1. Probably the one Malaysian value I picked up before even graduating from highschool, was laziness. I have been thinking about how to make the absolute minimum amount of money for most of my life, probably starting around the age of ten. Back then I thought maybe 500 RM/month would be enough.
2. The people I do meet who want to make money, have disappointingly low notions of how much money to aim for. But I guess I have chosen my environment ... I began studying commerce in 2006, in Malaysia, a country whose notion of a unicorn company is one that remains 17 B USD in loss after 14 years in business.
2.1. Speaking of which, I have understandably mixed feelings about that particular unicorn. They are very nice people, and make lots of money as employees ... many yuppies I met in the 2000s, now work there. But I could never bring myself to take it seriously as a tech company - perhaps because I don't personally use such products at that price. (Male privilege and the 6 RM taxi ride to work, in 2005.) Plus it's not very high-tech, more of a service co, so off flavour for tech. Furthermore just thinking about Uber and extrapolating, I could never convince myself that the privatisation of public infrastructure would have any viable exit except back to the public sector in the very long run. Long, painful, cloudy, investment horizon. Doesn't matter much to wage-workers, I guess. Mattered a lot to me. Hm. Weird.
2.1.a. I'm not averse to lossy ventures at all. But I prefer to fail as small as possible. I think the only time I took outside money, I capped losses under 100 grand, after six years.
3. I find that I work best when I allocate large periods of time to give unwieldy projects a lot of attention. Smaller projects are not risky enough, and shorter timeframes seem too risky. Stupid personality quirk, I suppose. Pre-college was a decade. College was four years. Post-college was 20 years. Sabbatical is ten.
3.1. Corollary - I am not so practiced at dividing my attention. I can make money as a trader, but if I start studying something else at the same time, I lose money. If I'm doing well in business, I'm not learning anything, because predictability is orthogonal to learning.
4. I have been testing a restricted diet for science, for a few years. It feels efficient, but not for performance growth or hypertrophy. So I am pensive, in a bad way.
Ah well, on with the program for now. Today is day ... 1171, 32.08% in.
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