CB Prosperity Diaries #6

By this time, I am getting the hang of the circuit breaker. My day is normally broken down into three segments - morning, afternoon and night-time.

1. Breakfast followed by digesting all the news.
2. Coding exercises that do not end until I create something substantially useful for my course or my own investment purposes. 
3. Lunch
4. In the afternoon I either blog, work on my lesson slides or read my Kindle books.
5. In the evenings, I will either run or do some circuit training before I get a shower and have dinner.
6. After dinner, I get to chill slightly more, so if there is no work to do I get to paint some miniatures, watch Jojo or start clowning around with my kids.

As I have to run errands for my family and juggle my work tasks, my day is starting to shape up into a fairly busy one. If I can remain productive and busy throughout the day, I can sustain this lifestyle if the CB gets extended to July, which makes sense if you look at the simulation from SUTD that is being shared on the web. 

The question that remains after this is how to make life even better than pre-COVID days. 

For today, I just have one book review :

My business partner, Alvin Chow,  wrote an interesting article which can be found here. He asked whether you should start a business or invest your money. Company of One by Paul Jarvis considers the middle-ground which is more or less what I am trying to do with my life.

There are things that Dr. Wealth does very well that I really hate to do like build an elite sales team to communicate with potential customers or do email marketing. For me, even getting a payment gateway is painful and a waste of time. 

For me, I just want to build a product that is disruptive and engage a vibrant community. This takes up almost all my energy, trying to improve my product in response to the latest market trends and competitor movements. I don't like to go back to the good old days when I have to let go of people I manage or terminate their contracts. 

My problem with the book is that it is too focused on being anti-growth. The central thesis is that businesses can thrive if it focuses on customer relationships and quality at the expense of growth. You can build a business and then relax once you get decent profits. I think that idea is highly limiting because growth can be parlayed into a better offering to create more customer delight. By charging a premium, I get to reinvest some excess profits into better tools that make customer engagement even better. 

Student fees generate investment income for me to afford better slide designs and the time to plan more free public webinars - which I hope can get me more sign-ups. To enable this, revenue has to grow. 

If one day, I can put a designer on a retainer basis, the quality of my materials goes up even more. If I can pay for cleaner fundamental data from Quandl, my analysis and charts become even more useful to my community members.  

Anyway, your reading of the book may turn out to be very different from mine.