This is important for people to understand.
In business, an expensive watch signals to others that you’re good at what you do. Not necessarily that you’re a flashy asshole, although for some that can be the case too!
1,491 karma · joined November 25, 2016
In business, an expensive watch signals to others that you’re good at what you do. Not necessarily that you’re a flashy asshole, although for some that can be the case too!
I've always found the grid layout of US cities difficult to navigate, which is strange because it's objectively a much simpler system. The sameness of each block and straightness of the roads makes it really hard for me to position myself with sight alone, whereas in the UK there seems to be more uniqueness to each road that makes it easier for me to find my way around.
Interestingly, my US friends who've visited the UK have had the exact opposite experience!
I don't want my spreadsheets crapping out on me at a few thousand rows.
First, it sounds like you've got unsolved personal issues that are going to prevent this from working. Taking good care of your mental health is key to making any business work. Getting off the ground is a marathon, not a sprint, and you need a certain amount of mental stability and long term thinking to ride out the highs and lows that are part of the process.
Second, I'm not sure of your familiarity with Japanese culture or language, but if Japan is quite foreign to you, I'd have thought that's making things much harder.
Last, unless you can afford to and are willing lose all the money, don't mix up your personal wealth in business ventures. It's much better to bootstrap and be learn to be profitable right from the off with tiny amounts of money than lose your life savings because you've no idea what you're doing. Keep your money and the business' money separate and grow slowly.
Depending on their severity, addictions, felonies, learning difficulties and health problems (and many other things) could all be legitimate limiters on wealth building.
Just my experience, but my first world poor friends, without exception are all bad with money. They have little understanding of how money actually works, have terrible spending habits, are incredibly risk averse, and carry a "money is evil" mindset.
If it's possible for you to live within your means (edit: putting aside illness, addictions, felonies etc), you can build wealth at a good rate in the first world. You may never be a multi-millionaire, but you can be financially secure and stable.
I think they can be brilliant, and they can be awful. It depends on the approach of the manager and their subordinate.
The money you do invest can generate a return, which when re-invested compounds. Yes, this happens very slowly at first, but over the course of many years gets you towards your thousands per month.
I don’t have thousands left from my 9-5 job every month, but my assets (accumulated over years) work for me, and I just add what I can to that money making machine.
Billionaire level wealth aside, amassing a few million over the course of a lifetime isn’t as difficult as people think, it just requires discipline.
Live well within your means and invest your saved money in assets consistently, compounding and time will do the rest.
Most rich people get there slowly, and don’t appear to live a rich person’s lifestyle. Conversely, a lot of people who appear rich have little accumulated wealth.
If you’d like to know more, Have a read of “The millionaire next door” and “I will teach you to be rich”. They changed my outlook on what being wealthy meant, and I’m now putting thousands onto my net worth every month in a automated way.
People stop taking advantage when you stop letting them. More than you might expect actually respect it. I don’t think this way of working has hurt my career progression, and it’s certainly done wonders for my mental health.
Businesses will do enough to pass the sniff test of proper compliance with GDPR, and no more. I've worked with enough to know most mid sized orgs are far too reactive, too technically incompetent, and far too busy making money to do a proper job on adhering. Most flout existing laws already, I don't think they'll be scared of disregarding elements of this too.
I managed to come near the top of my class this way with something like 5% attendance at lectures.
I expect this isn't the case in the top Universities, but I left my University thinking I could have just paid to take the exams and self-taught the rest of the material. In hindsight, I was really taking out huge loans for a few years of drinking, socialising and playing video games.
In the working world, I've found meetings to be similarly pointless. 95% of the time I'd rather hash out a problem on an email thread where thoughts are expressed clearly, re-read and understood by others in their own time.
Check your dissonance. It’s the product.
There are numerous things I could pick holes in here, most noteably that the product tries to do far too much and probably doesn’t do one thing brilliantly. Personally I’m not going to invest my valuable time in finding out if that’s true. The ask is too big.
That said, nobody here is going to be able to give you a recipe for success. People are notoriously poor predictors of what will and won’t succeed in business. You’ve just got to work your way through this balancing intuition against feedback and data. It takes time, it takes money, and it’s really hard work.
Good luck!
In time people will begin to realise what Facebook puts in front of them isn’t necessarily the whole picture the same way posters from WWI and II seem crude and obvious to us now.