Reinvent the Wheel– Make it Your Wheel

Nobody is perfect. Not inventors, not statesmen, not writers or publishers. Not philosophers, not theologians, not thinkers or doers of any sort. Life does not require perfection. If it did, we’d all be in trouble. Great writers don’t write things perfectly the first time (unless they’re Mozart). They are great writers because they do a great amount of revising and editing. (You can probably tell that I spend a minimum of time on editing. If I am ever at liberty to work at this full-time, I’ll do more research, more development, and more editing and revising, producing a better product. If that seems desirable, click here.)

With this in mind, I have always tried to experience solutions for myself. I assume, on principle, that other people’s solutions are suboptimal. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I will do better, but it leaves open the possibility. Often I do find a more optimal solution than the stock one. However, what I often end up doing is the equivalent to reinventing the wheel. After tedious work, study, research, and experimentation, the best solution I find is the stock solution.

At first glance, it may appear that I’ve just wasted a lot of time that I could have saved by simply adopting the stock solution in the first place. On reflection, however, I’ve understood the stock solution (and a whole array of suboptimal solutions tried and rejected) better than anyone who adopted the solution without thinking. In short, I’ve made it my own. I own it. I prefer to get a comprehensive view of the world by testing all its parameters. As the Bible says, “Prove all things…”

An example of this is my recent set of articles about the tax consequences of participating in the money system. I concluded that taxation eats up nearly 50% of earnings, but savvy taxpayers can avoid most of those taxes by playing the peculiar game that the IRS has created. After writing those articles, I chanced upon a CD at the Dollar Tree called “Lower Your Taxes For a Better Life” by Bob Adams, for SimplyMedia. Imagine my surprise, when Bob Adams reiterated all of my points! Of course, he had a number of his own points that I didn’t own. Bob is a tax professional, so he stated these things with much more authority than I could. But the basic points lined up beautifully. I had reinvented legal tax avoidance. It wasn’t profound or new, but it was mine. I own it more than if I had simply listened to the CD without doing my own research. I highly recommend the audio titles at www.simplymagazine.net. I listen to every one that comes through the Dollar Tree. You can buy them for a dollar there (no surprise) or you can download them from their website for $10.00. I am not affiliated with SimplyMedia, so if you buy their titles it won’t help me. Nevertheless, from the ones I’ve listened to, I highly recommend the titles they sell.

Another example of reinventing the wheel is tribal economics. Born in 1973, I grew up in a non-tribal, non-family oriented society. I have gradually invented what I have come to call tribal economics. It is the way for families to grow and prosper in the modern world. But the more I have learned, studied, and experimented, the more I have come to suspect that tribal economics is simply what happens naturally, in the absence of artificial, perverse incentives created by government regulations and tax laws. Long after large-family agrarian life was passe, a continuing staple of American communities was the family business. Our country was built and grown on the economic bedrock of family businesses. As I stated before, and Bob Adams backs me up, there are still significant tax incentives for the family business, incentives which multiply as the family gets larger and larger, but the personality required to realize the benefits of a large family business is much the same personality required of a CEO. Good CEOs are in high demand and they demand high salaries. The same is true of tribal economic leaders. The only difference is in the genetics of the people being led.

When I was in music school, I re-wrote the fundamental scale patterns and technical methods for guitar and piano in my spare time. I also wrote my own manual of music composition. These three writings were based on mountains of research through centuries of textbooks. In the end, although they built on centuries of tradition, they contradicted the current models. The guitar method for instance uses tuning in 4ths (EADGCF) instead of the traditional EADGBE. This allows symmetric scale and chord patters all over the fretboard. I invented my own wheel and nobody else owned it. It was more optimal for my purposes than the traditional method. The composition manual simplified 400 years of compositional style and technique and provided simple algorithms for the composition of complex music.

So my advice is this: Don’t be afraid to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes your wheel will be better than the stock wheel (or at least better for your purposes in a given time and place). Sometimes your wheel will be identical to the stock wheel, in which case you will be more connected with the stock wheel than everyone else.