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Wealth from Adam Khoo and Me

I’ve been reading Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires by Singapore’s own Adam Khoo for the past week. I must say that this is so far the most interesting entrepreneurship books I’ve read. Perhaps it’s because that he has a similar writing style to mine. His anecdotal style makes me glued to the book and learn more about these so called secrets.

But while his books have been about business and financial literacy, I’ve been writing more about civic issues, technology and the occasional business pieces. I find that I’m talented in writing civic issues, which prompted me to wonder if I should be a journalist and work for BBC. The BBC website is my primary source of news and perhaps that’s why I’m inclined to think that BBC has the best journalistic standards. I’d rather not work for MediaCorp or SPH. My rebel-like personality does not suit well with the pro-PAP stance of its papers and journalists having huge egos don’t like to see their masterpieces rejected.

On second thought, a huge part of me is a risk taker, and I’d rather be running a business than working for someone. So here I am, running my own nearly-daily online zine. After reading some of Adam’s book, it inspired me to press on with this experiment of mine. Note that this is an experiment, and I am prepared for failure. If I fail, I’d just continue experimenting, until Eureka!, I find a solution.

While I may not totally agree with some of his opinions, I do agree with most of his assumptions, ideas and points of what makes a person a potential millionaire. I find that Adam is obsessed with wealth-making, short of being meglomaniac. Perhaps he does present a strong bout of narcissism, especially since he names a business after himself. It does suggest he likes to be revered, and he does make outrageous boasts about how his business outperforms or supercedes his competitors. But since he has earned his way up, who’s to say he doesn’t deserve that authority to make such claims?

At 26, what I have in my bank account is peanuts compared to his nett worth. So, I shall not suggest that I know more about business than he does. But I do have my own ideas about what makes a person successful in business and I’ll draw parallels and perpendiculars against 5 of his ideas.

Passion

Passion is one thing that a lot of so-called businesspersons think they have, but in truth, they lack it. Passion is the difference between people like Steve Jobs (CEO, Apple Inc), and someone like you. Adam nailed it on the spot when he described what kind of business is a good business to go into when he was asked by some of his course participants, and I completely agree.

In this age of enlightened fiscal awareness, I observed that a lot of Singaporeans are struggling to get out of the rat race by moonlighting in programmes called Multi-Level Marketing. When the name of their business received flak, they renamed it to Network Marketing. In my opinion, you can call it by any other name, marketing is still marketing. No difference.

If you ask anyone in the MLM world, you realise that they have little or no passion for the product. They’re not fascinated by it, and they don’t know the inner workings of the product, and in all likeliness, they didn’t invent it. Most times if not all, you will find that people who peddle these products are only in it for the passion of making money, motivated by the dream of living comfortably, far far away from the rat race.

If you have passion for your business, you’d have the main ingredient to become successful in it. Without it, your business will die a natural death, joining those other 90% of businesses who fail to make it in their first year of business. Mostly those who lack that drive.

So before you start a business, you must have an interest in what you do, and you must have more than merely liking it. You must be passionate about it!

Passion to the point of obsession

Adam describes that he would work 19-hour days, everyday, and only rest on Chinese New Year, and even that for 1 day, and he seems to suggest that you must do such things to be successful like him. I believe that passion for something is good. But like all things, one must be balanced.

I believe that being successful doesn’t mean you should sacrifice your social life, but you should forego some of the more pointless or less productive ones. For example, these are some of the activities you can do without or have less of:

• Bumming around (In Malay, we call it Lepak)
• Partying
• Gaming
• Anything that you do that does not help you make money and the list goes on…

Less or none of these activities should push you away from your inertia of non-enrichment. I notice that those who tend to fail, are those that do not put their time into good use. In Adam’s case, he makes use of most of his time making more money. Not a bad activity I must add, and obviously, he enjoys it. People who tend to go clubbing a lot or people who skive from school are often those who do poorly academically. Unfortunately, they may also be people who have untapped intellect and if they had spent their time doing more productive things, they could be very successful today.

Dedication

What I think Adam can do better to illustrate his idea of passion is to make use of this word called “dedication”. Adam is a dedicated educator. He likes making money, running businesses and sharing with people his knowledge on how to be financially independent. He is genuinely sincere about helping you reach your potential as can be seen by his extremely thorough programmes, from academic success to financial freedom.

Dedication is what separates Adam and his business competitors. He dedicates his waking hour to help you with your success. Where others only give you a 1 hour preview, Adam gives you a free 1 day course. Where others catch up with you on an adhoc basis, Adam provides free dedicated access to his guides via email for a minimum of 3 solid months.

Dedication is what makes people like Fandi Ahmad the best footballer Singapore has ever produced. A lot of younger Singaporeans, particularly those born from 1987 and after may not remember his heroics. I am a big fan of Fandi. I was one of those crazy people that bought his biography. I read how he would spend an hour extra a day to perfect his skills. That’s dedication, and that’s why he was successful in Europe. Fandi became Singapore’s first sport millionaire and today, he is also in the Dutch team, Groningen FC’s hall of fame.

You don’t need to spend 19 hour days like Adam. But if you spend an extra hour everyday to hone your skills, then you’d only get better.

You don’t need $100,000 capital

You already have a million dollar capital and you don’t even realise that it’s there. Your brain, says Adam. Your brain is the gift that God gave you that helps you create ideas. And ideas are priceless. You certainly don’t need capital. Ideas are all you need. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak didn’t have $100,000 capital when they started an idea to make pre-fabricated boards for personal computers. Their first office was a garage at Job’s home! And they paid their friends $1 for each board assembled for a $20 profit. Today, Apple Inc is a multi-million/billion dollar business with high profits selling the best computers on Earth, the Apple Macintosh.

Inaction will not realise an idea

I must admit that I am a procastinator. I tend to wait till the cows come home and rush for the last mile. If I’m lucky, I’d only just make it, and if I had achieved better, that must have been a fluke. But if I was consistent, I tend to not just achieve, I over-achieve.

I’ve written countless of business plans, from cafes with a niche online audience, to amateur soccer competitions with an online social network, to a music social network with an internet version of Idol. A lot of these ideas eventually became reality, but by other people. I had procrastinated and I paid the price of non-enrichment.

Adam was right that ideas are priceless. They may be worth a million dollars, but without action, they may be worth nothing.

A failure adverse culture stunts success

Adam was talking about the traits of Millionaires being able to turn failure into success. He cites how Donald Trump had lost $935 million but somehow turned it into a $3.7 billion fortune. I do not agree with Adam that most people with that much wealth would call it quits. However, most people who don’t have that much wealth and hears about such failures would call it quits even if they had lost $5,000 in the first 6 months.

In Singapore, failure is not an option. Maybe it’s the educational system. You can’t be a failure to go to college, and if you are a failure, your place is in ITE. For some cases, the non-achieving student may be just plain lazy and thus did not even make an attempt to achieve something in life, which of course thoroughly deserve a place there. But there are others who break out from this stereotype. I’ve seen ITE students who are hardworking and willing to work to be somebody. These people usually do not end up with college degrees, but they will end up with a more colourful life, while a few have gone on to Polytechnics and even University. These are what I like to call the late bloomers and for me, they have achieved more than those who get straight As every year.

I think however, the system is influenced by the people’s culture. Our Asian culture has this paranoia of losing face. People who fail are not well received by the community and the thought of being embarrassed in front of your other friends and relatives is simply just unacceptable. This failure adverse culture transcends into business. Venture Capitalists firms here are very conservative in my opinion and they have no intention of risking thousands for a new brilliant idea unless that idea can be proven to succeed.

This stunts creativity and in turn success. It has been proven time and time again that the creative triumphs even the grey money-making monster. Apple created the first personal computers with a mouse and GUI. At the time, there was no such innovation, and Apple made a huge breakthrough in personal computing. They made computers accessible to normal people. Microsoft in partnership with IBM and later with other computer makers made PCs even easier with a simpler OS and made it the giant it is today. But this large behemoth is way behind in innovation, and Apple has time and time again showed that even though they are smaller, they can become the market leader in personal computing. They created the first personal computer in Apple I, the first PDA in Apple Newton, and they revolutionised portable music, completely making Sony Walkmans and MDs irrelevant with their iPod. Today, Apple has reinvented the phone and is poised to gain a leadership position in the smartphone domain. Whereas Microsoft’s pathway to dominance is by bullying the smaller companies to extinction. Their anti-competitive actions caused companies like Netscape and Real Networks to utter footnotes in the IT world.

But with an open playing field like the Internet, Microsoft has found itself lagging, grabbing only 4% of Internet advertising revenue as opposed to Google’s 77%. Google is so much smaller, but they never stop innovating. PC makers like IBM, HP and Dell find themselves way behind Apple because of their lack of innovation to make better PCs.

In a nutshell, failure cannot be feared to achieve success.

Altogether now

So let me sum it up for you in a single sentence. Success in business requires a person to be passionate and dedicated at what he does, coupled with consistent action and an enterprising idea and a willingness to be fearless of failure.

And that is wealth by Adam Khoo and me.