TIMELESS FINANCIAL ADVICE FROM THE RICHEST MAN IN BABYLON

Babylon existed 4,319 years ago, these advice were found written on tablets. And it’s interesting how despite of the millennia our world and their world is separated, the advice written on those tablets are still relevant till this day.

This only proves that no matter how many times the Earth revolves around the Sun, human nature, our biases and our tendencies remain the same.

I hope these advice would help you propel in your journey towards financial freedom.

1. START THY PURSE TO FATTENING
   “If thou select one of thy baskets and put in it each morning ten eggs and take out from it each evening nine eggs, what will eventually happen?”
   
   This is not new financial advice but probably the most ignored, to keep 10% of thy income REGARDLESS. Most people would argue that they are struggling to make both ends meet with their current income, then what more if they would put 10% aside every paycheck?
   
   This is a case of what I called financial Parkinson’s law; expense expands so as to consume the budget available for spending.
   
   It is feasible and you will survive. Just imagine if your government decides to increase your tax by 10% more, will you not adjust? will you not survive? This is completely the same aside from the fact that this time you are taxing yourself and the money will be set aside for your future self.
   
   
2. CONTROL THY EXPENDITURES
   “What each of us call as our necessary expenses will alway grow equal to our income unless we protest to the contrary; Confuse not the necessary expenses with thy desires.”
   
   Frugality is the most misused and abused word in the world of finance today. Billionaire Warren buffet is known for being notoriously frugal, however, frugality is not the sole reason why he’s a billionaire. And let me repeat it, “Frugality alone will not make you rich but it can prevent you from being broke.”
   
   Frugality + multiple sources of income + some luck = Wealth.
   
   Being frugal is not being cheap but wise. It is the act of paying less and getting the same result.
   
   Dress to keep you warm, food for nourishment, house for shelter, car to bring you from point a to point b with peace of mind etc. Function first then aesthetic and pleasure second.
   
   
3. MAKE THY GOLD MULTIPLY
   “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.” – Albert Einstein
   
   Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more people are now engaging to stocks trading around the globe. Trading at the stock market is a good avenue to invest and enjoy the benefit of compound interest, if you know what you’re doing. On the other hand it can also lead to someone’s financial disaster.
   
   S&P500 prior to the 2008 crisis increased on average 10% annually. If you invest $100 yearly for 20 years and received 10% increase annually for 20 years. After investing $2000, you will end up with $5,727.50 or 186.37% gain.
   
   
4. GUARD THY TREASURES FROM LOST
   “Gold in a man’s purse must be guarded with firmness else it’ll be lost; thus it is wise that we must first secure small amounts and learn to protect them before the gods entrust us with larger.
   
   Study carefully before parting with thy treasure, each assurance that it may be safely reclaimed. Be not misled by thy known romantic desires to make wealth rapidly. Before thy loan it to any man, assure thy self of his ability to repay and his reputation for doing so.“
   
   Lending money becomes tricky and hard when it’s someone close to us that’s asking for help. However, be clear whether you’re lending money and expecting it to return or you’re giving money away to help out (tolerate) your love one. If you will be resentful if the person fails to return what he/she owes you, it is far better to say no from the start.
   
   If you’re working to earn money, remember that you traded your time for every dollar you earn. Giving away your hard earned money is like giving away your time, a commodity that you can never earn back.
   
   
5. MAKE THY DWELLING A PROFITABLE INVESTMENT
   Most people’s greatest investment would be their homes, which I think is not really accurate. If you’re not aware yet, your house is domesticating you and it doesn’t appreciate all the time. Look at 2008 for reference.
   
   But again if you know what you’re doing, you can leverage your equity on your mortgage to acquire additional properties that will generate income and pay for itself.
   
   Unless the you the homeowner is doing this, your home is more of a liability than an asset.
   
   
6. ENSURE A FUTURE INCOME
   Provide an advance for the needs of thy growing age and the protection of thy family
   
   Investing on rental properties, stocks or annuities etc. will ensure future income but would require some knowledge and effort on your side but will definitely worth it. Liquidation of some estate and living modestly would make anyone’s retirement more pleasurable.
   
   
7. INCREASE THY ABILITY TO EARN
   “The more you learn the more you earn.” -Warren buffet
   
   If you look closely, COVID-19 teaches a lot of lessons and one of those is that no job is safe during a pandemic and that a pandemic can happen and last this long despite of the technology that we have today.
   
   It’s either we adapt or perish. Adaptation means learning new skill, new trade or new field. Things we conveniently delegate to professionals before in exchange for a good sum of money. Now since most people’s livelihood is in jeopardy, people don’t have the means to pay that it forced them to learn new things and do things on their own.
   
   During times of prosperity however, if we would adapt this kind of mindset and become a sponge or a learning machine, not letting our profession limit our identity, the sky is indeed the limit in terms of our earning capacity.

/THE SUBTLE ARE OF NOT GIVING A F*CK

We are social creature by default, we cannot live just on our own. But that doesn’t mean that we have to subject ourselves to the desires of our immediate environment and the society as a whole. As proven over and over again by those who made it, no one accomplished anything meaningful by giving so much f*ck about what the world has to say.

In reality it is the entire opposite, those who made it defy the status quo and don’t give a f*ck about the opinion of other people as long as they know that what they’re pursuing is worth their time. While the rest of us is busy worrying about other people’s opinion, the outliers are busy pursuing their goals.

So if you want to succeed, do what successful people do. Giving too much f*ck is paralyzing you and preventing you from taking action towards your goal and realizing the best version of yourself. It’s time to stop that limiting habit and here are some pointers where to start from the book The subtle art of not giving a F*ck: a Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

• Don’t try (Just Do It)
  A lot of people want to do something that keeps them awake at night but ends up not doing what they wanted to do because of the idea that they have to do it right the first time. In reality, no matter how great your work or your product is, there will always be somebody who would not appreciate it. Let not this people stop you from pursuing what you want. Even if your work sucks at first that is far better than nothing.
  
  Failure should not be a hindrance to pursue something but a useful tool for us to learn what doesn’t work. Think about the time when you were a kid learning how to walk, if you have given up after hundreds of times you tried to stand on your feet, your first step then just to fall, we will all be crawling by now.
  
  You don’t to be great to start, but you have to start to be great – ZigZiglar

• Happiness is the problem
  We admire those people who succeeded in this life, those people who are still with us today and those who are gone. We celebrate their success and accomplishment and sometimes envy them. However, none of those accomplishments would have happen if not for the struggles that they’ve gone through that made them resilient and strong and with their gained courage allowed them to thrust their way to success.
  
  There’s nothing to be learn in times of prosperity. The difference between life and school is; in school we get the lesson then we’re being tested, in life we’re get the test first and comes the lesson afterwards. But you will not learn the lesson if you’re too occupied complaining about fairness and mistreatments.
  
  You should not aim to be happy all the time, every once in a while a dose of misery is important in order for us to appreciate prosperity more when they come, light after darkness and sunshine after a heavy rain. Struggle is a gift that allows us to test ourselves, learn things we don’t know about ourselves and push our boundaries further.

“My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it — all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity — , but to love it…”

Friedrich Nietzsche

• You are not special
  We all have this imaginary popularity or importance syndrome I would call it. As if we’re living in Big Brother’s house, we think too much about what other people would say because subconsciously we’re thinking as if they’re watching our every move, but in reality they don’t give a single f*ck about our life. Well maybe for a bit of time to have something to gossip about but other than that, they’re also busy dealing with their f*cked up life. So, do you.
  
  Whenever you feel embarrass in public, remember this, those people will not remember you after an hour or two unless you become an internet sensation out of it. The most important thing is, you might not meet those people ever in your life, so why care?
  
• Learn to say NO
  For every YES you are saying NO to a hundred things that could be better. Whenever you say YES to other people, you should understand that sometimes that means you’re saying NO to yourself.
  
  Some people do this deliberately in the hope that other people would reciprocate in the future, just to disappoint themselves later on. The reality is you can’t and should not rely on the promise of reciprocity from other people. You should do things because you want to do it and not as an investment that you can demand in the future.
  
• Memento Mori

You could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think.

Marcus Aurelius

You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply – though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire – Seneca (On the shortness of life)

The stoics could not explain it any better, if there’s anything that COVID-19 made us realize is that, you can’t really rely on Fortuna. What she gives, she can easily take back. In that sense, we should not be delaying anything we think is worthwhile for we may not have the opportunity to do so, for tomorrow is not a promise.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. … It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months.

Steve Jobs

WHY YOU SHOULD BE AUDACIOUS WITH YOUR GOALS

In 1993, twelve years after becoming chief executive of General Electric, Jack Welch traveled to Tokyo and, while touring a factory that made medical testing equipment, heard a story about Japan’s railway system. In the 1950s, during the lingering wake of the devastation of the Second World War, Japan was intensely focused on growing the nation’s economy. A large portion of the country’s population lived in or between the cities of Tokyo and Osaka, which were separated by just 320 miles of train track. Every day, tens of thousands of people traveled between the cities. Vast amounts of raw industrial materials were transported on those rail lines. But the Japanese topography was so mountainous and the railway system so outdated that the trip could take as long as twenty hours.

So, in 1955, the head of the Japanese railway system issued a challenge to the nation’s finest engineers: invent a faster train. Six months later, a team unveiled a prototype locomotive capable of going 65 miles per hour —a speed that, at the time, made it among the fastest passenger trains in the world. Not good enough, the head of the railway system said. He wanted 120 miles per hour. The engineers explained that was not realistic. At those speeds, if a train turned too sharply, the centrifugal force would derail the cars. Seventy miles an hour was more realistic—perhaps 75. Any faster and the trains would crash. Why do the trains need to turn? the railway head asked. There were numerous mountains between the cities, the engineers replied. Why not make tunnels, then? The labor required to tunnel through that much territory could equal the cost of rebuilding Tokyo after World War II. Three months later, the engineers unveiled an engine capable of going 75 miles per hour. The railway chief lambasted the designs. Seventy-five miles per hour, he said, had no chance of transforming the nation. Incremental improvements would only yield incremental economic growth.

The only way to overhaul the nation’s transportation system was to rebuild every aspect of how trains functioned. Over the next two years, the engineers experimented: They designed train cars that each had their own motors. They rebuilt gears so they meshed with less friction. They discovered that their new cars were too heavy for Japan’s existing tracks, and so they reinforced the rails, which had the added bonus of increasing stability, which added another half mile per hour to cars’ speed. There were hundreds of innovations, large and small, that each made the trains a little bit faster than before.

In 1964, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, the world’s first bullet train, left Tokyo along continuously welded rails that passed through tunnels cut into Japan’s mountains. It completed its inaugural trip in three hours and fifty-eight minutes, at an average speed of 120 miles per hour. Hundreds of spectators had waited overnight to see the train arrive in Osaka. Soon other bullet trains were running to other Japanese cities, helping fuel a dizzying economic expansion. The development of the bullet train, according to a 2014 study, was critical in spurring Japan’s growth well into the 1980s. And within a decade of that innovation, the technologies developed in Japan had given birth to high-speed rail projects in France, Germany, and Australia, and had revolutionized industrial design around the world. For Jack Welch, this story was a revelation.

What GE needed, he told Kerr (GE chief learning officer) when he got home from Japan, was a similar outlook, an institutional commitment to audacious goals. Going forward, every executive and department, in addition to delivering specific and achievable and timely objectives, would also have to identify a stretch goal—an aim so ambitious that managers couldn’t describe, at least initially, how they would achieve it. Everyone, Welch said, had to partake in “bullet train thinking.” In a 1993 letter to shareholders, the chief executive explained that “stretch is a concept that would have produced smirks, if not laughter, in the GE of three or four years ago, because it essentially means using dreams to set business targets—with no real idea of how to get there. If you do know how to get there—it’s not a stretch target.” Six months after Welch’s trip to Japan, every division at GE had a stretch goal.

The division manufacturing airplane engines, for instance, announced they would reduce the number of defects in finished engines by 25 percent. To be honest, the division’s managers figured they could hit that target pretty easily. Almost all the defects they found on engines were small, cosmetic issues, such as a slightly misaligned cable or unimportant scratches. Anything more serious was corrected before the engine was shipped. If they hired more quality assurance employees, managers figured, they could reduce cosmetic defects with little effort. Welch agreed that reducing defects was a wise goal. Then he told them to cut errors by 70 percent. That’s ridiculous, managers said. Manufacturing engines was such a complicated affair—each one weighed five tons and had more than ten thousand parts—that there was no way they could achieve a 70 percent reduction. They had three years, Welch said.

The division’s managers started panicking—and then began analyzing every error that had been recorded in the previous twelve months. Simply hiring more quality assurance workers, they quickly realized, wouldn’t do the trick. The only way to reduce errors by 70 percent was to make every single employee, in effect, a quality assurance auditor. Everyone had to take responsibility for catching mistakes. But most factory workers didn’t know enough about the engines to identify every small defect as it occurred. The only solution, managers decided, was a massive retraining effort. Except that didn’t really work, either. Even after nine months of retraining, the error rate had fallen by only 50 percent. So managers started hiring workers with more technical backgrounds, the kind of people who knew what an engine ought to look like and, therefore, could more easily spot what was amiss. The GE factory manufacturing CF6 engines in Durham, North Carolina, determined that the best way to find the right employees was to hire only candidates with FAA certification in engine manufacturing. Such workers, however, were already in high demand at other plants. So to attract them, managers said employees could have more autonomy.

They could schedule their own shifts and organize teams however they wanted. That required the plant to do away with centralized scheduling. Teams had to self-organize and figure out their own workflow. Welch had given his aircraft manufacturing division a stretch goal of reducing errors by 70 percent, an objective so audacious the only way to go about it was to change nearly everything about (a) how workers were trained, (b) which workers were hired, and (c) how the factory ran. By the time they were done, the Durham plant’s managers had collapsed organizational charts, remade job duties, and overhauled how they interviewed candidates, because they needed people with better team skills and more flexible mindsets. In other words, Welch’s stretch goal set off a chain reaction that remade how engines were manufactured in ways no one had imagined.

By 1999, the number of defects per engine had fallen by 75 percent and the company had gone thirty-eight months without missing a single delivery, a record. The cost of manufacturing had dropped by 10 percent every year. No SMART goal would have done that.

source: Smarter, Faster, Better

THE TRUE LEISURE IN LIFE

When you talk about leisure to anyone, the first things that would come in their mind would probably lying on the the beach while listening to the waves and getting their tan lines under the bright clear day with some piña colada on the side. Or traveling the globe and seeing different countries and continents and the exotic places one can only dream of. Or a staycation in a luxury hotel or resort.

Those are just some of the many definition we can derive from leisure and what’s in common to all those is that they all require a good sum of money in order for those leisure to materialize. Sources that provide ephemeral satisfaction, funded by compensation you get from labor and trade of your precious time.

All these would fall short to be considered as leisure in a stoic standard.

“Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only they truly live. Not satisfied to merely keep good watch over their own days, they annex every age to their own. All the harvest of the past is added to their store. ”

Seneca

Contemplation is how you make time for philosophy. Ledgering your life through reflection on your decisions that lead you to where you are at present. This practice doesn’t require special place or ambiance and time and most importantly, doesn’t cost you anything in order to do it, however, requires an unbiased view of previous events and the openness to accept shortcomings or faults as they unfold.

Only through an honest evaluation of one’s life can anyone find true wisdom that would enable them to make better decisions in the future in a way making them a better person.

It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously.

Seneca

The more time you make for philosophy the better you become. The objective eye that sees events as they are and unvarnished by emotions and personal interest requires time and consistency to acquire and can only develop through test. Hardship gives everyone the opportunity to test wisdom and resilience that they developed through philosophy. Knowing wisdom is not wisdom, only through action can anyone showcase their wisdom.

Anyone who preaches wisdom but unable to put their words to action are no better than a hypocrite. Although it doesn’t cost anything to contemplate, acquiring wisdom can be painful. To confront one’s belief towards the betterment of one’s life and the people around him. To challenge the validity of the status quo and live contrary to the existing culture granted that that culture is inconsistent and does not promote wisdom.

Life spent on any other leisure than the pursuit of wisdom is time wasted on earth. His existence does not count for living, for his time only benefited himself in striving to fill his insatiable appetite for pleasure and does not help improve the world around him.

Anyone who has the desire to make the world around him better would have to strive to be better. Time spent on philosophy is time well spent, and only through philosophy will anyone know how to live.

TIME HAS CHANGED BUT THE ACTORS REMAIN THE SAME

Closing @.86/share then flirted with 7.1 before the announcement of stock offering, betting on DGLY could have given you a profit of 725%

Not much movement on the stock after George Floyd’s death until it becomes violent and people started looting shops that spiked the gun and security stocks. DGLY consolidates for few days until the announcement of subscription service to enable the economically challenged law enforcement departments to purchase body cameras.

With negative net income reflecting on their books, DGLL;

announced the pricing of an underwritten public offering of 2,325,581 shares of its common stock at a price of $2.15 per share, for gross proceeds to the Company of approximately $5 million, before deducting underwriting discounts and other offering expenses. The Company intends to use the net proceeds from this offering for working capital, product development, order fulfillment and for general corporate purposes. The Company priced the offering based on the last closing price.

In addition, the Company has granted the underwriter a 45-day option to purchase up to an additional 213,953 shares of common stock offered in the public offering to cover over-allotments, if any.

Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed on Aug. 9, 2014, by Darren Wilson, a white police officer, in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. The shooting prompted protests that roiled the area for weeks. On Nov. 24, the St. Louis County prosecutor announced that a grand jury decided not to indict Mr. Wilson. The announcement set off another wave of protests. In March, the Justice Department called on Ferguson to overhaul its criminal justice system, declaring that the city had engaged in constitutional violations.