Image of my desk, Winter 2024.
At the time of writing, it is the beginning of 2025, and last year has been a never-ending battle. At the beginning of the year, for some reason a friend who graduated with me from the University of Hong Kong and has helped in the business since then, left the business, so I have to take up basically all the tasks in the business, save for the physical retail part. It was rough. We just went from selling basically under 5 products, to 30 products with the release of Re Bedding around the end of 2023. I knew I have to step up. There was no other options. Don’t waste anytime on whining, it would not help. Just put the work in, and just work.
And that was what I did.
Since we are on the topic of work, reminds me of a story I just read recently, in 2018, When Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA was at 91, he said to the company managers in the meeting, that “I am so jealous of you, you get to continue work in IKEA and continue to work in it.”
Then he passed away same year.
This is the dedication to work that all of us should learn from and follow. Too many people out there are not hardworking enough. I think hardworking and a dedication to work is a very basic requirement if you want to build something that is truly impactful for the world. I know this is going to cause some disagreements among some, so let me explain. First, it is perfectly fine to choose your own lifestyle. It is ok not to “build something that is impactful”, for real. But I think the issue is a lot of people wanted to build soemthing impactful in the world, but they are just not putting enough work. Hardworking is a very baisc requirement to this. And I also think having a good heart, to journal down this process, and distill lessons for the future comers, also tells us soemthing about the person. You’re welcome. Haha, but for real, I want you to succeed too.
This is why instead of going to bed or take a break, or watch dumb videos, I am here typing this, at 10:35PM on Sunday. Because I care about you. I know, by the magic of the internet, you somehow found my blog (not sure why), I wanted to make your trip to my blog worth it.
Since we are here, let us go deeper. I think this will get clearer the more I progress in life, but at this point of my life (just turned 27), I have an observation on why most people said they wanted one thing but seldom really get it. This might be a little bit offensive to some so I gotta be careful in phrasing this. Here it is:
Most people say they wanted one thing, but their lifestyle suggest otherwise.
The easiest example as you might have guessed it, is the “getting fit” thing. Most people said they wanted to get fit, but really their lifestyles says “McDonald’s and Hot Dogs. No exercise thank you.” You get the point.
But one thing that is more related and easily missed by us is that on work. If we wanted to truly make an impact to the world with our work, we have to set up and structure everything to align to this goal. If we reverse-engineer this, there has to be a lot of opimisation in each aspects of your life, so that everything can contribute to this goal. I guess you understand what I mean.
At the end I wanted to talk a bit about this contradicting paradigm between the “taking mindset” and the “giving mindset“.
In this world, there are two types of people — people with the taking mindset, and people with the giving mindset. Now I am not saying which one is bad and which is good, I am just going to put it out here, for you to think about. People with the taking mindset focuses on “taking”. Basically, their minds go like, how can I give the least and get the most from the world out there? They view things from a very zero-sum game and “me vs you” perspective. That is, they would think, if I give you my m0ney, I will have less and you will have more. If I can give less in return to getting more, why should I give more? In fact, most of the people in the world operate this way. And most of them live life in all these countings and miseries. Be careful.
Now there is an opposing paradigm, that is, the giving mindset. People with the giving mindset do not see things in the same way like the people with the taking mindset. They believe things are readily available, and seldom try to “get things”. In fact, they always want to GIVE things to the world. They would not count how much I have given out in exchange for how much I am taking back (while not being dumb)… They want to provide value to the world. They think about “how can I contribute to the world today?” all day, everyday. Shockingly, they are happy, and even though they are not thinking about the rewards, rewards come to them.
I think you know how to act.
I truly support you, always. You can do it.
Best,
Ryan