See the Magic

Transcript

So I wanted to talk to you about seeing the magic.

The other day I watched this movie on Netflix it’s called Money Ball.

And it’s got Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, it’s based on the true story based on the athletic’s baseball team in the United States.

What’s happens is, Brad Pitt’s character I think his name is Bean, he sees that they have a small budget as a baseball team.

There’s no way they’re going to win by trying to fight for the best players. So he starts talking to Jonah Hill who is an economist and analyst with a great passion for baseball and inspired by a certain book trying to do statistical analysis on baseball players.

They set out to find players who are very cheap comparatively. So instead of playing 5 million dollars a year for a ball player they’re going to pay 250,000 a year. That means they can afford a much better team in the end.

To do that they have to overlook certain things or ask how can we get value?

In one scene Jonah Hill says “Look, this character is a very good pitcher but people don’t want him because he throws funny. He has an unusual style and because of that people don’t want to hire him”

But they see past that, they see something special. They see the value in this fellow who has something unusual about him.

The reason I tell you this as I’ve said before there is value everywhere and it can be monetary value.

Many years ago when I first learned about bitcoin, I remember trying to tell people about it. It was hard for me to communicate why it was so special but I had that eye for looking for the value in something.

There’s a famous entreprenuer maybe I won’t mention his name but he was famous in part because he had this talent and philosophy of finding value in human beings and he would say things like when you go into a gold mind, you do not go looking for dirt.

Of course you go looking for gold and when you can ask that question, what is magical about this, what is special about this person. What is awesome about this situation?

Of course as I said it results in monetary value but there are greater rewards than that.

I also think about a certain study, about luck.

So what happened was they said “Alright you’re going to look through this newspaper” at the test subjects, a couple hundred uni students and you say “if you find a certain classified in this newspaper then I’m going to give you 10 dollars for the study.”

Many of these students go looking in the newspaper but what they weren’t aware of was there was another classified in the newspaper that says “If you point this out to the experimenter, they’ll give you 100 dollars.

As it turned out people who considered themselves lucky were more likely to find this opportunity.

Part of the scientific basis of luck isn’t an what you normally think of as luck, like good things just happen to me for no reason.

It’s actually to do with being open to new opportunities and yes it can make you money when you do this because you can see value where others don’t and that means you can find bargains and find things cheaply that others do not understand the value of.

But it’s beyond money, not just about money cause when you can observe things around you and see the value, see the magic that is it’s own reward.

When you notice things around you that are wonderful, that have their charm and beauty, their talent, their character, their uniqueness.

That is when you see the magic.

Thank you for listening, have a wonderful day.