Some General Observations

THE BENEFIT OF INDIVIDUALISM

Have you ever noticed something about the people who are always in the news for making the modern economy? I mean Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk and so on. Generally college students who come up with a brilliant idea, drop out of college, and end up with their name in the news all the time and more money than they could ever count.

I notice a couple of things that they seem to have in common that I have never seen documented.

1) They have never served in the military.

2) They have not had much involvement in team sports.

Coming up with new ideas requires individualism. If one thinks like everybody else then they won't notice the things that everybody else didn't notice. There is a lot of emphasis nowadays on being a "team player" but being part of a team, as positive as it might sound, inevitably reduces the individualism that is necessary to come up with breakthrough new ideas.

As for dropping out of college the one disadvantage of a formal education is that it inevitably means learning to think like everyone else. Many people who come up with breakthrough new ideas or discoveries have been largely self-educated.

Countries with a Protestant cultural background, northern Europe and the U.S., have created the modern world because the individualism and think-for-yourself mentality of Protestants is ideal for coming up with new ideas and discoveries. It is no coincidence that the Reformation was followed by the Industrial Revolution. 

Modern democracy, where anyone can run for office and anyone can vote for whoever they want, is 100% a Protestant development. The traditionally Protestant dim view of the world opens the mind to seek better ways of doing things. If someone has too much respect for things as they are they will be less likely to notice better ways of doing things.

History is so often made by radicals who turn out to be right. The way to make history is usually not to follow the crowd but to sense when NOT to follow the crowd. This is the power of Individualism.

THE POWER OF NICKNAMES

There are so many people in the news for mass shootings and serial killings, and things like that. It goes over their life stories, the interactions others had with them, and how they came to commit this terrible crime.

There is something I notice that they have in common, and which contrasts them with the general population. Very rarely do people who commit horrific pre-planned crimes have nicknames.

This doesn't include descriptive nicknames assigned by the media, such as "The Suburban Strangler", or something like that. I mean usually playful nicknames assigned by peers.

We might thus presume that, as a general rule, people who get nicknames are more likable than those that don't. It might also be self-fullfilling, people unconsciously like people who have nicknames because they perceive them to be more likable.

Has anyone ever thought of making up a nickname for yourself when applying for a job or other position? Don't make it complimentary, make it kind of silly. You generally have to be likable to get a silly nickname. Or it might reference something like the color or style of your hair. But people have to think of someone as significant to assign them a nickname.

DICTATORS AND SMALL TOWNS

In reading about the great dictators since the beginning of the Twentieth Century there is one thing that I notice they virtually all have in common. They all come from relatively small towns. They might move to a city at around college age but spend their formative years in a small town.

I have written about this here before and know that it applies to European dictators. From what I can see it usually applies across the world.

DEFINING OUR ERA

If I could define our era in one sentence it would be, "We have reached the point where we can change the world faster than we can adapt to the changes that we have made in the world".