Whitehouse Privilege

When I first heard the concept of privilege, I was skeptical. While the lack of a disadvantage is an advantage, the term privilege suggests that one has an unfair advantage, and I've never been completely convinced of that for myself. I have some advantages, but I have some disadvantages as well. The question of what privilege is and who has it is a long discussion for another day and another blog.

However, my intention is that when the Koalid grows up and someone suggests that she has some kind of "privilege" she will not be able to argue that she does not. It will be unambiguous that she has district advantages over other people that she may encounter.

My intention is to be like a coach preparing her for the game. Throughout the next 17 years and beyond, I intend to expose her to experiences, teach her skills, and provide her mentors that will provide advantages no matter what she wants to do.

Too many parents see their job as keeping their kid "out of trouble" until they leave the nest, then they can brush their hands off and say their work is done, anything that happens after is on the kid's head. I find that ridiculous. A child and later young adult is the product of their upbringing. I am not merely responsible for her childhood, but all outcomes afterwards. If I have prepared the Koalid well, she will have the tools that she needs to be successful in any endeavor that she chooses.

This and $2 will get you a cup of coffee.

However, it is important to focus on the right things. When I was young, I was told that I was "gifted" and that I had an obligation to use those gifts in the right way. Good so far. This was then used as a cudgel to hammer the point that I should get better grades than I was because I had "potential".

I have a great disdain for the system of schooling in our culture because it places great weight and emphasis on things that don't matter one little bit. Getting good grades is a matter of learning to play and win a certain kind of game. Unfortunately, most of the lessons learned in excelling in that game will not serve one well in the real world. I hope the Koalid does get good grades, but I am not terribly concerned as to whether she does or not except in how those grades can pave the road the further success.

This will get you a cup of coffee with
or without a good report card.

I care that she knows skills of human interaction like persuasion and empathy. I care that she learns literacy and numeracy. I care that she has a thirst for knowledge, a curiosity to learn more, and the wit to know where to find it. I care that she is ambitious and knows how to set and achieve goals. Many of these things can lead to better grades, but grades are not, in the final analysis, important. Preparation for life is important.

The Koalid will be prepared. She will be inspired. She will be privileged.

Raising a Child in a Declining America

America is a great and mighty nation, and it stands for wonderful things like liberty and opportunity. America today is not as great as it was in the past and it is greater than it will be in the future. That's decline.

This is not to say that we should all dig bomb shelters and stock canned goods. We aren't on the way to some lawless social collapse. Great Britain declined in the 1800s and went from an empire on which the sun never set in 1770 to America's much loved, goofy cousin in 1990 (and is on their way to surpassing us once again today). England is certainly not a bad place to be, but their time on top of the world has well passed.

An article in today's New York Times explains that the American middle class is no longer the most affluent in the world. The Europeans and the Canadians are surpassing us. We can no longer take it for granted that our economy will grow for everyone and that each generation will do better than the one before.

Such decline is natural in the way of nations. The things that make a nation great also lay the groundwork for decline. Accumulation of wealth and power creates an environment in which the ambitious seek to accumulate more and more for themselves. The stability of the society removes the existential need to put the national interest above your own. 100 years ago, although there were still greedy, shady people in America, there was the need to keep the big picture in mind. The world was a scary place full of potential enemies who could do far more than destroy a building or two. Today, no two other countries together could challenge us militarily and this perception of security allows certain people to put themselves ahead of the national interest.

This is simple a fact and one that should be considered. The Koalid will be born in three months That is also a fact.

A lot of people facing those two facts might despair. Woe are we, the Koalid will not have the opportunities I had. Boo hoo.

In the poorest places, there are people at the top doing well. In the richest places, there are people at the bottom doing poorly. There is opportunity everywhere, especially in America, and even in declining America.

In America, education is getting worse and worse as a certain e-card I recently saw online laments. Some parents would despair that their children will be ill-prepared. I see this situation and determine to make sure that the Koalid is educated in all ways, with academic as well as social and business skills.

Real wages for American working people have declined. No longer can a young person just go to the local factory and get a good job that will support their family to retirement. Well, I guess that means the Koalid will not be working at a factory. She will, however, due to her education and preparation be ready to face whatever is in front of a young person in 2032, to identify the opportunities which exist and to seize them.

A nation in which we have lost the spirit of exploration and innovation is not ideal, but for a young person who has been raised to preserve the entrepreneurial instinct, it is a land full of opportunity. The next 100 years in America will be rough on the average person. Thus, it is all the more important that the Koalid is above average. She become so by divine providence (although faith in God will hopefully help her), but by planning and preparation: the same recipe that has lead to success since the dawn of time.

Priorities

I have always been the kind of person who likes to have an overriding purpose. When I ran Phoenix Games, all efforts were directed towards that project. When I worked for American Income Life, that was my primary purpose. So, when the release date for the Koalid was announced, it was clear what my new driving purpose would be.

Phoenix Games, my first offspring:
900 square feet of
amazing community.

Everyone says that everything changes when you have kids, and that you have new priorities, but I see so many parents who can't seem to find time to give the kids the attention they need. While they are a priority, they have to make room around other priorities.

Everything I have focused on previously has had some aspect of improving things for someone. Phoenix Games was built around creating a community that benefited all those associated with it. An incremental benefit for many people.

Now I have the opportunity to make a fantastic, tremendous, total difference for one person. The choices I make, the resources I dedicate, the lessons I teach will mold and create a whole person. Of course, this would now be my near total focus. What other priority could possibly have such potential.

Given this, why doesn't every parent give total dedication to their children? I believe that there are two answers: the first answer is that they still have goals they have not reached and the child must compete with those. I am fortunate to be at a place in life where I have already done many amazing things, and there is nothing that I feel is incomplete. I am ready for the next great priority.

The second answer is that they don't know what to do. They do not know exactly what the goal is in raising a child, and even if they do, they don't know how to get there. Give them too much attention, they could become spoiled or dependent. Drive them for success too much and they could become burnt out and rebel. And the instant feedback is of no use because children often rebel at doing what is best for them.

Beautiful, but not my source of faith in God.

I have a deep faith in God because I see evidence of His work in my life. I don't mean the beauty of the trees and the flowers. I mean coming to a place in life and realizing that entirely without my knowledge or effort, I have been prepared with the tools I would need to meet this challenge for years in advance.

This is one of those cases. Over the past few years, the road of life has pushed me in a way that gave me the skills for my current professional endeavor, providing me knowledge of persuasion, training, and motivation. Fantastic skills for a business consultant. In my work, I help business people to identify and achieve their goals, not mine. Understanding their needs and what they are trying to do, I select my skills that can help them to be successful.

Sound like anything else I'm preparing to do?

I don't know what the Koalid will want to do with her life, but I intend to develop my skills to help her exploit whichever talents she chooses to pursue. What other project could possibly be as engaging as this?

Teenage Years as a Beta Test Period

In the last post, I discussed the idea of strategically educating a child to prepare for success. Let us now explore how this educational strategy can survive the challenges of adolescence. My mother referred to that the teenage years as the "alien period". When I was 14, she says, I was replaced with an angry, practically unintelligible alien, to be returned at 19 with a pleasant, well mannered young man.

That is a valid point, adolescence is a time of pulling away, exploration, and independence, but not necessarily a time of alienation. I believe, based on some research and considerable anecdotal experience, that the most severe adolescent conflicts are caused by the unexpected transition from obedient and respectful child to adventurous, curious, and independent teenager. Most of the conflicts center around the teen's attempts to assert her independence versus the parent's desire to keep the child close and safe.

This next paragraph is one of those that I may read years hence and either pat myself on the back for my prescience or laugh at my naivete...

My theory is that if the teen years are looked at a different way it can increase their educational value, prepare the teen for adulthood and preserve the parental bond better. Rather than seeing the teen years as a difficult extended childhood, view them as a beta test for adulthood. Increase independence and responsibility progressively. Like any other training process, allow the teen just slightly more responsibility than she is ready to handle, then provide support as she grows into the challenge.

Rather than use arbitrary punishments to teach lessons, use natural consequences. Grounding is an artificial construct which has no parallel in the adult world. It shifts the lesson from understanding what she might have done wrong in the real situation to a lesson in how to win against mom and dad. A grounded child does not sit in her room and contemplate what she did wrong; she sits in her room and contemplates her anger at the punishment and how she can avoid it in the future: an absolutely useless learning process.

I cannot protect her from this, but
I can provide the mental resources
for her to protect herself.

If the teen does not live under the immediate fear of parental punishment, it allows her to open her awareness the more distant, but much more real, set of real threats and dangers in the world. Traditionally, a teen who goes to a party and stays out too late is most worried about the most proximate danger: mom and dad finding out. In reality, the real dangers are much more serious: alcohol poisoning, drunk driving, drug complications, personal injury, rape, etc. How many teens have died in drunk driving accidents because they did not want mom and dad to know where they were? How safe did that discipline structure keep that child?

Alternately, what if a teen of 16 is given the autonomy to make her own choices, under the condition that parents must be kept informed of where she is and what she is doing, not because they do not trust her but because adolescence is a form of training mode where the parents are available as referees, lifeguards, and coaches on call to assist when she gets in over her head but allowing her to have the experiences that will prepare her for the rest of her life.

Barney Stinson approves
of a restrictive parenting
style. I believe my point is made.

To those who think that I suggesting too permissive of a parenting style, I will give one more piece of evidence to support my theory. Ask a typical college boy how he feels when he meets a college girl who tells him that her parents were very restrictive and kept her safe at home, not letting her go out much. The word "JACKPOT" comes to mind, because he knows that she is ready to make up for all that she thinks that she missed out on, and mom and dad are no where in sight.

If the Koalid decides to party hard in college, I want it to be because she knows the risks and has weighed them against the rewards, not because she is trying to make up for lost time, and I want to be sure that she knows and understands that if she gets in over her head, even in college, her old dad and mom are still there for her.

Raising a Child Like You Make an RPG Character

When you are playing a tabletop role playing game, the first thing you do is make, or stat out, your character. This generally involves selecting skills, talent, and equipment for your character, which you choose based on the challenges that you anticipate the character will face.

Traveller, a system renouned
for its highly involved
and customizable character
creation system.

The natural reaction to a title such as this is that an RPG is a game and raising a child is serious. You can't think like you would in a game for real life! Really? What is a game, but a simulation for real life? Chess was most likely invented and was commonly used to give children an understanding of strategy, necessary risk, and tradeoffs.

Most parents do their best to make sure their children are ready for the world. They teach them manners, boost their self esteem, push them to do well in school, but too often they fail. Many children are growing up to find themselves in the adult world completely unprepared for the challenges that they face. Many cannot balance a checkbook, read a bus schedule, or go to a job interview without embarrassing themselves.

If we assume that most parents are fairly well educated people who are doing their best to prepare their children, how do their children end up so ill-prepared. I would suggest it is a lack of strategic thinking, born of thinking that their job is to provide encouragement and support while the school system will provide the hard skills that the child will need in the world. Moreover, if a parent does try to set their own curriculum of things that they think their child should know, they could be seen as "overprograming" or "stifling creativity." This is partly because school makes learning so unpleasant that a child doesn't want to come home and do more things they don't want to do.

I intend to approach this differently. Looking back on my life, I can see skills and knowledge that I learned later in my 20s, which I would have been much better off to have received earlier. Using this experience of my own and my best projections of what a child coming of age in 2032 will need to succeed, I will prepare the Koalid with a variety of skills.

When statting out an RPG character, one usually selects a good mix of basic skills so the character can do well on her own with a few specializations to give the character unique value to the party. The strategy here is similar. She will be taught a variety of basic skills: math, financial literacy, balancing a checkbook and managing a bank account, cooking, cleaning, manners for polite society, proper carriage, situational awareness, basic self defense technique, persuasive skills, etc.

The more specific skills would be based on her interests, but whatever those interests are, there are common things that can be taught to develop those interests. For example, selecting a project, planning it, and following through. If she takes and interest in flower arranging, then she will be encouraged to learn about all kinds of flowers, gardening and other related skills, then put those skills to practice by actually making arrangements. No matter what the subject she pursues, learning to follow start and follow through a major project will give her confidence that she can succeed and help her to understand what working for a goal really means.

Whether she decides to be a flower arranger or a bounty hunter,
the Koalid will be equipped with the skills and worldview
to allow her to be successful.

 My goal is that in August of 2032, when the Koalid is ready to go out into the world, she will be prepared for success. Whatever she decides to do, she will have a suite of basic skills to stay safe, assess and handle challenges, make a plan and execute it to success, all with ethics and moral integrity. This means adopting a mindset more of trainer and coach than protector. It does not one bit of good to keep her safe from the world until she is 18 if I then dump her out into it completely unprepared. While others her age are still trying to figure out what a work ethic is and wondering why they have already ruined their credit, she will be able to pursue whatever goals she seeks to follow.

But Michael, you might object, in this kind of strategy, the four years before she goes into the world would be the most vital in preparing her, but that's adolescence, the time when a child pulls away from a parent!

I'll address that extremely valid point in Thursday's Koalid post.

Are Children Spoiled or Just Forced to Rely on Christmas?

If you have been to a family Christmas with any family that has small kids, between the ages of around 7 to 13, you have probably seen this scene. The child excitedly tears into a gift, dreaming of all the exciting bounty that lies inside. Suddenly, he stops, crestfallen. He looks up, tears in his eyes, and whines, "this is the wrong one! This isn't what I wanted!" The parents, deeply embarrassed by their child's behavior, try to settle the situation, apologizing to the deeply offended gift giver, trying to explain to the child that they should be appreciative and thankful. Meanwhile, everyone in the room is thinking that this kid is an ungrateful brat. Perhaps a phrase like "entitled little snot" comes to a few minds.

Is this child and entitled little snot? Or, is this child responding in a very reasonable way to a very poorly thought out economic dynamic?

My education background is economics, and that is what I have my degree in. Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited needs. It studies why people do what they do to get what they want and how an economic system teaches a person to behave.

Let us consider this from an economics perspective. What do you do when you want something? You buy it! If it is too expensive, you may save up for it then buy it. However, let us imagine that you don't have money. I don't mean you are broke. I mean that you do not have access to the concept of money. You can't earn it. You can't save it. You don't have it. (Or if you do have it, it is such a small amount as to be irrelevant.) If you want something, the only way you can get it is to ask someone for it. Sometimes you can ask for something and get it, most of the time, you will not, and the more often you ask, the more negative the reaction you get it.

However, there are two times a year when you are allowed and even encouraged to ask for things you want. These times are Christmas and your birthday. You are asked, nay, hounded for a list of what you desire. This list, you know, will be disseminated to family, friends, friends of family, family of friends. You will get many things on this list.

For a more in depth explanation of
opportunity cost, you can read
this article.

There is a limit, to what you will get. There is a finite number of people who will be buying you gifts, and, it is likely that they are coordinating so that two people do not get the same gift. This brings into play an economic concept called "opportunity cost". Opportunity cost is the highest value alternative option. In other words, if you have $5 in your pocket and get a burger with it, the cost may be $5, but the opportunity cost is the next thing you could have bought with that money.

If you want 10 things and there are 6 people buying gifts, then you will not get 4 things you want. The opportunity cost of the 6 gifts that you get is the 4 gifts that you do not. That's fine, and you understand that you will not get everything on your list, but if you get 6 things from the list, then they all have high value to you and you are happy.

What if one of the items is wrong? What if you asked for a Pathfinder Player's Handbook and you get a D&D Player's Handbook? The item is not what you asked for and it has no value to you at all. One might say, "it was a present, you should still be grateful. After all, it was free." But it wasn't free, was it? It cost you one of your gifts. That D&D book that you didn't want cost you the Pathfinder that you did want. Likewise if one of those six gift givers gives you a pair of socks or a nice sweater. Not only did you not get what you wanted, but one of your precious, highly limited, irreplaceable gift slots is taken up with something that you didn't even want in the first place. That sweater cost you, in terms of opportunity cost, the most exciting of the items on your list that you did not get.

When you get upset about this, are you an ungrateful little brat, or a person who realizes that the next chance to get what you want is 6 months away, and it is entirely likely a similar mistake will be made again, and there is not a damned thing you can do about it?


Many parents limit most gift giving to birthday and holidays, which makes sense from their perspective. Most kids get about $200-$500 of presents for each. What does a 9-year-old need more than $1000 of presents a year for? Indeed... if they are the right presents.

Many parents also do not believe that children should be paid for chores or doing their homework. This makes sense from the perspective that you want a child to understand that there are somethings that need to be done because they are your obligation.

These two very reasonable concepts come together to a very negative result. Either a child only gets gifts for birthday and holiday in which case, the whole "joy of giving" concept is entirely lost on them, since the pressure to ask for an receive the correct things is intense, or a child gets gifts throughout the year, learning that the way to get what he wants to is cajole and bamboozle mom and/or dad to get what he wants. Neither of these systems teach a child what you would want them to learn.

Very nice, but would not trade an
iPhone for it.

We consider gifts to be delightful things because they are either highly thoughtful things we could not get ourselves, such as hand made or unique items, or they are something we like that we could get ourselves. If grandma gave you a handmade sweater, you'd really appreciate the thought that went into it. But, what if getting that sweater meant that you couldn't get that new iPhone. You'd be a bit less appreciative. There is no pressure to receive the right gifts for an adult, under most circumstances. If you don't get what you want, you can just go to the store tomorrow and buy it for yourself. Most children have no such option, and they should, in the same structured and limited form that adults have.

Obviously, you can't just go to the store and buy everything you want. You have limited money. Teaching a child the value of work and money means allowing them to experience that same situation. Telling a child that they cannot have something that they want does not teach them any valuable lesson except that he should learn to settle and do without: a terrible lesson to teach a child. Telling him that he can't have what he wants then eventually caving in and getting it for him is an even more terrible lesson: "if I ask hard enough I can get anything I want."

Instead of "no", the answer should be "here is what you will need to do to earn it." Perhaps a structured system in which chores are assigned a specific value and the child can accrue credit, taking on additional chores to earn additional credit. Yes, I know, adults don't get paid for doing chores, but unless you're going to suggest the kid go work at the factory, there must be some method to transmute work into satisfaction of desires for the child to learn how that process works.

What are the benefits? First, the child learns to associate hard work with getting what he wants. Second, you don't have to figure out what the balance is between privation and spoiling, the economy you create does it for you. Third, you never have to say "no, you can't have it," instead saying "sure you can have it, and this is what you have to do to get it." Fourth, Christmas can be about what it is supposed to be about, instead of it being some kind of high pressure acquisition exercise.


Post Script: adults do get paid for doing chores. They get paid in the value of having a clean house, clean dishes, clean clothes, etc. What's that worth? Ask any cleaning company how much people are willing to pay to have chores done, and you'll see that it does have economic value. The child does not yet recognize the value of the chores, and may not care as much as you do about the benefits of those chores even if he does see the value.

Not An Ordinary Man

I am not an ordinary man. I often have chosen the road less traveled. When I graduated college, I elected to open a game store instead of finding a real job. Truth be told, I did so because I could not find a real job, but that is likely because I did not actually look very hard (at that time, hard work wasn't really a thing I had been trained to do). That store became a wonderful community space of great importance to many people. So much so that when financial reality meant that I could not longer afford to work the store myself, enough people stepped up to volunteer to run it that it was able to continue, surviving in an evolved form to this day.

It is about 5:00 AM as I write this because I woke up this morning with my mind racing. I was thinking about the Koalid and how I would raise the child. Writing a post seems a better use of my time than lying in the dark thinking.

I talked to my mother yesterday for the first time since she got the news, and she is very excited. She asked me if I was excited or nervous or what. I told her that I was not nervous because I come from a long line of people who have successfully raised children, so I imagine that most of it must be instinctively hard wired. I was not yet excited, however, as it had not yet sunk in.

As of 4:00 AM this morning which I woke up, I think I could say it sunk in,and I am excited.

A couple of weeks ago, I woke from a dream in which I was about to teach a class, and the prospect of teaching was deeply exciting to me. I love knowledge, both gaining it myself and teaching it. It was this that led me to start listening to the fantastic podcast by Dan Carlin, Hardcore History. This morning, as I am awake, I realize that I am now excited because I will be able to teach this child, I will be able to share my own love of learning, and I have one other very valuable strength for this adventure.

I remember some of my own path. I was raised feeling that I was destined for something important. (Apparently that is a common trait among my generation.) However, while I was raised with that feeling, and that led me to go off the beaten track, I was not prepared to succeed in it. I had minimal education in business, sales, marketing, networking and many other skills that would ensure that Phoenix Games became a community legacy and not a profitable business.

Apparently, this is also common in my generation. We have been taught that we are special, destined for great things, then put through an education system that teaches us disconnected facts and figures, providing us no tools and no skills to actually fulfill our apparent destiny.

I attended a private school called Sudbury Valley School (SVS) from the equivalent of grades 2 through 5. After that, I went to the Framingham Public School system. SVS is an unstructured school: no grades, no mandatory classes, no schedules. There are a variety of resources available, a massive library, art room, computers, wood shop and many more places for a child to explore and discover themselves and the world around them. It was there that my interest in gaming (board games, card games, role playing games) would develop, and I learned a great deal around the gaming table, from history to language to negotiation. It was also there that I gained a sense of independence and believe in my own ability to make my own destiny.

Public school was a hard transition when I had to leave SVS because of a lack of money to pay the tuition. I have since come to learn that the society of a public school is actually similar in some ways to the society in prison, in the sense that both kids and inmates work to establish a pecking order, often by violence, and that people are treated institutionally rather than individually. I did finally adapt well to the school system, learning to get the maximum return on grades for the minimum amount of work. This, combined with the God given high intelligence, allowed me to get into UMass Amherst on scholarships so that my family's savings was sufficient to pay my way. UMass also failed to push me academically, and I focused on many extra-curriculars that were very valuable to my development, especially Student Government and some event planning, both giving me many skills that would help down the line.

But, looking back, what the whole educational process did to me was to convince me that I was really smart and that I didn't need to work very hard to do well. By being trained into habits of laziness by easy achievement, I did not push as hard as I should of when my first great challenge, Phoenix Games, came along. This is not to say that I should have been pushed to work harder in school. I did recognize that much of what I was learning was not inherently valuable, and if it had been harder to get A's, I likely would have settled for C's. What was lacking in my education was real learning. All I got was book learning. I was never put into situations where my hard work or lack thereof,  my success or lack thereof, would lead to real results, or lack thereof.

There is no way that anyone who was not of my generation could have realized that. Our society changed so much from the 50-60s to the 80-90s that the tools needed to compete and succeed had changed as well. In my parent's generation, one could follow the traditional education track and be successful. The pie was big enough that there was enough to go around for everyone. Working class wage was living wage for the most part. Certainly not so in 2000.

My family did teach me many valuable things as I was growing my. My mother's father, whom I called Zadie, was a salesman and he taught me that sales is one of the best industries in the world. My father's father, whom I called Mana (for reasons completely lost to history) was a minister and he taught me a great deal about God that I would not come to truly appreciate for many years. My father started a business when I was 6 which continues to be successful to this day, and from this I learned that one can make one's own way in the world. However, I did not learn any details of these lessons, and this is mostly because I did not realize what I did not know and needed to learn and my family did not want to push me. I learned that sales is a great field but did not learn much of how to be good at it. I learned what it is to be a good person but did not come to know God until many years later. I learned how exciting the idea of entrepreneurship is but did not learn the details of running a business. I would come to learn these lessons on my own, and I only knew to seek them out because of what I had learned from my father and grandfathers. I certainly cannot fault them for not teaching me more assertively, but I can take what I see of that history and perhaps use that to inform what my child will need to be better prepared.

To be fair to my family, I had a very nice upbringing, and I did learn a great deal. Because I know that sales was a good place to be, I was able to follow a path that leads me to be relatively financially secure today. Because I knew that God was someone to know, I knew to seek Him out. Because I know that entrepreneurship was possible, I was able to take that path less chosen.

I should also especially mention my mother who taught me very much about dealing with people, particularly in an ethical and moral sense. She taught me the importance of respecting women, embracing diversity, and the value and reward of generosity, which is a hallmark of some of the most successful people I've every known.

Today, I feel that knowing what I do of my own education, and having an idea of what the world may be like going forward. I know how to replicate much of what strengthened me for success while filling in the gaps which left me waiting until my 30s to really find financial success. It's a matter of training the child for what is coming. Looking at those around me who are successful, finding the skills that make them so, and making sure that the child is trained in those skills.

How can I possibly know what life will be like in 2032? Obviously, in detail, I cannot. I can, however, be confident of a few things.

1) Society will be made up of humans who follow the rules of human psychology, regardless of how much technology those humans carry around on a daily basis.
2) Success will come of being able to work with, persuade, inspire and lead these humans.
3) Confidence and faith will always be key elements of success.

Obviously, society will change. Perhaps fast food jobs will all be done by robots and computer programming will be seen as menial labor, but wealth will continue to exist, and the clever, creative, confident, faithful person will be able to figure out where that wealth flows and work into that flow. This is a skill I am only learning now in my 30s, but I intend that the Koalid will get a great head start from my experience.