I saw this quote, and it struck me as interesting. Would I be rich or poor? So I decided to find out!

First, we assume a few things. First, I’m living in Canada, so the life expectancy will be 80.4 years. However, I don’t even speak until I’m like 1 or 2. So for our second assumption, we assume that “innocence” is lost at the age of 10. That’s 70 years of potential kindness/horribleness!

So how many times does a person speak a day? According to a study, its pegged around 16,000 words a day. According to Oxford, the average sentence length is 15-20 words. Since it takes a sentence to produce something that is meaningfully “unkind” or kind”, we will assume that in a day, the average person can say 800 kinda or unkind things.

So altogether, that’s 70 years, which is 25550 days. 800 sentences a day, would equate to 20,440,000 sentences spoken in a a lifetime, all of which could be kind or unkind. Now lets calculate this!

You gain $0.10 for every kind word. You lose $0.05 for every unkind word. So if you were a person who only spoke kinda words, you’d make, $2,044,000! Wow, I’d be a millionaire! That’s an $80/day cash flow. Not bad eh?

If you were a person who only said mean things to people, you’d be in debt with -$1,022,000. A million dollars! Most people don’t have this kinda cash, you’d have to pay $40/day to keep up with this kinda lifestyle!

What if you were neutral? So every kind word was immediately followed by an unkind word? You’d make $1,022,000 from the good words. You’d lose $511,000 for the bad words, leaving us with a net of only $511,000!

Lets graph this data, to see how many kinda words per day we would need to break even.

Wow, look at that data! What this means, is that you can figure out how rich you’d be given a percentage of good words:

Net Sum(over 70 years) = 3,066,000 * percentage of good words – $1,022,000

So to break even, you would have to only have kind words 33.3% of the time, with unkind words consisting 66.7% the rest of your speech.

To FINALLY answer the question, I consider being “rich” as being a millionaire, so lets see how many kind words we need to net $1,000,000!

$1,000,000 = 3,066,000x – $1,022,000
$2,022,000 = 3,066,000x
x = 65.9%

So there you have it, your vocabulary must be 65.9% kind words, if you wish to be rich! I guess it does pay to be a nice guy.

I’ve been job hunting, so that means sending out tons of resumes and cover letters, so imagine my surprise, when a family friend calls me up, and asks me,

Do you want to come to an event hosted by World Financial Group? There’s a good possibility that you can get a job!

My girlfriend needed a job too, so I asked the friend,

My girlfriend is a business graduate, do you think she can send in her resume too?

They answered,

She can come along! Bring lots of friends, the more the better!

That’s weird. Wouldn’t it be AMAZING if Microsoft or Google let friends bring other friends in for interviews? But I was curious, so I decided to give it a try.

I went to the event, and after a few minutes, I realized it was a scam, in the likes of Amway, Primerica, etc… Here’s the gist of their operation:

• Operate by yourself as your own “small business”
• Bug your friends and family to buy your products (mortgages, life insurance, securities, etc…)
• Recruit other people to become agents and open their own “small business” under you
• Gain “passive income” (kinda like a commission) from the people you’ve recruited
• Teach the agents you’ve recruited, to repeat what you’ve done.

The idea is, by doing this, you become rich fast, gaining yourself financial freedom through the passive income system. During their presentation, they stated that they wish to gain 1 million agents by the year 2010. They also have plaques all over their office, stating things in the like of “Recruit 3 agents a month for some reward!” These two facts is the reason why it will fail. Its all about the height of the tree!

Assume there is a tree with 1 node. That 1 node has 1 million children (based on the 2010 projections). Each of those children MUST recruit 3 agents. That means 3 million new agents must be found. Each of those 3 million new agents must recruit 3 more agents, meaning 9 million new agents must be found. Continue this for a bit, and by the 10th level, you must recruit 6.5 billion agents! That’s the population of the world. (America only has a population of around 303 million, so technically it would of failed by the 6th/7th level). Here’s a diagram to illustrate the concept:

The thing that bugs me the most, is that they require each agent to make a contact list of 25 people, which is basically a list of 25 people that trust your opinion, whom you will bug to buy one of your products. Sure, this concept could probably work in the short term (but then you wouldn’t get a perfect pyramid), but you end up alienating a lot of people this way.

This is the 3rd time someone’s tried to get me to join a pyramid scheme. First was Quixtar, second was Forever Living, now there’s World Financial Group. It sickens me, how they all give the same talk, with the same loud crappy techno music booming in the background as you mingle with the agents.

If that isn’t enough to convince you of the scam, here’s what really hit it home for me. I did not see a single BMV or Mercedes-Benz in the parking lot.

The people at these places, always bash their jobs, trying to sell a dream of working for nobody but yourself, getting rich quick, as if working in an office is the worst thing in the world. I guess that’s why they can never convince me. I’m too much of a nerd. I truly enjoy programming, and the idea of becoming a salesman just isn’t an appealing thought to me at all.

On a side note, I went ahead and fixed World Financial Group’s wikipedia page for them. They cited all these industry partners and merely referenced themselves as the source. A violation of Wikipedia’s “self publication” policy. Its like telling your friends you know Barack Obama personally, and when they ask you, “how do I know this is true?”, you reply, “because I said so.”

I just read an excellent article from esquire, called “Signs of Economic Depression“. Its about was about how people should of known about the economic crisis, but they failed to actually anticipate it because they are only taking into account current data. A great example is the following quote:

If you had done this calculation in January 2008, using data from the past sixty years…you would have estimated the chance of a crash in the upcoming quarter to be 3.17 percent, implying about one crash for every eight years of economic activity…But suppose instead that your time horizon is shorter. You decide to look only at data from the past twenty years …you would assess the probability to be just 0.04 percent — meaning one crash for every 624 years.

So by not taking into account all the information available, the economist’s calculation becomes very skewed, which ultimately effected their decisions. I think George Santayana said it best.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Its exactly like approximation a function. If you are approximating a function, and you do not give enough points, then your approximation won’t be as good, which could mislead you when making decisions.

Unfortunately, not enough people do it. Not just regular people, but great leaders too. Hitler (not saying he’s a good person, but a good leader) did not know history, and decided to try and conquer Russia. But like Napoleon before him, he failed due to Russia’s harsh winter conditions.

As Sir Francis Bacon said,

Knowledge is power

So its important to do your research. This is especially true in software engineering, where projects failure rates are very high. However, failing projects might be a good thing, as long as you learn from your mistakes.