Changes...a crappy title, fitting for a Saturday night FB note

Maybe it's the sign of the economically trying times, I am spending my Saturday night entertaining myself by reading my old xanga entries. Well it's not quite that sad. There was one particular entry that I had in mind and I had to sift through almost 3 years of comments to find it. The one about careers and filial duty etc. For those of you who missed it here it is in its grammatically abhorrent entirety.

Monday, January 09, 2006
We were discussing careers yesterday. So many people are stuck in dead end jobs either by lack of ambition, lack of opportunity or lack of freedom. They make just enough to scrape by from check to check. Maybe they live above their means, or maybe they have too many mouths to feed. But whatever the reason there are plenty of people who just end up 50 years old wondering why their chance to make it big never came. There are many ways to become successful; you can hustle, grind, or just get lucky. But there are many many more ways to just settle; you can just get lazy, just get by or just get married.

It's common knowledge that Americans have the lowest average savings rate of any industrialized nation. According to a study done by Newshour with Jim Lehrer in 1995 American households on average saved 5% of their income. By 2000 that figured had dropped to 0% and American consumers owed 7.2 trillion dollars on their credit cards. That was six years ago and I don't think that has changed much since.

These figures don't usually apply to first generation Asian families (I'm using Asian for lack of a better term) because they save upwards of 90% of their income so that they can fulfill the American dream. So they break their backs to build a business, buy a house and move to the suburbs to raise their kids in good school districts. Unfortunately their kids tend to grow up drinking more Coca-cola than sorrow can see only the best quality crab while acting like paper tigers and become trapped by the rules of the game. But Joy Luck Club aside many of us 2nd generation types have far more American tendencies. How many of your parents or grandparents would spend $300 on a bottle of Grey Goose or $1000 on a bag? Why am I rambling about our financial recklessness? Because I'm a jerk who took too much for granted for too long and this is my xanga. lol

My dad bailed me out of a couple of pretty bad situations over the past couple years. In exchange I signed away my freedom and agreed to work for the family business. At first I hated it and then I grew used to it and just went through the motions. For the past 6 months or so I've actually thrown myself into it wholeheartedly. I don't wear a suit to work, I don't have a corner office with a view of midtown and I don't get saturdays or federal holidays off, I have 20 minutes for lunch and I don't get paid overtime.

I used to complain that this was a dead end job and everyone said that I should be off doing something better. But I couldn't picture myself trying to climb that corporate ladder grinding the 9-5 in my cubicle. Some people do that really well, but it's not for me. I like being a student, but I hate going to school. I want to go to law school, but I don't want to be a lawyer wierd eh?

So why do I keep working here in this little office in Brooklyn? I got a decent gig here. I'm practically the boss. I get paid in cash. I get comped for gas and food. I get to drive around to see clients. I learned how to drive forklifts and backhoe loaders. Most importantly I've learned how to haggle like a 65 year old woman buying vegetables on Market St. I don't get big bonuses, but I will inherit the whole damn thing. So what the hell am I complaining about?

It isn't really what I wanted to do. I don't want to do this for the rest of my life.etc/ etc.

Sometimes I feel like I'm taking the easy way out. But every time I consider quitting to do my own thing I feel bad. Anywhere else it wouldn't really matter whether I was there or not. But here I'm actually somewhat important. My opinions and decisions have a direct impact on the day to day. So I guess staying here nurses my ego as well as my sense of security. If I were to quit things would still chug along but I would be abandoning something that my grandfather started and my dad continued. Somewhere along the way I got attached to this little operation. I look out for my workers, I actually care about my customers (the ones that aren't complete fucktards) and I want to see the company grow. We went from grossing 6 figures to 7 the past couple years. I want to get it to 8 and more...and it finally feels possible.

So what the hell is my point? The point is what I thought was a dead end job is actually not as dead end as I thought it was. Most limitations are self-imposed. I guess I felt like writing a pep talk for myself to say things are a lot better than they seem. Yea I guess this entry doesn't really do much for anyone except me.

So here's a funny tidbit for you guys.

During the race between the tortise and the hare the tortise stopped to pick up an ant who was hitchiking. A little bit further down the road the tortise sees a snail crawling by. The kindhearted tortise told the snail to hop on. The ant promptly said to the snail "Hang on tight this tortise is faaaast.!" lol

Told you this was a bad joke.

Nearly 3 years later I find myself in a very strange and new place. So many things have changed so dramatically in the past 33 months; people, places, philosophies. The next line is supposed to be, "but so much is still the same." But no things are not the same. They're actually pretty damn different.

In January of 2006 I was attending classes at Stony Brook University as a super super senior. I was seriously memorizing odds charts, card counts and comp points. I was contemplating law school as a fallback career in case the whole Pro Poker thing didn't work out. I was wholeheartedly considering gritting my teeth, putting my back into it and plowing forward with the family business as a full time career. The economy was chugging along at breakneck speed with carefree over-leveraged abandon. Words like crisis, subprime meltdown and election were still on the somewhat distant horizon. You could get a mortgage without pledging your firstborn for the next two generations. It was a heady time clouded by a thin veneer of nostalgia and a twinge of regret and it wasn't really all that long ago at all.

Somehow between there and here I got fed up. I flip flopped. I went through a lot of soul searching (being broke) and I learned how to live life again (being very not broke) and then I gained a new perspective with some real in depth introspection (being broke yet again) following which I applied that new found knowledge into a solid direction (not broke) and despite a few hiccups (periods of temporary brokeness) I've managed to stay the course, no more damned parentheses. Is it very shallow of me to frame my personal emotional growth in a financial context? Maybe, but Dick Clark says, "music is the soundtrack of our lives." Money is the scorecard of our lives, even though a high score isn't a prerequisite to victory. Growing up a fobby ABC in New York City, I am wired to unabashedly pursue money with gusto. We've covered this topic in the past. 20 years of school. 50 years of work. 20 years of incontinence. A lifetime of regret. yada yada yada. But it was in this pursuit of money that I have learned the most about myself and those around me.

Water, food, shelter. The basic necessities for human survival. Well in every part of the world that we need concern ourselves with at the moment, all 3 of those things require MONEY. Sure there's a big difference between; hydrant tap/rat meat/cardboard hut and Kona Nigari/Masa/15 CPW. Most of us capitalist drones spend our lives trying to claw our way from one end of the spectrum to the other.

So what have I learned? How am I different? You don't really want to hear that part. I'm more of an asshole. My attitude is take it or leave it, I know what I need and what I don't need, either be a positive force in my life or get out. Some might say these are the tendencies of a sociopath. They're probably right.

Given that money play such an overwhelmingly huge role in our lives I've spent the past couple of years trying to understand it. I've studied it more in depth than I have studied it more than anything in my 22 years of schooling combined. The learning continues and I doubt it will ever end. But I have analyzed and theorized hundreds of angles regarding wealth and its many evils from acquisition to disposition. I know how to make it, I know how to save it and most importantly of all I know how to spend it. Unfortunately I learned the last part first, the other two were much more difficult.

That study led me to my current career, a much reviled and underrated field. The disdain with which it is regarded is perhaps due to the fact that it is populated heavily by complete morons who don't know their ass from their elbow and would be better off scraping roadkill to sell to their grandmothers at hyper inflated prices as a 50th anniversary dinner banquet feast which they would have no compunctions about doing so long as the price was right. This noble profession is that of a real estate broker. My logic is that of the 3 basic human necessities; water,food and shelter, we wacky homo sapiens have managed to create a society where the 3rd one is the foundation of our entire civilization.
The very first city was a place where nomads decided to take a break from wandering about, plunked themselves down and brought the food and water to one place and then told their friends to come join them. It was a neolithic catered open house at the unveiling of a brand new sales center. Who needs exposed brick when you can have an entire limestone cave.

Point is, everyone needs a place to live and a place to hawk their wares. Even in our grand digital age we still need a warehouse to store those servers and those tech engineers still need at least a dorm to go back to and they still need to be fed and entertained and those people in turn etc., etc. we still need buildings and that requires land.

So I decided to embed myself in a career that is tied to a fundamental tenet of human survival. What a great way to hype up a shitty job. I do enjoy real estate, but it is definitely a shitty job. Actually that's a little redundant. Shitiness is implied in the word job, no?

I have digressed so far from the original scope of this note. I should probably go back and reorganize the I whole damn thing, but I won't. How many of you are still reading? Shouldn't you go do something more productive?

So I decided to get into real estate at the tail end of the bubble. Always a step ahead aren't I? After a small taste of the potential rewards I was hooked. I did basically the same thing that I did for the family business. I drove around, saw clients, looked at sites, gave them quotes, shook hands, smiled, haggled, filled out some forms, collected money. The only difference was that very last part involved a significantly larger amount of the good stuff. The next step of course is real estate ownership. Copiously obscene amounts of income generating, tax sheltered, appreciating while you depreciate it real estate.

Economic crisis, socialism, meltdown, credit illiquidity. It's all happened before and it'll all happen again. Thanks battlestar. There's always money to be made.

But as I delved deeper into my newfound career I learned that I could make money, but I couldn't make time. I could and I have spent my time more efficiently, but it was still all to finite. I had to divide my time between real estate and the family business on top of all of my other hooha. Work/life balance and all that psychobabble. I actually sat down with my father and told him that I would be working increasingly fewer hours at the shop. I went from 6 days a week to 4 to 3 to 2 and it's dwindling. He still introduces me as his son who just finished college and just started working there and will take over one day. Miind you, I have worked on and off for him since 1999. The hierarchy of a Chinese family owned business does not allow for innovation and changes occur at a pace that make the Mao run communist cadres melting cooking pots to make steel look like Google HQ. It's no wonder that after nearly two years my father still refuses to accept the fact that I have decided to stake out my own path. In my xanga entry of old I looked at it as an either/or proposition. But in practice, it turns out that I can do my own thing and run the family business. In fact the change has been mutually beneficial for both tasks.

The ultimate goal has always been freedom. The pursuit of happiness is a misleading phrase. Happiness tends to arrive when you stop pursuing it. But that is a story for another day. Moral is never confuse I can't with I won't.