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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