The reality of 'following your passion'.

[mr_engineer]

As someone who is working on his business and who has a business-vision that will leave the world a better place, here's what I've found about 'following your passion' in business. 

• The daily tasks are chores. Most of them will be as tedious as working a job. Add in the pressure of getting it right, because you have a lot more responsibility. 
• The weekly plan is a work-week, like a job. You gotta show up to work, you gotta get your shit done and you're accountable for backlog. 
• The monthly goals are very pragmatic. There are bills to be paid at the end of each month and when you audit your business every week, you gotta make sure that as every week goes by, you're making progress towards the monthly goal of paying your bills. Cashflow is a big factor in the way you manage the running of your business on a monthly basis. 
• It's when you set the yearly goals, that all of this starts to connect to a bigger picture for what you want to contribute to the world, what your personal interests are and what your passion is. Your passion will be the thing that will drive you to do better than your best. And that is what will create year-on-year growth and will ultimately make you rich. 

Nobody talks about this reality, because it can be very demotivating to someone who's working a 9-5 and who's barely toying with the idea of starting a business. Which is why, if you're currently on a conventional track, you'd better be sure that this business-idea that you're thinking about really does connect with your passion. Because it is not going to be easy, at all. It is very easy to get lost in the mundane shit you gotta do to keep your head above the water. Your passion will be tested over and over again. If you survive the process of becoming profitable, though, that's when you will know whether your passion is authentic or not. And, if it is, then you will get yearly growth and you'll make it big. 

Edited September 13, 2023 by mr_engineer

[Yimpa]

How long have you been working on your business for?

[mr_engineer]

5 minutes ago, Yimpa said:

How long have you been working on your business for?

2 years. 

[Yimpa]

Do you use any specific budging app? I was looking into YNAB, they have a nice web interface.

[Sandhu]

what business are you doing?

[mr_engineer]

1 hour ago, Sandhu said:

what business are you doing?

I'm offering a tutoring-service in which I change the dynamic between student and teacher. My aim is to maximize classroom-engagement, so that the students aren't just sitting there passively and bored, zoning out. Rather, they're engaging in active discussion and contemplation of the concepts. Their ability to apply the concepts to solve real problems skyrockets when I do this. 

My ultimate vision is to bring a change to the education-system. The monologue-based lecture-structure is inadequate for students to have a deep conceptual understanding of the material. Rote-learning and indoctrination is an archaic and barbaric practice that needs to be abolished with immediate effect. 

[Yimpa]

@mr_engineer Very nice. School was a torturous experience for me, so it’s nice to see people like you actively calling it out and having a vision for radical change. 

[txs]

Yes, totally agree, could not have said it better. Your days off are also not the same, as you do not get PTO. So that comes into your budgeting and plans. You also have to remain focused on end objectives. At a 9-5, you are handed projects / work to do. And you do it. In your business, you are often creating your own projects or, but even if you take one on you have to assess whether it will drive to successful outcomes for you, take you down a different path, or waste your time. Because your sense of time is different - your time has more weight as how you spend it can significantly impact your finances for the month vs. getting a predictable income each month. 

Edited September 14, 2023 by txs

[BlessedLion]

yeah but the value of doing something meaningful should pay off for all that stuff

[flowboy]

On 14/09/2023 at 8:00 AM, mr_engineer said:

I'm offering a tutoring-service in which I change the dynamic between student and teacher. My aim is to maximize classroom-engagement, so that the students aren't just sitting there passively and bored, zoning out. Rather, they're engaging in active discussion and contemplation of the concepts. Their ability to apply the concepts to solve real problems skyrockets when I do this. 

My ultimate vision is to bring a change to the education-system. The monologue-based lecture-structure is inadequate for students to have a deep conceptual understanding of the material. Rote-learning and indoctrination is an archaic and barbaric practice that needs to be abolished with immediate effect. 

Love the mission! I'm behind it 100%. Wish you the best!

How are you implementing this?

On 13/09/2023 at 5:04 PM, mr_engineer said:

It is very easy to get lost in the mundane shit you gotta do to keep your head above the water. Your passion will be tested over and over again.

Couldn't agree more. Sometimes it's really fun and feels like play, but if you treat it as that too much, you're not going to hit your goals.

 

[Leo Gura]

Of course, any new business is mountains of work. Yes, it's a job that you get to direct. Like shooting your own movie.

Edited September 19, 2023 by Leo Gura

[mr_engineer]

On 9/19/2023 at 1:43 PM, flowboy said:

Love the mission! I'm behind it 100%. Wish you the best!

 

On 9/14/2023 at 8:28 PM, Yimpa said:

@mr_engineer Very nice. School was a torturous experience for me, so it’s nice to see people like you actively calling it out and having a vision for radical change. 

Thanks! 

On 9/19/2023 at 1:43 PM, flowboy said:

How are you implementing this?

The Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) is an entrance-exam that high-schoolers who took science here in India take, to get into the best engineering-schools. The JEE(Advanced) is known as the second hardest exam in the world, after China's GaoKao. It is a hard exam by all metrics.

• You're competing against 100,000 of the most serious kids for around 7000 engineering seats in the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).
• The material is incredibly wide-ranged (some of it is college-level by American standards).
• And, most of all, the questions are incredibly tricky. You cannot just follow a simple step-by-step algorithm to solve them, the questions are not familiar, they don't repeat questions. You have to be creative on the spot and 'crack' the question (this is why we call it 'cracking the JEE'). 

This is what's being asked of engineering-aspirants in high-school here. Now, what's the reward, why would anyone sign up for this hard challenge? In India, if you're an IITian, it is a symbol of intelligence. It benefits you in every way. From job-prospects, to good potential for grad-school in the West, to contacts, to social-status. Which is why parents go nuts over this exam. There is a JEE-coaching industry here, that's worth $250 million. 

How do these institutes operate? By brute-force indoctrination. They have 3-hour classes every day (outside of school), in which they write everything on the blackboard, they throw a lot of material at the students and give hard questions to solve. It's really brutal for someone who's not passionate about it and who's just being pressured into this by their parents. And, it's an incredibly harrowing experience to have to study 12 hours a day, memorizing all of this material (I know cuz I've done it, not only does it suck, it doesn't work. I barely missed IIT by 1000 ranks). 

So, where is the gap in this industry? The core issue in this industry is that they don't understand JEE(Advanced) as an exam, they think it's just about hard work and more memorization, more solution-techniques. But, the reality is that IIT does not repeat any questions, they create new questions every year to test your problem-solving abilities (which is why they produce some of the best engineering-graduates that big-tech offers $100,000/annum jobs to). It takes a deep conceptual understanding and creativity to crack this exam. And this is something that an indoctrination-based machinery lacks the ability to equip students with. This is the gap. 

How am I filling this gap? Here's the root-cause of the problem - today's education-system believes that 'knowledge' is 'words'. This is the core epistemology (or, definition of knowledge) of today's education-system. Which is why there is a lot of focus on memorization, reproducing it in exams and, of course, indoctrination. This is why the 'epistemic-structure' (system of top-down dissemination of knowledge) is indoctrination-based. This is what I'm changing in my classroom. Because I understand spirituality, what I understand is that 'knowledge' is not 'words', it is 'awareness'. And, with the understanding of how the education-system works (I've seen all levels of it, from kindergarten to grad-school), if I create my own epistemic-structure, in which I'm aware that I'm interacting with a human mind that possesses creativity as opposed to a computer that I'm supposed to program or 'indoctrinate', students stop zoning out and sleeping in my class. I get a higher engagement-level from them. Also, I ask them a lot more questions that they're supposed to contemplate, so that they not only learn the words of the theory, but they understand how it applies to understanding practical reality. And, because this is what's being tested in the exam, I can sell this to the parents here and make a living like this. 

I could've talked a lot more about what my competitive edge is, what my USP is, how Leo's spiral-dynamics videos have helped me in implementing this (sorry Leo, couldn't get into it, but they've helped a lot) and what the core principles are, but in short, this is how I'm implementing it! 

P.S. Having watched Leo's spiral-dynamics videos, I went into further depth to understand how the Stage Blue mind works, how the Stage Orange mind works and what the correct way would be to help the people here move up the Spiral, as a teacher. This went into the creation of my USP! 

Edited September 20, 2023 by mr_engineer

[flowboy]

@mr_engineer That's honestly really cool.

It's not easy to figure out how to sell people something that's actually good for them.

But once you crack it... you're set for a satisfying LP endeavour.

[BlessedLion]

12 hours ago, flowboy said:

It's not easy to figure out how to sell people something that's actually good for them.

 

Aint that the truth