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Value, worth is a very interesting concept. It tells everything anyone needs to know about you.
Commerce, and most interactions are value-exchange-based when healthy.
But who defines what is value and how much?
Before we can go deeply into that, let’s look what you have that is of value…
Some of it is of value to you, some of it is of value to someone else.
You have your time. Instead of doing anything you want with it, some of it you’ll turn into value that you can sell. In exchange of something that you value more or equally as your time
I listened to a few Jordan Peterson talks (in classroom) yesterday. I valued what I got for my time higher than my time. What did I get? Enjoyment, some new ways to look at people…
Like the idea that Hitler was a germophobe, and an obsessive self-cleaner. He took 4-5 baths a day. That he saw the gypsies, the Jews, the homosexuals, and the communists as diseased, infected.
But before he got to them earnestly, he cleaned all the offices and factories of Germany of rats, and other impurities.
The second thing I got is that he wasn’t interested in winning the war. The war, for him wasn’t about what he said it was… giving Lebensraum for Germans. No, the cleansing was his only real goal… We can know this because when the push came to shove he hastened the holocaust at the expense of the war efforts… Hm, interesting.
It was worth my time.
Would I have paid more than my time for this information?
With what?
Well, my money… Yeah but I earned my money with my time investment, at least partially…
And that is very important to see. And most people, I feel, don’t connect the dots: your most important asset is your time… your life is made up of time… and I see people throwing away their life willy nilly, getting mostly no compensation for it.
And then there are the ‘offers’ where in addition to paying money for them, you need to INVEST i.e. spend more time to mine the value, to get the value you paid for.
This is where I see the most unclarity and therefore the most mischief.
Every single product of mine is a ‘it needs more time investment to deliver the whole value‘ product.
You need to first understand how to use it, then you need to use it skillfully, so you can get the whole value.
I spent some time, maybe 30 minutes to get the value from Jordan Peterson’s videos (I really just listened while played Freecell in a separate window).
The knowledge was interesting and worth my time, whether I process it beyond the time I spent listening. But that processing is not necessary for me to get the value I paid with my time for.
None of my products are like that. Especially with the barely wide enough intake ‘pipe’ you have…
People’s intake pipe, with rare exceptions, measure between zero and 10%.
What’s an intake pipe? It is the channel you have available to get and then process information, whether it’s visual, auditory, or sensory.
Whether you see it, hear it, or feel it in the end… and to what degree.
So with that slim pipe the value you can glean from any information is slim, unless you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it.
Time investment again…
And that is just to see it, hear it, or sense it… In order to actually GET IT, call it your own, you need to do things with it… and that is also time.
As you see, for simplicity’s sake I don’t even talk about what else is in that time… effort, intelligence, focus, skills, capacities, or whatever.
I am reducing this whole issue to time…
I played the violin, I played classical guitar, I sang. They, even before they gave any enjoyment, cost me an enormous amount of time.
Obviously, I valued building a skill and gaining many distinctions in the area of music and in the area of disciplined movements of my body higher or equal to the time it took.
I had one or two lessons a week, about an hour each… but for each hour with a teacher I spent about 12 hours on my own… For what? To mine the value each hour with a teacher gave me access to.
I am talking about this not to brag, not to say that I am better than you. I am talking about this so you look and see that
You have not been getting the value you have been paying big money for.
Not as much as it would be worth to someone who spends 12 hours for every hour they spend with me… The price of my products could be ten times what they are if you did. And it would still be a steal.
But when I interview my clients, my ‘students’, I find out that they never even spend as much time with the material outside of the class as much as they spent in the class.
So I am going to stop calling people ‘my students‘ to restore my integrity, and stop lying.
Coming to a class doesn’t make someone a student. It makes them a visitor… Like a visitor to youtube’s website.
And the people who show up on my site: they are visitors, not necessarily readers. I can see how much time someone spends there… and it is not even enough time to scan the article, let alone read it.
My articles are as valuable as a Jordan Peterson lecture at the University of Alberta. But, unfortunately, context is decisive…
In the context of my free site, my articles aren’t worth the 5-10 minutes it would take to actually read them.
Cat videos are worth more to you… or whatever you spend your time with.
Yeah, what do you spend your time with? How much does most of it contribute to your overall sense of living a good life?
0%, 10%, 20%?
My bottom line is: you overvalue your time when you are paid for it. And you undervalue it when it is yours to give it to whatever you give it to.
Although I value my time a lot, and although I think it is worth an awful lot, I have to price it to meet your unwillingness to invest your time in what you want from what you buy from me.
Luckily to me, I don’t hang the quality of my life on the results you produce with my stuff… or I would be very very very wretched.
Occasionally, for moments, I feel stabs of pain… and wish you got the value you desire by investing time, attention in getting it… but I am OK even though you don’t. None of you.
This happens not only to my products. I participated in Landmark Education’s programs in different capacities for 26 years.
About one out of a hundred actually did something with what the session was about. How much? Very little.
The ones that matched the time, not quite enough to actually get the value, but were the ‘top of the class’ became Landmark Education Leaders…
This is why medical doctors’ training isn’t left to what they do in their own time… there would be even more bad, ignorant, hapless doctors than there are now.
In architecture school the amount of work required outside of the class load was double… or you didn’t get a passing grade.
And some people, like myself, had to invest more than double… because in order to get good at it, double wasn’t enough.
Now put that next to what I attempt to teach, how my clients treat it, and you see why the results are ‘no passing grades’.
And I was just learning a profession, to get paid for my time. What I teach is how to get paid for your time and have a superb life, where you are able to get paid more, and enjoy every minute of it. The ART of living.
But, of course, only if you invest enough of your precious time to get good at it.
When I look at architecture and I look at the art of living a life you love and you live it powerfully, I do see a lot of similarities… with the exception that maybe living a life you love needs more work from you.
Obviously this doesn’t tickle your fancy… judging from your behavior.
You are perfectly happy living a humdrum life, most of it in your imagination. Imagining being happy. Imagining drinking Mai Tai in the Bahamas, or sitting next to your backyard swimming pool… whatever.
But real life is, without learning The Art of Living is miserable.
For everyone. Whether they drink Mai Tai, have a swimming pool, lose those extra pounds, make a lot of money, any of it. Because you can do all those ‘wonderful’ things and still be miserable.
Don’t believe the front, the facade people show on social media. They are lying.
If you haven’t done courses with me before, but want to get into an advanced class, The Freedom Courses would be a suitable beginner level class.
If you want to be in the upcoming Create a Context for a happy life… The ultimate ‘art’, you need to at least get GOOD at distinguishing reality from unreality… Or I won’t accept you. The next live course, Create a Context for a happy life is an advanced course… it leads, potentially, to mastery…
Get the Freedom Course
Please know that the chances that you won’t do the work is how the course is priced. Therefore there is no refund. You’ll get what you are willing to work for. Really.There are more than 27 hours of content in this course… Anywhere else this would be priced in the thousands of dollars… but I am realistic. Your hour is worth to you $10 or less… minimum wage.
Some of you will get a great deal: you’ll be able to get the thousand dollar course. Why? Because you’ll invest your time and your love into learning the foundation of THE ART OF LIVING.
