The Chinese Menu Of Life Choices

In case anyone wants soap. We can work something out.
Contact: metaphysics.of.mgtow@gmail.com

Paralysis to act kills off projects before they are even started. I don't know if anyone has ever done a study on this. But I would suspect that for every 100 great ideas we have, we probably fail to act on 99 of them. In turn, these ideas are forgotten. New ideas take their place. Those ideas also are not acted upon, and also forgotten.

Why is this? First of all, why do we have hundreds of ideas we consider good to begin with? Well, it must be the case that prima facia we consider them viable. This means that given our life experience, we are convinced at the moment of conception that these ideas are within the realm of reason for us to achieve.

I can't say for certain but I suspect that people hundreds of years ago were not plagued with an overabundance of good ideas. As in, I believe people of the past had a far narrower view of what they believed they were capable of actually achieving.

The mind is a curious creature. If you have convinced yourself of a deficiency in yourself, your mind will filter out ideas that necessitate an absence of this deficiency before a thought enters your mind.

For example. I have not had a single idea pop up in my mind that has involved me and anything space. I know I am never going to space. Hence, my mind does not bring to my conscious awareness any ideas, business or otherwise, where I need to go to space.

I think this sort of natural filtering mechanism was far more prevalent for people in the past. After all, if you were born the son of a shoemaker, you were pretty sure that you were going to be a shoemaker. Consequent to this, you were not bombarded with schemes around how to get rich as a cotton farmer.

Yet today, we have this ingrained idea that anyone can do anything and everyone is capable of everything.

Such an idea, by necessity, opens the floodgates for the subconscious to bombard you with endless possibilities because it appears there is almost nothing impossible.

But what happens then? You get paralyzed from choice. You have no idea how to filter down these endless possibilities.

Have you ever been to a Chinese restaurant that has 200 items on the menu? Kung Pow Chicken. General Tao Chicken. Hai Sin Chicken. Some other random non-descript word chicken?



It all reads like gibberish. What does any of it mean? Based on what filter do I navigate this menu? The advice to choose what one feels like is not helpful. How the hell do I differentiate an internal feeling of desire for General Tao chicken from Kung pow chicken when I have no idea what either of them actually mean?

You can't. And this is the same phenomenon I think we are all experiencing every day.

Now, I started producing soap. I like making stuff and use the stuff I make. But like I said in my last video, it does not hurt to put it up for sale and see what happens. I don't feel pressure to sell, but I would like to put it out there.

Now, I am faced with this seemingly endless set of options. Should I post on eBay, Etsy, Amazon, Allegro, the local Polish version of Amazon, Shopify, a home grown, or sell here on a YouTube channel shop?

The challenge is I don't know what any of these options actually mean. Sure, on a topical level I understand I am creating a store front, much the same way I understand I am ordering a chicken dish if I order General Tao chicken or Kung Pow chicken, yet, that's not helpful.

It's not helpful because all these properties each have their own rules, systems, fees, and other unknown downstream consequences.

You might say to yourself, Marcus, this is not a big problem. Just research each of these platforms and choose one you believe is best for you.

Ok. Sure, that's a project I need to take on. But now my project is researching like 6 or 7 options each with their fair share of success stories and horror stories. I have done this research. There are no good options. They all suck in their own way. If you search on youTube, you will find videos listing the 10 reasons it’s a terrible idea to start a shop on Etsy in 2024. You will also find videos telling you the top 10 reasons it has never been a better time to start an Etsy shop in 2024.

Additionally, with the price of shipping being ridiculously high, coupled with the percentages each of these platforms take, it seems like selling a product valued between 5 to 10 dollars a unit is a waste of time. Can it be made profitable. Of course, at scale it can.

Now, I am not new to business so please don't interpret this story as some Pikachu face shock on my part. In my case, all these options are of equal weight, consequent to that, it makes no difference. I can roll a 6-sided dice to decide and all results will, under final analysis, end up pretty much the same with the exception of rolling my own website.