It turns out I have not written a field note in almost two weeks. Over the past few days, I finally finished Rich Dad Poor Dad. It took me about a month and a half from start to finish. I read most of it on the subway, so progress was slow. The book is very popular online, and it was written a long time ago, so quite a few of its ideas no longer apply directly. Even so, it gave me a useful introduction to financial thinking. Here are a few short takeaways and thoughts.
The most useful idea for me was the four-part financial structure: income, expenses, assets, and liabilities. It gave me a basic framework and helped me make simple judgments about what counts as an asset and what counts as a liability.
The book also describes a fairly good business model: save your first meaningful pool of capital, use it to buy quality assets that can keep producing income, and then use the money generated by those assets to buy more assets. Eventually, this is supposed to lead to financial freedom. Of course, this model comes from decades ago. There are lessons worth learning from it, but it should not be copied wholesale.
Later, I talked it over with GPT and pushed the discussion further. For example, I currently lack the ability to spot business demand. I have only just left school and know very little about this area, so I am really only getting started. GPT suggested that I break down examples from everyday life. Take the milk-tea shops along the street—or, more specifically, gaga. I have seen many gaga locations in Shenzhen but have never had the chance to try one, partly because of the price: it can cost more than one hundred yuan per person. So what allows gaga to charge that much? There is the cost of ingredients and the cost of rent. But if it is so expensive, why do people still buy from it, and who are those customers? gaga mainly sells light meals. Its dishes lean Western and are presented attractively, while most of its stores are in large shopping malls. Its customers are therefore probably mostly middle-class people or young people from relatively well-off families. Add the brand effect, and there may be a premium on top. That might be its profit model. If someone gave me ten million yuan and asked me to acquire a gaga store, would I do it? How would I make money after buying it? How could I make it earn even more? For now, I honestly have no idea, haha.
I probably still need direct contact with real cases before I can make better judgments. GPT gave me one sentence that I thought went straight to the point: an asset is a form in which the flow of value has been stored.
To sum up simply, what I learned is a process: discover a need, understand that need, judge its value, make a transaction happen, and then let that value accumulate into an asset.