Welcome back to the 1st Law Newsletter - Friday Edition.

In this email:

• Osho's thoughts on relationships

• Rivalrous vs anti-rivalrous

• Quote about trusting the process

Relationships vs Relating

Osho is my kind of philosopher and religious leader - a sex guru who had 93 Rolls-Royce's (what a G). I enjoyed reading his thoughts on love and relationships and present them below in my own words (but I strongly encourage you to read the full article linked at the end of this section).

Loving yourself is a necessary prerequisite to loving someone else. You must be capable of being alone before you are capable of love. Otherwise you run the risk of becoming possessive and dependent and turning your relationship into an addiction.

The difference between a relationship and relating:
A relationship is finite and comfortable, to relate is forever. A relationship means the honeymoon phase is over. To continually relate means to never stop loving, never reducing loving to just love. Loving must remain current.

He also mentions how getting married legally is a cop out. Instead of trusting each other to remain committed to the relationship (or to relating, if you will) forever, people trust the law. It shows that they cannot trust their love.

I think that getting too comfortable is a common complaint in people's relationships, as well as someone not putting in enough effort to satisfy the other person. Perhaps both problems can be solved by not reducing your feelings to a relationship. If you are continually relating to each other in the present tense, the effort levels should remain high and you will now get complacent with how you treat each other. Overall there is a lot to think about and I will definitely carry this idea of continually relating with me in my future pursuits of love.

Read the original article here.

Escape Competition with Anti-Rivalrous Products

To explain the anti-rivalrous, I will begin with the rivalrous. A rivalrous resource or product is anything that if I have it, you do not have it. A hamburger, for example, is rivalrous because if I eat it, you cannot also eat the same burger. Other examples include oil, articles of clothing, and anything that you can consume. Rivalrous resources are finite and require continual input and energy to create more of them.

Contrariwise, anti-rivalrous products/ideas are not consumable and can be shared by everyone. Further, the value of the anti-rivalrous resource or idea can actually increase when more people are using it. The most classic example of this is language. If only I know a language, there is not much value. However, the more people that learn the language, the more communication is improved and more value can be derived from the language. Another example is calculus. The more people that know calculus, the further we can expand upon it and the more useful it becomes. Anti-rivalrous products require huge amounts of energy to create, but once created they can live on their own and evolve as adoption increases.

I want to share this with my audience because I believe most businesses of the future will have anti-rivalrous business models. What is your favorite anti-rivalrous thing/concept/idea/resource? Some other examples include all social media, iPhone (iMessage and airdrop), solar power technology (because the sun is infinite... to humans), public transit, taxes... the list goes on.

Quote I Want To Share

Poor habits are easy to form but hard to live with, while good habits are hard to form but easy to live with. Most of my goals for 2024 are daily goals. I know that the most gains are from continually doing the small things, rather than doing the large things occasionally. Consider rephrasing your 2024 goals into smaller, consistently achievable actions.

Thanks for reading!

Lucas