Thoughts on Life (22)

01/24/24

On Starting a Business...
When starting a business, it's crucial to prioritize creating and delivering value initially, rather than solely focusing on earning money or profit. If you prioritize profit too early and neglect serving your customers, you are destined to fail. Selecting trustworthy individuals for your business is paramount, particularly when money is involved. People's behavior can change when finances are at stake, so it's essential to choose wisely based on logic and experience, rather than blind trust in beliefs.

The Real Price of Things...
The real price of things is not money but time. While money can be created almost infinitely, time is a very limited resource. Once used, it will never come back. Many people don't notice this and spend their whole day complaining about money when, in fact, they are losing something more valuable than money-time. Life is all we have, and life is made up of time. That's why time is the most important and valuable thing we possess; without it, we wouldn't be here. So, use your time wisely before it's too late, and always ask yourself if the thing you're going to spend your time on is worth it. Successful and great people are those who are skillful and productive in using their resources, especially their most important and valuable resource, which is time.

On Dealing with Difficult People...
The best way to deal with difficult people is by not dealing with them, by avoiding them. People will be people, and things will be things. I've realized from my past experiences that, no matter how much we want to try and change people, they wouldn't do it. Change must first arise within them before it actually happens, and for that task, only life is the one I think is capable of doing. So, since then, I stopped teaching and trying to change people and just let life do the teaching. For I myself am not taught by anyone else but life itself. Since life, for me, is the best teacher of all.

Taking Things Seriously...
The fastest way to go insane is by taking everything seriously. Things happen all around us every now and then, and if we pay attention to all of them and take them all seriously, we will surely be overloaded with all the negativities and problems around us that can cause mental and emotional exhaustion, thus making us go insane. As Rumi, the poet, said, 'The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore,' and I think that is very true, especially since we can only pay attention to one thing at a time; that's just the way us humans are designed. So, we must take advantage of it and not let it take advantage of us.

On Freedom...
After the freedom of choice, the next most important freedom to acquire is financial freedom. As the saying goes, modern slaves are not in chains but in debt, and I think this is true. If you don't control your finances, your finances will control you. So, if you don't want to be forced to work till you die, you must strive to be financially free as early as you can. Even if you have the freedom to choose, without financial freedom, you'll still be forced to work just to earn a living, thus restricting your freedom to none. This is why many, if not all, those aspiring to become successful say that the main reason they are working towards success is to have the freedom to do what they want in life after attaining financial freedom and not needing to rely on work just to support themselves financially. I guess.

On Smart/Hard Work...
To achieve massive results, smart work alone is not enough, and hard work alone is not enough either; both must be combined, always putting smart work first (thinking) before doing the hard work (doing). If you do the hard work first before the smart work, the risk of making very bad mistakes and wasting lots of resources becomes higher—it's like doing before thinking. So, always choose to think before doing, smart work before hard work. The reason for this is that you can do hard work forever without actually getting any results, like a horse running in a circle without going anywhere. No matter how much effort the horse gives to running, it won't go anywhere. While on smart work alone, you might get results, but the absence of hard work stops you from achieving the best result you can have. Without hard work, the comfort of smart work might ruin you, thinking you have it all already and that you don't need to do any hard work anymore might soon stifle you.