In a circus of idiots the clown can remove his make up but his feet will always give him away.- Yours truly

Outcomes

Brace yourself. You wont like what I have to say today. In and around us, where we live where we work, where we play, about 50% of people are totally incompetent. The trail of confirmation is evident. They make terrible decisions. They shirk responsibility and the only thing consistent about them is their unreliability. Then we have group two, the 30%ers, they are typically nice, try hard and show up but really don’t get much done, they just talk about doing stuff and switch on and off much like a tube light from the years gone by with a faulty "starter". The real gravy train is the last 20% who carry everyone else and produce 80% of the output. This is not about Alpha Males or Type A personalities doing every thing, this is about the those who “get shit done consistently, reliably and without being told"

Stand in the mirror today. Decide which category you are in. It will be a life lived guilt free once you can admit to your self where you stand. The sooner you know the longer you have to either fix it or maybe not.

Alternately it can also about "will", to get to the right outcome if you are in the 50% group you still have a chance, should you be willing to not be. The sooner you realise this, go ahead and try to surround yourself with the 20% and cut off the other 80%, not easy when you are part of the problem. Its almost like knowing that you are stupid (see video above)

Take it from me today, trying to drag along the dead weight is a fools errand. Worse yet is the negativity that comes from the bottom groups, its is toxic and contagious and creates a sulking club. Misery loves company. It may sound selfish, but the sooner you cut through the nonsense the better off your outcomes in life will be.

You can try to change it, meaning if u continue to be part of these sad groups but think you can make a difference and get them out of their death spiral, you have an other thing coming, you will likely spend your life getting let down, frustrated and solving other people’s problems they refuse to solve themselves... Get out of all such groups. Friends, Families, Colleagues, Employers any one. Employer groups specifically, the minute you have a 6 month savings runway, get out, take a bet on your self, cut your losses. Try and do better.

Or you can accept it as fact, adjust accordingly, prosper and be happy knowing the limitations and constraints. Not an easy choice but a choice that may spare you a stroke one day.

Coming back to: trying and doing better, well one thing that never hurts any one to do better is by being rich. So How does one get rich?

Build a business with good process, systems, outcome measurement tools and consistency levers that the bloody 30% can come in and deliver a consistent product / service. Flipped, thats what your employer does, look at where they are?

How does one get Uber rich(read Loaded)?

Build a business with good process, systems, outcome measurement tools and consistency levers that the 50% can come in and deliver a consistent product / service at a better marginal utility than the the 30%ers.

The reality distortion field of Outcomes?

It's not easy launching any thing, let alone businesses, but those are easy examples to allow to demonstrate, what happens when you distort your own reality and fail to recognise which band of people you fall under.

So why do most businesses fail?

They are founded by a 50 or a 30 percent-er or some one in the middle at 70%.

Or by a 20 percent-er who thinks everybody they hire is a 20 percent-er. Reality distortion can happen on either end of the spectrum. Just because you are a doer doesn't mean you lack the maturity to also know how to recruit just yet. Experience will get you there no doubt.

One New Thing...thats not really new..

Tanveer Jamshed aka TeeJay founded the label Teejays in 1970 and in reality laid the foundation of Pakistani fashion. "We redesigned the shalwar kameez. It went from awami to the Sindh Club," Teejay states proudly. "We created a demand for it in high society. These were people who would rather go shopping in their night suits than shalwar kameez. The West was their trapping; it was 'babu' culture."

Pakistani fashion divorced the West in the ’70s. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto became an emblem of the awami look and hot on the heels of nationalism strode in Teejays.

“Teejays is to the shalwar kameez what Levi’s is to denim,” was one of Tanvir Jamshed’s many slogans and he transported the awami look from Bhutto’s political dais to the high street. He also popularised the view that the shalwar kameez is the Urdu language of fashion.

Why this is new but not is some thing he said in an interview. "General Zia enforced the shalwar kameez on everyone. When you impose something, it results in eventual rejection and when Zia went, people took their trousers out and dispensed with the national dress."

What this also tells us that it doesnt hurt to be ahead of your time if you are in the 20%. Teejay took the plunge, opening shops that were painted black with psychedelic posters on the walls. He went for colour spreads in print. Teejay was progressive with his idea to take fashion to the masses much like Zaara and fast fashion brands of the day. We have many heros and examples we just need to look at history.

*Content Credit Instep Magazine 2007 & Dawn The Way we wore 2013 Amna Isani.

Boring stuff that scales..the dark side

Every where I look I see images of

Every where I look I see images of Emmanuel Nwude a Nigerian advance-fee fraud artist and former Director of Union Bank of Nigeria. He is known for defrauding Nelson Sakaguchi, a Director at Brazil's Banco Noroeste based in São Paulo, of $242 million: $191 million in cash and the remainder in the form of outstanding interest. Oh btw he was selling them an airport that he didnt have & that didn't exist. Just fyi.

Clearly, cashing in on hope, dreams and aspirational goals scales quickly. Time and again we have heard allegations of people selling things they dont own, Like Land in our country or master developed projects. This scales so well, because all our lives, girls fortunes are associated with their homes, aka when they get married and leave, they also get told "you must have your own home" , men get told "the marker of success is owning your own home" lo and behold it gives birth tonew scams of scaling artists to take advantage of that fact. When there is no sustainable affordable housing for 200M people, but the conversations are around finding a home or making one every one falls victim to the mirage of schemes that offer that hope, hence it scales. . Most recently this master tile expose.

The French Connection: Master Tiles and Raja Martinez - Hot takes, Served cold — dmkm.substack.com

How Sheikh Mehmood Iqbal is perpetrating a mega scam with Le Paris Housing Society

As my Dear Friend Dr.Shoaib Zaidi said to me in a conversation this week "Salary based wealth generation is increasingly elusive. Very few salaried people can afford to buy a residence, but few alternatives." That got me thinking about the dark side of boring stuff that scales.. Emotions scales, despair scales, some thing for nothing scales.

There is a scammer born every minute. Scams scale, pyramid schemes scale. In our parts some ppl have become insanely wealthy selling Land they dont/shouldn't/cant be selling thus every time an affordable project comes up, the middle class "doesn't want to loose out" because if they buy today, they can scale their investment in 5 yrs.

We also have great companies/startups working in this space who are actually trying to work credible partners to solve real housing problems, if you want to draw inspiration look at what Modulus Tech is doing in this space. 

You heard it being (re iterated) here first ...

In 2018 the UNDP PK, Launched the Pakistan National Human Development Report

The data visualisation of youth of #Pakistan as 100 people:

- 29 have no education

- only 6 have 12+years of school

- only 6 have access to a library

- only 7 to a sports facility

So if I hear one more person tell me about how many bloody cell phone subscribers we have , how much data they use, what a great potential that is. I will classify them the same as I do political stall-warts. There is no joy(just yet) at the end of this stream. We dont need any more wallets or fintechs or net new collaboration innovation, we need innovation in vocational training + upskilling.

Data connectivity in Pakistan is an expensive privilege, not a utility yet. It is also taxed akin to luxury products with rates of 20%+ Short term gain is going to destroy us, policy makers do not get it.

Pakistan’s ‘youth bulge’ is very real, even palpable. 29 percent of Pakistan is between 15 and 29 years of age and as much as 64 percent is below the age of 30.

Unless we are aiming for 120m or so TikTokers who feel they are "influencerpreneurs" vs people with real jobs, real careers, real business we are in for a gradual decline and 5-8 yr implosion horizon.

90 Days out we will feel the first shots fired when the utility rates go up and consumers start getting bills. More taxes to the already taxes, subsidies to the sugar daddies and the richest 1%. No one is helping the youth, the government and its not so polished legislators are helping them to the politics of the youth bulge. The federal cabinet on (last) Friday approved the promulgation of an ordinance aimed at preparing a legal path to increase power tariff by a minimum Rs5.65 per unit from now till October to collect a whopping Rs884 billion from consumers.

Like every thing else in PK the people who should have a plan around this, only have plans for them selves. We do nothing and expect change, we add to the tax burdens and continue to grant relief to the ruling feudal class. Lets call them what they are, snakes. Till there is a whole sale clean up of pseudo democracy touting well off Pakistanis who in the comfort of their generator powered air conditioners continue to side with giving democracy a chance whilst being part of the hypocrisy of favours and benefits and concessions nothing can change. Politics is a dirty word, we need to get out of this trap left for us by the worst of us, all parties all political agents are only money transfer agents vs agents of change. Every ones dirty in the game of self reward and classist benefits. When people have lost every thing, including hope, they will fight to the end, we need to be very clear in where this can potentially go. A Classic watch below at 6:30 up until at least 7:10, sums up our position really well.

What you should be reading & why

This is an age where mental lives become more fragmented. Can one maintain a coherent self when attention, which is so fundamental to our mental lives, is increasingly distracted? In today’s world, a lot of human experience has become highly engineered and manipulated.

Crawford, who himself dropped out of a Ph.D. program at Stanford to form a motorcycle repair shop, refers to a psychological study where children were told they could have one marshmallow now or two in 15 minutes if they delayed the impulse. He goes on to describes today’s well-engineered marshmallows such as ads on the ATM or the gasoline screen slyly designed to break through any weakness the ordinary consumer might have. Resistance requires freakish self-control. Why? Because we are becoming the subjects of that engineering and just as antibiotics loose their potency, we are loosing the battle against the info-bombardment. Its a worthy read as it will give you spectacular insights into the realm of distractions and how to fight them.

Monetise your time

Lets start with the elusive dream. Every one wants to decouple time from money. Easier said than done.

Lets start with the elusive dream. Every one wants to decouple time from money. Easier said than done.

The problem? It's an extremely unpredictable way to make a living/if at all. Time and Money de coupling is not just content creation. This news letter is free it has a over 68% open rate, granted audience is still building. But over time this potentially an asset that is monetiseable provided that with growth the open rates dont fall.

The problem is how we are set up. We decide to pick a profession, we get trained or educated, we have historical data that said career can net off such and such money typically and hence we order the realm of predictability. Give or take your choice will follow some level of normal distribution.

Now enter the world of not so typical. Lets take instagrammer or blogger as a profession. There is no guaranteed way to make a living in that space as the average person in it. You can't just study InstaSuccess, pass an InstaExam , and expect to start collecting the minimum wage by producing content for 40 hours a week. In this world of the unpredictable the payoffs tend to follow a Pareto distribution, where you can expect wild differences in income among people doing the same thing. Making a living in this world is far from predictable. So whilst its insanely easy to want to or to have a desire to monetise your time its the exact opposite in practice. So what should you do?

1)No Shortcuts in life, only a few get stardom, the rest of us have to build expertise, do something then productise it vs doing nothing and being an expert in it

2)Invest your time in your self so that at some point in life the skills you learn become monetisable at scale. What does that mean. It means that initially you can not separate time from money. They will remain completely coupled.

3)Knowing this gets you to your end state faster, if you believe in the notion that you should be always producing "money" without producing economic value, you will have a hard stop in life to re-calibrate.

You can monetise it if you prioritise it. What do I mean. There is opportunity in every action, that is un related to the action at the time, but no less an opportunity to enable future monetisation.

Looked an other way.

"Killing time in Your next ride to the office"

"Waiting for Your favourite food delivery"

Any time you have time or you are waiting for some action that takes time after a selection has been made is an opportunity to invest time back in your self and or to monetise it. Office ride, if you are driving ideal time to review content, listen to a podcast, read this news letter. Waiting for the food you ordered, instead of idle mind farts while waiting make a list of top ten things you don't know or want to know more about and next office ride look them up. You cant monetise your time, if you don't organise your life.

Made in Pakistan

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

In 1301 AD Abdul Quasim Qasani wrote a book on the art of evolving colours and painting on pottery. During this period, the Chinese learnt all about Gila- lazwart(cobalt blue) from the Iranians. The Chinese were prepared to pay the price of gold for this wonderful element. Much later, Arab merchants would buy Gila- lazwart from Ajmer in India and sell it in China.

A new name “Muslim blue” was also tagged on.In the 15th and 16th centuries, Chinese porcelain was in great demand in Europe. Ship loads of the stuff were regularly dispatched from China. Seeing this, Iran’s ruler Shah Abbas (1587- 1620) thought of a shrewd scheme. He invited 300 artists/ potters from China.

Their leader was Manuhar and they found that Iranian soil was unsuitable for making porcelain. They along with their Iranian counterparts found a new alternative and thus was born ‘Blue Pottery’.

This title was conferred by the British. In Iranian language it is known as ‘Sangine’ or ‘Aatike’ and means ‘made out of stone’ or ‘old fashioned’.

Delft Blue is the world-famous (unlike its much superior counter part of multani blue pottery) earthenware that has been produced in the city of Delft since the 17th century. Between 1600 and 1800, this earthenware was popular among rich families who would show off their Delft Blue collections to one another.

Although the Delftware potters preferred to call their earthenware “porcelain”, it was only a cheaper version of the real Chinese porcelain. Delft Blue was not made from the typical porcelain clay, but from clay that was coated with a tin glaze after it was fired. In spite of this, Delft Blue achieved unrivalled popularity, and at its peak, there were 33 factories in Delft. Of all of these factories, the only one remaining today is Royal Delft.

Our fate is not too different, I stumbled upon the fact that, located in the suburbs of Multan, about 10 km from the main city at Bahawalpur road, Ustad Alam Institute of Blue Pottery is a place where the art of Kashigari is being exercised on an industrial scale it is yet an other made in Pakistan story that is an at scale opportunity for the willing. More About the art here.

One Last thing

Repeat after me..The fourth largest seller on Amazon is Utopia Deals. Its a Pakistani owned business. https://www.utopiadeals.com/ (US Facing site) https://www.utopia.pk/about-us/(PK Facing Industrial Site). You don't need a press release or a raise announcement or any thing else to be successful. Their site says they launched in 2018. Clearly there are multiple opportunities for B2B or D2C plays in for the organised sector on other peoples market places + building their own distribution. Not for every one but the model exists some one just has to take a deeper look and understand how to replicate it.