Three Feet From Gold
In Napoleon Hill’s classic book, “Think and Grow Rich”, he recounts a story of his uncle who went to California during the gold rush. He found a small vein of gold and invest in equipment to extract it. After digging up the small amount he first found he was unable to find anymore gold and sold his equipment to a junkyard.
The story then tells how the junkyard owner took the equipment and with the help of a mining engineer was able to locate a large vein of gold, just three feet from where Hill’s uncle had stopped.
The moral of the story is to get information from trustworthy and expert sources and to be persistent.
When I heard the story I couldn’t help but think that this must have happened to many people. They rush to California to try and strike it big on gold, investing in equipment, digging and digging to find nothing but rock and eventually selling their equipment to the next guy.
I thought that the story has a different lesson, why be the guy digging for gold when I can be the guy selling the equipment. Levi Strauss & Co., the company that sells Levi jeans, found their start doing just that. Rather than panning for gold, Levi saw the fortune in the amount of people coming to California looking to win the lottery on gold. He created durable clothing for the prospectors to wear during work. Now worth over $7 billion, Levi was one of the richest men to walk away from the California gold rush, with never touching a shovel.*
Original Thoughts
Are any of our thoughts original? How do we know which are our own thoughts versus opinions we have gathered from others? Is it possible to know how much influence others have had on our thoughts? Does it matter?
Our thoughts come from a combination of everything we know up until this point, so they are influenced by others, by books, by movies, but also by our own experiences. So that means all of our thoughts are partially our own and partially many other peoples as well.
I believe as we get older the percentage of ownership of our thoughts increases. When we are young our thoughts are directly influenced to the prominent figures in our lives, our parents, teachers, or by our favorite characters on TV or in books. As we age, our experiences have a greater impact on our thoughts and their influence becomes more pronounced.
This matters because it is the foundation for what we believe and why we believe it. It impacts our moral and ethical code, who we interact with, and how we spend our time. It also makes us individually ourselves, because no one will have the exact same experience and feelings towards those experiences.
Endless Problems
Humans are hardwired to find and solve problems. It has allowed us to dominate many different environments and parts of the world. It has led to scientific advancements and many wonderful things we have today, like healthcare and smartphones.
It also has been the root cause for the mental health crisis in much of the developed world and the political division in many countries.
Evolution has wired our brains in a way to always be looking for the next problem to solve. This was great when we needed to find food, shelter, and water. It kept our ancestors alive, lead to the discovery of fire and the development of tools, but what happens when the big problems get solved? You focus on the little ones, and then those become the big problems. Once our ancestors had the basic necessities, they focused on reproduction and gathering resources.
Over time the problems evolved into fitting in with a tribe, which made resource gathering much easier. Today, this has evolved into anxiety. When we don’t fit in with a certain group, which is bound to happen now that there are over 8 billion people on this spinning rock, our brain still has the response of not fitting in with the tribe, which almost always meant death.
For most of us our big problems today are not finding food or worrying about predators, but we still have the same evolutionary responses to problems. We keep focusing in on smaller and smaller issues. This helps drive progress but it can also cause even more issues.
With the crazy world of social media and traditional media, there is an endless stream of horrific news that can make it seem like the world is going to shit. Sometimes I just need to take a step back and realize that we are living at the best time to be a human being in history. As much that is wrong in our world, we’ve got it pretty damn good.
*Samuel Brannan had a very similar story. He opened retail stores to sell equipment to the miners, along with some other shady business practices, like collecting a percentage of profits from miners in the promise to secure them the titles to certain gold fields, which he never did.
