Immediately without researching much, the impression the write left on me is that he is a disgruntled employee at his job. One of those people who thinks their job sucks not because of their own doing.
FYI, I'm still mid 20s as of writing, my English is not that good, but try to see the point I'm trying to drive across rather than my grammatical prowess.
Those twenty steps:
1. You want to be able to decide when to begin your day. You want to work when you want to, the way you want to. There goes the concept of 9-5 in the bin.2. Formals? No way. You want to live in your denims - that’s who you are. Following dress codes is a ridiculous concept anyway that you just refuse to follow. 3. More than that, you’re just too restless to be seated at one place for 8 hours. It’s almost like being chained.4. You see no point sitting inside a glass box knowing there is a whole world out there. 5. Your mind just doesn’t work around those boring computer screens and a phone that reminds you of hospitals every time it rings. You want something like a whole wall to express yourself! 6. Nothing puts you off more than seeing people hate every minute of their day at work. You’d rather be around inspiring people who love what they do, because your work is your passion, not a ‘job’.7. You can’t wait to scoot out of the office the moment the clock strikes 6 and do what you love, the rest of the day.8. You hate how all offices run solely on hierarchy. You feel being pulled down by it more than being pushed forward.9. No matter how much you try, your mind just drifts away every time you begin working. You can’t be contained. You have to be set free to bring out the best in you. 10. You’re probably too outgoing and ‘alive’ to fit in to the straight faced, lifeless people at work. Oh no, no, you don’t give two hoots about maintaining the ‘decorum’, whatever that is.11. You want to create something of your own, not spend your whole life living an insignificant life, working for someone who probably doesn’t even know you exist.12. You’re a perfectionist. You need your own space to do things, at your own pace – like waiting for the sun to set for that perfect picture. You don’t believe in doing things just for the sake of it. 13. Life is too short to waste in rat races. You refuse to be a part of the herd.14. You hate Mondays, in fact you loathe ‘em. You desperately need to be in a place where you look forward to Mondays.15. Travelling is not just your passion; it is your way of life. From the depths of the seas to the thin air at the top of mountains – there’s so much to see in just one life! There is no way you’re giving up what you love the most for a desk job.16. You don’t believe in rules. No, not like a rebel-without-a-cause. You just want to figure it out on your own instead of going by what people tell you. You’re here to make your own way.17. You don’t have ‘aims’ in life. Only dreams. And you want to live them all. You owe it to yourself.18. You measure success by happiness and contentment, not by paycheques. 19. You want to earn by living, not live by earning.20. You cannot even begin to list down the things you want to do in life. What you want to be is beyond professions and careers. It’s a feeling. You want to live. That’s your calling.
This is in fact one of the most ridiculous things I have ever read. It is ridiculous because the writer preaches this as thought it is scripture.
I could pin-point the flaws in every single 'signs' but they are just generally excuses for being lazy.
Although technology has made life easy, we still cannot be lazy, instead of thinking tech is replacing us, why not say that tech can aid us to be more efficient?
We have to manage our expectations and always think far especially when it involves something like your career, and commitments. Think about two stories:
This is the story of the person who created this wallet. He probably felt the same way about one or more of the 20 signs above. He created this wallet, several things happened in his life and started/joint/left/closed many companies. At one point, he was sleeping at the back of his car if I got the facts right. Now, he is sleeping in a big mansion.
He is Robert Kiyosaki and the writer of a best seller: Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Many of you are thinking of following his footsteps, wanting to be the next Warren Buffett/Bill Gates/Robert Kiyosaki or whoever else is rich or famous.
Lets deconstruct the goal abit. Based on the above, you just want to end up being rich/famous, it didn't say how or what you are going to do. Because when you answer these two questions, you find that this 20 signs is complete utter nonsense.
Many youths today are about being rich and famous, to travel, to buy luxurious items and stay in big houses. So by wanting to become those Warren Buffett/Bill Gates, yet you strongly believe in these 20 signs, aren't you no different from some one who is trying to be a famous star on Hollywood without putting any effort to improve on their acting skills?
Granted, they did quite badly in school, but did you know that they poured in endless hours to be at where they want to be? Not to mention they are inherently intelligent people.
I, myself, am quite lazy to be honest. The biggest tell tale sign is the condition of my room, its in a perpetual mess. However, I felt that my career is not something I can do till I'm old as I am very family oriented, so now that I'm young, I decide to educate myself on finance, try to invest bit by bit to accumulate wealth, for my wife to be, kids, and grand kids. I'm not going to teach you how to invest as I know nothing myself. But I think we should all set out and learn and do it.
Please take time to read an abstract from the article: THE SUPERINVESTORS OF GRAHAM-AND-DODDSVILLE
I would like you to imagine a national coin-flipping contest. Let's assume we get 225 million Americans up tomorrow morning and we ask them all to wager a dollar. They go out in the morning at sunrise, and they all call the flip of a coin. If they call correctly, they win a dollar from those who called wrong. Each day the losers drop out, and on the subsequent day the stakes build as all previous winnings are put on the line. After ten flips on ten mornings, there will be approximately 220,000 people in the United States who have correctly called ten flips in a row. They each will have won a little over $1,000.
Now this group will probably start getting a little puffed up about this, human nature being what it is. They may try to be modest, but at cocktail parties they will occasionally admit to attractive members of the opposite sex what their technique is, and what marvelous insights they bring to the field of flipping.
Assuming that the winners are getting the appropriate rewards from the losers, in another ten days we will have 215 people who have successfully called their coin flips 20 times in a row and who, by this exercise, each have turned one dollar into a little over $1 million. $225 million would have been lost, $225 million would have been won.
By then, this group will really lose their heads. They will probably write books on "How I turned a Dollar into a Million in Twenty Days Working Thirty Seconds a Morning." Worse yet, they'll probably start jetting around the country attending seminars on efficient coin-flipping and tackling skeptical professors with, " If it can't be done, why are there 215 of us?"
By then some business school professor will probably be rude enough to bring up the fact that if 225 million orangutans had engaged in a similar exercise, the results would be much the same - 215 egotistical orangutans with 20 straight winning flips.
I would argue, however, that there are some important differences in the examples I am going to present. For one thing, if (a) you had taken 225 million orangutans distributed roughly as the U.S. population is; if (b) 215 winners were left after 20 days; and if (c) you found that 40 came from a particular zoo in Omaha, you would be pretty sure you were on to something. So you would probably go out and ask the zookeeper about what he's feeding them, whether they had special exercises, what books they read, and who knows what else. That is, if you found any really extraordinary concentrations of success, you might want to see if you could identify concentrations of unusual characteristics that might be causal factors.
Scientific inquiry naturally follows such a pattern. If you were trying to analyze possible causes of a rare type of cancer -- with, say, 1,500 cases a year in the United States -- and you found that 400 of them occurred in some little mining town in Montana, you would get very interested in the water there, or the occupation of those afflicted, or other variables. You know it's not random chance that 400 come from a small area. You would not necessarily know the causal factors, but you would know where to search.
I submit to you that there are ways of defining an origin other than geography. In addition to geographical origins, there can be what I call an intellectual origin. I think you will find that a disproportionate number of successful coin-flippers in the investment world came from a very small intellectual village that could be called Graham-and-Doddsville. A concentration of winners that simply cannot be explained by chance can be traced to this particular intellectual village.
Conditions could exist that would make even that concentration unimportant. Perhaps 100 people were simply imitating the coin-flipping call of some terribly persuasive personality. When he called heads, 100 followers automatically called that coin the same way. If the leader was part of the 215 left at the end, the fact that 100 came from the same intellectual origin would mean nothing. You would simply be identifying one case as a hundred cases. Similarly, let's assume that you lived in a strongly patriarchal society and every family in the United States conveniently consisted of ten members. Further assume that the patriarchal culture was so strong that, when the 225 million people went out the first day, every member of the family identified with the father's call. Now, at the end of the 20-day period, you would have 215 winners, and you would find that they came from only 21.5 families. Some naive types might say that this indicates an enormous hereditary factor as an explanation of successful coin-flipping. But, of course, it would have no significance at all because it would simply mean that you didn't have 215 individual winners, but rather 21.5 randomly distributed families who were winners.
In this group of successful investors that I want to consider, there has been a common intellectual patriarch, Ben Graham. But the children who left the house of this intellectual patriarch have called their "flips" in very different ways. They have gone to different places and bought and sold different stocks and companies, yet they have had a combined record that simply cannot be explained by the fact that they are all calling flips identically because a leader is signaling the calls for them to make. The patriarch has merely set forth the intellectual theory for making coin-calling decisions, but each student has decided on his own manner of applying the theory.
The common intellectual theme of the investors from Graham-and-Doddsville is this: they search for discrepancies between the value of a business and the price of small pieces of that business in the market. Essentially, they exploit those discrepancies without the efficient market theorist's concern as to whether the stocks are bought on Monday or Thursday, or whether it is January or July, etc. Incidentally, when businessmen buy businesses, which is just what our Graham & Dodd investors are doing through the purchase of marketable stocks -- I doubt that many are cranking into their purchase decision the day of the week or the month in which the transaction is going to occur. If it doesn't make any difference whether all of a business is being bought on a Monday or a Friday, I am baffled why academicians invest extensive time and effort to see whether it makes a difference when buying small pieces of those same businesses. Our Graham & Dodd investors, needless to say, do not discuss beta, the capital asset pricing model, or covariance in returns among securities. These are not subjects of any interest to them. In fact, most of them would have difficulty defining those terms. The investors simply focus on two variables: price and value.
I always find it extraordinary that so many studies are made of price and volume behavior, the stuff of chartists. Can you imagine buying an entire business simply because the price of the business had been marked up substantially last week and the week before? Of course, the reason a lot of studies are made of these price and volume variables is that now, in the age of computers, there are almost endless data available about them. It isn't necessarily because such studies have any utility; it's simply that the data are there and academicians have [worked] hard to learn the mathematical skills needed to manipulate them. Once these skills are acquired, it seems sinful not to use them, even if the usage has no utility or negative utility. As a friend said, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I think the group that we have identified by a common intellectual home is worthy of study. Incidentally, despite all the academic studies of the influence of such variables as price, volume, seasonality, capitalization size, etc., upon stock performance, no interest has been evidenced in studying the methods of this unusual concentration of value-oriented winners.
