So I am off to see William Jefferson Clinton, or as I like to call him ‘Billy J’, speak on Thursday. Now the build up for this has been great for me. You see through out the last seven years one of my critiques of George Bush has been his limited ability to public speak. This of course is supposed to be one of Clintons’ strengths. So I wonder, are my expectations too high?

‘Clinton’s public speeches describe the challenge of globalization, emphasize our growing interdependence, and point the way toward a common future based on shared goals and values.’ It is interesting to hear of a former president of the United States, which is attacked for its foreign policy and exploitation of people abroad, talk about how we all have to look out for each other. Maybe the message is getting across to our southern brothers or maybe he can only talk about it now that he is no longer in office?

Hopefully it will be a great speech with an inspiring message…

So much of life resides in you to make your choice.

I am fortunate that I have been successful at trading and have tons of opportunity in life. Really if I wanted to I could just start coasting by and still do fairly well for myself in life, but it is up to me to choose more.

Luckily for those of us living in most of Europe and North America we all have the ability to choose some of the direction in our life. For most people it is the basics of life that they feel stop them from making better choices for themselves. How can you go to school, start a company, or focus on our personal happiness if you can’t put food on the table?

Students seem to make it on 15k a year or less, why can’t those of us in the working world do the same? I think it is because we are not willing to make the short term sacrifice that could lead to long term gain. Here we are mostly trapped in a life that is barely good enough for us to not change, so that we don’t take a chance at actually experiencing greatness.

At this point in my life I am coming to the realization that it is up to me to make the choice for things to be great. If I don’t do anything things will be good, but I have to actively make the choice for things to be great. If I want greatness then I have to demand greatness of myself and those around me. I can’t settle, and I won’t settle.

One of my friends was inadvertently nice enough to remind me about how good it feels to demand greatness when we went for dinner the other day. Jim mentioned at dinner that one of the things he likes about talking to me was that when people complain I always ask what they are going to do about it. It might not be forcefully telling people to demand greatness, but it is my way of helping people ask more of themselves so that they will help me ask more of me.

At the end of the day no one can make the choices but me.

So I am reading Thomas Friedman’s the World is Flat trying to catch up to the new world that we live in. The more I read the more I feel it is important to be an entrepreneur going into the future. Let’s see if I can explain myself:

Back in university I was taught that if you offer higher wages you would get more people trying to get the job. So your supply of labour would increase as the wage increases. Of course if you were the employer you would be willing to employ more at lower prices and less at higher prices.

So what is happening with globalization is that for many jobs there has been a huge increase in the number of people willing to work at all prices. This benefits the employers as they are able to find relatively cheap labour a lot easier.

One thing that is often overlooked is that in the process of going to a global economy new jobs and industries are created on a world scale that increases the demand for labour. Unfortunately this increase isn’t enough to offset the massive increase in labour supply.

This still leaves people in North America fearing for their jobs and wondering what will happen in the future as they compete with people from India, China and Eastern Europe for employment. Luckily there is still one way to work that isn’t going out of style, and will always be around into the future: being a part of the innovation.

It actually doesn’t matter if you are the employer or the employee, if you are part of the innovation process you will always have a place going forward into the future.

On a basic level economies are made up of capital, labour, and innovation or technology. The capital will go to where ever it can find the best returns in a free market system. The labour will be farmed out to whoever is willing to do it the cheapest. The people who are involved in the innovation will be the ones who will be involved and working in the economy no matter how flat the world gets.

How does this affect the employer/employee relationship? Well the worst thing that can happen to you as an employee is that you become standardized labour; someone that can be replaced somewhere else. This is harder to do if you are an engineer or on the creative side of the business process. If you are the entrepreneur it is your job to make sure your company is never stagnant, always innovating, and you get to ensure that you are never standardized.

Who wants to be normal? Carve out your niche by leading the innovation and employing others to do the standard things for you!

Thank you for taking the time to check out my blog. It is under construction right now and should be up and running in mid October. I will be sharing ideas, insight and questions from all aspects of life and business and I look forward to getting your feedback. Sign up to be notified of any updates or changes.