Author: Brand Smit

WEDNESDAY, 21 FEBRUARY 2018

14:37

I know how to make money … in one sentence: Place on several markets hundreds, even thousands of products specially made for you by other people.

Note: If you try to manufacture hundreds or thousands of products yourself to save money, you’ll never be as successful as you would be if you pay other people to execute your instructions with you perhaps putting the cherry on the cake.

18:31

The aim should be to produce the largest amount of products in as little time as possible, without compromising quality or value for the consumer.

What it comes down to for me is simple: A small, skilled team of freelance workers.

SUNDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2018

A thought caught me offside today: “You have to tend to your business.”

No matter what you do for money, you have to pay attention to your business. You should do this if you teach English classes (preparation, checking homework, taking care of your mental and physical health), if you sell teaching material online (you need to look at reviews, answer queries, get clients or potential customers on your email list), if you trade in foreign currency (training, tracking the markets) or if you sell physical products on AliExpress or Amazon (again, you need to check reviews, answer queries, track orders, research new products, delete some products and add new ones). You should also do that if you produce your own literature and hope that more than a dozen people download or purchase your books.

For a few hours I was worried because I know I don’t have a good record with tending to your business.

Then I realised: If tending to your business is something mystical that you’ll be lucky to get right no matter how hard you try, then I’m indeed in trouble. But if tending to your business is something that can be systematised, I’ll be okay. I know how to take action. And if it’s not on someone else’s orders, in my own time, in my own workplace, I can keep it up week in and week out.

In other words, no reason for panic or worry.

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THURSDAY, 4 JANUARY 2018

The book I’m currently reading – Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, and the few I finished recently – Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Scott Adams’s How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, and Mark Douglas’s Trading In the Zone – presuppose two things, and expect of you to accept these two things if you want to lead a better life:

1) People have the ability to create an environment where certain (positive) results will be more probable, and

2) people are not only programmable animals, you can program yourself to abandon certain ways of thinking, to replace certain habits with better habits, and to replace certain beliefs with other beliefs that will enable you to achieve better results, and just maybe end up leading a happier and more productive life.

TUESDAY, 23 JANUARY 2018

When I write, translate, or edit a piece, I’m in my comfort zone. When I have to read it one last time and publish it, I’m uncomfortable, and I want to postpone this final step.

When I do research for a product, I’m in my comfort zone. When I have to produce the product, I’m still in my comfort zone. When I have to take the product to the market to sell it, I’m not in my comfort zone.

When I had to research affiliate marketing many years ago, I was in my comfort zone. When I had to write product reviews and beckon people closer to read my reviews, I was not in my comfort zone.

When I have to learn about currency trading, I’m in my comfort zone. When I need to enter live trades and monitor them, I’m not in my comfort zone.

I think it’s pretty accurate to say that there is limited money in my comfort zone, and that there is no restriction on the amount of money that can end up in my bank account if I can manage to venture outside my comfort zone.

* * *

As I was jotting down the above-mentioned thoughts, I remembered a piece I wrote in 2007 entitled “Expanding your comfort zone” (a reminder of my tendency to want to lecture other people while occasionally failing to do the right thing myself):

“What you need, is to EXPAND your comfort zone. Start doing things differently. Take new actions, even if they are strange at the beginning, and even though you stare back at your comfort zone like a child staring back at his mother on the first day of school.

But as you take these first steps, imagine becoming comfortable taking them. As you talk to new people, or do new things, or start running with new ideas, imagine these actions becoming PART of your comfort zone. Imagine a day when all those wolves that now roam outside your cosy circle run beside you like protectors, like part of your inner circle.

Isn’t that the more natural thing to do?”

* * *

One of the ideas in the Harv Eker book that I like is that getting rich is not just about making a lot of money. It is primarily about becoming the person you need to be in character, personality and outlook on life. He believes the fastest way to get rich and stay rich is to improve yourself: “The idea is to grow yourself into a ‘successful’ person.”

TUESDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2018

21:54

I crave my comfort zone. That’s why I easily sneak back to where I’m comfortable. I quietly ignore what I have to do outside of my comfort zone.

23:09

What I’m trying to say is: The way I work is still inadequate. From time to time, I’ll do things outside my comfort zone, but instead of broadening this area with repeat actions, I quietly sneak back to the old boundaries of my comfort zone.

What I need is a system where you repeatedly take actions that are initially uncomfortable, for at least a few weeks, until the limits of your comfort zone have actually been moved. (It’s as if there is an agent inside my head that would say, “He wants to move the boundaries of his comfort zone again. If everyone stays calm and work together, it’ll be over within a week or two. Don’t kick up too much fuss if he wants to do something strange. Say: ‘Oh, yeah, that’s great, let’s do it!’ or something. As I say, everything will be back to normal soon.”)

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FRIDAY, 29 DECEMBER 2017

What does it mean to “make” money? Do you bake it like a cake? Do you cook it? Do you throw a bunch of ingredients together and call it “money”? The phrase is misleading. No wonder so many people struggle to make a living!

First of all, what is money? Money gives you the ability to get the things you need or want.

To earn a living, most people are happy to accept a position at an institution or a company, and then to earn a fixed salary for decades. Sometimes this salary is sufficient; sometimes not. If it is not enough, people think very hard about how to make more money. If they go through times when they’re not in the employ of an institution or a company, they think about it even harder. Failure is often the order of the day.

Here the value kicks in of seeing something you’re struggling with in a different light. Think about how you can create value and how you can provide it to the people who need or want it, and who are willing to pay for it. Don’t think of “making money” – think about creating value. Think about providing a valuable service. I believe most of us can come up with more ways of providing value than we can come up with vague ways of making money. To give value to others is also something that comes naturally to many people.

Of course, if you already provide value but you don’t deliver enough of it, or you don’t do it on a regular enough basis, you won’t earn enough money from it to get what you need or would like to have. Many people also find themselves in situations where they provide something that can be provided by dozens or even hundreds of other people, maybe even at a lower price.

Another way to obtain money is to master some game well enough to win more than you lose. People who hustle on the stock market play a game. They themselves may differ from this view, but at the end of the day it’s only a little less or a little more complex than Pacman, or Bubbles or any other game you play on your phone. Some people will argue that no money is involved in such games. Think of poker. Every year, millions of dollars are pushed across poker tables. Same with other card games like Blackjack, and other casino games like Roulette. These activities are all entertaining, and yet untold amounts of money exchange hands. In a similar vein, just because there’s a lot of money involved in the buying and selling of shares doesn’t make it less of a game. The same can be said of the foreign exchange market.

Ask yourself if it’s easy for you to make money. Now ask yourself whether you have mastered at least one game well enough to win more than you lose, or to play it well enough to record a new high score or reach a new level every now and then. I count myself among the masses that have always found it hard to make money. But I can think of many board, card, and electronic games that I have mastered quite well over the years. I’ve also tried my hand at speculating on a few markets. I can confirm that the idea of losing money is terrifying, but the actions you need to take to succeed are not much more complicated than succeeding at Super Mario, for example – maybe even easier, as any person who has ever played Super Mario until the final mushroom can testify.

My advice for myself and for other people who hope to improve their financial affairs is to be honest about the amount of value you provide and to how many people you provide this value, and if necessary, to make changes, or to change to a whole new market. And if you don’t see yourself in the value business or you simply want to widen your options, I suggest you familiarise yourself with a “game” that you might not find much more complicated than a good round of chess.

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WEDNESDAY, 27 DECEMBER 2017

I received a number of blueprints from my parents: specific primary language but also awareness of the value of a particular secondary language, specific culture, specific moral values, specific religion, and specific ideas and expectations about money and the process of making money as an adult.

I have confronted the language (Afrikaans), and accepted it as good enough for my needs. I also accepted that the secondary language (English) had considerable value – as confirmed and modelled by my parents, and also mastered this language.

I have confronted the specific culture (Afrikaans/South African culture) and accepted it as good enough for my needs – everyone needs “culture” as part of their identity and as part of the way they fit into the broad community.

The particular moral values I confronted, and accepted most of them as fair and noble.

Finally, I also confronted the particular religion, and to a large extent found that it lacked credibility. With time, the “energy” that the specific religious worldview and frame of reference had had in my brain got exhausted (since it wasn’t being regularly refreshed and fortified), and I replaced it with an alternative worldview and an alternative frame of reference.

The specific relationship with money, ideas about how adult life works, and what my expectations should be when my turn arrived to start earning money as an adult to sustain myself and possibly other people … were more difficult to confront. These things didn’t have a name like a nationality with accompanying symbolism. Poverty and wealth were universal. Good people struggled all over the world to keep their heads above water. Ideas about money and how adult life works and what my expectations should be were not specific in the same way that the religion with which I grew up was specific and visibly different from what people believed and did in, for example, India, or Saudi Arabia. It was also easier to interpret failures as the result of my particular personality, even my specific ambitions – for example, I preferred spending time on my own projects to selling my time to someone else, who I feared would oblige me to do boring, simplistic tasks.

I rebelled against the ideas I grew up with. “Money isn’t everything,” I said. “I’ll show them,” I said. “They will not get the best of me.” [12/10/18: I thought I had rebelled against the ideas I grew up with, but I only rebelled against certain aspects. The expectation of failure had been fully internalised.]

I had visions of becoming a hermit, and of breaking away from the conventional way of doing things.

Unfortunately, I had to eat, pay rent, and buy clothes. And seeing that I was earning a living in Northeast Asia in an attempt to get away from the bad world where things didn’t work out for my parents, and where I fully expected things to not work out for me (meaning, the suburban middle class in South Africa), I also had to buy a plane ticket every year or two to visit my family.

Eventually I met a woman whom I liked very much and who I wanted as my life partner. I was deeply aware of the difference that more money would have made in our lives. But how? More knowledge was surely the answer, I believed. Learn how to make money. Be bold. Imagine you can be a good salesman. Learn how to trade on the financial markets. If I could only learn the right lessons about making money, I reckoned, get good advice on what to do when, and have money to spend on knowledge and opportunities and resources, it was just a matter of time.

It’s been more than twenty years since I graduated from university. I’ve become clever about many topics related to making money. I know how to publish and market books; how to develop and sell websites; how to write reviews about products, publish them on the web, and make money when people buy the product; and how to earn money trading foreign currencies. But how do I make most of my income? By selling my time to local language centres and helping people improve their English. Seeing that most of my students are adults and that most of the classes have a social value that is not unpleasant, I can say that it’s not a bad way to make money.

There are, however, a few rhetorical questions I can’t ignore: Is this method of earning an income sustainable? Do I save enough money with this job to last me into old age? If I lose my ability to do this job in an accident, will I receive compensation?

Has my current financial position something to do with the ideas I received when I was younger? Does it have anything to do with the expectations I developed of how adult life works, especially when it comes to earning a living?

SATURDAY, 20 OCTOBER 2018

It sounds like I blame my parents for me not doing better financially, and I don’t like it. But it would be dishonest to claim that I’m not laying some blame at their doorstep – they did program me after all with a faulty operating system, or with programming that only worked for some people in the decades when my parents had to make a living as young adults.

It is, however, and has been, my responsibility to confront any faulty programming I had received as a young “robot”. And I cannot, and do not, blame my parents for my failure to realise, a long time ago, what the problem was, nor do I blame them for my failure to remedy the situation in a more timely manner.

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