PREPARE THE WORLD FOR A WOLRD WITHOUT YOURSELF
EVERBODY IS REPLACABLE
Even people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Remember how everyone predicted Apple to fail when Steve Jobs died? Well, it didn’t. This is of course doesn’t mean you can get an exact copy that fulfills the exact same place, in this case, the place of a person just as well as the original one. It just means, that, if the system was indeed a good one in the first place the
SYSTEM WILL OUTLIVE ITS COMPONENTS
Because it is something bigger than its components. In our example: the individual people working in and leading a company. Sometimes the founders themselves. Remember the saying
THE WHOLE IS BIGGER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS?
This describes the systemic approach very well. This doesn’t mean a system is an ideal and completely undestructable structure that will live from now on till time itself seizes to exist. It just means
THIS IS WHAT AN IDEAL SYSTEM WOULD LOOK LIKE
IN THIS REGARD
Everything interacting to form a “unified whole” is a system. But what we want to focus on right now, is not abstract system theory, but rather its application in business. Using the systemic approach to
MAKE SOMETHING BIGGER THAN YOURSELF
something as independent as possible from its individual components or entities. Because every single entity has a certain risk of failure and even if it doesn’t fail entirely, it also could reach a point, where it does not function optimally anymore. If all football players of a single team just give 20% less in each and every game, then the system “football team” will almost certainly have to deal with a drop in outcome. A
SMALLER CHANCE OF WINNING
is the thing you risk when you rely on individual entities like yourself when it comes to creating something bigger than yourself. People themselves are only single entities and therefore have just like every other entity a certain risk of failure.
SOME PEOPLE SAY MACHINES ARE BETTER
And sometimes they are. When it comes to the tasks machines actually do better. It’s actually not a question that matters at the end of the day. Because what matters is: what an entity does, meaning what its function within the system is and how well it fulfills this function. To which category this entity belongs isn’t and shouldn’t be a criterion for choosing a system’s component. This would put these single characteristics over the actual function and therefore wouldn’t be a criterion that necessarily
OPTIMIZES THE SYSTEM
is the thing every system design should strive to do. But now finally,
HOW CAN YOU CREATE A SYSTEM?
It starts with this one single question
WHAT IF I WERE GONE?
EVERY SINGLE’S QUESTION
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN?
to your family? To your friends? To your finances? To your company? To your work? If until now you didn’t ever ask yourself this question, now is the time to do so. And if you are done, then we can focus on the things about this situation
WE CAN CHANGE
something. MakING the outcome better. It’s not that this unpleasant outcome necessarily is something you wanna achieve as soon as possible, it is just, that this single question just leads or triggers the questions and problems we actually would have to solve anyway in order to
PREPARE FOR YOUR EXIT
Whether this means you would leave the business you built or die in a car accident [therefore also leave the business you built] is again not the question we need to ask, because this question is only the trigger to get us to a point, where we can
SEE EVERYTHING MORE CLEARLY
And finally, start preparing for this inevitable outcome of you being gone in some way or another. And even if this outcome never “comes out” meaning you maybe could live till infinity if you could maybe upload yourself into the cloud finally, this doesn’t really reduce the probabilities of other variables causing you to be gone in some way. Therefore, we now take a look at what you can do to
GET RID OF YOURSELF
in order to prepare. Or take an infinite vacation for the rest of your life. Or to finally trace your Hawaii shirt back to its origin and open up a surf school after you finished your dreadlocks. Again, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is, to which question and subsequently which actions this problem of “you being gone” could guide you towards.
IF YOU WERE GONE
Would your family be provided with money? Would there be enough money for all your kid’s education? Would it be something they actively had to understand? Like running a 1000-employe-company? To sell? Would it mean they would have to manage your 48 properties from now on? Or: would they only simply own a cash flow and a system you prior put in place would actually produce the cash flow?
IS THERE ENOUGH MONEY FOR YOUR FUNERAL?
Is your funeral maybe already prepared? All of these are on the one hand of course quite macabre but also personal questions. But on the other hand nevertheless questions someone has to answer eventually at some point. Whether it’s with you, or without you. And the more it’s with you
THE MORE ANY SYSTEM IS DEPENDENT
On you. And your contribution. Of course, our place in this world is something we like. Someting we need psychologically probably as one of our needs in Maslow’s hiearchy somewhere. But this doesn’t take away our own risk of failure, and this not in a career sense, but rather in
A PURELY SYSTEMIC SENSE
would be to try to automate your life to the maximum extent and as soon as possible. Not because it is a fun hobby to pick up, but rather the necessary preparation for the inevitable. And if not inevitable, then at least still something with a certain probability of becoming reality. This doesn’t mean you have to be gone afterward. You still can do the things the system now does for you. It just means you now chose to.
APPLIED TO YOUR WORK
This means. Let’s say you are an artist making music. Of course, you could record your music and then release it. Or you could try to create a system. A system in which you as an artist only have limited functionality, being: coming up with ideas and recording them. And receiving an active cash flow for one as a business and for two as a private person, a human, that requires a constant cash flow in order to fulfill his needs in order to continue living. Therefore your role is first
TO CREATE THIS SYSTEM
It could look like this: as a songwriter, you create and record the songs. You then use another systemic component. A distributor where you upload your music. If these royalties would be your only source of income, you now had to find a way to distribute your royalties across
LIFETIME AND BEYOND
in order to create a cash flow independent from your creative doing. Remember, you could lose your ability to play certain instruments. By having a stroke for example. You could lose your ability to come up with new ideas. You could get Alzheimer’s. Anything could happen. And you for the most part simply don’t know
WHAT TO DO
could be this: why not first: spread all releases across a period of time that actually creates effectively “a virtual musician or copy of you” that still releases music, even if you are not producing music anymore? Meaning you would create a system that still produces output, namely releases music, but without you putting music into it? This first would
SPREAD YOUR ROYALTIES OVER TIME
Second, it would generate activitiy. An essential part of todays algorithms determining whether something like music is recommended. As a result you would create a stream of royalties with a resulting royalties’s cashflow at any point in time looking like this
ROYALTIES OF RELEASED SONGS + ROYALTIES OF CONSTANTLY RELEASED SONGS
If you as a person then decide to take some of this cash flow and put it into other assets like a distributing Exchange Traded Fund fully diversified within the world’s economy and therefore effectively averaging the risks of all existing businesses worldwide that are part of this ETF is the again a different question. Of course, this would also be part of
YOUR SYSTEM TO REPLACE YOURSELF
But not part of the “music system”. This means: Prepare for the inevitability. Prepare the world for a world without yourself. Something you just could do, not necessarily because it would be something you needed to. But just because it is something you could do is to
