agent, they retire, they die, they get sick, I’m kind of screwed there. I am vulnerable. But it’s such a benefit-cost ratio that it’s worth it to me for my circumstances where the bulk of my time and energy is given to REtipster, it’s a no brainer.

So, I’m building my entire business based on agents, but I validated it, sold a handful of properties through agents, and said, “All right, game on. I don’t even have a buyers website. I don’t even have a buyers list. I don’t need to put my attention on there at all. I’m just exclusively leveraging agents”. That’s a primary example for me in my land business.

Seth: The thing that I can’t deny is that there is some kind of power to that 10X mentality. I remember hearing, man, I think it was Brandon Turner and Josh Dorkin about two separate things at one point. It was kind of back when they were getting big into tech stuff and interviewing Grant Cardone and stuff. I think Brandon said, yeah, my goal is to… Don’t quote me on this. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something like my goal was to own a thousand units in the next X number of years. With the caveat that even if that doesn’t happen, I’m probably going to end up with a lot more than if I hadn’t had that super ambitious goal. And I think there’s some truth to that.

If you’re really shooting for something way bigger than what you think is actually possible, like assuming you’re actually implementing anything, you probably will end up further along than if you were just very small thinking, very ultra-realistic, that kind of stuff. However, that’s what the caveat that you actually have the right systems in place.

I’m listening to the audiobook of “Atomic Habits” right now by James Clear, who also defined the 10X rule that we just talked about a few minutes ago. And a big thing he talks about in that book is the difference between goals and systems. He says if you don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.

When you think about the Olympics, everybody has the same goal. It’s to get a gold medal, but many people do not get that. It’s not the goal because certain people didn’t get it, it’s because of the systems that got them to where they are. Just as in general, James Clear was talking about how the problem with goals is that they create this “either/or” version of happiness. It restricts your path of happiness to one single scenario where in reality there are many different paths to success.

Say for example, if my goal is to own 10 apartment buildings and if I don’t end up owning 10 apartment buildings, that means I failed if I didn’t reach that goal. Whereas if I focus more on the system, systems-first mentality allows you to fall in love with the process instead of the product, which kind of allows you to be happy along the way. So, you can sort of feel like you’re getting there just by following the right process in the first place. Kind of underscores the importance of really understanding what you’re doing before you’re really let loose and go crazy doing that thing.

Jaren: Yeah, I like that a lot. But as you’re talking, I don’t know if I agree with the underlying principle of setting your goals to something that’s not realistic and achievable. And the reason why is I do agree with you that if you shoot for, “I want to own a million properties”, you’re probably not going to end up hitting a million, but you might end up hitting a thousand. But realistically it’s hard to build a system around buying a million properties. And I think going back to some of the stuff we were talking last week in last week’s episode about when is enough is enough. Having the end in mind I think is really important.

For me if we talked about cash flow or something, at 125 units, I personally, I’ve run the numbers and stuff, that would be ideal for me. I think that would be an ideal spot where I would have money to continue to grow and invest and my family wouldn’t have to worry about finances anymore. We would be in a good place based on our current lifestyle.

So, if I have 120 properties as my goal, over the next say, 5-10 years, and then I reverse engineer it because I have the end in mind, I can actually feasibly hit that. Whereas if I 10X that and I’m like, “Okay, no, I want a thousand units in the next 10 years”. And I could feasibly try to build a system around that and spin my wheels and really put all that effort and energy into it. But why? Why when I know I just want 125?

Seth: Yeah. It’s almost like you would have to do the 10X rule with the underlying understanding that it’s okay if you don’t get there and it’s almost likely that you won’t get there. Which then leads back to the question, “Why do you have that goal in the first place?”

Jaren: Yeah, that’s my point.

Seth: It’s kind of like you are intentionally overshooting for something that you know you’re not going to get. I don’t know. Because if you really do believe you can do it and then the likely scenario comes to pass where it doesn’t happen, then you feel like a failure. So, I don’t know. I think in with you. Maybe it depends on the individual and how they think through and process this stuff. Maybe some people just need to get all hyped up like that in order to take any action. And I guess if that’s what it requires to move the needle, okay, but I don’t need that. I’m much more of to default a very realistic kind of thinker. I don’t pretend that I’m going to do like tens of millions of dollars of deals and stuff. If I don’t think it’s going to happen, I’m not going to make that goal. And if I think it’s out of line with my other priorities, then I’m not going to sacrifice everything and put it all on the line just to hit this stupid ambitious goal.

Jaren: Yeah, I think because what we were talking about last week, man, having a very clear “why” behind what you’re doing and when you’ve reached success, maybe it’s because my personality is achievement-oriented too. My failing to hit a goal, even if it was an unrealistic goal hurts me. Even the thought of it like right now emotionally, in my body I feel the emotional chemicals fascinate like “No, no, no, I can’t fail. No, no, no, no, no, no, no”.

I think the 10X rule of setting unrealistic goals just so that I work harder just creates a lot of anxiety and stress for me. Whereas I’d much rather just set a realistic goal, accomplish it, and then set another goal. If I said, “Okay, I’m going to 10X and I’m going to get a thousand units in the next five years”, I mean I can break down and try to build a system like that, but it’s going to take 10 times the amount of effort and I got other stuff going on and it’s unnecessary. I don’t know from a system standpoint why you would ever set your goal higher than you need it to be.

Seth: Yeah, an interesting thing about that is having a goal that is 10X larger than what you would normally do. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to take 10 times the effort.

Jaren: That’s true.

Seth: If you do set up the people and the systems to get there, it could only be like maybe twice as much effort, maybe the same amount of effort, you’re just working towards different things like managing other people who do the job rather than you doing it yourself. So, it’s actually an interesting thing to differentiate.

Jaren: But what I saw begs the question as to “Why do I need a thousand units when I only realistically need 125?” I guess in Grant Cardone’s mind, more is always better and at all costs. Just do more, get more, be more. But I don’t know if I would just fundamentally agree with that belief system. I need to be all that I need to be, I guess. But I don’t know. But there’s something about wanting to attain more and always trying to be the best that you can be and reach for the stars.

Seth: Well, when you were asking that earlier about, “Why do I need that number of units?” my question was, “Why do you need anything?” How does anybody come up with a number and decide that that’s enough? It’s totally a subjective thing and it depends on whatever that person decides is going to make them successful or happy.

Jaren: But to that point, I can understand having a goal of a thousand units because if I have a thousand units that are under management or under my control, or they’re owned by my company, then I have a crazy amount of influence because anybody is going to be lining up to listen to what I have to say. Even if what I say is good or bad, it won’t matter because I have so much success.

Seth: Until somebody else comes along with 10,000 units and now you’re a nobody to them.

Jaren: Well yeah, it’s true, but there’s still a certain level of like, if my goal is a thousand units, then my goal is a thousand units and that’s cool. But to say, “Okay, my goal is a thousand units, I’m going to shoot for 10,000 units” – Why? Why 10X it if you know exactly what you want?

Seth: Yeah. Well, maybe you want more clout or it will make you feel better about yourself for some reason. You’ve decided that that makes you worth more or more valuable as a human. I don’t know. There are all kinds of crazy reasons for that.

Jaren: But those would be reasons to set the goal for 10,000 units. If you have 10,000 units and you’ve got all the clout in the world, shooting for 100,000 units, at some point you have the law of diminishing returns in effect. Your accomplishment is going to have a drop-off point of value or ROI. I understand if you have a clearly defined goal for an adjusted vacation for 1,000 or 10,000 units or even 100,000 units, but at some point, in your assessment, you’re going to hit a tipping point where you’re not going to get the same amount of ROI on your effort. So, it’s pointless. You might as well just from the get-go, be very clear on what you want and define what success is required to get what you want and then go after and actually make it happen at all costs.

In my mind, I would rather 10X, so to speak, on accomplishing my actual goal and actually having that happen versus me shooting for the moon and then be okay if I hit the stars. Do you know what I mean? I’d rather like get the moon and own it.

Seth: In summary, it sounds like the 10X rule is basically the equivalent of working harder, whereas 80/20 is working smarter. Would you agree with that? There is a time and a place to work harder. But usually, that’s after you understand what the 20% is. And I think when you start out, nobody knows what that is. You can’t get away from some waste. There will be some hard work that does not pan out as planned, but it seems like the optimal path is “As soon as possible, figure out where that 20% is and start heading down that path”. And hopefully, you’ll actually get lucky enough to discover the 20% of the 20% or even beyond that.

And that’s actually an interesting thing. I know lots of people who are successful real estate investors that have done tons of deals, but they’ve never even tried the land business or they’ve never tried a delinquent tax list. Not that you need to do that to succeed, but there are certain things I know about that are super powerful that they’ve never done and vice versa. They probably know super powerful stuff that I’ve never done. So, it’s kind of makes you wonder if there is only one 20%. Does that mean everybody has to arrive in the same place, come to the same conclusion for it to work or there are different subsets of 20% that can work for other people and different approaches?

Jaren: Yeah, I think it’s the latter because certain leverage points can only happen based on your unique circumstances. For example, you and me are both American. Just by the sheer fact that we were born in this nation, we have advantages and leverage points that the majority of the world doesn’t have. I think you mentioned it in last week’s episode about you heard Jordan Peterson say on some podcasts that the top 1% of the world is anybody who makes over $32,000 a year. Just that sheer bracket. If you live in a family where your parents make $32,000 a year or above, you have a substantial leverage point for success. You have opportunities that people just don’t have in other places.

If you take a kid, I’ll pick Kazakhstan because my wife is from there, some orphan kid from an obscure village in Kazakhstan. They’re not going to be able to invest in flipping land in the United States most likely unless certain circumstances happen that expose them to those opportunities. But that orphan kid in Kazakhstan, he can look at what he’s exposed to and what leverage points he has available and he can use them.

Not to get spiritual on you guys but what we’re getting into here is really a lot of what the parable of the talents teaches. That some are given 2 talents, some are given 10. But really what matters at the end of the day is what did you do with the talents that you were given? And so, it is true that because 80/20 is fractal, it can scale down or scale above depending on what you’re exposed to and what leverage points you have.

Somebody who goes to an Ivy league school or somebody who grew up in the hood or all of the different factors, they give you a different set of possibilities to leverage. But in any scenario, there’s still an 80/20 opportunity for you to capitalize on. You just have to learn how to pay attention to it and identify it. And then once you see it’s there, that’s when you want to increase the effort to reach your goal.

Seth: Do you feel like you’ve discovered any 20% in life, Jaren?

Jaren: Yeah. I would say being a Christian is a massive 80/20 because you can hear from God. My faith is one of them, but I don’t want for those in our audience that are not religious or whatnot, I don’t want to make you roll your eyes at me. What I’ll say is reading has been a massive leverage point in my life. I didn’t graduate from college. I did a freshman year and then I dropped out.

But because I’ve been an avid reader and I’ve been obsessed with self-development, it hasn’t phased me at all in my life and in the things that I have available to me. So I think that being a self-starter, being somebody who is aggressive about personal development and reading widely, reading everything that you can get your hands on is a massive leverage point. We wouldn’t even be talking about 10X or 80/20 right now if I hadn’t read them in the book. That’s just the reality of it.

Seth: That’s very true. But is there an 80/20 of what you should be reading? Because there’s a lot of stupid books out there that are a total waste of time. Do you just kind of go with the New York Times bestseller list under personal development and stick to that? How do you know which things to read?

Jaren: That’s a good question. I think how I gauge it as I look at what other successful people that I admire are reading and the types of books that they’re reading. So, I don’t just read anything, I don’t look at reviews. I might do some searches as the top 10 books for X subject and then cross-reference those 10 books to a number of other sites and then see which ones are mentioned several times. There’s an online influencer named Tom Bilyeu that runs something called Impact Theory, and he has a recommended reading list. And because I trust Tom and he started Quest Nutrition, like those quest bars because he’s been super successful and he interviews all a lot of these guys that have had a really impact on my life, that’s where I’ve heard about David Goggins and other people that I really emulate and look up to. If he says it’s a good book, I feel like I can trust his views on it because it’s a filter. It’s a leverage point. I’m leveraging his experience and what I value in his assessment.

Seth: As I look on my audible reading list here, I can’t do the math as quickly, but it looks like not all of them but at least 80% of these, the only reason they’re on my list is that I heard about them from somebody else. Somebody else that I trust. Like they said, “Hey, this is a good book, read it”. A couple of them are ones that I just sort of saw as recommended items in Amazon and that kind of thing. But yeah, most of them are direct recommendations from other people. I guess for publishers that’s a note to them. It’s really important to get people to recommend your stuff.

Jaren: Yeah, a hundred percent. Word of mouth is a huge leverage point. I think another big 80/20 thing, at least in business is branding. The reason why Simple Wholesaling, a company that I used to work for in Indianapolis is on the map, whereas other wholesalers that are just as good, if not better in terms of price, aren’t, is because of branding. It’s a weird psychological thing, but if you’re on a podcast or you’re the guy on the video or you’re the guy writing the blog post or you’re the guy at a networking event talking on the mic, people for whatever reason, say you are higher esteem.

If you can do things that brand you like having a booth or showing up in magazines or being on a podcast or building a content strategy where people look up to you for whatever reason, that’s a huge, huge, huge, huge leverage point that a lot of people don’t want to put the time, energy and effort into because it’s a lot of work. But it pays out dividends for years and years and years to come.

Seth: Yeah. Going back to what we were talking about earlier, that is an interesting thing. There could be somebody who hears that and they’re like, “Okay, well, that’s a lot. I got to get up in front of a stage and start speaking” or “I got to brand myself”. But maybe they just don’t have the skill set or they’re not gifted at being an onstage personality or maybe they just hate it. It’s just not their thing. Maybe their leverage point is something else. They have a different 20% that they ought to go after. That’s kind of a tricky thing to wrap your mind around because on one hand, it seems like this 20% should be the same for everybody, but on the other hand, it’s like it can’t be because it’s just not everybody is the same. Everybody is in a different situation, so, unfortunately, there is no perfect formula everybody ought to follow. But I think you can’t deny there is that 20% somewhere for everybody.

Jaren: Just to respond to what you said right there, even in our work, I feel like your 80/20 would be writing. You’re way better writer, it comes much easier to you. You’re much more methodical, you’re much more detailed. Whereas for me, it takes me probably twice as long I would guess as it does you to write something that is up to the REtipster standard because I’m just not wired that way. I’m much better on a podcast or in a coaching environment or in a live medium. That’s just how I’m more wired. Whereas for you, those things drain you. And so, you’re not going to be able to, like I could do a podcast every day. I could probably do two podcasts a day and I’d be super happy and pumped. Whereas Seth would be like, that’s literally the definition of hell.

Seth: Yeah man, that is a fascinating thing because it’s very true. We just excel at totally different things, which is really kind of a good thing for any organization to have people who aren’t all experts at the same stuff because you can cover more ground that way. But it’s not that you can’t write and it’s not that I can’t go live, it’s just hard. It’s not where we come live and enjoy every moment of life. It’s kind of like a ticking clock. Like I can only do this so long before my head explodes.

Jaren: That’s how I feel when I edit articles.

Seth: Me too. I’m the same way. Cool. Anything else we want to explore about the 80/20 versus 10X?

Jaren: No, man. I’ve always wanted to have some form of content about this subject because I used to go ballistic and just try to do everything and go crazy under the guise of the 10X rule. And it didn’t really get me anywhere. It just made me waste a lot of time. Whereas when I started applying the 80/20 principle, that’s when I started getting real traction in my life, in every area of my life. It applies to everything. I just really hope that for somebody out there, even if it’s just one person, that you guys find this as helpful as I did.

Seth: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it was a good conversation for sure. And now that we’ve gone through the meat of our conversation, do you want to do one of these little random questions that you and I can both answer?

Jaren: Yeah. Let’s do it.

Seth: Okay. So, this is an interesting question. The question is this – What is the longest line you have ever stood in? What was it for and was it worth the wait?

Jaren: Mine is super boring.

Seth: So, it was not worth the wait, I take it.

Jaren: No, it was worth the wait, but I’m just saying it’s like, I think the longest line I’ve ever been in was that in customs visiting, going back and forth from Kazakhstan when I visited my wife when we were separated for a year and a half going through the immigration process.

Seth: How long was it?

Jaren: It wasn’t even probably that long. Probably 30-40 minutes.

Seth: Oh, it’s not that bad.

Jaren: Yeah, it’s not that bad, but that’s the only thing that I can think of off the top of my head. I’ve never been one to like on Black Friday, go stand outside Walmart. That’s not my thing.

Seth: For me, I did that one time. I stood outside. If you remember, this store is Circuit City which no longer exists. I remember there was a really good deal on a laptop or something. This was when I was in college. And so, I got up super early, like 04:00 in the morning and just froze almost to death waiting for this thing. I was probably like the hundredth person in line and when they opened the door as I found out they only have four of these laptops in the whole store. It was literally for nothing. I totally wasted my time, I didn’t have to get up that early, I didn’t have to freeze. I just went home disappointed and went back to bed. That was not the longest line. The longest one I think was at Cedar Point when I was in high school waiting for a rollercoaster. It was like standard to sit in line for at least two hours for some of these things. It was just nuts.

Jaren: As you brought that up, I think realistically it’s probably been the amusement parks, but I don’t have any particular memory of like, “Oh my gosh, this is so long”. The only one that was annoying that I can remember is the customs.

Jaren: It’s interesting. I remember when I was a kid waiting for anything just seemed like an eternity. It was almost physically painful to just like wait and wait. Even if it was like waiting at a restaurant to get a table for like 10 minutes. It just was like pulling teeth. And the older I’ve gotten, I don’t know. Not that I enjoy it, but it’s like, it’s just okay. Maybe I’ve gotten better at daydreaming or something.

Jaren: Well, I actually saw an article about that phenomena recently where a lot of people feel like when they were younger, days felt longer and years felt longer. The article, I don’t remember where it was from, otherwise, I’d have listed in the show notes. But it was interesting because the older you get, the more time you have.

Seth: It’s proportionally. It is longer for how long you’ve been alive.

Jaren: Yeah. When you’re younger, if you’ve only been alive for let’s say 4 years, a year is a really long time compared to when you’re like 55.

Seth: Yeah. My wife’s grandparents are in their 90s and I’m getting to the point in life where I mean I think everybody can relate to this at some point. But obviously the older I get, when it’s like, “Oh, it’s Christmas again. Holy cow. It was Christmas like last week. I can’t believe that’s here already”. And I’m 36 at the time of this recording. And if you’re in your 90s, man, it’s going to fly so quick. Because you’ve just been alive for so much longer and a year really isn’t that long compared to how long you’ve been alive. That must be kind of trippy when you get that old.

Well folks, if you want to check out the show notes for this episode, hopefully, you enjoyed it. Go to retipster.com/70. That’s 70. And you can find links to a bunch of stuff that we referenced here and other resources and other information about both the competing viewpoints.

And if you guys are listening to this from your phone, you can send a text to stay up to date with what we’re doing. Just text the word FREE. That’s F-R-E-E to the number 33777 and you’ll know what to do after that. So, thanks again everybody for listening. I hope you guys got something out of this. I hope you’re doing well in business and life and we will talk to you again in the next episode.

Jaren: Later guys.

The post 070: The 10X Rule vs. 80/20 Principle – What’s the Right Way to Run Your Business? appeared first on REtipster.

from Real Estate Tips https://retipster.com/070-10x-vs-80-20/

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drtanstravels · 6 years ago

Text

Anna and I came to a conclusion recently — She needs to relax more and take more holidays. Yes, we do go on a lot of trips and we have plenty coming up this year, but it is almost entirely for her work so she doesn’t really get to take a break. When we went to Thailand and a resort in Indonesia recently, she was a completely different person and got to unwind properly for the first time in about a year. We did go to Turkey late last year, but it was on the tail-end of a conference that Anna had put in a lot of work for, plus it was an extremely hectic trip anyway, hardly any time for relaxation. That’s why we decided to take part in the world’s largest annual human migration and get away at Chinese New Year this year; it’s a relatively quiet time for her at the Eye Centre as few people in Singapore want to have surgery done during this period and the timing of Chinese New Year meant that Monday, February fourth was a half-day public holiday, while the fifth and sixth were full days off. We wanted to go somewhere neither of us had been before and initially considered Taiwan, but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to go there during Chinese New Year as everything would be closed and we kind of wanted to escape the stress of being in a Chinese environment during those celebrations, because constant drums, chanting, and fires aren’t conducive to a relaxing weekend. Instead, we opted for Sri Lanka, a place neither of us really knew a whole lot about. My knowledge of Sri Lanka was limited to what was shown when singer Kamahl did advertisements for teabags in Australia and the fact that their cricket team was abysmal when I was growing up. Well, here are the basics on Sri Lanka:

Sri Lanka is an island country in South Asia, located in the Indian Ocean to the southwest of the Bay of Bengal and to the southeast of the Arabian Sea. The island is historically and culturally intertwined with the Indian subcontinent, but is geographically separated from the Indian subcontinent by the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait. The legislative capital, Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, is a suburb of the commercial capital and largest city, Colombo.

Sri Lanka was known from the beginning of British colonial rule as Ceylon. A nationalist political movement arose in the country in the early 20th century to obtain political independence, which was granted in 1948; the country became a republic and adopted its current name in 1972.

The island is home to many cultures, languages and ethnicities. The majority of the population is from the Sinhalese ethnicity, while a large minority of Tamils have also played an influential role in the island’s history. Moors, Burghers, Malays, Chinese, and the indigenous Vedda are also established groups on the island.

‘Colombo,’ not ‘Columbo’

Sounds like it could be an interesting place to spend a few days so the plan was to fly out on Friday evening and stay the night in Colombo, catch a train to Galle and spend Saturday and Sunday night in the Fort area there, meeting up with our Australian friends from Singapore, Tom Cargill and Leonie Brown, whom it happened would be in the same place at the same time, and then come back for a final night in Colombo before flying out very early Wednesday morning. There was, however, the issue that I had had an epileptic seizure a few days prior to leaving that would require me to get my head stitched up in hospital, but wasn’t expected to put our trip in any jeopardy. Let’s see if all went to plan.

Friday, February 1, 2019 Anna finished work early on Friday afternoon so we packed, took Kermit to the dog hotel, and then got a cab to the airport. Our flight was at 7:30pm and it would take three-and-a-half hours to touch down in Colombo, however, Sri Lanka is two-and-a-half hours behind Singapore so it was barely 9:00pm by the time we landed. Getting through immigration wasn’t too much of an issue, although I did get a few sideways glances from officers because of my rather impressive black eye, but we were soon through the gate and one thing became abundantly clear; A lot of people landing at Bandaranaike International Airport must purchase fridges on impulse! Sure, there was the regular duty free store selling alcohol, cigarettes, perfume, and the usual stuff that you encounter in any international airport, but this was surrounded by endless shops selling duty free white-goods — refrigerators, washers, dryers, ovens, vacuum cleaners, and everything else any complete home requires were all available and all tax-free at any of the countless electronics and homewares stores in the arrivals area. I think Harvey Norman may have to rethink their business model, I’m not kidding, there are tons of these stores so they must be selling something, take a look around for yourself:

Anna looking a little confused

Just a couple of the stores

Looking from the standard duty free section

Even more

We managed to resist the urge to pick up a reasonably priced chest freezer and walked down to the taxi rank. Initially we thought that maybe we should’ve requested a hotel transfer, but we had nothing to worry about, getting a taxi without getting ripped off wasn’t a problem as there was a fixed-priced taxi counter. Now onto our home for almost the next 24 hours, Colombo:

Colombo is the commercial capital and largest city of Sri Lanka. According to the Brookings Institution, Colombo metropolitan area has a population of 5.6 million, and 752,993 in the city proper. It is the financial centre of the island and a popular tourist destination. It is located on the west coast of the island and adjacent to the Greater Colombo area which includes Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, the legislative capital of Sri Lanka and Dehiwala-Mount Lavinia. Colombo is often referred to as the capital since Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte is within the urban area of, and a suburb of, Colombo. It is also the administrative capital of the Western Province and the district capital of Colombo District. Colombo is a busy and vibrant place with a mixture of modern life and colonial buildings and ruins. It was the legislative capital of Sri Lanka until 1982.

Due to its large harbour and its strategic position along the East-West sea trade routes, Colombo was known to ancient traders 2,000 years ago. It was made the capital of the island when Sri Lanka was ceded to the British Empire in 1815, and its status as capital was retained when the nation became independent in 1948. In 1978, when administrative functions were moved to Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, Colombo was designated as the commercial capital of Sri Lanka.

To make matters even better, we were staying at the legendary Galle Face Hotel. Just have a click around that website and you’ll see why we were excited to be staying there or if you’re too lazy, just read a portion of what Wikipedia has to say about our humble abode for the night:

The Galle Face Hotel, founded in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1864, is one of the oldest hotels east of Suez. It is listed as one of the “1000 Places to See Before You Die” in the book of the same name.

Celebrity guests include Mahatma Gandhi; the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin; John D. Rockefeller; former British Prime minister Edward Heath; Princess Alexandra of Denmark; Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; First Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru; Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India; journalist Eric Ellis and photographer Palani Mohan; future British RAF officer and MI6 agent F. W. Winterbotham; Prince Sadruddhin Aga Khan; then-Prince Hirohito of Japan; Roger Moore; Carrie Fisher; Richard Nixon, US President; Lord Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma; Noël Coward, English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer; Josip Broz Tito, Marshal of Yugoslavia. In January 2018 Prince Edward and the Countess of Wessex stayed at the hotel during their five day official visit.

I guess I can now name two hotels in which Richard Nixon has stayed. Anyway, once we had arrived we checked into our room and then went down to King of the Mambo, a Cuban-themed bar and restaurant within the hotel, right on the water. We pulled up a seat, ordered a couple of drinks and just started chatting while a Latin band played in the background when, before long, a couple on the next table, an Italian man and an Indian woman, must’ve overheard us say something about Singapore and asked if we were “Jacu’s friends.” It turned out that they both live in Singapore too and knew someone there whose friends were also traveling to Sri Lanka this weekend as well. We told them that we were from Singapore, but didn’t know a Jacu. I later had a look at Facebook and saw that there were comments on my friend’s page tagging me as traveling to Colombo, as well as another couple. This particular friend doesn’t use his real name on Facebook and I thought that maybe I had just forgotten his name as he is someone I only know from the pub so I showed his photo to the couple on the next table. “Yes, that’s Jacu!” they replied, so we settled in, ordered some food and got chatting with them. Not only did we have the mutual friend we knew of, but it turned out that the Indian girl, Adita, also went to university and is friends with one of Anna’s best friends, Roshini. To quote the comedian Steven Wright, “It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to have to paint it.” Here’s a look around our room in the Galle Face Hotel and King of the Mambo that night, although we didn’t get one our new drinking buddies:

Looking toward our bed

looking away from it

toward our bathroom

Out our window

Getting a bit rough on the way to the bar

Part of the view of King of the Mambo from our table

Looking along the shore

Inside the bar

Another area

Part of the skyline in the background

Saturday, February 2, 2019 We were still operating on Singapore time so we were up pretty early by our holiday standards. One thing that we didn’t realise was that Sri Lankan National Day, or Independence Day, also happened to fall during our trip, being celebrated on the Monday so there were thousands of soldiers rehearsing for the National Day parade when we left the hotel in the morning. Our plan for Saturday was to catch a train down to Galle, however, first-class trains only departed at around 6:30am, which wasn’t an option for us. Instead, we could get an express train at 3:50pm, but we would only be able to get either second or third class tickets with unreserved seating. You’re probably thinking, “Oh, poor Tim and Anna, can’t get first class tickets, boo-hoo,” but anyone who has ever caught public transport anywhere on the Indian subcontinent would understand that even first class could be deceptive in definition, second class with unreserved seating could mean absolutely anything, and third class with unreserved seating may possibly resemble something like this:

Still, we had a few hours to kill so we hit the street, taking in some of the military rehearsals along the way. We began walking toward the centre of town along Colombo-Galle Main Rd. when we were almost immediately approached by a very well-dressed, albeit extremely sweaty, local man who burst into a power-walk to catch up to us. Sri Lanka is famous for its gemstones and this dodgy guy insisted on taking us to a gemstone museum and then a shop afterward. We’re used to dealing with scammers overseas so we made it clear that we weren’t interested and that’s when the bullshit began. “Today is National Day so nothing else will be open anyway, as you can see by the parade on the beach.” We explained to him that we were more than aware that National Day was on Monday, the shops were clearly open, and that the parade on the beach was a rehearsal, but he wasn’t deterred. “I work at your hotel, what sort of representative would I be if I didn’t show you the best of Colombo?” We then pointed out that it was one of his alleged coworkers that told us about the rehearsals and he wasn’t dressed like any of them, but still he insisted we see the gemstone museum, going on and on about it as we sped up, him struggling to keep pace. It was finally when he called over a tuk tuk for us and told the driver where to take us that we both finally snapped, telling him that we saw through his bullshit and that we were doing something somewhere else. He kept talking, but soon realised he wasn’t getting anywhere, muttered something under his breath, and walked away. We were expecting to meet hustlers like this after the time we’ve spent in India and the first person we encountered on the streets of Colombo was exactly that, but fortunately we wouldn’t meet too many more.

We continued exploring, but everyone we know that has been to Sri Lanka told us beforehand that there wasn’t a whole lot to do or see in Colombo, just tons of construction, and Galle was where the real action was. Still, we had a look around, grabbed a decent lunch, and then soon we had to head back to the hotel to grab our luggage in order to catch our train. A look around our hotel and the surrounding area of Colombo:

A panoramic view from our balcony

Inside the lobby of the Galle Face Hotel

Our doorman about to let us out

Looking across the road

The parade rehearsals from a distance

Part of the exterior of the Galle Face Hotel

Part of where we had spent the previous night

More of the parade action on the beach

The local police station

A building that seems to be missing a roof and some walls

One of many construction sites

A cool mural on a building on our way to lunch

These photos may not paint a particularly beautiful picture of Colombo, but it is really nice, just the area we stayed on that first night may have been a little less aesthetically pleasing. After lunch we walked back to the hotel, got our luggage and checked out, and then we were on our way to the train station. The train station wasn’t far away, but we had to get there about an hour early in order to get halfway-decent tickets for our two-and-a-half hour journey to Galle. Anna read online that if we wanted to get a seat on the train, it was best to go to the first station on the trainline, but the concierge at our hotel said it was too far out of the way and we only needed to go to the nearest station. We got our first tuk tuk in Sri Lanka, negotiated a decent price due to the fare metre still being sealed in its original packaging, and rode in our three-wheeled deathmobile, weaving recklessly through traffic, all the way to the station. Anyone that has ever ridden in a tuk tuk before knows that you never feel all that safe in one and that’s not including the time a tuk tuk driver in Pondicherry, India (the vehicle called an “auto” there) made a piss-poor attempt at kidnapping me! These things are completely unstable, you’re not secured into the vehicle in any way, the drivers just throw caution to the wind, and in some countries they’ll do anything to screw you over to make an extra buck or two. Only some of them in Sri Lanka have a fare metre, but they are never used so you just have to haggle first and fortunately we never had any drivers try to scam us. Tuk tuks are the cheapest, and sometimes only, option, but all the ones we encountered on this trip could be trusted. We soon arrived at the train station and I watched the bags while Anna bought our tickets and then we walked down to platform 5 where our train would eventually be arriving. We managed to get second class tickets with unreserved seating, which meant that the process for getting a seat was first in, first served when entering the carriage, however, our carriage would have ceiling fans. When we saw a train arriving on another platform, we realised exactly what this meant; the carriages in both classes were extremely crowded with people getting on and off while the train was still moving, others just hanging out of the doors as the only convenient place to stand in third class. After we saw this, I decided to ask someone on our platform where to board the second class carriage. I approached a friendly-looking young woman, only for her to let out a little scream and grab her handbag. Train stations around the globe are generally seedy areas so I guess when a female is approached by a rather large man with a black eye and facial stitches, she needs to be on her guard. I apologised, explained our situation, and she advised us to wait in the middle of the platform, as that is where the second class carriages would most likely be.

Our train soon arrived and we boarded, and although I wasn’t expecting complimentary champagne, we were also unable to get a seat despite how proactive we were, instead relegated to standing in the centre of the carriage, the end nearest to us only having two of the seven ceiling fans operating. Initially the carriage was overcrowded, people even sitting in the open doorway, legs hanging outside the train. There were handles hanging from bars from the ceiling, but it was easier for me to hold the bar, Anna grabbing a handle, and we were soon on our way. Sri Lanka is infinitely cleaner than India, but as we were departing we crossed a river that could almost be tasted as we passed, the horrendous stench of raw sewerage hanging in the air. None of the locals really reacted to fragrant aroma of human waste, but almost every foreigner on the train instantly gagged. I’ve also heard awful rumours about the toilets on trains in this part of the world, essentially just a seat with a hole that drops turds directly onto the tracks, the room ending up ankle deep in human waste. How much truth there is to those stories can really be neither confirmed nor denied for me, but we both decided it was best to clench for the next couple of hours and take in the scenery. Any photos from inside the train were captured as it was still moving, the view almost always obstructed by another passenger’s arm gripping a handle or pole:

In a tuk tuk en route to the station (note the sealed metre)

Looking down at Anna on our platform, early for our train

Inside the station

An earlier train that would resemble ours

Not sure what class this is, but it looks like it’s going to a concentration camp!

Our train has finally arrived

A gentle reminder not to rub your nuts on seated passengers

Looking one way up our carriage at a worried-looking European tourist

And we’re off!

The other way down our carriage

This guy sat like this for the bulk of the journey

Crossing the festering river

Some of the scenery out of the door was beautiful

Some not so much

Going behind some houses

Location, location, location

You also shouldn’t rub your nuts on standing passengers

Trying my best to blend in while onboard

That bar was a little dirty

Finally made it to our destination

Our ride only stopped four or five times en route to Galle, but for the last ten minutes or so enough people had exited the train so Anna could have a seat and I could sit on the table in front of her.

Me with some of our dinner

Once we arrived in Galle we took a tuk tuk to our hotel, The Bungalow in Galle Fort, and by that time it was already about 7:00pm so we decided to hit the town. The first plan of attack; get some hoppers. Hoppers are kind of like a bowl-shaped pancake made from fermented rice flour and coconut milk, generally eaten with curry and sambol. Not long after we had walked out the door and around the corner, we stumbled upon a small store simply called Hoppa so we pulled up a seat and ordered what we had come for. We got some egg hoppers and cheese hoppers, as well as some curried prawns and black curry pork and Anna later ordered some dessert hoppers that came with treacle. To be honest, I could happily eat hoppers for every meal daily, but I don’t know how my waistline would handle it. After dinner we walked down to the Old Dutch Hospital, one of the oldest buildings in Galle, dating back to the 17th century Dutch occupation of Sri Lanka when the building actually functioned as a hospital. Now it serves as a shopping and dining precinct so we sat down in a bar, ordered some drinks and a shisha, but it wasn’t going to be a long night as it turns out most, if not all, bars in this town shut at 11:00pm, even on a Saturday. Oh well, it had been a packed day so we really weren’t complaining.

This concludes the first part of our Sri Lankan adventure, stay tuned for the second half when we spend more time wandering around Galle and getting into a couple of weird situations before returning to Colombo again for a final night.

Chinese New Year in Sri Lanka, pt.1: Colombo to Galle Anna and I came to a conclusion recently -- She needs to relax more and take more holidays.

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bettydgunter90 · 4 years ago

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070: The 10X Rule vs. 80/20 Principle – What’s the Right Way to Run Your Business?

In today’s episode, Jaren and I are going to talk about two competing ideologies about how to handle work.

They can’t all be right, can they?

Does it make more sense to massively increase your outputs or to selectively work harder on the very few things that produce better results than everything else?

In this conversation, we’ll talk about the merits of both, and the areas where each philosophy falls short.

Links and Resources

What is the 80/20 Rule?

What is the Pareto Principle?

Book Summary of The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone by James Clear

80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall

033: How to Build an Empire with the 80/20 Principle – Interview with Perry Marshall

Overview on Fractals

The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone

The Perfect Kettlebell Swing by Tim Ferriss

Everything You Need to Know About Getting Your County’s Delinquent Tax List

The One Thing by Gary Keller

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30)

Diminishing Returns

Perry Marshall’s Evolution 2.0 Project

Seth’s Best Audiobooks

Seth’s Best Books

Share Your Thoughts

Leave a note in the comments section below!

Share this episode on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn (social sharing buttons below!)

Help out the show:

Leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts Your ratings and reviews really help (and I read each one).

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe on Spotify

Subscribe on Stitcher

Thanks again for joining me this week. Until next time!

Right-click here and “Save As” to download this episode to your computer.

Episode 70 Transcription

Jaren: Yeah, that’s my point.

Seth: Yeah, an interesting thing about that is having a goal that is 10X larger than what you would normally do. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to take 10 times the effort.

Jaren: That’s true.

Seth: Until somebody else comes along with 10,000 units and now you’re a nobody to them.

Seth: Do you feel like you’ve discovered any 20% in life, Jaren?

Jaren: That’s how I feel when I edit articles.

Seth: Me too. I’m the same way. Cool. Anything else we want to explore about the 80/20 versus 10X?

Jaren: Yeah. Let’s do it.

Seth: Okay. So, this is an interesting question. The question is this – What is the longest line you have ever stood in? What was it for and was it worth the wait?

Jaren: Mine is super boring.

Seth: So, it was not worth the wait, I take it.

Seth: How long was it?

Jaren: It wasn’t even probably that long. Probably 30-40 minutes.

Seth: Oh, it’s not that bad.

Seth: It’s proportionally. It is longer for how long you’ve been alive.

Jaren: Yeah. When you’re younger, if you’ve only been alive for let’s say 4 years, a year is a really long time compared to when you’re like 55.

Jaren: Later guys.

The post 070: The 10X Rule vs. 80/20 Principle – What’s the Right Way to Run Your Business? appeared first on REtipster.

from Real Estate Tips https://retipster.com/070-10x-vs-80-20/

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