Have more sex and get more money

Have I got your attention? Good. Getting other people’s attention is what propels most of the Internet. Actually, all of the Internet. There’d be nothing on the Internet at all otherwise. And elsewhere in the real world there’d be no advertising; no books written; no films made; no music recorded; no photographs taken; no television programmes; no news journalism; no paintings; no labour strikes and no terrorism. I want your attention because, well, not just the warm and cosy feeling of gratification and validation, which is the most direct immediate result, but also via a more circuitous route of increasing the probability of being able to offer something of value to you, and thus increasing the risk of being rewarded appropriately in the long run.

One of the interesting things about the unintuitive nature of our networking relationships is not only that the quantity of connections follows a scale-free power-law progression, but also that the type of relationships matter somewhat too. In real life, our interpersonal networking tends to take two dominant directions — business or friendship relationships. Business relationships are often about provider / client differentials. Sometimes they’re about equal relationships, in which one side provides something that the other side is lacking in, and vice-versa — basically, acting as contra-operating provider / client relationships. Friendship relationships are complicated. There are several initial condition situations, and several strategy choices to run the relationship by.

The initial conditions may begin in the playground as “best friends” learning that people offer value and we can consume that value — but within a fairly innocent and basic notion of transactional value. As we grow up, we experience romance, which modifies our idea of value. Into adulthood, some get the hang of how those relationships can impact our social effect. We experience the extrinsic value of having a partner, that the relationship itself can have an effect on your network fitness. Hence, some people even collect relationships. Others may observe other’s relationships and hanker after similar situations without easily achieving anywhere near as many followers.

Perhaps more traction to escalate ones network fitness is gained through personal relationships than what we term as business relationships. This is not to say that one should attempt to have sex with as many partners as possible in order to widen one’s connections. One only has to look at cultures which consider baby mothers and absent fathers to be the norm. Those involved in such highly connected networks are not necessarily enjoying a high powered state of business success. It’s often quite the contrary, with more mouths to feed, limitations placed upon times and places, and consequently not accessing a rich range of rational choices for progress — like dragging an anchor.

Very often a partner is supportive and will believe in you when times are bleak. It’s tempting to think that if one partner in a relationship supplies such a lot of help, then why not simply increase the amount of relationships? However, the stability of one single relationship for a longer term may prove more valuable than the immediate benefits of a highly varied relationship scene, if for no other reason than long-term reputation. But this shouldn’t prevent being promiscuous in other associations that are not romantic. Perhaps the best way forward in business is having learned a lot about the value of interpersonal relationships, to go full circle and return to being a bit more like we were in the playground again, with networks of multiple “best friends” innocently evaluated by reputation, loyalty, and support.

Sequence is important

The order in which we do things is very important. Initial conditions are important. What happens next is important. I’m not any kind of cook, but I imagine that cooking is probably like this too — you can’t just empty all the ingredients at once into a receptacle and cook it and end up with a three course dinner. Or maybe you can, I’ve no idea. I doubt there’s really an endeavour in life in which it doesn’t matter at all in which order you do things. Not important activities, anyway. Even making a cup of tea is a religious matter — milk in first or last?*

Let me ask you a question. What comes next:
1 2 3

If you answered 4, that’s a perfectly logical response, but if you answered 5, you’re also correct.

How is 5 the next in the sequence? Well, we might be just beginning a Fibonacci sequence. Let me present it in a more correct way:

0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 and so on.

Let’s say you have the first number — 0.
Let’s say you put in a second number — 1.
These two numbers represent our initial condition.

Now, take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. Take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. Take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. And so on. This is the process we will apply.

Well, life’s a lot like this. We have initial conditions, and we have processes.

The initial conditions may be the way we’re born, for example. We’re born into certain families with certain belief systems and certain attitudes to wealth (or more usually, a lack of it), and certain ways of looking at the world, wherever in the world we’ve had the luck to be born. Or, you could think of initial conditions as where you are now. What you’ve got now. What you start with if you were to start now. If you’re about to embark on a big change in your life from now on, you have to take it from where you are now, who you are now and what you’ve got now. Those are your initial conditions.

The processes we might also call strategies. A strategy is simply a predictable repeatable already-defined approach to doing things, applied no matter what. Occasionally we find the strategy doesn’t work effectively so we have to do something on the spot, something exceptional, some made up fix, instead of following the plan, just enough to get us back to the strategy. We call these tactics.

A tactical approach deals with cases as they occur, each in a specific way.

A strategic approach deals with everything according to a defined process.

With the Fibonacci sequence, the strategy is simple, as I said above, “take the two most recent numbers, add them and this is your next number” and then do it again and keep doing it. No matter what the last two numbers on the stack are. Doesn’t matter. Don’t care. As long as there’s two numbers on the top of the stack, we’ll take them, add them, push the result onto the top of the stack, and then do the whole operation again and again. That’s the strategy. That’s the process. That’s the thing we do in life. If you have a specific approach to life, if you respond to things that happen in a characteristic way (you know, according to your character), if you have your way of doing things, then you have a strategy and you’ll do it no matter what, to whatever happens. Doesn’t matter, don’t care, just do the strategy as usual, it got us this far so it must be the correct thing to do.

If you change the strategy to a different strategy, let’s say, “take the two most recent numbers, divide the newer one by the older one and chuck away the remainder, and this is your next number” and you run this strategy over and over, you will get a totally different result. You’ll end up at a different destination, even from the same beginnings.

As I say, life’s a lot like this. There are people with comfortable beginnings, and people with tough beginnings. There are people who have a certain strategy to what happens in life, and there are other people who have a different strategy to what happens. Some people seem to have no strategy, treating everything as it comes on a tactical basis but in reality, this is some kind of strategy in itself (not a particularly strong one, though). Change one part of the initial state of the fibonacci sequence and apply the same process and you get a different result — try this:

Instead of 

0 1 1 2 etc

run it beginning

3 1 etc

see what you get. Same process, different initial conditions. Totally different destination in life. Busy millionaire instead of daytime telly on the sofa. Unfortunately, we can’t very well do much about who we are, the family we’re born into, the country, the economy, the educational opportunities planned from birth, etc. We can’t even do much about where we are today, retrospectively — we can’t go back to yesterday and make a change. We take it from where we are now. What we can change, though, is the process in our lives. The strategy. We can re-strategise any time we like, and if we like the results, stick to it as though it’s a proper strategy and we meant to do it like that all along. The strategy we live by is a specific sequence. Put the milk in first, every time, or put the milk in last, every time? Or put the milk in first if it’s a teapot and last if it’s a teabag in a mug. It’s a sequence, it’s a process, it’s a strategy.

* The answer is last, if you’re using a teabag, first if you’re using a poncy teapot — the teabag requires tea to brew at pretty much boiling point. If you let cold milk cool the hot water before it has a chance to perform the action you just end up with tea-coloured hot water instead of a proper cuppa. However, if you think you live in the Edwardian era and use a teapot, then the brewing occurs in the teapot, unhindered by the cooling effects of cold milk, and therefore the tea can be poured into cups that already have a bit of milk. This would have been a necessity in the olde times as the bone china in those days was quite prone to fracturing with contact with boiling hot water, and the milk in the cup helps avoid this outcome. As you see, the initial conditions followed by the sequence of the process consequently applied is important. Especially with tea, which is of course of utmost importance.