“What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee.” – Marcus Aurelius (b. 121 AD – d.180 AD), Roman Emperor (161 AD – 180 AD)

Those closest to me know that I’m not fan of the gig economy. It only takes a slight mention of Uber, Lyft, GrubHub, or InstaCart to set me off and ruin an evening out with friends.

“Either you’re spending your time. Or your time is spending you.” – Seth Godin

I’m reminded of the classic story where you are given a magical bank. Each day it puts $86,400 into your bank account, but there’s a catch. (There’s always a catch, right?)

At the end of the day, whatever you don’t invest, whatever you don’t give away, whatever you don’t spend, it vaporizes. It goes away without anything to show for it.

If you were granted this magical account, what would you do with it?

I’m sure most of us would blow it on ourselves, but eventually, that would get old (or then again, maybe not). We would start to find ways to invest it in future opportunities. And once we experienced the joy of spending it with and giving it to others, we would start spending it with and giving it to those around us. Eventually, we would realize that every dollar is precious and would make certain that we were getting the most of every dollar, every day.

Where am I going with this?

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in” – Greek proverb

I’ll admit it. There are a lot of things in life that I take for granted. Here’s a few of them:

• Turning the handle on a faucet and having clean water come out
• Flipping a switch to light the darkness
• Driving my car on well-maintained roads
• Heating my house during the cold winter months
• Having access to a wealth of information through the internet

I could continue on, but you get the point. The common thread in this list of amenities is that they are the result of infrastructure built by those before me. At some point, people made decisions to put their time and effort into building things that were bigger than themselves. They had the foresight and took the initiative to build something that would not only benefit them and their direct descendants but also society as a whole.

Do you know what the “illusory truth effect” is? It’s our tendency to treat a false or misleading statement as fact after repeated exposure. You see, as humans, we tend to take shortcuts when assessing if what we hear is true or not. Instead of racing out to collect facts, we evaluate statements based on prior knowledge and how familiar we are with them. Researchers have shown that people who are exposed repeatedly to statements, even when false, are more likely to believe they are true.

How does this work you ask? Let’s take a look at a specific example.