Remnant Review (March 18, 2011)
One of the most famous children's stories in the history of Western civilization is the story of the tortoise and hare. The hare had a rapid start. The tortoise plodded along. When the listener begins the story, he assumes that the hare will outrun the tortoise. That is the point of the story. If we did not assume that the hare would defeat the tortoise, the victory of the tortoise would have no particular relevance.
The point of the story is this: "Slow and sure defeats fast and inconsistent." Over the years, I have found that most of the fast starters I ever knew have been overtaken at some point in their lives. I am not saying they have been failures, but their remarkable productivity or even fame at a young age did not characterize the rest of their lives. I am old enough now to be able to look back and make these assessments.
A fast starter like Mozart did not live a long life. It is a good thing for the rest of the world that he was a fast starter. On the other hand, there is Johann Sebastian Bach, who started fast, was the best of his generation, and continued to be productive all of his life. That is the ideal. It is rare.
If a person is highly talented, and he applies himself to his calling, he can achieve a great deal. The reason for this is the legendary effect of compound growth. Any rate of growth, when compounded over time, begins to approach infinity if time is extended very long. The faster the rate of increase, the sooner the production curve will look like a rocket ship heading for the moon. I have known a few people like this, but I have not known very many.
No matter how productive you are, you will always find somebody who is smarter, more efficient, and wealthier, a person who seems to have a permanent edge. I am not talking about nearly superhuman people, such as Abraham Kuyper. I am not talking about Isaac Asimov or that other remarkable Jew, Jacob Neusner, who has written 741 books so far. He was born in 1932. This is obviously inconceivable. If a person writes two books a month, he can produce 24 books a year. In 10 years, he can produce 240 books. In 30 years, he can produce about 750 books. Think about producing two books a month, every month, 430 years. Neusner has been doing this longer than 30 years, but you get the idea. One book a month would not have let him achieve this level of output. No one but Neusner knows how he did it. (He pronounces his name NEWSner.)
Great mathematicians seem to reach maximum productivity sometime before 35. If they are going to make a major contribution, they have to do this before they reach 35. The same is true of physicists. So, these extremely fast starters have limited time in which they can be consistently productive. Again, there are exceptions. The mathematician John von Neumann is an example. He made major contributions in multiple fields, and he kept making them as he grew older. He was a fast starter, a steady producer, and a long producer. But there are not many people like him.
I am generally in agreement with the message of the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise will probably win the race. The steady attention to detail, and the daily application of time and effort to a particular task will produce remarkable results over three or four decades. If someone can begin early and stick to his knitting, he is going to make a mark in his field. This is because most people do not have the tenacity and the self-discipline to stick to any particular task. They lose interest. They run out of gas. They get sidetracked. The person who sees that he can make a contribution if he spends enough time, effort, and perhaps money, and then who follows a systematic plan for a period of three or four decades, is probably going to make an important contribution if he is above average intelligence. His brains are important, but IQ is not as important as tenacity.
Future-Orientation
This is why a person who is intensely future-oriented has an enormous advantage over his competitors. If he figures out early enough in life what it is that he should do to make a difference, and if he applies himself on a systematic basis, by means of a plan, over a period of several decades, he is likely to achieve his original goal of making a difference.
He has to understand well in advance that he has limitations. The limitations of intelligence and available time are major constraints on everyone. He cannot make himself more intelligent, or so we believe, but he can learn to budget his time. He can be fanatical about not wasting time. He realizes early in his life that time is an irreplaceable resource. He honors the value of time when he is young, which most of his contemporaries do not do. He looks to the future, and he sees the potential for a systematic plan of action. He sees that the compound growth effect will begin to accelerate his output in the second half of his career. He may struggle for years without attaining much, but the compounding effect over time overcomes most barriers.
There is a video about the difference of future-orientation in young children. It is one of the most interesting videos that I have ever seen. The psychologist who presents the audio portion of the screencast makes the point that, over time, the children who were future-oriented have achieved more than those who were not.
Understand, the results of this study became visible in a relatively short period of time: under 20 years. If
the study had continued for another 20 years, I am confident that the disparity between the output of the future-oriented children to the present-oriented children would have been even greater. The compounding effect manifests itself more prominently the longer the process of compounding continues.
I tell this people who do not think that they can make a difference in life. I do not tell them this when they
are 50 or older. I suppose I should, because people are living a lot longer today. But if someone has not been future-oriented up until age 50, I think it is unlikely that he is going to become future-oriented at age 50. It is possible, due to some event in his life, but it is not likely.
This is what I like to work with younger students. I do not usually have contact with students until they are in their teen years. I know a few teenagers are highly productive. I have mentioned the young man who earned an accredited college degree in the month of his 18th birthday. He had completed all of his coursework while he was 17. He is unique, but he is not a genius. What makes him unique is that he found out early about how to go to college cheap and rapidly through distance learning and examinations. He also adopted a plan of action when he was 14 that enabled him to achieve his goal by the time was 18. It was not his intelligence that carried him through; it was his future-orientation and tenacity, beginning no later than age 14.
Music as a Training Program
One of the reasons why we have young children practice piano when they do not want to practice is because the practice enables to achieve basic proficiency by the time they are in high school. Then, if they choose to pursue a particular musical skill as a career, they have enough of a head start on their peers so they can do this. If they had not practiced for the 10 years prior to reaching age 15 or 16, they would be too far behind those teenagers whose parents persuaded them to apply themselves when they were younger.
One of the most productive man I have ever known is a genius. He tested at 176 IQ when he was a teenager. That is extremely bright. He was a fast starter. At the age of five, he told his mother that he wanted to learn how to play the piano. His mother told him that she would by a piano for him, and lessons for him, but he had to promise to practice diligently. He agreed, and he fulfilled his end of the bargain. I never heard him play the piano. In the mid-1960s, I heard him play the banjo. He was generally regarded as one of the best bluegrass banjo players in California by the time he was 17 years old. He played in a local bluegrass group, and it was good enough so that it had a weekly spot on a local Los Angeles television station. He played with the legendary bluegrass group called the Kentucky Colonels. His name is Bob Warford.
One of the members of the Kentucky Colonels was Clarence White. In the late 1960s, White was regarded as among the top three or four studio guitarists in country music in the West Coast. He pioneered a new genre of music called country rock in 1965/66. He joined a rock group called The Byrds in 1968. They had already begun to make the transition from rock to country rock. For two years, he played with the group, and in 1968 he joined full-time.
At about that time, Warford decided that he would also learn country rock guitar. It took about one year to master the instrument. By 1970, he was probably as good as White was, and he had a unique style. In 1973, White was run over by a drunk driver in a parking lot, and this left Warford as the master West Coast studio guitarist in the field of country rock. He began touring with Linda Ronstadt about this time. He used the music money throughout his college years to pay for his education. Then he used the money made from touring to go to law school. He passed the California bar exam in his first attempt, which is rare. The reason he went to law school is because he found that his PhD in neurophysiology was not marketable. So, he took his knowledge of medical science into the courtroom. A few years ago, he was inducted into an international organization of trial lawyers, an organization so exclusive that there are only about 500 of them in the group, worldwide. He still works as a lawyer.
I use him as an example because he is a classic case of someone who started very early in one field, music, and became highly successful in this field. But he also recognized that the music industry would not be a good lifetime career for him. It would not be as lucrative as law, and also would not enable him to achieve as much significance as he could in the courtroom. He has tried over 100 cases, which is a large number. He could have been a great studio musician, but it would have been a life lived in the shadows, and also would not have been as lucrative as the field he went into.
He was a very fast starter. Also, he had a major detour in his life. He flunked out of college at one point. He and my friend Steve Gillette took a course at the University of California, Riverside, in music composition. They worked together on a project, and they both flunked. Gillette then went into music full-time, as both a performer and songwriter. He wrote a number of highly successful songs, including a classic, Darcy Farrow, which he wrote before he flunked out of college . . . the second time.
Warford went to junior college, got his grades up, returned to university, and finished with grades sufficiently high so that he was able to get into grad school. In other words, he had basic tenacity to match his intelligence. He was sidetracked briefly, but it did not deflect from a course of action. He was able to use his musical skills to fund his intellectual skills.
Gillette is still on the road, although he never became a major figure in the music industry. That was to be expected, since his specialty is folk music, and not the radical protest folk music of the late 1960s. He writes traditional songs, and he and his wife singing traditional songs. There has never been a large market for people with these skills. He is well-respected in the field, but the field has a restricted audience. He nevertheless pursued his calling, which is also his job, and has written songs that are so buy more famous performers. He is a success, but he is not famous.
If you want story of a fast track performer in the field bluegrass music, Allison Krause is the obvious example. She is by far the most successful performer field, and she started very young. In contrast, there is Ralph Stanley. Stanley was one of the pioneers in the field, beginning in the 1950s. He never became famous outside the field. Then, when it was 75 years old, he was given the opportunity to sing a song a capella for the movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?. That song, sung with an old man's voice, won him a Grammy. He stuck to his knitting for a long time, and fame and some degree of fortune came to him when he was an old man.
Plan Revision
It is difficult for someone who is not future-oriented to discipline himself, with a specific plan in mind, when he reaches his teenage years. Most men develop future-orientation when they get married, or perhaps when their first child is born. This happens these days when a man is 30 years old. Men get married much later these days. This puts them at a distinct disadvantage when compared with earlier generations. Men married earlier, and they were forced by the responsibilities of marriage to begin focusing on the future with greater intensity.
When we are young, we are in the presence of people who are fast starters. The high school star athlete, the prom queen, the super-intelligent student who learns everything easily and breezes through high school: all of these are familiar to us. We knew them when we were young. When I look back at the careers of those who were fast starters, I find that, at some point, they faded in the stretch. That is the language of horse racing, but it applies.
There are some cases where the decision was self-conscious. I have talked about the girl I knew in high school who danced with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly before she was a teenager. I did not know this until the 50th high school reunion, when her husband told me about. I knew that she had been in the movies, because I have seen her in one of them, where she was at least a face in the crowd. She walked away from Hollywood, because she wanted no part of the lifestyle. Her father died before she went into high school, and she was happy never to mention any of the "glory years" again. As an adult, she applied herself to her family, and her children are successful. She has had a good marriage. In her case, she was a fast starter, but soon realized that the path in which she had the enormous advantage, namely, professional dancing, was not what she wanted to do for the next 20 years. She wisely abandoned Hollywood and dancing, even though she had actually toured nationally as a dancer at the age of 12. This does not indicate a person was sidetracked. In fact, her initial opportunity was a kind of sidetracking. She recognized this by the time she was 12 years old, and she set a new track for herself. Her husband was successful, and I have no doubt that much of his success came because she back him up, and took on most of the responsibilities of raising the children.
There is nothing easy about success. If it comes easily, it can depart easily. We know this over long years, but we forget about it when we are in the presence of people who are enormously successful. The more successful anyone becomes, the more he travels in circles populated by what appear to be highly successful people. He is constantly comparing himself with others who appear to be more successful. This is why it is difficult for successful people to maintain their sense of balance. They are constantly rubbing elbows with others who seem to receive greater attention, or more money, than anyone else they know. Sometimes, the other people really are more productive, and this shows in their degree of success. But whenever these people are interviewed, they seem to display a clear sense that much of their success came for reasons that they cannot understand.
This is a major problem for a lot of people who have enough talent and even enough self-discipline to become highly successful. They see others who seem to outperform in the middle of their careers, and they decide that they have no chance of becoming a real success. They define success in terms of other people's attention, wealth, or fame. They do not recognize their own capabilities, and they do not recognize the reality of the price of success, which is attention to detail, constant practice to improve one's performance, and tenacity. The person becomes convinced that he will never achieve great deal of success, and he drops out.
It is very difficult to decide whether a particular plan of action needs revision or not. It is difficult to decide whether your talent in a particular field is best applied in that field. People struggle in a career for many years, and they do not seem to achieve great deal, but occasionally, we come across a story someone like Colonel Sanders. It was not until he retired from his career of running a small restaurant out of a gas station that he built Kentucky Fried Chicken. It can be done, but it is so rare that we never think about it. In fact, all those years of frying chicken to be sold people who came to his gas station prepared him for the rigors of launching what eventually became a conglomerate. But he could not have known this before he reached age 65 and could devote full-time to developing the franchise. He did not waste all those years frying chicken for people who came into his gas station. At age 65, it was the right era to start a fast food franchise. It was surely the right time for him to start a franchise.
If someone selects a task at the age of 20 and actively pursues that task for 20 years, and finds that he does not think his talents are sufficient to enable him to make a contribution field, I think it is legitimate for him to select another task. Some people call this the midlife crisis. It can be a serious crisis for somebody who has to rethink what he wants to do with the rest of his life. It is especially difficult for men who do not get married until they are 30. But, at some point, a person should re-examine his original goal, and compare his productivity with what he expected to accomplish by 84. Sometimes, it is best to take the skills and self-discipline that you have sunk into what is essentially a dry hole, and apply those skills and tenacity to new field.
When someone is 40 years old, he has 30 years ahead of him, and maybe 40 years, in which he can make a contribution. Anyone who looks at his productivity after 20 years, and concludes that he is spinning his wheels, should look around to find another field in which he may have more traction. It is not just that he wants to quit; it is that he wants to quit in order to go into a new field in which he honestly believes he has enough time to make a significant contribution.
On Not Getting Sidetracked
The time someone spends in pursuing systematically some area of production is not wasted time. The psychological makeup of the person has been positively affected by years of self-discipline, which is then applied to a long-term goal. That outlook is not common to many people, and the experience of following a plan of action for a decade or more is also not common. Time and self-discipline over a period of two decades constitute a major capital investment. The investment is in the person, and the fact that the investment has not resulted in a marketable product does not mean that the investment has been wasted. If a person defines himself strictly in terms of the marketability of this project, then he has defined himself too narrowly.
Economists say the labor theory of value is incorrect. Technically speaking, it is incorrect. The market value of a product is not the result of the market value of the inputs that produced the product. But part of the product is human capital. The market value of human capital may be low, but the actual value of the human capital is great, or may become great, simply because it produced a person who is self-disciplined and able to follow a long-term plan. The market may not impute value to it, but God does. This is why people who believe in God have a distinct competitive advantage over those people who think that the only imputation that matters in life is the imputation of paying customers.
Hugh Hefner has satisfied paying customers. There is no question that he made a great deal of money. He is famous. Yet, in terms of human capital involved, he has wasted his life, and he has wasted the lives of a great many young women who had good looks and poor judgment. The fact that the free market imputed value to Hugh Hefner's work does not validate the legitimacy or productivity of his work. We can see this in the case of a man like Hefner, but we may not be able to see it in the lives of other people whose choice of profession is not so obviously a mistake.
A more difficult career to assess is that of Congressman Ron Paul. He left a highly productive career, obstetrics, for a career that most of those with regard as a waste of time compared with delivering babies. But he was able to pursue a career in which his voting record gained the reputation of being a man of principle, and this in turn gave him an opportunity to express his principles in public.
Because of the unique series of economic events that took place in late 2007 and then in 2008, he became world-famous, because he was critical of the Federal Reserve System. He had a developed economic theory of what was wrong with the Federal Reserve, which other Congressman did not possess. In fact, the entire economics profession did not possess the conceptual framework that he possessed, which gave him an advantage over virtually the entire economics guild. The many years that he spent in Congress, ignored by the media, ignored by his fellow Congressmen, paid off in 2007-8. He was able to get a hearing for Austrian School economics that no other politician in history has ever gained. His job was his calling. His career was the most important thing he could do in which he was most difficult to replace. He did not waste his time.
I will now compare that career with another individual in Congress. The other individual was a far better speaker than Ron Paul. He was a far better speaker than virtually every other member of Congress. He was a scholar. He had originally been in the field of private education. He was a good writer. He could have made major contributions in the field in which he was trained: history. I think he could have produced an effective high school curriculum in the social sciences and humanities all by himself. Instead, he went to Congress and was constantly reelected for years. He had great seniority in Congress when he finally was defeated. He was a conservative. His impact on his peers was minimal. He was generally ignored by the conservative public, because most Congressman never become famous outside their own districts. If he had devoted the same amount of time and effort to developing a high school curriculum, I think he would have made a major contribution. Instead, he went into politics. He has a very lucrative retirement program, but he missed his calling. It was not that he was a bad Congressman. He was a good Congressman. But he would have been a better educator than a Congressman if he had stuck to his knitting.
I believe he got sidetracked. Most people would say that career in Congress would have been better than teaching high school. I think that this is generally true, but not if you have the potential of creating a curriculum that would change the thinking of tens of thousands of students. Would anybody believe the best thing for Salman Khan to do would be to get into Congress? Would anybody say that 30 years in Congress would be more productive than 30 years transforming the entire educational curriculum available to students on YouTube all the world free of charge? I don't think so.
Regular Self-Assessments
I do not know how old you are. I do not know how many years you have been applying yourself to your occupation. I do not know if you have identified your calling in life. I do not know how much human capital you have developed. I do not know if you're present-oriented or future-oriented. I assume that you're future-oriented. I do not know whether your spouse shares your vision of what you want to do with your life. But the kinds of questions that you ought to be asking yourself should relate to your legacy. Every five years, a person ought to sit down and re-evaluate where he is on his career path. He may be doing just fine. He may be on track. Even if he is not on track, some new technology may appear which will enable him to get back on track. This is certainly happened to a lot of us over the last 15 years.
One of the advantages of being 40 years old is that you have had to pay fees to apply yourself to a specific field. You know how you have done. You can compare yourself with others who are in your same field. You can make an assessment of how much progress you have made so far. It is important that you do this.
I tell people this: they should be able to say at the end of the assessment that they can do things that they could not possibly have done at the beginning of the period. They should have achieved some level of skill, or some level of acceptance by their peers, or some level of responsibility that they could not have achieved at the beginning of the period.
This is why a person ought to sit down on a weekend and list the skills that he has, the successes that he has had, and the failures that he has had since the time of the last evaluation. Some people think this should be done quarterly. I think most people are geared to doing it annually. They probably should do it in the week after Christmas. I do not believe in New Year's resolutions, but I do believe in setting goals to strive toward. I do not think you should promise yourself that you are going to achieve a particular goal, but I do think you should have particular goal in mind and a plan of action to enable you to achieve that goal.
I am coming to the end of a project that I began in 1973. Over the next 11 months, I have plans to revise all of the previous commentaries that I have written on the economics of the Bible. I want to make certain that I still believe what I wrote 38 years ago. I want to cross-reference the verses and ideas by means of footnotes. I want to refer forward and backward in each of volumes, so that there is consistency in what I have said. This involves reading close to 13,000 pages, and making footnote additions and revisions in the text. My goal is to finish the project on screen, meaning in PDF format, by my deadline that I set in 1977: February 2012.
Because of the invention of YouTube, and because of the development of website technology, I now have to stretch out my original deadline by at least three years, and it may be more. I want to create videos summarizing what I have found, passage like passage. I know that people are not going to sit down and read 13,000 pages of my commentary. So, I have to find ways of getting the ideas out to people in bite-size chunks. I have to make the chunks memorable. For those people who want to follow a particular idea, they can do so by going to my website, and from there to PDF files where I have developed a particular chapter. All of this will be free. In other words, adopting a new technology, which is literally revolutionizing the way we communicate, is mandatory. I must extend my original deadline by several years beyond the writing of the series. It will be a lot of extra work, but I would be foolish not to do it, because the value of the work that I have already done can be multiplied by means of the new technologies.
This is plan revision. Plan revision is made necessary by changing conditions. New technologies that could not have been imagined in 1990 are now changing the face of the world. These technologies have changed North Africa in ways that we could not have predicted in December 2010. Anyone who does not respond to these kinds of technological innovations is not going to maximize the effect of his work. This would be wasteful. The result will be a loss of time in my life.
I still have to write several volumes in my final treatise on Christian economics. The reason I did all the work exegetically since 1973 was to prepare myself to be able to write these final volumes. So, I must not let myself devote too much time posting videos on YouTube if that time should be devoted to exposition of the books. But, at this stage in my career, I can write fast, and I have done the groundwork. I have been a fast writer for a long time, and I have become much faster by meeting the deadlines imposed by my occupation.
Opportunities have been made available to me it did not exist when I began this project in 1973. This is going to be increasingly the case as digital technology advances. We are constantly going to see that we have tremendous opportunities available to us because of the innovations that people around the world are making in the field of communications. The man who runs Mises.org, Jeffrey Tucker, says that he has had to readjust his thinking in multiple ways because the Web, which includes re-thinking his time perspective. He says that innovations are coming so fast, that within months, he is forced to develop new applications of new technologies or at least experiment with new technologies. He is constantly innovating. He has to maintain the accessibility of all of the previous materials. They must not get lost in the shuffle. But he has to make available the material in new formats and new venues. If he does not do this, he will fall behind. Yet the pace of change is accelerating. Nobody else in the nonprofit world of education is anywhere near his level of productivity, yet he finds that he is falling behind constantly.
The careers of Lew Rockwell and Jeff Tucker illustrate my point. They have stuck to their knitting for a long period of time. Rockwell developed the most successful newsletter in the history of education, and certainly in the history of the conservative movement. He invented and pioneered Hillsdale College's newsletter, Imprimis. He published the Rothbard-Rockwell Report in the 1980s and 1990s. Those paper-based media, while not entirely obsolete, are rapidly becoming obsolete. He still publishes newsletters and materials in paper format. Some people still prefer to read the material on a piece of paper. Also, when you send out a piece of paper, you can include a postage paid envelope for sending a check. But Rockwell and Tucker made the transition to digital communications before almost anyone else did. This gained them a tremendous initial advantage, and this initial advantage has been extended by constant attention to technological innovation. They were fast starters in the field of digital communications, but they did not rest on their laurels. If anything, they are innovating even more rapidly today than they did 15 years ago. The result is a wide penetration into the conservative market, including international market, for the ideas of Austrian economics and the related fields of historical revisionism. There are no sites like Mises.org.
Both men have found a way to get paid for their callings. They have callings that are also their occupations. Most of us do not have this advantage. This is why people have to give considerable attention to their calling, and not let the calling be overwhelmed by the responsibilities and requirements of the occupation. People have to budget their time so that they do not get sidetracked by the lure of money, prestige, or the other benefits of becoming a major player in a particular profession. The temptation to spend your time only on your profession is always very great. The lure of money is very great. But when your profession visibly is absorbing the necessary time that is required to make a major contribution in your calling, you have to be willing to walk away from a least a portion of the benefits offered by your profession.
One of the reasons why you need to take care of your health is to extend the amount of years that you have available for completing your calling. This is been important in my life. I had an extremely fast start in terms of my health at the age of seven. I was sickly, so my mother took me to a physician who specialized in nutrition. In 1949, he was just about the only position in the country who did this. He was able to restore my health. I had a physical this week, and the physician said that I am very healthy. This was the first full physical I have ever had. I have been so healthy for so long that I have never gone to a physician to have a complete blood test done. The only reason why I did it this time is because I was required to by the health care company that covers the under the Medicare program. The fast track that I got onto because I got sick as a young child enabled me to maintain my health over the next 60 years.
It seems as though I will be able to do so over the next decade or perhaps longer. If I am able to do so, then the compounding effect really begins to take over. I can get more and more material out, though not on the level of Neusner, because I have stuck to my knitting for a long period of time. I have built up an inventory of books and materials, as well as ideas, that will now enable me to become far more productive in the years that lie ahead. This is where the compounding effect will become parabolic. That, at least, is my hope. Health is not guaranteed. Life is not guaranteed. But if I meet the actuarial tables, and if my mind continues to be sharp, I have close to a quarter century ahead of me. If I get those 25 years, I can crank out a lot of materials. And remember, technology is now on my side. I do not need a publisher to keep all my books in print. The Web can do that free of charge.
Conclusion
If you dedicate yourself to your calling, and if you develop a plan of action and stick to it, then offer the time available to you, you will find that your output increases dramatically as you get older. It is not as though you are an athlete who will fade at age 35 (Herschel Walker excepted). It is not as though you are some master mathematician. You are in a position where experience counts, and people will pay you to share your experience of whatever made you successful. This is why I am a great believer in diaries. People should write down detailed descriptions of the problems that they face, and then write down detailed descriptions of the solutions they came up with. That becomes a form of marketable capital. You will forget the details, but if you write them down, they become a kind of inventory of experience that can be converted into in, or influence or both.
When you are young, you can afford to concentrate more on your occupation and your family than you do on your calling. But you should never abandon a systematic program of implementing your calling. You can invest about half an hour a day. That investment of time becomes part of the compounding process. You have to keep at it, even if it requires you to skip lunch, or skip football games, or skip going to the movies, or skip a lot of things that your peers are unwilling to forgo. There is always a way, or almost always a way, to carve out a few extra minutes in a day to devote to your calling.
Ideally, part of the work that you do in your profession can be applied to your calling. When your children get older, part of the time that you invest in their educations can also be used to develop training materials related to your calling. Teaching children is an investment is not simply an investment in your children's lives; it is an investment in your development of marketable skills. People who can teach can have enormous impact the lives of other people. I you should strive to become such a person. Even if you cannot sell what you know when you are 60, you can get away and have a major effect on other peoples plans.
I have a lawyer friend who teaches inner-city pre-teen black boys how to mow lawns every Saturday. He is not making any money. The money that he makes is used to buy equipment, keep equipment and repair, and pay the boys. This is not his occupation; this is his calling. His time is well spent. I have seen the development of these boys over the years, and when they become teenagers, they have a major head start on their peers with respect to their work habits. This will make all the difference in their lives in the inner-city community in which they find themselves. Some have gone on to college. They were smart to begin with, but in all likelihood, they would not have gone to college. It was not they made a lot of money mowing lawns. It was that they developed habits personal self-discipline which gave them both the vision and the capacity to go to college and be successful. The lawyer made a self conscious decision to transform lives of children in that part of town who had been basically cast off by their parents in the educational system.
There is a lot that you can do. There is a lot that you can do with a minimal investment of time per day, but which becomes a major investment of time over three or four decades. The compounding process is the key to the development of civilization. We have seen this since about 1800. We have never seen anything like this in the history of man: 2% per year for 200 years. The rate of change is accelerating. I believe the rate of liberty is accelerate. This means that the opportunities for developing new tools, new ways of achieving our goals, and new opportunities to find significance in our lives are increasing. Not to take advantage of these opportunities would be a huge mistake.
One of the most famous children's stories in the history of Western civilization is the story of the tortoise and hare. The hare had a rapid start. The tortoise plodded along. When the listener begins the story, he assumes that the hare will outrun the tortoise. That is the point of the story. If we did not assume that the hare would defeat the tortoise, the victory of the tortoise would have no particular relevance.
The point of the story is this: "Slow and sure defeats fast and inconsistent." Over the years, I have found that most of the fast starters I ever knew have been overtaken at some point in their lives. I am not saying they have been failures, but their remarkable productivity or even fame at a young age did not characterize the rest of their lives. I am old enough now to be able to look back and make these assessments.
A fast starter like Mozart did not live a long life. It is a good thing for the rest of the world that he was a fast starter. On the other hand, there is Johann Sebastian Bach, who started fast, was the best of his generation, and continued to be productive all of his life. That is the ideal. It is rare.
If a person is highly talented, and he applies himself to his calling, he can achieve a great deal. The reason for this is the legendary effect of compound growth. Any rate of growth, when compounded over time, begins to approach infinity if time is extended very long. The faster the rate of increase, the sooner the production curve will look like a rocket ship heading for the moon. I have known a few people like this, but I have not known very many.
No matter how productive you are, you will always find somebody who is smarter, more efficient, and wealthier, a person who seems to have a permanent edge. I am not talking about nearly superhuman people, such as Abraham Kuyper. I am not talking about Isaac Asimov or that other remarkable Jew, Jacob Neusner, who has written 741 books so far. He was born in 1932. This is obviously inconceivable. If a person writes two books a month, he can produce 24 books a year. In 10 years, he can produce 240 books. In 30 years, he can produce about 750 books. Think about producing two books a month, every month, 430 years. Neusner has been doing this longer than 30 years, but you get the idea. One book a month would not have let him achieve this level of output. No one but Neusner knows how he did it. (He pronounces his name NEWSner.)
Great mathematicians seem to reach maximum productivity sometime before 35. If they are going to make a major contribution, they have to do this before they reach 35. The same is true of physicists. So, these extremely fast starters have limited time in which they can be consistently productive. Again, there are exceptions. The mathematician John von Neumann is an example. He made major contributions in multiple fields, and he kept making them as he grew older. He was a fast starter, a steady producer, and a long producer. But there are not many people like him.
I am generally in agreement with the message of the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise will probably win the race. The steady attention to detail, and the daily application of time and effort to a particular task will produce remarkable results over three or four decades. If someone can begin early and stick to his knitting, he is going to make a mark in his field. This is because most people do not have the tenacity and the self-discipline to stick to any particular task. They lose interest. They run out of gas. They get sidetracked. The person who sees that he can make a contribution if he spends enough time, effort, and perhaps money, and then who follows a systematic plan for a period of three or four decades, is probably going to make an important contribution if he is above average intelligence. His brains are important, but IQ is not as important as tenacity.
Future-Orientation
This is why a person who is intensely future-oriented has an enormous advantage over his competitors. If he figures out early enough in life what it is that he should do to make a difference, and if he applies himself on a systematic basis, by means of a plan, over a period of several decades, he is likely to achieve his original goal of making a difference.
He has to understand well in advance that he has limitations. The limitations of intelligence and available time are major constraints on everyone. He cannot make himself more intelligent, or so we believe, but he can learn to budget his time. He can be fanatical about not wasting time. He realizes early in his life that time is an irreplaceable resource. He honors the value of time when he is young, which most of his contemporaries do not do. He looks to the future, and he sees the potential for a systematic plan of action. He sees that the compound growth effect will begin to accelerate his output in the second half of his career. He may struggle for years without attaining much, but the compounding effect over time overcomes most barriers.
There is a video about the difference of future-orientation in young children. It is one of the most interesting videos that I have ever seen. The psychologist who presents the audio portion of the screencast makes the point that, over time, the children who were future-oriented have achieved more than those who were not.
Understand, the results of this study became visible in a relatively short period of time: under 20 years. If
the study had continued for another 20 years, I am confident that the disparity between the output of the future-oriented children to the present-oriented children would have been even greater. The compounding effect manifests itself more prominently the longer the process of compounding continues.
I tell this people who do not think that they can make a difference in life. I do not tell them this when they
are 50 or older. I suppose I should, because people are living a lot longer today. But if someone has not been future-oriented up until age 50, I think it is unlikely that he is going to become future-oriented at age 50. It is possible, due to some event in his life, but it is not likely.
This is what I like to work with younger students. I do not usually have contact with students until they are in their teen years. I know a few teenagers are highly productive. I have mentioned the young man who earned an accredited college degree in the month of his 18th birthday. He had completed all of his coursework while he was 17. He is unique, but he is not a genius. What makes him unique is that he found out early about how to go to college cheap and rapidly through distance learning and examinations. He also adopted a plan of action when he was 14 that enabled him to achieve his goal by the time was 18. It was not his intelligence that carried him through; it was his future-orientation and tenacity, beginning no later than age 14.
Music as a Training Program
One of the reasons why we have young children practice piano when they do not want to practice is because the practice enables to achieve basic proficiency by the time they are in high school. Then, if they choose to pursue a particular musical skill as a career, they have enough of a head start on their peers so they can do this. If they had not practiced for the 10 years prior to reaching age 15 or 16, they would be too far behind those teenagers whose parents persuaded them to apply themselves when they were younger.
One of the most productive man I have ever known is a genius. He tested at 176 IQ when he was a teenager. That is extremely bright. He was a fast starter. At the age of five, he told his mother that he wanted to learn how to play the piano. His mother told him that she would by a piano for him, and lessons for him, but he had to promise to practice diligently. He agreed, and he fulfilled his end of the bargain. I never heard him play the piano. In the mid-1960s, I heard him play the banjo. He was generally regarded as one of the best bluegrass banjo players in California by the time he was 17 years old. He played in a local bluegrass group, and it was good enough so that it had a weekly spot on a local Los Angeles television station. He played with the legendary bluegrass group called the Kentucky Colonels. His name is Bob Warford.
One of the members of the Kentucky Colonels was Clarence White. In the late 1960s, White was regarded as among the top three or four studio guitarists in country music in the West Coast. He pioneered a new genre of music called country rock in 1965/66. He joined a rock group called The Byrds in 1968. They had already begun to make the transition from rock to country rock. For two years, he played with the group, and in 1968 he joined full-time.
At about that time, Warford decided that he would also learn country rock guitar. It took about one year to master the instrument. By 1970, he was probably as good as White was, and he had a unique style. In 1973, White was run over by a drunk driver in a parking lot, and this left Warford as the master West Coast studio guitarist in the field of country rock. He began touring with Linda Ronstadt about this time. He used the music money throughout his college years to pay for his education. Then he used the money made from touring to go to law school. He passed the California bar exam in his first attempt, which is rare. The reason he went to law school is because he found that his PhD in neurophysiology was not marketable. So, he took his knowledge of medical science into the courtroom. A few years ago, he was inducted into an international organization of trial lawyers, an organization so exclusive that there are only about 500 of them in the group, worldwide. He still works as a lawyer.
I use him as an example because he is a classic case of someone who started very early in one field, music, and became highly successful in this field. But he also recognized that the music industry would not be a good lifetime career for him. It would not be as lucrative as law, and also would not enable him to achieve as much significance as he could in the courtroom. He has tried over 100 cases, which is a large number. He could have been a great studio musician, but it would have been a life lived in the shadows, and also would not have been as lucrative as the field he went into.
He was a very fast starter. Also, he had a major detour in his life. He flunked out of college at one point. He and my friend Steve Gillette took a course at the University of California, Riverside, in music composition. They worked together on a project, and they both flunked. Gillette then went into music full-time, as both a performer and songwriter. He wrote a number of highly successful songs, including a classic, Darcy Farrow, which he wrote before he flunked out of college . . . the second time.
Warford went to junior college, got his grades up, returned to university, and finished with grades sufficiently high so that he was able to get into grad school. In other words, he had basic tenacity to match his intelligence. He was sidetracked briefly, but it did not deflect from a course of action. He was able to use his musical skills to fund his intellectual skills.
Gillette is still on the road, although he never became a major figure in the music industry. That was to be expected, since his specialty is folk music, and not the radical protest folk music of the late 1960s. He writes traditional songs, and he and his wife singing traditional songs. There has never been a large market for people with these skills. He is well-respected in the field, but the field has a restricted audience. He nevertheless pursued his calling, which is also his job, and has written songs that are so buy more famous performers. He is a success, but he is not famous.
If you want story of a fast track performer in the field bluegrass music, Allison Krause is the obvious example. She is by far the most successful performer field, and she started very young. In contrast, there is Ralph Stanley. Stanley was one of the pioneers in the field, beginning in the 1950s. He never became famous outside the field. Then, when it was 75 years old, he was given the opportunity to sing a song a capella for the movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?. That song, sung with an old man's voice, won him a Grammy. He stuck to his knitting for a long time, and fame and some degree of fortune came to him when he was an old man.
Plan Revision
It is difficult for someone who is not future-oriented to discipline himself, with a specific plan in mind, when he reaches his teenage years. Most men develop future-orientation when they get married, or perhaps when their first child is born. This happens these days when a man is 30 years old. Men get married much later these days. This puts them at a distinct disadvantage when compared with earlier generations. Men married earlier, and they were forced by the responsibilities of marriage to begin focusing on the future with greater intensity.
When we are young, we are in the presence of people who are fast starters. The high school star athlete, the prom queen, the super-intelligent student who learns everything easily and breezes through high school: all of these are familiar to us. We knew them when we were young. When I look back at the careers of those who were fast starters, I find that, at some point, they faded in the stretch. That is the language of horse racing, but it applies.
There are some cases where the decision was self-conscious. I have talked about the girl I knew in high school who danced with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly before she was a teenager. I did not know this until the 50th high school reunion, when her husband told me about. I knew that she had been in the movies, because I have seen her in one of them, where she was at least a face in the crowd. She walked away from Hollywood, because she wanted no part of the lifestyle. Her father died before she went into high school, and she was happy never to mention any of the "glory years" again. As an adult, she applied herself to her family, and her children are successful. She has had a good marriage. In her case, she was a fast starter, but soon realized that the path in which she had the enormous advantage, namely, professional dancing, was not what she wanted to do for the next 20 years. She wisely abandoned Hollywood and dancing, even though she had actually toured nationally as a dancer at the age of 12. This does not indicate a person was sidetracked. In fact, her initial opportunity was a kind of sidetracking. She recognized this by the time she was 12 years old, and she set a new track for herself. Her husband was successful, and I have no doubt that much of his success came because she back him up, and took on most of the responsibilities of raising the children.
There is nothing easy about success. If it comes easily, it can depart easily. We know this over long years, but we forget about it when we are in the presence of people who are enormously successful. The more successful anyone becomes, the more he travels in circles populated by what appear to be highly successful people. He is constantly comparing himself with others who appear to be more successful. This is why it is difficult for successful people to maintain their sense of balance. They are constantly rubbing elbows with others who seem to receive greater attention, or more money, than anyone else they know. Sometimes, the other people really are more productive, and this shows in their degree of success. But whenever these people are interviewed, they seem to display a clear sense that much of their success came for reasons that they cannot understand.
This is a major problem for a lot of people who have enough talent and even enough self-discipline to become highly successful. They see others who seem to outperform in the middle of their careers, and they decide that they have no chance of becoming a real success. They define success in terms of other people's attention, wealth, or fame. They do not recognize their own capabilities, and they do not recognize the reality of the price of success, which is attention to detail, constant practice to improve one's performance, and tenacity. The person becomes convinced that he will never achieve great deal of success, and he drops out.
It is very difficult to decide whether a particular plan of action needs revision or not. It is difficult to decide whether your talent in a particular field is best applied in that field. People struggle in a career for many years, and they do not seem to achieve great deal, but occasionally, we come across a story someone like Colonel Sanders. It was not until he retired from his career of running a small restaurant out of a gas station that he built Kentucky Fried Chicken. It can be done, but it is so rare that we never think about it. In fact, all those years of frying chicken to be sold people who came to his gas station prepared him for the rigors of launching what eventually became a conglomerate. But he could not have known this before he reached age 65 and could devote full-time to developing the franchise. He did not waste all those years frying chicken for people who came into his gas station. At age 65, it was the right era to start a fast food franchise. It was surely the right time for him to start a franchise.
If someone selects a task at the age of 20 and actively pursues that task for 20 years, and finds that he does not think his talents are sufficient to enable him to make a contribution field, I think it is legitimate for him to select another task. Some people call this the midlife crisis. It can be a serious crisis for somebody who has to rethink what he wants to do with the rest of his life. It is especially difficult for men who do not get married until they are 30. But, at some point, a person should re-examine his original goal, and compare his productivity with what he expected to accomplish by 84. Sometimes, it is best to take the skills and self-discipline that you have sunk into what is essentially a dry hole, and apply those skills and tenacity to new field.
When someone is 40 years old, he has 30 years ahead of him, and maybe 40 years, in which he can make a contribution. Anyone who looks at his productivity after 20 years, and concludes that he is spinning his wheels, should look around to find another field in which he may have more traction. It is not just that he wants to quit; it is that he wants to quit in order to go into a new field in which he honestly believes he has enough time to make a significant contribution.
On Not Getting Sidetracked
The time someone spends in pursuing systematically some area of production is not wasted time. The psychological makeup of the person has been positively affected by years of self-discipline, which is then applied to a long-term goal. That outlook is not common to many people, and the experience of following a plan of action for a decade or more is also not common. Time and self-discipline over a period of two decades constitute a major capital investment. The investment is in the person, and the fact that the investment has not resulted in a marketable product does not mean that the investment has been wasted. If a person defines himself strictly in terms of the marketability of this project, then he has defined himself too narrowly.
Economists say the labor theory of value is incorrect. Technically speaking, it is incorrect. The market value of a product is not the result of the market value of the inputs that produced the product. But part of the product is human capital. The market value of human capital may be low, but the actual value of the human capital is great, or may become great, simply because it produced a person who is self-disciplined and able to follow a long-term plan. The market may not impute value to it, but God does. This is why people who believe in God have a distinct competitive advantage over those people who think that the only imputation that matters in life is the imputation of paying customers.
Hugh Hefner has satisfied paying customers. There is no question that he made a great deal of money. He is famous. Yet, in terms of human capital involved, he has wasted his life, and he has wasted the lives of a great many young women who had good looks and poor judgment. The fact that the free market imputed value to Hugh Hefner's work does not validate the legitimacy or productivity of his work. We can see this in the case of a man like Hefner, but we may not be able to see it in the lives of other people whose choice of profession is not so obviously a mistake.
A more difficult career to assess is that of Congressman Ron Paul. He left a highly productive career, obstetrics, for a career that most of those with regard as a waste of time compared with delivering babies. But he was able to pursue a career in which his voting record gained the reputation of being a man of principle, and this in turn gave him an opportunity to express his principles in public.
Because of the unique series of economic events that took place in late 2007 and then in 2008, he became world-famous, because he was critical of the Federal Reserve System. He had a developed economic theory of what was wrong with the Federal Reserve, which other Congressman did not possess. In fact, the entire economics profession did not possess the conceptual framework that he possessed, which gave him an advantage over virtually the entire economics guild. The many years that he spent in Congress, ignored by the media, ignored by his fellow Congressmen, paid off in 2007-8. He was able to get a hearing for Austrian School economics that no other politician in history has ever gained. His job was his calling. His career was the most important thing he could do in which he was most difficult to replace. He did not waste his time.
I will now compare that career with another individual in Congress. The other individual was a far better speaker than Ron Paul. He was a far better speaker than virtually every other member of Congress. He was a scholar. He had originally been in the field of private education. He was a good writer. He could have made major contributions in the field in which he was trained: history. I think he could have produced an effective high school curriculum in the social sciences and humanities all by himself. Instead, he went to Congress and was constantly reelected for years. He had great seniority in Congress when he finally was defeated. He was a conservative. His impact on his peers was minimal. He was generally ignored by the conservative public, because most Congressman never become famous outside their own districts. If he had devoted the same amount of time and effort to developing a high school curriculum, I think he would have made a major contribution. Instead, he went into politics. He has a very lucrative retirement program, but he missed his calling. It was not that he was a bad Congressman. He was a good Congressman. But he would have been a better educator than a Congressman if he had stuck to his knitting.
I believe he got sidetracked. Most people would say that career in Congress would have been better than teaching high school. I think that this is generally true, but not if you have the potential of creating a curriculum that would change the thinking of tens of thousands of students. Would anybody believe the best thing for Salman Khan to do would be to get into Congress? Would anybody say that 30 years in Congress would be more productive than 30 years transforming the entire educational curriculum available to students on YouTube all the world free of charge? I don't think so.
Regular Self-Assessments
I do not know how old you are. I do not know how many years you have been applying yourself to your occupation. I do not know if you have identified your calling in life. I do not know how much human capital you have developed. I do not know if you're present-oriented or future-oriented. I assume that you're future-oriented. I do not know whether your spouse shares your vision of what you want to do with your life. But the kinds of questions that you ought to be asking yourself should relate to your legacy. Every five years, a person ought to sit down and re-evaluate where he is on his career path. He may be doing just fine. He may be on track. Even if he is not on track, some new technology may appear which will enable him to get back on track. This is certainly happened to a lot of us over the last 15 years.
One of the advantages of being 40 years old is that you have had to pay fees to apply yourself to a specific field. You know how you have done. You can compare yourself with others who are in your same field. You can make an assessment of how much progress you have made so far. It is important that you do this.
I tell people this: they should be able to say at the end of the assessment that they can do things that they could not possibly have done at the beginning of the period. They should have achieved some level of skill, or some level of acceptance by their peers, or some level of responsibility that they could not have achieved at the beginning of the period.
This is why a person ought to sit down on a weekend and list the skills that he has, the successes that he has had, and the failures that he has had since the time of the last evaluation. Some people think this should be done quarterly. I think most people are geared to doing it annually. They probably should do it in the week after Christmas. I do not believe in New Year's resolutions, but I do believe in setting goals to strive toward. I do not think you should promise yourself that you are going to achieve a particular goal, but I do think you should have particular goal in mind and a plan of action to enable you to achieve that goal.
I am coming to the end of a project that I began in 1973. Over the next 11 months, I have plans to revise all of the previous commentaries that I have written on the economics of the Bible. I want to make certain that I still believe what I wrote 38 years ago. I want to cross-reference the verses and ideas by means of footnotes. I want to refer forward and backward in each of volumes, so that there is consistency in what I have said. This involves reading close to 13,000 pages, and making footnote additions and revisions in the text. My goal is to finish the project on screen, meaning in PDF format, by my deadline that I set in 1977: February 2012.
Because of the invention of YouTube, and because of the development of website technology, I now have to stretch out my original deadline by at least three years, and it may be more. I want to create videos summarizing what I have found, passage like passage. I know that people are not going to sit down and read 13,000 pages of my commentary. So, I have to find ways of getting the ideas out to people in bite-size chunks. I have to make the chunks memorable. For those people who want to follow a particular idea, they can do so by going to my website, and from there to PDF files where I have developed a particular chapter. All of this will be free. In other words, adopting a new technology, which is literally revolutionizing the way we communicate, is mandatory. I must extend my original deadline by several years beyond the writing of the series. It will be a lot of extra work, but I would be foolish not to do it, because the value of the work that I have already done can be multiplied by means of the new technologies.
This is plan revision. Plan revision is made necessary by changing conditions. New technologies that could not have been imagined in 1990 are now changing the face of the world. These technologies have changed North Africa in ways that we could not have predicted in December 2010. Anyone who does not respond to these kinds of technological innovations is not going to maximize the effect of his work. This would be wasteful. The result will be a loss of time in my life.
I still have to write several volumes in my final treatise on Christian economics. The reason I did all the work exegetically since 1973 was to prepare myself to be able to write these final volumes. So, I must not let myself devote too much time posting videos on YouTube if that time should be devoted to exposition of the books. But, at this stage in my career, I can write fast, and I have done the groundwork. I have been a fast writer for a long time, and I have become much faster by meeting the deadlines imposed by my occupation.
Opportunities have been made available to me it did not exist when I began this project in 1973. This is going to be increasingly the case as digital technology advances. We are constantly going to see that we have tremendous opportunities available to us because of the innovations that people around the world are making in the field of communications. The man who runs Mises.org, Jeffrey Tucker, says that he has had to readjust his thinking in multiple ways because the Web, which includes re-thinking his time perspective. He says that innovations are coming so fast, that within months, he is forced to develop new applications of new technologies or at least experiment with new technologies. He is constantly innovating. He has to maintain the accessibility of all of the previous materials. They must not get lost in the shuffle. But he has to make available the material in new formats and new venues. If he does not do this, he will fall behind. Yet the pace of change is accelerating. Nobody else in the nonprofit world of education is anywhere near his level of productivity, yet he finds that he is falling behind constantly.
The careers of Lew Rockwell and Jeff Tucker illustrate my point. They have stuck to their knitting for a long period of time. Rockwell developed the most successful newsletter in the history of education, and certainly in the history of the conservative movement. He invented and pioneered Hillsdale College's newsletter, Imprimis. He published the Rothbard-Rockwell Report in the 1980s and 1990s. Those paper-based media, while not entirely obsolete, are rapidly becoming obsolete. He still publishes newsletters and materials in paper format. Some people still prefer to read the material on a piece of paper. Also, when you send out a piece of paper, you can include a postage paid envelope for sending a check. But Rockwell and Tucker made the transition to digital communications before almost anyone else did. This gained them a tremendous initial advantage, and this initial advantage has been extended by constant attention to technological innovation. They were fast starters in the field of digital communications, but they did not rest on their laurels. If anything, they are innovating even more rapidly today than they did 15 years ago. The result is a wide penetration into the conservative market, including international market, for the ideas of Austrian economics and the related fields of historical revisionism. There are no sites like Mises.org.
Both men have found a way to get paid for their callings. They have callings that are also their occupations. Most of us do not have this advantage. This is why people have to give considerable attention to their calling, and not let the calling be overwhelmed by the responsibilities and requirements of the occupation. People have to budget their time so that they do not get sidetracked by the lure of money, prestige, or the other benefits of becoming a major player in a particular profession. The temptation to spend your time only on your profession is always very great. The lure of money is very great. But when your profession visibly is absorbing the necessary time that is required to make a major contribution in your calling, you have to be willing to walk away from a least a portion of the benefits offered by your profession.
One of the reasons why you need to take care of your health is to extend the amount of years that you have available for completing your calling. This is been important in my life. I had an extremely fast start in terms of my health at the age of seven. I was sickly, so my mother took me to a physician who specialized in nutrition. In 1949, he was just about the only position in the country who did this. He was able to restore my health. I had a physical this week, and the physician said that I am very healthy. This was the first full physical I have ever had. I have been so healthy for so long that I have never gone to a physician to have a complete blood test done. The only reason why I did it this time is because I was required to by the health care company that covers the under the Medicare program. The fast track that I got onto because I got sick as a young child enabled me to maintain my health over the next 60 years.
It seems as though I will be able to do so over the next decade or perhaps longer. If I am able to do so, then the compounding effect really begins to take over. I can get more and more material out, though not on the level of Neusner, because I have stuck to my knitting for a long period of time. I have built up an inventory of books and materials, as well as ideas, that will now enable me to become far more productive in the years that lie ahead. This is where the compounding effect will become parabolic. That, at least, is my hope. Health is not guaranteed. Life is not guaranteed. But if I meet the actuarial tables, and if my mind continues to be sharp, I have close to a quarter century ahead of me. If I get those 25 years, I can crank out a lot of materials. And remember, technology is now on my side. I do not need a publisher to keep all my books in print. The Web can do that free of charge.
Conclusion
If you dedicate yourself to your calling, and if you develop a plan of action and stick to it, then offer the time available to you, you will find that your output increases dramatically as you get older. It is not as though you are an athlete who will fade at age 35 (Herschel Walker excepted). It is not as though you are some master mathematician. You are in a position where experience counts, and people will pay you to share your experience of whatever made you successful. This is why I am a great believer in diaries. People should write down detailed descriptions of the problems that they face, and then write down detailed descriptions of the solutions they came up with. That becomes a form of marketable capital. You will forget the details, but if you write them down, they become a kind of inventory of experience that can be converted into in, or influence or both.
When you are young, you can afford to concentrate more on your occupation and your family than you do on your calling. But you should never abandon a systematic program of implementing your calling. You can invest about half an hour a day. That investment of time becomes part of the compounding process. You have to keep at it, even if it requires you to skip lunch, or skip football games, or skip going to the movies, or skip a lot of things that your peers are unwilling to forgo. There is always a way, or almost always a way, to carve out a few extra minutes in a day to devote to your calling.
Ideally, part of the work that you do in your profession can be applied to your calling. When your children get older, part of the time that you invest in their educations can also be used to develop training materials related to your calling. Teaching children is an investment is not simply an investment in your children's lives; it is an investment in your development of marketable skills. People who can teach can have enormous impact the lives of other people. I you should strive to become such a person. Even if you cannot sell what you know when you are 60, you can get away and have a major effect on other peoples plans.
I have a lawyer friend who teaches inner-city pre-teen black boys how to mow lawns every Saturday. He is not making any money. The money that he makes is used to buy equipment, keep equipment and repair, and pay the boys. This is not his occupation; this is his calling. His time is well spent. I have seen the development of these boys over the years, and when they become teenagers, they have a major head start on their peers with respect to their work habits. This will make all the difference in their lives in the inner-city community in which they find themselves. Some have gone on to college. They were smart to begin with, but in all likelihood, they would not have gone to college. It was not they made a lot of money mowing lawns. It was that they developed habits personal self-discipline which gave them both the vision and the capacity to go to college and be successful. The lawyer made a self conscious decision to transform lives of children in that part of town who had been basically cast off by their parents in the educational system.
There is a lot that you can do. There is a lot that you can do with a minimal investment of time per day, but which becomes a major investment of time over three or four decades. The compounding process is the key to the development of civilization. We have seen this since about 1800. We have never seen anything like this in the history of man: 2% per year for 200 years. The rate of change is accelerating. I believe the rate of liberty is accelerate. This means that the opportunities for developing new tools, new ways of achieving our goals, and new opportunities to find significance in our lives are increasing. Not to take advantage of these opportunities would be a huge mistake.
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