I had lunch today at a sandwich shop that posted Warren Buffet's 10 Rules for Success on their wall.
I've been a fan of his for years and I have to say I wish he owned Cryptic.
Barring that, this would be my advice for Cryptic and PWE.
Buffet's 10 Rules for Success:
1. Reinvest Your Profits. This makes sense not only in the stock market, but in a small business as well. Entrepreneurs who bleed all the profits out of a business find that they may struggle to grow the business into something larger and more valuable.
2. Be Willing to be Different. Buffet didnt make his fortune by following the crowd. Instead, he invested when everyone else was panicked, and sold off when everyone else was buying. That strategy always beats the market. Doing what everybody else is doing - the same way they are doing it - is the recipe for becoming average. Nobody pays extra for average.
3. Never Suck Your Thumb. After you gather the information you need, make a decision. To Buffet, any time wasted to get to a decision is just thumb sucking. Success comes from immediately grabbing every opportunity that you can recognize.
4. Spell out the Deal In Advance. Your bargaining position is never stronger than before you are committed. So, advantage of that opportunity to spell out the details and specifics of any deal before you start. This is especially true when working with friends or family.
5. Watch Small Expenses. In the investment world, this translates into watching not just the returns offered by investment funds, but also the fees charged by the fund managers. This is so true in every aspect of small business and personal finance, as well.
6. Limit What You Borrow. Buffet claims to never have borrowed a significant amount of money. His advice is to remain debt-free, and then save and invest money. This is a very counter-cultural (see #2) contrast to those who preach getting rich using Other Peoples Money.
7. Be Persistent. This is an advantage that the small entrepreneur has over larger, more established competitors. Persistence and ingenuity can, and often does win against large odds. If youve done your research, taken care of the details, watched your expenses and stayed out of debt, your success through persistence may only be a matter of time.
8. Know When to Quit. Dont throw good money after bad. Resist the temptation to salvage a bad deal with a last-minute home run.
9. Assess the Risk. Buffet recommends thinking through both the best-case and the worst-case scenarios. This helps clarify the risks and rewards for any venture, which is critical to the decision making process.
10. Know What Success Means. Buffet doesnt measure success in terms of dollars. As he says, When you get to my age, youll measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. Here is wisdom.
Comments
It's not really financial advice as I see it. It's advice for how to run an operation and, really, how to live.
When DDO faced similar, my understanding is that they actually borrowed significantly to reinvest, but they made large portions of their new content require F2P people to purchase access (subscribers get access to everything).
There is still some truly new content added, to appease those who don't want to pay for content at all, but the better stuff all costs you.
That meant having to raise the funds to cover the development push though....
I have no idea if that is still working for them... not logged into there in a while... but it was working well when I stopped playing.
Last semester I shared a house with three business students in Nottingham. When the first two left I found out that they had discarded all the utility bills (they were addressed to them). The third thought that we should ignore them because we were moving out too within a few weeks, hadn't payed his rent for months and planned to move out immediately after me and then bartering with the landlord for a reduced rent because he was afraid that the landlord would take his stuff to force him to pay when nobody else would be in the house. I think you will understand that I would prefer it if everybody with any kind of business education would be sent to the dark side of the moon.
aaaaaaand /thread.