#125: College students used to not care about money...what happened?
Greetings from Taipei. A first-person night market view:
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#1 B-Needs
I had a conversation with someone today in which he mentioned that our best ideas are still buried in books and that we are distracted by a lot of surface level knowledge on the web. This rang true and shocked me a bit. How many times have you searched for something and just found some SEO optimized search results? It is amazing to see some people doing the deep work for no reason other than they are curious. Here is Kyle Kowalski’s latest deeeep dive into Maslow’s book, Farther Reaches Of Human Nature:
“I would go so far as to claim that these B-Values are the meaning of life for most people, but many people don’t even recognize that they have these metaneeds.“
“If B-Values are as necessary as vitamins and love, and if their absence can make you sick, then what people have talked about for thousands of years as the religious or platonic or rational life seems to be a very basic part of human nature.
Here are the needs, but I do recommend diving into his post: Truth, Goodness Beauty, Wholeness, Dichotomy Transcendence, Aliveness, Uniqueness, Perfection, Necessity, Completion, Order, Simplicity, Richness, Effortlessness, Playfulness, Self-Sufficiency
#2 Reinvention Stories
Here is a thread of some of my favorite reinvention stories…what would you add?
#3 Money & The American Freshman
In some digging this weekend I stumbled upon this research on American Freshman that has been going on since the 1960s. Here was a fascinating switch that happened in the 1970s:
Especially notable are changes in two contrasting value statements: The importance of "developing a meaningful philosophy of life" and of "being very well off financially" In the late 1960s developing a meaningful philosophy of life was the top value, being endorsed as an "essential" or "very important" goal by more than 80 percent of the entering freshmen. Being very well off financially, on the other hand, lagged far behind in the late 1960s, ranking fifth or sixth on the list with less than 45 percent of the freshmen endorsing it as a very important or essential goal in life. Since that time these two values have basically traded places, with being very well off financially now the top value (at 73.6 percent endorsement) and developing a meaningful philosophy of life now occupying sixth place at only 43.1 percent endorsement
I extracted the data and put this into chart form because I love graphs:
Something happened in the 1970s to convince incoming college graduates that money was the most essential “objective” AND that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was the value that was no longer important.
#4 Issac Asimov On Creativity
His thoughts on where new ideas come from:
Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)
#5 Question
I have no 5th thing this week but a question for you…
What is an article, essay, book or quote that you keep coming back to?
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