Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

Wealth Is a Skill

I started my next start-up by accident.  I had gone to an art supply store to pick up supplies for my latest hobby of oil painting.  The previous night I had stumbled onto a YouTube impersonation of Bob Ross, where the painter calmly paints a highly inappropriate image.  After some digging I found that Bob Ross was a real person with a wonderful set of oil painting DVDs.  Because I had given up doing start-ups, I figured I would do something else constructive.  After spending far too much on paint supplies, my girlfriend convinced me to go with her to the bookstore.  I have never enjoyed going to bookstores because they remind me of the terrible time I had at the university.  Perhaps it was my restlessness over the most recent failure that caused me to look around.  While browsing the comic section, I happened across the business section.  There, a book leapt out at me.  That book’s title was The One-Minute Millionaire.  I stopped, picked up the book, and started flipping through the pages.  I have developed a bad habit of only reading one side of a book while I flip pages and usually only read the pages on the left.  This was likely because the first books I read growing up were Chinese, and they open in the opposite way from English books; the front of a Western book is the back of a Chinese book, so in Western terms, Chinese read from back to front.  What shocked me as I was skimming through the book was that the pages on the left seemed to be connected.  The contents of first and third pages matched.  I then discovered that what seemed to be a single book was actually two; one side was dedicated to engineers and the other dedicated to artistic people.  This floored me because I had never seen a book like it.  So, I resolved to finish the book as quickly as humanly possible.  I am a slow reader, averaging about 30 pages an hour, so I knew it would take far too long to get through it by reading.  I decided to go home and find a copy of the audiobook online.  I started listening to this book while I was painting and discovered that it was just what I needed to answer my questions.  The book was a "how-to guide" on how to reach my goal of becoming a millionaire.

I was able to finish listening to the book the very same day.  I felt electrified.  The book was very clear on how to reach my goal in five easy steps. 

Step 1: Why do you need the money?  If the why is big enough, the how doesn't matter. 

Step 2: Find a mentor.  It would be unwise to climb Mount Everest without a guide who has done it before. 

Step 3: Find a team.  Find people who will complement and fill in the gaps in your own ability.  You can't win a hockey game with a team of goalies.  

Step 4: Brainstorm ideas until you land on a few that the team can execute. 

Step 5: Execute one, and if that idea fails, keep trying.

For step 1, the why was simple.  I was tired of working in the rat race; I wanted independence; I wanted to create new inventions and travel the world. So I went to step 2: Find a mentor.  The only person I knew who could be my guide was Mr. PrintMan.  It just so happened that the following day I would be meeting him to talk about an iOS application he wanted to create.  The next day, I met him at a coffee shop.  We talked casually for a while, and while we were lining up I felt it was the right time to ask him for a mentorship.  I was astonished to find that his condition for accepting me as an apprentice was for me to read The One-Minute Millionaire.  When I told him that I had just finished the night before, he reminded me that there are no accidents in life.