Name: 3 Money Habits I Wish I Learned In My 20s
Uploaded: 2024-08-04T08:46:02.000Z
Duration: 7 min 27 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Three money and business laws I wish I understood in my 20s.

Number one, the assigned value framework.

A number of studies and research has shown that money doesn't buy happiness.

If you're struggling to make ends meet, then yes, every additional amount you make can in fact have a big difference.

But beyond a certain level where you've got your basics taken care of, it may well in fact be that not making more money, or not taking on that extra money, will have a bigger impact on your happiness than making that money.

So consider a scenario where you're really happy in your day job.

The work is fulfilling, it pays well enough, it gives you flexibility to enjoy your relations and your hobbies outside of work.

Now all of a sudden you're offered a promotion.

That promotion comes with a pay rise, but it also comes with working longer hours and taking on less enjoyable tasks and less fulfilling work.

So you have less time overall to even spend outside of work with the relations, spending on the things that are of interest to you.

A year from now, would you be happier with the promotion and the more money that came with it, despite the drawbacks, or in preserving what you have now and instead leaving the money on the table?

This is obviously more generalised and there's different things to consider depending on where you are in your career, time horizon.

But my point is that it's very tempting to maximise every opportunity and not leave money on the table or feel guilty about it, when maybe the value of not doing it might be worth more.

So I try to approach decisions that I make with my own assigned value framework.

So the first layer is, will the extra money I make from saying yes to doing this thing impact my happiness levels in a positive or a negative way?

If no, it doesn't make a difference, then go for it.

Take on the opportunity and you'll probably be happy you did it years from now when that extra money buys you freedom or happiness or something else that you need.

If the answer is yes, it will make a difference and it'll make a difference in a positive way and I'll be happier through doing it, then yeah, take on that opportunity.

If however, the answer is yes, it will make a difference, but the pursuit of doing this thing and the extra money will be at the cost of my emotional and mental wellbeing and my happiness levels are there for a trade-off, then comes through another layer, which is what's worth more to you?

The money or the assigned mental and emotional cost of doing the thing that's in relation to earning that amount.

No one can assign a value on your emotional or mental wellbeing better than you can.

So it's not something that you need to justify to anyone else.

And I now use this framework to make sure that I'm not just chasing something just because.

By doing this, you don't feel the need or feel guilty about leaving money on the table or feeling the need to squeeze the most out of every opportunity, which comes with a lot of other costs that we don't necessarily look at.

Something that has been worth the value is CleanMyMac, which I've been using for nearly three years now.

I've tried a lot of Mac cleaning apps and this has been by far the best and they are doing a 30% off Black Friday sale right now.

In less than two minutes, it scans and cleans up your Mac in a few clicks.

It removes any malware and every time I use that, I see a noticeable difference in the speed and the functionality of my Mac.

My favorite feature is their dashboard, which gives me a quick overview on every aspect of my Mac's performance, from the battery temperature to the internet connection.

And they've also added a moonlock engine, as they call it, where the malware detection technology can analyze your external drives and your browser extensions.

I've got the option that includes two Macs and I've left the link to check it out in the description.

Let it scan your laptop, see just how much of a difference it makes.

And if you decide to continue with the paid version, then by using the code Nisha, N-I-S-H-A, you can get 30% off right now through the Black Friday sale.

One of the most important business and money laws I've learned is that there's a delicate balance between effective planning and analysis paralysis.

And I've sometimes overstepped into the excessive analysis part and other times I've fallen short of the proper planning part.

So my sister and I, we created an app a few years ago and it was a networking app centered around those that worked in the city.

So we spent so much time perfecting it and we spent a lot of money making it the best that it could be.

We thought that the more perfect it could be and the more close it could be to the final product, the better our chance of success and getting buy-in from other organizations and people.

Then when we fully launched it, we realized that we were off the mark.

There were a lot of issues that we didn't foresee.

There wasn't enough demand and we were competing in a market where there was so much competition.

And looking back, I would have done it very differently.

Drew Houston, who is the CEO of Dropbox, when he had the idea of Dropbox, he spent only a few months developing a very basic but functional version of Dropbox.

He just wanted to see firsthand what the reaction of others would be.

So he created a four-minute video, a demonstration showing how it works and then he sent it to potential customers asking them to put in their details and sign up to the waiting list if they were interested in it.

That's very different to someone just saying, yes, I'm interested.

Saying yes is easy to do, but signing up and putting your details in, you're asking people to put their money where their mouth is.

And his waiting list exploded to 75,000 people overnight.

While planning and perfection has its place, the most crucial thing you can do for a new product or new business is to get it into the user's hands as soon as possible.

And in this case, there was tangible proof.

I learned that it doesn't need to start as a masterpiece.

It just needs to be put into the hands of users to test the hypothesis and then adapt based on real unfiltered user feedback.

The true validation isn't from theoretical success or from a completed product in this case, but from actual user engagement.

Number three, do the hard and risky things early in life.

You can see this is a random mix of my favorite three laws.

This is one I'm putting in because I failed to learn it early, but then I went on to the opposite end of the spectrum and really understood it by my late 20s.

And I'm so thankful I did, because if I didn't push through the hardships and take a level of risk, this would have been one of my biggest fails of my life.

I'm talking about taking great risks in my 20s. 20s and even 30s are the time to do it.

When I don't have responsibilities, no one's relying on me, I can work stupid hours, which I did in my day job, and then go home and keep working on my businesses and trying to push and make it work.

I'm so grateful that we set up that app and it failed and we lost some time and some money, but I learned so many mistakes from it.

I'm so glad that I've set up other businesses and they failed, but because I realized that I'm not good at it, I can't excel at it, or I wasn't interested.

But I'm so thankful that I started this YouTube channel and lost my dignity and embarrassed myself in the early stages.

I can't even watch my first few videos back, but I've kept them up because it shows the time when I was pushing through awkwardly in my living room and it gave me the skills to keep getting better.

I know that I don't want to be hustling like I am right now for the rest of my life.

I want to do the hard and the risky things now and then plan to be chilling someday.

That's not to say I'm not enjoying the journey, going back to that framework that we spoke about earlier.

It's well worth it, but it is to say that thinking of putting in the hard work now makes life so much easier.

So those are, at the moment, my top three business and money laws that I wish I knew earlier on.

Let me know if any of them are surprising or new to you.

If you disagree with any, I'd love to hear from you.

I'm going to take some time to re-energize, strategize, look at things with a fresh pair of eyes and come back with some better stories and better content.

If you have anything that you want to see specifically, let me know and I'll make those videos around that.

I'll see you in a few weeks so we can close out this year together.

 As always, thank you for watching and here are some of my other videos to binge and watch in the meantime.

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3 Money Habits I Wish I Learned In My 20s

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