know yourself

Know yourself

You should know your limit before trying anything. If you take action to a project that is out of your reach, you'd loose your power and may get sick for that. You should not try too much.

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It requires some explanation. Above notation is aimed to the old. Older people should know their limits from their past experiences. And that assumption leads to the above advice. How old is old enough to know themselves? I have no idea, do you?

If you were young, excluding young-at-heart, you should try to extend your limit. That is why you need mentor. It is very hard to measure your own limit. One way to tell that is that if you cannot set up plan to a certain objective, then the objective might be out of your reach.

Here's my experience when I was 50 years old. My worst experience that had triggered me of taking series of wrong actions resulted to loose most of my money. I had picked up a project to sell audio magazine in USA. The guy approached me wanted to build tape player that could be sold cheap.

To sell that kind of electrical gadgets, you need to build it in quantity. I was pretty sure of it from my past experiences. That was the limit but I didn't aware of it. Well, I have ordered 100K sets at US$20 a piece. I picked a manufacturer and placed the order. I was too busy to pursue this project myself.

I had to rely on guys who had been introduced by my business partner. At the beginning, I had 3 persons involved in this project, one for taking care of US relation, one for taking care of preparing the design of it and the guy who should take care of developing the market.

Sound smart? No way. I have known everyone of those guys for 6 months or less. I was pretty bad in measuring people. and the problem was that I didn't know that. I gave everyone of them my full credit to spend. Oh, and none of them was my employees.

To make a long story short, everyone of them had spent my money for themselves and consequently I had lost 2 million of my money in 2 years. So, here's my sincere advice. know yourself. However tough, it pays you return for sure.