Wednesday, November 23, 2005

I'm not curious

It dawned on me yesterday that I've lost my curiousity. I no longer really care why things work, nor how, except just enough to get them to do what I want. In the code I write, I just get it to work. I don't especially care if it's elegant, just that it does what it's supposed to. Some of the time I don't even care enough about how something works to bother finding out for myself to do it, I'll just gladly pay someone else to take care of it for me.

An implication of this is that I don't think I can think of myself as a scientist. I'm just not interested any more in how or why things do what they do.

It's kind of sad, I suppose, and I suppose maybe I'll try to get that back at some point, but maybe now I can focus on getting what I want in life instead of bumbling about asking irrelevant questions.

Monday, November 07, 2005

I'm going about this all wrong

I am tired of not having money. I just posted on my other site an essay on finding the easiest way to do something, and I'm not doing that with regards to making money. I'm in the wrong job, it's obvious. I think having a passive revenue stream is very key, multiple streams in fact. Selling your time only once is insane.

I also need to start exercising again. I got sick, and then it got cold outside, and now I need to exercise indoors and I'm not doing it. There's a decent exercise facility here, so I need to just bring a change of clothes, a towel, and some shampoo to clean up after exercising.

I'm also thinking that having a job, as in working for someone else, is also insane. It's nuts for the same reason that service based contracting is nuts - you can only sell your time once with it. It's much better to do one thing and have a lot of people incrementally pay you for it.

Buying stocks, bonds, mutual funds, annuities - those are all fine and dandy passive revenue streams, but they also have a really pitiful rate of return when you really think about it. Very few businesses have as their plan, "We'll take our investor's money and put in the bank, and as the interest comes in, we'll pay out dividends." That's just stupid. Investors require a much higher ROI than that, as they can just put money in the bank themselves.

Of course, a higher ROI means greater risk, but that's the business of playing the law of large numbers. If the ROI wasn't high enough, people simply wouldn't start new businesses, or anything like that.

So I need a much, much higer ROI on my time.