Realizations

The best way to learn is by doing, and life likes to give hard lessons. These are facts. They are facts with little way around. It is why successful people are not afraid to fail. In fact some of the most successful people in the world embrace failure. It is also why the idea that people are motivated by fear and loss is absurdly wrong.

I didn’t mean to write a political post but this quickly took that turn. I was going to write about my own lessons and how learning on the go is the best type of learning, but we had that turn and now I am going to talk about it.

The book I just finished, The Art of Spending Money, had an interesting section that compared welfare and trust funds. It included a Warren Buffett quote or paraphrase that was along the lines of trust funds are simply welfare for the rich. The idea is that it is still a system where your own effort and ability isn’t creating the reward and the book numerous times makes the point that inherited wealth or the potential for inherited wealth creates less motivation.

With welfare people are not getting wealth. They are getting barely enough to survive. If the fear is that people will simply live off the system then try it out for yourself and see if that is something you’d call living. Imagine you’re in the grocery store shopping with your EBT benefits and decide your kids have been good and you kind of want something tasty. So you throw some soda and pop-tarts in the cart. As soon as the EBT card comes out strangers are judging you and turning you into a meme on Facebook. All over a $6 twelve pack of soda.

Where human’s have price sensitivity is odd to begin with and it is even worse when we have it for others. Our welfare system isn’t enough to lift a person out of poverty. For that they need a comfortable existence that removes the risk of mistakes, and once more people are free to make mistakes the economy will benefit far more than it does with people being pushed down or denied comfort.

If we are investing in an employee for a company we don’t think they will write better emails if every typo opened the alligator trap door just a bit more, do we? Discomfort doesn’t motivate us. It makes us uncomfortable.