Teaching cause and effect students to elementary |

We are excited to invite you to participate in our study titled "Effect of Design Patterns in Social Media on Usage Behaviour". Your involvement will include completing a series of brief surveys (each taking no more than 5 minutes) and installing an application that will modify certain aspects of how you interact with specific social media apps.
Your participation is greatly valued, and as a token of our appreciation, you will be entered into a draw to win one of several €50 vouchers for an e-commerce store of your choice from a selection available in your country.
To be eligible to participate, you must:
-> Reside in an EEA country
-> Use an Android smartphone
-> Regularly use at least one of the following apps: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok
If you are interested in participating, please begin by completing the initial survey through the following link: https://uva.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6rGZbO4MbFUYSdE
Thank you for considering our request. Your contribution will be instrumental in advancing our understanding of social media usage patterns.
Best regards,
Radu Andrei David
[radu.david@student.uva.nl](mailto:radu.david@student.uva.nl)
University of Amsterdam

I'm an international student going to a university in England and I have an internship this summer. The internship starts at the end of May. According to my BRP, I am allowed to work 40 hours a week outside of term time and 20 hours a week inside of term time. Term technically ends at the beginning of June, but my exams have already finished, so the term has effectively ended for me. Will I encounter any problems if I were to start the internship in May?

A wurm is an earth dragon. She can't fly, and she's a little ditzy, but she's plenty lovable.
Guide to the script:
(words in italics): Suggested sound effects
(words not in italics): Voice cues and narration
Uaagh: Sleepy wurm
Eeeek: Happy wurm
It's okay to monetize this script, make minor edits to it and genderflip it. Please note that the sound effects are optional.
Script length: About 1.5K words
It's strange. I used to read a lot of monster girl stories before I got into ASMR. I don't do that anymore, but on some days, I'll remember a scene or a sentence from one of those stories. And then I'll want to write.
For the listener:
You return home from work to see your wurm girlfriend coiled up by herself in her ‘pillow fort’. A cold, fierce storm is raging outside and you know how much the thunder scares her. So the two of you snuggle up together and gossip, just the way things should be.
...
SCRIPT:

(Thunderstorm ambience. Rain and low rumbling of thunder are heard.)
Uaagh. Where were you?
I was worried you were stuck somewhere. I was about to go look for you, but you told me not to go outside on my own.
I know. People are afraid of me. Because I can smash through buildings. But I was worried. What took you so long?
Oh. The trains got delayed because of the thunderstorm?
Are you alright at least? (Sniffing) I do not smell any injury on you.
Good. Will you help me sleep? I couldn’t sleep because of the thunder. And I wanted snuggles. I missed you.
I get stressed when I can’t coil around you. And when I get stressed, I get hungry. So I ate all the chicken we had. But I still can’t sleep.
(Ruffling of sheets and pillows)
Yay! Let me coil around you. I can already feel your warmth.
(Coiling sounds)
Mmnnh. You’re so warm. How do you do it? How are you so warm?
Oh. Because humans are warm blooded. Yes, you told me earlier. But I forgot. Sorry.
Yes. You also told me not to apologise. Sorry.
Hmm? Why are you shaking your head? Is there an enemy present in this room?
That’s it, isn’t it? Where are they? I cannot see them. Are they hiding in the wall? Should I tear it down?
Oh. I did tear it down last week. But that’s because I thought you were trapped inside! I heard you calling from the other room but your voice was so faint and you were taking so long. I thought you needed help!
Are you mad at me?
(Sighing) You always say that. That you can never be mad at me. But I am not sure. You never take me outside with you. This morning, I saw some pigeons on the lawn and I went to say hi to them. I even used the doorknob this time instead of smashing through the door. I was really gentle. But the pigeons all flew away when they saw me coming.
It’s not just the birds. I wanted to know why the pigeons were scared of me, and so I asked a human who was walking outside. I only asked him why the birds flew away. But he ran away from me too. I just scare everyone away.
I don’t scare you?
Yeah*. (Coiling tighter)* You’re the only one who doesn’t run away from me. Even though I’m a monster.
No. I am a monster. I attacked you when we first met. I shouldn’t have done that. Friendly wurms don’t attack people.
I know. It was....instinct. That’s the word you used. When I saw you outside my cave, I-I wanted you. I’d never seen anything like you before. And so I just took you. I wouldn’t let you out of my coils! I know it was scary for you. I am sorry.
Yeah. I did agree to move into your house after that. Because I didn’t care as long as I had you. And because you said there’d be chicken. I like chicken.
Eeeek! I like it when you stroke my hair. It’s so soothing. It makes me want to snuggle up closer to you.
(Coiling sounds)
Thank you. For holding me. I don’t like thunder. The sound scares me. I can’t go to sleep when there’s a storm outside. Unless you’re with me.
Yeah. The thunder can’t hurt me. Because it’s far away. And because I’m a wurm. Wurms are strong! I think I’d be okay, if I was in my ancient form. Then I’d be an earth dragon as big as this house! But the thunder still scares me.
Human?
What causes thunder?
Lightning? You mean those bright flashes in the sky before that horrible noise?
Oh. I didn’t know they were called lightning. What is lightning made of?
Plaaz-ma. Ion….Ionized air. I don’t know what they are.
I saw those flashes of light before I met you, of course. I thought it was another dragon challenging me to a fight. And I was terrified of its roar. But I still tried looking for that dragon every time there was a thunderstorm.
Yeah. Because I thought that dragon could be my mother. Maybe she could fly and she was calling me to join her in the sky. But I don’t have wings.
Wurms can’t fly. But I didn’t know anything about mother. When I hatched, I was alone in the wild. There was nothing that looked like me. And there were no humans. No one to teach me how to fend for myself. I went hungry for the first few days and it was cold. It would rain often. I’d hide under a bush but my tail would still get wet. But the thunder was the scariest thing of all. I’d cover my ears with my claws but I’d still hear it. I didn’t know what to do.
Human, why do you look sad? That expression means you’re sad, right? You taught me that. Did I get it right this time?
You’re sad for what I had to go through? But it’s okay. It made me a strong wurm! I learnt how to catch prey, and how to protect myself from the weather by curling up in a cave. And if there was a spring deep inside the cave, then I could also stay warm!
Eeeek! You’re brushing my hair again. That feels nice. I’m so glad I met you in the forest. You’re the first human I ever saw. You’re special. You taught me how to use cutlery, and that I shouldn’t eat the plate along with the chicken. I’m sorry it took me a while to get that one right.
I forgot. You told me not to apologise. I’m sorry.
You’re sighing again. That means I messed up somehow, didn’t I? But I did as you asked! I didn’t leave the house today. I didn’t go outside because I didn’t want to scare any more humans after the first one ran away. I know I can be a burden. I’ve seen how people look at you when you try to defend me. It’s not much different from how they look at me when they think I’ve eaten their chicken or silverware. But I don’t do that. Not after you taught me it was wrong.
I wish I could go outside with you. I wish I wasn’t such a burden.
(Sighing) I know. You always say I’m not a burden. And you get really sad when I keep insisting. I don’t like seeing you sad.
It is true though that I don’t think like a human. I’m not as smart as most humans. But I....I’m not dumb. You always tell me I’m not dumb. And maybe you’re right.
I know if you have money, then you won’t be hungry. I know if you help strangers for free, then you’re kind. And kind people make for good friends. I know a good friend doesn’t leave you alone when it rains and thunders. I know the property of rain is to wet my scales, and of the sun to dry them. I know it gets dark at night because there is no sun, and pigeons can fly because they have wings. And I know something inside me hurts when you leave the house, but the hurt goes away when you come back to me.
I have to hide during the day because I’m not human. People are scared of me. But at night, when no one is looking, I can go outside with you. Slither beside you. Really quietly. And we can count how many streetlamps there are.
I do not know what face you’re making, human. I didn’t make you sad again, did I?
Eeeek! That must mean no. Are you happy with me? Do I make you happy?
Eeeeeek! You make me happy too. I want to try brushing your hair like you brush mine. One of these days....
No, I’m not cold anymore. You always keep me warm. And in the morning, all the pillows smell like you (giggling). Thank you for teaching me how to build a giant pillow fort! It’s just like my cave, but even comfier.
(Yawning) Uaagh. I think I can go to sleep now. The thunder can’t hurt me. (very softly) The thunder can’t hurt me. I have you with me.
Human?
You won’t run away from me, right?
(A brief kiss, as the listener reassures her)
I like it when you kiss me. Eeeek! You make me the happiest wurm in the world! I’ll...I’ll always protect you, okay? I won’t let anyone invade our pillow fort.
Good night. Can we get more chicken tomorrow? I want to eat chicken tomorrow.
Yay! I’ll go with you to the market. The shopkeeper gave us extra last time when he saw me. I don’t know why. I was hungry but I wasn’t going to eat him.
Yeah. I really do feel sleepy now. Good night, human.
Dar....Darling. Sweet dreams.
I love you too. Eeeek.

This might be a slightly philosophical post. But the aim is to get to the bottom of what you should be truly doing. To truly get the most results.
There seems to be a MASSIVE amount of conflicting information online about how to do this.
“Do stuff that moves the needle forward”
“Do stuff that brings in revenue”
What does this truly mean though. And is it even the right thing. That’s the purpose of this post, to uncover.
When I’ve spent my time on actual needle-moving forward things, like taking business from 0 to revenue, doing all offer development, operations, sales process, marketing myself, it generally has taken me about 6 months to fully ‘try out’ a business idea I’ve had.
Most times it hasn’t worked.
Either it wasn’t profitable. Or there was a big problem somewhere.
I believe fundamentally it’s because I’m moving too slow.
Because it usually takes me around 6 months to ‘validate’ whether a business has good potential.
When you haven’t sold it or developed expertise in it yourself yet.
And I would say about 5% of the time it does work.
So if it takes 6 months and only 5% of the time it works (where you bring in revenue, no major issues), and each time it doesn’t work you try a new variation of it or something new based on what you learned, then it might take 10 years of trying different things to get the business to work.
Which sounds like it takes way too long.
So I thought about how the top companies move much quicker.
What separates them and my strategy.
And realized they simply had much more people on their team.
If you think about any successful organization who has achieved great things, and is world-leading, usually there is not 1 person on the team.
There seems to be a correlation between number of people on the team and speed of progress they can make in business.
Which goes against what most conventional startup wisdom tells you, most small business content creators etc all tell you to do it all yourself.
Which I’ve done for quite a few years and it’s gone so slowly in terms of overall progress.
If you should ‘do everything yourself’ then most Fortune 500 companies would’ve had single founders, and 1 person on their team. But the vast majority of successful Fortune 500 companies had co-founders.
And most successful businesses I know of, had co-founders.
And as they succeeded, they got more people on the team, and these people helped bring more success, then they brought more people.
Obviously there can be bad staff and not everyone contributes to the success of the company.
But I do believe, based on this, and observing top companies, that generally the more successful they are, the more people were involved with bringing about the success.
Which completely contradicts most information given to startups about ‘lone wolf’, ‘go it alone’. If that were true, Google would have 1 employee. Apple would have 1 employee.
And they would have never gotten off the ground.
Anyway, I may not have explained this perfectly but I do strongly believe the more & higher quality people are working together on something, the stats show these companies tend to do better, and successful companies you see often have more people than less working on them.
From the very beginning and now.
Regardless of the stage they were at.
So going based off this information, that the more people, the better, I have hired 30+ different people for different roles. Over the past few years. Across different businesses. To help speed up the progress in different areas.
From marketing roles, sales process roles, web development, app development, customer service, delivery of services.
And I would say there have been maybe 1 or 2 of them where I was actually happy with the result.
Most times, I would hire someone to do a job, and they didn’t do the job well, despite saying they were experienced.
And showing past examples of their work. And telling me everything I wanted to hear about how good they were.
It would often be that they would end up performing badly in the KPIs I set for them, giving many excuses, asking for help/questions/not solving anything on their own.
And just so many other problems. Like when there were multiple people at the same time on a team, working on the same project, they would blame each other and no one took responsibility despite clear responsibilities.
All telling me how other staff were bad and they were good, but getting conflicting info from all staff where they blame each other for everything so it’s difficult to know who to trust and who is being truthful.
Oftentimes not being reliable or doing what they were clearly asked to do.
Oftentimes trying to outsource the work I game them, to other people and not caring about the quality.
At my expense.
So I lost lots of clients, had low performing areas in the areas I hired for a lot of the time.
To be fair, things happened faster the more people there were.
But they often needed much more from me than they were contributing.
Like they always wanted to get paid more, for doing less work, weren’t reliable, did low quality work, didn’t hit KPIs, missed clear deadlines, always gave excuses, blamed others/external things, always asking how “I” wanted their job to be done, to the point where I was having to literally tell them every single thing to do and become an expert at their job myself, and show them how to do what they were put there to do, or do it myself, and still get a low quality result from them.
Anyway, the list goes on in all the problems I have experienced hiring people.
It really seems like a minefield.
But there were 1-2 people who did actually do well, who were responsive, who did what they committed to do, who hit deadlines, who did what they were asked, who didn’t give excuses. Who were actually honest hard workers who figured out how to solve problems and actually do the job that was asked from them.
Because of the amount of people I hired and the very low % of people who seemed to do their job well, it made me think that I am probably the problem here. If so many people are doing a bad job and not doing what they were actually hired to do. When most other companies seem to succeed at hiring people.
Then it must be a problem with myself and how I am hiring and managing them.
So it makes me think I need to level up in how I hire and manage people.
I’ve tried lots of different businesses and variations of them and some have done okay, some have not.
Mainly the most success I’ve had is in my own freelancing, where I don’t have other people on my team.
Because it’s kind of turned into a headache working with others. Who just seem to have mostly never been able to deliver what they promised without it becoming pointless to hire them in the first place with all the work I’m doing on their behalf and trying to pick up after all the problems and failures they’ve done.
So I’m not sure exactly what to spend my time and resources on.
I have money saved up from freelancing.
Where I can continue to hire people.
But I do feel I’ve had many many bad experiences.
And I believe it’s mostly my fault. Maybe my training, my hiring, my management, at places along the line I’ve not done it well enough.
I’ve tried to make improvements each time but it has kind of seemed like luck to get people who do actually do their job well.
I genuinely want to hire people and succeed in this.
Because if I can successfully work with people to achieve outcomes, rather than relying only on myself, I can build a real business and not just do freelancing.
In freelancing, I was able to make $3k-5k/month but it was very stressful and I hated speaking with clients, and was constantly stressed.
I generally really don’t like socialising with people. Including clients and staff.
And staff often try to get me to socialise unnecessarily so they can avoid doing their job, and pull me away from mine.
So trying to make it work.
I want to make it work with hiring people because if I can do this, I can make 10x-100x-1000x faster progress with other people on the same team.
But I do have a very bad track record so far. So it’s kind of painful returning to it and continuing to have bad experiences.
But at the same time I know it’s me who’s probably at fault because there can’t be this many bad people I’ve hired and it surely can’t be this bad for everyone.
I think the reason is that I’ve been better at managing myself and doing things successfully solo throughout my life.
Like I’ve achieved very good things in solo sports, in academia, and in many areas that don’t require a team, but often become frustrated working in a team.
But I don’t want my business success to be limited to 1 person.
So I truly want to make it work in improving my ability to manage (ideally a large amount of) people in a way where they can actually deliver and it work well.
Because I was capped in freelancing to making $3k-5k/month because I couldn’t take on more clients because I was undercharging and overdelivering and couldn’t handle more due to being massively stressed out and hating it. I was able to work with less clients at times and charge higher, but they never wanted me to ‘outsource’ my work to others or bring on a team, and I felt bad about it because had bad experiences where I had felt like I let clients down, and oftentimes they told me they had hired me because of me, and not wanted me to ‘outsource’ the work.
But I want to make it work.
Building a real business with a team. Not just doing freelancing and relying just on myself.
So I have time and money and resources to put into this.
I have 1 staff member currently who is unproductive. But we have an equity deal so it doesn’t cost me money for them to perform. But costs me lots of time and their performance is extremely weak. Don’t even want to go into detail, but it’s a nightmare. Their performance is about 1/10 but I believe I can raise their performance if I improve my ability to raise their performance.
Anyway. I want to build a team, but not sure exactly what activities are best ways to spend my time.
If I am physically making improvements, I feel I am slowing down the business progress.
Whereas I want to hire and manage people.
I’ve built training so that this co-founder is able to hire people. And these people can use the same training to hire people.
But I don’t currently have training to enable them to manage people.
My fear is that without training, people just ask unlimited questions on how to do something in their role and it becomes pointless to have hired them because I have to do everything they should have done to do it, so they basically just become a robot following very specific instructions. Rather than a human being who can achieve things independently.
So for example, if I made this training, it would take up all my time, whereas I have savings I’ve accumulated from freelancing which I can put into either having the co-founder manage staff, or have the co-founder make management training at the same time to enable more and more staff to hire and manage new staff. To achieve overall objectives and KPIs.
Or I could have the co-founder hire someone to make the training.
Then that frees up my time, my co-founders, time and only takes financial resources to accomplish.
What I want to achieve, is a scenario where I can give staff KPIs and objectives, and they are enabled to hire and manage people who can meet these objectives. Independently without my help required.
They give feedback, and I have a system for feedback to internal improvements can be made based on staff feedback.
Without it being unfiltered, it’s structured and organised so people can’t just get unlimited help/training/whatever from me.
Where they should be able to take actions, iterate, learn, improve, and act as independent thinking people who can achieve objectives themselves. Or within a system where it’s not all tied directly to me.
E.g. I have direct reports going to me.
But they have direct reports who go to them.
Previously I had a system where I did this, but then staff at the bottom of the hierarchy would ask their managers questions, and the managers wouldn’t know the answer so would then ask me the questions, and so jumping over the managers and making me deal with everything.
Whereas I want to build a system where people can make business progress in their specific area, independently without everything going to the CEO. Only important/urgent things are feedbacked to the CEO.
This way I believe much faster progress can happen.
Because I won’t be bogged down by exponentially growing problems.
Like with how it works in any successful organisation.
Tim Cook has only a handful of direct reports. Who each only have a handful of direct reports. And so on.
He’s making the most important decisions, dealing with what’s most important and strategic, with top authority, dealing with everything as a birds eye view, but not doing every employee’s job for them, teaching every employee how to do their job. Picking up the pieces after every employee misses their deadlines, doesn’t do their work, gives excuses, does poor work that doesn’t help the company.
Even in any successful organisation. Each unit/person is making their own decisions, taking their own action, learning from it, practicing themself at improving, gaining their own experience, not all relying on 1 person, every single person in the organisation, just for them to do their job.
In successful organisations, people at every level experience new problems all the time, and don’t need to contact the #1 person at the top just to deal with it.
They come up with a solution and go for it. And iterate. Learn, try to do something better next time. And there’s a constant learning/feedback process going on across the organisation which everyone takes part in, not just 1 person doing every part for everyone.
I believe this structure of modelling what actually successful organisations do is the correct way. Because they’re successful for a reason.
Not this ‘hustle grindset’ BS in the startup/business world where lots of information seems to be saying the wrong thing. It just makes no sense to make every single person 100% reliant on you for them to do their job.
Anyway so I’m thinking about what I should do with my time.
What I want to do, is tell my co-founder what to do, which involves hiring and managing people who do things that move the needle forward in the business, as defined by me, and some of those people also hire and manage people. To have an exponentially growing system of people growing the organisation. And a communication and feedback and learning system and autonomy within the system itself so it can take action, learn, grow, thrive. As a system within itself.
I believe if hypothetically, I did everything myself, then it takes about 6 months to ‘validate’ whether a business has good potential, and 5% of the time it does. So if I do everything myself, I believe it will take me 10 years to get a business off the ground.
But if I utilise my money and time more efficiently, I can have as many people working on each part involved in validating these businesses as possible.
I don’t know if that is lazy or smart.
I believe it’s both. But mostly smart. Because I believe I can convince, hire, organise, manage people to either work on equity deals or pay in a way where businesses can realistically bring in profit.
My co-founder does very little of what I ask him to do.
And he wants me to be doing individual things.
He objectively is financially and intelligently very poor and has very minimal skills or experience.
Not to be offensive. Just to paint a picture. So since there is conflicting information everywhere in the business world and you need to choose who to trust, I don’t trust what he believes.
Objectively I am much richer in all these areas than him.
So I used to operate on a democratic system with them. But it’s kind of like, in a vote for president, if you have 80% of the population being easily controlled by the media and being very dumb and easy to sway and manipulate into believing anything, and they vote for things which are objectively dumb and go against what the smartest and objectively most valuable people vote for, I don’t want to be held back by a dumb population having authority or being listened to, if they have a clear, long track record of making very bad decisions.
If you were to take business advice from a homeless person with no experience, money or intellect, or a Fortune 500 CEO, who let’s say objectively has massive experience, money, intellect and success. Then I would probably take what the CEO has to say.
If you had to listen to what a scientist vs 12 year old had to say about a scientific topic, you’d probably want to listen to the scientist who studied the topic and is well respected in their field.
So I believe it would be dumb for both of us, if he made decisions, objectively.
But at the same time it’s difficult to truly know what the truth is.
The Fortune 500 CEO could be telling you what you want to hear, and could have an incentive to lie to you to send you in the wrong direction with bad business advice so you don’t become competition to them, and the homeless person could be honest.
The scientist could be trying to gain fame and get attention to themself to build their career on a lie and fake experiments whereas the 12 year old could be a science savant.
So it’s difficult to truly know what the truth is.
If I should listen to him or myself.
Objectively.

I believe if I spend time building the business via this logic I’ve described above, it can grow much faster, with unlimited people working on it and performing well, if the necessary improvements are made.
And I believe if I were to do the individual things necessary to do it, it would take 6 months to ‘validate’ each’s potential. I.e. try everything in that timeframe to make it work, build a good service/product, build good sales process, build good marketing, deal with customers, etc, all on your own.

Whereas in the first option, other people could do all these things.
Human development over history has happened due to the input of millions, if not billions of people.
There wasn’t 1 person who did all the work to get Carnegie or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to gain the success they’ve achieved.
They all build an empire off the backs of others.
Did the slave owners do the slave work themselves when they brought slaves to America? No.
Does Elon do all the individual parts necessary to grow the company? No. He leads and controls the people in order to do that.
Does Mark Zuckerberg single handedly get Facebook off the ground? No. There were 10+ people involved. He stole code from others. Who sued him.
All of these people had exponentially growing staff as the company grew, as fuel to grow the company.
So if you have the money and strategy to lead them to success, I believe it surely is possible.
So long story short this is a long rambling piece of writing but I believe there’s very little impact 1 individual person has on the success of a company. Controlling and amassing an army of people who build the company up and contribute to the company sounds more true.
Does 1 person do everything involved in every sports team? No. Each player plays their respective part. Directed by the coach/manager.
Does 1 person do everything involved in musical orchestras? No each musician plays their part. Directed by the conductor.
And so on.
If you can build an exponentially growing team of staff who effectively work together, bring others on, take action to grow the business, learn from mistakes, make improvements, are highly motivated, are led successfully, it can achieve great things. I feel like it’s a delusion that individual people single-handedly grow companies without others.
So what should that person spend their time doing?
Doing all the millions of things necessary to grow the company? Or bring and manage others who some make progress themselves, some bring and manage others, to gain more and more resources to make progress at faster and faster rate.
Do successful people really have only 1 person responsible? No. They have teams of people behind them.
So trying to do the work of 1,000 people as 1 person sounds 1,000x as hard as getting 1,000 people to each do the work of 1 person.
So if you can finance the growth of the company via hiring others.
Let’s assume I can finance this exponential staff growth. Then surely I should do it right?
Like if I were to compete with 1 person trying to grow their business, and I had 1,000+ people, all doing their jobs effectively, being organised, working as a system not all relying on me, the competition where it’s 1 staff member on average would get beaten.
And surely any excuse you could give, I could just hire someone to solve that excuse.
Like “oh but what roles do you hire these people to do?” well I could hire someone whose role is to figure out what roles they should do. “But what if x?” well I could hire someone whose role is to solve that too. And so on. “Oh but do you have enough money to pay these staff?” Yes. And I can hire people whose job is to bring in money. Whether it’s fundraising, raising from
Did Hitler fight WW2 with 1 person? No. He fought it with millions, if not hundreds of millions of people.
Did Amazon/[insert any Fortune 500 company] get to their size today from having 1 staff member who did everything? No. They had thousands if not hundreds of thousands of staff.
Did any successful mom and pop shop/small business get to their size today from 1 staff member? No. They are one of the largest employers in the USA. Which means they hire a lot of people. Successful mom & pop shops generally have more staff the more successful they are.
Armies generally have more success the bigger and more effective they are.
Companies generally have more success the more staff and more effective the staff are.
So surely we shouldn’t hold ourselves back, to use the example of war, it’s like trying to go to war with others who have hundreds of thousands of people in their army, with just 1 person, yourself. Who is going to win? Them.
How are you going to compete with companies with way more staff, and way more effective staff than you? You would have to become exponentially more effective as 1 person which I just don’t know if it’s realistic.
I think it’s more delusional to believe that 1 person can do as well as 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 or more people who are each as effective as that 1 person.
So if you were to win, you would probably want to expand your army/staff and make them more effective, rather than try to make yourself somehow perform on the same level as armies/companies with thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. It’s just delusional to believe you can beat them in my opinion.
In business, you’d have to be extremely skilled at hundreds of different skills, spend 10+ hours on 100+ individual areas of the business each week to compete with 1,000+ staff who, if performing effectively, would crush you.
This is just my thoughts.
Am I being delusional? Come on…
I just feel like this is the way. Just look at the most successful organisations in history. Was it 1 person?
No, 1 person cannot realistically win a war against 100,000+ people. No matter how good they are. They would need to be top 0.00000000001% in skill in the world at what they’re beating the other side at.
Could 1 footballer beat a football team of 100 people of equal ability than them? No.
Could a company of 1 person outperform a company of 1,000 people? No.
So I believe if I can solve the ability to do this, I can grow a team of unlimited size to conquer and beat any problem thrown at us.
It’s just down to control of people.
Money doesn’t exist.
Even biggest most successful companies in the world mostly didn’t get there on their own.
I believe less than 1% of Fortune 500 Companies were bootstrapped. Or something similar.
And this is what I’m saying.
People in the small business/entrepreneur world tell you you need to have everything yourself.
How are you going to outfinance, outcompete companies on complete other levels without acquiring these resources from others? Just relying on yourself.
How could 1 person get more financing/investment in a company from investors compared to 1,000 of equal ability.
It’s never 1 person ‘beating the world’. Or beating the industry on their own.
Maybe if your aspiration is to be an average business.
“Oh but you should do what is best at each level, and it’s different for each level. Start just by yourself until you get X revenue. THEN hire people”
…..Well if you struggle to get X revenue on your own, how are you ever going to hire others?
The others help you grow the revenue in the first place.
I feel like the small business world is too overreliant on the founder and delusional about the capabilities of 1 person when competing against units 100-1,000x + bigger than them.
Come on.
Anything you want to compete in. In business.
Generally you already have competition.
And if you manage to somehow “spot” something they’ve “missed”, they could just copy you and wipe you out with their massive resources anyway.
In my opinion you need to expand your resources as FAST as possible.
Not this BS “oh wait until you get X profit on your own to hire other people”
Well if you’ve only made good profit on your own as a freelancer, and you’ve spent a lot of years trying to get a business off the ground solo, what are you meant to do?
“Oh just make it work” Great advice.
I just feel like there’s too much delusion into what it actually takes.
In a job or as a freelancer. It’s easier to make $3k-5k/month revenue because you’re only competing against individuals.
But when you try to compete against other businesses to make $3k-5k/month profit, you’re competing against businesses with 10x-100x the people, the money, the resources, the everything, to beat you.
So how are you meant to realistically beat them on your own? Without expanding your resources as quick as possible.
So because of this I believe if 1 person on their own is somehow meant to take a business from $0 to $10k/mo profit, then surely it will happen quicker if more people, of equal ability, are trying to make the business $0 to 10k/mo profit.
To be honest I don’t know what the truth is. This is just what I believe the truth is.
Because I’ve consumed so much wrong information from people acting like they have the correct advice in business.
All Youtube videos, articles, courses, claiming to make you successful in business, when in reality it’s just advice that sounds either easy to say or easy to hear.
Like it’s easy to say as a comment to this post, a response that takes 5 seconds to write, like the first thing that comes to your mind, like “just figure it out on your own”. But that’s not necessarily the truth, it’s just easy for you to say as a commenter. Comments aren’t necessarily the truth.
And on the other side business advice is easy to hear. Like “work on your own, make $1m/month, move to X country, live the life, working 2hours/day” which is just pure delusion. And most of the time the content/advice’s purpose is to benefit the business who made it, not the receiver of the advice. Because it’s selling a course or they have ad sense so they just want maximum engagement and views.
And anyone who is successful in business doesn’t need to give any advice. Because they’re applying the advice. Not giving it. Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos etc have no strong incentive trying to help others get to their level because they could just make an extra $10M-100M from spending the same time/energy/resources giving advice into growing their business.
They’re never gonna have advice that would help you beat them because otherwise they would’ve applied it themself.
And they are actually incentivized to not want others to truly succeed. Because it means more competition for them and less success for them.
So 99%+ of info online just seems like it’s not true.
I’m trying to figure out what is true and what isn’t.
Honestly though it’s difficult to even trust what anyone says in business. Any advice or feedback. For the reasons given.
Because 99% of feedback is either from people who haven’t truly grown a successful business, or it’s not related to you, or it involved luck, or it’s just like a motivational quote they tell you, or it’s a snarky comment they tell you.
It’s only helpful to them. And you are actually their customer or viewer or their entertainment. Not a successful business yourself. Because it’s just all misinformation that all contradicts with the truth.
So not even sure if it’s worth trying to get advice or if it’s all just pointless, just to figure it out myself from experience, trial and error and learning from my own thinking than relying on any other thinking.
Anyway do you think this is just crazy and I’m going crazy or is there any truth to what I’m saying?
Let me know your brutal honest feedback

Hello everyone,
I’m a 33-year-old Chinese citizen with a bachelor's degree in architecture and ten years of work experience in design institutes, real estate design departments, and government public utilities. I have recently been accepted into two graduate programs: an MEng in Building Science at BCIT and an MSc in Civil Engineering at Lakehead University. I'm having a hard time deciding which program to choose and would appreciate any advice or insights.
Pros of BCIT:

Location and Networking: BCIT is located in Vancouver, a major city which offers ample networking opportunities that could be beneficial for local employment.
Interdisciplinary Program: Building Science is an interdisciplinary field that accepts students with backgrounds in civil, mechanical, and architectural engineering, potentially making the course difficulty more balanced.
Institutional Focus: This is the only master's program at BCIT, which might mean the school places more emphasis on it.
Practical Orientation: BCIT emphasizes practical training, which might make it easier to graduate.

Cons of BCIT:

High Cost of Living: Vancouver has high housing and living costs, making it less cost-effective to stay and work there.
Job Market Competition: The job market in Vancouver is highly competitive, which might make it harder to find a job.
Recognition of Interdisciplinary Program: The interdisciplinary nature of the program might not be as widely recognized.
Limited Intake Period: The program only has a fall intake, and if my study permit isn’t processed in time, I cannot defer to a winter intake.

Pros of Lakehead University:

Lower Cost of Living: Thunder Bay has a lower cost of living, and it might be easier to immigrate through Ontario's graduate programs.
Clear Career Path: Civil engineering is a well-established field with clear career paths, such as structural engineer or project engineer.
Proximity to Major Job Markets: Being in Ontario, it might be easier to find a job in or around Toronto, with potential recognition of my studies at LU.
Flexible Intake Periods: The program has more intake periods (fall and winter), allowing for the possibility of deferring to the winter term if there are delays in processing my study permit.

Cons of Lakehead University:

Remote Location: Thunder Bay is remote, and I don’t wish to live there long-term. The smaller city size also means fewer local job opportunities and networking chances.
Academic Background Challenge: Most students accepted into the MSc in Civil Engineering have a civil engineering background, while I have an architecture background, which might make it harder to keep up with the coursework.
Opportunity Cost: Choosing LU would result in a CAD 3000 opportunity cost, as I’ve already paid a CAD 3000 commitment fee to BCIT.

Any advice or experiences shared would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

This might be a slightly philosophical post. But the aim is to get to the bottom of what you should be truly doing. To truly get the most results.
There seems to be a MASSIVE amount of conflicting information online about how to do this.
“Do stuff that moves the needle forward”
“Do stuff that brings in revenue”
What does this truly mean though. And is it even the right thing. That’s the purpose of this post, to uncover.
When I’ve spent my time on actual needle-moving forward things, like taking business from 0 to revenue, doing all offer development, operations, sales process, marketing myself, it generally has taken me about 6 months to fully ‘try out’ a business idea I’ve had.
Most times it hasn’t worked.
Either it wasn’t profitable. Or there was a big problem somewhere.
I believe fundamentally it’s because I’m moving too slow.
Because it usually takes me around 6 months to ‘validate’ whether a business has good potential.
When you haven’t sold it or developed expertise in it yourself yet.
And I would say about 5% of the time it does work.
So if it takes 6 months and only 5% of the time it works (where you bring in revenue, no major issues), and each time it doesn’t work you try a new variation of it or something new based on what you learned, then it might take 10 years of trying different things to get the business to work.
Which sounds like it takes way too long.
So I thought about how the top companies move much quicker.
What separates them and my strategy.
And realized they simply had much more people on their team.
If you think about any successful organization who has achieved great things, and is world-leading, usually there is not 1 person on the team.
There seems to be a correlation between number of people on the team and speed of progress they can make in business.
Which goes against what most conventional startup wisdom tells you, most small business content creators etc all tell you to do it all yourself.
Which I’ve done for quite a few years and it’s gone so slowly in terms of overall progress.
If you should ‘do everything yourself’ then most Fortune 500 companies would’ve had single founders, and 1 person on their team. But the vast majority of successful Fortune 500 companies had co-founders.
And most successful businesses I know of, had co-founders.
And as they succeeded, they got more people on the team, and these people helped bring more success, then they brought more people.
Obviously there can be bad staff and not everyone contributes to the success of the company.
But I do believe, based on this, and observing top companies, that generally the more successful they are, the more people were involved with bringing about the success.
Which completely contradicts most information given to startups about ‘lone wolf’, ‘go it alone’. If that were true, Google would have 1 employee. Apple would have 1 employee.
And they would have never gotten off the ground.
Anyway, I may not have explained this perfectly but I do strongly believe the more & higher quality people are working together on something, the stats show these companies tend to do better, and successful companies you see often have more people than less working on them.
From the very beginning and now.
Regardless of the stage they were at.
So going based off this information, that the more people, the better, I have hired 30+ different people for different roles. Over the past few years. Across different businesses. To help speed up the progress in different areas.
From marketing roles, sales process roles, web development, app development, customer service, delivery of services.
And I would say there have been maybe 1 or 2 of them where I was actually happy with the result.
Most times, I would hire someone to do a job, and they didn’t do the job well, despite saying they were experienced.
And showing past examples of their work. And telling me everything I wanted to hear about how good they were.
It would often be that they would end up performing badly in the KPIs I set for them, giving many excuses, asking for help/questions/not solving anything on their own.
And just so many other problems. Like when there were multiple people at the same time on a team, working on the same project, they would blame each other and no one took responsibility despite clear responsibilities.
All telling me how other staff were bad and they were good, but getting conflicting info from all staff where they blame each other for everything so it’s difficult to know who to trust and who is being truthful.
Oftentimes not being reliable or doing what they were clearly asked to do.
Oftentimes trying to outsource the work I game them, to other people and not caring about the quality.
At my expense.
So I lost lots of clients, had low performing areas in the areas I hired for a lot of the time.
To be fair, things happened faster the more people there were.
But they often needed much more from me than they were contributing.
Like they always wanted to get paid more, for doing less work, weren’t reliable, did low quality work, didn’t hit KPIs, missed clear deadlines, always gave excuses, blamed others/external things, always asking how “I” wanted their job to be done, to the point where I was having to literally tell them every single thing to do and become an expert at their job myself, and show them how to do what they were put there to do, or do it myself, and still get a low quality result from them.
Anyway, the list goes on in all the problems I have experienced hiring people.
It really seems like a minefield.
But there were 1-2 people who did actually do well, who were responsive, who did what they committed to do, who hit deadlines, who did what they were asked, who didn’t give excuses. Who were actually honest hard workers who figured out how to solve problems and actually do the job that was asked from them.
Because of the amount of people I hired and the very low % of people who seemed to do their job well, it made me think that I am probably the problem here. If so many people are doing a bad job and not doing what they were actually hired to do. When most other companies seem to succeed at hiring people.
Then it must be a problem with myself and how I am hiring and managing them.
So it makes me think I need to level up in how I hire and manage people.
I’ve tried lots of different businesses and variations of them and some have done okay, some have not.
Mainly the most success I’ve had is in my own freelancing, where I don’t have other people on my team.
Because it’s kind of turned into a headache working with others. Who just seem to have mostly never been able to deliver what they promised without it becoming pointless to hire them in the first place with all the work I’m doing on their behalf and trying to pick up after all the problems and failures they’ve done.
So I’m not sure exactly what to spend my time and resources on.
I have money saved up from freelancing.
Where I can continue to hire people.
But I do feel I’ve had many many bad experiences.
And I believe it’s mostly my fault. Maybe my training, my hiring, my management, at places along the line I’ve not done it well enough.
I’ve tried to make improvements each time but it has kind of seemed like luck to get people who do actually do their job well.
I genuinely want to hire people and succeed in this.
Because if I can successfully work with people to achieve outcomes, rather than relying only on myself, I can build a real business and not just do freelancing.
In freelancing, I was able to make $3k-5k/month but it was very stressful and I hated speaking with clients, and was constantly stressed.
I generally really don’t like socialising with people. Including clients and staff.
And staff often try to get me to socialise unnecessarily so they can avoid doing their job, and pull me away from mine.
So trying to make it work.
I want to make it work with hiring people because if I can do this, I can make 10x-100x-1000x faster progress with other people on the same team.
But I do have a very bad track record so far. So it’s kind of painful returning to it and continuing to have bad experiences.
But at the same time I know it’s me who’s probably at fault because there can’t be this many bad people I’ve hired and it surely can’t be this bad for everyone.
I think the reason is that I’ve been better at managing myself and doing things successfully solo throughout my life.
Like I’ve achieved very good things in solo sports, in academia, and in many areas that don’t require a team, but often become frustrated working in a team.
But I don’t want my business success to be limited to 1 person.
So I truly want to make it work in improving my ability to manage (ideally a large amount of) people in a way where they can actually deliver and it work well.
Because I was capped in freelancing to making $3k-5k/month because I couldn’t take on more clients because I was undercharging and overdelivering and couldn’t handle more due to being massively stressed out and hating it. I was able to work with less clients at times and charge higher, but they never wanted me to ‘outsource’ my work to others or bring on a team, and I felt bad about it because had bad experiences where I had felt like I let clients down, and oftentimes they told me they had hired me because of me, and not wanted me to ‘outsource’ the work.
But I want to make it work.
Building a real business with a team. Not just doing freelancing and relying just on myself.
So I have time and money and resources to put into this.
I have 1 staff member currently who is unproductive. But we have an equity deal so it doesn’t cost me money for them to perform. But costs me lots of time and their performance is extremely weak. Don’t even want to go into detail, but it’s a nightmare. Their performance is about 1/10 but I believe I can raise their performance if I improve my ability to raise their performance.
Anyway. I want to build a team, but not sure exactly what activities are best ways to spend my time.
If I am physically making improvements, I feel I am slowing down the business progress.
Whereas I want to hire and manage people.
I’ve built training so that this co-founder is able to hire people. And these people can use the same training to hire people.
But I don’t currently have training to enable them to manage people.
My fear is that without training, people just ask unlimited questions on how to do something in their role and it becomes pointless to have hired them because I have to do everything they should have done to do it, so they basically just become a robot following very specific instructions. Rather than a human being who can achieve things independently.
So for example, if I made this training, it would take up all my time, whereas I have savings I’ve accumulated from freelancing which I can put into either having the co-founder manage staff, or have the co-founder make management training at the same time to enable more and more staff to hire and manage new staff. To achieve overall objectives and KPIs.
Or I could have the co-founder hire someone to make the training.
Then that frees up my time, my co-founders, time and only takes financial resources to accomplish.
What I want to achieve, is a scenario where I can give staff KPIs and objectives, and they are enabled to hire and manage people who can meet these objectives. Independently without my help required.
They give feedback, and I have a system for feedback to internal improvements can be made based on staff feedback.
Without it being unfiltered, it’s structured and organised so people can’t just get unlimited help/training/whatever from me.
Where they should be able to take actions, iterate, learn, improve, and act as independent thinking people who can achieve objectives themselves. Or within a system where it’s not all tied directly to me.
E.g. I have direct reports going to me.
But they have direct reports who go to them.
Previously I had a system where I did this, but then staff at the bottom of the hierarchy would ask their managers questions, and the managers wouldn’t know the answer so would then ask me the questions, and so jumping over the managers and making me deal with everything.
Whereas I want to build a system where people can make business progress in their specific area, independently without everything going to the CEO. Only important/urgent things are feedbacked to the CEO.
This way I believe much faster progress can happen.
Because I won’t be bogged down by exponentially growing problems.
Like with how it works in any successful organisation.
Tim Cook has only a handful of direct reports. Who each only have a handful of direct reports. And so on.
He’s making the most important decisions, dealing with what’s most important and strategic, with top authority, dealing with everything as a birds eye view, but not doing every employee’s job for them, teaching every employee how to do their job. Picking up the pieces after every employee misses their deadlines, doesn’t do their work, gives excuses, does poor work that doesn’t help the company.
Even in any successful organisation. Each unit/person is making their own decisions, taking their own action, learning from it, practicing themself at improving, gaining their own experience, not all relying on 1 person, every single person in the organisation, just for them to do their job.
In successful organisations, people at every level experience new problems all the time, and don’t need to contact the #1 person at the top just to deal with it.
They come up with a solution and go for it. And iterate. Learn, try to do something better next time. And there’s a constant learning/feedback process going on across the organisation which everyone takes part in, not just 1 person doing every part for everyone.
I believe this structure of modelling what actually successful organisations do is the correct way. Because they’re successful for a reason.
Not this ‘hustle grindset’ BS in the startup/business world where lots of information seems to be saying the wrong thing. It just makes no sense to make every single person 100% reliant on you for them to do their job.
Anyway so I’m thinking about what I should do with my time.
What I want to do, is tell my co-founder what to do, which involves hiring and managing people who do things that move the needle forward in the business, as defined by me, and some of those people also hire and manage people. To have an exponentially growing system of people growing the organisation. And a communication and feedback and learning system and autonomy within the system itself so it can take action, learn, grow, thrive. As a system within itself.
I believe if hypothetically, I did everything myself, then it takes about 6 months to ‘validate’ whether a business has good potential, and 5% of the time it does. So if I do everything myself, I believe it will take me 10 years to get a business off the ground.
But if I utilise my money and time more efficiently, I can have as many people working on each part involved in validating these businesses as possible.
I don’t know if that is lazy or smart.
I believe it’s both. But mostly smart. Because I believe I can convince, hire, organise, manage people to either work on equity deals or pay in a way where businesses can realistically bring in profit.
My co-founder does very little of what I ask him to do.
And he wants me to be doing individual things.
He objectively is financially and intelligently very poor and has very minimal skills or experience.
Not to be offensive. Just to paint a picture. So since there is conflicting information everywhere in the business world and you need to choose who to trust, I don’t trust what he believes.
Objectively I am much richer in all these areas than him.
So I used to operate on a democratic system with them. But it’s kind of like, in a vote for president, if you have 80% of the population being easily controlled by the media and being very dumb and easy to sway and manipulate into believing anything, and they vote for things which are objectively dumb and go against what the smartest and objectively most valuable people vote for, I don’t want to be held back by a dumb population having authority or being listened to, if they have a clear, long track record of making very bad decisions.
If you were to take business advice from a homeless person with no experience, money or intellect, or a Fortune 500 CEO, who let’s say objectively has massive experience, money, intellect and success. Then I would probably take what the CEO has to say.
If you had to listen to what a scientist vs 12 year old had to say about a scientific topic, you’d probably want to listen to the scientist who studied the topic and is well respected in their field.
So I believe it would be dumb for both of us, if he made decisions, objectively.
But at the same time it’s difficult to truly know what the truth is.
The Fortune 500 CEO could be telling you what you want to hear, and could have an incentive to lie to you to send you in the wrong direction with bad business advice so you don’t become competition to them, and the homeless person could be honest.
The scientist could be trying to gain fame and get attention to themself to build their career on a lie and fake experiments whereas the 12 year old could be a science savant.
So it’s difficult to truly know what the truth is.
If I should listen to him or myself.
Objectively.

I believe if I spend time building the business via this logic I’ve described above, it can grow much faster, with unlimited people working on it and performing well, if the necessary improvements are made.
And I believe if I were to do the individual things necessary to do it, it would take 6 months to ‘validate’ each’s potential. I.e. try everything in that timeframe to make it work, build a good service/product, build good sales process, build good marketing, deal with customers, etc, all on your own.

Whereas in the first option, other people could do all these things.
Human development over history has happened due to the input of millions, if not billions of people.
There wasn’t 1 person who did all the work to get Carnegie or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to gain the success they’ve achieved.
They all build an empire off the backs of others.
Did the slave owners do the slave work themselves when they brought slaves to America? No.
Does Elon do all the individual parts necessary to grow the company? No. He leads and controls the people in order to do that.
Does Mark Zuckerberg single handedly get Facebook off the ground? No. There were 10+ people involved. He stole code from others. Who sued him.
All of these people had exponentially growing staff as the company grew, as fuel to grow the company.
So if you have the money and strategy to lead them to success, I believe it surely is possible.
So long story short this is a long rambling piece of writing but I believe there’s very little impact 1 individual person has on the success of a company. Controlling and amassing an army of people who build the company up and contribute to the company sounds more true.
Does 1 person do everything involved in every sports team? No. Each player plays their respective part. Directed by the coach/manager.
Does 1 person do everything involved in musical orchestras? No each musician plays their part. Directed by the conductor.
And so on.
If you can build an exponentially growing team of staff who effectively work together, bring others on, take action to grow the business, learn from mistakes, make improvements, are highly motivated, are led successfully, it can achieve great things. I feel like it’s a delusion that individual people single-handedly grow companies without others.
So what should that person spend their time doing?
Doing all the millions of things necessary to grow the company? Or bring and manage others who some make progress themselves, some bring and manage others, to gain more and more resources to make progress at faster and faster rate.
Do successful people really have only 1 person responsible? No. They have teams of people behind them.
So trying to do the work of 1,000 people as 1 person sounds 1,000x as hard as getting 1,000 people to each do the work of 1 person.
So if you can finance the growth of the company via hiring others.
Let’s assume I can finance this exponential staff growth. Then surely I should do it right?
Like if I were to compete with 1 person trying to grow their business, and I had 1,000+ people, all doing their jobs effectively, being organised, working as a system not all relying on me, the competition where it’s 1 staff member on average would get beaten.
And surely any excuse you could give, I could just hire someone to solve that excuse.
Like “oh but what roles do you hire these people to do?” well I could hire someone whose role is to figure out what roles they should do. “But what if x?” well I could hire someone whose role is to solve that too. And so on. “Oh but do you have enough money to pay these staff?” Yes. And I can hire people whose job is to bring in money. Whether it’s fundraising, raising from
Did Hitler fight WW2 with 1 person? No. He fought it with millions, if not hundreds of millions of people.
Did Amazon/[insert any Fortune 500 company] get to their size today from having 1 staff member who did everything? No. They had thousands if not hundreds of thousands of staff.
Did any successful mom and pop shop/small business get to their size today from 1 staff member? No. They are one of the largest employers in the USA. Which means they hire a lot of people. Successful mom & pop shops generally have more staff the more successful they are.
Armies generally have more success the bigger and more effective they are.
Companies generally have more success the more staff and more effective the staff are.
So surely we shouldn’t hold ourselves back, to use the example of war, it’s like trying to go to war with others who have hundreds of thousands of people in their army, with just 1 person, yourself. Who is going to win? Them.
How are you going to compete with companies with way more staff, and way more effective staff than you? You would have to become exponentially more effective as 1 person which I just don’t know if it’s realistic.
I think it’s more delusional to believe that 1 person can do as well as 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 or more people who are each as effective as that 1 person.
So if you were to win, you would probably want to expand your army/staff and make them more effective, rather than try to make yourself somehow perform on the same level as armies/companies with thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. It’s just delusional to believe you can beat them in my opinion.
In business, you’d have to be extremely skilled at hundreds of different skills, spend 10+ hours on 100+ individual areas of the business each week to compete with 1,000+ staff who, if performing effectively, would crush you.
This is just my thoughts.
Am I being delusional? Come on…
I just feel like this is the way. Just look at the most successful organisations in history. Was it 1 person?
No, 1 person cannot realistically win a war against 100,000+ people. No matter how good they are. They would need to be top 0.00000000001% in skill in the world at what they’re beating the other side at.
Could 1 footballer beat a football team of 100 people of equal ability than them? No.
Could a company of 1 person outperform a company of 1,000 people? No.
So I believe if I can solve the ability to do this, I can grow a team of unlimited size to conquer and beat any problem thrown at us.
It’s just down to control of people.
Money doesn’t exist.
Even biggest most successful companies in the world mostly didn’t get there on their own.
I believe less than 1% of Fortune 500 Companies were bootstrapped. Or something similar.
And this is what I’m saying.
People in the small business/entrepreneur world tell you you need to have everything yourself.
How are you going to outfinance, outcompete companies on complete other levels without acquiring these resources from others? Just relying on yourself.
How could 1 person get more financing/investment in a company from investors compared to 1,000 of equal ability.
It’s never 1 person ‘beating the world’. Or beating the industry on their own.
Maybe if your aspiration is to be an average business.
“Oh but you should do what is best at each level, and it’s different for each level. Start just by yourself until you get X revenue. THEN hire people”
…..Well if you struggle to get X revenue on your own, how are you ever going to hire others?
The others help you grow the revenue in the first place.
I feel like the small business world is too overreliant on the founder and delusional about the capabilities of 1 person when competing against units 100-1,000x + bigger than them.
Come on.
Anything you want to compete in. In business.
Generally you already have competition.
And if you manage to somehow “spot” something they’ve “missed”, they could just copy you and wipe you out with their massive resources anyway.
In my opinion you need to expand your resources as FAST as possible.
Not this BS “oh wait until you get X profit on your own to hire other people”
Well if you’ve only made good profit on your own as a freelancer, and you’ve spent a lot of years trying to get a business off the ground solo, what are you meant to do?
“Oh just make it work” Great advice.
I just feel like there’s too much delusion into what it actually takes.
In a job or as a freelancer. It’s easier to make $3k-5k/month revenue because you’re only competing against individuals.
But when you try to compete against other businesses to make $3k-5k/month profit, you’re competing against businesses with 10x-100x the people, the money, the resources, the everything, to beat you.
So how are you meant to realistically beat them on your own? Without expanding your resources as quick as possible.
So because of this I believe if 1 person on their own is somehow meant to take a business from $0 to $10k/mo profit, then surely it will happen quicker if more people, of equal ability, are trying to make the business $0 to 10k/mo profit.
To be honest I don’t know what the truth is. This is just what I believe the truth is.
Because I’ve consumed so much wrong information from people acting like they have the correct advice in business.
All Youtube videos, articles, courses, claiming to make you successful in business, when in reality it’s just advice that sounds either easy to say or easy to hear.
Like it’s easy to say as a comment to this post, a response that takes 5 seconds to write, like the first thing that comes to your mind, like “just figure it out on your own”. But that’s not necessarily the truth, it’s just easy for you to say as a commenter. Comments aren’t necessarily the truth.
And on the other side business advice is easy to hear. Like “work on your own, make $1m/month, move to X country, live the life, working 2hours/day” which is just pure delusion. And most of the time the content/advice’s purpose is to benefit the business who made it, not the receiver of the advice. Because it’s selling a course or they have ad sense so they just want maximum engagement and views.
And anyone who is successful in business doesn’t need to give any advice. Because they’re applying the advice. Not giving it. Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos etc have no strong incentive trying to help others get to their level because they could just make an extra $10M-100M from spending the same time/energy/resources giving advice into growing their business.
They’re never gonna have advice that would help you beat them because otherwise they would’ve applied it themself.
And they are actually incentivized to not want others to truly succeed. Because it means more competition for them and less success for them.
So 99%+ of info online just seems like it’s not true.
I’m trying to figure out what is true and what isn’t.
Honestly though it’s difficult to even trust what anyone says in business. Any advice or feedback. For the reasons given.
Because 99% of feedback is either from people who haven’t truly grown a successful business, or it’s not related to you, or it involved luck, or it’s just like a motivational quote they tell you, or it’s a snarky comment they tell you.
It’s only helpful to them. And you are actually their customer or viewer or their entertainment. Not a successful business yourself. Because it’s just all misinformation that all contradicts with the truth.
So not even sure if it’s worth trying to get advice or if it’s all just pointless, just to figure it out myself from experience, trial and error and learning from my own thinking than relying on any other thinking.
Anyway do you think this is just crazy and I’m going crazy or is there any truth to what I’m saying?
Let me know your brutal honest feedback

For context, I’ve worked in schools for 7 years as a private school teacher, para, sub, and a student teacher in public. Despite challenges, I always loved being in the classroom and the relationships I’ve built with students. However, student teaching was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in my entire life.
From September-May, I became extremely depressed and had terrible bouts of anxiety. The behaviors were constant and parents didn’t care. It truly felt like glorified babysitting. Despite this, I did very well on all observations (I have no idea how). Long story short — I graduated with my masters and now I just don’t want to go back into the classroom as a teacher.
**Correction: I do want to teach but not with the behaviors we’re seeing today. I cannot do it.
I’ve been just subbing to make some sort of income and stay in the school environment. I used to be Type A, super determined and ambitious. Now, I’m fine with just subbing and going home and not worrying about school 24/7. I crave more but for now, I’m fine with this simple life.
Did anyone leave teaching for a simpler life and is happier? What do you do now? I can’t handle the stress of teaching but I also need to make more money. I’m really not sure what to do.

So, long history short: I have two accounts, one per region.
I’m in Germany (not German, just located here) and I’m playing mainly in EUW. This split I’m jumping to my account in NA and I’m feeling the pain. People in this region tend to:

Throw the games that are basically already won because they get cocky and then they get desperate because they lost their advantage, causing a snowball effect that makes us lose the games or it’s way more difficult that it should’ve been.
At minute 10, after two ganks against them they start to call for ff, typing “jg diff” (don’t even make me start with this) or they start to feed the enemy like they are paid for it.
Split suicide.. I call this to act of thinking that you’re split pushing, but getting killed over and over because you don’t know how to split push.
(The most difficult for me). People here ignore their advantages and take forever to finish the games. In average, I’m clocking 40 minutes games; but most of those games should’ve ended 10 mins earlier. You ping like crazy to push people towards the towers, get some jungle camps, or something; but nooooo, they reset, waste time picking their shiny items and the enemy is up now.

EUW is the region of the weird (or exotic) picks. But comparing my suffering as jungler; EUW is manageable, whilst NA makes me want to drop LoL completely.
Is it my idea? Am I having a bad run of games? Or definitely the region is like they say: silver in EUW is like diamond in NA?
(65% win rate btw, so this is not the point)

TW! Suicide
HELP!! Ever since i was 7-8 I have had anxiety, though every year it gets worse and worse. Im at the point where i never go outside and lay in bed all day, rotting away. I have done this for maybe 4 years, though the past 2 years i legit haven’t went outside at all, where as before i would maybe go to the store with my mom or something. I was even homeschooled due to my anxiety. The most embarrassing part is that its all because of the fact that i have to fart/poop when i am anxious. Knowing this, i get even more anxious. Its a snowball effect.
When i did go to school, i would cry and beg my mother to not make me go because of the fact that i would constantly have to fart during class. I never did, i would just hold it in. Even when i did so, my stomach would make loud growling noises that i swear the entire class could hear but idk if they did. When i was finally homeschooled, i stayed inside because i was afraid of having to fart. Yes, even around my family.
But after some traumatic events this anxiety has caused which i cannot go into detail abt, i never want to leave my bed again. Unfortunately, my family is broke and we can’t afford to live in our trailer anymore so we are getting kicked out. My mother can’t afford to buy a home and we don’t wanna keep getting kicked out of homes because we can’t afford rent. So, she decided on getting a camperv for all of us to live in. I thought this trailer was bad, but i cannot imagine having to live in an rv with my family. I get bad anxiety thinking about it, and as im typing i am shaking.
I know i am dramatic for being so afraid of these things, especially around my family, but i don’t think i have any control over it. I just don’t know what i am gonna do. All my life i’ve felt hopeless and isolated from the world. I have even gone so far as to considering suicide multiple times when at my limit. Im just so tired. I don’t wanna live this way, but i am too afraid to get out of my comfort zone or tell anyone.
Im only 15 and i have had no childhood. Its just been me on my device in bed all day long. I don’t even remember anything due to my anxiety sometimes, like most of my childhood. My mom tells me she wishes the old me before my anxiety, though i dont remember it. I wish i could live life like a normal person and not like a freak with my stupid anxiety. Rn all i know i can do to prepare to move into the rv is to not eat which i haven’t for 2 days so far. I am so afraid of getting a stomach ache or diarrhea, especially in a car. I haven’t even been in a car for years, but every time i was in one it would be a terrible experience.
Im writing this to maybe get some reassurance or tips, and to get it off my chest as i am having a mental breakdown. I read some others having a similar issues on here, so i got a bit of courage to share my own story. Srry its long.

Hello everyone,
I’m a 33-year-old Chinese citizen with a bachelor's degree in architecture and ten years of work experience in design institutes, real estate design departments, and government public utilities. I have recently been accepted into two graduate programs: an MEng in Building Science at BCIT and an MSc in Civil Engineering at Lakehead University. I'm having a hard time deciding which program to choose and would appreciate any advice or insights.
Pros of BCIT:

Location and Networking: BCIT is located in Vancouver, a major city which offers ample networking opportunities that could be beneficial for local employment.
Interdisciplinary Program: Building Science is an interdisciplinary field that accepts students with backgrounds in civil, mechanical, and architectural engineering, potentially making the course difficulty more balanced.
Institutional Focus: This is the only master's program at BCIT, which might mean the school places more emphasis on it.
Practical Orientation: BCIT emphasizes practical training, which might make it easier to graduate.

Cons of BCIT:

High Cost of Living: Vancouver has high housing and living costs, making it less cost-effective to stay and work there.
Job Market Competition: The job market in Vancouver is highly competitive, which might make it harder to find a job.
Recognition of Interdisciplinary Program: The interdisciplinary nature of the program might not be as widely recognized.
Limited Intake Period: The program only has a fall intake, and if my study permit isn’t processed in time, I cannot defer to a winter intake.

Pros of Lakehead University:

Lower Cost of Living: Thunder Bay has a lower cost of living, and it might be easier to immigrate through Ontario's graduate programs.
Clear Career Path: Civil engineering is a well-established field with clear career paths, such as structural engineer or project engineer.
Proximity to Major Job Markets: Being in Ontario, it might be easier to find a job in or around Toronto, with potential recognition of my studies at LU.
Flexible Intake Periods: The program has more intake periods (fall and winter), allowing for the possibility of deferring to the winter term if there are delays in processing my study permit.

Cons of Lakehead University:

Remote Location: Thunder Bay is remote, and I don’t wish to live there long-term. The smaller city size also means fewer local job opportunities and networking chances.
Academic Background Challenge: Most students accepted into the MSc in Civil Engineering have a civil engineering background, while I have an architecture background, which might make it harder to keep up with the coursework.
Opportunity Cost: Choosing LU would result in a CAD 3000 opportunity cost, as I’ve already paid a CAD 3000 commitment fee to BCIT.

Any advice or experiences shared would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Hi all So I teach French and students need to do writing as homework and some of them request to do more topics. I'd like to inquire how you charge that? Any ideas?

After working in after effects, premiere pro and photoshop, the water splash to the right and black box ended up stuck on my wall paper. They are not covering anything, the toolbar is in front of it and not behind. The mouse cursor is also in front of it. So it’s essentially a wallpaper that I didn’t set.
The water splash was something I was working on in those Adobe programs. What could have caused this and how can I remove it?
(Been at least 3 weeks like this)

I've been looking to score some cash and I know a lot of you don't have much money to spend. Also I love to teach. So I'll make you a deal: I'll do my absolute best to help you win a prize in your next OTB tournament in return for 90% of the profit (prize money minus your entry fee). For the memes (and to cover some expenses) I will also charge sixty-nine cents per lesson.
Now, there are reasons why you shouldn't hire me. I'll list as many as I can think of, but if I've missed any put them in the comments - I'll respond/edit this post if I agree. If at all possible I'd like you help you make a good choice, so:
Don't do this if:

You haven't got your mind set on entering a U900, U1200, or U1500 OTB tournament within 4 weeks. I'm willing to consider other formats but a prize or some form of compensation needs to be involved.
You mind being coached by a 1980? Lichess classical player. I can teach like nobody you've met (I've taught multiple skills over the last 9 years) and you'll enjoy every minute. But there's a non-zero chance you might learn some bad habits that GMs understand and I do not.
You care about playing a beautiful game. I'll teach you the ugliest possible type of chess, the one where you're losing half the game but very often win because your opponent did an oopsie. Here's a perfect example where I play as black.
You actually have no choice but to win. Don't bet large sums of money on yourself - I'm extremely decent as a teacher and am willing to explain/justify every choice I make, but none of my students have won a tournament yet. If you're entering a tournament it has to be for your love of the game.

Think of me as the experimental, dare-devil sensei with a disturbing amount of undiagnosed ADHD. I love to put myself in a difficult teaching situation and see how I'll overcome - no matter whether you win or you lose, we'll both be much improved at the end.
Comment below with your timezone if you want in. I have two students and time for another.

TLDR: there are tons of 'academic' papers about grade policies, almost none of them use empirical data. I spent an afternoon finding and reading as many of these papers/articles as I could and am posting the links.
Like many of you I am now faced with the possibility of a 'minimum grade' policy (no grades below 50% allowed) and I have concerns about keeping students motivated and possible exploits. I was curious about any research that had been done into what the effect of these grading policies are.
I tracked down many many articles and 'academic' papers that cited no data and were just theory pieces based on behavioral and cognitive science with out data that actually compares outcomes under the different systems. I only found two papers that referenced data about student outcomes, one paper shows that minimum grading lowered student performance ( https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6973&context=dissertations ) and one stating that minimum grading has positive outcomes (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1022559 and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X12453309?journalCode=edra ). The paper stating that minimum grade policies had positive outcomes is problematic because it is an analysis of the data gained from other another study (the second link, a paper I do not have access to) and their analytical methods seem questionable. Possibly the problems with the analysis are covered in the original paper but it is hard to say, the whole thing reads like an opinion piece where some in is trying to find support for something they like, instead of actually doing data analysis.
Other related papers that would qualify as academic, but not scientific (lack of empirical data) below:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236791579_A_Critical_Examination_of_Current_Minimum_Grading_Policy_Recommendations
https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/making-the-grade-what-benefits-students
https://locutorium.byu.edu/issues/volume-17-2022/grading-for-process-what-grading-alternatives-most-emphasize-process/
https://www.edutopia.org/article/the-evidence-backed-grade
If I was an administrator I might be in favor of a minimum grade policy, as there does seem to be evidence that it can reduce harm done by poor grading policies. As a teacher I find it immensely frustrating as it removes a lot of the gradebook balance I use to fairly assess and motivate students. Proper training and policies that support teachers in gradebooks that include process and product, and proper outside (not just the classroom teacher) support for students that are failing, can not be replaced by a minimum grade policy.

A very common explanation of gravity and orbits is to imagine a thin rubber sheet pulled flat like a trampoline then you put a heavy weight on it like a bowling ball and a marble rolled across the sheet will fall into that hole too.
OK but what is making the bowling ball sag down and stretch the rubber sheet? It's gravity, right? And now there's a dent in the sheet from the bowling ball, what makes the marble slide down the slope? That's also gravity. A heavy bowling ball stretches the rubber more than a light marble because they weigh different amounts. So we're using gravity to explain how gravity works.
And what direction does the bowling ball sink in? The flat rubber sheet is meant to represent the entire 3D universe as a 2D plane as a simplified model for the demonstration. But the bowling ball stretched out the rubber sheet in the third dimension, the dimension that doesnt exist in the simplified model. So if the bowling ball is the Earth is the Earth moving into some fourth dimension? The answer is no, the movement in an extra dimension is just a misleading part of the demonstration that can cause accidental confusion. And that's confusion on top of trying to get students to think of all of space as a 2D sheet of rubber, which is going to cause questions in itself.
So we use gravity to explain gravity and use a 2D representation where the metaphor creates more problems with trying to understand a 3D universe transformed into 2D. I don't think that's a good way to explain gravity.
To be clear I'm not saying gravity is fake or that I don't understand gravity. I'm saying this is a bad way to explain it to kids who want to know how gravity works. The metaphor only makes sense if you already understand it, if you look at it from the perspective of someone who doesn't understand it then it doesn't help. You're using gravity to explain gravity.

“We do not know how long we will live. Those who are young may die sooner than those who are old, those who are healthy sooner than those who are sick. For many causes and under many conditions we can find death; few, however, are the conditions that favour our health. Even the things that usually help us stay alive can kill us, such as the food we eat. The weakness, vulnerability and fragility of our bodies all contribute to our uncertain lives. Many things can destroy our bodies, such as an accident, illness or some natural disaster. [...] The things we possess now, such as wealth, possessions, social position, money, will be of no help to us. Neither relatives nor close friends will be able to prevent our death, nor will they be able to experience with us what we will have to experience. Not even our body, our precious and only body, will be able to help us. We will have to leave everything behind, like a coat that we will never wear again.”
-‘Death and dying in the tibetan buddhist tradition’, re-elaboration of a Tsongkhapa meditation
Vesak, a sacred day in all Buddhist traditions, is approaching, so I am furthering my reading on the subject by finding this short extract. As I have already reported in other posts, the Buddhist perspective is extremely focused on death as a peculiarity of the characteristic of existence called ‘impermanence’ that encompasses continuous change and, indeed, death. I find this approach fundamental when contrasted with the optimistic, obtuse and delusional approach that purports to paint the world according to a vision that is completely opposite to reality, where the reality of impermanence is ignored and dismissed. This is why one gets entangled in relationships, marriages, great life plans, great hopes, only to see it all degrade over time and end miserably. I will end this commentary by quoting the words of the Buddha Shakyamuni: “For this reason, monks, you should all become impractised by repeating within yourselves: ‘We will always live with intense awareness. We will always cultivate a full and attentive awareness of death in an acute manner and to effectively extinguish unhealthy thoughts.’” -ANGUTTARA NIKAYA 6.19, Maranassati Sutta

I will be teaching 5th and 6th grade next year & am ready to make the commitment to getting a class pet. After research, I think guinea pigs are the pet that will be best fit for our classroom. Before committing, I wanted to hear some personal experiences with guinea pigs as class pets! Do your students help with care/clean up? Do you feel like the guinea pigs add to the overall SEL of students? What other advice or ideas do you think I should know before bringing guinea pigs into our space? All helpful thoughts are welcome. (:

So I’m an incoming freshman for fashion design, and Drexel wasn’t my top choice but it’s what I got in the end yk it is what it is, I wanted to know more about their program, the pros and cons, cause I know it’s supposed to be good but I’m worried it won’t help your career as much as fashion school, (since fashion is a difficult industry to thrive in to begin with) also I’m thinking about reapplying to my top choice as a transfer from Drexel, any alumni can you talk about how it was graduating from Drexel and making your way in the industry? Did the school help you make good contacts? Where are you now? And current students how is the workload, have you gone to important events or fashion week? How are the teachers?…. Any input negative or positive is insanely helpful tysm!

Hi! I (20F) have been on ozempic for 6 months now (1.0) due to PCOS, BED and an overweight BMI. For all the reasons I’ve been taking the medication, i’ve had great improvements. I never really had any side effects at all, during most of my treatment. About two months ago the delayed gastric emptying became more noticeable, and, after all, it is part of ozempic. However already at 1 month and half ago things worsened drastically. I ended up going to the ER 3 times in a single week, complaining of constant nausea, chronic pain (which i’ve had for years now, but got significantly worse), low grade fever and other infection signs (extremely swollen lymph nodes). I’ve done several exams (blood, urine, physical), but they couldn’t explain what’s happening. I can barely eat or drink liquids and even taking my usual prescription cause me to throw up. I’ve been trying to get in touch with my endocrinologist without any success (my state is going through a massive flood and it would be even impossible for me to go to his clinic since it’s in another city. Honestly, I can’t even tell if what I am experiencing is related to the medication or not, and I am scared to take a break without confirmation of my endocrinologist. Any advice or contributions are welcomed❤️

TW! Suicide
HELP!! Ever since i was 7-8 I have had anxiety, though every year it gets worse and worse. Im at the point where i never go outside and lay in bed all day, rotting away. I have done this for maybe 4 years, though the past 2 years i legit haven’t went outside at all, where as before i would maybe go to the store with my mom or something. I was even homeschooled due to my anxiety. The most embarrassing part is that its all because of the fact that i have to fart/poop when i am anxious. Knowing this, i get even more anxious. Its a snowball effect.
When i did go to school, i would cry and beg my mother to not make me go because of the fact that i would constantly have to fart during class. I never did, i would just hold it in. Even when i did so, my stomach would make loud growling noises that i swear the entire class could hear but idk if they did. When i was finally homeschooled, i stayed inside because i was afraid of having to fart. Yes, even around my family.
But after some traumatic events this anxiety has caused which i cannot go into detail abt, i never want to leave my bed again. Unfortunately, my family is broke and we can’t afford to live in our trailer anymore so we are getting kicked out. My mother can’t afford to buy a home and we don’t wanna keep getting kicked out of homes because we can’t afford rent. So, she decided on getting a camperv for all of us to live in. I thought this trailer was bad, but i cannot imagine having to live in an rv with my family. I get bad anxiety thinking about it, and as im typing i am shaking.
I know i am dramatic for being so afraid of these things, especially around my family, but i don’t think i have any control over it. I just don’t know what i am gonna do. All my life i’ve felt hopeless and isolated from the world. I have even gone so far as to considering suicide multiple times when at my limit. Im just so tired. I don’t wanna live this way, but i am too afraid to get out of my comfort zone or tell anyone.
Im only 15 and i have had no childhood. Its just been me on my device in bed all day long. I don’t even remember anything due to my anxiety sometimes, like most of my childhood. My mom tells me she wishes the old me before my anxiety, though i dont remember it. I wish i could live life like a normal person and not like a freak with my stupid anxiety. Rn all i know i can do to prepare to move into the rv is to not eat which i haven’t for 2 days so far. I am so afraid of getting a stomach ache or diarrhea, especially in a car. I haven’t even been in a car for years, but every time i was in one it would be a terrible experience.
Im writing this to maybe get some reassurance or tips, and to get it off my chest as i am having a mental breakdown. I read some others having a similar issues on here, so i got a bit of courage to share my own story. Srry its long.

I thought the last year of school was going to be easy and I ruined everything, now I've lost my chance to get a good job.
I've already sent my application to McDonalds, now I have to see if they'll accept me.
My friends are going to be rich and have happy lives: BMW in the garage of the mansion, holidays in the Caribbean and Möet & Chandon and Bacardi for dinner and clothes from Prada and Burberry.
I, who was dumb, will be working in a dirty kitchen making food that causes diabetes and earning in a year what my friends will earn in a week and I will be living the most boring life you can imagine.
If I could, I'd go to all the schools in my country, gather all the students in the auditorium and give them a serious lecture to listen to from start to finish, without distractions or cell phones in the auditorium.
If you know someone who is at the age of choosing whether to go to university, please let them know about this, I don't want anyone else ruining their life.
And if you're the one at that point in your life: please don't be stupid, don't ruin your life, it's an insult to me and to all those who missed their chance.

Teaching cause and effect students to elementary

Teachers