Let’s go back half a century. In 1973, there was no internet. There were no electric vehicles. The antiquated Walkman would not be invented for another six years, and flying was still extremely expensive and way beyond the means of 98% of the population. Sure, if you are more of a conservative-leaning individual you could also point out plenty of the traditions, customs and values that have died out in this time, but from a technological and informational standpoint there are so many developments that were non-existent in your parents childhood days that we could go on for hours on end just listing them out.
Information
This is the biggest reason why we believe the present to be the greatest time to date. As long as you have access to a smartphone you can now obtain almost any information in less than three seconds. You can learn and teach yourself about any topic you want, whether it be fitness, sports, business, coding, law, etc. Even if you can’t afford a basic smartphone, all this information requires no money to retrieve since you can obtain it by going to a public library.
Accessing Information: There are plenty of high-quality blogs, websites, podcasts and Youtube channels run by people with decades of experience in a respective field that don’t even have a big following. If an average person wants to get pumped up before going to his 9-5 in the morning, he can go on his Youtube app and search for videos of motivational speeches with montage sequences of athletes training. If an intelligent person wants to learn how to write text for advertisements, he can go online and find plenty of content on copywriting. In short, there are zero barriers for acquiring information today.
Sending Information: This has been completely revolutionized as well. In the past, if you wanted to contact your supplier to get an update on the status of your latest order, you had to do so via either landline or by post. Then you had to wait for your supplier to follow up with their shipping company representative and there would be a further delay while they go check with their internal contact before getting back to your supplier who would finally get back to you. This involves at least four lines of communication. But now in 2023 you can go directly to the supplier’s mobile app and track delivery status to the minute. A process that previously took weeks as recently as two decades ago now takes just a matter of seconds!
How about communicating with your friends? If you were growing up back in the 1990s/early 2000s you had to call your friend’s home landline in order to reach him. More often than not someone else in his family would pick up and take a message, meaning you were limited in your ability to pass on information you considered sensitive. But now even elementary school children use WhatsApp to communicate with each other. Once again, completely free. Sending large quantities of documents used to also be an extremely costly and time consuming process. If you wanted to send a thousand page business report to an investor, you had to resort to standard mail. Now? Just send it as an email attachment. Once again, there are zero barriers to sending information today.
Storing Information: Let’s take a moment to picture what this used to look like in an industry like investment banking. Prior to the computer age, IB on the advisory side was exclusively dependent on using large paper-based spreadsheets and slide rules (this was before the advent of programmable calculators). Wall Street firms used to have entire teams of junior bankers working with these gigantic physical spreadsheets doing everything by hand and signing their initials at the bottom right hand corner of the sheet. The first guy would create the spreadsheet, then pass it on to the next guy one level up in the hierarchy who would verify the numbers on the spreadsheet and then sign his name next to the guy who signed it prior. This process would typically go through 4-5 revisions before obtaining full approval and then being transferred over to the client.
Could you imagine the tediousness and sheer hassle of trying to store just these spreadsheets alone? Or going to a physical data room as opposed to a fully-secure internet-based data room? That’s exactly how it worked for over the greater part of half a century. SEC filings had to be sent by post and documents had to be stored in large physical storage containers stacked on top of each other. Now your basic laptop can store an entire Empire State Building’s worth of financial and legal documents. There are no barriers to securely storing sensitive information.
Verifying Information: With a basic level of intelligence, you can easily verify the accuracy of the information you have obtained. As with practically everything else, data verification can be conducted entirely digitally in 2023. At any given moment, you can cross-check any information you have acquired with hundreds of other online sources, as well as conduct different types of verification such as triangulation, auditing and testing via an internet-connected device.
Securing Information: There are plenty of detractors out there who argue that information can be better secured using manual means as opposed to digitally. We vehemently disagree for the simple fact that digitally stored information is far more compact when it comes to physical storage infrastructure. Assuming for whatever reason you absolutely must write a document and secure it perpetually, this can be done with a basic laptop or tablet. Keep the device permanently disconnected from the internet, compose your document, store it on a USB stick and then permanently delete the document from the original device and then destroy that device. This is taking it to an extreme, but it can be done if the document is that important and sensitive.
As a real example, John Grisham, the world’s best-selling author in legal thrillers whose books have sold over 300 million copies in 40 different languages, has composed all of his works using a computer in a small shed on his farm in Virginia. The computer is fully disconnected from the internet, and when he goes to the shed to work he does not bring any other internet-connected devices with him. Unlike many other best-selling authors, he has never had a single incident related to hacking or having his work stolen. There are zero barriers to obtaining information security.
Making $$$
It is both substantially easier and harder now to make money. This is the case for the exact same reason: Barriers have gone down. As long as you have an internet connection and a personal bank account, you can earn money while based in some of the most remote regions in the world. At the same time, in certain respects it is also harder because information is so widely accessible to everyone in 2023, which wasn’t the case fifty years back. To go back to an investment banking example, during the 70s and 80s the trading side of the business was based on following the ticker tape all day long and the actual trades were either phone-based for OTC or pit-based for exchange listed products. Arbitrage opportunities were extremely abundant and profitable back then due to a gigantic asymmetry of information regarding prices of universally traded instruments (i.e. currencies). With the widespread availability of readily accessible information and the adoption of cutting-edge technologies in finance, the number of arbitrage opportunities have fallen significantly since.
With that said, the nature of people has not changed in the last five decades and never will. As soon as they have their basic necessities and immediate needs addressed, people become lazy and turn to sources of immediate gratification. Accessing and utilizing information to generate money involves hard work and boredom, so despite information being so readily available these days you can be sure that almost no one will act upon it. To add to this, 99% of people are risk averse and won’t be willing to invest any $$$ into something that involves hard work and is not a sure bet. So all in all, the pros and cons of these two different eras mostly cancel each other out, although the overall impact is still a net positive for the average person when it comes to building wealth.
Let’s take a look at some examples.
Online Businesses: Running a basic brick and mortar business involves all-in upfront costs ranging from $100-200K (commercial real estate is a killer). With that same amount of money, you could literally buy millions of clicks in traffic to your website! We are not exaggerating – depending on cost-per-click you could drive over a million visitors in a day to your online store. Take a moment to think about the sheer scale of that. How long would it take to bring one million visitors into a thousand square foot brick and mortar store? Six months? Definitely not, that would be more than 5K visitors per day assuming you are operating 7-days per week, which is not even legal in many parts of the world. A year? Extremely unlikely and still logistically impossible. A decade? We are not going to do the math for this one as we don’t even want to know the answer. It’s just not a space we ever plan to get into when a far superior option is readily available.
Zero Barriers: No starting capital? No problem! You can now sell someone else’s product online without owning the product or signing any kind of employment contract. All it takes is sitting in front of your computer screen for a couple of hours and doing some typing. Boom! You now have two income streams. As a plus, if you are intelligent and thinking ahead, you can buy several accounts to ensure that none of these sales can be linked back to you (unnecessary in most cases).
Industry Mobility: The online/digital developments have really been a game changer in this respect too. We have personally moved across 3-4 industries in the span of under a decade, and it is now not unusual to start your career out as an auditor, move into consulting, then shift into online sales and eventually selling your product all within the span of just five years. Can you imagine the reaction you would get telling people about this kind of move back in 1973? “I was working as an accountant 18 months ago but I now net $300K a year selling cosmetics to women.” Back then people would ridicule you and even doubt your honesty. Now you see these kind of stories popping up in motivational clips left and right all over Instagram.
Treasure Chests: Broadly speaking, there are two directions to take if you are looking to make big money: 1) go where the money is right now or 2) go to where the money will be in the future. You will need to act fast, but this is especially the case if you go down the first direction: if the treasure chest is loaded today, it may be empty 5-10 years from now, so you want to grab as large a chunk of it as possible before that happens. Our recommended strategy would be to focus 75% of your effort on #1 and 25% on #2. This will enable you to put away a mini-fortune in the medium-term and get your neck above water, after which you can shift close to all your focus on where the money will go. In short, use what is making money now to finance new business ambitions – where the money will go.
Making $$$ Through Services: Assuming you don’t want to do any of the above, you can focus on the labor-intensive side. We don’t recommend this as it would essentially be a job (business > career > job). A business makes money while you sleep, a career pays you based off performance (how much revenue you generate), while a job pays you directly for your time. But if you just want to get by, simply go to the neighborhoods where rich people live. These guys do not want to spend a single moment going through unnecessary discomfort or tedious work and will gladly pass it on at an above market rate to someone whose physical presentation and demeanor they like. Offer a service, whether it be babysitting, tutoring, car washing, cooking, golf caddying, etc. This way you’ll earn an above average income by simply putting in 30-40 hours a week and also make some valuable connections you can leverage in the future should you change your mind and decide you want to start some sort of business.
Investing: Nothing more to be said here. Investing is a far, far easier process today than in previous decades, with investors having the capability to trade obscure securities in distant markets with the click of a mouse. The lineup of potential investment options is now so great that it can be a little frightening and perplexing for new investors. If you want to invest in an entire index like the S&P 500, you can do so today. What about buying options? Not only can it be done just as seamlessly, but it can be done for a cost in the single digits and at very thin spreads. Anyone here old enough to remember back when stock prices were listed in newspapers with fractions such as ⅛? Probably not many, but it was certainly the case.
Health
Time and health are the two most important items in our lives, with both being complementary to each other. Improvements in your health secure more time for you while time is the only thing you can 100% never get back ($$$ come and go while health fluctuates before an inevitable decline when you reach an advanced age). While it was certainly possible to live a healthy life 40 years ago, here are some of the major changes.
Technology: Advancements in technology means we are living longer. Since we are now relying on computers and digital devices to earn a living, we are no longer subjecting our bodies to the harsh and dangerous physical conditions on the factory floor or construction site. Healthcare has made some significant breakthroughs. Without addressing the obvious with regards to surgeries and medicine, the implementation of healthcare analytics over the last 10-15 years has provided vast opportunities for progress in healthcare through offering insights into patient records, hospital management, diagnosis, spending, budget allocation, etc.
Data & Analytics: Physical activity trackers have become a billion-dollar product category. Smartwatches are so prevalent these days on the wrists of people everywhere and are the most common and readily accessible tool for long-term biomonitoring. Besides tracking the basic steps taken, calories burned, sleep stages, heart rate/minute, and so on, you can extract the raw data, collect and merge it into an Excel file, do some data cleansing and come up with a dataset that can answer more specific questions:
- What factors result in the highest calorie burn?
- Which exercises that I have engaged in in the last six months are the most effective way for me to achieve my fitness goals?
- What factors influence my sleep schedule?
- What is the effect of a Netflix binge on my weekend sleep?
Enough said here.
Access to Better Equipment: For less than $1 a day, you can now get a gym membership with all the standard weightlifting equipment and an array of machines. With enough discipline and dedication, literally any healthy individual can develop a six-pack. At the professional level, athletes in most sports leagues are now not only far quicker and more athletic but also lasting far longer than their predecessors. NBA teams provide their rosters with the most cutting-edge equipment, such as anti-gravity treadmills that enable players to maintain great conditioning while decreasing the physical load on their knees. In a similar way, polyurethane swimsuits and lightweight bikes have enabled Olympic swimmers and cyclists to break prior world records with relative ease.
Life
Networking/Forging New Relationships: You can do this now while sitting behind the screen. Go on to any mainstream forum, offer sound advice in a specific subsection, and messages will pour in from people who are interested in this topic. If you are an introvert you no longer need to force yourself in front of social settings that make you extremely uncomfortable. Plenty of shy and geeky people these days who would have never stood a chance as recently as twenty years back are now building online followings in the hundreds of thousands and millions without ever setting foot beyond their front door.
What does this mean? It means there are no real barriers to meeting new people. You can live in Tulsa and find someone online who lives in Nigeria. The individual in Nigeria can then go on Google Meets and video call you to discuss something you are mutually interested in. Of course, no one needs to do this, and we do not recommend relying on the Internet for socialization, but the point is that it can be done with close to zero barriers.
Live Information: There is no longer any tangible value in the relay of information. These days, news reports that pop up on Cable television at a scheduled time every night is almost always old news. You can now receive information directly from the source with a simple click of a button. Why take information from a source that spent 3+ hours deciding how it should be displayed when you can view it live?
Concluding Remarks
There will always be detractors who say that it is a matter of perspective, and we don’t deny that. When is only part of the equation, and we must also add in the Where and the How. It is better to be a wealthy man during the Middle Ages than a peasant in Paraguay today, just as it would have been better to be a Merchant in Venice five centuries ago than an Iraqi or Afghan in 2023. Speaking of the Middle Ages, there are without a doubt far more people living in abject poverty today than all of the Middle Ages combined.
But none of these above comparisons are relevant to you. Why? Because if you are reading this post right now, you already have access to the internet which as we have discussed earlier is sufficient for improving your living standards to a very high level. No one, not even the richest people as recently as a few decades earlier had close to this type of access to information.
On an ending note, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with our position, there is no denying that this is the only time/age/era you will live in, so staying optimistic (or realistic, however you prefer to call it) will lead to a better and more enjoyable life.
We wish you all a good Q4!