The Business Opportunity That Ruined Our Lives
"The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant." - Max De Pree
Your Problems are Trivial: Imagine a fictional society that has unlimited wealth, unlimited health, and permanent peace. Would they be overflowing with joy? Probably not. I think their defining characteristic would be how trivial and absurd their grievances would be. They’d be enraged that their maid was 10 minutes late, stressed about whether their lawn was green enough, or despondent that their child didn’t get into Harvard... In each case, the world can get better but people don’t feel it – they can even feel like they’re going backwards – because once a problem is solved it’s replaced by a new one, often with the same level of anxiety, fear, and anger.
https://collabfund.com/blog/minimum-levels-of-stress/
The Exciting Business Opportunity That Ruined Our Lives: The first time I recall my mother mentioning Amway, we were in the car late at night, coming back from a meeting at her boss’s house. Ten years old, I’d gone upstairs to play and missed the whole point of the whiteboard sitting on an easel downstairs. My mother, however, had been rapt. Riding home with my brother and stepfather, she seemed almost to glow, as if she were throwing off sparks in the darkness. The name Amway, she told me, was short for the “American Way.” We could sign up and buy products we already needed for the house, then sign up friends and neighbors to buy things, too. We would get rich by earning a little bit from everything they sold.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/amway-america/681479/
Narrative Structuring for Storytelling: Several years ago, I heard a podcaster explain how Marvel uses the four-act structure. Basically, they have the usual first act and second act, but then the climax of the third act is overcoming their internal flaw, belief or misunderstanding of the world. The fourth act is the action climax. You can see this really well in the first Thor movie. Act 1 is him being Thor as usual up to the inciting incident of getting banished. Act two is him on earth, trying to get his hammer back and learning to appreciate humans. Act three is when he brings war to humanity, realizes how horrible it is and gives his life to get Loki to stop attacking the town. Act four is him rising from the dead, getting to Asgard and kicking Loki's ass. Then there's a little falling action. I don't know if that four-act structure holds throughout the Marvel movies, but it seems to work well in origin stories where the protagonist has to overcome some internal struggle before he can know enough, or be strong enough, to take on the external antagonist.
