I always thought that investing was irrelevant to me. I always thought that I would make something one day and get rich, and then I would think about investing and managing my money.
But the reality hit me hard. Bill Gates founded Microsoft when he was 20, and Jobs founded Apple when he was 21. At 21, I took a detour to graduate from college. At that moment, I didn’t know that they both dropped out of school and started their own businesses. I didn’t have the guts to drop out of school, so I just entered the world and worked my way up to the age of 29 before I started my first company.
After I turned 21, I kept using Craig Newmark’s story to inspire me. The story goes like this:
Someone asked on a forum if there were any examples of older people in Silicon Valley who had become successful entrepreneurs, such as Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, etc. There are countless teenage success stories in Silicon Valley. The person said, “I’m over 30 years old, I don’t know if I still have the courage to start my own business.
At that time, Craig Newmark left a message saying, “I was 42 when I started my own business, and I made something called Craigslist.
Craigslist has not been listed yet, so it is impossible to say how high its market value is, but its annual revenue is at least over 1 billion US dollars. You know, Airbnb’s earliest users were all Craigslist users.
However, the incentive is fading because I’m 41 years old, and I’ll be 42 next year. After that, I can only rely on Wang Jiangmin’s 45-year-old business to motivate me. If I have a few more years, I guess I will have to console myself with the fact that JiangZiYa debuted at 80.
Last year I went through a rather big break in my life and started to reflect on it all and started to invest. I didn’t read any books or take any courses, I just bought a bunch of funds and stocks.
I don’t know how to buy stocks, buy indiscriminately, see colleagues and friends buy what they buy. So now it’s been almost 1 year. Earned a little, individual stocks also have losses. On the whole, I find that I am not suitable for being a trader, I don’t like to stare at the market all the time. I often forget to keep an eye on the market. But, all in all, I still made money.
Anything short term, I have a hard time doing well. I think this is my personality’s fate; my personality is not suitable for the short term. I’m not as eager to make money as I look at the K chart and be happy. I’m only suitable for the long term. I’m only good for the long term. I only buy stocks that I’m convinced are good, but they are temporarily undervalued. Once I buy them and forget about the ups and downs, these stocks always surprise me in the end.
On the other hand, I think this is also a problem in my life. Life is also a matter of character. Of course, I envy Gates and Jobs, but I’m probably not the kind of hero who became famous as a teenager. Well, isn’t that nonsense, I’m not a teenager anymore.
I think one’s late success may have been forced upon one, but who doesn’t want to be famous as a teenager? I may not be a late bloomer, but I can only be called a late bloomer whenever I can make something out of it.
Maybe it’s a little late to start developing long term thinking in your 40’s. However, it’s better to be productive at 60 than to be unproductive at 60. But it’s better to be productive at 60 than to be unproductive at 60.
We are all unfortunate and fortunate.
One of my high school classmates actually died in a car accident before I graduated from college, while he was attending college in another city. Regardless of my diabetes and high blood pressure, I survived to the age of 40.
When I was a kid, I lived on a farm. My mom worked with a lot of aunts on the farm. When we were kids, we didn’t know the names of our aunts and uncles. We just knew whose mother and whose father they were. When I was young, some of my aunts and uncles passed away, some under 50 years old.
For the first two days, there was a big gathering of more than 30 aunts on the farm, and my mother was there, and they were walking down the street after dinner in a restaurant. I said hello to them. Soon some of them recognized me, and a bunch of them asked me if I recognized them. A few of them still remembered me. But some of them I couldn’t recall.
When I got home in the evening, I talked with my mother, and I said, “Technology is progressing, as you can see. Some of the uncles and aunts on the farm passed away before they were 50. But the ones who didn’t, most of them are still alive and well now, in their 60s and 70s. My mother also said that in those days, if you had cancer, you would die.
The world is slowly changing, and everyone has the potential to live longer. Our mindset needs to change, as well. My parents’ generation retired and is basically on a pension. But we can continue to invest, write code, and write articles if we don’t have Alzheimer’s when we retire. Life may be just beginning in retirement.
At my website Ourcoders.com Every year, people ask if it’s okay to start learning to program when they’re 30 or 40, to migrate, change careers, or invest. The answer, of course, is yes.
Why not? From the age of 21 to 39, I lived entirely by writing code (including starting my own business). In the past two years, I’ve mostly made a living by writing articles (including technical consulting), and maybe in a few years, my main livelihood will be making videos. From a skills perspective, I’ve always been a long term thinker. If a skill can be used for 5-10 years, how can I lose if I spend a year and a half learning it?
But life is not only about skills, but it’s also about how to invest, how to manage money, and that’s something I’ve only started to learn in the last two years. Some people will think that you’ve been playing stocks for a year and only made so little money. Is it worth it? Or are you learning too slowly? I feel good about myself. I’ve made so much money in only 1 year. Can I keep investing until I’m 60, 90? How much do I will earn in 20 or even 50 years?
Slow doesn’t mean “always slow”. But if profits can be accumulated, slow is a huge force. I don’t want to be fast. I don’t have the ability. I don’t have the mental capacity. I want to earn 10% every year, which is good enough for me.
Well, this year I did, and it’s up to me to keep up a steady, cumulative momentum.
There are so many useful things in this world, how much could we learn if we only studied between elementary school and college? The good thing is that in these 70 years, from 20 to 90, no one has ever forbidden us to learn something slowly and become something slowly.
Yes, I still have a great future ahead of me, and I’m not even 80 yet ……