A Country Devoid of Opportunities

Selling an opportunity is the best opportunity.

This has been in my mind for a long time and I have hesitated if I should talk about this explicitly. But the truth needs to be told and people need to know the truth. I connect with my readers by being honest with my thoughts; this post is another opportunity.

If you look at the business situation in our country today, who are the people who seem to be doing very well? Who has been making a lot of money and showcasing their success?

Unfortunately, it's not the people who are creating products and services that people want. Instead, it is the people who are helping people (or promising to help people) to make more money.

During the California gold rush period, people made more money selling tools for mining gold than by mining gold itself. When income is the most in demand, products and services that promise to help people generate more income will have a lot of demand.

The country is devoid of opportunities. The lack of opportunities in this country has many underlying reasons. It goes all the way deep into how the monetary system is structured.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because the poor do not have a good way to save their money from the theft of inflation. While the solution to this is complex and correcting it may take a long time, the result of this structure which affects all the people is apparent and cannot be overlooked.

(Source: Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023 - Wid.World)

You can see in the above chart that the wealth of the Top 10% has gone up significantly, and the middle and bottom’s wealth has dropped drastically. It is also estimated that 1 out of 2 people under the age of 25 are jobless. Why? As long as people want products and services, there should be demand and jobs. The answer is not easy. And if you look for the answer, you will be disappointed. This post is a question. I am asking why. I am not giving a solution. The solution will appear only when all of us ask the question: Why?

In the 1960s, in the US, construction workers, plumbers, farmers, small store owners, and so on were able to afford a house and raise 3-4 children. That doesn't mean that they were making a lot of money doing it. The things needed to raise a family were cheap and that's because the economy was efficient.

But the system on top of which the economy is built is so weak that it rewards a few people at the top and leeches the economic energy of many people at the bottom. Because of this system's capacity to drain people of their savings, many people in India, especially the millennials and GenZ find it almost impossible to make enough money even to just run a simple family with 2 kids. Buying real estate is almost impossible and they don’t have enough to save for the future.

The lack of jobs, coupled with the lack of a good savings mechanism, creates a mass of unemployed youth in India who can no longer get jobs with their college education. Colleges do give people skills that are needed for the economy but the problem is not that these jobs do not exist or these jobs do not pay. They just don't pay enough to meet the expenses of basic livelihood.

I studied civil engineering and I can get a job in civil engineering if I want to but the salary might be at best around 50k per month which is not enough for me. Not because I want to live a luxurious life, but because 50k is not enough even to provide the basics for my family and raise kids.

Anything in demand sells a lot. Housing is in demand, vegetables are in demand, furniture is in demand, but the highest demanded product is "income opportunity". Because in a country devoid of opportunities, selling an opportunity is the best opportunity.

• That's why people who teach other people how to follow their passion make more money than following their passion.

• People who teach other people how to become a coach make more money than being a coach in a niche.

• People who teach other people how to start or grow their businesses make more money than running a business that provides products and services that are needed for our daily lives.

• People who have built platforms to help other people invest and make more money make more money than investing themselves.

There is nothing wrong with doing this. When there is demand for something, someone will fill that demand with supply. I am not away from this phenomenon.

I discovered that teaching people digital marketing is going to be more profitable than doing digital marketing for companies and that's why my offers are more focused on education. Because tens of thousands of people graduate from colleges with skills that do not pay much or do not pay at all. And they want to earn more, they want to learn digital marketing because they believe that marketing jobs are more lucrative. And I fulfill that demand with my digital marketing training programs.

With MicroStartup, I will be making a lot of revenue by teaching people how to build Micro Startups. Is it unethical to tap into that opportunity? Definitely not. Because there is demand for it and I am not forcing anyone to buy.

However, I wouldn’t preach what I don’t practice. I will be running services and software companies under Micro Startup along with teaching people how to build their own Micro Startups. I might end up making more revenue with education and services. It just reflects the demand in the market.

We are all rational beings and we do what gives us the most return on time, money, and energy spent. But this cannot go on forever.

School and college education should teach people the skills to create products and services that other people want and need. This includes the basics for human survival. And suppose the economy is running more efficiently. In that case, all of us will be creators of real products and services and the money that we earn will be enough to pay for all the expenses for raising a family of a few kids and educate them further.

When I can’t make any revenue by selling an opportunity, that’s when I know that we are in a strong economy. If every college graduate gets a good job after graduation, they wouldn’t bother to buy my Micro Internship program and I would be happy for the country because that would happen only in a strong economy.

In an ideal world, there will be no need to sell or buy an income opportunity. The skills learned in college should be enough. We should not only dream of a utopian world but do something about it to get there.

The world operates on the exchange of goods and services that people need. And everyone should specialize in one thing for that. As people specialize in one thing, they will get better at it and it will help other people improve the quality of their lives.

There is an answer to this, but you need to look for the answer. When you start looking for an answer, the answer will be obvious. The answer is not electing better politicians. The answer is changing the underlying incentive structures of the world which incentivize the production of goods and services.

The government should enable the exchange of goods and services by creating a platform with strong laws and less bleeding at the top. Tax revenues should be used to invest in healthcare and education rather than paying interest on foreign debt that is taken to build fancy projects that make the headlines. The list goes on and on.

As I said, this post is the question and I encourage you to start asking this question. Only when we ask the right questions, we will arrive at the answer.