When you publish an article on Medium, you can choose five tags to describe its essence. When the 1,000-article mark is approached, a pattern emerges all by itself. My most frequent tags are Business, Entrepreneurship, Psychology, Self-Improvement and Self-Awareness. If you read my articles for a long time, then, it turns out, these tags characterize your interests, too. But why choose these particular words?
Business is one of the most exciting and realistic games, the rules of which allow you to pursue your interests while satisfying the needs of others. Each of us is capable of producing a specific value to then make an exchange with other players. It doesn’t matter so much whether you are a company owner, an investor, an employee or a freelancer. In this game you can achieve anything, try on different roles, and most importantly, constantly build your skills. Unlike other fields, the meaning in business is difficult to distort, lose or substitute because it is easy to measure.
Entrepreneurship is appealing by the act of creation, when some brave person pulls the threads of a new order out of a tangle of frightening emptiness. Importantly, creativity is not just an unexpected combination of known things, but one that provides tangible benefits to people. Perhaps business is the most effective mechanism for getting a fair reward for real breakthroughs, even taking into account all the reservations about force majeure, immorality of some players, local system failures, etc.
Psychology is important because problems are solved by people, not machines or algorithms. A particular individual or group is extremely vulnerable, but at the same time has infinite potential to protect itself and everyone else from anything. To be sure, society itself today is a purveyor of new problems, in addition to those presented, as at all times, by nature. But despite humanity’s regular slide to the brink, I believe in man’s ability to let go of false beliefs and to steer back on the path of truth.
Without self-improvement, life would be dull, if not impossible. Just as the difference in potential between the cathode and anode conditions the flow of charged particles, so we move forward only because there is a gap between what we really want and what we currently have. The inner world of man resembles a Big Hole, in the kimberlite pipes of which there are tons of diamonds, ready to be cut.
However, without self-awareness, all the above is meaningless, or at least ineffective. Thousands of years ago our wise ancestors noticed that the bottleneck is not somewhere out there, but exclusively inside each of us. Since then, the rapid growth of technology and the vector of cultural development make this insight even more evident, poignant and irrefutable.
And what five tags would you choose to describe this newsletter?
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
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”Who are you and what do you do?"
As a business therapist, I help tech founders quickly solve dilemmas at the intersection of business and personality, and boost company value as a result.
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