Learning Above Everything Else
To create wealth you must create value to others. To create value to others you must learn.
Premature Optimization is one of the common pitfalls in programming. It is like trying to find the shortest route before you decide where you will go. You are spending your time on things that may not matter at all in the end.
“How do you know what you should do to create value? If you are just starting out you don’t and even if you knew you could do nothing about it.”
Focusing on money is a premature optimization. You create wealth by providing value to others. Instead of money, you should focus on providing value to others. How do you provide value to others? By doing things that create value. How do you know what you should do to create value? If you are just starting out you don’t and even if you knew you could do nothing about it. You need to learn.
Let’s say you are living in a small village by the sea. You ask yourself how can I create wealth for myself. You think people love eating fish, so I should go and catch some fish. You need to learn how to fish, and you need to find out where to find the fish. You need to spend a lot of time practising fishing before you get really good at it. You need to make yourself boat so you can catch more fish. You learn how to make a boat. Every time you need to increase the level of wealth you accumulate you need to increase your knowledge.
Learning does not stop when you graduate from school. Just the opposite, the only useful thing you learn in school is how to learn. Here is the exciting part: Learning things just for the sake of learning and grades has just ended. Now, you can start learning what matters to you. You can start learning what excites you. The possibilities are limitless. It is up to you what to do with your life. Unfortunately, most people choose to find some secure boring job and then come home and watch TV. The learning ended for them with graduation.
The best way to provide a lot of value to the world is to be the best at what you do. How do you become the best at what you do? The only way to be best at what you do is to learn and practice what you learned continuously.
If you learn constantly on a field and apply what you learn, at some point you will start generating incredible amounts of value to the world. Once you do that you can capture some of that value to yourself.
On a personal level, don’t pick a job that offers the most money, instead, pick a job that provides more learning opportunities. Work with people who are better than you. Learn from them. Volunteer for the hardest problems.
On a business level, don’t try to squeeze too much money from your customers. Create so much value to so many people that some tiny percentage of that value is enough to make you rich. We have 1.3 million users on JotForm. That’s a pretty good number for a B2B product. We provide lots of value to our users for free. We have lots of happy users on JotForm that will never pay us a single cent. That’s OK, they will talk about JotForm to their friends and colleagues.
“The word gets out when you provide value to people.”
The word gets out when you provide value to people. Hundreds of thousands of years of human collaboration has created all kinds of mechanisms so that if you do good things for others the society will find a way to pay you back. On an unrelated note, same principle applies to bad people. You can do bad things and think you are ahead for a short while but in the end it will catch up to you.
Don’t Settle. The danger always lurks around like a sneaky shark. When you get successful it will get to your mind. You will assume you have learned enough. Hubris will set in, your ego will balloon and learning will stop. Don’t let this happen to you. Keep learning.
