The Division of Labor and Finding Your Niche

0:00I want to talk about the division of labor, and division of labor is maybe something you've been taught, but probably not, it's really what society is built on, and it's how we coordinate with others. Everyone's allowed to specialize in what they do best, instead of spending hours of day Murray Rothbard, U.N.L.V., The Further an Exchange Economy Develops, the Further Advanced will be the specialization process. So what we have is a very, very highly developed economy and the specialization process has become very keen. And so this world has come a long way since the first person who came up with the idea of division of labor and that was This is Plato, 2400 years ago. Plato said that the division of labor, he pleads for the division of labor, in fact, for three reasons.

1:24There's a natural productive difference between individuals. Some individuals are good at some things and they're not good at other things. And vice versa. And that makes one person a better tailor, why another person may be a better farmer, so on and so forth. And, of course, the daily exercise of doing what you do best makes you better at it. So if you do the same thing over and over and over again, you get very good at it. And if you enjoy what you're doing, you will get better at it. Now, many jobs need to be done at the right moment and the right time, and therefore they require permanent availability with someone charged with this task and this was another reason that Plato believed in the idea of the division of labor. So it started with Plato 2400 years ago and here we are today and what has what has the division of labor turned into and what's it mean to you? Well I wrote a piece recently about

2:34about Cosmetic Surgeons in New York. Now, I don't know how many of you have had cosmetic surgery. That was another laugh line. I don't know how many of you are interested in cosmetic surgery. I'd ask for a show of hands, but I wouldn't get any, so I'm not going to do that. But in New York City, there are plastic surgeons to specialize, not in just your normal nose jobs, you know, chin lifts, other, shall we say, infrastructure improvements, it really comes down to ethnic preferences amongst people.

3:23And for instance, Italian women want their knees done. Now why do Italian women want attractive knees? Well, they wear short skirts, so they want their knees to look good. Now, Iranians want nose jobs, Egyptians, they're looking for face lifts, Russian women, breast implants, Chinese men want bigger ear lobes, that's what Chinese men want, the most sought after procedure by Asian women is double eyelid surgery, because in their view, large eyes Specialized Accentuate Beauty. So the point of all this is that you have, you have surgeons, not one surgeon who does all of these types of surgeries, but you have individual surgeons who specialize in each one of these procedures.

4:20There's no one surgeon who could do all of these procedures as well as the individual

4:55The Bears fans, right? You've got the upcoming NFL draft, right? So who do the Bears need to draft? Everybody. Well, okay. But they need offensive of Lineman, right, to protect Jay Cutler, so the thought is in the first round that they're going to pick maybe this Derek Sherrod from Mississippi State or whatever the case may be. And the NFL draft is interesting because it used to be no big deal.

5:44Nobody cared about the NFL draft. But in fact in Auburn, as you might expect, there's actually some excitement about the the NFL Draft, not that we have a pro team, but we have a couple of players who are going to go very high, supposedly, Cam Newton and Nick Farley. In fact, there may even be a party at my house to watch these guys get drafted. But it may surprise you that 40 million people watched the NFL Draft. 40 million people, I mean, that's hard to imagine. But nobody was watching the draft in 1979 when there's this skinny kid, he was skinny, he was uncoordinated, he had big glasses, he wanted to play, but the coach just says you're too uncoordinated, you love sports, but we're not going to let you play because you're terrible.

6:40So he sat in the stands and he studied players and his name was Joel Buschbaum, you've probably never heard of him. Joel Buschbaum, in 1979, began writing for Pro Football Weekly, and that was the year he wrote his first draft book, Pro Football Weekly and the Scouts Notebook, 1979. He analyzed the top 600 college players that were going to be drafted, and he interviewed all kinds of coaches and players and all kinds of people to determine who the top draft picks And some experts in the NFL say that Joel had a lot to do with the glorification that we see today with the NFL draft and that ESPN that now televises it wouldn't have even become interested in it if it wouldn't have been for this skinny kid who couldn't play ball himself named Joel Boschba.

7:43Now that same year, in 1979, if you follow the draft, there was a 19-year-old kid named Mel Kiper Jr. that he started typing out his first draft reports, and he mailed copies to 150 agents and teams and personnel all around the country. He spent hours talking to coaches, he talked his dad into getting a satellite dish to put on their house so they could watch every college game, and he cranked out these reports the following year in 1980. And that was the same year that ESPN first televised the NFL draft. Now I remember it because I was 22 at the time, and I was running a nightclub, and I'd work till three o'clock in the morning the night before, but this was a Tuesday morning I got up at, I believe, 6.30 or 7, and watched the NFL Draft on ESPN at the bar, eating a box of doughnuts.

8:52But that tells you that this was not prime time, right? Seven or eight in the morning, Eastern time, to start the NFL Draft with the first pick, it was no big deal. But Mel Kuyper, 19-year-old kid, started Mel Kuyper Enterprises. He sold 130 reports, and now he sells that analysis to 10,000 people, and of course, anyone who watches the NFL Draft, and if you watch it on April 28th, you'll know that he is the face and of course the hair of a sprawling draft empire. I mean, he does sports spots, he does interviews, he does websites, he became part of the ESPN announcing crew in 1984, I mean, he is the NFL draft, Mel Kuyper Jr.

9:51Of course, the NFL draft now starts in prime time, on a Thursday night, starts up again It starts again on a Friday, and then on Saturday it starts up again on Saturday morning. It's watched by 40 million people, as I said, and Joel Boschbaum never got to see this. He died at age 48 in 2002. But the point here is that I want to make is that Joel Boschbaum, Mel Kuyper Jr., found a very, very specialized niche based on their passion for a game.

10:44And they created a business out of it. And they did it when they were teenagers. And I don't know whether Mel Kuyper Jr.'s wealthy or not, but I guess, I can guess that he is doing exactly what he wants to do every single day. And as long as there's an NFL draft, he will be reporting on it. Now I'm sure all of you have watched every John Wayne movie there's ever been, right? No? Okay, how about Hell Fighters? How many people have seen Hell Fighters? Oh, thank you. Two people in the audience, well, that's the first thing you should do once you leave here.

11:32is go watch Hellfighters. It's got John Wayne in it, so you know it's good. But the story is about a guy named Red Adair, and you probably don't know Red Adair's name, but he passed away in 2004. But before he passed away, he was renowned He was known for putting out oil well fair hires. Nobody on earth was as good as he was at capping a blazing oil well. Whether it was on shore or whether it was at sea, Red Adair was, there he goes now, no, except he's dead, I'm sorry, but nobody was as good as Red Adair was at putting out about Oil Welfires And he's not only a hero to the oil service industry, but he's invented the equipment and methods that put out oil well fires today.

12:37And at one time there was nobody else in the world who could do it. And although oil was discovered as a form of energy in the 19th century, People took great pains to figure out how to get it out of the ground and use it. They didn't figure out that when one of these oil wells blew out and a fire erupted, they didn't know how to put it out. He's the guy that figured that out. He created measures to put out these fires and the reason I would recommend you watch John Wayne and his crew, as he plays Red Adair, or a Red Adair-like character, shows you how they put it out. It's very instructive how they do it, and it's very interesting.

13:26In fact, when the Iraqis set, you may remember that the Iraqis set hundreds of wells on fire in Kuwait. And people said it would take years to put out those fires, years. Red came in with his crew and put those fires out in less than six months. Now by that time, Red Adair was already in his 70s. And he told reporters, retire, I don't know what the word means. As long as a man is able to work, and he's productive out there, and he feels good, keep at it. I've got too many of my friends that retired and went home, got on a rocking chair and about a year and a half later I'm always going to the cemetery.

14:19And what he meant was he knows people that go and retire and then they sit for a year and then they die. And I've known these kind of people too. of Dare lived dangerously till he was 89 years old. He found his specialty. He became the absolute best in the world at what he used to do. And again, I would urge you to watch the movie because there's a very poignant scene where that is played out. And that illustrates my point to be part of the division of labor, to be part of the specialization, to be part, find out what you're Make it your life's work, your life's passion.

15:07Now I can stand up here and tell you that government's going to muck everything up, and we will, and they do, but you know what? You have your whole lives ahead of you, and you should make the most of satisfying the life that you can. And you better start now. Don't wait. Don't say, well, I gotta get through school or whatever excuses you can think of. You can always think of excuses. But right now, you're like, you think your time is limited, or limitless, I should say. Well, you're thinking I've got plenty of time, I'm bored half the time, I don't know what to do. Well, you better get busy, because time is going to become a very, very, very precious resource. You won't have enough of it. And while you're wasting it, right now, you're wasting the best years of your life. There's work by a Swiss psychologist, Jean Peugeot, who indicates that we become Uncapable of Formal Operational Thinking at Age 11.

16:25We peak in those abilities at age 15. In his book, The Measurement of Adult Intelligence, David Weschler concluded that the highest mental age we can reach is 15 and a half. J.C. Raven wrote in the British Journal of Psychology, intelligence peaks at 13 or 14. Robert Epstein wrote in the Case Against Adolescence, we're most able to reason clearly when we're in our teens and no matter how aggressively we try to train people of other ages, this basic fact is unlikely to change.

17:11That's why people learn languages, they learn music, they learn so many things, so much easier when they're young. You know, I had an MRI recently. I've got a number of health issues, as I'm sure you can tell. And jeez, this is the deadest audience I've ever had. Anyway, I'm going to try to say something funny. I had an MRI recently and my neurologist said part of my brain had atrophied. By the way, you don't want to hear that from your doctor. In other words, part of my brain is gone. And he said, you know what, that's normal for your age, don't worry about it.

17:59But part of what I got up here doesn't work anymore. and the two guys following me. They're older than I am. Okay? Now, we don't all use all of our brain. We don't even use a fraction of it, but what I'm saying is you're at your peak. The people sitting in this room, not the old folks sitting in this room, the young people sitting in this room, you've got more mental horsepower now than you ever will. I mean, Raven writes that after age 30, a person's ability to understand a new method of thinking, adopt new methods of working, or even to adapt a new environment steadily decreases.

18:46By the time a person's 80, they start thinking about it like an eight-year-old again. And when it comes to memory, at or shortly after puberty, our memories are as good as as they are going to get. So if you're depending on your memory, and I depend on mine a lot because I'm told I have a good one and it still is pretty decent, well listen, it all starts gradually going downhill. Now speaking of some guys in their old age, hopefully you've heard of the Rolling Stones. Yeah? Hello? Okay. They are the self-proclaimed greatest rock and roll band in the world, and for guys my age that's true, for people your age that's not true, but so on.

19:38Time is on my side, hits number 6 in the US in 1964, Satisfaction, Get Off My Cloud, and Paint It Black hit number 1 in 1965. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were born in 1943. They moved into a London flat in 1962. They began writing songs. They were 19 years old. And recent, you probably wouldn't have picked up this book, but Keith Richards just wrote a autobiography that has somewhat rankled his partner Mick Jagger, and Mick, although it doesn't bear Mick's name, probably wrote a piece that was in Slate magazine, and that Mick, we think Mick wrote this, By the time of Tattoo You, which came out in 1981, I was exhausted, entirely drained of ideas, I told Chris Kinsley to ransack the archives, Start Me Up was a very old song, with some 20, 30, 40 ticks as reggae, and one with the real rock guitar. It turned out to be our last real hit.

21:02And the arc of our career would look much different if we hadn't found it, he said. With it, we could plausibly least claim to be hit makers in the 1980s. Waiting on a friend, Mick said, that symbol of our newfound maturity was if memory serves a centuries-old session with me and Mick Taylor. The point I'm making here is that the Rolling Stones are in their late 60s. They are making a very handsome living off songs that Mick and Keith wrote when they were in their teens. They haven't really written anything since.

21:47Mary Shelley, have you heard of her? Thank you, I get one nodded head. published her first poem at age 10. She started writing Frankenstein at age 18. Maybe you've heard of Frankenstein. Edgar Allan Poe, you probably have had to read The Telltale Heart and The Raven, published his first book of poems at age 18, some of the poems he had written at age 12 and 13. Samuel Colt constructed the My first multi-round pistol when he was 16 years old, if you've ever played Monopoly or Risk or Trivial Pursuit, George Parker started his board game company at 16 years old.

22:41Have you ever seen the Muppets? Anybody seen the Muppets here? He began developing those characters when he was 13 years old, the show first aired When he was 18, Stevie Wonder wrote his first hit when he was 14 years old. Speaking of blind, Louis Braille invented the first version of the Braille system reading when he was 12. He completed it when he was 16. And for many Americans, Bobby Fischer is the greatest chess legend of all time. In 1958, at the age of 15, he became the youngest international grandmaster of all time.

23:30And at the time, nobody thought anybody younger would ever achieve that feat. Since then, seven players younger than Fisher have achieved the International Grand Masters of Fame, including a 12-year-old. And the number of teenagers who have made significant contributions in the area of mathematics is so long, it's not even worth going into. There's just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these examples. Our brains are in their prime time. Now you might say, well, I've got too much work to do, I've got chores, I've got stuff to do around the house, I've got a Facebook page to keep up, you know, there's a lot of things I need to be doing.

24:22But imagine if you're an in-demand movie star. I mean, these folks don't have much time on their hands. They're either filming, they're doing publicity, they're going to award shows, they're getting in trouble with the law, whatever they're doing, they're busy, right? Well, you guys know who Natalie Portman is, right? Any Natalie Portman fans? Any geeky enough guys in here? That's because, you know, Natalie's, that's the, yeah, that's every geek's fantasy, right? All right, well she just won an Academy Award for those who don't know. She won for her portrayal of Nina in the black swan, but she's not just any pretty face. She made it to the semifinals of the Intel Science Talent Search when she was in high school. Now people who have won that competition or come close to have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two field medals in mathematics, half a dozen national medals in science and technology, and a long string of MacArthur Foundation genius grants.

25:40When she was doing this, she was already making movies. She was already busy. She was cast in the Star Wars trilogy when she was 18 years old. So it's not like she made movies and then went to school. She was doing this all at once. And she could quit school, right? I mean, she could just be a successful actress and let it go at that. But she went to Harvard to study neuroscience and the evolution of the mind. One of the, one of her instructors said, there are very few who are as intelligently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did.

26:29She didn't take a single thing for granted. Now, most of you are not going to recognize the name of Danica McKellar, because you never watched a show called The Wonder Years. She was Wendy in the wonder years. The West Wing, she was in NYPD Blue, Young Justice, well she also at the same time she was acting summa cum laude in mathematics, University of California Los Angeles, helped devise mathematical proof for certain properties of magnetic fields. That theorem has her name along with those of her collaborators. These people are busy. They are busy actors and they are still excelling in school, still doing great things.

27:21James Franco is a movie star, you've probably heard of him, nominated for Academy Award, he just co-hosted the award show with Anne Hathaway. He's working on a doctorate in English at Yale. He's also a film director, screenwriter, a painter, an author, a performance artist, In addition to the Yale program, which could take years by the way, he's on track to earn a master's degree in film from New York University this spring. It's a full-time project. Last year, Franco earned a master's degree in writing from Brooklyn College and this semester The Theory is co-teaching the course in film editing at Columbia College in Hollywood, a private school in Los Angeles.

28:14One of his students said to see someone who has everything that most people would consider an ideal life, you know, fun, successful career, to be voluntarily doing such school work at a time is really admirable and something that most people can't comprehend. Now, I've talked about some extraordinary people here for sure, but there's everyday people, young people, doing great things. Anybody heard of the man-cans? Nobody has heard of the man-cans. Well, you know, when you buy, um, when you buy candles, what are the scents like? They smell like lilac and lavender, you know, generally girly sort of smells, right?

29:05Well, there's this 13-year-old kid, and he decided he'd come up with the idea of man-cans, candles that when you burn them, they smell like things that men want to smell, like a well-worn catcher's mitt, bacon, sawdust. I'm thinking maybe cocoa butter and perspiration. I don't know. I've got all kinds of things, you know, suggestions for this kid. He came up with this himself. He's giving away the soup to the soup kitchen and they're planting the scents in these cans. He's making a little bit of money at it. Wall Street Journal recently had an article about young people coming up with jobs. Listen, it's going to be tough for you to get jobs. I mean, we've done these This kind of, I've taken, I'm not even gonna ask today, but we do this and it's very difficult.

30:07Most young people are not working and so it's tough to find a job and you have to be creative. You've got to create your own job. Nothing fancy, but as the Wall Street Journal article reported, you know, they just went Most of you guys can fix a computer and probably set it up better than the average fifty, sixty year old. I guarantee you can do it. You can show them how to do it and you can advertise your wares and make a little bit of money and have great fun doing it. There's stuff you know how to do technological-wise that old people can't figure out. And you can help them with that, and you can make a little money doing that.

30:52And for instance, there was, after a vendor knocked on the door of a lady, I believe it was down in Dallas, the vendor wanted to wash her windows for 150 bucks. She told her son, hey, go make the rounds and undercut his price by a third, you know, by a third of the price. And he ended up earning money that summer with little more than squeegee vinegar and some newspaper. But the problem is you've got more competition now. See, it used to be that retired people were going to stay retired, old people were going to stay old and go sit in a rocking chair.

31:37Well, they can't afford to do that because they didn't save enough. Wall Street Journal reports 34% of senior men aged 60 to 69 have jobs. Fewer than 15% of teenage males have jobs. Now, 10 years ago, that statistic was the opposite. 29% of senior men had jobs, 34% of boys in their mid-teens had jobs. In the year 2000, 35% of teenage girls had jobs, now it's only 17%.

32:26So it's tough out there, laws have made it difficult, government's made it difficult, and competition from old folks has made it difficult. Life isn't about spending 12 or 16 years hating school, then finding a job for 40-plus in the last years, and hating that, and then happily retiring to do nothing, and saying, ah, I made it.

33:14Boy, this life's been terrible, school, and then job, and I'm finally retired. We'll go back to the early part of my speech. What happens is you do that, you sit in your chair and watch Oprah or Jerry Springer for a year, and then you die. There's no way to live life. The way to live life is to find out what you do good at, what you're passionate about, and do that, and make a full life for yourself. But millions are doing exactly the opposite. When you enjoy what you're doing, it's not work. And when you're good at something, you want to do more of it.

34:01And oh, by the way, when you're good at it, people want you to keep doing it. They want you to keep doing it no matter how old you are, no matter what, because when you're good at something, people want to hire you. And that's the division of labor. That's specialization. That's what progresses society when we're all doing what we do best and cooperating There is an endless number of jobs to be done. There's an endless number of products and services to be created, invented. A year ago, there was no man can, but think five years ago, we didn't have this droid in my pocket didn't have that you know computers much of what we take for granted was just wasn't here there's more to be created you can be the guys to create it so find out what you're good at find out what you like to do that that others find value in.

35:21And you have to have an education to do part of that. The education is certainly part of it. But you also learn on the job as well. You'll learn how to deal with a variety of people. And if you think your family's a bunch of screwballs, well, wait till you get on the job. You'll really, boy oh boy, you'll really You'll learn how to, you know, figure out how to work day to day with a variety of people. You'll learn to budget your time, you'll learn to prioritize, and if nothing else, you'll get out of the house. So don't wait. Technology and progress is passing you by. There's people, Mark Zuckerberg wasn't waiting.

36:09He was putting together Facebook, you know, in his teens, and there was stuff he was creating. He was turning Google down or Amazon down when he was in high school for stuff he was inventing. There's people out there doing it. They're not waiting. You don't have the luxury of waiting around for another life. You're not going to get another life. I wish you would have another life with less government, with less interference, but you don't. You get this life and you have to survive and you have to thrive in this life. The freedoms we are gaining, we are gaining through technology and the progress and the division of labor that I've been talking about.

36:59So what I want you to do, what I want you to take away today, find your niche, find what you're good at, become part of the Division of Labor.