How Running a Business Changes the Way You Think (2011)
kalzumeus.com
kalzumeus.com
Another way running a business changes the way I think is the value of time and the ROI on temporary things. Most non-business people would hesitate, for example, to buy proper furnishings for their house or upgrade their tools/workspace if they only plan to stay somewhere temporarily for a few months, but I would do it because of how much more enjoyable and productive those few months will be if I had proper facilities, which may have a far greater ROI than simply saving money for a few months.
sometimes this is self-deluding. You perhaps didnt need those luxury furnishings, when a barebones one would've done the same job. It's an excuse that some people use to justify their splurge.
And yes, no doubt some people use that as an excuse to over spend. But that doesn't mean people don't take it to the extreme in the other direction as well.
It really does come down to the numbers. If I can spend $X to take in $5x over the month, you should do that.
indeed, but the point was that the $5x is not known in advance, and in fact, might even be an emphemeral figure.
Buying the right chair and desk for your height is not a luxury, but buying something expensive, when a cheaper version, which would've done the same job, is available, is to me the definition of luxury.
Just like all turing complete programming languages do "the same job" at some level. But we'd all be more productive in your choice of high level language over any processor-specific assembler.
Then it becomes a matter of asking when does it transition between appropriate and luxury. Which grain of sand makes the pile?
I know that one person’s bad luck doesn’t cancel out good rules for financial management. And I agreed completely with you up until 16 months ago. But in retrospect, I would have made different choices.
It isn't even splurging, just spending some time looking through Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace.
Everyone reading this: Take care of your back!
From the photos, the Embody looks a LOT better.
They are generally poorly made, have terrible ergonomics, but absolutely excel at being plastered with logos and advertisements.
Get a decent mattress and pillows. Replace your pot from college with the handle that falls off. Paint the room you hate the color of. The ROI on such things is huge.
I agree with you (and clearly like your username), but writing to ska is quite amusing.
Thanks for commenting and I hope you have an excellent day! :)
My wife used to wear a wrist brace for years until she started benching. Now she never gets pain. Lifting is also one of the safest sports there is. Highly recommend it for health, especially among the nerdy crowd who may not be inclined to try it; building muscle doesn't reduce nerd cred.
Let's hope your customers don't have that same "anything but the cheapest option is luxury" mindset.
My business experience taught me the opposite of this, and I've carried it over to my personal life. What I do in both my personal and business money management is to identify the two or three key things that are critical to success and go high-end on those, then do everything else as cheaply as I possibly can.
I would remove that qualifier.
I have plenty of friends living in the wild in Yukon and Alaska who live very happily on <$20k a year.
One friend was bummed she had to work for 8 weeks at a mining camp as a cook. That is the most she has ever worked in her life, and she's in her 50s.
I too grew up in a fairly modest household, where I was often told that good grades were the ticket out of a precarious existence and into, if not a luxurious one, one with at least a modicum of safety. It really warped my perception for a long time about what I actually wanted out of life, and led me to some pretty tough choices emphasizing financial safety at all costs. It's hard to call those choices "wrong" so much as selected based on the flavor profile of a younger, much more anxious me, whereas I am now considerably more willing to swing for the fences now that I've realized just how high the ceiling, and how low the bar, really are.
As someone in a similar situation where it has become time to make bigger bets: Those earlier smaller, safer, bets enabled you to get here. If you made the big bets too soon, you'd run out of swings.
Kelly criterion talks about this in a mathy sense. This fantastic old HN comment talks about it in a more relatable way: Entrepreneurship is like a carnival game https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076
Financial safety has never really been a huge deal with me because I know that I can live on almost nothing, and I know that money and how happy I am in life are not correlated. That means that I've taken risks that others wouldn't have taken because I don't see them as very risky. Sometimes, those have paid off.
The time of my life where I came closest to living on nothing were the 4 years where I was an unemployed NEET. Torrenting movies and eating day old rice got real old after a while. I'm considerably happier now that I kicked my ass into gear and am now making something valuable for my fellow man. That ascent is good reason to suspect my life will be even better if I can do things that drive even more
Now I've taken more than my share of risky moves in life after that period, and I intend to take more in the future. But saying "Well it's not risky to me, worst case scenario I'll just go back to rice and torrenting" is just not going to work for me, because I've been there before and it actually sucked. I'm no Diogenes. I find it's much better to fuel my actions from thinking about what an overwhelming success would look and feel like. Of course if I felt money and how happy I am in life were actually uncorrelated, then not only would failing the die roll suck immensely, but winning the die roll wouldn't actually make my life any better. Why play the game at all in that case? Luckily, in my experience, that latter part just isn't true at all.
> Why play the game at all in that case?
Because, for me, "playing the game" isn't really about maximizing income. It's about doing something fulfilling. Income is important, of course. My business ventures have to generate enough income for me to live in the manner I prefer. But once that bar is met, income is not why I do any of it.
My only point is that I come from a place where if the venture fails, I'm fine. I can make another stab at one later. That gives me freedom that I value a lot and is the reason that I've had business successes. The risks I take aren't all that risky to me.
This thinking changed my life.
Back in about 2007 I was a young developer working full time, and a new guy started. He didn't work Wednesdays.
Why Not? Because he didn't want to. Because he didn't need more money. Because he wanted to ride his bike with his lawyer wife (who also didn't work Wednesdays).
I spent many, many hours over lunch chatting about this thinking and how in the world it was even possible - it utterly blew my mind coming from a completely middle-class "go to work everyday" family. I had no idea it was possible in this universe.
At my next job I negotiated a "flexible work agreement". If I put in an average of 37 hours per week, nobody really cared how I did it, as long as my work gone done. I sold it to the boss as good for the team because they would have to be able to fix whatever broke without me, and I would have to create good documentation on exactly how to do that. Over the next four years I basically never worked a Friday, and between leave days, stat holidays and the odd flex day, Mondays were rare too. I still got a full salary.
I will never work "full time" again.
These days now I run my own business, I will likely never work for someone again.
I feel lucky I had a few "Copernican moments" like this when I will still young enough to believe I might be able to pull it off (hint: you can).
Could you explain what other copernican moments have you experienced? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALaTm6VzTBw
There have been quite a few, I've written about them my books I've written about my adventures around the world [1].
- You really don't need much money to live, and if you're happy doing inexpensive things, you can be a very happy person without going to work much at all. A ~$300 day at Disneyland is a surefire good time, but if you enjoy a walk in the park throwing a Frisbee around with friends just as much... you'll have a lot more time to enjoy life.
- Be careful with debt. The reason so many people in the western world go to work everyday is because they get the debt, then have to work to pay it off. Go to a country where debt isn't really possible because the economy can't support it (Argentina, Mexico, Mali, Angola, etc.) and you'll see everyone has TONS of time to live the life they want. Play guitar, play with cousins, hangout on the beach. Little work, lots of living. No sane person will go to a soul-crushing job for weeks just to buy a new iPhone.. but because it isn't that obvious, everyone in developed countries actually does.
- You can live whatever life you want, and don't worry what other people say. If it's your close friends or family you can certainly take input and advice, but random people telling you stuff is pure noise.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Books-Dan-Grec/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27...
Been living in Buenos Aires, Argentina for a year and a half now, and this is exactly what I've seen. This explanation makes sense. I always chalked it up to socializing being a much more important part of the culture than in the US.
As a former investment banker, investment bankers don't make that much more than everyone else. Many functions are less. Some relationship managers, some traders, some investment managers, some deal makers do. But most don't make mega money.
Avg US wages is $59k
Avg IB wages is $180k (3x US overall avg)
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/investment-banking-...
Equities in Dallas is a big reality. It's highly ageist. The lustre of Wall St or The City wears out after a while, Docklands like New Jersey is ghastly. Some get out and cut Connecticut hedges or polish pearls in Bond St, some make pizzas. Asia was fun in the 1990s, apparently.
I will never drive a car without first fastening my seatbelt, I feel naked if not fastened(if you do it when paragliding, you die). I don't leave objects in unsecured state(if you do it on the hill, a wind gust messes up your day and even injures you). I trust mechanisms I understand(that's the only way you fly, you have to trust the tools and make sure the tools are in tip top condition.). I don't trust critical tools and systems without inspecting them(we did the regular maintenance of the reserve parachute ourselves and it was on us to work if needed).
This is one example of course but as you said, everything you consciously go through changes you profoundly. If are into drawing with pencil, that also changes you, I'm sure.
It's also why I'm worried quite a lot for people who experience everything through a screen in a bubble. I'm sure they are also profoundly changed by the experience and I'm afraid in a bad way. I suspect that's one of the main reasons people in many different cultures end up with similar constructs like "incel" - that is, the social experience through the screen is about the same everywhere and it primes the people to think about other people in a specific way.
- military, skydivers, scuba divers (apparently), swat, many first responders.
By the way, public announcement: Don’t forget to ring up your relatives, knock on your neighbor’s door and spend some time doing public service talking to weird people (after evaluating the risk). It goes a long way in releasing tensions.
We joke about it on HN pretty regularly, how it seems like programmers have the most hubris of anyone, always thinking every problem can be neatly solved with a bit of logic.
A tendency to analyze and solve problems rationally. Even if unfortunately it is not at all a rational problem at the time.
A tendency to (successfully) deep dive in a recursive fashion on problems. Ex: contractor is doing something weird, talk to the city inspector. City inspector refers to building code. Read building code. Work with contractor to bring up to code, or sic the appropriate regulatory authority on them.
Etc.
Similar to debugging something weird in someone else’s backend.
Short version, any sufficiently complex profession will have problems and associated solutions analogous to problems and solutions outside its domain. Therefore, the more deeply one understands a complex profession of that nature, the more likely one is to successfully apply lessons from that professional domain to problems outside it. Programming of course has peculiarities in that regard which color the kind of solutions one comes up with, eg a preoccupation with process and systems, linguistics, etc.
For the long version you can check out my book on the subject, shameless plug: https://www.amazon.com/Mindful-Programming-Christopher-Henni...
To contradict a sibling comment, I do not believe the world can be controlled, or that algorithms are a solution to everything. One important element of mastering programming (a world largely of pure logic) is to recognize how it differs from our human world.
(mostly)
Or cleaning lady. Cleaning might not be fun, or glamourous. It may be thankless or unpleasant. But you don't exactly have to "work hard", by my definition at least (programming isn't hard work either, for what it's worth).
I don't want my kids to become janitors or work fast food either, but it's not because I think the jobs are too easy.
I think it's possible to treat people working these jobs with some basic dignity, while realizing that there are practical differences
Has this been tried anywhere?
I personally think people should care better about agressive people, rather than the current “block him!” attitude, which leads to pent up aggressivity. A bit of love goes a long way.
[1] Grammar schools are academically-selective, state-funded schools in the UK and elsewhere—staff and students alike are generally of a higher socioeconomic milieu than in non-selective, state-funded schools.
Seems more like disinterest or a lack of friendliness.
But I think consistently refusing eye contact does constitute a lack of respect, if the person refusing to return eye contact has no problem returning it to the upper echelons of staff. And, having attended one of those grammar schools, I know that some of the teachers who refused to return eye contact had no issue with faux friendliness.
I could see that expectation being a form of respect.
As I mentioned in my previous comment, I've worked all (ok, most) of the shitty jobs. I've also been president of a software company and have been paid to play golf.