Ryan Ho's Entrepreneurship Blog

Cooking is the preparing of food for consumption.  It is a mastery of skills, handling, experience of using the fire, water, ingredients, mix and matching of different food to come up with a excellent display of dish with nice presentation for both visual, and mouth-watering tasting sensation.

Cooking requires positive discipline, organizing, tidiness, cleanliness, budgeting, creativity and sensitive sense of smell, taste-buds, hearing and sight. It’s not simple to master it, but when you master it, the same skills which were used to help you cook up a nice table full of dishes will help you greatly in the process of becoming wealthy if you correctly apply it and convert it into financial and business disciplinary education.

How a person cooks directly reveals his/her attitude and working style. It’s similar to wealthy businessmen playing golf to determine their business partners and the deal etc. Cooking is just a part of the consideration factor. Still, if you want to get wealthy, learn to play golf, they have their reasons for playing golf.

Cooking and the cleaning up part will reveal a person’s attitude and thinking to clearing up a mess of his/her own. The preparation of the dishes will reveal how hardworking and meticulous a person is in details which translates to business customer service. The presentation of the dish, layout etc will reveal to you how a person present and sell him/herself to others. How they eat the food will reveal how much table manners, respect they have to their elders, parents and friends.

Mastering cooking will not help you to go from rags to riches, but not wealthy. It will help you improve yourself, have more discipline etc. To be wealthy, you need to learn a lot of other related education to succeed; it’s more about the mindset which determines your success, so work on it.

You can get rich from cooking, but when you’re rich, you can’t stop cooking else your money will stop which is the difference between getting rich and getting wealthy. Wealth is accumulated even when you do nothing; it’s just a result of what seeds and hard-work you put in previously that allows you to reap the fruits of your hard labour in the past which not many people will know of.

Cooking encourage communication, discussion among family members. Advice and experiences are shared on the table during dinning or at a tea-break session with a common interest in food, the universal language regardless of boundaries, thus it is the easiest method to break the ice, increase the family bonding etc.

If you want to instill discipline into a spoilt brat, throw him/her into the kitchen and just make sure they don’t burn the kitchen in flames will do. Stand by their side, offer advice, not nag, and let them do what they like experiment it, taste the difference, than advice are much appreciated, rather than immediately saying No to this, that whatever is wrong, than they get the expected answer without first tasting the bitter, burnt food dishes which they should taste.

Cooking is a great way to teach children as they grow up and be independent to cook for themselves and family members if all are staying together sharing the fun process, enjoyment and happiness of cooking.

Savings are the conservation of money, to save and conserve for a clause, example for a rainy rain.

Saving is a good habit but not necessarily a positive habit. Starting as young as kids, parents were taught to pass and impart the knowledge and importance of savings to their kids but not investment. Thus everyone across the globe knows the importance of savings but not investment.

The poor will impart the good habit of savings for a rainy day idea to their kids and they will save every single penny in their whole life without any changes to the knowledge that was imparted to the kids.

The wealthy will impart investment habit to their kids in different learning examples, coming up with games, learning lessons to increase their knowledge of doubling their start up capital to generate more income.

If there’s no external new knowledge being passed to the kids who are growing up in a savings mindset family, the future of the kids’ family will suffer, more unhappiness will follow, something which I realized long ago but it only stuck and was imprinted in my mind only today thus this blog entry.

As a kid, it’s good to save, so when they grow up, they have a starting pool of piggy bank to for investment into a business, but parents often just stop their financial education to their kids once they see that their kids are doing well, stopping halfway, without telling them the core idea and importance of savings.

Savings from young is to start accumulating a bucket of gold, than when the time is ripe, with sufficient funds, than their first bucket of gold should be used for investment purpose and must learn the steps to investment.

Parents failed to impart the knowledge of investment to their child solely because they neither lack the knowledge nor know-how to go about investment, thus in the adulthood stage, when poor mindset people start working, the problem of having a mindset savings snowballs into a bigger problem, creating lots of unhappiness and life living in misery.

Young kids can save, as they have not much items or gadgets which they need to buy, if proper discipline is being used and proper knowledge of financial management has being passed down to their kids.

Saving money as a teenager than starts to become a problem, with lots of temptations, peer pressure, and the fear of being bullied, left out/behind in a fashion savvy or technology updated group of peers. Teenagers will than experience more difficultly in saving any money.

Adulthood and beyond are the worse section and experience which a person will experience if he/she were to continue saving money and not learning the how-to to invest. Having seen different parents, family members, relatives (even those who are living a landed property) are saving as much as possible, making them look more like a cheapskate and not a thrifty person.

Cheapskate is one who will collect, take back small little free items from restaurants, hotels, air-planes when they either dine out if not are on a holiday vacation. Not willing to part with small money will not lead to big money which is needed in investment. The worse and unhealthy example of being a cheapskate is to wash those microwavable Tupperware after use to repeat use them. I’m concern about using them over again since it’s plastic and it chemicals will more or less leave some scent and taste with the food, plus health reasons.

Adults who are near if not already classified in the seniors age above fifty years old have even worse saving habits which are the cause of family unhappiness too, picking up redundant habits which only make matters worse than better thus elder folks are either unable to live happily with their children and grandchildren.

When grandparents’ saving ideology worsen and degrades into scrimping and squeezing every single possible cent out from any offer etc, now that is a saving behavior and mindset gone completely wrong and children can’t accept nor understand the changes thus they just move out.

Ugly saving ideas and behaviors such as plastic bags, starting form the aunties group all the way to grandmothers, whatever they do, wet market, super market, dinning in or out, plastic bags are the sure take item and they take lots of it. Taking back empty boxes, paper cardboards, newspapers etc, all back home to safe-keep in case there’s a need one day for the box which still can be used to store things.

When they pick up the items, to them it’s saving money, but without proper arrangement, it transform into a house full of junk items and the grandparents or aunties are super reluctant to throw away the items which are junk in our eyes. Those items can be recycled in recycling centers and even for profit but elders are ignorant, they don’t know, so to help get rid of their ‘junk’, we need to sort and tidy it, than sell it away, money pass to them so they will keep quiet.

Next time if somebody teaches you to save money, look and observe what saving practice do they use themselves?  If it is savings to scrimping, don’t even follow. If it is savings to investment than you stick to that person and learn it well.

Choice is an option of careful selection between different options offered, excellent, good average or bad products, merchandise and services. Different buyer decision leads to different customer experience and satisfaction, thus creating different classes of customers and businesses targeting a specific group of customers.

Choice is an opportunity for each of us to decide what we want, how we want it, and the expected results is already clear when we make a decision, knowing that the decision we make will have direct effects affecting our desired results.

It is a very fine and thin line between making a wise choice and a negligent choice. Whatever you do, do the right thing, make the right choice, but most importantly ask the right people.

Getting wealthy is not a want, it’s a need, a necessity for Singapore given that Singapore’s high-end property is snapping up fast by foreign investors, as fellow Singaporeans, are we so useless to submit and raise the white flag and allow their to take over and run our property, assets, earning money from us? Is this a repeat of history when the British took over Singapore only to run away giving Singapore to suffer at the mercy of Japanese during WWII?

Are we throwing away our choice to the foreigners? Getting wealthy is no longer a want, it’s a need that we need to protect Singapore, and be able to lift our heads up high, able to show the world what a little red dot can do in the globe, whoever that looks down on the little red dot will regret for making that choice and for even saying it and think about it. The Singapore founding leaders have done an excellent job in this aspect, but what are the majorities of the people doing to this? Nothing, so getting wealthy is no longer a want, but a need and a must do it. The world is your oyster, will you allow others to take the credit from you, taking away your fruits of labour only paying you a miserable small sum of money?

We the Chinese holding the huge population percentage should work together instead of cutting each other fighting among one another and giving the opportunity to the on-lookers who took advantage of it. Look at China; they made a very wrong choice, to be a fake dominant country producing products, food, merchandise that’s not real, giving foreigners a chance to grab a slice of the pie. All can be avoided, but it’s the thinking of the leaders running the country that needs a good washing to plan long term and not short term.

Singapore has done a great job in this aspect, and now not many countries dare to even mention the “little” again. It’s a fact that we’re small like a dot, but together we make a difference, and are the envy of a lot of other neighbouring countries wanting our help to grow their economy.

We should and must learn how to uphold, fortify our fortress, promote the Singapore brand, increase our advantage in the region, and work together to be a wealthy and successful.

Just like Jay Chou who wants to help his fellow singers in the music industry in his country, and China also being proud of themselves without the need to neither depend on foreigners nor even bother about what the world wants. So work towards being self-sufficient and depend on ourselves for our living instead of dependent on others.

Are you going to be a loser or do you want to grow together with Singapore and shine, even if we are the little red dot, but we are in fact multiplying our little red dots in other countries with their nations’ approval, so do you want to have your imprints all over the world helping Singapore multiply the red dots in other countries or are you happy to have others taking away our hard earn labour?

As we pursue our dreams, ambitions, we can throw away our pride, ego, face, reputation, and even work like a slave, but we can never ever throw away our dignity which is the core of ourselves, something which we need to be proud of despite how little and small our efforts may be but it makes a huge difference.

Even a beggar have dignity to stay at a place, work hard at begging for food, rather than a stray dog making pitiful sounds and a sad eyes tears rolling begging for food.

Dignity is what makes us who we are regardless of how small we will make around us, but if applied and used correctly, dignity will be the source fuel like the Sun in the galaxy burning its own fumes warming other planets that stay around the sun. Like Bruce Lee, he started low, throwing away his pride, learning multiple disciplines of martial arts, keeping his dignity and respect for our yellow skin and done us Chinese proud.

Do you want to be the person offering and extending a helping hand to others or do you want to be the receiver asking for help? It’s your choice and only YOU can decide what you need!

The wealthy and successful businessmen always have a positive mindset. Regardless of what problems, obstacles, and technical issues they face in front of them, businessmen will always have a positive mindset and work towards a solution.

“It takes positive to breed positive and together positivity breeds success,” something which I just thought of as I was writing this blog.

Being positive has got tons of benefits, especially if you want to go from rags to riches, you must equip yourself with a positive mind and constantly hang and network with positive and successful people.  Who you network with will affect the results you produced. If you want to know the results of what will happen to you if you network with the wealthy people, look around and find out more on who are they mixing with, are there a single failure with a negative mindset among those successful businessmen, absolutely NO!! When you even associate yourself with one, the damage is already done, so stay clear and don’t even network with people who have negative or happy mindset.

A life example will be, look at actors actresses, all the media artist hang around media artist, what the chances whereby you can see them are hanging around with average people who are non-media artists with the exception of going out with their family and relatives. In fact, even if you do spot them, what is the percentage of you seeing them frequently, it’s like one in a thousand chances to see media artist on the streets unless they are working.

Each successful individual are successful because he/she hang around and network exchanging ideas, strategies, tips and methods to improve each others weakness to mastering the art of perfection in each other giving positive remarks and comments.

If you want to make a change, start by reading more of my blog, ask questions. Go to libraries to borrow self-improvement books, read, learn and absorb what you find useful and beneficial to you. At times if you can’t find any, than you need to dumb away your negative unproductive thoughts before you can even accept and absorb positive education which is easily available to the public.

It is easily accessible to the public to learn and picked up, but it’s not simple to absorb those free successful education and thinking into our minds. Just look at how many people go to libraries, how many people who read such books make it to the multi-millionaires rank. Little to none, because they can’t absorb what is taught and shared by successful people without first admitting their own learning is flawed and try to learn from the book with their flawed thinking and mindset which will of course produced flawed results.

If you need statistics, ask your friends, how many even bother to read millionaire, multi-millionaires or even billionaire’s books and trillion dollar company strategy books? Not many, nor do they even go to the business section to know that it’s free to the public for borrowing. Do what you need to do & do it!

If you’re not successful, now you should know why and what you need to do to alter the results which you’re getting. You have a choice between positive and negative. What will your option be?

Happy is to be satisfied, cheerful, enjoy, and get delighted over something or a person or a event or even a drama.

Being happy is another feeling which breeds contentment and that manifest itself in our mind and tells us that we are already happy with our living environment, house, and our own room, thus the desire to seek a higher, better housing diminish with being happy and feeling contented.

Staying happy is what is encouraged by all government nationals across the globe, but they didn’t even once differentiate between being happy and being positive.

If you’re happy with what you’re doing, you will be happy of whatever results you’re getting, thus there’s no particular desire to grow our own income thus there’s not much productivity increase in factories, manufacturing plants when it comes to producing more products, and services.

When people are happy getting the results they get monthly which breeds contentment, they will stop if not maintain at that level which is required to allow them to get the pay-cheque at the end of the month to partial delayed gratification which consist of mostly instant gratification after they get their hands on the money.

Productivity, efficiency of the business growth is dependent on the employees running the operations, the foot soldiers. IF they are happy with what they have, the most any business could do is to build another factory or manufacturing plant and hire another group of employees to produce another batch of products, services and even merchandise for profits.

Businesses grow by finding ways to increase their profits, which translates to wealth accumulation. Employees being equipped with a poor mindset will only do what is required to meet ends needs only.

Do anything more, and get stares from fellow colleagues for spoiling the market for being hardworking, which bosses know but can’t do anything to this work culture except to hire more people.

The reason why foreigners aren’t welcome by the foot soldiers in Singapore mainly the low income earners is exactly because of the fact that they are hardworking, spoiling the market working culture getting paid the same amount if not lesser but working double harder than their peers gaining recognition and promotion, especially the intelligent foreign exports of talent into the business.

To get wealthy, we need to be positive and not be happy. Being happy means that they shouldn’t be any problems and the ideal situation for people who seeks happiness is to have a worry-free environment to grow up in which manifest itself to what the general mindset of the vast majority people have currently “study hard, get a job, work harder get promotion and be happy with what you have”.

By being happy bunch of people, they will not be hungry for any additional pleasure and just seek the basics necessity and nothing else, thus people are just contented with having their own HDB, start a family, get a job to cover the expenses and meet months’ ends only.

Being positive is another story. Regardless of whatever situation, positive mindset breeds positive results which will attract wealth and talents to you with time, and results. Being happy will not.

Do you want to be happy or do you want to be positive? You decide what kind of life you seek or desire.

Comfort is the feeling which we all seek. Regardless who we are and across the globe, we all seek comfort of feeling pleasurable and contentment thus accounting for the entertainment, self-reward after a day’s of hard work etc.

Comfort is what the key to what differentiates the wealthy and the poor.

People who are poor live in an illusion of their own, feeling and being contented with what they have and never will take steps walk out from own misleading impression of reality. Going home everyday after work, or school only thinking of how it is like to live in a better house. What does it feels like to have a room of their own, example if they are living in a one room flat; they will move to three room flat etc, upgrade and expand their comfort zone.

Poor as they may seems to be, but all of them have a inner desire that seeks a better environment but numerous discouraging experiences from their peers have caused their downfall, submitting to fate and destiny without even fighting to get what they deserved.

Being poor means to live is a unreal precedence of comfort, lying not only to themselves, their family members and even their children to stay within the family, don’t do anything more, just be contented with having three meals a day.

Contentment comes from the fear of having to meet nasty experiences and setbacks again which are obstacles to people and people who are weak mentally will trip, fall and never be able to learn to stand up and continue walking. Like a spoilt brat seeking attention from the caregiver wanting to be coax into taking the next step like a baby learning to walk when he/she is crawling.

There’s only a limit to how much a caregiver can offer to the baby, anything else extra not within the abilities of the caregiver will require the baby’s own efforts to learn and get it him/herself. It is the same like government who never fails to provide food to the poor acting like a caregiver, but by doing so, they are not allowing the baby to grow and pick up a skill which can help them gain independence. That kind of care as a caregiver is a form of negative practice of upbringing that everybody should change.

Instead of feeding the baby, why not put the food there, let the baby learn how to do it, teach them the skill. Gradually letting go of them encouraging them to stand on their own two feet, it’s identical to seeing a baby grow. But people just forget that it is a natural learning curve which everyone must go through and learn from it. If they fail, both the caregiver and the baby failed. If the caregiver does what is needed, but the baby refused to learn a skill to be independent, than the baby has only him/herself to blame.

Wealthy people grow and expand their wealth faster due to their desire to improve their living conditions increases and expand at the limit that surpass their success thus the wealthy are never happy with their homes and seek for bigger better homes. It’s good to have desires, but work positively towards it like the wealthy people.

Are you happy and comfortable with whatever you have currently?

“You can’t blame your parents for the environment you were born in but you will know who to blame when your child is born in an environment he/she dislike.”

Gratification is the source of pleasure satisfaction. Gratification is uses and practiced by all man kind regardless of nationality, race, language or even skin colour.

There are two types of gratification: instant and delayed gratification.

Instant gratification is whereby people purchase something in the form of items, products or services to reward themselves or their family and friends to have great satisfaction from something. Even prostituting is instant gratification, the want to instantly satisfy their desire to get ‘loved’ to compensate for their failed relationship or lack of love etc.

Delayed gratification is whereby people find a goal, have a target of what to buy, set a period of time, and tell them If they complete their own mini goals, than they will gratify themselves by buying a particular product/service or item. That is delayed gratification.

Depending on the types of gratification you choose to practice, it will be matter of either poverty or wealth respectively.

People who are in poverty or those with just over broke situation will give themselves excuses which they think of it as ‘reasons’ to buy this buy that to reward themselves, but if they look at the past year, have their self-rewarding instant gratification helped them to get rich not even speaking about being wealthy. No it impossible for a spendthrift to even save let alone invest to get rich and wealthy.

People who are rich and wealthy on the other hand will guard their wealthy strictly and only allowing transactions to go through after their personal review before signing on the line for approval. They will wait patiently, for the right time, right indicators and opportunity in times of distress of the competitor to either buy over at a lower price if not buy over the whole company to take out a competitor to safeguard and fortify their barrier of defense against fellow on-looker warlords who have set their eyes on the kingdom with lots of wealth and prosperity.

It’s similar if not identical to China building the Great Wall to increase their defense against the Mongolian troops and war from even have any chances to strike them when they least expected by building the different post along the Great Wall of China using fire and smoke to warn the guards spreading the message efficiently across all troops guards China.

Delayed gratification was a term which I heard overheard from afar when I saw my senior in sales advising his junior about it. Since then, I have always bear this in mind and it has helped me gain a lot of wisdom and discipline with time and practice. I hope this will be helpful to you readers.

Fantasy is a mental image which is unreal, a thought with no solid foundation. Dreams and fantasy are often thought to be the same which slight similarities that all four words dreams visions foresight and fantasy have in common is imagination.

Dreams, visions, foresight to people who think is not possible are just fantasy.

Without imagination, dreams fantasy vision or foresight will not materialize taking shape in our mind before we take concrete steps to put that imagination in different forms to actualization to make something real. It all again starts with the mind.

Without a thought, nothing is possible. A thought can lead to an idea which leads to a wanted result thus indirectly allowing the person who has that thought to come up with different steps and procedures to realize the action of the desired result.

The process isn’t really important, what is important is the final idea than take care of the steps which can slowly be mapped out. It is similar to Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Edison whom improved on a 50 year old idea by Sir Humphry Davy.

If you believe it to be a fantasy, it will be but if you take steps to realize it, with time patience and determination success will prevail as long as you don’t quit.

Foresight is the foreseeing into the future. With the relevant knowledge, linking up what events, society trends, lifestyle is heading towards in the form of trend and to look forward more by just a few years ahead of business rivals and competitors to gain the competitive advantage of manufacturing, producing gadgets which will whoa customers, cool geeky, sleek, information technology enthusiast will want to get their hands on.

Foresight need not decades of planning, it just requires two-three steps ahead of business competitors. Look at Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs one who revolutionalized the new era of computers, notebooks, and other electronic gadgets for maximum portability.

No longer is it a necessity to have a CPU (central processing unit), monitor and keyboard plus a mouse to make a complete set of operational computer. Now all it needs is a tablet, with touch-screen keyboard, monitor, CPU and even mouse all integrated into one single product which is an excellent idea for maximum portability, convenience for the consumers.

Giving what the customers wants, convenience, portable, cost efficient and productive and multiple functions for convenience and easy storage is exactly what information technology is all about.

From computers to notebooks to palm-top, MP3, MP4, PSP to 3G phones to iPhones. All those are just a natural progression of product cycle life. Innovation and foresight is so important that you can’t do without it. So observe what’s happening around you and who knows you will have a billion dollar idea which you can capitalize on when the time is ripe, with all the right ingredients, soil, elements, environment, farmer, water, right and timing.

Be at the right place at the right time and you will be the next winner. Opportunities are everywhere and anywhere, it solely depends on how you capitalize on your ideas for profit and how it benefits the people around you and the community.

Vision is the act or power of anticipating what will or may come to be often said that entrepreneurs are visionaries. It is a vivid imaginative conception or anticipation with visions of wealth and glory.

Vision isn’t possible without dreams. Only with dreams than vision is possible. Dreams are the catalyst to react with action, application to form a vision which an entrepreneur sees.

Dreams cannot be shared it’s just all in the mind playing games only. Vision on the other hand is different. Once a vision is shared among a group of like-minded people, it creates a collective group of people working towards a common goal. A team is formed, and with more people having the same goal, its influence is greater and denser with the ability to influence more people to accept their vision and work together towards a common and greater goal of success.

Visions are the catalyst to entrepreneurship. If you can’t see yourself to be on the top sharing successes helping others who helped you, than there’s no joy in reaching the top if nobody is celebrating your success together with you as a group.

At times when the vision seems too far-fetch, than entrepreneurs will use another term, foresights, seeing what is to become in future tense and drawing up steps on how to make it a reality by implementing steps necessary and gradually to morph it into a reality with time and patience.

Vision works well with foresight, one who can looks into the future, identify the future, shape it will be the winner. Look at Bill Gates, one a college drop-out now a billionaire having his computer operating system in majority of the computers worldwide until the rise of the Apple Mac-book Steve Jobs the founder of Apple computer and forerunners of super cool information technology processes and ideas.

If visions don’t work, work on foresight instead, it is something that is much closer and has higher possibility than visions which some people might think it’s impossible.