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zt: 一位华裔移民的30年奋斗

zt: 一位华裔移民的30年奋斗

一位华裔移民的30年奋斗:我最终成为了美国社会的1%



今天主页君要讲这么一个故事,一个曾经连麦当劳都不要的16岁中国移民,其中数次大起大落,面对各种艰难困苦,却靠着自己的一步步努力到现在过着1%的人赢生活。他经历过英语口吃,地位低下,抑郁,自杀,他理解你们在美国的想法,懂得那些漫长的深夜。不过他挺过来了。然后,他成功了
From 知乎专栏-董老师在硅谷

本文是Quora上关于How Can One Become Part of the 1%?-http://www.quora.com/How-can-one ... e-1/answers/8734078

问题的高票回答,作者匿名,译者:Joe from 17work,Sam Wang from Stanford MBA

(译者注:这位仁兄在80年代从中国来到美国,三十多年间经历三次大起大落,本文是他的自述,在Quora上获得了14万次浏览和无数好评。希望大家能够从中获得经验教训。)

到今天为止,我做到了三次。但这件事没有捷径,除非你能中彩票,否则我也给不了你挣钱的速成方法。

我在80年代中期随父母离开中国大陆来到美国,那时根本没人在意中国。就算是在西雅图这里的华人群体中,我们也被看做是第三等公民,排在ABC甚至是台湾人后面。我们家没有任何技术背景、财产或是人脉,我们唯一能做的就是体力活。

我的父母在国内原本是大学教授,而且不会说英语,也不会经商,所以别以为我在做生意这方面有先天优势。他们在这个资本主义的世界里一点用处也没有,甚至对钱都没什么概念。他们在美国只能做保姆和清洁工,在50多岁的时候从头开始。所以,要是有屌丝抱怨说顶尖1%的土豪们有什么不公平的优势,我想对你们说,去你妈的。我唯一的优势就是我手脚完好,而且生性顽强好斗。



连麦当劳都没要我,因为我的英语实在太烂了。那年我16岁。我像疯了一样地工作,总是盼望着周末、假期、还有任何我可以加班的时间,因为加班工资更高。我骑车冒雨上班(西雅图的雨天多得一逼),有时候下雪路上结冰,有时候下晚班要到凌晨2点才能回家,然而回家了我作业还没做。我两年就上完了四年的高中,这样我才能和我的同龄人一起毕业(我的高中不认可中国高中的课程)。

我不想在20岁的时候还在高中里上学,所以我上的课也比正常人多。这段时间我同时打三份工,晚上在7-11超市上班,白天去呼叫中心接电话被人调戏,有时候还去大学当实验对象,在市里的血库卖血——只要来钱,我什么都干。所以评论里有人抱怨自己要加班加点才能交得起房租,我完全理解你们的处境。但我不会对你有任何同情,因为这段时间里我每天都对自己说,这只是暂时的,只要我努力,我一定会离开这糟糕的处境。

在Safeway超市做了两年收银员后,我从家里搬出来了,因为我遇见了我第一个女朋友,但是父母不同意。我那年18岁。我的支出更大了,而且还得为大学存钱,所以我开始找收入更高的工作,而我只是个高中生。结果我发现,只有做销售的收入比$5.25(最低工资)要高。

像很多男生一样,我喜欢各种各样的机器,而且我最喜欢相机。在国内的时候,我们家很穷,所以根本不可能接触到相机——这是一个很昂贵的爱好。我在西雅图会在Bellevue的相机店呆上半天,就为了把玩这些牛逼的机器。让我惊讶的是,很多销售员工对相机的了解还不如我多。我意识到我可能会比他们做得更好。所以我问店里的经理能不能给我一份销售的工作。那时我的英语还是不太好,而且从来没有销售的经验——经典的先有鸡还是先有蛋的问题。我知道必须找一点销售的经验。

我看到一个Cutco刀具的广告,说一个小时可以挣$9。说白了就是挨家挨户地推销。我买了一套基本款刀具,开始销售。我找到一份在波音公司西雅图办公室的中国工程师名单,然后开始挨个联系他们。我编了一堆故事,比如介绍刀具是学校市场课的作业,而且装作他们都认识我在波音工作的叔叔。大多数人觉得一个高中生不会是什么坏人,还有一些甚至模糊地记得我叔叔的名字,所以很少有人会挂我的电话。这教会了我一个道理:如果你不去索取,你就不会获得。我甚至还叫我叔叔开车送我去这些“朋友”家做刀具演示。当然了,不是每个人都会买,但是那些买了刀的人直到今天还在和我提起那些刀具质量多好。

有了一个暑假的销售经验,我把它加到了我的简历上,然后拿到了一份在本地相机店销售相机的工作。但是连这份工作也来之不易,为了拿到offer,我不得不无薪工作一个月,而且我告诉经理,要是这个月底我没有完成销售任务,我就不干了。在Cameras West(现在倒闭了)、Silos(也倒闭了)和Video Only这些本地的相机店我都干过,不管在哪家,我几乎都是销售冠军,因为我把所有的空余时间都花在了解我销售的产品上面。在不上班的时候,我会去其他电子产品商店了解他们销售的产品;我会跟在别的销售身边,听他们是怎么销售的;我在Tower Books书店读杂志上的产品评测。我就是想比其他人更清楚我在做的事。我很早就知道站在别人的角度为别人解决问题这种销售方法真的奏效。从时薪$5.25,两年以后我一年挣了$40,000。这年我20岁。



Video Only的老板Peter Edwards采用销售提成制度来为公司挣钱。销售人员会拿到一张打印好的纸,上面是每件产品的成本,和产品在展架上的实际价格,只要最后卖出的价格在上述两个数字之间,销售人员可以自由定价。每到月底,销售的提成和他们的业绩成正比。我很喜欢这份工作给我的自由,并且我学会了与人谈判的技巧。后来我也教会了我的员工这些技巧。

也就是在这时,我开始对商业和金融产生兴趣。我把我的零花钱大部分花在了书本上。我从来不party,我把能存的钱都存了下来,并且买了第一套房子,这样我就能省下租金。我买第一套公寓的时候21岁。因为我在零售市场做销售,而且业绩越来越好,我很快发现很多同事都比我年长一倍有余,而且业绩还不如我。我不想在销售行业干一辈子,所以我开始考虑其他选择。如果我要在销售上更上一层楼,唯一的方法就是增加销售的产品价值,或是增大销售的频率——所以房产经纪人或是股票经纪人看来是个不错的选择。我考取了房产经纪人许可证,但是很快发现这一行的节奏太慢而且太无聊。所以股票和债券销售成了唯一的选择。但是作为少数人种而且缺乏人脉(能立即投资的有钱朋友或家人),大多数基金经理都不会雇我,更别说我连大学都还没毕业。

我不停地打cold call骚扰本地几家券商的基金经理们。因为西雅图和纽约证交所有三个小时的时差,这意味着大多数券商在早晨6点就要到办公室上班。于是我在凌晨5点会在券商办公室的大厅里等待,希望能够幸运地见到作招聘决定的经理。三个月中我每天都这么干,我的努力没有白费,Prudential Securities西雅图分部的Paul Wannacott聘用了我。这是我第一次实际意义上遇见1%的土豪。虽然股票经纪实际上就是一份销售工作,我试着学习和吸收一切知识。金融、会计、业务结构、年报、研报,这些材料对我来说就和天书一样,但是我一点点地啃下来了。我对股票市场的技术分析越来越感兴趣,早期的彭博终端(Bloomberg)成为了我的好朋友,我不敢相信这个泛着橙色光的屏幕能够给我这么多信息。几年内我的年收入达到了六位数,以90年代早期的标准,我已经是前1%的土豪了。我非常骄傲,但同时也讨厌我的工作。我不喜欢把带有极高手续费的产品卖给别人,或是帮着销售公司染指的股票。不管怎样,这份工作只是销售,和交易投资没有一点关系。



1996年,新婚燕尔,我发现在线股票经纪变得越来越火爆。我当时收取每笔交易110刀的手续费,而网上的手续费才20刀,我意识到我的工作岌岌可危了。而且,20刀的手续费比我们公司内部人员的50刀手续费还要便宜,我终于看到了离开的机会——我想自己交易。

我在1996年晚春辞职,但我当时只有20万刀的流动资金用来交易。起初的6个月是个悲剧,我的20万刀几乎全都赔在了Ascend,Shiva这些早已不复存在的科技公司上。我不得不大幅减少生活开支,而且开始怀疑当初的选择。为了弥补亏损,我需要更多的资金——我刷爆了所有的信用卡。幸运的是,市场转而向上,我不但把亏损填上了,还小赚了一些——这时我一共有5万刀的资金。但我知道我需要有个周密的计划。我为自己定下了一个目标——一年挣10万刀,这样我才能相信我在做正确的事。



我计算并整理了我以前的错误操作,然后准备了一个简单的计划。寻找一个一年里翻倍的股票是不可能的,就算找得到,风险也太高了,这些股票的波动太大。但是有很多股票每天上下的幅度超过了几个点,我只要能抓住一部分波动,我就不需要持股过夜。因为每年有超过200个交易日,这意味着100,000/200 = 500,也就是每天1%的回报。我完全能做到。这个计划的关键就在于止损,如果你了解交易的话,止损是日内交易的精华所在。于是我开始实施计划,在1996年底,我的资金已经超过了10万刀。我达到目标了。

一年以后我的年收入达到了50万刀。没错,我又回到了1%的群体。然后我就蒙逼了。由于日内交易只占用了每天早晨的几个小时(西雅图比纽交所晚三个小时),我每天早晨10点就下班了,剩下的时间都属于我自己。因为无聊,我开始买各种东西。我买了好多辆车还有好几套房子,最后我的支出没有底线了。很快,我成为了购物欲的奴隶,我每个月的固定支出达到了5-10万刀。每天操盘的时候,我开始觉得我必须赚够一定的数字才能保持现状。这时我还不到30岁。我的情绪开始受影响,我对自己很愤怒,并向周围的人发泄。我变成了一个愤怒的混蛋,因为我太自大,而且还不明白我为什么不快乐。现在想想,我觉得金钱并没有让我高兴,所以即使我达到了我的目标,我的内心还是空虚无比。

我必须想办法在交易上面挣更多钱,才能负担得起我当时的生活方式。于是我回到了以前所憎恨的生活——找有钱人募资,开设了我自己的对冲基金。我在拓展人脉方面并不是很擅长(对一个混蛋来说当然很困难),所以这个基金开始的时候只有少得可怜的1000万资金,很大一部分还是我的自有资金。我在合伙人的监控下操盘,这种感觉太糟糕了。我感觉每时每刻都有人在监视我,我的操作也随之受到了影响。我没办法再保持以前的操作风格,于是我的回报开始下降,我开始感到抑郁。我有几年都在和抑郁症斗争,有时几天里什么都不干,整天整天地上网。我的婚姻受到严重影响,我责怪我妻子和她的家庭贪婪无度,总是想着从我这里得到什么。甚至我儿子的出生都没给我带来快乐。

因为我的糟糕表现,人们开始退出基金。我的操作风格越来越激进,以前的风险管理原则也随之丢到了九霄云外。我完全就是凭运气和直觉在选股。到了2003年,我彻底完蛋了,我把所有的资金全部亏完,同时还有几套房贷和其他债务。我向我妻子坦白了我们的处境,她哭了好多天。我觉得我的人生完了,我尝试过自杀。

现在回想起来,那些日子真的很黑暗。我孤立无援 ,没有任何人可以倾诉。因为我已经疏远了身边所有人,现在只剩下我来收拾残局。我还记得有天晚上天黑以后,为了不让邻居看到,我尽可能快地打包了所有东西,从我的豪宅搬到小了很多的出租公寓里。我羞耻又绝望,因为这座豪宅还有贷款没有还清,我只能让银行收走,然后在接下来的几年里我学会了如何躲避来讨债的电话。



我必须寻找一些有用的方法,开始工作。那时候,我们只能靠我妻子的收入来支持我们的生活。那些年入百万的日子已经不复存在了,那时我们的收入只有每年7万刀。随之一同离去的是豪车、无意义的花销、还有每年的度假。我的精神状况也开始坚定起来,是时候离开家去工作了。2004年我加入了一家科技创业公司当销售总监,不管怎样,我还是会做销售。

这个创业公司没有真正的投资,它是靠创始人们不到5万刀的种子投资建立起来的。我加入的时候只剩下最后的两个创始人。因为没有客户,公司也没有收入。我们在西雅图南部工业区Southcenter的一个仓库里上班,这里比车库还要糟糕,进进出出的卡车噪声让我连电话都没法好好打。要是客户问起这些噪声,我就告诉他们因为我们的生意太好,卸货的卡车源源不断。

我作了一个计划,从一切可以获得收入的渠道挣钱。我在全国各地作销售,几乎每月就要去一次中国与制造商和合作伙伴见面。因为公司只有我们三个人,我担任起了销售、商务拓展、会计、财务和市场营销的职务。我们第一年的收入是50万刀,第二年200万刀。在这时候我已经成为了CEO,因为是我定下的计划和方向,并且产生了所有的销售额。2007年,销售额涨到了300万刀,我们觉得是时候找风投机构融资了。不幸的是,在西雅图,没有人相信我们的故事。和20多岁的创业者们比起来,我们三个人年纪都太大,而且一个都没有计算机背景。作为CEO,我是最拿不出手的一个——大学都没毕业,而且没有任何技术行业的经验。即使公司有不错的收入,我们根本没法找到投资。西雅图的风投们要多势利有多势利,但他们确实指出了我们的不足。VC们反复问我们一个问题:你们有什么竞争优势是别人没有的?这个问题我根本不会回答,因为我们实际上没有任何确切的优势,就算有也无济于事。现在回想起来,真正的答案是我们内心充满激情。

也就是在融资的时期,我真的觉得受到了冒犯。我们会和所谓的“天使”投资人见面,这些人通常是微软或谷歌的早期幸运员工、从大公司退休的管理层、或是医生等等。大多数人一辈子都没有开过自己的公司,却总是有着大公司的傲慢。其中一家投资集团叫ZINO Society,我们在他们吃饭喝酒的时候做演示,我真的觉得自己像个舞台上的廉价小丑。我对自己保证如果真的能挣到大钱,我会尽我所能改变创业者们的待遇,现在不再是有贵族阶级的中世纪社会了!

我们融资的目的是为了改变现有的商业模式,也就是为OEM(已有产品和品牌的公司)开发软件技术。我们的客户把我们开发的技术产品贴牌打包,当做自己的产品进行销售。我们渐渐发现我们每张拍照只能收取50-60刀,而终端客户却要支付1000-10000刀。我们意识到旧的模式走进了死胡同,我们必须做出改变。虽然我们没能获得风投资金,我们还是决定在2008年开始转型。这也意味着将原有的产品全部开发完成,当成我们自己的品牌进行销售。用商业语言来说,我们想爬上更高的价值链。这也意味着我们不再和销售额5000万-1亿刀的公司竞争,我们的新对手是数十亿美元价值的公司。这需要我们构造一个完整的产品线,然后将其与企业级的硬件设备兼容,并做好开发、服务、和售后支持的准备。我们既没经验又没客户,我要是能得到投资才怪。

我们的时机也糟的离谱。抛弃我们现有的300万刀的生意,然后靠自己的一点点投资开发新生意,这简直是天方夜谭。创始人和我从来没有为自己开过工资,因为我们决定把所有的收入全部投入到企业里。这真的是一段难熬的日子,我的婚姻彻底玩完了。我5年里没有挣到一分钱,我再也不是家里的顶梁柱了。



我没有收入,公司转型也不顺利,因为我们的新收入不足以弥补失去老客户的损失,市场和经济也不景气。我必须作出改变。

我离了婚,开除了大部分员工。离婚之后我的银行户头又只剩20000刀了,但我还是得想办法发工资。我被赶出了以前的房子,为了省下租金,我带了一个充气床垫搬到了公司的储藏室(下图是用鱼眼镜头拍的,我的头顶着另一面墙)。



更糟糕的是,我们的办公室租金也已经拖欠了几个月了,供应商鸟都不鸟我们,还欠了银行一大堆钱。我又一次跌倒了,而且还无家可归。

有时候我6岁的儿子会来办公室看我。虽然他知道我住在公司的储藏室,他从来没有觉得丢脸或是不好意思,就好像他知道我能再一次爬起来一样。连我儿子都不怕,我有什么好怕的?我们把这样的处境变成了一场闹剧,我们会在充气床垫上跳来跳去,胡闹搞笑。

住在这么小的空间,身上没几件值钱玩意的日子让我意识到物质是多么的重要。我仿佛又回到了小时候,我的脑海一片清澈。我的员工们都知道我住在储藏室,但是没人说起这件事。我不断地告诉每个人坚持住,在商场上,只要活下来就是成功,我们一定要想方设法活下来!

很明显,这段时间里我的生活和生意都濒临崩溃,但有意思的是我一点也不伤心,也不生气。我甚至觉得我的处境很有戏剧性。我总是向别人炫耀我是如何从一无所有奋斗到现在的,而且不会害怕回到一无所有的日子。现在一语成谶,然后呢?我知道我不能在储藏室里住太久,物业不允许这么干,我的健身房会员也快到期了(我每天在那里冲凉),因为这是我前妻的公司福利。我只能重新开始做交易。

又是20000刀的本金,但这是2009年,市场非常动荡的一年。对日内交易很有优势,但是我必须加倍小心不要套牢,持股过夜的风险高的离谱。还好我以前的几把刷子还在,很快我就能用交易的获利支付员工工资了,至少可以留住骨干员工。我与我们的房东、银行、供应商重新谈判,让我们再多坚持一会。我的直觉告诉我,这种五十年不遇的经济危机会帮我们解决掉很多竞争对手,我们只需要存活下来,我必须尽我所能做到这点。

也就是在这时候,我帮助了一位做技术支持的哥们,我们就叫他老王好了。老王刚被公司裁员,他的房子也被银行收走了,他的三个孩子和老婆一起搬回了他父母家。我能感觉到这个家伙对成功的极度渴望。我让他来我们公司做销售,而不是他的老本行技术支持。我们两个把他以前的老客户全部联系了一遍,还真有几个客户答应和我们合作了。这给了我们急需的信心。

2010年初我从储藏室里搬出来了,股票的20000刀本金变成了250000刀,这给了公司一点喘息的空间。这时候我们还找到了公司转型以后的第一个大客户,这位客户的触角遍布全球(是一家家居用品公司),所以问题就很明显了——我们公司才6个人,怎么为这么大的客户提供支持?我用上了以前当销售时的一招:免费给他们使用我们最好的产品。我们把公司的产品与客户的现有系统结合起来,并在其中加了一个软件,实现了更简洁、更容易操作的界面,同时还为客户节省了开支。这花了我们几个月的时间和汗水,但最后我们成功地交出了100倍于我们公司的对手都没能搞定的产品。为了更好地服务和支持我们的客户,我们把执行和安装任务外包给别人,同时监控整个系统的运作,来保证更好的体验。而且,我们监控客户端上所有的运营,一旦出现问题和bug,就会实时传回到我们这里,这样我们就能在客户意识到问题之前就把问题给解决了。我们的底线是确保客户和我们产品的互动处在最佳情况。我们2010年的收入是100万刀。

因为老王的成功加入,我想把我们公司打造成我们两个的形象——有决心的屌丝。公司里一半员工都是开发人员,而且他们来自世界各地。我们公司有俄罗斯人、罗马尼亚人、印度人、中国人、拉脱维亚人、德国人、意大利人、等等等等。我们还有自学计算机出身的开发人员、专业是地理、数学的员工,甚至还有一个以前是打渔的哥们。销售和支持人员也一样多元化,大多数没有高等学历,有些曾经有严重的家庭问题和个人失败经历。但是他们都知道我们是一条绳上的蚂蚱,这个紧紧结合的团队把我们的公司推进到了我想都没敢想过的境界。

四年以后,经济终于有所好转,我个人也慢慢回血了。我的公司在过去的12个月挣了2000万刀,在接下来的一年目标是5000万刀。这很大一部分和技术转销售的老王有关。在2010年他的起薪是4万刀,而去年他赚了75万刀。今年他的预计提成是300万刀。2015年初,老王把所有的债务都还清了,还用现金为他的家庭在西雅图郊区买了一座马场(现在还是没有银行愿意贷款给他)。他买房子的那天,我和他坐在在公司的会议室里,面前放着买房用的支票,我们四目相对,几乎留下了眼泪。这一路走来,我们能互相理解各自的付出和艰辛。也许有一天,老王会在知乎上讲述他的故事。

公司的利润率达到了80%,公司户头上也存下了不少现金,我终于支付给我自己100万刀。公司的估值在一级市场大约是年销售额的2-3倍,也就是在1-1.5亿美元之间(截止目前为止)。我有信心过两年我们的销售额能达到3亿美元,所以公司估值达到10亿美元也是迟早的事。现在我能告诉自己,我又回到了1%的人群。这一次我希望能一直保持下去。

我知道的烂笔头写得太长了,但是以下是我从自身学到的几课。



1. 坚韧不拔。学会克服你的恐惧。

也许我很幸运,因为我出生在“文革”的后期,那是充满混乱和破坏的日子。也许上天眷顾我,让我天生逆反,不喜欢循规蹈矩,蔑视一切权威,要是在传统保守的亚洲社会,这些品质会让我的生活一塌糊涂。但我是幸运的,我离开了。我的意思是,我小时候就经历了很多个人的问题,缺少安全和稳定,所以我已经有一些习惯了。也是这段经历让我意识到大多数人都是恐惧的,而且是不理性的恐惧。

你恐惧的时候会发生什么?你会退缩,你会保守,你会犹豫,你会拖延。更糟的情况是,你看问题更加偏执,甚至开始充满极端的怨恨。你会开始错过机会,你成为了你不理智的囚徒。所以当你不敢做某件事的时候问问你自己,我有什么可损失的?很多情况下,你根本没什么可损失的,除了心跳开始加快,除了脸上开始发烧,除了你的自尊受到一点打击。

当你学会面对这些荒唐的恐惧时,你很快就会意识到你身边绝大多数的人都活在这种傻乎乎的恐惧里。所以如果你真的想超过大多数人,你不需要靠颜值,你不需要很有钱,你不需要有更好的教育,你只需要我们大多数人都具有的品质——勇气、坚韧、脸皮够厚。你的时间在一点点流逝,所以赶紧行动!

2. 量入为出。别和我一样傻逼。

3. 学会怎样挣钱,而不是怎样存钱。你永远不会存钱存成有钱人。话说回来,这不意味着你要像傻逼一样花钱!

4. 学会发展自身和公司。这意味着学会为公司着想,学会激励他人,学会雇用牛逼的人来做你不会做的事。我的公司到处都是我招来的员工,他们中大多数人都没有传统意义上的成功。我的销售老王就是很好的例子。要是没有他们的帮助,我不可能有今天。

5. 不断学习。我每个月用Kindle和有声读物看10-20本书。我不知道除了阅读,还有什么更好地办法帮助我超越和提升自己。我们没有什么理由不读书,因为有这么多书,现在的读书方法又这么多。我开车或是做事的时候,用有声读物“读书”。我会把语速调到两倍,这样我几个小时就能消化一本书。关于读什么类别的书——我过去20年只读了两本小说。

6. 从自己的经历和以前的成功/失败学习。

7. 多问“为什么”。通常问5个“为什么”以后你就能找到事情的真相。

8. 和聪明的人共事。学习,偷走他们的想法,他们不会介意的。

9. 在你能力范围内尽可能多地旅行,你会拥有一个更宽广的眼界。现在就去把护照准备好!

10. 在困境中开怀大笑,多找乐子。生活有时候会很艰难,不要觉得只有你倒霉,连比尔盖茨都有屎一样的日子。

11. 不要觉得自己是受害者,不要找借口。因为并没有什么卵用。

12. 学会一项能在困境中同样挣钱的技能。我自己总是可以靠股票挣钱,这让我无所畏惧。

13. 找到排解压力的方法。当我觉得我没法再工作,或是不想面对任何事的时候,我就开车出一趟远门,自己一个人。很幸运的,我住在世界上最美丽的地区之一,所以我不用离开太远就能变得很平静。我最喜欢去的地点是死亡谷,美国西岸的一号公路。我另外一项活动是在海里划皮艇。当我一个人在大海中时,没什么事能够让我感到压力。当我没钱的时候,我会一个人听古典音乐,进入我的禅修状态。

14. 时刻勇狠好斗是一个不错的品质,它让你时刻充满动力。但这也是一个很讨人厌的个性,所以保持好平衡。

15. 也许你不是生来就斗志昂扬。我哥哥就和我完全不同,他只想保持平庸,对我的挣扎和成功不屑一顾。如果你不是打了鸡血的个性,那就学会满足。

16. 美国西部能够在过去的几个世纪中保持快速发展的原因之一,是因为在人类历史上第一次认可了“创造阶级”,企业家们首次获许保留他们的财富。这激发了人们创造财富的激情,并激励各式各样的人们努力奋斗。不幸的是如今世界上很多地方依然没收或是查抄人们的劳动成果。如果你发现自己身处这样的环境中,你需要决定是否留下来和体制搏斗,还是干脆离开。我很幸运,能够在我认为的世界上最好的体制中奋斗并有所收获,要是我还留在中国,我一定不会像现在这样成功。

17. 不要相信“不平等”这种鬼话。真正的不平等是自身的动力和智商。我这两样都没有——我连大学都没有毕业,智商比小布什也高不到哪里去。要是像我这样的人都能进入1%的土豪群体,其他人一定也可以。

18. 没错,你的人生就是你对抗全世界。

19. 学会销售。这也许是最简单的超越别人的方法了。无论你是医生、律师、会计还是其他职业,你会发现成功的人们通常都是会销售的人。他们销售自己,他们销售想法,他们销售并激励其他人帮助他们。不管怎样,一些销售人员有世界上最高的薪水,而销售不需要任何特殊技巧或是教育。

20. 不要太把自己当回事。你得确保自己开开心心。在美国,关于“做自己想做的事,保持激情”这种陈词滥调太烂大街了。找到能让你开心的事简单多了。做生意就可以很开心,很多时候快乐和放下身段就是生意是否成功的关键。谁想和一帮无聊又不开心的人一起工作?

21. 对大多数人来说这一点会很难接受:为别人打工永远不会让你有钱。你可能还是能够成为前1%的土豪,但是你依旧是某个人的工资奴隶。不管是不是公平,资本主义就是关于资本的拥有者,也就是生产要素。在一个长期发展受限的世界中(欧洲、日本甚至是美国),生产要素就显得前所未有的重要,因为获得资本的方式有限,而资本的产出又很低(你可以试试看小额贷款——你根本就贷不到钱)。所以对大多数人来说,唯一的办法就是创业。你最好在你人生的早期就想到这一点,我很幸运,因为我没有通过分析和思考想到这一点,我仅仅靠动力就想到了。

22. 这一点我说出来可能会冒犯很多人。没错,我是中国人,在美国是少数族群。但是我从来没有这么想自己。我从不觉得我是中国人、亚洲人、黄皮肤等等。当然了,在美国这个种族和文化的熔炉里这么想不难,但是,种族和文化这张牌被少数族裔滥用得太多了,包括中国人。

我不是说这里没有种族歧视,我也不是说对有些人来说没有玻璃天花板。你可以不断抱怨“不公平”,你也可以忽视它,然后努力奋斗。我很感激马丁路德金这样的人们为少数族裔铺平的道路,但是人生苦短,不要沉迷在自怜自艾中,仅仅因为你是少数人种。种族、肤色、国籍只是你人生中的几个小波折,所以快点自己调整好。我个人就经历过所谓的“种族歧视”,但我从来不让这样的事影响到我,我只是更努力地尝试。你会很惊讶地发现即使是种族主义者也会喜欢埋头努力的人。努力是会传染的!

23. 你得知道你究竟有多想成功。评论里有人说我不是普通人,或是我全凭运气才达到了我现在的水平。我承认我很幸运,但是大部分的原因在于我对成功的渴望。我在高中和大学里从不去派对,从不喝酒,从不碰毒品,从没出门旅游。我只是不断地工作再工作。你必须老实回答自己,你究竟有多么渴望成功。

在很多西方国家,平庸并不是一件坏事或是难事,所以追求成功的旅途可能对很多人来并不值得。最后,不是每个人都能承受我这样的生活,长时间的工作和状态的起伏对感情生活简直是摧毁性的。如果你没有一个能理解并包容你的另一半,你面对的是数年的孤独挣扎,而且还没有保证最后会有回报。有些人会觉得我的故事能激励自己,但这也是一个警告。就算出发点再好,后果也可能是灾难性的。

24. 做多面手没有什么不好的。我父母那一代人喜欢给人贴标签。你是个医生、律师、工程狮、等等。我16岁来西雅图的时候,我叔叔还在波音做工程狮。他曾是我敬重并仰慕的人。结果90年代初波音开始裁员,我叔叔就接受了提早退休的选择。他那时候只有50多岁,就再也没有工作过。我当时甚至还想过学工程,还申请了加州理工(Caltech)这种牛校,结果被录取了。

我估计他们是搞错了,因为我数学很烂,要是去读工程,一定会鸡飞蛋打。还好我根本上不起加州理工,只能去华盛顿州大(University of Washington),结果连那里都没能毕业。现在回头想想,我的工作包含了销售、财务、交易、商务合作、会计、HR和管理。我的头衔多得可怕,我曾是“事务专员”、后台专员、销售员、股票经纪、财务顾问、投资顾问、对冲基金经理、创业公司CEO和风险投资人。

如果你问我擅长什么,我还真不知道。好多年里,我父母都认为我靠坑蒙拐骗过活,他们甚至不想把我介绍给他们的朋友们。我只是在最近才获得了他们的尊重,因为我的办公室在一栋不错的写字楼里。事实是我所有的经历成就了我。没有人应该以我为榜样。正因为我是个多面手,并且尝试了这么多的角色,我才能有今天。把所有的角色综合起来为自己所用,才是生活的真正成功。

25. 追求你的心头之爱太扯淡了。如果我自己选择,我可能会做和艺术相关的工作。我的父母和哥哥都是古典音乐家,我听着古典音乐长大。我还会画画,我花了不少钱和时间在摄影上。但是这些爱好中随便选一个都可能让我落魄潦倒。我对商业成功的渴望最终能够让我追求我所爱的事,因为我拥有了时间和资源。

但是这是不是说我不喜欢这些年所从事的工作?绝对不是。我热爱交易,我热爱参与并打造公司,我热爱激励别人并见到他们完成自己都没想过能做到的任务,但是我极度厌恶在达到我的目标前所需的那些细枝末节的事务。我不喜欢会计,但是我不得不花费大量时间阅读财务报告,从中寻找投资机会。我觉得我想说的是一个人需要一个开放的心态来学着爱上创建公司的过程,即使你的爱好和商业完全无关。如果你在商场上获得成功,你就拥有了更多的资源和时间来追求你的爱好。

26. 如果你很年轻,刚刚开始生活,以下是多年前我从别人那里获得的建议,到今天依然是我的座右铭:在20岁尝试一切,反正你也不会在任何领域有所建树,但是人们对你的期望很低,所以不用害怕失败。好好享受,尝试一切!30岁前试着找到你擅长的领域。40岁前在这个领域努力提高。因为我现在40多岁,我想我没法告诉你更多了。

27. 如果你是从底层出发,不管你年龄多少,记住这条简单的规则:总是交出高于期望的答卷。我不管你是做什么的,在什么行业,或者你的任务有多简单,你得超过基本的要求。如果你总是超出老板、雇主、合伙人、或是你另一半的预期,你一定能在你的领域里成功。

记住,这不意味着你需要经常加班加点,聪明的工作更重要!一项小任务的成功可以导致更大的成功。你要保持这样的想法,做更多、提供更多、思考更多,这样你才能让别人惊艳,进而记住你并为你提供机会。我还记得我第一份在Safeway超市的工作,我知道我其实干着2-3个人的活,领着一个人的工资,但是我很快就得到了晋升,工资也从3.5刀涨到了5.25刀。这教会我努力可以带来认可和回报。当然了,要是你的老板看不到你的努力,那么他/她就是个白痴,你应该尽早离开

28. 变得与众不同,就算是为了不同而不同。对于一个在循规蹈矩的社会里长大的人,做到这点非常难。这意味着要成为出头的椽子,要不断反抗,而且很多时候要有不同意见。但是变得与众不同有其自己的目的和好处。在商业社会里,公司都试着变得与众不同,在消费者中获得更高的知名度,以此获得更好的竞争优势。不幸的是,很多人和公司还是不断地犯同样的错误,也就是抄袭别人,特别是社会认可的“成功”人士和企业。问题在于,这些成功的个人和公司擅长他们自己的领域,如果你直接抄袭他们的所作所为,你只是在他们制定的游戏规则下竞争。就算你和他们一样优秀,一样努力,你还是很难在他们擅长的游戏里打败他们。你应该在不同的游戏里比赛,选择你擅长的游戏,由你制定规则。这就是为什么我刻意地雇用那些别人觉得不合适、奇怪的员工们。当你被一群“正常”而又无聊的人包围着的时候,创新自然就成了一桩难事。

29. 金钱不能代表你。请从我的失败中学习!当我是个二十出头,脾气暴躁的有钱混蛋时,我愚蠢地以为财富就是我的身份。很多人还在重复同样的错误,这些人到处都是,他们把金钱当做衡量自己的标准,比如说Dan Bilzerian(Instagram上的炫富土豪,类似王思聪)。

虽然我没有Bilzerian先生那么有钱,我能看出他的态度和我当时很相似。把金钱和自我捆绑在一起的问题在于,当你失败的时候,你的自尊会随之一同粉碎。不是每个人都能像我一样重新爬起来的(更不用说爬起来的过程有多艰难了),很可能你的一辈子就随之毁掉了。现在回想起来,我骄傲的不是那段混账日子,而是我没钱没地位的时候。

30. 学会说不。我们很多人都想要被爱,被接纳,变得受人欢迎。不幸的是这也意味着你会被迫说很多“yes”,即使你心里不是这么想的,因为你怕冒犯别人。我不是棒球迷,但是在棒球里有个术语叫“fat pitch”(肥球),意思是说作为击球手,你不会在每次投手出手的时候挥杆,因为挥杆的机会有限,你要耐心等待成功可能性更高的球。

同样的想法也可以用到人生和生意上面。生活中有太多干扰和低质量的沟通,你不可能一一应付,否则你会被这些干扰拖后腿。一直问问自己,时间是不是都花在有帮助的事情上了,如果不是,那你为什么在做这件事?我已经教会了我的销售们“开除”客户,没错,开除客户。如果一位顾客在经济上接受不了我们的服务,我们要是继续服务就是在浪费时间,长此以往我们的生意就会变得不可持续。

对人也是一样,如果你想不断提升自己,那就和有价值的人们多在一起,不要容忍平庸。如果你发现在你的圈子里你是最差的那一个,恭喜你!如果情况是反过来的,你就需要做出改变了。我很讨厌中国的一句老话:比上不足比下有余。不,你要一直比上不足。掌控你的时间和精力。

31. 要是你不聪明怎么办?不要担心!我不确定财富和智商有没有必然的联系,即使有,那也是负相关的。我不是说你越笨就越可能成功。我自己不是很聪明,因为我连大学都没能毕业,我是典型的拖班级后退的那个家伙。我做交易员的时候,我注意到了一个清晰的现象:“聪明”的交易员,就是那些有高学历,从常青藤学校毕业的那伙人,通常是表现最糟糕的那一群。我做股票经纪人的时候,我们一直嘲笑那些医生和工程师,因为他们通常是最烂的投资人。

我公司的首席工程师是个绝顶聪明的哥们,但是作为投资人简直不能再差劲了。虽然这不能当作真理,但也许有那么一点点道理。我所认识的成功人士并不是最聪明的那个,为什么?一次又一次的,聪明的那些人倾向于太理智,喜欢分析和对比,他们总是错失良机,因为机会不总是成熟而明显的。聪明人同样还倾向于追求“竞争优势”,你会听到很多交易员和基金经理们到处寻找所谓的“消息”。

同时,那些和我一样比较笨的知道实在的价值不总是依靠消息得来。坚持不懈和不那么高大上的努力也可以得到回报,但是这类回报需要时间。我以前总是嘲笑龟兔赛跑的故事,觉得我宁可是那只兔子,现在我长大了,我意识到持久成功的秘诀其实是努力笑到最后。

32. 坚持长期贪婪!大多数人都是自私而贪婪的,他们只是不想承认而已。我不觉得贪婪有什么不好的,但是我不喜欢的是短期的贪婪。对比中国和西雅图(中国的人口比西雅图稠密多了)让我了解了商业头脑的不同之处。你在中国经商或是遇到中国商人的时候,通常他们的要求都很肤浅。中国生意人总是爱问清楚你能给他们带来多少生意、数量多少、什么时间等等,他们想在生意成交以前掌握一切好处,他们一般不去考虑“长期”的合作。

这就是为什么我叫他们短期贪婪,随之而来的就是基于交易数量的商业模式。原因很简单,中国人太多了(废话!),售后服务和长期价值就相对不那么重要,因为不断有新的企业出现。而在西雅图,以及大部分美国西部地区,你找不到这么大的人口基数来支撑这样的模式。于是你被迫开始考虑长期的合作关系,希望随着时间,每个合作伙伴都能带来更多的生意。

实际上这是一个更好的商业模式!因为所有的生意都需要寻找客户,所以为了找到客户,企业就必须产生获取客户的支出,例如广告、请客户就餐等等。典型的中国公司就像轮子上的仓鼠,必须不断地获取新客户,因为公司的老客户在不断流失。如果你用相反的方法,为客户提供周到的服务和体验,你不需要时时刻刻都在转动轮子,因为你的老客户会不断地带着新的生意回来,这也间接地降低了你获得客户所需要的支出。

西雅图作为一些对消费者最友好的公司发源地其实一点也不奇怪,比如好市多(Costco)、诺德斯特龙(Nordstrom) 、星巴克(Starbucks)、亚马逊(Amazon)、还有REI都从西雅图起家,而且都有一个共同特点,那就是优质的服务!长期贪婪意味着你要做一些乍一看没什么回报的事,但这些事会帮助你打造一个可持续的商业模式,并且逐渐地带来回报。如果你能够以这样的态度对待客户,你就不会有太大的压力(因为你不需要不断地转轮子)。

时刻提醒自己,你选择了长期贪婪还是短期贪婪?你是只想要这单生意,还是想要一段持久的合作?

我应该把这点也加上。我儿子2009年被诊断出患有一种罕见的血液疾病,那时候我还在离婚的过程中。要是没有西雅图儿童医院的努力,他可能就已经离开我们了。他花了一个月接受化疗,现在已经转危为安了。我还不是一个老人,所以可能现在说这话为时尚早:如果我能够留在1%的人群中,甚至成为一名亿万富翁,我一点也不想回到年轻时愚蠢的生活方式。我现在住在一个中产阶级社区的公寓里,面积不到150平方。我没有多处房产,或是一堆超级跑车,我唯一的奢侈爱好就是旅行。我想量入为出地生活,然后把我所有的财产全部留给西雅图儿童医院,这不意味着我不会同时尽我所能地多挣钱☺

我发现了这个网站http://www.death-clock.org/

有一天,出于好奇我回答了所有的问题,它告诉我我能活到92岁,也就是说今天我刚好在人生的一半。我很感激能够经历这么多,老实说,如果明天我出门被车撞了,我也已经拥有了很值得的一生。这无关我已经获得或是还未获得的成就,虽然我的回答是关于这一点的,但是这绝对不是生命的意义。你应该享受生活并且用尽全力,不管你的目标是什么。仅仅因为你挣扎过,或是沿着我的脚步达到了经济上的成功,并不意味着你一定能在生命中成功。你一定会获得发现,我可以保证这一点。如果你再努力一点,你也许就会遇到你遇到过的最有趣的人,所以赶紧开始行动。如果以上这些听起来太自恋了,无所谓。我已经等不及开始我人生的下一个46年了。








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84
tsiyuki

天哪…这种人生才算人生吧…
5 hour(s) ago
57
兔子等着瞧

能说明什么?你的运气比别人好?历史不过是幸存者的谎言
5 hour(s) ago
54
江江Darui

太佩服作者这种屡次失败又重新站起来的精神了,但是这样折腾了二十多年,家庭也散了,即使钱赚了很多,真的会感觉到幸福吗?如果一开始就好好经营人生,经营家庭,会不会有更好的结果呢?
4 hour(s) ago
42
FENGQIAN CHEN

成功的人说的都是圣经
5 hour(s) ago
41
哒哒哒哒悦

讲真,这位叔叔是真的骨子里对金钱非常有激情。20岁赚了如此多得钱
5 hour(s) ago
27
TurinC

有这本事和毅力 就算留在中国也是社会精英
5 hour(s) ago
19

TOP

原文: How can one become part of the 1%?

Anonymous
Updated 3 Oct
Quora is full of questions along these lines, "I am fifteen, I would like to be a multi-millionaire when I am thirty." Or "I want to be a billionaire when I am at XXX age", and so on. I get a chuckle whenever I see these kind of questions. (I am 24 years old. I want to be a billionaire by the time I'm 60. What should I do? ) (https://www.quora.com/topic/Beco... )

It is easy to fall in love with the results, but few really want to know the process it takes to get to those results. What people really should be asking is that "I want to be rich, what kind of crap and how much of it will I have to take to get there?"

In my case I have done it three times thus far. But there is no short cuts, so unless you find a magical way to win the next lotto, there is no get rich quick scheme here. Oh, talk about getting anything quick, if you of the type who don’t want to put in the work, or for that matter hate reading some guy’s long rant, well this one is going to run long, very long. You should just click the back button now.

There are some real bitter counter to other posts on this topic, most are along the lines of how lucky someone was and so on. The younger, poorer me, or the outsider looking might have agreed with a lot of those sentiments. But having gone through it a few times, I feel like I have a better perspective now. After all, I was desperately poor a few times myself.

I came to US along with my parents as a teenager from mainland China back in the mid 1980s, a time no one gave a fuck about China. Even among the Chinese here in Seattle, we were considered 3rd class citizens behind other Chinese, namely American born ones, Chinese from Taiwan and so on. We had no skills, no money, no connections, but we had our physical labor we could sell. My parents were college professors from China with no language ability and zero business sense. So, no, you can't accuse me of having some kind of head start in business. They were utterly useless and had no concept of money in this new capitalistic society. They had to work as housekeepers and janitors, starting fresh from the bottom in their 50s. So yes, I want to say a gentle fuck you to all those whiners about how some of the 1% had all the advantages. The only advantages I had was I had my four limbs in tact, and chip on my shoulder.

Since it was obvious my parents were in no position to help me, I have to fight my own way to get ahead. This meant getting a job.My first job was at the local Safeway for the simple reason McDonalds turned me down due to my poor English skills. I was sixteen, having just arrived three months prior. I worked my ass off, always looking forward to weekends, holidays, and any overtime shifts if possible so I can earn more. I biked to work in the rain (Seattle rains a shit load), snow, ice, sometimes not getting home until 2am in the morning, and I still had homework to do. I finished 4 years of high school course in 2 years so I can graduate on time with my age group (my high school in US didn't accept credits from China). I did not want to stay in high school until I was twenty. So I had extra course load too. During this time I worked as many as three jobs at a time. Moonlighting as a clerk at the neighborhood 7-Elevens, got abused at call centers, participated in focus groups, sold plasma to the local blood bank. Pretty much anything I could do to earn extra money. I simply couldn't understand how kids in my high school could afford to drive cars to school, cars of their own! Needless to say I did not participate in any of the after school activities, nor did I make any friends. I was this nerdy looking Asian dude who wore cheap Kmart and thrift shop clothes who excelled at math (fill in your stereotypes) on campus. I worked, and worked some more. So for those of you who complained that you have to make ends meet to work extra hours and take on extra jobs, I understand exactly how it goes, but you will not get any sympathy from me because the entire time I kept telling myself this is all just temporary. There is no way I won't get out of the hell hole if I worked hard.

Two years into my Safeway clerk job I moved out of the house because I met my first girlfriend, my parents didn't approve. I was eighteen. Faced with the prospect of having to make more money to support myself, saving for college, I looked for anything that would pay more for a high schooler. The only thing that paid more than $5.25 an hour was selling.

Like a lot of young men, I liked gadgets. I was fascinated by cameras. Growing up poor in China meant virtually no one had a camera of any kind. It was a very expensive hobby. I would hang out at a camera stores in Bellevue so I can fondle some of these amazing machines. To my surprise a lot of the clerks knew far less than I did about the equipments they were selling. This made me realize I could probably do their jobs better. So I asked their managers for a sales job. But none would hire me because my English was still not so great, of course I didn't have any sales experience. The classic chicken or egg thing. I knew I had to get sales experience somehow.

I saw this flyer from Cutco ( Kitchen knives, block sets, utensils) promising that I could make $9 an hour. As it turned out, it was all about door to door sales. Undaunted, I bought the starter knife set and started selling. I found a directory of all the Chinese engineers in Seattle that worked for Boeing and started dialing away. I would make up stories about how showing them knives was for a school marketing project, and assumed they all knew my uncle who also worked at Boeing. Most assumed a high school kid would just be harmless, and some might have vaguely remembered my uncle's name, but few would turn me down for a house call. This taught me a lesson, if you don't ask, you won't receive. I even went so far to ask my uncle to drop me off at some of those "friends" houses so I could do my sales demo. Of course not everyone bought, but the few who did still reminds me to this day just how good those knives were! The company is still around, I saw Costco carrying their knives!

Having had this sales experience in one summer, I used it on my resume and got a job selling cameras in the local camera store. But even this first sales job didn't come easy. I had to offer to work for free for one month just so I could get in. I told the manager if I didn't sell as much as he expected by the end of the month, I wouldn't get the job. I went from Cameras West (now out of business) to Silos (gone too), to Video Only (Don't Be Sorry... Shop Video Only!). I was always nearly the top sales guy everywhere I went because I spent all of my spare time learning about all the products I was selling. During my off days, I would go visit other electronic stores to learn about the product they were selling. I would linger around other salespeople to listen in on their sales pitches to learn. I hung out at magazine racks at Tower Books to read about product reviews. I simply wanted to know more about what I am doing than the next guy. I learned from early on that solution selling worked. I went from making $5.25 an hour to making $40,000 plus a year in two years. I was twenty.

My job at Video Only also gave me a small taste of entrepreneurism. Peter Edwards, the owner of Video Only instituted a margin based commission system for salespeople. We would all get a computer printout of the "costs" of all the items for sell along with the displayed price on the floor. The salespeople get to decide what the item actually gets sold at between those two data points. By the end of the month, the higher the profit margin of ones overall sales, the higher the commission payout. I loved the freedom this gave me and it taught me how to do deals on the fly. I would later on copy some of this approach with my own employees.

This was also the same time I got really interested in business and finance. I spent most of my "entertainment" money on books. I never partied, I saved whatever money I could so I can buy my first piece of real estate so I can avoid paying rent. I bought my first condo at twenty-one. Since I worked in retail sales and got pretty good at it, it quickly made me realize most the people I was working with were twice my age or older, and I was already doing better than them. The thought of spending the rest of my life on the sales floor made me looking further ahead. If I was going to be doing sales, the only way to "scale" was to move merchandise with much bigger dollar value or speed. So the idea of being a stockbroker or a real estate agent seemed appealing. I got a real estate license but found the pace too slow and boring. So stock and bonds sales it was. But being a minority with no connections (rich friends and family you can immediately bring to the firm in the form of new accounts) was not so appealing to most hiring managers, not to mention the fact I had yet to graduate from college.

I kept cold calling, pestering the local branch managers of various brokerage houses. Since Seattle is three hours behind NYSE opening time, it meant most brokers show up to work around 6AM. So I would camp out at the lobbies at brokers offices at 5AM in the morning, hoping to improve my odds of intercepting the decision makers. This went on day after day for more than three months. Eventually it paid off, I finally got hired at Prudential Securities by Paul Wonnacott in their Seattle branch. This is the first time I have actually encounter the 1%. Despite the fact stock brokerage was really just a sales job, I tried to learn and absorb everything I could. Finance, accounting, deal structure, annual reports, research reports, most of these were Greek to me but no matter. I read and read some more. I also got interested in technical analysis for stock trading. The early Bloomberg terminal became my best friend. I couldn't believe how much information I was able to find on this orange tinted screen. In a few years I was making six figures, or by early 1990s standards, I was in the 1% myself. I was proud but also hated my job. I hated the conflict of selling products loaded with fees or promoting stocks that we "knew" the firm had a vested interest in. After all, it was all about selling and not actually figuring out how to make trades and investments. I wanted out and started looking for a reason.

By 1996, freshly married and sick of my job, I noticed online brokers starting to flourish. Considering the fact I was charging clients $110 a trade to trade 100 shares of Microsoft, the online brokers were charging $20 a trade, I thought my business as a broker was going to be toast. Besides, at $20 a trade, it was cheaper than the $50 a trade the firm charged employees. I finally saw the chance to leave and trade for myself.

I quit my job by late spring of 1996, but all I had was about $20,000 liquid cash to trade. The first 6 months was a disaster, I lost nearly all of my $20,000 on stocks like Ascend, Shiva and a host of other bygone tech stocks. I had to drastically scale down my lifestyle and asked myself if I was really serious. In order to trade out of my hole, I needed more capital. I maxed out all of my credit cards for cash advances. Fortunately, the market turned and I recovered my losses and some. When all said and done, I had $50,000 to trade. But I knew I needed a plan to make it. I set a goal of making at least $100,000 a year to justify what I was doing. That meant making at least 200% a year from my then $50,000 stake. It seemed almost impossible.

After some calculation and observing what I did wrong I came up with a simple plan. It would be impossible to look for stocks that can double or triple in a year without major downside, these kind of stocks are volatile. But there are plenty of stocks that moves more than a few percentage points a day, if I can capture just a chunk of those movements I didn't need to hold stocks overnight. Since there are more than 200 trading days a year, it meant 100,000/200=500, or roughly 1% return a day on my $50,000 stake. This was entirely doable. The key would be to contain my losses. For those of you who knows trading, this is day trading in its essence. And off I went. By the end of 1996 I was up more than $100,000, I reached my goal.

I know it sounded easy, but it wasn't. This was during a time when I was dealing with slow dial-up 14.4 modems (it drops in the middle of trading day all the time), multiple CRT monitors crammed up in a small room while running multiple servers, temperature routinely ran up to well over 100 degrees, but I didn't care. I was a man possessed, sleeping on 3-4 hours a day while pouring thousands of charts daily, surfing message boards, reading floods and floods of news, gossips trying to gain any kind of edge. It was a daily battle of my own internal greed vs. fear, but I was loving it because I felt I could conquer the market (famous last words for sure).

A year later I made more than $500,000 and never looked back. Yes, I was back in the 1%. And this is also where things got crazy. Since day trading only occupied a few hours in the morning (Seattle is 3 hours behind NYSE time), and I was done usually by 10AM, I had plenty of time on my hands. I started shopping out of boredom. I bought multiple cars, houses, my expenses quickly got out of control. Pretty soon I was feeling like a slave to my purchases. The monthly fixed cost to my lifestyle was $50,000-100,000. For a day trader starting fresh everyday, I started to feel like I had to make certain amount just to stay afloat. I was not even thirty at the time. My mood was no longer upbeat, I was angry at myself and took out on people around me. I was this raging asshole because I was so full of myself yet I couldn't figure out why I was so unhappy. I heard this line from someone, "having money merely unmask the real person", in my case, it unmasked a terrible individual. Despite the fact I reached my goal I had nothing but an empty feeling inside.

I had to find a way to scale my trading to pay for my now lavish lifestyle. So I went back to do what I hated, namely going after other rich people to raise funds for my hedge fund. I wasn't particularly good at networking (hard to do when you are an obvious asshole), the fund got started with a very small pool of $10,000,000, a good chunk from myself. I struggled to trade under the nagging of limited partners, I hated it. I felt like I was being watched all the time, my trading suffered. I could no longer do the same style of trade I was used to, the returns lagged and I started to feel really depressed. I went through a couple of years of depression, spending days doing nothing but staying home and browsing online. My marriage suffered. I blamed my spouse and her extended family for being greedy and always wanting more from me. Even the arrival of my son didn't cheer me up.

Due to my underperformance, people started to pull money out. It compounded to me starting to trade recklessly. I no longer had my old discipline of risk management, it simply went from one Hail Mary trade to another. By 2003 I was insolvent. I burned through all of my capital while still stuck to multiple homes and other obligations. I gave my wife the bad news and she spent days crying. I thought my life was over. I tried to kill myself.

Looking back, those were pretty dark times. I was completely alone with no one to talk to. Since I alienated everyone around me for a long time, it was now up to me to pick up the pieces. I still remember quickly packing up our belongings from my "mansion" to move into one of our much smaller rental properties one night so the neighbors couldn't see me leaving. I felt so ashamed and desperate. The mansion had a mortgage, I let it slide into foreclosure, and for the next several years I had to learn how to dodge calls from debt collectors.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that hiding, feeling sorry for myself wasn't going to solve my problems, I had to get up and look for something constructive to work on. By now we had to depend on my wife's income to support us. Gone are the days of $1M plus a year income, say hello to $70,000. Also gone are all the fancy cars, unnecessary spending and vacations. My mental attitude started to get hardened again. It was time for me to get out of the house and work. I joined a tech startup in 2004 as head of sales, after all, I could still sell.

The startup had no real funding, it was started with less than $50,000 seed by the founders. When I joined, there were all of only two founders left. It had no real customers since it had no revenue. We worked out of a warehouse in Southcenter, an industrial area south of Seattle. It was actually worse than a garage, the constant noise of trucks coming and going made it difficult to even conduct phone calls. Whenever a customer or a prospect asked about the noise, I would jokingly tell them our business was booming since they can obviously hear all the commotion from the loading. I devised a plan to generate revenue anyway we could. I went around the country on sales calls, traveled to China almost monthly dealing with vendors and partners. Since there was only three of us, I did sales, business development, accounting, finance and marketing.

Chronically short of cash we were constantly juggling between which bills to pay first. We tried outsourcing part of development to China, then India, shuffling between different vendors, chasing after deliquent customers constantly. It was stressful and exhilarating at the same time. I had to learn all kinds of new skills on the fly. I went through silly books like “The Portable MBA”, “Dummies” series of books on using Quickbooks, accounting, finance and so on. I felt like a fraud most of the time because so many things I was doing was new to me. But what choice did we have? In retrospect, a lot of the things we did were absolutely correct, at least based on the The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses: Eric Ries: 9780307887894: Amazon.com: Books

In our first year we had revenue of $500,000, the next year we got to $2M. It was during this time I took over as the CEO since I came up with the plan and direction, generated all the sales. The business grew to $3M by 2007 and we thought we should be able to raise venture capital. Unfortunately no one in Seattle bought our story. All three of us are older when compared to the twenty something startup guys. None of us had a computer science background, as a CEO, I was the least presentable. A college dropout without any experience in the tech space. Despite the revenue, we were unfundable. The VCs in Seattle are about as WASP as they come, but they did point out flaws in our business. One of questions the VCs asked over and over again at the time was: what unfair competitive advantage did we possess. I could never give them a straight answer because we didn't have any differentiating IP, but even if we did, it wouldn't have mattered. In was only in hindsight now that the real answer was that we had heart.

It was during this fund raising process I really felt insulted. We would present to "Angel" investors, which often times made of people who got lucky to be some of the earlier employees of successful companies such as Microsoft and Google, or they retired as wealthy corporate executives, doctors and so on. Most never ever ran a business in their lives, most carried this entitled arrogance. One of the investment groups is ZINO Society, we presented while they were wining and dining away as a social club, I really felt like cheap entertainment on the stage. I vowed that if I ever make it big, I will do everything I can to change how startup guys are treated, we are not in medieval society with overlords anymore!

We were raising funds to find a way out of old business model, which is to develop technology to sell to OEMs (basically companies with their own brands and products). Our customer would package our technology and sell it as if it is their own. We discovered over time that we were getting $50-60 per license for our product, when it is all said and done, the end customer actually pays anywhere from $1,000-10,000. Sensing the old business model was running into a dead end, we felt we needed a change. Despite not being able to raise VC funding, we decided to pivot by 2008. This meant building out the rest of the product features and market it directly to the end customers. In business jargons, we want to climb the value chain. What it also means is that we are no longer competing against companies doing $50-100M sales, but billion dollar companies instead. This would require us building a comprehensive suite of products, integrate it with enterprise grade hardware, be responsible to deploy, service and support the product. It is utter insanity if I tried to convince investors that a dinky little company with no prior experience, no direct relationships with large accounts dare to pull it off.

Our timing was horrible. Walking away from $3M a year business while trying to build a new one with little funding was more wishful thinking than anything. We also had a dozen employees to feed. The founders and I never took a salary because we needed to reinvest all the cash back into the business. This was a real stressful time. My marriage went down the toilet. Not earning an income from me for 5 years changed the dynamics of my marriage. I was no longer the "man" of the house.

The world nearly came to an end by 2009. I had no income, the pivot wasn't going well because new business didn't pick up fast enough to offset the lost revenue from the old business. The market and the economy came to a halt. Something has got to give, as it turned out, it was me. Adding insults to injury, our largest customer owed us a pile of money, instead of paying, they decided to find an angle to sue us. It was such a shock and totally out of the blue, my partners and employees were in denial for several months. We tried to dodge the subpoenas, tried to reach out to the customer to try and resolve the issues, but it was clear this is the dirty business tactic they decided to employ to get out from paying nearly a million dollars they owed us. I thought I had read and experienced enough with some of the unsavory aspect of business, but this was a new low. You couldn't help but feel the unjust and get all raged inside. With the lopsided liability from the lawsuit and dwindling prospects of the old business, it would have been really easy to simply fold and shut down the business, and we did entertain that prospect. But I simply couldn't let this stand. I am a fighter, I will not go down without a fight. We counter-sued.

With legal and business troubles piling, I got divorced, laid off most of my staff. With my divorce finalized, I was back down to $20,000 in the bank. But I had to fund payroll. I was also kicked out of my former home. Not wanting to spend money on rent, I moved into the office broom closet with an air mattress (the picture below was taken using a fisheye lens, a lens with a normal angle of view couldn't capture the whole tiny space. My head was against the other end of the room).




To make matters worse, we were late on our office lease, got cut off from our vendors and owed the bank a pile of money. The legal bills were piling up fast. It felt impossible. I finally hit bottom again. I was broke and homeless.

There were days when my then 6 year old son came to visit me in the office, knowing full well that I lived out of the office broom closet, yet the little boy never displayed any shame or embarrassment, it was as if he knew I can work my way out it. How could I possibly not be motivated if my little boy is unfazed?!! Of course we couldn't help but turn a bad situation into something fun, so we would bounce up and down on the air mattress just goofing off.

Living out a tiny space with a few possessions makes one realize just little material things matters, I felt like a child again, my head was clear and uncluttered. My employees knew I was living out of the broom closet but no one talked about it, life and business went on as if nothing is going on, even though the whole financial system was in a train wreck. I kept telling everyone day after day just hang in there. In business, success is all about survival. We have to do anything we can to just not die!

It was obviously a dire situation in my life and business at the time, but the funny thing is that I wasn't sad or angry. I actually found my situation comical. I had always bragged to others that I came from nothing and I wouldn't be afraid to go back to nothing. I got my wish, now what? I knew I couldn't stay in the broom closet for too long, it was against the building code. My gym membership (where I took shower everyday) was going to be cancelled because it was a family membership from my ex's workplace. I had to get back to trading again.

The irony of starting with $20,000 to trade didn't escape me. This was 2009, a time with extreme market volatility. It was great for a day trader, but I had to be extremely careful not to get stuck. The overnight risk was tremendously high. Fortunately I still had some of my old trading moves, pretty soon I was making enough to make some of the payroll and hang on to my key employees. I renegotiated with our landlord, banks and suppliers to allow us to float a bit longer. I intuitively knew at the time that the worst recession of more than fifty year was going to wipe out a lot of our competitors. All we had to do was to stay alive. I needed to do anything possible to do just that.

It was during this same period I helped out a tech support guy from a competitor of ours. Let's call him Joe. Joe was recently laid off, his home was foreclosed and the entire family with three teenage kids had to move back in with the grandparents. I sensed the same burning desire in this guy to succeed after his financial failures. I offered Joe a job in sales instead of tech support. We worked together on the company's sales efforts by going after some of old accounts he supported at his prior job, we managed to poach a few this way. It gave us much needed confirmation that we were on the right track.

By early 2010 I was able to move out of our office broom closet, I turned $20,000 trading stake into $250,000. It gave the company much needed breathing room to survive. The legal fight was also over. The old customer was able to get away with paying the bulk of what they owed us, and we were out of personal liabilities. This same unsavory "customer" eventually went out of business a couple of years later because they lacked the key technology we used to provide to them. But most importantly, I believe it was their unethical business practices that eventually caught up with them. Talk about karma!

In 2010 we were also able to land our first big customer with our newly pivoted product. The large customer has far flung operations all over the world (it is a household name), so the obvious question for them was how this little company with now only 6 employees can support them. I went back to something I learned from getting my first sales job, namely offering them something that is very difficult to do for free as a trial. We integrated our product with their legacy vendor's product while adding a software layer to allow easier, scalable workflow while saving the customer money. This took us a few months worth of sweat labor, but at the end we were able to deliver something a competitor nearly 100X our size couldn't deliver. To service and support the customer, we outsourced the deployment and installation while managing the entire logistical process to ensure a superior customer experience. To go one step better, we wrote an entire management suite to monitor their operations and the health of our product to make sure all failures and bugs flow back to us immediately, so we can proactively fix the problems even before the customer is aware of any issues. The picture below is an example what a typical site for our customer looks like, now multiply this by up to a few thousand, and you can imagine the mess we have to manage




The bottomline, making sure the customer always interact with our product in the best possible light. We finished the year with $1M in new sales.

With the success of hiring guys like Joe, I wanted to model our company after guys just like him and me, underdogs with attitude. Half of the company are development staff, people from all over the world. We have Russians, Romanians, Indians, Chinese, Latvians, Germans, Italians, and so on. We also have people with non computer science background who learned in unconventional ways too. Folks with majors in geography, math, and even an ex-fisherman. The sales and support staff are equally diverse, most do not have advanced degrees, some with serious family problems and personal failures in the past. But they all know we are in it together. This tight knit group has push the business ahead much better than I could have imagined.

Four years later, the economy has recovered and so have I. My company did $20M in sales in the past 12 months and we are on pace to do $50M next year. Much of this had to do with the effort of tech support turned sales guy Joe. From a starting salary of $40,000 back in 2010, Joe made $750,000 last year and he will bank more than $3M this year from sales commissions. In early 2015, Joe took care of all the bad debts from his past and bought his family a nice horse ranch right outside of Seattle with cash (no one would finance him still). The day he bought his house, we sat in the office conference room with a check for his new home, we looked at each other and nearly cried. We understood each other for the shared journey we both went through. Some day Joe should be telling his own story on Quora.

With gross margin in the 80% range and plenty of cash in the bank I paid myself $1M. The business is probably worth 2-3X sales in private market value, so anywhere between $100-150M as of this writing. I am pretty confident it will be able to do $300M in sales in a few years due to our backlog. So the number of $1B is entirely possible. It is probably safe to say that I am firmly back in the 1% again. I hope to stay there this time.

I know I went long with my crappy writing. But here are some of my lessons for myself, you can take away whatever you can from my ups and downs. If you want to be part of the 1% you have to do the following:

1. Be mentally tough. Learn to get over your fears. I might have been lucky to have been born what is the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, a time of mass chaos and destruction, both figuratively and literally. I might also have been blessed with a natural tendency of being rebellious, going against the grain and paid no respect for authority, all qualities that could have made life miserable in a conservative Asian society. But I was lucky, I left not by my choosing. The point is, I had plenty of personal turmoil at an early age, where there wasn't a lot of security and stability, so you sort of get used to it. It is also this experience that made me realize that most people are afraid, and for the most part, irrationally afraid. What happens when one is afraid? You retreat, you hold back, you dither, you procrastinate. Worse, you become more prejudiced, or even take on extreme forms of hate. You miss out on opportunities, you become a prisoner of your irrationality. So learn to ask a simple question when you are uncomfortable with something, what have I got to lose? In most cases, nothing, nothing but that quickening of your heartbeat, nothing but that little burning sensation on your face, nothing but that ego of yours getting pinched. Here is the thing, once you realized the absurdity of those fears, you soon realize that vast majority of people around you are pre-occupied with those same idiotic fears! So if you really want to get head and shoulders above the rest of people, you don't need to have better looks, you don't need to have more money, you don't need to have better education, you don't need .... well the list goes on and on. But you only need one thing that is actually in all of us, just reach down a bit more. You have the courage, the toughness, yours skin is thick enough, your time here is only getting scarce... so get over it already!

During my early days of trading, when I just tasted a bit of success, I thought to myself this is it! My life is going to be a success from here on. Then I read more and more about successful traders in history, it seemed without exception all of them have gone through stretches of devastating failure, often lead to bankruptcy. I thought it would never happen to me, because….I am reading and learning from their mistakes aren’t I? I don’t think there was anything out here that can adequately prepare me for the multiple failures I went on to have. I have been warned, but it still took some desperate soul searching moments to prevent me from doing something even more stupid during my dark times. I don’t mean to scare you, but whether you choose to pursue your goal or not, life can deal you a nasty hand sometimes. You better learn to toughen yourself up early and often.

So yes, if you want to get ahead, get ready and prepare yourself as early as you can for some inevitable tumbles. Don’t be afraid, as long as you have your head above your shoulder, you can fight on.

2. Live within your means. Don't be an idiot like me. Spend money that helps you get ahead, don't spend money that makes you look like you are already ahead, unless that is part of your business model or tactic (most smart people can see through that right away).

In business this means don’t get ahead and do the “business” make believe things first, like getting an expensive lease, fancy office furniture store and so on. I have ran across so many failed businesses with great ideas and willing founders that made this mistake, it is downright saddening. Make sure you have a long enough runway to see your ideas through, don’t burn your own bridge. This has nothing to do with not being afraid or not being optimistic, it is about being fiscally responsible.

I have very much been guilty of wanting instant gratification, this meant over-extending myself and rationalize that somehow I will make enough to pay for it later. Guess what? There will always more shiny toys to distract you and tempt you, this is what our material world is built on. So justifying spending beyond your means today isn’t going to reduce your lust for the next new toy tomorrow, you are merely digging a hole for yourself. So get hold of yourself!

3. Learn how to make money, not how to save money. You will never save your way to riches. Again, this doesn't mean you need to be an idiot with money! Learn to understand how business, the economy and ultimately the world actually works. The old cliche "follow the money" is absolutely true. Be inquisitive and always ask yourself what is the business model, cash flow, personal motivation in all encounters you run into. That means the businesses, stores, restaurants, the management and so on, what makes them tick when it comes to money. I have been doing this for nearly 30 years now, I can quickly assess how a business makes money, how much money, the key drivers of them making money, the kind of people involved, their motivations and so on. You will be blown away once you get this level of understanding that a lot of so-called "successful" businesses are actually quite lousy, and a lot of seemingly boring ones are cash cows. It will absolutely give you a different perspective on people and life.

Making money in its core is actually quite simple. You take some ingredients, whether it is raw or already processed by someone else, add your own reprocessing, and charge a higher price than the costs of your ingredients and sell it in the market place. This can be a product or service, and your added value can be as simple as merely being early and having patience. Of course I am putting it much too simplistically, there are many many other components to it, but at its core, it really is that simple. Factories takes raw materials and transform them into goods, speculators buy stocks or real estate and wait for higher price to sell. Doctors, lawyers and other professionals use their skills to service others, in this case their costs are their long term education, time and efforts. You need to be very realistic yet opportunistic about your own abilities and opportunities that lies in front of you in choosing how you go about making money. I will say this much though, like anything else in life, make money in and of itself is a craft. The more effort you put in, the more you learn, you will get better over time. At the higher end, it involves in building large and complex businesses that are sustainable with enduring value. If you look at the super rich that are self-made, they usually start with a very simple and often not so special idea but gradually climb the economic value chain and built something of substance. With the ease of information flow these days, hoping to get lucky or speculating like an arbitrager is increasingly difficult.

I guess what I am trying to say is make sure you understand the difference between probabilities vs. possibilities in your approach on making money. In my long rambling answer it is easy to think, sure, everything is possible. The truth of the matter is you need to be absolutely hard-nosed to assess the probabilities, not just fantasize about possibilities. Unfortunately there seem to be too many of those “dreamer” type that only think about possibilities and spend very little time to work out the steps that can actually increase their probabilities.

4. Understand the difference between speculation vs. investing. This is really a follow up to learn how to make money. A lot of us fantasize on how to make money, unfortunately a lot of the ideas people generally come up with are of the get rich quick type. When you do that, what you are really doing is falling for someone else’s scheme and/or fraud. The fraudster and schemer is really taking advantage of human nature and/or gullibility. They tend to appeal to our laziness, or our self-aggrandized cleverness. When you are engaged in a business that can generate cash, hopefully a business that is sustainable, and you are putting in either cash and/or effort into such a business, I consider this kind of activity investing. When a business that can generate sustainable cash over the long term, it will certainly have value. If you put in the time to work towards this, even if you get tired, bored of this business down the road, you can always sell it.

Take the above definition of an investment but remove the cash generating capability of the endeavor, what you effectively have is pure speculation. Why? The answer is simple, because the only real way of you getting more money out than what you put in is to hope to sell it at a higher price to the next person. Think things like collectibles, raw land, precious metals and so on. Those things can’t generate cash flow, because they don’t pay dividends and so on. The only way to get more money out of them is to hopefully buy low and sell high. Needless to say, when you are the one doing the buying, you are speculating.

A business or assets that generates cash is considered an investment is because even if you don’t sell it, it pays you on an ongoing basis. You should seriously think about this for a moment when you are about to embark on your next venture. Are you speculating or are you building value? Do you want to be an investor or speculator? This should trickle down to your personal purchasing decisions too. Is that shiny car or boat or McMansion you are about to buy going to generate a cash flow for you? If not, you might want to curb your enthusiasm.

5. Learn how to scale yourself and the business. This means learning how to delegate, how to motivate others and recruit great talent to do works you don't know how or can't. My company is filled with people I recruited and most of them are unconventional successes as well. My sales guy Joe is a great example of this. Without the efforts of others, there is no way I am where I am today. People always tell me but I don't know how to start to leverage and motivate people! I laugh, this isn't true at all. Have you ever tried to get a bunch of classmates, friends together? Have you tried to round up a bunch of people to go see a movie together? Guess what? You are doing motivation (the event, the movie, etc) already, and the effort of organizing, telling people what to do is the most basic form of management. So it is in all of us. You do enough of this from the small scale, pretty soon you will have authority and clout to do it on a bigger scale and you will be amazed people will naturally gravitate towards the person who is organizing all of this, yes, you the leader.

6. Learn all the time, I read 10-20 books on Kindle or Audible a month.




I know of no better way to stay ahead and improve yourself better than reading. You probably hear the cliche that you should "invest" in yourself, HELLO! If learning and acquiring knowledge isn't THE investment in oneself, I don't know what is.

Looking back the past 30 years, I have witness an explosion of demand for college education. There was virtually no such thing as for profit colleges 30 years ago, now they are all over the place. Needless to say it is due to no small part of the massive inflation for college tuitions. Let me let you in a little secret, most of your college education is wasted time and money and grossly overpriced. I am saying this not because I didn’t finish college myself (I have more than 250 college credits, more than enough to graduate), it is strictly due to my own personal experience and the people I have hired. With the exception of a few electrical engineering, legal and computer science majors, most of the people I hire are working in fields that has little or no resemblance to what they majored. The best employees I have are the ones who can quickly learn on the job and eager to learn more!

I am not at all disputing with the fact that better paid and upwardly mobile people in this world have better education, but it doesn’t mean the said advancement is due to the traditional education at all. Your income and achievement gap has everything to do with your overall education, and this has little or nothing to do with how long and/or where you went to school. It has to do with habit of life long learning. For most of us, learning used to come in only one form, which is reading.

There is really no excuse not to read, considering all the available titles and topics, not to mention delivery mechanism. I use Audible or audiobooks to "read" when I am driving or doing random chores. By changing the reading speed to 2x I can digest an average book in only a few hours. One more note about the types of books to read, I have read only two books of fiction in the past 20 years. Reading doesn't mean reading the latest or popular businesses books. What is popular or faddish today might be worthless tomorrow, not to mention a lot of the authors have no clue about business anyways! I still remember back in the late 1980s, the most dominant topic in the business section was how Japan was going to take over the world, it was Japan this, Japan that. Guess what is popular today? China this and China that. The same goes with faddish business theories. Six Sigma anyone? How about "excellence"? You get my point. Use your own critical thinking!

I attribute to most of everything I know to books I read outside of schooling. I learned finance, accounting (I flunked my accounting classes in college), trading, business management, technology, history, arts, music, psychology, marketing, science, and some rather esoteric stuff from my readings. Pretty much nothing is off limits as long as I can learn something, especially if I can find a way to "cross pollinate" the lessons and strategies. In retrospect, what I have learned is that learning from all different kinds of disciplines allowed me to be able to see the essences of most issues right away, because the broader I learned, the closer everything are related. I learned recently this ability to take ideas from seemingly unrelated field has a name, Steven Johnson calls it the adjacent possible. The Genius of the Tinkerer This ability to be able to jump around in different subject matters and see correlations can be disconcerting to some, often times people around me wonder just what I was talking about, but it is a trait I find in a lot of successful business people. In business and in investing, folks who are narrow and deep actually scare me, because it is precisely the "expertise" that blinds them. So read, read a lot, don't worry about if and any of the reading actually contribute to anything right away. Just get into the habit of reading, learning for the rest of your life. You will make yourself smarter, if not else, more charming

With the abundance of information all over the place these days, especially if you have learning challenges like me, you don’t have to resort to just reading. There is so much free and amazing educational content on Youtube, blogs and even video games, it is a paradise for the learning addicted! My significant other has complained that I spend way too much time reading and learning that I am not paying enough attention to her! Can you blame me? What’s more sexy than knowledge?

7. Learn from history and previous success as well as failures. Some of my favorites books are biographies, you get to learn a great deal about some of the greatest characters in history. Don't be surprised to learn that a lot of successful people in history had to overcome a tremendous amount of adversity and failure before accomplishing greatness. For example, I learned several key attributes from Genghis Khan, the greatest conqueror in history, and apply them in my business. 1. Genghis Kahn was pragmatic, wherever he went, he tend to kill ideologues and kept the craftsmen who did real work. 2. He tolerated different religions in his regime and employed based on competence. 3. He preferred to fight with a nimble and lean force that is resourceful, instead of having a large supply line. 4. Genghis Khan also recognized that sometimes the best way to win is to feign defeat first to lure your opponents into complacency. The list goes on and on. The point is, I am particularly interested in upstarts overcoming great odds, it serves both as a guide and inspiration for me. If you study the great characters enough, the lessons and examples they have set can be just as valuable today.

8. Ask a lot of whys. Usually 5 whys in a row will help you dig out the truth of the matter. I stole this idea from how Toyota run their production lines. Asking whys can come across as challenging the status quo, or it might be downright uncomfortable depending on your personality, but it is critical you get over it. If not, at least explore the deeper meanings and answers at your own private time, do not ever assume. I am know I can get annoyed by people asking whys sometimes, but what is more disappointing are people who lack curiosity. I am brutally honest when it comes to hiring, I will not hire people who aren’t intellectually curious.

9 . Work with smarter people, people who like to hack mostly. Learn, steal their ideas, they won't mind. It would be the most flattering thing you can do. How else do you stand on the shoulders of giants? Do not fall into the trap of hanging around with people who are dumber than you, sure it might make you feel smug, but eventually you will be left behind. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and others aren’t genius in any one thing, what they are great at was their ability to recognize their own limitations, so they go out of their ways to work with talents who are smarter, better than themselves. It is always tempting and at times we unconsciously hang around people who aren’t any smarter than ourselves, we sure feel superior and smug, but it leads to what Steve Jobs a Bozo explosion (A quote by Guy Kawasaki ).

When you are starting out at the bottom, you obviously have little choice in who you work for and work with, but you need to understand it is far more valuable to work smarter people. So even if you don’t have much job mobility, you should always be on the lookout for better opportunities, I don’t mean only opportunities for better pay and so on, but most importantly, opportunities to work with people you can learn from. I cannot stress this enough. I would be more than happy to take pay cuts even to work with great talent.




10. Travel as much as you can afford, you will have a much broader perspective. I have learned so much even as a casual tourist from different parts of the world that ultimately helped my business thinking, it makes the airfare and trip costs bargains! How much does a typical college in US costs a year these days? $30–40,000? I doubt very much traveling will cost you anywhere as much, but the lessons and outlook you learned will be far more valuable.Go get your passport already! Here are some pictures I took while running around the world.































11. Laugh at adversity, have fun. Life can be really hard, don't take it personally, even Bill Gates has really really shitty days. It always gets better. Ask yourself a very simple question when things gets really tough, "is this the end of the world for you?" I am absolutely certain the answer will always be no. If it isn't, then why are you wasting time wallowing in your self-pity? Get up and fight!

As I get older, I realized that get to be more philosophical. I had no idea some of the mental attitudes I have acquired fits right in line with Stoicism.

Stoicism has enjoyed somewhat faddish reemergence of late, especially among the Silicon Valley crowd. Fad or not, this approach in life should help one keep perspective in times of adversity.

Adversity also has much to do with ones frame of mind. I used to live next door to a neighbor who enjoys century bike rides on weekends, especially ones with long hill climbs. Living in Seattle gives one easy access to places like Mt. Rainier and Mt. Baker, both with substantial hill climbs. The thought of grinding away on a bicycle for several hundred miles on a weekend would wear me out, but this is a man who looks forwards to the torture! It is precisely the fact he chooses the challenge and adversity ahead he actually get a mental high from it! Just imagine the reverse, had this task been imposed on you, the misery would be unbearable.

On your road to wealth, I hope it is a path you picked by your own free will, you need to know there will be many many adversities, you better take the attitude that no one is forcing this on you. You can just as easily pick a normal path and be in full contentment!




12. Don't be a victim, don't make excuses. Nobody gives a shit about your problems. As a person who grew up in China, this is the part that drives me crazy. As a group of people, we dwell on the fact how China was a victim in recent history (like the past two hundred years) and so on. That's fine and all, but how is that going to solve any of my problems? I can't live off whining about how life isn't fair! Some say inequality is a fact of life, but I never wasted much time bemoaning it. Embrace your dire circumstances and make the best of it, adversity is a blessing in disguise. But most importantly, don't make excuses. I can find no one who likes someone making a lot of excuses. Excuse making is a common flaw that I see both here in US and China. If you own up to mistake, even mistakes you aren't 100% responsible for, it will absolutely help you win people over. The time and energy you spend on making excuses could be spent fixing the problem already.

13. Learn a trade that can make you money in good times and bad. I personally can always fall back on my trading no matter what. This makes me fearless. For that matter, I can fall back on all kinds of jobs and functions I have done. I can work as a bookkeeper, a stockbroker, a trader, a salesperson and so on. I almost certainly can start another business and build it up from scratch, I am the jack of all trades.

14. Find an outlet for your stress. When I really really feel like I can't deal with things anymore, or just don't want to face anything, I get in my car and go on a road trip, all by myself. I am fortunate to live in one of the most beautiful part of the world, so I don't have to venture far to find peace. Some of my favorite places to drive have been Death Valley, Highway 1 up and down the West Coast of USA.










The other option for me is to go sea kayaking. There is no way I am going to get stressed when I am sitting down in a kayak paddling around the ocean.




When I didn't have much money, I spent my zen time listening to music, mostly classical music to escape. But please, drinking and doing drugs isn't an outlet for your stress, it will just make matters worse.

15. It's good to have a chip on the shoulder, it gets you motivated. But it is an annoying personality quirk too, so balance it well.

16. Maybe you are just not born with it, I mean motivation. My brother is nothing like me, he is perfectly happy being average and couldn't give a shit about my struggles and successes. Don't stress yourself out even more, if you aren't motivated, learn to be content. If you are however, never satisfied with what you are being told to do, and firmly believe you can do better, you just might be "born with it". I have always been obnoxious ever since when I was a kid. I constantly challenged the elders, the status quo and always wanted to do one better. I don't think it has changed even all these years later. As my wealth and the resources available to me has grown, I want to do even more. People around me are used to me saying "why not" all the time. Why can't you do it this way? Why can't you do better? Why not me? Where are you weak?

But there is another way to get yourself motivated, I mean even for those who just aren't born with it. Human beings, regardless of culture, are naturally motivated when we feel like it is our choice, our decision to go forth, or in so many words, when we feel like we are in control. None of us like to be told what to do. The secret to motivation then is clear, get control of your own situation; Push, explore, push some more of your boundaries! I am certain the more you push, the more likely you will find new capabilities that you didn't know you had. Pretty soon this becomes a positive feedback loop that propels you to accomplish bigger and greater things in life. This is precisely why I choose to be a handoff manager and foster the environment of freedom and respect at my businesses. People around me surprise me all the time when given the space to bloom!

17. One of the reason the West lead in development for the past few centuries is the fact for the first time in mankind's history they allowed the creative class, the entrepreneurs to actually keep their money. This allows wealth creation and built in motivation for people from all walks of life to strive to push themselves to accomplish more. Unfortunately confiscation and coercion that loots the fruit of labor are still going on in much of the world today, if you find yourself in this kind of oppressed environment, you have to decide whether you want to stay and fight the system, or just leave. I was fortunate to be able to thrive and prosper in what I consider the best system in the world, I certainly couldn't have done as well in the old China I left behind. Even in US there lies a great disparity in the odds of startup success. I was fortunate to be at the right place at the right time in many occasions, being in the Great Seattle area surely helped. If you are trying to do a startup in Mississippi, good luck. You might want to move to a better state.

18. Don't believe the BS about inequality. The real inequality is the level of personal drive and intelligence. I came from nothing, dropped out of college with IQ no higher than George Bush. If I can join the 1% 3 times, so can a lot of people. The populists would like you to believe there is less social mobility these days. Really? Would the 1950s have been better? Say I am a minority in US with no “proper” education, no capital, no connections and so on, could I have accomplished what I did? How about going back to the 1850s? Slavery in America and much of the world, was that a golden era for the underdogs? My point is, if you want an excuse, you don’t even need to come up with one yourself. There will be plenty of people out there helping you to whine. And what does that accomplish? It will just help you maintain the status quo, which is poor, uninformed and down. Don’t fall prey to that.

Every time there is an election cycle in the US, politicians would like us to harken back to a time when there is a large middle class, as if that is the golden era of mankind. Fact is, even the poor in US today enjoys a better standard of living than the upper class in the 1950s. It is human nature that whenever there is a comparison, you will not care about where you stand on an absolute level, you will almost certainly measure your wellbeing on a relative level. There is no question the so-called middle class is shrinking, I am not going to spend time and effort here to debate the causes. This answer is about how to get to the 1% after all, aiming for the comfortable middle is easy. We are statistically born average anyways. Decrying in equality almost certainly put yourself in a worse off position, at least psychologically. Throughout history there is always this fantasy of having some kind of utopia where most everyone is equally happy. I don’t know about you, I lived through that fantasy, it was communist China, where everyone was equally miserable and poor. There was less envy for sure, but human beings will find other ways to tip the scale to make things unequal.

For sometime in America and certainly in Asia, there has been what I consider a fraudulent marketing of higher education, all based on this unspoken notion that advanced education is the key to break the strangle hold of “inequality”. The thinking goes that rich people have better access to a better education, therefore they will do better in life. So it makes sense for a middle-class person/family to go in debt to get one of those fancy education. If you really believe in that, you might as well believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. In my years of doing business and functioning as an employer, I see next to no correlation between advanced education, particularly ones from pedigreed schools vs. job performance and success. What I do see is more narcissistic and overconfidence from those with the pedigreed backgrounds, some of them carry themselves with this badge.

I have been a fierce advocate of lifelong learning, heck, learning all the time for that matter. With the internet and abundance of freely available information, even courses from fancy Ivy League institutions freely available online, the so-called inequality in learning is gone. Do you and your family need to go in debt and pay what is essentially highway robbery kind of pricing for advanced education? Is that really the difference maker? How is that any different than any other form of conspicuous consumption? If I am sounding like someone who is self justifying my own failure in standardized education, perhaps I am, but I suspect I am not in the minority. There are plenty of people like who cannot pass the rigors of the status quo, do we write those people off at an early age and condemn them as a life failure? Is that really equality? You know my answer.

19. Yes, it is you against the world. There will be all kinds things that "conspire" to put you down, but so what? But even at my darkest moments, there are inspirations I look for to lift myself up. Here is my favorite poem, you might find it a bit cliche, nevertheless, here is what English poet William Ernest Henley wrote while suffering from severe tuberculosis (lead to leg amputations and so on)




Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

20. Learn how to sell. This is perhaps one of the easiest way to get above everyone else. Whether you are a doctor, lawyer, accountant or any other professional, you will notice the ones on top are usually people who can sell. They sell themselves, they sell their ideas, they sell and motivate others to do their bidding (this is scaling). Bottomline, sales people are some of the highest paid out there, and it requires no specialization or education. I know some of you look down upon salespeople, some of that might be the result of a bad experience or encounter. For others, even some of my family members, salespeople are somehow “lower class”. I am a pragmatist, so I will say get over it. All businesses are in the business of sales, period. If you want to succeed, you need to learn how to sell and do it well. I have been asked quite a few times in the comments section of this answer about sales books. When I started out selling nearly 30 years ago it was full of the old school salesbooks espousing the virtures of “Glengarry Glen Ross”, things like always be closing, it is a numbers game and so on. This is one of the biggest reasons I quit my job as a stockbroker. I despised the social engineering, high pressure and ultimately stupid approach of the old school of selling. If cold-calling 300 times a day resulting in maybe one to two prospects isn’t terrible non-scalable yield, I don’ know what is. Calling it a numbers game simply means you are doing the same stupid thing over and over and expecting a different result is just insane!

Sales isn’t magic. There are very few things that works. In this day and age where consumers have so much more access to information, the BS meter is always on. So here are a few things I found that works:

Be competent. Know your stuff, know your product or services that you are trying to sell. Know your competitors, know your customer’s alternatives well. There is no quicker way to lose credibility when you aren’t prepared and exposed to be a know-nothing bullshitter. This is perhaps the biggest reason a lot of salespeople fail. They don’t put in the work in the first place and somehow expect to wing it.

Know the difference between being enthusiastic and pushy. Enthusiasm can be quite infectious, but being pushy simply means you are trying to impose your own interests, your own agenda onto others. No one likes being told, harassed, or tricked into doing anything, even if it might be in their best interests. Think of it this way, would you rather go to a party or a school assembly?

You customers always have options. Even if they don’t at the moment and had no choice but buy from you, the moment they do have a better option they will leave. So never, ever make them feel like they have no choice, instead make sure you are always their best option, but make sure they come to that conclusion themselves.

Service your customer like they are the most important person in the world. Think how you would behave when you are in the same room with the President of the United State. Yeah, treat your customer that way

Make darn sure you actually have something better or different you are selling. It doesn’t always have to be the main and obvious features or benefits. People have assumed that the reason my company is successful is because we have some amazingly fantastic technology, or we have some incredible handsome salespeople, or we have the right connection or relationships, so on and so on. When I tell them it is actually our attitude that sales, they always look puzzled. Imagine you have a life threatening disease, and you have this world class doctor who can cure you, yet this doctor never comes across as a savior or condescending but instead behaves like your servant. How would that make you feel?

Selling is about story telling. I don’t care what culture what country you come from, as human beings, we all share one trait, that is we enjoy stories. Great salespeople and effective leaders know this all too well. We don’t buy products or services, we buy from people. Ultimately we want to be able to relate to one another. There is no better way than to tell stories to reveal the personality of you, your product or services. I am not suggesting you make up some BS story or some canned pitch. It has to be authentic. This is another reason I tell people to read, read a lot. You can’t help but come away with all kinds of stories, anecdotes, “junk knowledge” that you can infuse in your story-telling. You should practice telling stories on random strangers, and you will be surprised to hear and learn all kinds of new stories from others this way. I know some of you are introverts, so this might be a challenge. But learn to open yourself up and be vulnerable, share your experiences and stories. You will be shocked a lot of times people buy from you even if you haven’t pitched anything yet. Again, people buy from people. Don’t be a robot, don’t be a pitching machine. Be human.

21. Don't take yourself too seriously. Make sure you are having fun. The American cliche about working on something you love or having passion is grossly overrated. It is far easier to find something you can fun in. Business can certainly be fun. Often times fun and not taking yourself too seriously can be the key differentiator for your business success. Who wants to do business with a bunch of boring and sour puss?




22. For most people this is the part that is hard to take: you will never get rich working for someone else. You might still be able to join the 1% if you have a highly paid job, but you are still someone else's wage slave. Fair or not, capitalism is about the ownership of capital, the means of production. In a world where long term growth stagnates (Europe, Japan and even America), ownership takes on even more importance because access to capital is constrained and return on capital is low (try to get a small business loan these days). So the only way out for most people is through entrepreneurship. Try and figure this out early in your life. I got lucky because I didn't arrive at this notion twenty years ago through thought and analysis, it was pure drive.

23. I am probably going to offend a lot of people with this one. Yes, I am Chinese, or what might be considered a minority in US. But I never view myself as such. I mean I never considered myself as Chinese, Asian, yellow-skinned and so on. I feel no superiority or inferiority, I am human no different than anyone else. It absolutely helps to be in a country such as US where there is such a mix of race and culture. BUT, the race and culture aspect has been played far too much by the minority groups, including the Chinese. I am not suggesting there isn't racism, nor am I saying there isn't a glass ceiling for some. You can decry all the "unfairness" that is in life or you can ignore it and fight on anyways. I am grateful for the likes of MLK who helped to pave the way for minorities and the disadvantaged, but life is short, you don't want to wallow in your self-pity just because your circumstances. Race, skin color, where you are from are just some of the small bumps in your long struggle in life, so get over it. I have personally experienced what some might considered racism, but I never let it get to me. I simply try harder. You will be surprised that even a racist appreciates someone who doesn't give a fuck and simply out hustles. Effort is infectious!

24. You have to know how badly you want to succeed. Some of the comments I see out there regarding this more or less suggests that I am not the norm and I got to where I am by luck. I will admit that I have been incredibly fortunate, but much of it had to do with the desire to succeed. I went through high school and college years never going to parties, never drank, never touching drugs, never traveled and so on. I simply worked and worked some more. Any spare time was spent learning and reading. This in hindsight is perhaps a tall order for most people, but it laid the foundation for where I am today. You have to be honest with yourself just how badly do you want it? In most Western countries, it isn't that hard or terribly uncomfortable to be average, so the journey to success might not be worth the price for a lot of people. Lastly, it takes a saint to live with someone like me. Some of hours and some of the ups and downs are absolutely brutal on relationships. If you don't have someone who can understand and tolerate it, you are looking at years of lonely struggle with no real prospect of paying off. Some might find my story as inspirational, but it is also a warning. Even with the best of intentions, it can wreck your life too.

Just because you want to succeed badly, or what I call desire, it might not take you very far. I see this on Quora all the time. “I want to be a billionaire when I am 30”, “I want to be such and such in the next five years”, “I want to be able to buy this or that”, “I want to get this job or that job”, “I want to make $$$” And so on. Do not mistake desire and ambition. Most everyone has desires, but few has ambition. It is easy to see a fancy car, a big house or someone with stature and desire to acquire or be that position. This is your reptilian brain doing its work. The work and effort to satisfy those desires might still be quite arduous, but they seldom lead to to long term success. I have experience that for sure. The high you get from accomplishing material success is fleeting, it might lead to an ultimate crash like I did. But ambition is another thing entirely. Ambition will drive you far beyond the trappings of material wealth and success. Wealth will be merely just means to an end for your ambition. Look at people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and so on. Material wealth isn’t what they are after, material wealth is a byproduct of their ambition.

Ultimately even having all the desire and ambition in the world without a practical day to day approach won’t get you far. All those Quora questions of “I want to be $$$$ rich or successful” are what psychologists call high level goals. Psychologically it is comforting to ourselves to daydream about those high level goals, we can all fantasize how wonderful life would be if we reached those goals, there is almost this level of innocence to it. Kids do it all the time, and we find it absolutely charming. But the harsh reality is that fantasizing with high level goals without implementing with a long series of mundane lower level goals will eventually leave you with nothing but “potentials” unfulfilled. We all know those older people talking wistfully about what could have been their life, or what they wanted to pursue but didn’t. I hate to sound harsh, but I really have very little sympathy and time for those people, because they didn’t want to put in the effort to do the real work, or lower level goals that could have led to those higher level goals. So there, I might have burst your bubble a bit, but the good news is if you do the real work, you will have already set yourself apart from the 80–90% out there. If you want so badly to succeed, make a list of all the things and goals you want, then take a long hard look at this list and reduce it down to less than half a dozen, then ask yourself what are the concrete steps you need to make day in and day out for the rest of your life to get there. Don’t be surprised to find out the steps are absolutely boring and repetitive, be brutally honest with yourself. You have a choice to make right here, right now, do you still want to go forward? If not, at least make peace with yourself that there is still a great deal of joy and peace in life to live for, perhaps more average than extraordinary. You will be happier that way.

25. It's OK to be a generalist. In my case, I probably have a case of attention deficit disorder. I could never sit still for long, I get bored and distracted easily. It is very very difficult for me to focus on any one thing. While I am writing this, I am listening to music, got some news feed going, stock tickers and live stock charts going, and two dozen browser tabs open on various things like photography, business news, travel and gadgets. This inability to focus has costed me in some ways but it has also allowed me to pick up on so many seemingly disjointed and unrelated know how and skills.

My parent's generation liked to label people. You are a doctor, lawyer, engineer and so on. When I came to Seattle when I was sixteen, my uncle was still working at Boeing as an engineer. He was someone I looked up to and wanted to model my life after. That thought went out of the window when Boeing did a round of layoff in the early 1990s and my uncle took the early retirement package. He was still in his mid 50s at the time and he has never worked since. I even went so far to try and apply for some engineering oriented colleges and somehow managed to get accepted by Caltech. I think they made a mistake, because in hindsight I really sucked at math by the time I got to college and I didn't at all enjoy any of the engineering classes. I would have failed miserably. Fortunately I was too poor to be able to afford Caltech anyways, I went to University of Washington instead, but even then I didn't finish. Looking back, my work involved in sales, finance, trading, business development, accounting, HR and management. My titles were all over the place. I was a "courtesy clerk", back wall clerk, salesman, stockbroker, financial consultant, investment advisor, hedge fund manager, startup CEO and now a venture capitalist, and maybe something else in the future. If you asked me what is my specialty, I have no idea.

For years my parents just assumed I BS for a living, they didn't want to introduce me to their friends, what do you tell others just exactly what I did for a living anyways? I have only recently gained respectability in their eyes because our office is larger in a nicer building. Truth is, all of my experiences brought me here today. No one should copy me. It would be almost impossible anyways. I suppose it is a recent fad that generalists like me are not acceptable but somehow thought as being a positive attribute. Being a generalist because I tried and failed at so many things is the real reason I am where I am today, but being able to synthesize all the things I learned from different aspect of work and life is the ultimate triumph.

26. Pursue what you love is so overrated. First of all, what you loved to do in your earlier life might have little or nothing to do with your love and interests later in life. If I were to be left to my own devices, I probably would have pursued something in the arts. My parents and my brother are all classical musicians. I grew up listening and loving music, I painted, I spend a lot of time and a small fortune on photography. But most of these pursuits would have easily landed me in the poor house. My burning desire to succeed in business is what will actually allow me to pursue what I love, now that I have the time and resources. But does this mean I hated what I did all these years? Absolutely not. I loved trading, I love being engaged and building business, I love motivating people and see them do amazing things with abilities they didn't think they had. I loved the process of building a business. I absolutely despised the little tasks required to get there though. I don't care for accounting at all, yet I have no qualms spending a ton of time reading financial statements and reports to spot opportunities. I guess what I am trying to say is that one needs to have an open mind and learn to love and enjoy the process of a business, even if you rather pursue your "passion" somewhere else. If you get some success in business, you will have far more resources and time to go after your real love.

27. If you are a young man just starting out in life, this is the advice I got from someone years ago and I still try to live by it today:

Try everything in your twenties, you aren't going to be any good at anything anyways, people have low expectations from you so don't worry about failing or being lousy at what you do. Have fun, try everything!

Try and figure out what you are good at in your thirties.

Maximize what you are good at in your forties.

Since I am still in my forties, I guess I can't really tell you any more!

The advice above is important, especially when you are starting out in life. I talked about having higher level goals in life and doing the mundane work to fulfill the lower level goals that help make the higher level goals possible. Here is the rub though, even if you are telling yourself that doing all the “boring” chores are necessary, and it will be for your own good and so on, few people will have the passion to do that day in and day out. This is why experimentation early on in life is so hugely important. I tell people to be different in business and life for a reason, the world interest originated from Latin “interesse”, or different. You need to be trying out different things early in life to find what really interests you, hopefully you find that one thing that get your juices flowing that you are willing to devote countless hours and sacrifices to become that master some day. This is why I find the conventional education system, especially the Asian system that I grew up in appalling, it manages to kill imagination and curiosity early on. The more promiscuous you are in your interests early on, the better!

28. It really is okay to start later in life. I didn't start the company that transformed my life (in terms of wealth) until I am 36, by age 40 I was homeless and living in my office closet. So by Silicon Valley standards, that is just ancient. You read all about these late teen or young twenty something that is somehow taking over the world all the time these days (UNDER 35 AND CRUSHING IT: Meet the most ambitious young founders in New York who are building the next giant companies)

Guess what? My parents used to guilt me about some prodigy getting into college in their early teens, as if this is somehow going to motivate me and transform into a prodigy. But the truth of the matter is, life is all about how you finish, NOT how you start. I have met several of those prodigies, they end up no different than anyone else. This is why I love the story of Sidney Frank ( The Cocktail Creationist). He didn't get his start until well into his 50s, but the man never gave up. His best days was certainly in his later years. Keep the thought that you will be judged after you expire, not all the days in between your birth and deathbed. So if you didn't get your life figured out until you are at a later age, don't fret. Everybody is different, you might well be a late bloomer.

29. If you are starting at the bottom, regardless of your age, remember this one simple rule: always deliver more than what is expected. I don't care what job, what industry, or just how menial the task is, go above and beyond what is required. If you always do more, or delivering more value to your boss, your employer, your partner, your significant other, there is no way you won't succeed at what you are working on. Keep in mind this doesn't necessarily mean working long hours and working late, working smart matters even more! Success in one small task can lead to success in something much bigger down the road. It is the mental attitude that you are just going to do more, offer more, keep coming up with more that will impress people and make them want to work with you and offer more opportunities to you. I still remember at my first job at Safeway, I knew I was taking on the work load of 2-3 more people without getting paid more. It got me a quick promotion and raise from $3.50 an hour to $5.25 an hour. It taught me that effort does lead to recognition and payoff. Of course, if your employer doesn't recognize this, he/she is an idiot, you should move on.s

30. Please keep your envy in check. Yes, envy is jealousy without the sexual tension, and it is really really stupid. Envy is what gets what seemingly reasonable people into deep trouble, the younger me was an easy prey for this. Envious of someone getting more success (job, money, etc) faster, younger and so on drives people to do stupid irrational things. If you are a trader, you saw someone else with a bigger house, flashier car, so you think you "must" have it too and soon! It leads you to over trade, over leverage and take on unreasonable risks. If you are a businessman, you think your competitor is getting all the attention and press, so you want to "prove" you are more deserving, so you jump up and down and do the "I can do better" deal (Microsoft to Acquire aQuantive, Inc.) So stay away from silly articles like The richest person in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and up It will surely mess up your head. Envy is toxic, it can wreck your wealth and good fortune, not to mention sanity faster than just about anything else in life. I am all for being competitive, but not envy.

31. Be different, even if it means being different for spite. For someone who grew up in a culture where conformity is expected, this is hard. It meant being an outcast, rebellious and being disagreeable a lot of times. But there is a real purpose and benefit by being different. In business, companies are being told to be innovative, differentiated in order to be more appealing to consumers and be better competitors. Unfortunately most people and companies still make the same mistakes over and over again, namely copying others, especially people and companies that society deem "successful". The problem is this, the people and businesses who are already "successful" are good at being themselves, and most likely already have more skills and resources perfecting what made them successful. If you copy what they do, you are merely trying to play a game that is perfected by them! Even if you are good, work hard and so on, you are not likely to beat them at their game. You should play a different game, a game played on your terms, perfected by you! This is why I intentionally look for and hire people who are considered misfits, weirdos, and malcontents. It is awfully hard to be "innovative" when surrounded with a bunch of generic, "boring" people, isn't it?

32. Money doesn't define you. Please learn from my mistakes! When I was this raging asshole with money back in my late 20s, I was foolish enough to think money is my identity. Plenty of people make this same exact mistake. You see them everywhere. They carry themselves based on how much money they have, here is one example Dan Bilzerian (@danbilzerian) • Instagram photos and videos Although I went nowhere near as far as Mr. Bilzerian, I can identify with the attitude. The problem with having your ego tied up with money is that when you fail, like I did, your ego will get crushed along with it too. Not everyone can get up like I did, (and boy was it difficult to get back the first few rounds) then what? It might well ruin you for good. Looking back, I am proudest of the periods of my life when I was down and out, not my douchebag days

33. Learn to say no. Most of us want to be loved, approved of, fit in, popular and so on. Unfortunately this also means saying a lot of yes when you really don't want to for fear of offending others. I am not a baseball fan, but there is this expression in baseball called the "fat pitch". It basically means as a batter you don't swing at every pitch that is coming at you, you patiently wait for the statistically high probability pitch because you only have limited chances at swinging. You need to think life and business the same way. There are too many distractions and low quality encounters, you cannot partake in all of them, otherwise you will be dragged down. Constantly ask yourself if what you are about to spend your time on actually help you advance your cause, if not, why are you doing it? I have trained my sales staff to fire customers, yes, fire customers. If the customer isn't economically viable for us to service, we are doing them a disservice by hanging on. We would certainly not able to run a business in a sustainable manner either. With people it is the same, you want to get ahead, then spend time with quality individuals, do not tolerate mediocrity. If you find yourself the lowest caliber person in the group, that would be fantastic! You can learn from the rest of the group. If the opposite is true, you need to move on. I absolutely despise the Chinese expression 比上不足比下有余, which means when compared to those who are better, you can't measure up, but compare to those who are worse, you are doing just fine. No, you can always do better. Take charge of your time and effort.

34. What if you are just not smart! Don't sweat it! Well, I am not so sure there is a strong correlation between monetary success and intelligence. If anything, there might even be somewhat of inverse correlation! This is not to say the dumber your are the more likely you will succeed. I am not particularly smart, considering the fact I couldn't finish college, it is further proof I am your typical slacker in school. When I was a trader, I noticed a clear pattern. The "smarter" ones, you know the ones with advanced degrees, went to the right Ivy League schools and so on are usually lousy traders. When I was a broker, we laughed at the doctors and engineer types because they are usually terrible investors. The head of my company's engineering is a brilliant fellow, but he is a terrible investor. Again, this might just be all anecdotal, but there might be something to it. A lot of the rich and successful people I met aren't exactly the sharpest tool in the drawer, but why? Over and over again, the "smarter" ones tend to be too logical, which leads to analysis to paralysis, and they miss great opportunities because opportunities don't always present themselves as fully formed and obvious. Smart people also tend to want to pursue an "edge". You will hear a lot of traders and hedge fund types go around and around looking for one. Meanwhile, the dumber ones like me understand the real tangible value isn't always an edge. Persistence and doing the things that just aren't glamorous can pay off big too, but it tend to take time. I used to scoff at the turtle vs. hare story and thought I rather be the hare. Now that I am much older, I realize the secret to enduring success is winning over time.

35. Always be long term greedy! Most people are selfish and greedy, they just don't want to admit it. I have no problem with being greedy. But what I cannot stand is being short term greedy. Coming from China to Seattle, a place that has a relatively sparse population (compared to most places in China) made me realize the vast difference in business mentality. When you do business in China, or when you encounter a typical Chinese businessman, the common scene is right on the surface. The Chinese business or businessman always asks how much business are you going to bring to them, what is the quantity, how fast and so on. They want to gauge the upfront upside for them before they will commit. They usually couldn't care less about the "long" term. This is what I call short term greedy, which leads to businesses that are transaction oriented. To me the reason why is simple. There is a lot of people in China (duh!), customer service and long term value isn't so important, because there is always more coming! Meanwhile, in slow going Seattle, or much of the West for that matter, you don't have the vast pool of people you can dip into. You are forced to value longer term relationships, hoping for more businesses over time. As it turns out, this isn't a bad way to do business at all! Because all businesses need to acquire customers, so there is this cost of actually getting a paying customer which we call customer acquisition cost. It can be in the form of advertising, personal selling and so on. The stereotypical Chinese businesses is very much like a hamster on a wheel, it needs to be acquiring new customers all the time because they are disposing the old ones fast! If you do the opposite, which is take care of the customer with great service and humility, you don't actually need to be spinning your wheels all the time because they come back over and over, thus reducing your overall customer acquisition costs! So is it a wonder Seattle is the home of some of the most customer friendly businesses in the world? Costco, Nordstrom, Starbucks, Amazon, and REI all started here, and they all have one thing in common, great customer service! Being long term greedy means you do the things that might not pay off right away but it will help you build sustainable business and hopefully wealth over time. If you treat your relationships with people with this mentality, you will be far less stressed out (you are not spinning your wheels all the time). Always ask yourself when you engage with people in business and life, am I being short term greedy or long term greedy? Do I want a transaction or do I want a relationship?

36. Money is a tool. When I first arrived in US, I was blown away by the wealth of this great country, I fantasized one day being able to reach middle class status. I saw this ad for the Washington State Lottery, which only had a top prize of $1M at the time, and I thought to myself if I had that amount of money I would be completely set for life! I would have a house, a nice car and never have to work again! This is all before I really had a real job or made any money of course. I suspect most people, even middle class people think along this same logic, only if I had XX amount of money! I can buy this or that! Wrong! As I have suggested earlier in my story, yes money can buy you stuff, and the pleasure that comes with it might be great, but as time goes on, the amount of pleasure diminishes, so you look for more and more expensive items to buy to get that some amount of pleasure as before. I have never done drugs, but I suppose that is pretty much what a drug addict must feel like. Unfortunately, your desire for material goods might run faster than your ability to make money, it certainly happened to me! So eventually I got into trouble. When I was going through all this, my mom asked me just how much was enough, I never gave it much thought then, it seemed no amount of material possessions was enough. It wasn't until years later, after my struggles of building my current business that I finally got it. I didn't need all that much money to build the business (remember, it took us $45,00 to build what is now a $100M business), I didn't need all that much material possessions to feel safe and secure, but why am I still trying to make so much money?!!! The answer is simple, it really isn't about the money, it is about having the tool to do things. I never thought I could be in my position today, a guy with no formal degrees in anything running a software company. But here I am tinkering, wondering about possibilities everyday with my staff, my friends, the startups I have invested in, possibilities of doing this and that. As of this writing, I am working on four companies and nearly 10 different products at the same time. I am having the entrepreneur's high everyday! I don't need a venture capitalist, I am my own venture capitalist! I don't need approval from anyone to see if my idea is sound, we simply brainstorm and start going at it. I am more engaged and having so much more fun today than I have ever been. Sure, I am not an engineer, but it hasn't stopped me from coming up with all kinds of wild and crazy ideas and pursue them. Having the means to pursue all the crazy ideas but more importantly keep having the means is more important than ever. I sincerely believe we live in a fantastic age of technology renaissance, the pleasure I derive from expressing creativity using technology is a much better high than I can get from anything else. I now understand why Richard Branson gets into so many businesses! It is just plain fun!

37. Don't do business with dodgy people. You know who those people are, most of us can feel it in our bones. Due to circumstances, we sometime overlook and override our gut instincts and end up doing business with questionable people. It will unfortunately boomerang and come back to bite you, just like what happened to us. We did business with questionable customers that nearly killed us. Ever since that episode, I am vigilant with people or businesses that I find questionable. When in doubt, get out! Of course, some of those dodgy people will make excuses to continue to fool people. But here is a line I heard from somewhere else: There is no such thing as laps in integrity, you either have it or you don't.

38. Are you a choice maximizer or a choice satisfier? In Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less: Barry Schwartz: 9780060005696: Amazon.com: Books he posited that there are two types of people, choice maximizers and choice satisfiers. The concept is simple. Some of us agonize over decisions on all things in life, then there are people like me, able to make snap decisions and be perfectly happy with our choices. The folks who agonizes over things will spend a great deal of time doing research, slicing and dicing over their decisions to make sure it is the "right" one. Often times, even after the decision is made, they will spend a lot of time second guessing their choices. Needless to say, these people tend to be unhappy, unsatisfied a lot of times. I am not sure if there is a right way or wrong way to be an entrepreneur, but based on my own experiences and watching others, I prefer to stick being a "choice satisfier". Yes, I make bad choices all the time, since I am your snap judgement type. But I view nothing as life or death decisions, and I am perfectly comfortable to be wrong all the time, if not most of the time, the quick decisions allow me to have more "at bats" in life. At bats is a baseball term, it just means you have more chances at trying whatever you are doing. I believe my quantity of experiences and mistakes actually allow me to learn fast, make mistakes fast and get ahead even faster. Needless to say I am far happier as a result since nothing really bothers me. So, are you are choice maximizer or satisfier?

39. Learn how to spot opportunity. This one is actually not all that hard. Life can throw you a wrench sometimes to make you feel miserable. But it does the same to the rest of the world as well! In the past 30 years I have been in US, I have witnessed the crash of 1987, the bear market of 1990-1991, the stealth bear market of 1994 (Orange County bankruptcy), the 1997-1998 Asian/Russian currency crisis, the 2000-2002 dotcom crash, the 2008-2009 Great Recession. Not to mention all the ups and downs in my personal life and the troubles in other people's lives. In retrospect, these were all opportunities! Why? When the whole world is in crisis mode, people and businesses are in turmoil, as humans, we simply want someone, something to step up and turn things around. If you are an entrepreneur, there is no better time to start or invest in your ventures when there is a crash or recession because pretty much everything is cheaper and you will have far fewer competitions! You will be able to attract better talents too! But what if you are simply working as an employee and the company is in crisis mode? Even better. Your boss might be in a jam and panicking, someone needs to step up and doing something to right the ship. Look at sports teams, over and over again we see new stars being made became some veterans got hurt. Think of it this way, the world or the business you work in is having a problem precisely because the incumbents screwed it up! It is the perfect time for you the newbie to shine! As of this writing, it appears we are heading towards another recession/crisis. China's economy is slowing, the stock market there and perhaps the rest of the world is heading towards a bear market. There might be a lot of chaos and confusion ahead, so will be a lot of fear. I view it as a golden opportunity as I have been preparing for just this for the past several years. You should view it as such too. Keep calm and get ready to step up!

40. If you are aiming to get into the 1%, you are aiming too low. A lot of the comments I received from readers both from Quora and Chinese sites seems to give the impression that I got to where I am today because I worked my ass off. That is only partially true. I absolutely did worked like a dog in my early days, but simply working like a dog with minimum pay isn't going to get you far. This is also the same reason the most working class people around the world are stuck making no forward progress. The real reason I am where I am today has a lot to do with my choice of industries I trafficked in. In much of the 1980s and 1990s, Wall Street was enjoying one of the greatest bull markets in history, if you worked on Wall Street, there was money to be made. Unwittingly, I made a simple choice because I read Liar's Poker (Norton Paperback): Michael Lewis: 9780393338690: Amazon.com: Books and got absolutely fascinated and opted to work on Wall Street. By the early 2000s, precisely because I lived in Seattle, one of the biggest technology hubs in the world, I sensed that is where the opportunities are. In hindsight, I got very lucky and got my choices right. So I was at the right place at the right time. But that isn't really my point at all. My point is, at the current time, I believe we are at the golden age for entrepreneurs. There has never been a time one can have so much access to computing power, exponential scalability and the abundance of cheap capital, resources. If you work hard, work as an individual contributor, you can get to the 1%. I did that when I worked in sales, in trading and running a small hedge fund. But ultimately, it didn't scale. Not only that, I didn't really solve other people's problems, I solved my own, which is strictly financial. If you really want to go far beyond just the 1%, you should aim much much higher. Aim to solve problems on a massive scale, because the resources are there for the taking. Unlike the industrial age, you don't need a ton of oil, iron ore, coal and transportation or even an army of workers to get things done. You can now harness the easily available computing power and bandwidth from the likes of Amazon Cloud to solve problems in all aspects of life and make immediate impact.

I will repeat the old cliche in business, if you solve other people's problems, money will come. If you solve massive problems, you can expect massive wealth too. Since most profitable businesses operates between zero to low double digit net profit margins, the realistic assumption is that you are doing fairly well if you can net 10%. So the math is really simple. If you aim to be a millionaire, you have better be working on at least a $10M problem or opportunity. If you want to be a billionaire, then $10B problem! I think most of us are smart enough to spot the $10M problem and engineer some kind of solution for it, it becomes that much harder to solve a $10B problem. This is why venture capitalists fund moonshot ideals and entrepreneurs that are sometimes borderline crazy!

41. I don't know why it took me this long to get to this point, which is be persistent. This isn't a secret. Persistence wins by default. Think about it, you don't have to be good, you just have to be around when everyone else gives up. That is what happened to my company during the "Great Recession". I intuitively know if we persists, we will be fine, or even thrive because our competitors will have thinned out. Think about anything significant you want in life, if you don't make the initiative and persists, would someone simply hand it to you? Even if someone does hand it to you, would you treasure it? I very much doubt it. Persistence does something else too, instead of worry about being judged based on someone's disadvantaged beginnings, you now have control on how you finish. Are we all going to be judged based on how we finish? You don't get medals for how fast you start at a marathon. I really resented all the "child prodigies" when I was a kid (Chinese culture seems to have a perverse affliction on this, just read all the nut job Tiger Mom books Amazon.com: tiger mom). Those early expectations place unrealistic demands and stress on an individual, when in reality pacing and nurturing ones talents is far more important. I have no idea what my talent is, since I exhibited nothing special at an early age, my exasperated parents probably wrote me off because the only attribute that I had was constantly asking why and rebelled. Turns out, the persistent defiance is probably what got me here. It is the same defiance that allowed me to press on when no one believed in me. So yes, persistence = defiance. Of course, how loud or quiet you want to be in being defiant is entirely up to you

42. Beware of lists of "what successful people do" The irony of it all! I see these silly clickbait lists more and more these days. List like: 5 things successful people do in the morning; 10 things successful people never say!; 7 habits of successful people. So on and so on. Please stop and think for a moment, you are NOT them! I am almost certain all those successful people didn't get to where they are by blindly following some do or don't do lists! The biggest irony for all those well-meaning list maker is that they have in effect reinforce the notion of conformity. Conformity is almost always a losers game, success hardly ever comes because you conformed. We all need to find our own way. Don't be intimidated just because you somehow don't fit any of those lists.

43. I wish I was taught statistics at an early age. I believe the education system worldwide is doing a great deal of disservice when they don't teach kids and adults the basics of statistics. It is so much more relevant than say another foreign language or even advanced math, we would all be so much better off if we aren't mislead by things in everyday life if we have a basic understanding of statistics. Perhaps the most important idea out of statistics is this, correlation doesn't equal causation! Here I am dispensing what I thought is true to my so-called success, but it could easily be a mistaken case of correlation and nothing to do with causation! Here are some correlations that are popular today but may have nothing to do with causation:

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs all dropped out of school and became successful billionaires, so I am going to do the same.

The French eat a lot of cheese and drink wine and they are not obese like a lot of Americans, so I am going to drink a lot of wine and indulge in cheese!

A lot of CEOs came out of Ivy League schools, so in order to be successful, I need to have an Ivy League MBA.

A lot of successful startup founders came of Stanford, so if I can get in Stanford, it will increase my odds of success.

Facebook did this and this and they are super successful, if my company copied what Facebook did, we will be successful. Of course, before Facebook there was Google, Microsoft, IBM, Xerox.....

My point is, DO NOT be easily swayed by what appears to be the causes of success, often time it is nothing more than correlation. You need to be engaged in critical thinking and do your own thing. Blindly copying someone who has mastered their own game only means you will always be inferior to the said master. Be a master of your own game.

44. Grades isn't everything. Actually, what I am really trying to say is that you should value what you have learned, how much you have retained more than the grades you are getting. We all know those people in school that don't study most of the time but managed to scramble at the last minute and magically getting As. Well, I wasn't one of those, I didn't really envy those people either. But society in general surely liked them because they are able to do very well at tests. The whole time I was in school, I was far more interested in learning how things worked, this also meant I skipped a lot of things that I didn't find important. Needless to say it didn't help my grades. But years later I still remember all the lessons and steps on things that interested me. I value how knowledge of one aspect lead to another, how basic foundations are laid.

I am not advocating you goof off in school and get lousy grades, I am advocating you devote the time and energy to learn about things you are really interested in, and better yet, gain and understanding how it can lead to body of know-how that is useful and meaningful to you. If it means not getting good grades, so be it. You are only being graded in school, the grades you are getting later is the life you build for yourself. You should value life long learning instead of standardized testing scores.

45. Be generous. Offer more, give more, and do more. I don't think anyone likes stingy people, and I don't mean just the monetary stingy kind. "Letting it rain" is also stupid, it is nothing more than showing off. But the authentic kindness with your time, money and efforts goes a long way. Generosity really means you have no expectations of a return on your efforts. It took me a long time to learn this. I must admit that when I was poor and struggling, it was quite difficult to even think about generosity. But looking back at all the opportunities and breaks I got, I was on the receiving end of the generosity of others. Most of those people I have either lost track or are no longer in contact with, and they certainly had little to no gain from my success, yet I was offered chance after chance. Just the thought of it humbles me. I hear all kinds of sales pitches these days, the most common one in technology startup pitches is this line "we make the world a better place...." Here is my pitch to you and a reminder to myself, be generous, you will make the world a better place for all. It doesn't take much. If anything, you will make the world around you a better place.

46. Know which pool you swim in and choose for yourself. I am obviously not politically correct, some have accused me of not favoring my own "people", others have suggested that I am a Social Darwinist. I like to consider myself an optimist who happens to be highly skeptical. Having gone through enough for my age, I have some observations about people and the environment, namely what I consider the pool we happen to swim in either by choice or circumstance. When I was starting out in the work place, my first few jobs were entry level, manual labor type jobs. The businesses that employed me were mostly "cost-plus" type establishments, with a simple business model. Since they are cost-plus, which means they source goods or materials then apply some basic labor or shelf space then turn around to resell, there is very little value added to the end product. This meant the profit margins are low, and it almost certainly means the few ways to improve margin is to either improve work place efficiency or cut costs. If you are an employee in such a work place (consider just about all factory, service level type jobs), you are constantly being squeezed. I will use Starbucks, which is considered by many a more humane company to work for as an example. A typical Starbucks generates $750,000 to $1M revenue per location. A typical location can staff up to a dozen employees or more (different shifts and so on). This means revenue per employee is less than $100,000. Real estate costs (such as lease), raw material costs (coffee beans, milk, etc) and other inventory can easily be $250,000-$500,000 per year per location. If you take the top line number of $750,000-$1M and subtract all the costs except labor, you will be left with no more than $500,000. Take the no more than $500,000 and divide it by a dozen, you will be left with barely $40,000 per employee. This is a number that includes benefits! Stop and pause for a moment, now put yourself in the shoe of the company. Where are you going to squeeze out more profits from this picture? Do you squeeze suppliers? Or do you squeeze out of your labor cost? The labor cost is by far the biggest component in this equation, so would it surprise you a business like Starbucks tend to draw a hard and stingy line on labor? If you are an employee at such a place, how much upside can you really expect?

If you know your upside in terms of compensation is limited, and you are smart and ambitious, would you really want to work in a place like Starbucks (I mean the stores, not headquarters)? I suspect not. So what kind of people, in terms skills, caliber and so on end up working at service level or factory jobs? You can draw your own conclusions. If you are going to be stuck working with people with limited skills, how much can you learn from your peers to help advance yourself? I am certain by now I have angered or insulted a lot of people with my line of reasoning. This does not mean I look down on entry level jobs, I was there myself. But if you are going to get ahead, use it as a stepping stone.

I am doing this exercise for you so you can understand and be aware of the various businesses and their business models and choose for yourself. If you want to get ahead, you need to look for businesses that can either generate a high level of profits, or have very high value-add. This means they will require employees who are either highly skilled or the business itself is run by very smart and/or innovative managers. If you work in such a business, you can be compensated well for your efforts and you are almost certainly going to learn a great deal. This is why the most successful companies tend to be technology companies, but tech companies do not have a monopoly in being great businesses. What technology and other creative type businesses have in common is that labor costs can be highly flexible, this means the businesses (the smart ones at least) aren't too sensitive about their labor costs, because the revenue and profits they can generate from their creative labor forces is at least 2-3X if not 10-100X. Revenue per employee for successful technology companies tend to be $500,000 or more. Google for example is around $1.2M. My company is even better than Google This is why a startup like Instagram was able to sell itself for $1B when it only had a dozen employees, and in hindsight they sold way too low! In the future, do this mental exercise when you encounter a business and you will be able to quickly figure out whether the business is an elite one or just an also-ran. Find out the total revenue (addressable, not some passthrough ones) and divide it by the total number of employees. The higher the number the more likely the business has defensible value-add, and mostly likely the more flexibility and upside for its employees. If you want to start a business of your own, the high revenue per employee type of businesses are exactly the ones you want to learn from. This is probably the most valuable and simplistic lesson I have learned from studying all kinds of businesses, and it is applicable no matter which part of the world you live in. If you are an investor, this also works. High revenue per employee businesses tend to have high net income and/or cash flow as well, and they tend to have very defensible "moat" as Warren Buffett would like to call it. It shouldn't be a shocker to anyone if you find such a list it will have some familiar names in it, names like Apple, Exxon Mobile, ConocoPhillips, Gilead Science and Everest RE. To simplify, you currently have technology, bioscience, energy and insurance type of businesses dominating the high revenue/employee and high profitability list. My personal goal for my businesses is to have revenue per employee exceed $2M per year. This is a very tall order, and I am using what is commonly considered 2nd or 3rd string players to do the job. So it is a challenge and a worthwhile project for me. How do I get my so-called 2nd or 3rd string personnel and have them far exceed what they thought is possible?

So ask yourself a simple question, am I swimming in a "shallow" pool or do I want to swim in an ocean? If you are stuck in a shallow pool, what capabilities and skills will you need to get out and go for a larger pool and prepare you for the vast ocean? Where can I learn and acquire these capabilities?

47. The most successful people in the world didn't get there because of better education, higher IQ or some magical upbringing, these people have a different mindset. I am not a religious person, I imagine what goes on in my head and others who are successful isn't all that different from a person going through a religious experience, meaning we all take a leap of faith. The difference being that faith rests in ourselves instead of some higher being. You might call this blind faith, but after encountering so many "extraordinary" people in my life that are only extraordinary in retrospect, I cannot help but come to the conclusion that the willingness to fool oneself into doing great things despite humble backgrounds is precisely why humans are so incredible.

48. Choose yourself. Coming from a Chinese upbringing, the explicit message from an early age is clear, conform, obey, follow and respect authorities, get good grades, get to the right college, work for the right/large entity and your life will turn out good. Your family, especially your parents will be proud.

The harsh reality is this: I probably have attention deficit disorder, and a lot of you out there might have the same thing. I cannot sit still for long periods of time, my mind wonders, I pick out flaws, inconsistencies from elders and authorities, my grades weren't that great in school, I have other challenges in life and so on. Well, this is starting to sound like a long list of excuses, but the bottom line is, I wasn't going to be able to fit into the standard mode and be successful in the conventional ways anyways. This leaves a very obvious choices, you either choose yourself or give up and be mediocre. I chose myself because I had no choice. Industrial capitalism by nature want the masses to fit in, to conform. Ask yourself a simple question, do you aspire to be a cog when you grow up? Do you get excited and feel another connection when your interests are shared by millions of other people, say Justin Bieber music? Or do you actually feel more of a connection with another human when you are both fans of a some obscure musician? I wager the latter. There is a pendulum swing in the world today that not only allows, but actually encourages individualism that caters to the obscure. There are platforms of expression and networks that allows connection that make creating and even creating your own job, space, art and what have you possible.

So the choice is clear, you have to choose yourself. Your dreams, your aspirations might not match up to what your parents, spouse or friends want. That’s quite alright. Will they be doing all the heavy lifting and live in your shell for you? Of course not. My independence, my divorce, my own ups and downs is what brought me here today. Yes, it is terribly selfish, but I am living my own life, my path, and finally became comfortable in my own skin, because I picked myself.

49. Know how to position yourself. Those of you who took MBA type classes know a thing or two about product positioning, yet few people think about their own personal situation in the same way. When you are younger, you probably get asked about what you want to be when you grow up. When my son was little, he wanted to be a fireman. When he got older and hung around business people in way too many occasions, he said he wanted to be a corporate lawyer. After getting interested in sports as a teenager, he now want to be a sports agent. I am sure he will change his mind some day. Whatever he chooses to do in life, I will be supportive. That said, I want to engage him at an early age and start thinking about how he wants to position himself, regardless the career path. I believe everyone needs to think through this type of questions about their career, business and personal life as well.

Let’s say you went to school, got a job and worked hard at your job, but have you not noticed that some people in your organization have much bigger titles and compensation even though they aren’t much older than you? What gives? Is it because they went to a better school? They performed some brilliant task that made a huge difference in the business? Maybe, maybe not. Often times, it has nothing to do with any of the above. It has everything to do with how they position themselves. It is a mindset switch. I am the CEO of my company not because I went to the right school, performed some amazing magic trick to change the business. I am the CEO because there really wasn’t anyone else around at the time, I learned and grew into the job (we had, including me three people when I got the title). I positioned myself to be the CEO by default. You don’t always have a chance or choice to start your own business, that doesn’t mean you can’t position yourself to advance the success ladder faster.

Let’s say you are at the lower end of the totem pole at your large company, by switching yourself to a smaller company or upstart, albit not without its risks, you will be able to drastically climb to the upper end of the pole. If you are a dentist, how are you going to stand out in a crowded city with a lot of dentists? You have to find a position that you are the undisputed expert. My company has struggled for years against our competitors, companies with far more resources, connections and experiences. It wasn’t until we changed our positioning, a position that actually doesn’t talk about our products or services, instead, we emphasized our attitudes towards problems solving and responsibilities that we began to gain traction in the market place. These days our customers and prospects no longer compare us against our former competitors, they do business with us not because our products features and benefits, they do so because where we stand as a group of individuals.

Knowing your positioning in your jobs, business, your relationship can set you on a clear path forward. The courage to do something about that knowledge will be the starting point of your future success.

50. As I keep adding more and more to this already very long-winded answer, I have encountered some questions and comments more or less along the lines of: Can you teach me? Can I come work for you and so on.

I am flattered that so many of you would find value in my ramblings, going so far to want to come and learn from me. That said, I am also very disappointed in all those requests. Why? If you have read my answers, you should understand that in order to be successful, you have to first deliver value to whoever you encounter and sell to. Before you can deliver value, you are really in no position to be asking for something of value from others, even if you believe you are flattering them. In my case, I am not going to pretend that I am very busy man, I am not, and it is by design. I view busy people are essentially micro-managers who can’t delegate and trust others. Otherwise they would have more free time. But still, even if I am not busy, I could be spending my time doing whatever my whim calls for as oppose fielding random requests. I am just as lazy and selfish as the next guy, so if you want me to help you, you need to ask yourself, what is going to motivate me to get off my butt?

I know this all sounds condescending, but I am being blunt and honest here. What is going to motivate anyone to do something for others? For money? For vanity? For altruism? If you can’t answer that question regarding whoever you are trying to target or sell to, then you haven’t done your homework. The least you can do is to do some digging and come up with a decent pitch. So instead of can you do this and that for me, you really should be putting a bit effort, tell a compelling story when you have nothing material to offer.

So remember, offer something of value before you ask for anything. Your offer better be compelling or there will always be other more compelling offers in life. Remember my story of camping out at the lobbies of brokerage offices in Seattle before I got my job at Prudential Securities? I made sure I brought coffee and donuts. This went on long enough someone finally broke down and felt sorry for me, this is how I got my first big “break”. Again, offer value, offer more, offer something compelling. Take it easy on the ask part, that can come later when the scale is obviously tipped your way.

51. If you want to get filthy rich, look for challenging environments. Yes, it is quite contradictory to what I have suggested in my earlier writing about looking for an environment that is business friendly. If you are living in a place that is downright hostile to any kind of business, so corrupt to the point of posing physical threat to you, then by all means leave. I have had the great fortune to be living in US for the past 30 plus years, I was never in physical danger and so on. But part of the reason I am where I am is the fact I ended up in an antiquated and not very competitive industry. Most of the venture capitalists I have pitched to simply dismissed me out of hand because the “addressable market” for our product was rather small, only a few hundred million dollars worldwide, not to mention the brutally long sales cycle (up to 2–3 years) and the dull nature of the application. So I couldn’t convinced them how I could scale up quickly, or provide some kind of recurring revenue and/or subscription model (those businesses get higher valuation). Bottom line is, my business sounded terrible and not very profitable, and so I thought as well. But we all missed the point. It is precisely due to the “small” nature of this market place that few if any big competitors were interested in. Even the few players who traffic in the industry are what I considered lower caliber players, they are highly unlikely to have rockstar coders or hustlers. So my competitive bar is set quite low for me by my peers The long sales cycle is enough of a deterrent to most get rich quick type of guys, so again this is additional filter to weed out lesser players.

The reality is, by identifying other aspects of customers pain, and the fact I am forced to be long term greedy (sales cycle necessitate), my customers places a very high degree of trust in my business. For this very reason, they throw other problems on our plate as well, which in turn allows us to dive further into their businesses and build additional solutions, deeper hooks that would rendered it very painful if not impossible to eject us. What you ended up is a sticky and somewhat monopolistic business platform. Yes, we are small, but we are well on our way to do just that in our industry. As a student of business history and success, you too wouldn’t be shocked that most of the greatest successes in business history are companies with monopolistic characteristic and a strong moat.

Getting back to your particular environment, the same can be said about challenging situations. If things are easy, there will be more competition and margins would certainly suffer, not exactly formulas for fabulous wealth. So sometimes it absolutely pays to be in tough situations. As an anecdote, notice how the fastest rising group of super wealthy people on the planet are coming from in the past few decades? Business friendly Western Europe, US and Canada? No. Most come from tough grinds like China, India, Russia and increasingly Africa. So my friend, if you want to get really rich, it might pay to head to Africa and India. The quality of life compared to US is horrible, but you will have a better shot of getting rich.

I should add this little tidbit. My son was diagnosed with a rare form of blood disease in 2009, while I was going through my divorce. He nearly died if not for the efforts of Children's Hospital in Seattle. He spent a month in chemo at the time he is now in remission. I am not exactly an old man yet, so this may be presumptuous at this point. If I get to stay in the 1% and even get to be a billionaire, I have no intentions of going back to my former young and stupid lifestyle again. I'm living in a middle class neighborhood this time around in an apartment smaller than 1500 square foot. I don't have multiple properties or a bunch of fancy cars. My only splurge is travel. I want to live way beneath my means and leave all of my money to Children's Hospital when I die. This doesn't mean I won't do my best to make as much money as I can at the meantime

I ran across http://www.death-clock.org/

The other day. Out of curiosity I answered all the questions, it tells me I should expire at age 92, which puts me at exactly at the half way mark as of today. I have much to be grateful that I made it this far, I can honestly say if I get run over by a bus tomorrow I would go out having a life well lived. It isn't about what I have or have not accomplished, which is what the contentious debate about getting to the 1% is focused on. It is absolutely the wrong focus. The goal is to live life and reach your full potential, whatever your goal may be. Just because you struggle and follow paths like mine to strive for financial success, you will not be guaranteed of success. You will be guaranteed of discovery, I promise you that. If you push yourself you just might find the most interesting dazzling person yet, so go ahead, start digging. If this all sounds a bit narcissistic, so be it. I can't wait what adventures lies ahead for me for the next 46 years.

Postscript:

Thanks to one of the readers, my way too long answer got translated into Chinese and found its way onto various Chinese websites. Sure enough some people who knew me read it, including my own family members. Needless to say it has brought on some awkward acknowledgements from them. Airing ones "dirty laundry" in public with no payoff seems stupid, and it probably is. Which brings on the question as to why I wanted to write this answer in the first place.

Looking back, I wrote it on a lark because I felt there was too much backlash against the so-called 1%, and there were simply too many misconceptions about the "rich". I am not an apologist for the rich by any stretch of the imagination, but like a lot of things in life, there is always another side of the story. My story is just that, one man's perspective, one man's experiences, and certainly one man's bloated opinion of himself. Needless to say, there is a great deal of "survivorship bias" in my story as well. So yeah, I might just be very very lucky! I am not going to downplay that. If you know anything about statistics, you should know how incredibly lucky just to be alive and wasting your brain cells reading my 7th grade level writing! You too should have survivorship bias! But it really wouldn’t be any fun and perhaps even a bit demoralizing to think all “successful” people got to where they are by luck, would it? We all need a bit of motivational rah rah every now and then to get us going. Trust me, I know. Living in Seattle with its 9 months worth of gray and rain every year is enough to make anyone suicidal. So yeah, I feel lucky. Luckier than the bastards living in Iceland or Alaska for example.

Reading the commentary on various Chinese websites gave me a sense that there is a clear difference between Chinese readers and the rest. Most of the commentaries on Quora are positive and supportive, but I can't say the same about the Chinese comments. To say they are somewhat less charitable would be an understatement. It does make me feel sad that as a group that my own race seem to be some of the most negative people out there, and it just reaffirms just how difficult for a lot of people to get started on their own entrepreneurial journeys. I was taken aback that some Chinese commentators more or less consider me a traitor, or I must hate being Chinese. Fact is, being raised Chinese probably gave me some small edge, meaning I am terribly pragmatic and resilient. Do I think there is anything special about being Chinese? The answer is a resounding NO. I have been living in a diverse country for the past 30 years and traveled all over the world, my own observation from working with all kinds of people is that people are all the same. The sooner you understand and come to terms with that, the more open-minded you will be. It will go a long way towards making you a better entrepreneur. If some people think you are a sellout, that is really the least of your worries on your way to success.

Some thought I made up this entire story, I am sure to some it sounds like a bad Hollywood script, unfortunately, it is my life. Others simply want to bash what I did, whether it was trading, selling or doing what I am doing now, most if not all are not exactly conventional routes for Chinese upbringings. Of course there are those who thought I was looking for a way to brag. Sure, I am human, I am vain. But telling the good, bad and the very ugly about myself is one lousy way to accomplish that.

So am I bothered by the negative feedbacks? Not one bit. Not after what I have already gone through in life. I have already been beaten up, kicked on, spit on by life to not care about the haters. You simply can't please everyone. I have learned a long time ago to run the other way from negative people. But some people did ask a fair question as to why am I willing to go through what I go through to get to where I am now, and where is the end?

I can probably sell the business and live comfortably for the rest of my life as of now, but I have tried the so-called "retirement" before. I don't play golf, I don't fish, even travel can take toll on you, and pretty soon it will get boring too. I am at the end of the day a people person. But most importantly, I learned to understand myself better over the years. Just like for the longest time I couldn't understand why mountain climbers risk their lives to summit some of the most dangerous peaks in the world and do it over and over. I asked one and got a very simple answer, because it is there.

Those who know me know that I am not motivated by money, I am more motivated by what is possible. By any stretch of the imagination I have come far based on my limited intelligence, but through luck and persistence, I am here. With even more resources and capabilities than I have ever had, why not try to do more? Why not push oneself further? Why not see what is more inside? Why not explore more of your own limits?

Perhaps what I am doing is also a function of age. When you are younger, you are unsure of things. People around you try to tell you what to do, people of my age or older tell you how the world is like, people have something to sell try to tell you what is cool, how to conform, how to behave. The "authorities", whether it is your family, your boss, or your schoolmaster try to tell you how to fit in. Basically, you live in self doubt when you are young. As you get older, trust me, the twenty-year-old version of me would find someone who is in their middle ages disgustingly old, there is this magic, you get comfortable with yourself. You grow a gut, figuratively or literally You get comfortable in your own skin, and you start not to give a fuck, so to speak, as to what others think. I have had the good fortune to not to give a fuck about what others think for a long time,ever since I was much younger, and I am lucky enough to have survived this long, so it is perhaps instructive that you should actually care about what you think at an earlier age. Learn to like yourself, accept yourself, get comfortable earlier so get you over the doubts and start living already. In a world that expect conformity, the act of actually give a fuck about oneself is rebellious enough. So do just that, respect yourself and make the best of yourself.

Lastly, if you do find my story helpful, good. I merely wanted to convey what is possible in all of us. If you are so inclined, whatever your aspirations are, you owe it to yourself to at least find out what is possible for you.

PPS, since many of you have asked what books to read, or books that I found useful or influenced my thinking, I have decided to compile a short list here. This list will probably get updated from time to time since I am constantly reading new books.

Amazon.com: Robinson Crusoe (Penguin Classics) (9780141439822): Daniel Defoe, John Richetti: Books

This is actually the very first book I have ever read in my life, I read it in Chinese when I was seven. It left an everlasting impression on me to be strong, independent and having the courage to seek out adventures. Come to think of it, I will have to go visit Christmas Island one of these days.

Liar's Poker (Norton Paperback): Michael Lewis: 9780393338690: Amazon.com: Books

This is bordering on the cliche now, I read this book on my second year in college and I knew right away my goal of being an engineer was over. I wanted to go to Wall Street. This all time classic made me a big fan of Michael Lewis and it changed my life.

Market Wizards, Updated: Interviews With Top Traders: Jack D. Schwager: 9781118273050: Amazon.com: Books

I read this book when I was twenty, it was still in its first print at the time. I had very foggy concepts about finance, markets and money at the time but it got me very very fascinated about what traders do. There are several follow-ups books, all very worthwhile to read. The stories of some of the traders foreshadowed the ups and downs I was going to have in my life as a trader as well. Spooky!

How I Made $2, 000, 000 in the Stock Market: Nicolas Darvas: 9781614271697: Amazon.com: Books

I read this book when I got serious about trading, it inspired me to be an independent thinker and ignore all the noise that is Wall Street. All the lessons taught in this book is just as relevant today.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator: Edwin Lefèvre, Roger Lowenstein: 9780471770886: Amazon.com: Books

Jesse Livermore is perhaps the greatest trader ever, but a tragic life nonetheless. This book inspired me to get into the trading business, but the tragedy that is Jesse Livermore also made me quit and pursue my current business.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life: Alice Schroeder: 9780553384611: Amazon.com: Books

This biography of Warren Buffett is a must read for just any aspiring person who wants to get into business or investments. This book deeply influenced my current approach to business as well as investments. I am not sure I would have appreciated the lessons in this book when I was younger though.

The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book on Value Investing. A Book of Practical Counsel (Revised Edition) (Collins Business Essentials): Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig, Warren E. Buffett: 9780060555665: Amazon.com: Books

Not the most entertaining read but the concept of margin of safety is hugely important.

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto): Nassim Nicholas Taleb: 9780812973815: Amazon.com: Books

Consider me a fan of Nassim Taleb, the man is prescient. This book actually saved my current business as it served as a massive warning right ahead of the collapse of 2008-2009, I hunkered down and did everything I could to stay in the game.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto): Nassim Nicholas Taleb: 9780812975215: Amazon.com: Books

A very sobering book that uses a great deal of statistical concepts to teach us about the probabilities in life and business. It drastically changed my view of success and failures. I only wished this book was around I was much younger.

The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business: Clayton M. Christensen: 8601300047348: Amazon.com: Books

I consider this book the bible for all startup guys out there. The concepts laid out in this book taught me to look beyond the obvious and look for ways to compete more effectively.

The 48 Laws of Power: Robert Greene: 8580001039893: Amazon.com: Books

Don't be a victim, learn from past masters on how to play the game in business and life.

Where Good Ideas Come From: Steven Johnson: 9781594485381: Amazon.com: Books

You will learn that good ideas are products of accidents, errors and slow hunches. The key is to open-minded.

Amazon.com: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (9780609809648): Jack Weatherford: Books

An absolutely fascinating read about one the greatest conquerors in history, it is full of lessons how to to be an upstart that can go big.

Amazon.com: The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (9780307961617): Steven Lee Myers: Books

This biography of Putin is full of lessons on survival and the rise of an unlikely startup.

Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing): Tren Griffin: 9780231170987: Amazon.com: Books

Mr. Munger is Warren Buffett's sidekick, and probably the more intellectual of the two. This book is full of lessons on business and investments.

Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life: Alexander V. Pantsov, Steven I. Levine: 9780199392032: Amazon.com: Books

Another story of an unlikely upstart guy who ended up as a giant in history. Full of tales of survival, redemption, and human tragedy. I learned a great deal of modern Chinese history from this book.

Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry: Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff: 9781250060174: Amazon.com: Books

The story of Blackberry is still ongoing, and it is full of what not to do in business.

Amazon.com: The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (9780393329681): Vali Nasr: Books

I had very little knowledge or understanding of the Middle East until I read this book.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future: Ashlee Vance: 9780062301239: Amazon.com: Books

Wow! But wait a minute, so Elon Musk wasn't a prodigy? Yeah, the story of Elon Musk gives all of us mere mortals hope. You too can dream big and do great things.

Amazon.com: Bad Paper: Inside the Secret World of Debt Collectors (9781250076335): Jake Halpern: Books

The underbelly of America.

The Innovators( How a Group of Hackers Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)[INNOVATORS][Hardcover]: WalterIsaacson: Amazon.com: Books

The history of Silicon Valley.

The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals: Frank Partnoy: 9781586488123: Amazon.com: Books

Just about everyone has heard of Charles Ponzi of the Ponzi scheme, but the story of Ivar Kreuger is simply incredible. A great study of human greed.

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China: Evan Osnos: 9780374535278: Amazon.com: Books

Most Westerners still don't get China, this book opened my eyes despite the fact I was from China and frequently visit.

The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author: Richard Dawkins: 9780199291151: Amazon.com: Books

An all time classic, a must read to understand ourselves better.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why: Laurence Gonzales: 9780393326154: Amazon.com: Books

A compelling read about actual survival when in physical danger, some very interesting insights into human behavior.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers: Ben Horowitz: 9780062273208: Amazon.com: Books

I found plenty of similarities when compared to my own experiences of running a startup.

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less: Barry Schwartz: 9780060005696: Amazon.com: Books

This book gave me insight on why and how people make choices, including myself.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds: Charles MacKay: 9781463740511: Amazon.com: Books

The insight on crowd psychology from nearly 150 years ago is just as relevant today.

The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do: Clotaire Rapaille: 9780767920575: Amazon.com: Books

A very fascinating book about different cultures.

Amazon.com: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (9780393317558): Jared M. Diamond: Books

A different way of looking at human history.

Amazon.com: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition (9780143117001): Jared Diamond: Books

If you don't believe in climate change, this book will make you think twice.

Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built: Duncan Clark: 9780062413406: Amazon.com: Books

It is utterly incredible that someone with no technical knowhow succeeds by sheer will and leap of faith, in an incredibly cut-throat and political environment that is China.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas: Warren Berger: 9781620401453: Amazon.com: Books

Never stop asking why

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined: Steven Pinker: 8601300108858: Amazon.com: Books

Just when you are depressed about the world around you, this book will give you context.

#AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur's Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness: Gary Vaynerchuk: 9780062273123: Amazon.com: Books

I highly recommend the audiobook version of this book, I share much of the same views of Mr. Vaynerchuk.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business: Charles Duhigg: 9780812993394: Amazon.com: Books

I consider books like this entertainment, but not without some valid points.

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century: George Friedman: 2015767923057: Amazon.com: Books

Sobering book.

Influence: Science and Practice (5th Edition): Robert B. Cialdini: 9780205609994: Amazon.com: Books

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike: Phil Knight: 9781501135910: Amazon.com: Books

Phil Knight’s amazing story of how he built Nike. Great writing, great story telling

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph: Ryan Holiday: 9781591846352: Amazon.com: Books

Want to build mental toughness? Read this book!

The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity: Steven Strogatz: 9780544105850: Amazon.com: Books

Math is the key to the understanding of so many things in life, this book is easy to read and a great refresher in case you forgot what you learned in school.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance: Angela Duckworth: 9781501111105: Amazon.com: Books

Although I didn’t exactly follow what the book prescribes, but my overall direction and actions fits the bill. Persisting, sacrifices, and being optimistic and hopeful did help get me where I am today. This book attempts to have a “scientific” approach to validate these points, which I find somewhat dubious, but it is a good read nevertheless.

A Little History of Philosophy: Nigel Warburton: 2015300187793: Amazon.com: Books

I took a few philosophy classes in college, totally unnecessary towards whatever major I thought I wanted to pursue at the time, but it did teach me to be a skeptical, independent thinker. This is a great “Cliff Notes” approach of philosophers, easy to read and digest but still makes you think.

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Ellenberg, Jordan (2014) Hardcover: Jordan Ellenberg: Amazon.com: Books

A thoroughly fun book on everyday life and how math get entangled in it, it will shed light on an average person’s silly biases and lack of understanding handicapped by poor math. It will help you make better decisions.

Amazon.com: Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways
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非常长的文章,推荐一读,尤其是原文。

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原文最后推荐的几本书真心不错的!谢谢PP总跟大家分享有意义的东西!

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回复 5楼nightingale2013 的帖子

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为啥感觉象外国鸡汤?

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好文

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原文后续写了50多条附录,呵呵。上周在车行里等修车时把原文看了一遍,忒长了,在手机上看,把我眼睛都看花了。还是觉得写得挺好的,很多处我有共鸣,虽然我既不会做sales,也没能力创业,不过很多事情是有共性通性的,比如作者写的第一条附录: Be mentally tough!
上周把Quora原文链接发给我女儿,让她有时间也读读。一直觉得我女儿缺乏那种坚韧不拔的韧性,mentally tough, mentally strong,是我跟她唠叨的,希望她能听得进去。人这一辈子不知要经历多少挫折多少低谷,当你在最低谷时,只有内心强大的你自己,只有勇敢的你自己,才能扭转局面自救。我一直试图讲这个道理给孩子听,呵呵,不过,一切都只有经历了才真正能体会得到~

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但愿读到Quora原文的朋友,不会仅仅认为这是鸡汤呵
我确实不认为这是鸡汤,因为确有不少共鸣。


我应该把翻译文删了,这样愿意读的朋友会去读原文。就是文章太长了。

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文章太长了,没有坚韧地阅读完。
跳去直接看了LZ的小结,确实,现在的孩子,包括成人,坚韧的人很少了。

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