Category: Post Untitled, volume three

MONDAY, 1 JUNE 2009

A few years ago, I said how you earn an income is not who you are; it is merely how you make money.

In fact, how you choose to earn an income requires so many choices – if you are lucky, I should add – from so many possibilities that you eventually choose something either because you reckon you would have an easier time making money with it than with something else, or because you know who you are and what you want to do with your life.

What you ultimately choose as a career or how you choose to earn a living is for many people a concrete manifestation of identity – of how they see themselves, how they want to be seen, and of how they choose to spend their days and nights, or a significant block of hours each day.

WEDNESDAY, 3 JUNE 2009

13:21

For me, the attraction of betting and trading lies in the fact that no identity or appearance is required, only commitment to the minimum of routines, and a predilection for statistics, patterns, and strategies.

14:10

It is as if I have forgotten since 2006 who and what I am and what my life is about with all this obsession with making money.

“Money is important,” I wrote at one point. When do you lose your soul? is what I ask now.

16:58

Someone without identity is dead to the world.

Want to appear, must have identity.

Who are you? What are you? What is your purpose? What is your function? What are your goals?

21:34

The thought occurs to me that I would do better managing money than making money. Problem is, I do not have money to manage, so I would have to focus on first accumulating enough money. For this, I reckon, one needs identity – or then, public identity: “Hi, how are you? My name is X” type of identity.

This, to me, is apparently a huge fuck-up.

21:50

Isn’t it ironic: I recently had all these insights about brands and identity and “Platform35 is Brand Smit” … and now I am basically saying I’m like an old pickup truck stuck in a ditch full of quicksand when it comes to identity – spinning my wheels until the air is thick with rubber, but I’m not getting anywhere.

______________________

FRIDAY, 29 MAY 2009

10:40

I mentioned this recently, but I am once again thinking: my activities of the past forty months have been conducive to the manifestation of an inherited tendency I have toward manic behaviour.

11:23

Funny thing is, I didn’t connect the dots, not until recently. I think it is one of those things where you can go your whole life without knowing you have something in your blood – like the genetic potential for cancer or something. If the environment is right, and other factors are conducive, then the writing is, however, on the wall: it will manifest.

In my case, it has manifested. It also wasn’t the first time that it manifested, but other times I called it something else – eccentric behaviour, compulsive behaviour, compelled by faith or, in the service of an idea.

Is this a handicap? It could be. It is, in many cases. You would have to control it. You should be aware of it. You must be wary of it.

15:02

The psycho-analyst will say: Brand Smit suffers from periodic episodes of Hypomania; or rather, he experiences these periodic episodes, then he suffers the consequences in the following weeks and months as he tries to be “consistent”, to “see things through” and to finish what he started instead of “flip-flopping from one project to the next”.

SATURDAY, 30 MAY 2009

12:20

So, what am I saying?

I am caught between two poles: days, and sometimes weeks of creative, inspired activity characterised by totally exaggerated ambition and unrealistic, over-optimistic expectations, and then the days and weeks in between of trying to make something of the over-ambitious projects that I had started, but without the energy, the conviction, and the inspiration of the “other time”.

22:12

The conversation would go like this: “The bad news is that there is indeed something wrong with you. The good news is that it isn’t so bad, as long as you keep it under control.”

______________________

MONDAY, 4 MAY 2009

It seems my attempts to make money on the Internet have been held back by a question I had considered answered: Who am I?

I underestimated the degree to which the Internet represented a new environment. I didn’t know that I would again be compelled to ask and answer certain questions like any other case of a geographical transfer of your person would necessitate: Who am I in this place? Who am I for the people I am going to encounter, in the conversations I am going to get involved in, and in the projects that I am going to work on?

THURSDAY, 7 MAY 2009

After weeks of thinking about things like my own brand name, and the increasing use of the moniker “Platform35” as a personal handle on digital markets and as participant in forums, and the identification of three domains as my primary focus, and lessons learned about using pictures of myself on websites and the benefits of using my own name, I finally see the forest for the trees.

“It’s been about identity all this time?” I cry out, and I wonder why I – I! – hadn’t realised this a long time ago.

I was seduced for too long by the idea of doing business on a website rather than face to face, and by stories of being anonymous and making money while you stay behind your computer screen – which is possible, but a part of me wants to appear. Of course I, “Brand Smit of Personal Agenda” did not want to appear as a marketer (“How vulgar!”), but I certainly wanted to make money from home.

It was in a fix. I did write one or two articles and published them under my own name on EzineArticles, but I disappeared behind a pseudonym again pretty soon after.

My advice (to myself): Define yourself in the area where you reside, work, do business, study and live. Define yourself and introduce yourself as the person you say you are. That is if you want to appear at all, and if you want to harvest and enjoy the fruits that appearance brings.

And to think I already knew this in 2004.

SATURDAY, 9 MAY 2009

I thought I had resolved the question of who and what I am by 2004, but the moment I entered a new environment (Internet Marketing in 2006), the confusion and uncertainty returned, with a thousand fresh troops armed to the teeth.

______________________

FRIDAY, 17 APRIL 2009

Starting from next week, I will do nothing every now and then. I am getting the idea that inspiration is scared off by constant activity.

SATURDAY, 18 APRIL 2009

This is the problem with the idea, the belief that everything is within your reach, that you can do anything: Suppose it is true, what do you do and what do you leave? And how do you decide?

MONDAY, 20 APRIL 2009

If you want to make money, there is a series of questions you’d have to answer before you can move forward. First, you need to decide whether you want to make money by

A. selling something – physical items, a service, your time;

B. making investments and waiting for a dividend; or by

C. speculating, to increase the money you already have.

Now, if you do not have enough money for B or C, you don’t really have a choice – you have to sell. (You can of course borrow money for option C, but that is such a bad idea that it doesn’t warrant serious consideration.)

Having made peace with the notion that you’d have to sell, you are faced with two new questions:

1. WHAT are you going to sell? and

2. to WHOM?

Considering that the market dictates the “what”, it boils down to you needing to determine “who” your market is. Or, considering some other factors, which is the market whose needs you would most want to meet?

A basic demographic profile of your market – location, age, income, gender, and so on – will bring you to the next set of questions: What is your market already doing? What do they want to do? What would they like to do more often? What thing do they already have of which they would like more? Is there something that they do that they would like to be easier? What benefit would they like to enjoy without actually doing much, or without learning to do something themselves?

WEDNESDAY, 29 APRIL 2009

Not that I had been deliberately thinking about it, but the idea came to me late this afternoon that one of the reasons why I am not making much money with any of my Internet projects, is identity.

Fact is, what I wrote about myself and identity in 2003 and 2004 was written with a particular environment in mind: myself as a foreigner in Taiwan, with friends and family and acquaintances as part of my world, and me being part of an abstract “wider community”. In this world, I knew who I was; I even asked somewhat arrogantly, “Do you know who you are?”

What I have been referring to since 2006 as the “Internet” is an entirely different world. Almost overnight I was faced with possibilities, risks, and opportunities to develop my talent and potential. I also have opportunities to be part of forum communities where no one knows who I am, and where I have to prove myself as someone who can make valuable contributions to the specific community. Can I? To be honest, I can add a few comments if the conversation is about identity or religion or other serious matters, but what about when it comes to freelance writing markets or sports betting or social networking?

And since we are on the subject, who or what am I – e-book author or so-called e-book reseller? Am I a “short report” producer, or a contextual advertising guy?

In 2004, I would have answered: It is not who you are, it is simply what you do for money. Was I just a little wrong, or did I miss the target completely? After all, there are people who say, “Listen, I’m not a sales rep. A shop owner perhaps, maybe a taxi driver, but I’m definitely not a sales rep.” Is it not true that there are people who can say that with absolute certainty?

______________________

THURSDAY 12 MARCH 2009

The Chinese film director Chen Kaige speaks of “cinema as church” – where a crowd of people sit in the dark, staring straight ahead, and not just being entertained but receiving something.

What they receive is not so much message, but stimulus, something that causes them to critically look at their own lives, that causes them to wonder and think and contemplate their own futures.

THURSDAY, 8 APRIL 2009

“Be like water,” Bruce Lee still recites in my head. This dictum is also true when it comes to making money.

I know I can make money by promoting products or by selling things, but when I think of myself as a sales rep, a glorified door-to-door salesman, then I am not like water. Then I am like thick, gritty mud you have to pour through a narrow paper funnel.

On the other hand, if I think of making available or recommending resources that will facilitate the process that will lead to a better life for other people, or if I think of offering my skills and knowledge at a reasonable price to help others where they get stuck, then the mud becomes watery and the grit crumbles and disappears.

Identifying and removing the obstacles in your way will increase the probability of you achieving your goal; it will significantly enhance the possibility of you reaching your destination in good time. If neither Bruce Lee nor Confucius said that, I am sure someone else did.

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