Assorted Notes

MONDAY, 15 AUGUST 2011

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.

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WEDNESDAY, 3 AUGUST 2011

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.

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TUESDAY, 2 AUGUST 2011

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.

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MONDAY, 25 JULY 2011

The last few days I’ve been thinking about motivation, the “Why?” of which Dennis Becker speaks in 5 Bucks A Day Revisited (the follow-up to his classic how-to-make-money book).

Already on the plane back to Johannesburg I realised that I didn’t have an answer ready. Of course there are things I can mention that occasionally motivate me, but I know what we’re talking about here – a reason that propels you forward.

Perhaps it was because I was sitting against the wall of a house on the Highveld, on a cold July afternoon, but I thought, it’s like I don’t care. I know there are people who are propping me up – especially my most beloved, but how much will I mind if they let go? Will I survive? Sure, for about two years, maximum three.

That should matter, shouldn’t it?

And I am happy. I am loved, and I love. It does matter after all that I am alive …

Am I asking the wrong questions?

SATURDAY, 30 JULY 2011

Hong Kong Airport

I often look for a single tree trunk to hang my skins on, one thought or slogan that will bind everything together.

Maybe there is something like that for me; maybe not.

What I already know is that you fight for things: to stay on your feet; to stay alive; to improve your quality of life and that of your loved ones, and in the end to do more than just survive for as long as possible.

A struggle, therefore, as has been pointed out earlier.

(So, no trunk for the skins, because it’s a struggle? Or, your skins over any branch that can take a skin … And yet all your skins hang in a single enclosure: STRUGGLE.)

MONDAY, 1 AUGUST 2011

It is sometimes as if I am waiting for a Big Idea before I take action. Not an idea of what to do, mind you, but a motto, an idea that I can print out in title case and paste on my kitchen wall; something that will tell me every time I look at it, or on days I forget, exactly what I’m doing.

What am I doing?

PUBLISH WHAT YOU WRITE.

MAKE MONEY.

HELP. CONTRIBUTE.

* * *

Do the ideas above qualify? Kind of, for practical purposes.

The situation can be compared to a crowd waiting for the Great Orator to arrive to stir them into action, so that everyone can march away, fist in the air, ready to do what they already know they should do.

What very few people know, though, is that the Great Orator is nowhere to be found.

Then someone else jumps on stage. He shouts a few instructions and pumps his fist in the air. The crowd responds. The man on the stage again shouts the same instructions. The crowd responds again.

Then people start reading between the lines: The Great Orator isn’t coming.

As the news spreads through the crowd, the man on the stage again shouts, clenched fist in the air. This time the replies are few, and scattered. Again, he shouts, fist in the air. A few more attempts, and the crowd stirs again, as if they realise: If The Great Reason Why They Are There is himself absent, then the guy on the stage is certainly better than nothing.

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THURSDAY, 7 JULY 2011

The last time I was in South Africa, my mother told me my father was afraid that I was making the same mistakes as he did. I found it very interesting. Naturally I agreed with my mother, although my understanding of the issue was quite different.

If writing is the path I should take, the way of life I have to follow, then it can be said that I had lost my way during the last five years (and a few months). It can then be said that I have indeed made the same mistake as my father, by doing what I thought was “right” according to the standards of other people – or maybe my own standards were somewhat compromised, but that’s a story for another piece.

Does that mean the pursuit of profit over the past half-decade in more ways than I care to count has been a waste of time? I think not. Here are the reasons:

Reason one. I have learned how to publish my own writing. This includes everything from domain name registration to HTML and setting up WordPress sites, to preparing manuscripts for print-on-demand services like CreateSpace, CafePress and Lulu. There have also been lessons in marketing and experience with social media. I now feel comfortable introducing myself and exhibiting my work to an audience anywhere in the world.

In short, I learned a lot about things I knew next to nothing about before I started learning about them as part of the process of making money on the internet.

Reason two. A few years ago I wrote about how out of place I felt in the so-called World of Money. I looked at people who had money, and I envied them for the apparent ease with which they moved around in this mysterious world. It was clear that they had mastered the right vocabulary, they knew the right actions to take to make money, and they knew enough other people who possessed similar talents.

In this World of Money, I felt like the flustered, overwhelmed small town child who visits his cousins in the Big City.

Now, more than five years after starting my pursuit of profit and financial well-being, after reading (or at least downloading and sorting) hundreds of e-books on marketing and ways to make money, watching dozens of video tutorials, even serious investigations into the possibilities of online poker and Forex trading, I can say with a substantial degree of confidence that I no longer feel uncomfortable in the World of Money. More than that, I now see that what many of the people who had previously so impressed me with their supposed knowledge and money-making skills actually do every day is to just shut their eyes, throw the dice, and hope for the best.

Reason three. By the end of 2005, my inspiration for producing new material had begun to dry up. There was not much more I could or wanted to say about the many issues I had touched upon in my Personal Agenda project, and in the six months of writing that had followed its completion. Of course there were other topics I could have written about, but there was none that inspired me sufficiently, or about which I had enough confidence to write about.

Looking back, the many failures of the past five years, and the few – but significant – successes, as well as the wide range of subjects on which I have educated myself, and even people whom I have met through online forums and about whom I read, were exactly what I needed as a producer of literature.

Should I therefore have looked the other way in January 2006 when I caught a glimpse of that first of many ads that had wanted to sell me some instant wealth product? I sometimes wish I did. I sometimes wish I didn’t waste so much time on so much research and on so many projects that ultimately rendered absolutely no dividend – except for a cryptic side note that simply said, “This doesn’t work – or I can’t make it work.”

Before January 2006, I used to be confident about my choices. I regretted very few things I had done or did not do. It is now clear that the last five years were a good education: By making mistakes similar to mistakes my father had made thirty or forty years ago, I’ve learned a few valuable lessons.

I’m even tempted to say I’m a better person because of it.

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