Want Some Short Term Gain and Long Term Pain? Also, Malta.

“In 1539, the Knight Templars of Malta paid tribute to Charles V of Spain by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels.  But pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery . . .” – The Maltese Falcon

In Malta they don’t check your bags for guns, they check them with guns.

Sometimes advice that is good for a country is really bad for an individual.  I tried building my own navy once, and it was an abysmal failure, since I’ve never lived near water all the ships just sat on the gravel.  Thankfully it was still enough of a navy that France surrendered anyway.  So, memo to self:  don’t build a navy 1000 miles away from water unless you want to take Paris.

But why beat on France?  I’ve discovered that on this blog, it’s really okay to trash-talk the French because in the last year I’ve gotten more traffic from Malta than I have from France on an absolute basis.  On a per capita basis, Malta is ahead on visitor count of any place in the world.  The United States is second, but it’s gaining ground.  Malta, spread the word!

I digress because it’s late and I’m a bit punchy – so I’ll get back to the point.  One place where the advice for a country and the advice for an individual both make sense is when it comes to know-how.  Where does know-how come from?  Sweat.

I had a boss fairly early in my career (technically a grand-boss, i.e., my boss’s boss) who was fairly fond of saying, especially when assigning a task that would entail huge hours of overtime and personal sacrifice, “Think of it as short-term pain for long-term gain.”  He’d smile when he said it, but that didn’t make it better.

Being young and stupid, we grumbled about what he was saying:  “What does he know?  It’s always short-term pain.  We’ll never get to the long-term gain.”  This was exactly the type of short-sightedness you’d expect out of a kid.  And we were kids, really.  We also worked our butts off while we were in our twenties, and most people who started in that group did okay.  The short-term pain translated (finally) into long-term gain.

Please donate to Malta so they can end this horrible poverty.

It’s that way for individuals.  Is it that way for countries, too?

Yes, absolutely.

When you do something productive, anything productive, you learn.  You learn as an individual.  You learn as a company.  You learn as a country.  If you do it right, it’s painful.  It’s hard.  It’s work.  It’s frustrating.  And when you finally win?  It’s exhilarating.

If you do a really, really, really good job?  You get rewarded, by trying to do it again.

And those results are consistent between an individual, a company, and a country.

Imagine a kid who was born wealthy.  Given tutors.  Given “help” getting into a good college.  Coasted in college.  Coasted in Daddy’s company.  Unless Daddy was very, very wealthy, the kid will ruin the company as he runs the company.  Why?  The kid never had to work, never had to learn.

The entire life of the child was built around pain-avoidance.

Okay, I’ll admit, that water looks the complete opposite of painful.  I guess I wouldn’t learn anything there.

I’m not going to blame wealth – wealth is neither moral nor immoral.  I’ve known wealthy kids who were better people than I’ll ever be.  I’ve known wealthy kids who weren’t worth gum on the bottom of my sneaker.  But poverty is no virtue, either.  I’ve met horrible people who had no money.  And, again, I’ve met people who were dead broke that could qualify for sainthood.

Morality aside (for the moment) the one thing I know about effective people is that they know how to work hard.  They are driven.  Most of them, wealthy or not, were not spoiled.

Pain and sweat is good for companies, too.  It makes them shed employees, it makes them focus on the things they do that actually provide value to the customer.  Or they die.  And the death of inefficient companies is good – those resources can go to companies that can be efficient, can meet the needs of their customers, like PEZ®.

But the critical step is playing the game.  If iPhones® aren’t made in the United States, we simply won’t know how to make them.  Certainly someone knows how to make them, but it’s not Apple™.  I won’t argue that Apple© designed the phone, but there is a world of difference between designing a complex integrated electronic component and building it.  In building iPhones™, the Chinese have solved the technical details on how to implement that design and how to stack all the apps behind that sheet of glass so they don’t fall out.  I’m relatively certain (though I’m not in those meetings) that Chinese teams from the manufacturer meet regularly with the Apple™ teams on design.  The Chinese teams tell Apple® most of what Apple© wants to know, but the Chinese teams learn:

• Global logistics
• Effective employee training
• What stock options are
• Management of complex system integration
• Where the best restaurants are in Palo Alto
• Quality control

All of that’s pretty good, but they also develop the teams on ground – the engineering know-how to solve the production problems that invariably start.  You might have a complete set of drawings of a baby, but you certainly don’t know how to build one from start to finish.  Nobody does.

Oh, wait.  You probably do.  Okay, pretend the baby is a 1966 Mustang™.  That you don’t know how to build from start to finish.  You have to go all the way from smelting iron to figuring out how to put numbers on the AM radio dial.

That’s (one of) the problems that we have getting into space nowadays.  We forgot how to build the Apollo stuff.  Certainly we know, for instance, what chemicals went into the heat shield on the Apollo command module, but we had to figure out how to build one in 2018 – the engineers who did it in the first place are all retired.  My bet is that they didn’t figure out how to build it the way they did in the 1960’s – they probably figured out a new solution.

More fun facts:  If you stacked all of the current residents of Rome in the Pantheon, someone would arrest you, unless they were at the bottom of the stack.

This isn’t the first time we’ve lost technology.  The Romans used concrete to build many structures, including the largest un-reinforced concrete dome ever – at 142 feet in diameter.  How do we know this?  The dome still exists today – it’s in Rome, and it’s called the Pantheon, and like your mother, it’s almost 2,000 years old.  Yes it’s made of concrete, as in concrete just like your garage floor is made of.  But after the Goths came over for an extended visit, the Romans . . . forgot how to make it.  Consequently, concrete wasn’t “invented” again until 1824, and we weren’t that great with it until 1900 or so.  The Romans had a quality of concrete that was so good, it wasn’t until the last few decades that we were able to match it, and some of the properties we still can’t figure out.

We don’t have records on all the failures and sweat that the Romans had as they perfected their concrete, but they were good at it.

This floor could break a LOT of plates.

But as the Romans learned, if you don’t make stuff anymore, you forget how to do it.  You specialize it, you ship it abroad.  The Romans didn’t have time for nasty old industries like making dinner plates, so they shipped it off to a lower labor cost area in what’s now France.  Archaeologists know this because when they sifted through the trash, they found these really nice plates.  But after Rome fell, trade fell off with France, and the factories closed because they didn’t have customers.  Archaeologists love plates because people break them on a periodic basis, and even more often if there are teenage boys in the house.  Thus, they go into the trash at a regular rate, and you can date the trash by the style of plate.

In the trash 100 years after the fall of the Empire (in the west), the plates were rough.  Even the most wealthy people ate off of plates that were inferior in every way to the plates common people had easy access to in the past.  The future didn’t get better, because the Romans forgot.

I worry sometimes that we’re the wealthy spoiled kid, shipping off our work to other people so that they learn how to do it while we ship them money that we’ve printed out of nothing, short-term gain for long-term pain.  But that’s okay.

Based on the recent protests in France, I think the French are planning something.  Maybe they’ll surrender to Malta?

Nah.  The Maltese are too good for the French.

Pantheon photo:  By Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via wikimedia

Malta floor photo:  By Sudika [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] via wikimedia