As you think … you exist

WEDNESDAY, 8 AUGUST 2018

19:23

I, Brand Smit, am grateful for the hundreds of people who read the pieces I have written.

I, Brand Smit, are grateful that I own 90% of my own time and can use it as I see fit.

I, Brand Smit, are grateful for the opportunity to teach other people what I have learned on the long road to success and financial well-being.

19:58

People should stop saying you have to THINK of a solution, or THINK about what to do. Your task is to optimise your situation. Eat healthy foods that positively affect your body; shower when you need to shower; comb your hair (if you have any) and do what you need to do to feel physically good; do light exercises; drink enough water or tea (or coffee if you prefer); make sure the room is cool and pleasant (or warm enough in winter); get busy with things you need to do, and make sure you get enough downtime in between. The answer, or the solution, will COME to you.

20:27

You think hard about what you’ll leave behind of your existence. Will there be anything worth cherishing, or would it be as if you were never here?

I have in the past been severely bothered to leave proverbial tracks in the sand that other people could see. But there is another way to look at it. There are people in this world who do much harm and injustice during their earthly existence. They don’t leave much behind that can be considered good by any measure. Any accountant who is worth his salt will conclude the final figure is a bold, red negative.

Considering this nasty reality, it suddenly doesn’t sound so bad to leave a ZERO on the final score sheet.

SATURDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 2018

As you think, so you do.

How you think affects the results you produce.

Source: You – when you realise how true it is.

______________________

Go deep for reprogramming

WEDNESDAY, 8 AUGUST 2018

How long was I programmed about money and making money, and about my role and place in the world before I said, “Hold on! What’s going on here?”

The answer: For a long time. At least 25 years, but the same operating procedure continued because I didn’t replace it with another way of thinking about things. Even when I went through a period of intense self-examination, during which I critically considered what I believed in and how I went about doing things, I never went far enough to truly reprogram myself.

I learned how other people made money and tried to take the same or similar actions. But it’s like teaching someone a few Russian phrases and then dropping him in the middle of Siberia expecting him to be an effective spy. He won’t fit in because he’s not from that environment. He wasn’t programmed into, and for, that society. He may succeed in producing sounds which other people will recognise and to which they’ll respond appropriately, but to really succeed in his mission he’d have to receive much more intensive training.

For two decades, I was taught to trust in “God” for guidance in my life. “God” would send my life in a particular direction. “God” knew where “He” needed me. “God” would take care of me; I just had to be patient. Then, one day, I realised that I no longer believed in “God”. Oops, now what? Two decades of programming that the world works in a certain way, that my place in the world is determined in a certain way, and suddenly – nothing. You’re on your own. Good luck.

I have done okay in almost three decades of adult life since that traumatic turn – not great, but there are definitely some positives in my good column. But I will find it difficult to argue with someone who’s of the opinion that I have just been slogging it out the last two and a half decades as well as I could.

Fact is, I can do better, but I would have to go deeper than before, especially with regard to my relationship with money, and how it affects my place and role in the world – or how I think about my role and place in society.

______________________

Did I swallow the red pill, or am I still reasonable?

[The “red pill” and its opposite, the “blue pill” are popular cultural ideas – metaphors that represent the choice between knowledge, freedom, and the brutal truths of reality (red pill), and the safety, happiness, and ignorance of illusion (blue pill).]

MONDAY, 18 JUNE 2018

I understand why people, especially young men, want to migrate across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

I also understand why many European people see mass migration as an attack on their way of living, welfare, language, and culture – and why they are pushing back.

TUESDAY, 17 JULY 2018

(Inspired by the article “Devastation and Denial: Cambodia and the Academic Left”.)

(1)

A particular political group claims something is happening. Just because you are opposed to this group’s politics is not to say that that particular event is not happening.

One example: Conservative, pro-free market, pro-capitalism politicians, especially those in positions of power, took every opportunity during the Cold War (1945-1990) to argue that communism was an evil doctrine. (They also had the habit of ignoring injustices perpetrated by their own side.) In 1975-1979 they spoke of hundreds of thousands of people who had been killed and who were dying of hunger and inhumane treatment at the hands of the radical communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Many of their political opponents on the left ignored them, with tragic consequences. These people had clung to their own ideological positions instead of critically looking at reports about what was going on in Cambodia. One gets the idea that eyewitness reports were inconvenient for them, and instead of doing their own research they decided to reject and even criticise the reports.

(2)

Just because you can point to one case where someone whom you oppose politically was disastrously wrong is not to say they are wrong on other positions they take.

An example: Malcolm Caldwell, a British Marxist, was critical of American imperialism and the foreign policy of other Western powers in the 1960s and 1970s. He was also an energetic supporter of the Khmer Rouge – until he was killed in his hotel room in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, in 1978. The fact that he was wrong about the Khmer Rouge does, however, not mean he was wrong in his criticism of American actions and policies, and those of other Western powers in those decades.

SUNDAY, 22 JULY 2018

00:40

I watched a conversation on TV this morning with a woman who advocated the term “theybies” instead of babies. The idea is to not program the young child with any gender before the child has had an opportunity to choose their own gender. (According to nbcnews.com: “to shield them from gender stereotypes”).

So, I thought: Why stop at gender? It’s just one of many factors that ultimately determines who and what you are and how you think of yourself. Why speak English to the child? Why not expose the child to a dozen languages in equal measure, and give the child a chance to choose their own language? Same with culture. The American parents of a young child should never mention baseball and hot dogs and Independence Day or any other aspect of American culture in those first few years of a child’s development. What if the child wants to be culturally Portuguese, or Russian or Taiwanese? Then those parents would have caused the child irreparable damage programming him/her/X with a culture not of the child’s own choosing. The same goes with socioeconomic elements of their upbringing. How dare the parents expose the child only to middle-class culture? Should the child not be equally exposed to at least also working-class culture and artistic-bohemian? And if the child is primarily exposed to artistic-bohemian culture, how dare those parents? What if the child ultimately realises that he/she/X is petite bourgeois?

11:20

Most citizens of a country are keen to welcome new immigrants with talents and outstanding abilities.

Most citizens of a country are keen to welcome new immigrants with positive characteristics.

Most citizens of a country are keen to welcome new immigrants who are tolerant and open-minded.

Most citizens of a country are keen to welcome new immigrants who will contribute something to their community.

What people do not want is more garbage in the street. (The nation’s own citizens already create enough litter.)

What people do not want is more criminals. (There are already enough criminals among their fellow citizens.)

What people do not want is intolerance. (There is already enough intolerance among their own country folk.)

What people do not want are more gangs of young men angry with people they hold responsible for their own misery. (There are already enough gangs of nihilistic young citizens who destroy communities.)

* * *

Us South African English teachers in Taiwan are like Mexicans, and other Central American people who want to go to the US in search of a better life, and Taiwan is our America. We arrive here with a tourist visa, knowing that we are going to look for work, and if we get a job, that we might settle down here. We also hope for a “green card” (APRC plus personal work permit) that will allow us to live and work here permanently.

______________________

Advice for the 25-year-old foreigner who plans to teach English in Taiwan for the next thirty years

THURSDAY, 12 JULY 2018

You burn up a lot of energy and desire to do things with the type of English teaching we do. For example, for my evening classes I leave at 17:00, and I’m back home at 22:30. The work is not difficult and not physically demanding, but you spend time travelling with a bookbag over your shoulder, pedalling your bicycle, climbing stairs, sweating in the sun, getting soaked in the rain. All of these things either burn energy, or your desire to do other things after you get home, or both.

People who have regular 9-5 jobs also burn up just as much, and even more energy. But – these people with full-time jobs, how much do they contribute to paid holidays when they burn up energy and desire to do other things? How much do they contribute to a pension fund that will keep them alive in twenty or thirty years’ time?

FRIDAY, 13 JULY 2018

The questions that the long-term English teacher in Taiwan should ask him or herself:

“What did I do today to make up for the fact that I do not get paid holidays? What did I do today to make up for the fact that I do not pay into a pension fund?”

(Same applies to anyone who does part-time work with no fringe benefits.)

MONDAY, 16 JULY 2018

You know how there are some people in modern, industrialised societies that simply don’t “make” it? The homeless people sleeping on a park bench or on the sidewalk on a piece of cardboard late in the afternoon or early evening when office workers are on their way home? Who try to rustle up some leftovers from a trash can?

Two things saved me from such a life: 1) I had no appetite for hard liquor and drugs – strong contributing factors for especially young men who end up on the street. 2) I could get a job teaching English in Korea, and then in Taiwan. (Would I really have ended up on the street without the latter option? I would have skated on thin ice, probably for years. Maybe I would never have fallen through, but I definitely would have been on thin ice for years.)

WEDNESDAY, 18 JULY 2018

Energy is the key. Without energy you can’t work. Without energy, you can’t do anything extra when you come home after the work that pays your rent and buys your food. Without energy, you can’t put up any resistance against thoughts or people or incidents or events that undermine your morale.

How do you get energy?

You start by thinking correctly. Then: Get enough sleep, eat the right food, and do regular exercise.

TUESDAY, 20 MARCH 2018

Suppose you are 25 years old, you’ve just arrived in Taiwan, and you are ready to start your career as an English teacher. Other people may see it as just part-time work you do after you graduate from university, before you start your “real life” as an adult, but you see it as a serious occupation – the answer to the question of how you’re going to prepare for your eventual retirement.

The problem is that, the way most foreign teachers do it in Taiwan, it’s a part-time job, with no benefits. You don’t make contributions to a pension fund. You probably won’t get a fixed salary. You don’t get paid holidays, and you won’t receive a bonus at the end of the year. One way you can provide for your retirement is to save money.

How much money do you need to save?

Let’s say NT$75,000 [USD2500] per month is enough for a good retirement (if you had to retire today). You can rent a good home or apartment (if you don’t own the property), afford decent health care, eat well, and take one or two trips per year. Considering that it is estimated that you must save at least 200 times your monthly income before you can retire (if you retire at the age of 60) you need to save approximately NT$15 million [USD500,000].

How long will it take our young adult to save that kind of money, working as an English teacher in a place like Taiwan?

Part-time work means you can only hope for eleven full months of income a year if you take compulsory holidays like Chinese New Year, and even so-called typhoon days into account. As you probably have family in the West you’ll want to visit once a year, you will need to budget at least one month’s savings for that. Those few weeks you go on vacation will also have to be subtracted from the number of months a year you earn money. Let’s say you can save a fixed amount of money for your retirement for ten months each year. Let’s go on and assume that you can put away as much as NT$30,000 a month (which is more than the average office worker earns in a full-time position in Taiwan).

How long will it take you to reach NT$15 million when you save at a rate of NT$300,000 a year?

The answer is a somewhat shocking fifty years. If you invest your savings and get at least 3% per year and never use any of the capital, it will still take you more than thirty years to save enough money.

To spend fifty years teaching English classes week in, week out, month in and month out, is in my opinion … let’s just say a unique challenge. To do it for thirty years would still require extraordinary endurance, a particularly thick skin, and a great deal of luck – to keep your flow of part-time work going month in and month out, year after year.

Is there a better solution?

My advice would be a schedule of 20-25 hours a week, ten months a year. Keep your expenses low. Live a simple life. When traveling, don’t be extravagant. In the three to five extra hours that ordinary salary-earners spend “at work”, you need to learn skills and gain knowledge that you can use to make more money. Any extra money must be kept aside to invest in projects that you will embark on when you have gained enough knowledge and you have sufficient confidence in your skills.

MONDAY, 19 NOVEMBER 2018

What kind of skills and knowledge should you acquire if you wish to make more money?

In Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, T. Harv Eker advises the reader to focus on the following four factors to improve his or her net worth: increase your income, save more money, increase the dividend you earn from your investments, and reduce your living costs by simplifying your lifestyle.

One of the books I read this year (I thought I knew which one but couldn’t find the text) suggested the following areas where you should at least master the basic skills to increase your income and your net worth: You need to learn how to advertise a product and/or service; you need to learn how to effectively manage people who work for you; you need to learn how to invest your money; you need to learn how to sell and do marketing.

And in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams shares his list of skills in which every adult needs to develop basic competency: Public speaking, Psychology, Business writing, Accounting, Design (just the basics), Conversation, Overcoming shyness, Second language, Golf, Proper grammar, Persuasion, Technology (hobby level is sufficient), and Proper voice technique.

Take all this advice into account and you will at least be able to lay the foundation for a good retirement after twenty or thirty years as an English teacher in Taiwan – or after a few decades in any other freelance or part-time job situation.

______________________

Happiness is a requirement

TUESDAY, 29 JUNE 2018

“Happiness is not a reward. It’s a requirement.”

… Insight early on Thursday evening on the way to the subway station, at the end of a thought about exactly when I worked out how important a perception of happiness is for success. My conclusion was that I started thinking that way about ten years ago, but that I didn’t truly realise the seriousness of the matter until a few years ago.

Happiness is, in other words, not a luxury, as I believed for many years, but an essential ingredient in the journey to success. A happy person is a productive person – one who wants to reach for things and take chances. The happy person finds the inspiration to act. The happy person has the energy to take on challenges. The happy person is motivated. The happy person believes in himself and what he can accomplish. The happy person believes in a happy future.

* * *

What if you don’t consider yourself happy at the present moment?

It is crucial that you change this perception. Force yourself to smile more (scientifically proven to affect your mind – see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow); change things in your immediate environment to remove resistance to a perception of happiness; identify things that affect your senses negatively – what you taste, what you look at, what you feel on your skin, what you smell, what you hear, and change what you can.

A perception that you’re happy is to a large extent something you can create. You can indeed manipulate yourself to feel happier, and there is scientific proof it doesn’t even matter that you know you are trying to manipulate yourself.

Considering how important a perception of happiness is for what you do and how you see your chances of success, even your ability to identify opportunities, the importance of trying harder to feel happy cannot be overstated.

* * *

Last thought: Your happiness must be a tough bastard, not a fragile child. Happiness must be your hard shell, not your delicate heart that can be shaken at any moment.

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