Mastering the Business Puzzle

Having more pieces to the puzzle gives you an unfair advantage of seeing what others can’t. The more wisdom pieces you can add to your life, the more you increase your odds of living a better life. Investing the time to learn what others have already figured out is the fasted way to get ahead. This  dramatically increases your odds in reaching a level of success that few will ever know.

In our fast paced, no time to spare lives we are unaware of the many technologies that have come to us from ancient times. Technologies that took hundreds of years to develop. Rarely do we contemplate the long and arduous journey that was undertaken so we can now experience a radically better quality of life than our ancestors.

Let’s look at the path of glass. About twenty-six million years ago grains of silica were melted and fused under an intense heat of at least 1,000 degrees ˚F in the sands of the African desert. Scientists think they were formed when a comet exploded overhead in our atmosphere. When those superheated grains of sand cooled down, that part of the desert ended up being coated with a layer of thousands of pieces of glass. Roughly ten thousand years ago, a surprised traveler passing through the area came across a large fragment of this glass. It most probably passed through several hands before finally ending up as the centerpiece of a brooch carved into a scarab beetle. There it sat undisturbed for four thousand years, until archeologists unearthed it in 1922 in the burial chamber of King Tut.

Silica which makes up more than 50 percent of Earth’s crust wasn’t used much until it’s ability to morph into glass was discovered. That ability didn’t come about until the furnace was invented. By learning how to generate extreme heat in a controlled environment, we unlocked it’s molecular potential forever altering the way we see the world and ourselves.

Glass then made the transition from ornament to advanced techology during the Roman Empire after glassmakers figured out how to produce a sturdier and less cloudy material to hold liquids.

Tired of the many wars of the crusades glassmakers from Turkey migrated to Venice where they produced a luxury pieces that were and still are sold around the globe. In 1291 these same glass makers perfected “clear glass.”

In the 12th and 13th centuries monks who worked by candlelight in the monasteries figured out they could use a clear curved glass to help them better read their manuscripts. Soon thereafter the glassmakers started putting bulging disks into a wire frames inventing spectacles. After Gutenberg invented his printing press books became a lot more affordable and in 1440’s there was a surge in literacy. This helped many to discover they were farsighted and so glasses became common place.

In the 1550’s the Janssen brothers used glass lens to create the microscope which led researchers like Robert Hooke to the discover cells and disease which led to the science of medicine, better health, and longer lives.

20 years later when a concave and a convex lens were aligned into a tube, the telescope was invented. This allowed Galileo to discover that only one heavenly body circled the earth, our moon, much to the displeasure of the church.

In 1887 a very creative Charles Vernon Boys decided to shoot a heated glass rod out of his crossbow with the other end tied to a boulder. He ended up creating a glass fiber that was as strong as a strand of steel of the same diameter. This paved the way for fiberglass and the lightweight wing on the Airbus A380.

In the 1970’s the out of the box thinkers over at Bell Labs shot laser beams thru glass fibers to create the first fiber optic. This was many times more efficient than copper at sending electrical signals over vast distances. The laser light allows a much wider bandwidth and is far less susceptible to noise and interference. Today, the backbone of the global Internet is built out of fiber-optic cables woven together out of thousands of threads of glass.

Think about snapping a selfie on your phone, and then uploading it to an app that sends it to other’s phones and computers around the world. Consider the many ways glass supports this: we take pictures through glass lenses, store and manipulate them on circuit boards made of fiberglass, transmit them around the world via glass cables, and enjoy them on the other end on screens made of more glass.

The technologies of  glass has had a huge effect on our culture and law.  In 1835 German glassmakers coated the back of clear glass with a silver mixture to create an almost perfect, mirror. This was literally a revelation.

Before mirrors came along, most people had only glimpsed at themselves in distorted reflections in water or polished metals. They went through life without ever seeing an accurate self-image. Imagine never being entirely sure what you really looked like. That was the reality until the invention of this new mirror.

Just as the glass lens was extending our vision to the stars and to microscopic views of cells, glass mirrors showed us ourselves for the first time. The impact on society was profound.

This new mirror enabled artists to paint self-portraits and inventing a new perspective in art. Shortly thereafter, a fundamental shift toward individuality occurred in European culture.

Once you saw yourself, you were more likely to think more about yourself. Because of this new way of seeing oursleves, laws were increasingly enacted around the concept of being an individual, and bringing about a new emphasis on human rights and individual liberties.

Many forces converged to make this shift possible, and glass was one of them. Glass helped invent our modern sense of self; now it’s helping us explore worlds beyond ourselves. Maybe you’re wearing glasses or you’re looking at this page on a smartphone or tablet. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, there are probably a hundred objects within reach that depend on silica for their existence: the panes of glass in your windows, skylights, the lens in your phone’s camera, everything with a microchip or digital clock.

Glass has changed the way we see and experience the world in a multitude of ways while broadening our understanding of humanity.

Since the time of the first recorded business over 7,000 years ago there have always been a minority of business people who were able to create fantastic lives for themselves. They were able to have exceptional financial and time freedom to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. This didn’t happen automatically. The only model they had was the trial by error method. With failure as the most common result. Many businesses failed by going out of business trying to discover better ways of doing things. Eventually though over time and learning from those who came before them, more started having fantastic success.

“What did they know that the majority of business people didn’t?”

 “Why is it that most businesses are totally dependent on their owners? Where the owners and managers are trapped inside their businesses and can’t leave for any extended period of time. Like a real vacation.”

Much like the development of glass, a time-proven body of business knowledge has been discovered over the centuries thru trial and error. These are the Wisdoms that are the keys to building super successful businesses.

Today if you want to send files around the world you don’t have to invent them and make your own fiber optics cables. Likewise if you want to create a very successful business, you don’t have to go into your lab and experience all the failure from “trial by error”.

In applying these wisdoms some have been able to live a life that most only dream about.  Their success, like silica/glass was built upon previous discoveries of the preceding generations. Each new discovery added another layer of time-proven business wisdoms.

Up until the last few hundred years most of these time-tested business wisdoms were concentrated in the hands of the ultra-wealthy. Those who could afford to learn how to read and to go to school.

With the invention of the printing press thousands of business books were published which has helped to more widely disseminate what others have already figured out.

With fiber optics it is now possible to access thousands of blogs, podcasts, and ebooks from anywhere in the world at any time. You can attend virtual seminars, and even communicate with mentors & coaches on the other side of the planet.

The time-proven success wisdom-pieces that have been accumulated over time can now more quickly and dramatically be accessed by you almost anywhere altering your trajectory into a fantastic life that previously was only available to the wealthy.

All that is required is a desire and commitment to put in the work and educate yourself. Yes it takes work. Yet it is the type of work that is extremely rewarding on many levels.

Woody Hayes, the legendary football coach was fond of saying:

“If it comes easy, it’s not worth a damn.”

You now have the potential of providing yourself and your family with a life of financial and time freedom. Freedom to do what you want when you want it. This potential also affords you the opportunity to share what you learn with others to enhance their lives, and the lives of their families. The reality here is that to do exceptionally well these days, all you have-to-do is learn what others have already paid the price to figure out; “How the pieces of business success best fit together” and become a reality in your life.