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You are the boss of a company of one. Your company sells labor to the labor market, it makes investments in assets, it borrows funds, etc. It’s your job to de

• powvans 5y ago
  I think this is a great way to look at things and would just like to add that when you have a spouse and children, aka additional stakeholders, it's not exactly a business of one.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• srveale 5y ago
  > When truly internalise that fact is when you become an adult. Implying that everyone who runs a company is mature and makes responsible decisions, which is not true.
  • mc32 5y ago
    Not all companies survive. Some companies, like people survive despite odd choices due to corruption, etc.
    • ryanbrunner 5y ago
      We live in societies that find it unacceptable for people to fail, to varying degrees depending on where in the world you are, and at least personally, that's a difference between companies and people that I'd like to maintain and even strengthen.
• s_dev 5y ago
  >You are the boss of a company of one. This is a poor analogy and and an analogy that isn't needed (what exactly have you simplified for the reader here -- the concept of self-determination?). Not sure why you think that every person is basically a temporarily embarrassed CEO of a minuscule company and then to grandstand on that as if anyone who doesn't subscribe hasn't hit the same threshold of maturity.
  • Jensson 5y ago
    > every person is basically a temporarily embarrassed CEO That wasn't the point. The point is that businesses are people, so people are businesses. And while regular businesses can be run by a separate CEO, the business of your own person can only be run by yourself, so you got to learn to think like a real CEO to run the business of your person, even though this business will never have more than one member.
    • Rury 5y ago
      And the counterpoint being made here is that: you can tell yourself that, but it's not true. Why? Because bussinesses aren't people, rather businesses are made up of people. People aren't businesses, people do business. You can tell yourself "you got to learn to think like a real CEO to run the business of your person" and "make good decisions" or else "you will fail". Or you can tell yourself "I am my own man (CEO), I can decide what my goals are, and what's considered success/failure. And I have decided that I don't actually want nor have to work so hard". The day you can do that, is the day you hold a huge component to being happy.
  • decebalus1 5y ago
    I think it's a great analogy. It's a shift in mindset, don't take it literally, the point isn't that you're a temporarily embarrassed CEO.. the point is that for example when you interview for a position, don't think about it in terms of getting a job, but in terms of a business transaction (ie you also interview the company) or, when you're constantly in crunch mode, ask yourself whether or not your 'company' is being taken for a ride under an unfair contract. You trade time, health, mental energy for money and health insurance (and/or reputation or whatever you get from your job). That's pretty much it. We (well, most of us) live in free countries, so if the business transaction does not benefit you, you're free to take your 'business' elsewhere.
• verisimi 5y ago
  > When you truly internalise that fact is when you become an adult. When you truly internalise that life is about making money, that you need to make a good return for your stakeholders (aka family), etc is the day when you have been fully assimilated into the borg.
• adenozine 5y ago
  Do you have kids? This makes no sense from my perspective. I could literally put myself through anything that I needed to, if it meant the safety or well-being of my children. It's not a company, it's a primal force from thousands of years of primordial reinforcement. I'd manage with less capital, so that my kids have a chance at college. I'd manage with less chance of promotion, so that my kids can have my presence at important functions. I'd manage with anything that arose, if it meant something better for them. I think it's important to understand, and deeply internalize the personal responsibility that adult life brings and the extent to which our decisions influence the things that end up happening, but this analogy of yours borders on psychosis if taken to it's literal end. A little deeper still, and I think what you're really pointing at is the boundary that decisions can't cross, that certain things are out of our control. Risk management can come into play, but ultimately risk can never be negated. You can only shift it. You can evade the risk of being run over by a bus by never leaving home, but maybe that raises the risk of dying in a house fire, or by being poisoned by lead paint, etc. These aren't "company decisions" they're just a byproduct of life in the natural realm. I sincerely hope that you don't actually conduct this thinking deep into your lifestyle, perceiving things as though one big company spreadsheet of assets and liabilities. Much love, friend.
  • allisdust 5y ago
    To expand the analogy further, your children are the shareholders of course and your partner is the board (:
    • adenozine 5y ago
      I dare not imagine my wife's response if I were to say this to her.
      • AitchEmArsey 5y ago
        "You're fired"
  • bobkazamakis 5y ago
    I don't see how changing the perspective of selling labor to ...selling labor really jumps the gap into psychosis.
• shuntress 5y ago
  I notice you forgot to mention mutually beneficial collaborations, soft skills, and "intangibles". Through unofficial back channel communication between my company and yours I would like to suggest you work on refining your metaphor to include these things more prominently. Also maybe don't focus so much on _"Personal Responsibility"_.
• Toine 5y ago
  From a certain extreme perspective, there is some truth to what you're saying, but wow, this is so one-sided, extreme, partial and damaging. What decades of neo liberal brainwashing has done to people. This is so sad, really. We are NOT companies, we're not robots only driven by free will, we don't live in an economy. We are hardcore social animals with huge biological & affective needs, this is scientifically proven. I hope young people don't read this and blindly believe it.
  • danielvaughn 5y ago
    I think you're severely misreading the original comment, and to be frank, your interpretation is pretty juvenile. Nowhere does the person say that we are robots.
    • ravenstine 5y ago
      Yeah, I took it as rather the opposite of saying that we are robots. Ultimately, being responsible for one's self is a choice, which is something robots can't do.
      • danielvaughn 5y ago
        Right. I didn't even take it as disagreeing with the piece - there's enough nuance there to see harmony between the post and the comment.
    • beaconstudios 5y ago
      the parent is critiquing the argument that we are all homo economicus - an agent whose primary function is to operate within the market at maximum efficiency to optimise for profit. The counterargument is that no, we aren't, and optimising for market exploitation is both an effort in frustration and anathema to human wellbeing. The GP is encouraging us to act like robots by living our lives in accordance with market calculations, not human actualisation and need-fulfilment. It's an ideological position, and a harmful one at that. We aren't all totally independent actors competing in a ruthless market to maximise profits.
• lliamander 5y ago
  The amount of bad faith interpretation and just missing the point in response to this solid bit of career advice is just astounding.
  • vkou 5y ago
    There'd probably be a lot less bad faith interpretation if it didn't end with a double-zinger of 'And once you reduce your life to a neo-liberal economic model, is when you will finally grow up and become an adult'. That last part in particular poisons the rest. Sure, it could be interpreted in good faith, but as it's so damn condescending - why put the work in?
    • saiya-jin 5y ago
      I don't get these knee-jerk reactions, clearly a lot of people here are putting their wishful statements into his mouth/keyboard - where I see none. Take ownership of your life, nobody else will. Set priorities straight, nobody else will. Beware of far-reaching mistakes, you can screw up your life irreparably, nobody is going to magically save you like in Hollywood stories. What the heck? These are some solid life advises. They are crystal clear to any adults, yet so many people fail with those, often badly, and their lives are ruins. Were you told these things at least once when growing up in a manner that actually sticked with you? I didn't and for sure I wish I did (I ended up all right but I believe I had more luck than average and sometimes risked way too much)
    • lliamander 5y ago
      > 'And once you reduce your life to a neo-liberal economic model, is when you will finally grow up and become an adult' Case in point. You use quotes, and some of the words are the same, but what the author actually said and what you think the author said are just different things. It's not even about giving the benefit of the doubt for something that was poorly worded. I just don't think you understand what was actually written.
    • caffeine 5y ago
      > And once you reduce your life to a neo-liberal economic model, is when you will finally grow up and become an adult I apologise. It’s not what I meant, in two different ways: 1. You’re not JUST a company. 2. The adult realisation isn’t that you’re a company - it’s that you’re responsible, and your decisions have Real Consequences. I wish I could write more clearly. I made an edit to try to address this. Thanks.
• ausbah 5y ago
  people aren't perfectly rational individualistic economic agents. no one operates like this and expecting anyone to do so is psychotic and dehumanizing this reads like a teenager, or ironically someone who never mentally moved past the point of being a teenager, who just read Atlas Shrugged for the first time
• dxbydt 5y ago
  ffs. Humans have lived on the planet for 200000 years. This way of organizing people as a company interacting with the labor market with assets & investments & risk management...is at best a 100 years old. Its like a drop in the ocean of time. That said, when I was taking courses in Finance as a young 20 something, I came up with this same exact analogy & took it to its logical end - I conceived a stock exchange called the Human Stock Exchange, where every human being was a human stock ticker, and if you liked the performance of your colleagues you would buy their human stock so their human stock price would go up. You could sell short the poorly performing colleagues on your team...its a pretty toxic concept, if you think through it. Ofcourse, since its such a toxic idea, given the extremely virtuous nature of our benign species, this toxic idea must already exist & thrive. See for instance Will Smith's stock taking a beating after what happened yesterday - https://www.hsx.com/security/view/WSMIT https://www.hsx.com/security/view/WSMIT
  • bsedlm 5y ago
    > I conceived a stock exchange called the Human Stock Exchange, where every human being was a human stock ticker, I've had a very vague (somewhat similar) idea that I'm stil trying to articulate well. something like what you said but the stock is run on a blockchain then every person can emit their own stock which can get traded around. at some point, the emitter person must (somehow) be made to respond for what they emitted. naturally, some people will be reliable (and their emited credits will have high value) and others will constantly flop and default so nobody will be interested in having lots of their credit. so far, this "idea" (which is just barely a sketch) poses more problems than solutions (maybe it's a bit of a barely-baked idea looking for a problem?) but it's fun to think about what else we could possibly do that nobody's thoght to do yet.
    • caffeine 5y ago
      Ha it’s actually sort of already happening with NFTs. If your celebrity status goes up your NFT value does too.
  • ozim 5y ago
    What is your idea of how people were living for most of that history? You think being human stock ticker is worse than: living on average 25 years, starving most of your life, having high chance of being literal slave not figurative, being ostracized and killed for any silly reason by local community, being dumped into trash or simply killed if local community found you were not useful or weak So if you take it into perspective of 200000 years - being human ticker is actually really nice and comfortable.
• cool_dude85 5y ago
  Wait, I can think of myself as a company selling my labor power on the labor market? Interesting thought experiment, let's see where it goes. I sell this commodity on the market, to whom? Business owners, I guess. And this is a weird one: I actually have to sell this commodity on the market, if I want to eat and live and all. So does almost everyone else. But the buyers have other options, so I guess everyone on the sell side basically has to undercut each other til there's no more profit left on our side. What does it mean if I'm not profiting, I sell my labor at the cost of production? Best I can hope for is find an inefficiency and hope to eke out a little bit myself until I can afford to be a buyer? Maybe the whole thing doesn't quite work. Yeah, I'd say internalizing the, uh, implications of this setup is pretty much a requirement for being a grown adult.
  • lliamander 5y ago
    > But the buyers have other options That's not always an assumption that holds. Many "buyers of labor" in the tech sector right now are very limited on their options, whereas the "labor sellers" have many options. > Best I can hope for is find an inefficiency and hope to eke out a little bit myself until I can afford to be a buyer? You will always be a buyer of some things and a seller of others. "Spending" your time to invest in rare and valuable skills that you can "sell" on the labor market can net you very nice returns.
• zormino 5y ago
  Wow people are not liking this for some reason. This way of thinking about selling your labour in a market is exactly why it's called the labour market. People selling labour need to understand how the market works in order to participate in the most advantageous way for their own situationq. Nothing said here detracts from the fact that the calculus of how you go about this changes with your priorities, for example having children might lower your risk tolerance when deciding where to sell your labour, so maybe the 'company of one' way of naming it doesn't fit, but the concept is solid. It isn't meant to gut you of your humanity, just provide a thought framework to make sure you are competing in the market fairly.
• AlwaysRock 5y ago
  Companies === People. People === Companies. Understood.
• weregiraffe 5y ago
  >When you truly internalise that last fact is when you become an adult. When you truly internalise that last fact is when you truly internalize capitalism. Congratulations. There will be no prize.
• TheGigaChad 5y ago
• mathattack 5y ago
  I was trying to disagree with you on the point of becoming an adult, and I couldn’t come up with one.
• screye 5y ago
  There is are 2 assumptions here, that needs to stated more loudly. 1: "Companies maximize profits. Humans maximize utility. Profits != utility" 2: "Profits are absolute. Utility is perceived." Utility is an under-defined combination of components on Maslow's pyramid. Even more vexing, is the realization that these components vary from concrete (health, food, shelter) to hedonistically moving targets (social acclaim, money, material wants) to merely perceived (self-actualization). The term: "under-defined combination" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Because some utilities are uncomparable. 'Time spent with your children' cannot be quantified in corresponding wealth or social acclaim. Till date, I am yet to find a better compact representation (meme) of the human condition than Maslow's pyramid. However, to a more technical audience I prefer the 'RL agent' analogy. A human is an RL agent in a weakly observed universe. The utility function it weakly defined, expected outcomes vary from true outcomes and you can only control your action space. As any RL researcher will tell you; an agent tries to maximize their utility. However, they must periodically update the utility function itself and the manner in which the world is observed. This directly applies to humans. Every once in a while, use previous experiences to re-evaluate your perception of the world. Reflect on the very foundational drivers of your goals with this new perception in mind. Find new goals. In between these iterations, a person focuses on reaching whatever their current perception of the goal is, until the next iteration. This RL model is incredibly effective. If each iteration leads to massive changes in goals, then 'regularize' or use 'RMSE' on your utility function. If each iteration sees too little change and your utility isn't good enough; then you're stuck in a local minima. Increase your learning rate and lean more on exploration (try something new) instead of exploitation (staying your course).
• mesozoic 5y ago
  Or as Jay-Z puts it "I'm not a business man. I'm a business, man."
• ls-lah_33 5y ago
  > You are the boss of a company of one Nitpick, but companies have limited liability, natural persons do not. It's for that reason that I would probably never get hired if I actually was an employee of a "company of one" (formed me for example). Companies would obviously prefer to contract with me directly, not my company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability