The 1 thing I would tell younger me to do.
What I'm Up To (AI), What I Reflected On (Billing), and What's Occupying My Mind (A Writing Fable) - all part of Allen's Friday Flights
HELLO to my Friday Flights
Welcome back to my personal updates around the random things I do.
And for the new folks subscribing, come back Wednesday for the Crypto stuff.
Ciao!
Allen
Past Friday Flights
What I’m Up To
TL;DR: AI
The Things:
I spend my professional hours ranting about how many reports need to be made as a financial professional. It’s a great use of my time.
I had a goal of 1m LinkedIn views and I hit that goal a lot earlier than I expected. So um, now what.
I’m slowing down my Wednesday Crypto Explainer content creation.
You can join the AI Image Generation craze by using the legendary DALL-E, now free for everyone to use. All images you see in today’s post are from DALL-E.
I showed up quite late to an EY Pan Asian Picnic. You can get me to show up if theres food. It was great.
Hi Bruce. Thanks for introducing me to my next wall decor.
Also Hi Lindsey. And Will. And Dixon.
HEY PETER. IM SO HAPPY FOR YOU. FOR REALS.
American Tax Code TL;DR: Individuals are taxed on Revenue; Businesses are taxed on Profit; Single Member LLC S-Corp is loophole.
I’ll be in Seattle week of October 9.
What I Reflected On
TL;DR: My favorite professional lesson I wish I capitalized on earlier.
The 1 thing I would tell younger me to do.
If there’s one thing I could tell my younger, professional, Asian American self:
Go bill someone. Use your knowledge and be a freelancer - go bill someone for yourself.
Why?
It’s a powerful way to develop a new source of professional confidence. Because if you can bill once and collect $100, what is preventing you from doing more to collect $10,000? What about $200,000?
I didn’t appreciate this kind of thinking until this year.
It’s hard to see how one can “grow” money based on the business value because let’s face it, I had these constraints:
Broke during school forcing me to do cost containment strategies
Being in non-profit or volunteer orgs, constantly in budget strains, which will cause the organization to be in cost containment strategies
I worked as a consultant / auditor, and I am not a partner, thus I focus on delivery and execution, typically after service fees are agreed upon, so really I have to do work under the umbrella of a budget, and to not exceed said budget.
Exhausting to Grow a Business…for others
It’s hard to see how you can grow your business, when a significant amount of time and energy has spent on how you can maintain and reduce costs.
It’s hard to appreciate how much you can get rewarded when at best, the reward for earning money for a company is more work, or 0.05% earnings on a deal.
And it’s hard to appreciate any business growth when your bank account isn’t multiplying, yet your impact to a business has.
When you bill someone (as an independent), here’s what will happen.
You start to become a revenue driver, not a cost container.
You start to figure out how to actually prioritize what is valuable in a business, and what isn’t.
You start to look at costs and debt as a means to earn more. Or a reason to be earning more.
You de-risk your dependency on only having one source of income.
I’m a bit late.
It’s quite funny I bring up the concept of billing and even pricing for yourself. I’ve had several encounters with sales, yet it never dawned on me to do just do it.
During my freshman year of college, I was a computer salesman (which will be its own story one day), and I sold computers to consumers on a physical storefront. My device sales were high, but my warranty and anti-virus sales were nonexistent, so that earned me penalties - to which I left that job before the first one could be instilled.
Through out my years in college, I made a good living buying and flipping computer parts, sniping pricing and negotiating on used parts.
At EY, you don’t get exposure to billing until maybe your Manager years. Yet, I did, when I was a staff 2, collecting out-of-scope fees and making a case for it because I did so much <insert expletive work> that I knew wasn’t part of an original agreement that I bitched until a case could be form to collect an additional $60k check for 2 weeks of work.
Hell, I was decent at recruiting. For non-profits, other companies, or even EY.
And most hilariously, I was already helping other people’s businesses.
So now my biggest takeaway for a younger me is this:
Go bill someone. Use your knowledge and be a freelancer - go bill someone for yourself.
What thing is on my mind
TL;DR: …writing increases forgetfulness rather than memory?
The Myth of Thamus and Theus
A story by Socrates, terribly paraphrased by Allen
There once was an Egyptian god named Theuth. He is noted as the one to have discovered arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and writing.
At the time, King Thamus of Egypt ruled the land. Thamus had requested Theuth to share his gifts to the Egyptians. Theuth presented many of his arts to the King so that the King may be judge them an offer praise and criticism.
Theuth presented writing.
Theuth had said:
O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom. (Phaedrus, 274e)
King Thamus responded to Theuth, addressed Theuth as “the Father of Writing”, and said that Theuth was blinded (biased) by his own creation which prevented Theuth from seeing the true problem of writing:
…writing increases forgetfulness rather than memory.
Instead of internalizing and understanding things, students will rely on writing as a potion for reminding.
Moreover, students will be exposed to many ideas without properly thinking about them.
Thus, they will have an “appearance of wisdom” while “for the most part they will know nothing” (Phaedrus, 275a-b).
This myth was told by Socrates to present an argument that “Writing alone has no understand of itself”. Writing "continues to signify just the same thing forever”, and offers no self explanation to the audience. Essentially, Socrates favored conversation over writing, because in conversation, one’s “proper soul is seen”.
I interpret that as the meaning behind someone’s communication carries more weight than what is actually said.
One could say this is the underlying intent, or as the first page of Michelle Obama’s Becoming book emphasizes, “the context” of how each person came to be and what is that each person means is a crucial step to understanding someone’s message. (I didn’t actually read the book and I’m completely taking my girlfriend’s paraphasing, which admittedly she also only read one chapter of the book as well)
Anyway…
While the myth presented is about writing, I think about the relevance of the message when applied to:
Learning for Curiosity vs Learning for a Test
Doing things slowly vs using technology to make it faster
Old segregation laws such as pool segregation where advocates of pool segregation “talked about the pool” but it was never really about “the pool” now what was it?
I also think about it when someone wants you to do something a certain way, because they want you to appreciate “the beauty” in it, based on how they experienced.
Guilty as charged.