Russell Nagami's Blog

Movies have it right, games have it wrong.  In a movie there’s always that one genius scientist/engineer/madman that does all the coolest stuff and knows everything, you know who I’m talking about.  They save the day with science, somehow program a virus in an alien language, and just in general act as deus ex machina with a few pieces of sciency sounding jargon thrown in.

But games (and most companies) treat scientists/engineers as a number.  I was just playing XCOM and the way the games works is that you need X scientists to research something or Y engineers to build something.  I’ll take 1 Albert Einstein over a hundred run of the mill scientists any day.  I could rant for awhile about this, but I think you get my drift.

The economy doesn’t make sense in my eyes.  It’s something I enjoy thinking about and I wanted to share this thought with you.

What if everyone, tomorrow, stopped drinking coffee?  What would be the impact to the economy?

Aside from a very small group of people (military, boat captains, anyone required to remain focused for 12 hours or more per day), I posit that coffee is wholly unnecessary.  Some may call BS, say that they need their coffee, but I bet if they gave it up for a week and found some more time to sleep by cutting something out of their lives, they would feel a lot better and laugh at the thought that they needed coffee.

So back to the question at hand, what would happen if the world dropped coffee?  A quick google search says in 2011 Starbucks employed ~150,000 people, and that’s just one chain.  Just as a quick estimate let’s say 300,000 people worldwide have a job directly tied to the selling of coffee.  So, 300,000 people, roughly the population of Anaheim, CA, are now out of a job.  Everyone that grows coffee beans is now out of a job (but they can re-purpose their land).  Everyone that ships coffee, builds coffee makers, and sells anything coffee related (filters, creamer, etc) has lost some if not all their business, and likely sitting on a lot of now useless inventory (although they can slowly unload that on the small number of people that actually require coffee).  In essence, the economy would be negatively affected.  Update: if you believe Business Insider over 25 million people have jobs directly tied to coffee.

So the global economy is going to take a small but noticeable hit and hundreds of thousands of lives will be affected.  But in reality, what’s changed in the world?  The same amount of farm land would exist, the same semi trucks and shipping aircraft would still exist, and in essence if you think about the resources of the planet, they would all actually increase.  More farm land freed up by not growing coffee.  300,000 plus people now free to work other jobs.  A few dollars a day extra in every coffee drinker’s pocket.

And yet, the way our economy is set up, despite all the positives, this would be a negative event.  Weird right?

My cousin posted on facebook recently about the number of steps she took and it got me thinking about some things.  Mainly: who cares how many steps you took?  If you take 5000 steps a day and I take 2500, and I get compliments on my body all the time and you don’t, who comes out ahead?

In business it is common knowledge that “what gets measured gets done.”  Applying this thought to different measurements is very powerful.  For example, who cares how many clicks your ad got if revenues didn’t go up?  Who cares how many units you sold if you didn’t make enough money to break even?

So why not apply this common business knowledge to self improvement?

After some hard thinking the answer became obvious:  many people would rather feel good about what they’re doing than see actual results.  It’s very easy to look at a step counter and say it’s going up than to look in the mirror and say you’ve seen no improvement.  Why?  Because then you’d have to admit you were wrong.  Then you’d have to come up with a new idea on how to improve your body image.  Then you’d have to do some real work.

So remember: don’t measure self improvement by how you feel, measure it with objective results.

The great things in life can’t be measured, and that’s okay.  Who can say who is more enlightened than who?  More happy?  But that doesn’t matter unless you’re insecure and must compare everything you do with other people

Some other interesting things that get measured and are unimportant:

• Anything to do with cars that isn’t gas mileage or cost/maintenance costs.  Oh it has 500 hp, but who cares if the speedlimit is 65 mph.  Oh it has a suspension twice as responsive as an economy car, but who cares if I drive in the city all the time.
• Height – it’s pretty interesting how our society values height, when really it objectively doesn’t do anything for you unless you’re a wall painter or stock boy.  Beauty is similar: they are only valuable in that other people value them.  Beauty is valuable because you can make money as a model, actress, or trophy wife.  If it couldn’t be used for such, it would be meaningless.
• CPU/graphics card power.  Can I play the same games as you with a cheaper computer?  Then I don’t care how fast your game is.
• Calories – anyone who counts calories is a complete an utter moron, or completely and utterly ignorant.  The only reason to count calories is to gain weight or measure up for a prize fight.  Powerlifters force themselves to eat X protein calories a day to keep or increase muscle size.  No one that counts calories loses weight.  There are people that are thin and count calories to maintain, but what they do isn’t useful to someone trying to lose weight.  Much like someone watching how I study math wouldn’t succeed by copying me, since they wouldn’t be asian.
• Times gone to gym, martial arts class, etc.  If you go to the gym 5x a week and I never go and I look better, you’re doing something wrong.  If you go to martial arts class and someone tha’ts gone half the time kicks your ass, you’re doing something wrong.  In terms of improvement, someone more effective will get further with less time. Of course if you go to those things to just burn off steam then it’s moot if someone is better than you.