My whole adult life I’ve been thinking of myself as a young man – after all, I don’t know what it’s like to be old. But then one day you’re confronted with the realisation that there are other young men as much as twenty years younger than you.
“Twenty years!” you cry out. “Twenty years?!”
And to top it all of you have to remind yourself that you can learn something from these youngsters any day of the week – that a guy of 20 or 25 can also sit on a rock for an hour or so and then rise with a piece of wisdom or good advice ready to share with the nearest bystander.
At the end of the day it’s just vanity, and pathological insecurity about your own value that makes you want to hold on to time, that makes you panic when you think of time slipping through your fingers day after day – like it does through everyone’s fingers.
“You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at.” WH Auden (1907-1973)
* * *
Self-confidence and enthusiasm are my greatest assets.
Self-confidence and enthusiasm are my biggest enemy.
MONDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER 2011
For weeks I’ll think I can – and will – do something.
Then, suddenly, I hit a brick wall.
Back to the pieces of paper. Back to the lists … And the recognition of the fact that, not for the first time, I got caught up in excessive self-confidence, and too much enthusiasm.
* * *
First you ask:
What can I do to make money?
After learning a thing or two about making money, you ask …
What need, problem or interest do people have where I can deliver a product or a solution?
There is, of course, a third question:
Once you’ve come up with a product for which there is a market, how do you bring it to the attention of enough of the right people?
If you cannot answer this third question, it won’t help you much if you had a hungry market ready to buy every little thing you can produce. If they don’t know your product exists, you won’t make a red cent.
The RT Mart is now selling a “UK Design” bicycle for NT$ 2,074 [US$70]. I’ve been saying for months that I’ll wait until my bike has completely disintegrated before buying a new one. A few points on this topic:
1. If that is my position, I should have started looking around for a new bike three months ago. One of the inner tubes had a puncture, both front and back tires were worn out, the brakes had stopped working properly, and the bike creaked and moaned as only a piece of metal can that should have come to rest in a junkyard ten years ago. What I did, of course, was to fix everything.
2. A bicycle rarely stops working like a computer or a computer monitor. A computer works fine one day, then the next day it’s nothing but ones and zeroes and lights flashing and screens freezing. Then you take it to the computer store, where the technician informs you that you might just as well buy a new computer. Same with a computer monitor: first some flickering, then poof. A bicycle, on the other hand, breaks. Then you identify the problem (usually fairly obvious), and you either fix it yourself or you pay someone to do it for you. Then it’s good for another few weeks. If you wait until a bicycle has completely exhausted its natural life, you may have to wait a long time. (For the record, my previous bicycle had indeed achieved that status. It was duly replaced with the current bike which was about twenty years older than the previous one.)
3. At the RT Mart there are also bicycles for NT$3,500 and as high as NT$5,000 – and then you’d have to leave the bicycle section at the supermarket for a proper bike shop where you can expect to pay between five and ten times as much for bikes that are between ten and twenty times better quality. Nevertheless, why not just go for the NT$4,000 bike rather than the NT$2,074 “UK Design”? Because, as I see it, all the supermarket bicycles are equally fragile. A cable will inevitably snap within a few months anyways. The seat will probably fall off within six months. The frame will probably buckle, the brakes will stop working, and the gears will slide graciously from slow to fast and back again for only about two weeks before it gets stuck in tenth gear. So, whether it’s NT$2,074 or NT$4,250, it’s not NT$25,000 or NT$49,500.
4. It would be better to retire my current granny-style bicycle now. That way I’ll know I’d be able to air up the tires any time in the future, when circumstances require, get on it and again ride like the wind – if the wind is blowing strong enough that day.
That’s it, then. I’m buying a new bike before the end of the month.
And at NT$2,074 I can even afford to reward the old Black Peril for good service with a new seat before giving her some space in the back room.
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Update: It actually took me another nine months before I forked out NT$2,500 for an exact copy of my old bike, but at least brand new.
During my recent visit to South Africa, I discovered (or rediscovered) two guides that can teach me a lot about making money: My own mother, and my friend Gerald G.
Both earn full-time incomes, and they even contribute to other people’s incomes, by marketing their own ideas and projects.
I could probably organise both their businesses more efficiently, because, as I’ve discovered, the process is sometimes chaotic, they don’t always know whether they can really do what they say they can do, and their administration sometimes leaves much to be desired.
But, they make money.
Every month.
MONDAY, 8 AUGUST 2011
Two reasons why I got up every morning, years ago in the blackest days of teaching English, and did what I had to do:
1. I didn’t want to get into trouble. I had entered into agreements with schools and/or businesses to perform a certain task. If I had failed to pitch up for work, I would have had to explain my absence.
2. I knew if I did pitch up and did the work to which I had agreed, I received money – a specific amount on a pre-arranged day and time – that I could use in a variety of pleasant ways.
Motivation is sometimes a problem for me. I admit it. It will be irresponsible not to acknowledge this. It would be foolish not to consider it as something I should pay attention to on a daily basis.
I have always thought if you are pursuing financial independence, it doesn’t matter if your clothes are shabby, if you ride around on an old, creaking bicycle, or if you live or work in a slightly dilapidated building in a low-income neighbourhood.
Eventually, it also dawned on me: It does matter.
If, on the other hand, you produce literature – or if you insist on applying the label to yourself, if you are a “writer” – and you are simply looking for a place to work in silence, you wear clothes to cover your nakedness (mainly because of the weather or for the sake of other people), and your bicycle brings you wherever you want to be or should be, it truly doesn’t matter how shabby your clothes are, how much your bicycle creaks, or how dilapidated the building is where you live or work.
But allow me to repeat my original point: If you are pursuing financial success, these things matter. It affects how you think about what you do each day, it affects your mind, and it affects your motivation.
