Yesterday I was watching the news and there was a segment that talked about how one entrepreneurial minded woman took an idea and created a multi billion dollar empire from scratch.

Her name is Zhang Yin and she created a recycling business called Nine Dragons Paper Industries Co. She basically bought junk from various countries and brought it to China where she recycled the waste and created items such as container boards which she then sold to companies. The reports mentioned that she is wealthier than some more well known figures such as Oprah.

I was very interested in the journey she endured to get to where she is today as I personally find reading about other people’s path to success to be very educational and inspiring. From what I read she started with about $3000 and grew up in a military family and having a lack of material possessions taught her to appreciate things in life.

I then read about one common theme that I have pretty much heard from all successful people where during her business development she went through extreme financial hardships from people who would cheat her out of her money along with other obstacles. Of course, she endured through them all.

She attributes a lot of her success by being able to look ahead and capitalizing on opportunities before her competitors. There was an interesting tidbit about her wealth building process as she tried to play it as low key as possible as she did not want to attract unwanted attention. That actually makes a lot of sense in many ways.

An important theme that I personally interpreted out of this is that saying I heard before where a big part of success is simply showing up and how results don’t come to you, but rather you need to grab it.

I was having a conversation with a person recently who was telling me about an experience he had on how there was a person whom he trusted a lot and as a result they had a mutual business agreement where he would aid the person in return for financial compensation that would be given to him down the road. Unfortunately, he ended up doing his part, but the other person got devious and attempted to weasel his way out from honoring his promises.

There was a lot of money involved too and I was kind of surprised that his decision was to move on while simply cutting contact with the person. His reasoning was a common one too though on how he could of spent his time to force the person to oblige to their agreement, but instead he felt that his time was better spent by recouping his losses through other means.

The other type of responses that I usually hear from people though in situations where there is a substantial amount of money involved is that they won’t allow the person to get away with it. A common reason is that it is the person’s intention to try and drag the situation on with as much drivel as possible so that you will hopefully just forget about it. So, they want to show that they mean business to prevent others from trying to do the same to them.

In my opinion, from a principles point of view, by not doing anything in these types of scenarios the person is essentially getting away with the damage they have done to you and thinking more long term that would increase the chances of them doing it to others as well. To me, that is usually the bigger motivator to do something as just thinking if they did that to someone else who is in a less fortunate position it would probably wreck a lot of people’s livelihoods.

I was told before that while obviously in a business you need to focus your time in doing what’s necessary to generate revenue, at the same time you shouldn’t forget about doing socially responsible things as well if possible.

Of course it is the shopping season and everyone wants to save money on their purchases. I often get a lot of requests from people on whether or not I know anyone who works in a particular field/company as they are interested in buying something and would like to save as much money as possible.

Having basic business knowledge of various industries as well as connections with people in different fields have provided me with a good foundation to know when something is truly a bargain or not. For example, generally speaking most types of retail businesses make the majority of its money selling attachments for a product such as accessories and it is not unusual for those items to be marked up say 60% to 500%. Another example is that in a grocery store, milk is often what is known as a “loss leader” which means they aren’t making any money off it and so you generally shouldn’t need to think too much if the price is too expensive.

As usual, I’m fairly confident that everyone knows at least someone in their social circle who could provide some knowledge or insight to make you more aware on what to lookout for in order to identify true savings. So even if you are not exactly a business minded person, it doesn’t hurt to do some research as it can make you a more savvy shopper.

I was reading this news article today that talked about a person who had racked up a cell phone bill of $85,000. You can read the story at http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=166511

In general, the person used his cell phone to acquire Internet access for his computer as he assumed his $10 a month unlimited browser plan would cover that. I believe the terminology for that would be data tethering where people connect their phones to a computer to gain access to the Internet when they are say on the road. Here in Canada at least it can be quite expensive and it is definitely not the same thing as having an unlimited browser service for your phone.

This is one of those situations where I am on the fence on whether or not the person should rightfully pay for the bill as the provider didn’t mislead its service in anyway. Like always, ask a lot of questions when it comes to service contracts if you are not sure.

One of my friend was telling me that he was going to a birthday party and the plan was to take the friend to as many restaurants and vendors as possible to see how many free birthday gifts they could get him. For example, getting free sundaes or clothing items.

I’ve never actually seen someone do this to the extreme personally. I think the only free stuff that I get consistently nowadays in terms of a vendor is my cell phone plan as people get free unlimited calling on their birthdays. I’ve never actually tried going to restaurants and getting free food though. Would feel a little strange doing that.