yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Groups Never Admit Failure


2m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Groups never admit failure. A group would rather keep living in a mythology of "we were oppressed" than ever admit failure. Individuals are the only ones who admit failure. Even individuals don't like to admit failure, but eventually, they can be forced to. A group will never admit they were wrong; a group will never admit, "we made a mistake," because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart.

So, I'm hard pressed in history to find examples of large groups where they've said, "we thought A, but the answer is actually B." Usually, what happens in that case is a schism, where you go from the Catholic Church to Protestant and so on. There's a divergence and usually a lot of infighting. This happens in crypto land too, where the coins fork. Bitcoin doesn't suddenly say, "we should have had smart contracts," or ETH doesn't suddenly say, "we should have been immutable."

I was on the board of a foundation that was charged with giving out money for a cause, and I found it very disillusioning because what I learned was that no matter what the foundation did, they would declare victory. They would give money for a certain thing; they would support a certain project, and every project was victorious. Every project was a success. There was a lot of back slapping, a lot of high-sounding mission statements and vision statements, a lot of congratulations, a lot of nice dinners, but nothing ever got done.

What I realized was because there is no objective feedback, because there is no loss, it's all social profit. They couldn't fail, and because they couldn't fail, they misdirected resources all day long. Eventually, of course, such groups run on money. If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way to do it is as a for-profit because for-profits have to take feedback from reality.

Ironically, for-profit entities are more sustainable than non-profit entities. They're self-sustainable. You're not out there with a begging bowl all the time, and of course, you lose the beautiful non-profit status; you have to pay your taxes. You can also get corrupted by being purely for-profit. But I would argue that the best businesses are the ones that, long-term, are both for-profit, sustainable, and ethical.

So you can attract the best people, you can sustain it because it's a mission. It's not just about the money because it's diminishing returns to making money. There's diminishing marginal utility and money in your life. So I learned that if you want to change the world, you're probably better off trying to do it with a for-profit.

More Articles

View All
World's Strongest Magnet!
This is the world’s strongest magnet, capable of sucking objects in and generating electric current. Can you see that? And levitating non-magnetic objects. It even wreaks havoc on camera equipment. Wire is magnetic! So if it’s a CMOS sensor, the electro…
Why I Sold My Tesla Stock ...
What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here. So, I rarely ever post videos like this on a Tuesday, and I promise this is going to be my last Tesla video for a little while. But given the recent and unprecedented price surge of Tesla stock over the last few days,…
An organism's niche | Ecology and natural systems | High school biology | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to talk about an organism’s niche, and all a niche is, it’s a fancy way of saying where you will actually see an organism: the environmental conditions where you are going to actually see organisms of a certain kind. To underst…
National Geographic Takes on New York Fashion Week | Fit for a Queen | NYFW
[Applause] Queens is a project about female leadership, not only in front of the camera but behind the camera, telling a story about nature in a new way. And there couldn’t be a better time in history right now to be getting that message across. The titl…
Seal Pups: Ferociously Cute and Worth Protecting | Expedition Raw
When working with fur seal pups, you really need to watch out for your rank. Personal pups are tiny, but they are ferocious in their own right. We’re weighing fur seal pups to make sure that they’re getting enough food to eat, and if they’re not, we can u…
fly with me from CA to AZ | tiny airplane, big adventure! day 1
Hi, I’m Stevie, and this is my 1949 Cessna 140A that we’re going to be flying all the way from California to Wisconsin for EAA Air Venture. If you’re not familiar, Air Venture is like the pilot event every single year. 600,000 people and over 10,000 plane…