Hello everyone !
First of all, I'd like to thank TFLF staff for approving my account so fast. I'd like to begin my participation here by introducing myself
I'm from Poland and 28 years old. I've read MJ's book The Millionnaire Fastlane and boy, was it quite an eye-opener for me ! I wish I had read that book (and had known about it) when I was 5-10 years younger...
I began my adult life by going to a university to study history, which is (and has always been, since my childhood) one of my passions. Besides, I was never good in maths or the hard sciences - and my teachers never explained them sufficiently to me. By contrast, I was an excellent History student and graduated with top grades... and useless degrees that didn't help me at all find a job. Once I graduated, it was very hard to find ANY job, even the most meagerly paid one. So I had to work as a telemarketer, a door-to-door salesman (and later as a store employee) for telecomm providers, and concurrently as a waiter. By the way, I was hardly a good salesman. For most of this time, I was only paid commissions on sales, and later, at the Orange (telecomm company) store, I was on the minimum wage. So I had to live with my parents. And the daily commute to/from work was 1h30min long - one way. So in December, I filed my notice and started looking for a better paying job elsewhere - in Cracow, the capital of a different region. Thank goodness that, in those intervening years, I had been learning French, because without that crucial skill, I would've never been able to find a better job.
In January 2015, more than 2 years ago, I was hired by a multinational corporation which had shipped many jobs to here in Poland, and so I moved out of my parents' home and relocated to Cracow. Last year, I got promoted and got a pay rise, but that's way below my expectations.
'Cause now I want to get out of the corporate goulag. Working at a corporation, overtime, making someone else rich, is NOT what I want in life. And waiting to get rich until I'm 65-70 (assuming I'm even alive by then) is also NOT what I want in life. Investing in the stock market, commodities, T-bonds, IRAs, etc. will not get me rich, either, for reasons MJ DeMarco has already explained in his book (which should be required reading, BTW).
I even have a specific business idea that I want to implement, though I recognize that executing it will require time, effort, and more learning. And I want to do it in China (bc it's a huge and still largely untapped market, at least for the kind of products I want to sell), so my learning curve will be very steep.
Additionally, I will have to follow the CENTS rules, and CENTS begins with Control, so I will have to own my store, have a diverse clientele, and not be depended on any one sales or advertising platform. And if I want to sell in China, I guess I'll have to be good friends with the local CPC boss
I'm not sure if I should divulge here what exactly my business idea is, but I will say that it involves a specific material product (for consumers) for which the market is already heavily occupied by pro players in Continental Europe, Australia, and the US (dunno about Canada and the UK), but not in China, where this product is still largely unknown (though there's a huge clientele waiting to be targeted with it).
There are two complicating factors there, though. First of all, I love France and all things French (hence my nickname), and I'd like to live there. Secondly, right now, I'm preparing documents necessary to study business creation and management in France... and one major, offered by one French graduate school, interests me in particular : "Franco-Chinese International Management"... where courses include, among other things, the Chinese language, business laws, how to operate a business in China, how to negotiate with the Chinese, and a 6-months internship at a Chinese company. And I really need to learn as much as possible about doing business in the Middle Kingdom. 'Cause whatever I do, there's always a huge, untapped market there. 1.4 bn people (20% of the world's population!) with all sorts of problems, needs, and wants that I can solve/satisfy.
My three biggest takeaways from MJ's book are that:
* Time, not money, is our most precious resource. It needs to be used very wisely.
* One must follow the market's needs/wants, not our passions or obsessions, when choosing what product/service to pitch. The world doesn't give a damn about our passions.
* We are never going to get rich from the Slowlane (jobs, stock markets, IRAs, T-bonds, etc.). For a while I thought T-bonds were an exception to this rule... before reading a bit and finding out that investors are rapidly DIVESTING from the T-bond market now. It's subject to the same ups and downs as the stock market.
First of all, I'd like to thank TFLF staff for approving my account so fast. I'd like to begin my participation here by introducing myself
I'm from Poland and 28 years old. I've read MJ's book The Millionnaire Fastlane and boy, was it quite an eye-opener for me ! I wish I had read that book (and had known about it) when I was 5-10 years younger...
I began my adult life by going to a university to study history, which is (and has always been, since my childhood) one of my passions. Besides, I was never good in maths or the hard sciences - and my teachers never explained them sufficiently to me. By contrast, I was an excellent History student and graduated with top grades... and useless degrees that didn't help me at all find a job. Once I graduated, it was very hard to find ANY job, even the most meagerly paid one. So I had to work as a telemarketer, a door-to-door salesman (and later as a store employee) for telecomm providers, and concurrently as a waiter. By the way, I was hardly a good salesman. For most of this time, I was only paid commissions on sales, and later, at the Orange (telecomm company) store, I was on the minimum wage. So I had to live with my parents. And the daily commute to/from work was 1h30min long - one way. So in December, I filed my notice and started looking for a better paying job elsewhere - in Cracow, the capital of a different region. Thank goodness that, in those intervening years, I had been learning French, because without that crucial skill, I would've never been able to find a better job.
In January 2015, more than 2 years ago, I was hired by a multinational corporation which had shipped many jobs to here in Poland, and so I moved out of my parents' home and relocated to Cracow. Last year, I got promoted and got a pay rise, but that's way below my expectations.
'Cause now I want to get out of the corporate goulag. Working at a corporation, overtime, making someone else rich, is NOT what I want in life. And waiting to get rich until I'm 65-70 (assuming I'm even alive by then) is also NOT what I want in life. Investing in the stock market, commodities, T-bonds, IRAs, etc. will not get me rich, either, for reasons MJ DeMarco has already explained in his book (which should be required reading, BTW).
I even have a specific business idea that I want to implement, though I recognize that executing it will require time, effort, and more learning. And I want to do it in China (bc it's a huge and still largely untapped market, at least for the kind of products I want to sell), so my learning curve will be very steep.
Additionally, I will have to follow the CENTS rules, and CENTS begins with Control, so I will have to own my store, have a diverse clientele, and not be depended on any one sales or advertising platform. And if I want to sell in China, I guess I'll have to be good friends with the local CPC boss
I'm not sure if I should divulge here what exactly my business idea is, but I will say that it involves a specific material product (for consumers) for which the market is already heavily occupied by pro players in Continental Europe, Australia, and the US (dunno about Canada and the UK), but not in China, where this product is still largely unknown (though there's a huge clientele waiting to be targeted with it).
There are two complicating factors there, though. First of all, I love France and all things French (hence my nickname), and I'd like to live there. Secondly, right now, I'm preparing documents necessary to study business creation and management in France... and one major, offered by one French graduate school, interests me in particular : "Franco-Chinese International Management"... where courses include, among other things, the Chinese language, business laws, how to operate a business in China, how to negotiate with the Chinese, and a 6-months internship at a Chinese company. And I really need to learn as much as possible about doing business in the Middle Kingdom. 'Cause whatever I do, there's always a huge, untapped market there. 1.4 bn people (20% of the world's population!) with all sorts of problems, needs, and wants that I can solve/satisfy.
My three biggest takeaways from MJ's book are that:
* Time, not money, is our most precious resource. It needs to be used very wisely.
* One must follow the market's needs/wants, not our passions or obsessions, when choosing what product/service to pitch. The world doesn't give a damn about our passions.
* We are never going to get rich from the Slowlane (jobs, stock markets, IRAs, T-bonds, etc.). For a while I thought T-bonds were an exception to this rule... before reading a bit and finding out that investors are rapidly DIVESTING from the T-bond market now. It's subject to the same ups and downs as the stock market.
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