Example of an Asian dude killing it.

Background: Many Asian students are at risk of wasting both their time and money navigating through adult life regardless of how high-achieving they are. This results in lost time to chase your goals and lower standard of living immediately and/or during college.

Notes:

1. When choosing colleges, look very carefully at not only tuition but rent around the area. Chances are, you will leave the dorms after freshman year and will relocate with buddies to an apartment. Make sure you won’t waste thousands of dollars on rent.

2. Scholarships trumps prestige. Medical, grad, law, dentistry schools, and jobs don’t care about where you went for undergrad. Most, if not all, only look at your achievements and your degree and not where you did/got it. Take the free tuition and go somewhere nicer for when it really matters.

3. Have a healthy diet. Junk food these days cost way too damn much. It’s actually more cost-effective to have a good meal-prep regiment than going to your cafeteria or your nearest fast food joint.

4. Pick three suits/formal dresses and stick with them. Suits are really expensive these days and are in use infrequently. Make sure you buy good, long lasting attire and stick with it until you start making good money (I personally had blue, black, and grey suits).

5. Don’t ever, ever buy books. Chances are they can be found as PDFs online or your lecturer won’t really use them. Use that money for celebrations or fun weekend trips.

6. Don’t be too high-achieving. I mean this as taking unnecessary extra classes and or majors. In a lot of colleges and universities, this would increase your tuition by a significant amount. Furthermore, this could lead to actually damaging your GPA and taking time away from social life or hobbies.

7. If you’re in the city, ditch your car. Parking is really expensive in college towns and cities. Just don’t bring your car or sell it during college.

8. Don’t drink or smoke too much. Buying drinks cost a lot and will create a burning hole in your pocket. Try to limit drinking down to twice a week or even less. Smoking destroys your lungs, just don’t do it frequently unless you want be paying medical bills down the road.

9. Pay off your loans ASAP. The more time you take, the more you have to pay. If you’re going to prof school, make sure you can secure a job that will allow you option of loan forgiveness if needed. This is crucial as these loans can be the only thing stopping you from buying a house or car.

10. Date someone who understand the value of money. You don’t want to be dragged into expensive events or be forced into buying expensive things.

The simplest system ever

This is just common sense but it seems many people don’t get it.

● suppress your consumption
● save money
● invest into assets like hard assets [business, real estate, automation, distribution channels, customer lists, and skills]
● repeat

You know who does this? The Asian economic miracles. They all escaped the dreaded middle income trap, which many other nations succumbed to. The system works. Use it.

Always do the practical first. It’s just sound risk management.

Warnings

Stop gambling
Hoping for "the big one"
Being inspired by instagram, snapchat, facebook. These are a fool’s errand. Each of these successes sits on a mass grave of failures.

What is money making?

It’s largely about

arbitrage
utility - solving a problem that affects lots of people
fast execution

It’s not about
the perfect idea
perfect protection - lots of ideas can be stolen and they constantly are.today, it’s hard to keep competitors from stealing or slightly modifying an idea.

money making [unless you’re scamming people]

Better system

In the UK, Chinese used to lend each other interest free loans to get each other off the ground. This is the power of synergy. Alone, we grow slowly. Together, we can grow quickly, survive price wars, and swallow our competitors. I don’t have a system for this now, but I will write about this later. There’s not much to write about but it’s the organization that needs to take shape.

money making

● arbitrage
● automation
● “money left on the table” fix-ups
● options [not stock market stuff]
● marketing / sales
licensing maybe
?? look at my sheet.

Most of you already handle this well. If not, get yourself a blue collar type contractor skill set. You’ll never be out of work and better
than that you can get paid in cash and avoid paying much taxes to incompetent and corrupt war-mongering governments. I
understand that many of you will feel that such work is beneath you, but I recommend this because there are very few changes to
keep up with (contrast with IT, accounting, medicine, pharmaceutical, sciences, and other STEM careers), training is fast, education
is cheap, you’re always in demand, you can build up your own business around it, the money is good (often, better than what many
college graduates are making), and you avoid being stereotyped as some IT nerd or lame accountant.

The BEST way to make money is to run a small business, but that’s way too much to cover in this guide. When I say small business,
I absolutely 100% exclude high capital cost businesses like restaurants and retail. If enough of you show an interest then I will teach
you the smart ways to make money. They’re very low risk and highly scalable.

If you are determined to get a white collar type job then I highly recommend that you do a market analysis to see what skills are
growing in demand and will continue to be in demand into the future. You need to factor in threats such as robotics, computing,
privatization, outsourcing, etc. If your job can be outsourced cheaply or replaced by a machine then you need to look at other jobs.

Money means you can support a comfortable lifestyle for yourself. In longer term relationships, to me, it means you can give a small
family a comfortable lifestyle: stress free monthly bill payments, no debts, eat out at least once a week, weekend trips once a month,
a vacation once a year, etc. Don’t worry about the private jet and 600 horsepower cars.