Essential to the success of my career and the growth of my perspective are many elements of history, but right now I want to point us to a concept known in philosophy as hedonism.
The idea of maximising pleasure and minimising pain, I learned this just over a decade ago when I was a senior in highschool. After highschool I took a diploma in accounting and what did I find there, I found hedonism again.
But what does hedonism have to do with profit or accounting?
Well in accounting I was not learning to maximise pleasure per say, I was learning marginal cost in cost accounting. However that idea was simply, maximise productivity compared to cost, or how much profit can I make for how little an expense.
Now we have maximise pleasure, minimise pain,
&
Maximize profit, minimise cost.
These two concepts are really important in my philosophies and the philosophies of my consulting. We want to take the most good for the least bad. This allows for exponential growth in the world of business. As many great business empires have been built off of.
IKEA for example, was build on buying less desirable items in bulk and selling them individually for a good profit. https://www.ikea.com/ms/en_JP/about_ikea/the_ikea_way/history/index.html
We as a society are going to continue to learn from nature going forward as we as a species wake up to our true potential and at that point we will flip the entire board of perceived value on it’s head.
However in the mean time, I want to leave you with this simple rule I live by.
Maximise the good, minimise the bad.
Whether we are talking in terms of good and bad, profit, cost, joy, time, or any such comparative relationship. When we perceive our best, we can be our best.