Posts Tagged ‘experience’

Needing Financial Failure To Become Better

Sunday, September 28th, 2008 by Alan Yu

In the midst of reading all this news about that bailout plan in the US one thing that was raised was how a lot of people disagreed that banks should be given money and that these businesses need to fail for the economy to then build itself back.

The more I thought about it the more it was true in many ways I thought. Even for myself, most people that I know who are good with money went through something that hit them hard financially which made them better and smarter when it comes to managing money. In a sense, they weren’t saved by anyone else and had to build everything from ground up. Basically, no borrowing money, credit lines, etc.

What helped me a lot personally at a younger age was video games strangely enough as in most games I played you had to in some way manage money/funds and you tend to screw up enough to learn a lesson afterwards. So if there are parents that say games are bad for kids, well here is a great way to teach kids about money considering schools don’t really teach kids about money when you think about it.

As an adult I find that it is more about the people you associate with on a regular basis as oppose to necessarily having to fail so many times to learn. Cause in general, most successful people financially have failed in some way except what makes them different is that they found a way to get back up. So with that, you can learn so much from others in terms of what they went through to make you appreciate what you have and ways to make sure you don’t repeat what happened to them.

Competing Against Free

Monday, September 8th, 2008 by Alan Yu

I was reading about all these comments the other day where I suppose people who did not have the budget to hire contract workers for some kind of creative work was looking for students or people new to the field who would be willing to do the work for free mainly as a way to build their portfolio.

Afterwards, it looked like a lot of industry veterans were upset about it as they were tired of seeing people constantly advertising for free labor and as well condemning everyone who was willing to do it for free as it devalued the services of the working professionals as a whole they believed.

That is definitely true in many ways where if people in a particular field constantly do things for free then people will just naturally assume that they can get aid for a very cheap price or virtually nothing at all. At the same time, I don’t really see any reason to be extremely against people that are willing to donate their time.

I personally just see it as another way of saying maybe one is not making their services sound good or different enough to make someone want to pay for it. Therefore, you should focus more on yourself than others in that sense. It’s kind of like getting news too I guess. Nowadays you can get virtually all the news you need for free on like the Internet yet there are still tons of sources like magazine subscriptions that people still subscribe to.

I suppose it is like that statement that goes something like if you offer something unique, then you people have to go to you to get those products/services. If you don’t offer something unique, then you are competing against price and convenience. So true in these cases I think anyways.



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