On solving audacious problems
By: Adam Bhakrani
Tags: Solutions, Simplicity, Problems, Debt, Traffic

Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash

Nowadays one can witness multiple movements around solving grand challenges that we are facing. Whether we perceive them in our personal lives in the west or people in developing countries. Even the United Nations came up with a poster with the claim “17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) to transform our world”.

This is definitely the right direction to go and where everyone of us should work on.

At the same time many institutions claim that we need to make huge investments and run grand research experiments to find solutions. And this is something I am not understanding. For many challenges we are facing, there are to my knowledge already existing solutions. Some are known to everyone while others are not known (or even hidden from the masses). I am gonna list out these 3 grand issues and also outline solutions that EVERYONE can apply. Most of them do not even require a penny to be invested. Rather the challenge is to overcome your own psycholgocial barrier, or as Ramit Sethi would call them invisible scripts, and be ready to take ACTION.

Debt of any kind (+ interest)

Debt is bad. You owe money to a person or financial institution. They make you a slave for a certain period of time, because they expect the money back plus an additional fee in the name of interest. If the payback is delayed, the interest rate will be higher. Let us face it, you become a slave. But for what price? Because “we buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.” Sounds familiar. You don’t need to buy a house (hint: it is not even an asset unless you rent it to somebody), you don’t need to buy the latest car (a used car is enough to get from A to B) and you certainly do not need to get a student loan to go to college. For the latter, it is better to do an apprenticship or buy books on what you want to learn. There are even tons of online courses.

Solution: Just do not get debt and make sure your expenses are lower than your income. If you have debt, be very agressive in paying them off first, before making any other important purchases.

Traffic Jams

This is a particular issue in Asia and many parts in the USA. Just recently I heard it from Joe Rogan and also Elon Musk who both mentioned how horrible the traffic is in Los Angeles. There are many factors which contribute to traffic jams and packed streets. When I observe the streets, one thing always catches my eye: 90% of the people I see driving on the seat, drive both a large car and alone. That is ridiculous. These have the guts to drive SUVs and station wagons to commute to work and back home and are sitting in their alone? Now scale this up to thousands of cars on a daily base. This is just sad. Probably the same people who wonder why we have traffic jams and find the fault in others or other institutions.

Solution: Switch to public transport, bikes or car pool with others.

General health issues (allergies, obesity and cancers)

I do not know the numbers, but I remember that it was mentioned that the health industry is worth billions of dollars, may be trillions. There are tons of people and companies with tons of different advice as well as products running around. People get more sick nowadays then feeling healthy and it ranges from smaller issues to frightening conditions. I assume that the real truth to optimal health is already existing, but certain institutions not interested to make this knowledge public. Especially the pharma industry who need this keep this secret for their profits.

You also hear how organizations invest tons of money in research for the next cure for cancer. This is great, but again, I do believe there is a solution out there and we need to embrace it soon.

Solution: Start fasting (e.g. intermittent fasting), drink tons of water, eat tons of colorful as well as unprocessed/natural veggies and only eat when you are hungry.

Conclusion

I am sure there are tons of other areas which need to be improved on. But it should give you an idea that most giant problems we face can be solved very easily and are almost free, at least affordable. The time to value is super low as the switch can be applied already the next day. It is probably not easy for somebody who is used to drive all the time to just simply change to trains and busses. But the impact can be tremendous and a win-win for everyone, except for those who profit from the problems above.