Category Business

Don’t ever give up

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The discovery

 Sometimes in life, we discover something that not only sparks our interest but also has the potential to impact the world significantly. Whether it is a great business idea that could make a lot of money or a scientific breakthrough that could change many people’s lives, we feel a sense of excitement and curiosity when we stumble upon such discoveries.

My experience

 I had a similar experience when I was in high school. I discovered eBay back then, an online marketplace where people could buy and sell almost anything. I was fascinated by the idea of e-commerce and how it could connect buyers and sellers from different parts of the world.

One day, I discovered I could buy video games wholesale on eBay and sell them back on eBay individually at a profit. It was a brilliant opportunity to make extra money and have fun simultaneously. I did some research and calculated the costs and benefits of this venture. I was confident that I could make it work.

I told my mom about it, hoping that she would support me. However, she disagreed with me making so much money at a young age. She said I should focus on my studies and not waste my time. She also said I was too young to understand the complexities and challenges of running a business.

I was disappointed and hurt by her reaction. I tried to explain to her that this was not just a hobby but a potential career path for me. I showed her the evidence and the numbers that proved my idea was feasible and profitable. But she would not listen to me. She said she knew what was best for me and that I should trust her judgment.

I gave up on the business idea and stopped doing it, looking back at it now. I regret that decision. What would have happened if I had pursued my passion and followed my intuition? Maybe I would have been successful and happy. Perhaps I would have learned valuable skills and experiences that would have helped me in the future. Perhaps I would have made a difference in the world of e-commerce.

Lesson learned

 The point is never to let anyone stop you, whether it is family, friends, or strangers. I know it is hard to decide what advice to take and what advice to dismiss. But when you have that spark or brilliant idea, you must pursue it no matter what.

Solution 

It is hard to believe in yourself when your idea is just in the beginning stages, and you are still determining whether you will succeed or fail. But you have to remember that every great discovery or invention started with a simple idea. And every successful person faced obstacles and doubts along the way.

The key is to be persistent and resilient. To keep learning and improving. To seek feedback and support from others who share your vision or have done something similar before. To overcome the challenges and celebrate the achievements.

You never know when you might discover something that could change your life or the world for the better. So don’t let anyone or anything stop you from pursuing your dreams. You have the power to make them come true.

How to come up with a successful business idea

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Coming up with a business can be challenging for most people. Some people take a lifetime to come up with a business idea. Other people use the first idea that comes their way.

The first thing to realize about coming up with a business idea is that it should be based on something other than just making a lot of money.

When I was younger, I started businesses based on the income possibilities, and they failed every time. Business ideas should be based on passion and what you enjoy doing. If you are not enjoying your work, you will burn out and fail before becoming successful.

You can also get into a lot of financial trouble. Most businesses like restaurants and brick stores take a lot of capital to get started. If the company fails, most of the money is lost.

The best way to start a business is to list your passions and find a way to make money with them. For example, if you enjoy kayaking, you could create a company that teaches people how to kayak or takes them on kayaking adventures.

One statistic about business success rate is that 50% of businesses fail in the first five years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So you should do something you enjoy for five years. Even if it fails, you will have great memories and fun times to look back at.

Many people have said at the end of their life that they wished they enjoyed life more. There have been very few people who said they would have chased making money more.

Gambling is a drug

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When making a lot of money from my websites, I got addicted to gambling. Gambling is like a drug but more addictive. You get a high when you hit the jackpot or bonus on the slots, which is what I was playing.

I was so addicted at one point that I would dream about playing slot machines. I would drive to the casino in the middle of the night when the money came into the bank account; I would go. I even drove in winter storms and blizzards.

The addiction was powerful after a few years; I would go with 10 and 20 dollars. The casino was an hour’s drive.

All because the casino promised something that was missing in my life, which was fun. They don’t advertise to win big money. They advertise to come and have fun.

After it stopped being fun, I was addicted. I would even gamble with rent money. It took years to overcome my addiction. I realized that I would never win. The slot machines are designed to look like you will win a million dollars, but nobody ever does.

The casino is made to look like it creates winners but it creates horrible addicts who lose all their life savings. The best way to win is not to play. No formula or combination will let you win every time it is all random.

It is a roll of the dice. Nobody ever beats the odds. The machines give you a false sense of control, but when you lose, there is no restart button. Gambling is not a way of making money it is a way of losing precious time and energy pressing the same few buttons repeatedly.

The biggest life lesson I learned

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The biggest life lesson I learned

Sometime after high school, my friend told me I could spend all the money I wanted because I would make it back when I was older. It sounded odd, but I believed it and took it to heart.

That was a huge mistake. Here I am at 36 with nothing to show for all my work. I started working when I was 16, so I made at least $400,000 during that time. I spent my money on books I never read, memberships I never used, and clothes I never wore.

Looking back, If I had been wiser with my money, I would have been way better off financially and personally today. I should not have listened to my friend and invested my money. I would have had more leisure time at this age and more freedom to go and buy what I wanted at this age.

I didn’t care much for money; I thought it was something you get and spend. I never realized the power of investing money and how much it can make your life by having more money to spend in the long run.

When you are young big decisions like this, impact your future significantly, and when you are young, you are slow to think about the consequences.

What you should do when you are young is save your money and invest in a well-thought, well-researched business opportunity or, better yet, real estate property which is the safest investment a young person can make. I also wish I had sought out the advice of a financial advisor and listened to his advice.

I met someone that was 50. They had saved all their money since they were ten. They owned a 20-apartment complex and were financially secure and safe for life. Saving and investing for the long term is the correct answer to what you should do with your money when you are young.

How to make a million dollars guaranteed

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Follow your passion

You will never have a million dollars unless you follow your passion. I met a young adult who was about 18 years old. I asked him what does he want to do with his life? He said he wanted to play golf. However, his father wants him to go into the family plumbing business. 

I told him he would never have a million dollars going into his family business. Sure, he might come into a substantial amount of money, but eventually, he would burn out, realize he doesn’t enjoy what he is going, quit and lose everything.

It’s hard

Since we are all unique, there that something that we enjoy doing more than anything else. It might be playing basketball or writing or whatever. That special talent is going to make you a million, nothing else.

 It’s hard because we might feel the pressure of our peers to follow the status quo. To do what everyone else is doing. But only some people are following their passion. If we do what everyone else is doing, we will get the results everyone else is getting—very few people because finally independent or wealthy.

Talent

There is no particular industry or job that will get you there. It’s hard to figure out what to do when you are young. A successful pizza maker said to me once when I told him I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living. He said to start with not doing what I don’t like. It is a simple philosophy, but it worked.

Warren Buffett said he met many people at the end of their life who said they would have followed their passion more when they were young. However, he met very few people who wished they had chased money more.

Chasing the money 

If you chase the money and don’t burn out before you get to the million dollars, you will spend it on things that make you fulfilled and happy, and before you know it, the money will be gone. The only solution is to double down on your passion. Even if you do not make a million, you will still be happy at the end of the day. The greatest wealth is health.

What happened when I increased my earnings to $15,000 a month

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The beginning 

It was 2014, and I just turned 27. I worked for an insurance company making about $45,000 as a temporary worker. In my spare time, I would work on website ideas and try to get them programmed by programmers in India.

The company

 Then I came across a database of phone numbers online and decided to make a phone book website. It took two months to create. After three months, I got many website visitors a day, and it grew fast.

I was amazed

The website made money even when I wasn’t there, and lots of it. It required very little maintenance except for the occasional person asking me to remove their information. I thought it set me up financially for life.

Silly decisions begun

I quit my regular job without two weeks’ notice. I finally moved out of my parent’s house and got an apartment as big as my parent’s house. I was a successful entrepreneur, after all.

 I had an incredible time buying things I didn’t need from Amazon. I was taking trips all over the country. I even stayed in new york city at a $ 700-a-night hotel in the famous times square. I was surprised when nobody spoke English at the hotel bar.

The crash

My website crashed and got hacked. It was unexpected, event none of my previous websites got hacked. I did know what to do. IT WAS TOO LATE when I finally found a way to fix it. Google algorithms have pinged me. I was losing website traffic quickly and the earnings even quicker. Although I tried for months, I could not recover the website.

Some things I learned from it.

  1. Refrain from expecting the money to keep coming in. I wish I had saved and invested some of the money that I was making.
  2. Everyone was surprised, so every idea that I had for improving the website was a good one for family and friends.
  3. Before you quit your job to pursue a venture, ensure it has an immaculate success rate and has been operational for at least two years.
  4. Technology changes, and it changes fast. You are a winner one day and a loser the next.

The conclusion

It was a good experience. I learned a lot, and the money allowed me to do many different things; however, I wish to be more careful with my decisions and created a financial cushion before I quit my job without possibly returning.

My Job as a Tech Temp: Lessons Learned and Insights Gained

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It started when I was twelve years old. My parents bought me my first computer. I became instantly hooked. I spent hours surfing the web, playing video games, and making websites.

The people around me noticed that I was good at computers. By age sixteen, I was making house calls and doing general troubleshooting.
It landed me a job in a pawn shop where I was fixing computers and making eBay auctions.

When I turned twenty, I went to a career institute for Information technology, otherwise known as I.T. It took a year to complete. My teachers’ little knowledge about their teaching subjects surprised me, but this was 2007, and computers were still new. I graduated, did my internship, got A+ certified, and was on my way to my first job through a temp agency. I remember applying to about 100 jobs before I got a call for an interview.

My first temporary job, otherwise known as a contractor project, as my recruiter put it. I was with a Fortune 500 company. I was excited; however, it turned out to be me and another contractor from the temp agency sitting in a conference room for three weeks watching computers install Windows 7.

I spent the first five years of my career. Getting calls from temp agencies for various projects. The longer my career progressed, the more calls came. The projects commonly included installing windows and hooking up computers at people’s desks. It was an easy job, and I was building my resume, creating contacts and references.

Then after about five years, I would do installation projects with troubleshooting which commonly included software installation issues and peripherals. Then on a 6-month project, the manager approached me and said if you do a good job, I will give you a permanent job then it hit me.
I was not enjoying this I.T. desktop support job and did not want to do it for the rest of my life. Around that time, I planned to go into business for myself. So I decided to continue these projects and stop when the time was right.

Being a “temp” or a contractor for these Fortune 500, even 50 companies, means you are a second-tier citizen. You get all the crappy work and little benefits as payment. Temps can’t go to the human resources department and, as a result, get mistreated and even insulted by full-time employees.

After about nine years, I got a semi-full-time desktop support technician position. I say semi because I was working for a different company as a full-time employee at a client’s location, meaning the client could ask us not to return to the company the next day for any reason. It would force our company to reassign us.

I was not too fond of it. From the lack of documentation of troubleshooting steps to unresolvable problems and customers’ frustration, we, the technicians, were the problem. Lack of support from management and the locks on the software prevented us from doing simple things like running updates.

I tried a different company, but it was the same scenario. I realized then I was in a job I hated. I never met anybody who enjoyed troubleshooting computers in a corporate environment. Sure, they said they liked it, but if you talked to them, They said they were doing it for the money.

Right around the fourteen-year mark, I started having some health issues. I decided to leave the information technology field and pursue other endeavors like this blog :-). So my advice is to avoid getting into I.T. Sure, I could have tried getting a better position and made more money, but that meant even more dead ends and computer problems with no solutions. Which management did not understand.

I made around $60,000 thousand. When I got out in 2020, it was the most miserable I have ever been that year. Looking back, I shouldn’t have stayed in it for that long, and it was nothing that I thought would have been in school—too many headaches for too little pay.

Owning a business versus working for a company

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Do you want to work a job or start a business? This is a challenging question that many people face today. There are a lot of variables that come with answering this question. No one answer says one is better than the other it all depends on you.

Money

They say that business owners make more money, but that is not necessarily true. If you have a job for ten years and make $100,000 a year, that is a million dollars in ten years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 20% of new businesses fail during their first year, less than 50% survive past the first five years, and about 65% fail by the tenth year.

Most businesses take years to profit, and you invest your money into it. Which you might run out of before you turn in a profit. At a job, you can simply ask your boss for overtime or transfer to a higher-paying company. By running a business, you have an opportunity of the business generating money. Even when you are not there, and lots of it.

Why

Successful entrepreneurs don’t start businesses to make a lot of money. They form a company to solve a problem or to create a change in the world.

When I ran a business that ultimately failed. I enjoyed every minute of it. However, the market shifted, and I lost the company. When I worked as a computer technician, I had job security as a tradesman. I knew I could transfer my skills to another company. However, I didn’t enjoy it as much. There is a risk of both financial and huge time sacrifices. In the end, it should come down to what you want more.

Time

In some businesses, you can reach the point where you don’t have to be there. The business will generate revenue for you. With a job, it would be easier to do if you save and invest all your money for an extended period and put in a lot of overtime. With a business, it could be shorter.

However, and life experience, it is better to find a job you enjoy doing, and you should use that as your determining factor. Not money or the time you will spend. If you can find something you enjoy. Even if it will take a lot of time, go for it.

Otherwise, if you don’t want to change the world and solve a problem, then stick with the job avenue. Let me know in the comments which is better, running a business or having a job.

Sometimes giving up is the best decision for you

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Today I decided not to chase money. It is a massive deal for me. I used to want to be rich so severely. I got to the point where I forgot what life is really about. Honestly, I was obsessed with it.


I thought money would buy freedom; I wasn’t after material wealth. I wanted a few material objects. I wanted the freedom of doing and traveling anywhere on my time. Today I realized I already have the freedom I like because it is an internal feeling, not an external one.


Sure, social status comes with having a lot of money, but it draws fake people towards you who are only after your money. They will disappear after the money dries up. What kind of people are they? Is it worth sacrificing so much time over them?


I went to the park and did a deep meditation about why I wanted to be rich, and I had a memory come back to me. When I was young, around the age of 12, my father said to me. If you don’t have money, you’re a nobody”. I was young, and I decided it was a true statement.


So for a long time, I was not only pursuing money to be somebody. Deep down inside, I wanted the approval of my father. Sure, money can buy a nice vacation, but do you need a nice break? Or is that social pressure? A trip to the park is delightful.


Today I chose to enjoy life and not dedicate much time to making and chasing money. I would rather spend time enjoying life instead of working all the time. I might not have absolute control over my time and whereabouts, but it is a sacrifice worth sacrificing.

How to overcome any life obstacle easily and effortlessly

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Have you ever faced an impossible obstacle and then overcame it to realize it wasn’t impossible? If you think about it, every life challenge is like that.

In life, from buying a car to getting your first job. It’s impossible till it becomes possible and easy.
What if I told you every challenge In life is like this?

For example, tying a shoe at one point was impossible. So the best mind technique is to make an impossible challenge into an everyday one. For example, making a million dollars a day seems like an impossible challenge.

What if we didn’t make it a big deal? Instead, we looked at it the same way we looked at it as a small everyday problem.

Our minds would be more relaxed, creative, and solution-oriented, and we would find a solution to the impossible challenge of making a million dollars a day. It is all perspective, my friends. Let me know what is your impossible challenge.