Besides this sentence, everything else was written on January 1, 2022. (mildly edited for clarity)
When things happen, it happens at an unimaginable pace. This is the nature of life, and it’s what makes life so interesting. When a business collapses, it collapses quickly. When a country collapses, it collapses rapidly. This escalation in things is not restricted to the negative end of the spectrum of things — it is the same for the positive things. Unlike fragrance that diffuses slowly in a room, the day your business takes off, or the love you met, happens within a snap. It occurs at a specific moment and specific day. This makes life meaningful, for these life-changing events take place quickly and often unexpectedly. During dull days, we crave for such events to take place. Such desire makes us impatient and easily fall into the scheme of quick fixes and overnight success. With this clarity in place, we can begin discussing the new year’s resolution.
Goals must be specific, and a new year’s resolution has to be the opposite. It should not be a step-by-step guide but a north star that a glance could derive from no specific actions. The answer should cost a reasonable amount of time for self-reflection and self-reconciliation. A clear sense of why matters in a new year’s resolution. Why do you want to get fit? Why do you want to do journaling? If we have no more comprehensive picture of the pyramid we are building and only gather a bucket list of to-dos, it will lead us to a 5-day freshness that will soon fade away. Then, life becomes dull and shit again. We will look for other quick fixes and a new bucket list of what we do. To me, as I’m building my business into an autonomous capital wheel that runs on its own, as I love to put it, the core reason is that I want to have enough time to play with my kids and spend with them in the future. This is why I am a try-hard to build my venture instead of working a regular day job. A day job would not provide me with enough capital and personal time to live with my family without sacrificing much family time. However, if I share this “why” with my employees and business partners, I doubt they would be willing to be led by me because this “why” is not mutual — how would they find it meaningful to work like hell to provide enough capital and free time for me to consume? This dilemma naturally leads me to examine the true reason for the business itself because the reason I do start up should not be confused with the reason for the business’s existence.
For ASIDU, it is to provide personalized consulting and disrupt the consulting industry. A new wave of innovations to the study abroad consulting industry is no long overdue, as the way of doing business has never evolved alongside the benefits of the evolution of technology. Paperwork and processes are largely paper-based, while literally the majority of schools and student visas are applied for and managed online. It makes no sense for students and parents to come to the office to submit a passport for photocopy when they can do it with their smartphone. It is ridiculous for study abroad agencies and customers to act like they are living in 2012 when technology is unreliable, and every new tech is new. It’s 2022 now.
For MAP, it is to provide insightful online test bank solutions for students. Although tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have put so much effort into PR in promoting how significant they are in schools and education, in reality, most of the schools on Earth are still stuck with pen-and-paper and the traditional teaching model - teachers writing on the blackboard with every student in the class copying the same thing without even trying to understand it. This kind of industrialization of education worked great pre-2012 when technology had no dominant role and had not interwoven into our daily lives (our smartphone screen time was close to 0 then!). In the past, the internet was slow and unsafe, and smartphones were not smart and would typically die in 2 hours. The access to information was highly tied to the geographical constraint - if you were not living on the Harvard campus, you could not have seen the work or interacted with the faculty there. Now, everything has immensely changed and moved online. The education industry must embrace this new world and adapt to the changes. Otherwise, the importance of a local school would decrease as screen time eventually replaces face-to-face learning time. We need to adapt, just like how gasoline cars have changed our lives, and we adapted by building 6-lane highways. Somebody needs to make the highway in this new world, and MAP is the player doing that, alongside other prominent players in the online education sector. Therefore, the new year resolution, which is very specific to the coming year, is to turn MAP into an innovative company with a similar office to SKI. This giant company houses a gym and fancy offices right next to where I live in Copenhagen.
Just like how the new year’s resolution of this year (2021) turned out, this new year’s resolution is aimed to be as vague as possible yet significant enough. I still remember how lost I was looking at my new year’s resolution at the beginning of 2021: to make 1 million in revenue in the year. This goal was big enough and vague because, in 2020, my company made around $280,000-320,000. How could I earn three times the revenue with no new capital injections? Nonetheless, in 2021, the company made over $700,000, more than twice as much as in 2020, and the big new year resolution played a significant role in it.
When things happen, it happens at an unimaginable pace. This is the nature of life, and it’s what makes life so interesting. When a business collapses, it collapses quickly. When a country collapses, it collapses rapidly. This escalation in things is not restricted to the negative end of the spectrum of things — it is the same for the positive things. Unlike fragrance that diffuses slowly in a room, the day your business takes off, or the love you met, happens within a snap. It occurs at a specific moment and specific day. This makes life meaningful, for these life-changing events take place quickly and often unexpectedly. During dull days, we crave for such events to take place. Such desire makes us impatient and easily fall into the scheme of quick fixes and overnight success. With this clarity in place, we can begin discussing the new year’s resolution.
Goals must be specific, and a new year’s resolution has to be the opposite. It should not be a step-by-step guide but a north star that a glance could derive from no specific actions. The answer should cost a reasonable amount of time for self-reflection and self-reconciliation. A clear sense of why matters in a new year’s resolution. Why do you want to get fit? Why do you want to do journaling? If we have no more comprehensive picture of the pyramid we are building and only gather a bucket list of to-dos, it will lead us to a 5-day freshness that will soon fade away. Then, life becomes dull and shit again. We will look for other quick fixes and a new bucket list of what we do. To me, as I’m building my business into an autonomous capital wheel that runs on its own, as I love to put it, the core reason is that I want to have enough time to play with my kids and spend with them in the future. This is why I am a try-hard to build my venture instead of working a regular day job. A day job would not provide me with enough capital and personal time to live with my family without sacrificing much family time. However, if I share this “why” with my employees and business partners, I doubt they would be willing to be led by me because this “why” is not mutual — how would they find it meaningful to work like hell to provide enough capital and free time for me to consume? This dilemma naturally leads me to examine the true reason for the business itself because the reason I do start up should not be confused with the reason for the business’s existence.
For ASIDU, it is to provide personalized consulting and disrupt the consulting industry. A new wave of innovations to the study abroad consulting industry is no long overdue, as the way of doing business has never evolved alongside the benefits of the evolution of technology. Paperwork and processes are largely paper-based, while literally the majority of schools and student visas are applied for and managed online. It makes no sense for students and parents to come to the office to submit a passport for photocopy when they can do it with their smartphone. It is ridiculous for study abroad agencies and customers to act like they are living in 2012 when technology is unreliable, and every new tech is new. It’s 2022 now.
For MAP, it is to provide insightful online test bank solutions for students. Although tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have put so much effort into PR in promoting how significant they are in schools and education, in reality, most of the schools on Earth are still stuck with pen-and-paper and the traditional teaching model - teachers writing on the blackboard with every student in the class copying the same thing without even trying to understand it. This kind of industrialization of education worked great pre-2012 when technology had no dominant role and had not interwoven into our daily lives (our smartphone screen time was close to 0 then!). In the past, the internet was slow and unsafe, and smartphones were not smart and would typically die in 2 hours. The access to information was highly tied to the geographical constraint - if you were not living on the Harvard campus, you could not have seen the work or interacted with the faculty there. Now, everything has immensely changed and moved online. The education industry must embrace this new world and adapt to the changes. Otherwise, the importance of a local school would decrease as screen time eventually replaces face-to-face learning time. We need to adapt, just like how gasoline cars have changed our lives, and we adapted by building 6-lane highways. Somebody needs to make the highway in this new world, and MAP is the player doing that, alongside other prominent players in the online education sector. Therefore, the new year resolution, which is very specific to the coming year, is to turn MAP into an innovative company with a similar office to SKI. This giant company houses a gym and fancy offices right next to where I live in Copenhagen.
Just like how the new year’s resolution of this year (2021) turned out, this new year’s resolution is aimed to be as vague as possible yet significant enough. I still remember how lost I was looking at my new year’s resolution at the beginning of 2021: to make 1 million in revenue in the year. This goal was big enough and vague because, in 2020, my company made around $280,000-320,000. How could I earn three times the revenue with no new capital injections? Nonetheless, in 2021, the company made over $700,000, more than twice as much as in 2020, and the big new year resolution played a significant role in it.