The tortoise and the hare…

[biophase]

Today I wanted to buy another massage gun that I got from Amazon in 2020. I wanted the same brand and model and when I searched for it, the brand was no longer available on Amazon. I kind of expected this because it was a weird China brand.

This coupled with a Facebook post about a company that I’ve followed for 7 years shutting down prompted me to make this post.

There have been many times in the past 10 years where someone I knew or a company that I followed achieved major milestones.

I remember back in 2013 someone I knew got over a millions dollars in seed money at a valuation of several million. I remember being a little jealous as with my limited business knowledge, I thought he was instantly worth a few million dollars. His company went bankrupt 5 years ago.

I also remember seeing another person go from zero to six-seven figures a month in e-commerce within 6 months and wondering if I was doing something wrong. This one crashed and burned as algorithms changed and ads became unprofitable.

This latest business was a guy who was scaling so fast with Facebook ads, doing $30m a year, buying huge warehouses in 2018. Now with a single cryptic FB post, his company is no longer in operation.

Sometimes I think, I may not be growing at 50% a year but I’m still here chugging along after 13 years.

Many of my successful friends have been running the same business for 5-10 years. We may not be reaching for the moon, but we are consistently slogging up a mountain.

I know this post may not fit the fast lane model, but it’s a pretty damn good speed lane. But I want to let some of you know that you aren’t being left behind as long as you are consistent and stay true. It’s ok to let the rocket ships pass you, many will fall back to earth.

Personally this fits my personality, I’m a low risk, slow ROI type of person. But I keep chugging along. It’s been 17 years for me in e-commerce and 25 in real estate.

I’ve also seen people make incredible amounts in crypto. I made the mistake of dabbling in crypto the past few years. Part of it was FOMO and part was to diversify. Even I’m not immune to shiny new objects.

But I’ve now learned that I’m good at certain things and I can finish a race doing what I know. I’ve caught many hares that blew past me at the start.

 

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[Subsonic]

Today I wanted to buy another massage gun that I got from Amazon in 2020. I wanted the same brand and model and when I searched for it, the brand was no longer available on Amazon. I kind of expected this because it was a weird China brand.

This coupled with a Facebook post about a company that I’ve followed for 7 years shutting down prompted me to make this post.

There have been many times in the past 10 years where someone I knew or a company that I followed achieved major milestones.

I remember back in 2013 someone I knew got over a millions dollars in seed money at a valuation of several million. I remember being a little jealous as with my limited business knowledge, I thought he was instantly worth a few million dollars. His company went bankrupt 5 years ago.

I also remember seeing another person go from zero to six-seven figures a month in e-commerce within 6 months and wondering if I was doing something wrong. This one crashed and burned as algorithms changed and ads became unprofitable.

This latest business was a guy who was scaling so fast with Facebook ads, doing $30m a year, buying huge warehouses in 2018. Now with a single cryptic FB post, his company is no longer in operation.

Sometimes I think, I may not be growing at 50% a year but I’m still here chugging along after 13 years.

Many of my successful friends have been running the same business for 5-10 years. We may not be reaching for the moon, but we are consistently slogging up a mountain.

I know this post may not fit the fast lane model, but it’s a pretty damn good speed lane. But I want to let some of you know that you aren’t being left behind as long as you are consistent and stay true. It’s ok to let the rocket ships pass you, many will fall back to earth.

Personally this fits my personality, I’m a low risk, slow ROI type of person. But I keep chugging along. It’s been 17 years for me in e-commerce and 25 in real estate.

I’ve also seen people make incredible amounts in crypto. I made the mistake of dabbling in crypto the past few years. Part of it was FOMO and part was to diversify. Even I’m not immune to shiny new objects.

But I’ve now learned that I’m good and certain things and I can finish a race doing what I know. I’ve caught many hares that blew past me at the start.

But at what point does it become slowlane. I could become a lawyer, live frugally and start investing in rental properties at age 30. However at the point I'd be wealthy at 50 or older.
I'd rather go with a more volatile way of life, as long as the EV is higher than the safe bet.

If I have the choice between
-a 100% chance to make 100k and the attempt takes 1 year
-a 1% chance to make 10 Million and the attempt takes 5 Years

I will always choose the second one. Why? Because the math leads to a expected outcome of 200k a year if I played the game long enough.

The even cover thing is, that it's not just pure probability but almost pure skill. There are people out there who have built and sold tens of companies valued at 8 figures or more.

If they can do it there is no reason why I shouldn't be able to also do so with enough effort, since business does not require good genes or some other exclusive thing.

 

[Johnny boy]

Reminds me of this song.

View: https://youtu.be/ii6u1wSAu90



I'll be around forever 'cause my skills is tip-top
To any amateur niggas that wanna get rocked
Just remember what I told you when your shit flop
In five years you gon' be on Love & Hip-Hop

- J.Cole

Everywhere I look I see 120 lb teenagers popping off and making 50k, 100, a million, all from some crypto pump, some quick hustle. It seems like I'm moving so slow. I'm expecting to open up my phone and see a story about a 4 month old who made 8 trillion this year.

But they're dorks and have learned nothing.

Then I never hear from them again.

And every year I double. Doubled two years ago. Doubled last year. Doubling this year.

I assume my double isn't the same as your 50% even, so it's not the same, but it's the same feeling, just constantly building. Growing deep roots and thinking in longer time horizons. Just staying in my lane.

But I want to let some of you know that you aren’t being left behind as long as you are consistent and stay true. It’s ok to let the rocket ships pass you, many will fall back to earth.

Gold. I think about this all the time.

Everyone is too impatient and discounts the value of constant daily 1% improvement.

I want to be around in 10 years more than I desire the instant success this year.

 

[biophase]

But at what point does it become slowlane. I could become a lawyer, live frugally and start investing in rental properties at age 30. However at the point I'd be wealthy at 50 or older.
I'd rather go with a more volatile way of life, as long as the EV is higher than the safe bet.

If I have the choice between
-a 100% chance to make 100k and the attempt takes 1 year
-a 1% chance to make 10 Million and the attempt takes 5 Years

I would not take the 1% chance at $10m per 5 years. You have a 4% chance of making $10m in 20 years or being broke. I’m not risking my time with those odds.

The problem is that you only have so many 5 year blocks in your life. If we ran this for 20 year time periods. You’d have $10m 4% of the time and I’d have $2m 100% of the time.

Be we know that these are two extremes. The realistic range is somewhere in the middle.

 

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[Avantem]

If I have the choice between
-a 100% chance to make 100k and the attempt takes 1 year
-a 1% chance to make 10 Million and the attempt takes 5 Years

I will always choose the second one. Why? Because the math leads to a expected outcome of 200k a year if I played the game long enough.

5 years at 1% is 500 years at 100%
So the first option is mathematically better. You have a chance of living 1 year. But to live 500 years there is no chance at all.

 

[heavy_industry]

Tortoise vs hare
Process vs event

This story is very poorly understood by most people.
The lesson is not that you should deliberately be slow and inefficient like a tortoise.

But rather the fact that the hare was an arrogant, impatient idiot that got distracted from the goal and operated in an event-driven way. Go go go, all or nothing, be impulsive, work harder, grind, you are the best etc.

Very similar to the idiots that burst with energy in the gym on January 1, only to give up on their goals 2 weeks later.

The tortoise on the other hand means wisdom.
The tortoise knew that it operates from a disadvantaged position when it entered the business market, but knew that maintaining the focus and having the humility to execute the daily process will eventually lead to victory.

And that's exactly what happened.
Process beats the hell out of event, each and every single time.

 

[Subsonic]

Tortoise vs hare
Process vs event

This story is very poorly understood by most people.
The lesson is not that you should deliberately be slow and inefficient like a tortoise.

But rather the fact that the hare was an arrogant, impatient idiot that got distracted from the goal and operated in an event-driven way. Go go go, all or nothing, be impulsive, work harder, grind, you are the best etc.

Very similar to the idiots that burst with energy in the gym on January 1, only to give up on their goals 2 weeks later.

The tortoise on the other hand means wisdom.
The tortoise knew that it operates from a disadvantaged position when it entered the business market, but knew that maintaining the focus and having the humility to execute the daily process will eventually lead to victory.

And that's exactly what happened.
Process beats the hell out of event, each and every single time.

Yeah you got me.

I think I fell under "most people" here.
I admitt, I understood the story the wrong way.

 

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[Black_Dragon43]

I'd rather go with a more volatile way of life, as long as the EV is higher than the safe bet.

EV isn’t the only criterion if volatility is high, because it ignores the (cumulative) effect of a large negative event. So the game may make sense if played in parallel (for a group) but not for most of the individuals.

For example — suppose we all start with $100,000, and the probability of win/loss is 50%. If we win, we win +50%, if we lose, then we lose -40%.

If you calculate it, EV is +5%.



And yet, if you look carefully 45% of those 11 individuals ended up with LESS money than they started after 10 rounds.

The GROUP, overall has $193K per person at the end. So a +93% return (vs +63% return expected).

But that’s largely due to outliers.

Life is the same. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and so on, they’re all outliers. So it’s not sufficient to play a +EV game to ensure a good outcome. At the same time, it’s true that if you don’t play those max EV max risk games, you won’t end up Bill Gates lol. Hence ending up Bill Gates also involves a good dose of luck, fortune or the gods smiling upon you.

 

[Jeix]

You can live like a king with only 1% of bill gates's wealth, it's your life after all and you can find happiness in whatever you want. To me, the fastlane is about freedom above all else. I can be as free as I want way before reaching multi-millionaire status so I won't go out of my way to seek exclusively that.

 

[Kevin88660]

Today I wanted to buy another massage gun that I got from Amazon in 2020. I wanted the same brand and model and when I searched for it, the brand was no longer available on Amazon. I kind of expected this because it was a weird China brand.

This coupled with a Facebook post about a company that I’ve followed for 7 years shutting down prompted me to make this post.

There have been many times in the past 10 years where someone I knew or a company that I followed achieved major milestones.

I remember back in 2013 someone I knew got over a millions dollars in seed money at a valuation of several million. I remember being a little jealous as with my limited business knowledge, I thought he was instantly worth a few million dollars. His company went bankrupt 5 years ago.

I also remember seeing another person go from zero to six-seven figures a month in e-commerce within 6 months and wondering if I was doing something wrong. This one crashed and burned as algorithms changed and ads became unprofitable.

This latest business was a guy who was scaling so fast with Facebook ads, doing $30m a year, buying huge warehouses in 2018. Now with a single cryptic FB post, his company is no longer in operation.

Sometimes I think, I may not be growing at 50% a year but I’m still here chugging along after 13 years.

Many of my successful friends have been running the same business for 5-10 years. We may not be reaching for the moon, but we are consistently slogging up a mountain.

I know this post may not fit the fast lane model, but it’s a pretty damn good speed lane. But I want to let some of you know that you aren’t being left behind as long as you are consistent and stay true. It’s ok to let the rocket ships pass you, many will fall back to earth.

Personally this fits my personality, I’m a low risk, slow ROI type of person. But I keep chugging along. It’s been 17 years for me in e-commerce and 25 in real estate.

I’ve also seen people make incredible amounts in crypto. I made the mistake of dabbling in crypto the past few years. Part of it was FOMO and part was to diversify. Even I’m not immune to shiny new objects.

But I’ve now learned that I’m good at certain things and I can finish a race doing what I know. I’ve caught many hares that blew past me at the start.

Your advice is not at odds with fastlane model.

Fastlane is about providing scalable value to circumvent the natural limit of earning money using personal time and labor.

Your post is about seeking incremental business growth over aggressive growth in business. It is more about how fast do you want to drive on the fastlane. How long can you speed at 200km/h without risking a crash?

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Upgraded to GOLD, totally missed this thread.

Your thread reminds me when I used to visit the Lambo forum regularly.

It also was quite regular that some guys would post that they needed to come up with a quick $50,000 for some type of emergency. The posts always confused the hell out of me ... I thought, "Geez, you own a $350,000 car but you don't have a spare $50k laying around?" The fact was, most of those guys were over leveraged and spending every dime. Some of them had a fleet of exotics.. .rocket to the moon, crash back to earth. I was a tortoise, they were the hare.

I think the last time my checking / savings account had less than $50K in it was when George Bush was president.

 

[Nostalgia]

Today I wanted to buy another massage gun that I got from Amazon in 2020. I wanted the same brand and model and when I searched for it, the brand was no longer available on Amazon. I kind of expected this because it was a weird China brand.

This coupled with a Facebook post about a company that I’ve followed for 7 years shutting down prompted me to make this post.

There have been many times in the past 10 years where someone I knew or a company that I followed achieved major milestones.

I remember back in 2013 someone I knew got over a millions dollars in seed money at a valuation of several million. I remember being a little jealous as with my limited business knowledge, I thought he was instantly worth a few million dollars. His company went bankrupt 5 years ago.

I also remember seeing another person go from zero to six-seven figures a month in e-commerce within 6 months and wondering if I was doing something wrong. This one crashed and burned as algorithms changed and ads became unprofitable.

This latest business was a guy who was scaling so fast with Facebook ads, doing $30m a year, buying huge warehouses in 2018. Now with a single cryptic FB post, his company is no longer in operation.

Sometimes I think, I may not be growing at 50% a year but I’m still here chugging along after 13 years.

Many of my successful friends have been running the same business for 5-10 years. We may not be reaching for the moon, but we are consistently slogging up a mountain.

I know this post may not fit the fast lane model, but it’s a pretty damn good speed lane. But I want to let some of you know that you aren’t being left behind as long as you are consistent and stay true. It’s ok to let the rocket ships pass you, many will fall back to earth.

Personally this fits my personality, I’m a low risk, slow ROI type of person. But I keep chugging along. It’s been 17 years for me in e-commerce and 25 in real estate.

I’ve also seen people make incredible amounts in crypto. I made the mistake of dabbling in crypto the past few years. Part of it was FOMO and part was to diversify. Even I’m not immune to shiny new objects.

But I’ve now learned that I’m good at certain things and I can finish a race doing what I know. I’ve caught many hares that blew past me at the start.

Thank you for this.

I'm 15 and it's so easy to here stories about teens making millions and then I end up getting distracted. I REALLY need to remember it's about slow improvements, meaningful improvements and I'll get there and when I get there I'll stay there.

Sometimes I forget I have so much god damn time, let's not rush and have it crash and burn in the end.

I'm gonna go print out a picture of a turtle now and put it next to my Chinese bamboo tree : )

 

[MitchC]

Not quite related but I love the quote from richest man in Babylon.

“Another word for risk is probable loss”

 

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[Darklight]

Today I wanted to buy another massage gun that I got from Amazon in 2020. I wanted the same brand and model and when I searched for it, the brand was no longer available on Amazon. I kind of expected this because it was a weird China brand.

This coupled with a Facebook post about a company that I’ve followed for 7 years shutting down prompted me to make this post.

There have been many times in the past 10 years where someone I knew or a company that I followed achieved major milestones.

I remember back in 2013 someone I knew got over a millions dollars in seed money at a valuation of several million. I remember being a little jealous as with my limited business knowledge, I thought he was instantly worth a few million dollars. His company went bankrupt 5 years ago.

I also remember seeing another person go from zero to six-seven figures a month in e-commerce within 6 months and wondering if I was doing something wrong. This one crashed and burned as algorithms changed and ads became unprofitable.

This latest business was a guy who was scaling so fast with Facebook ads, doing $30m a year, buying huge warehouses in 2018. Now with a single cryptic FB post, his company is no longer in operation.

Sometimes I think, I may not be growing at 50% a year but I’m still here chugging along after 13 years.

Many of my successful friends have been running the same business for 5-10 years. We may not be reaching for the moon, but we are consistently slogging up a mountain.

I know this post may not fit the fast lane model, but it’s a pretty damn good speed lane. But I want to let some of you know that you aren’t being left behind as long as you are consistent and stay true. It’s ok to let the rocket ships pass you, many will fall back to earth.

Personally this fits my personality, I’m a low risk, slow ROI type of person. But I keep chugging along. It’s been 17 years for me in e-commerce and 25 in real estate.

I’ve also seen people make incredible amounts in crypto. I made the mistake of dabbling in crypto the past few years. Part of it was FOMO and part was to diversify. Even I’m not immune to shiny new objects.

But I’ve now learned that I’m good at certain things and I can finish a race doing what I know. I’ve caught many hares that blew past me at the start.

I don't know, if you like it though, but look - you just see the projections, they burned because of the beliefs, they crashed because of the projection, they may be living the life of their dream, saving up the money, starting another business - this tortoise of yours has a lot of payoffs though, but "they" the hares, they're only what you think you are

 

[Aaron Harker]

Today I wanted to buy another massage gun that I got from Amazon in 2020. I wanted the same brand and model and when I searched for it, the brand was no longer available on Amazon. I kind of expected this because it was a weird China brand.

This coupled with a Facebook post about a company that I’ve followed for 7 years shutting down prompted me to make this post.

There have been many times in the past 10 years where someone I knew or a company that I followed achieved major milestones.

I remember back in 2013 someone I knew got over a millions dollars in seed money at a valuation of several million. I remember being a little jealous as with my limited business knowledge, I thought he was instantly worth a few million dollars. His company went bankrupt 5 years ago.

I also remember seeing another person go from zero to six-seven figures a month in e-commerce within 6 months and wondering if I was doing something wrong. This one crashed and burned as algorithms changed and ads became unprofitable.

This latest business was a guy who was scaling so fast with Facebook ads, doing $30m a year, buying huge warehouses in 2018. Now with a single cryptic FB post, his company is no longer in operation.

Sometimes I think, I may not be growing at 50% a year but I’m still here chugging along after 13 years.

Many of my successful friends have been running the same business for 5-10 years. We may not be reaching for the moon, but we are consistently slogging up a mountain.

I know this post may not fit the fast lane model, but it’s a pretty damn good speed lane. But I want to let some of you know that you aren’t being left behind as long as you are consistent and stay true. It’s ok to let the rocket ships pass you, many will fall back to earth.

Personally this fits my personality, I’m a low risk, slow ROI type of person. But I keep chugging along. It’s been 17 years for me in e-commerce and 25 in real estate.

I’ve also seen people make incredible amounts in crypto. I made the mistake of dabbling in crypto the past few years. Part of it was FOMO and part was to diversify. Even I’m not immune to shiny new objects.

But I’ve now learned that I’m good at certain things and I can finish a race doing what I know. I’ve caught many hares that blew past me at the start.

Just progress fast for the long term. Problem solved.