Medical help for people without insurance harris county

DONT BE MEAN TO ME PLEASE I AM JUST ASKING A QUESTION
so only recently was my SDA application put it took ages to get the OT and everything to do the stuff for it but its in. Anyway im wondering if there anything i can do to speed it up or that my suppot corrindator can do. I have been homeless sleeping on the streets for over over 2 months straight (since i had to leave my rental)(minus the week I spent in hospital)
I've been on public housing waitlist for over a year however because I have special requirements for housing due to my disability meaning I need a house with certain features or without certain features it means it is taking a very long time for one to be available. So I am disabled and without support at the moment because i cant get support living on the streets and because my funding is like 10 dollars left and I have been waiting 6 months for my change of circumstance put in a complaint for that and had MP contact them twice but still not done anything yet. Every services turns me away for reasons including

• being a girl not male
• my disability under 21 rate support pension is too low for them to do anything ( i just turned 19 a couple days ago)
• I need special housing requirements
• wont help me because i have lots of medical conditions and disabilities

Apparently sda can take like 12 months so am I just meant to try to not die on the streets in this time? Also winter is in like 10 days. I literally just be laying on the ground most of the time. Because im disabled and cannot go far can barely make it to the store to get food and get so lost trying to find it and end up like dropping my money all over the store floor and then cannot find what i am trying to find and then end up dropping my food on floor while trying to check out and its just so hard. I have alot of serve food allergies too which is hard when you cannot cook anything. And I can only shower every few weeks when I go to public beach shower (i went to homeless organizations that are meant to offer showers but got turned away for being a girl even tho there is nothing on their website saying its not allowed). I have not had clean clothes for over 2 months either. I have alot of hard time getting places and carrying stuff and buying stuff because i just drop all my money on floor and cannot really count it.
Not sure how I am going to not die soon?? Also I am not even on medicine anymore because it is too complicated for me to take myself and i lost it. when I had like the hospital social worker and stuff (I came in because i was having medical heart emergency so a ambualnce just took me) they were like oh well you have been homeless for ages now so you can just wait for public housing and continue what youre doing. I go into public housing and they just tell me to wait for SDA and when I have contacted NDis they tell me to just wait for public housing as apparently it will be quicker. Hm
also I have 0 family or friends so.
Im in sydney if reveleant
help appericated.

Who's to blame: Overbearing family, or college student?
I’m a 19-year-old black guy, and I’ve been grappling with some serious family issues concerning my mother and grandparents. It's a lot to unpack, so buckle up:
Growing up, it was just my mother and I, as my dad was in and out of the picture due to my parents' divorce. My grandparents played a significant role too, doting on me since I was an only child, and my mother was also the sole child in her family. Given our circumstances, my mother tended to be excessively protective, perhaps stemming from my early years spent in and out of hospitals due to medical concerns. Being the center of attention came with the territory, I suppose.
At 17, I began experimenting with substances like nicotine, weed, and alcohol with my best friend, a common scenario among kids my age. I’d sneak around, hiding these escapades from my mother. Freshman year in college rolled around, and so did more experimentation. Unfortunately, someone from my friend circle spilled the beans about my college shenanigans to my mother and their parents, leading to increased suffocation when I returned home. I got banned from my best friend's house for a period of time because of it. Additionally, my mother caught me high once, further worsening the situation. To me, it all felt blown out of proportion, considering it was typical teen/young adult behavior from the peers I was around.
Continuing my transition into college life, my mother never really provided a safe space for open communication. It felt like she was always breathing down my neck, fostering an environment of secrecy. As they say, strict parents breed sneaky kids. Moreover, my family’s insistence on regular church attendance felt stifling.
As I matured, my mother's grip seemed to tighten, suffocating any semblance of space I needed. More often than not, we clashed, and she persistently pushed for a closer bond. With that made coming home for breaks a struggle, and enjoyment going back to school after the breaks were over.
By sophomore year, I found myself delving into my studies as needed, hookup culture, a little bit of partying, piercings, more drugs, and then dating. The girl I was seeing didn’t attend my college but lived nearby. We clicked on a dating site and in real life, and I’d occasionally visit her place once we got comfortable with the idea. Her parents didn't know at first but didn't really care once they found out. In fact, once they met me, they came to like me because of my character and career plans. Though my mother and grandmother reacted with disdain at her and my actions, criticizing her career choice in cosmetology, her White ethnicity, and her action to bring me to her parent's house while they weren't there. With those factors, they accused her of being promiscuous, which is nowhere near the case.
Academically, I’m pursuing an engineering degree, managing to maintain my scholarships despite knowing I could do better. Fast forward to yesterday: I was discussing my grades with my grandmother, with my mother present. Which felt like a horrible mistake as my mother brought up my choices and who I was sleeping with, which snowballed into my mother prying the truth out of me in front of my grandmother. It was so bad my mother wanted to answer my grandmother's questions for me, with an irritated smile on her face, but luckily my grandmother shut her down and waited for my honest responses, which I for the most part gave.
During the conversation about the girl, my grandmother and mother made a joke about me being on a leash like my dog, which, in hindsight, felt more like mockery than humor. Moreover, my grandmother's ominous warning about potential legal consequences if I continued to visit her house against my family's wishes was unsettling. She claimed to have connections to the local police department near my school, which added an extra layer of fear and coercion. With that said my grandmother felt that I'd be better off locked up than be at the girl's house because of unreasonable safety reasons.
Additionally, my mother and grandma resorted to comparing me unfavorably to my cousin, who dropped out of college and got a girl pregnant. This comparison only served to exacerbate tensions and feelings of inadequacy.
Reflecting on everything, I made the tough call to end my relationship to appease my family. They judged her based on superficial criteria, and I couldn’t bear to subject her to their scrutiny any longer, so we broke up.
My relationship with my dad isn’t without its tensions, but he’s the one who speaks candidly, even if his words aren’t sugar-coated. After recent events, tensions with my mother have escalated. I yearn for her to loosen her grip, to allow our relationship to evolve naturally rather than being forced. I could say the same thing about my grandfather as well, but he only stays involved in my academic life.
My friends and my now ex agree – my family’s stance on my relationship and actions was wild. So, I'd like to know, am I 100% at fault or does my family have a part to play? Please help me figure this out. There's still a little bit of tension between me and my mother.

Just a little bit of a back story. I have been sick for the past year and half. My blood levels have been low and the drs don’t know what the cause is, is it it an iron deficiency or something worse. So they began doing a series of infusion treatments on me to see if my blood levels would rise. While this has been going on I was still working but thankfully my employer was understanding and said whenever I needed to go rest just make up the time where I could. I am a contingent employee under contract so I have no pto or sick time. So I cant necessarily miss because I need the money to help support my spouse and children. I also home school one of my children.
During this time because I have not been performing in the bedroom with my spouse because I have been sick and exhausted. It is not like I didn’t want I just physical could not. This past Christmas while I was working I sent a Text to my husband just telling him thanks for taking to me the dr the other day. He responds with I want a divorce. He then proceeds to tell me I am soul eater that I am drag him down and now that he has lost weight he wants to explore more options with his body that couldn’t before and I am not giving him sex everyday like I use to. He asked me for an open relationship. I said this is not a conversation to have via text come home. At that point I was worked up at my desk while working and not feeling the best.
He comes home and completely avoids me. I tried engaging in conversation everything but he went straight to his computer ignoring me. The next morning I woke up and tried engaging in conversation again he ignored me until later that evening. during the conversation he began a by saying he wants to leave because he doesn’t believe I respect him or appreciation him and he doesn’t feel in control of the relationship further more me being sick is exhausting and the children we adopted do not respect him either.
I sat their in a daze because something was not sitting right with me. I asked if there was someone else he initially said no but then I said you’re lying and he confessed he was talking with his ex and that they had been sexting. He said it wasn’t affair because it was not physical however in our first year of marriage he sexted someone and I sat the boundary that it was not ok! Fast forward 10 years he did it again.
On Christmas he decided to leave.. imagine having to tell the 2 kids you just adopted on Christmas it wasn’t their fault because they were blaming themselves due to the comment he made as he was leaving he stated “don’t let your mom get in your head like my mom did when she divorced my dad…” what why would say that! I explained to the kids that we were just in a rough spot and no matter what happens we love them unconditionally and nothing is their fault because our younger son was saying if him and his brother didn’t come in the picture none of this would happen. Worse day of my life especially. The next day he messaged and asked if we were going to his moms to celebrate Christmas and that k got what I wanted he had to sleep in a parking lot. I told him not to sleep in a parking lot and for the sake of the kids come home. But if he were to come home this thing with ex had to stop. The only reason it began because I wasn’t given him attention and she is going through a divorce and gave him everything he needed that she was better than me in all aspects. I sat there and cried. He the canceled my health insurance.
He came home and I went to the bedroom to sleep he texted me and said o you can’t come out here now that I came home. I go outside the room to talk to him and he told me I needed to speak to a therapist that I am crazy and a narcissist. That he is going to stay.
I began speaking with a therapist paying out of pocket and told her everything that occurred and what he had said and done and what I have said and done and that I was really nervous about being a narcissist and if I were a narcissist. After speaking with her for a moments she told me I wasn’t a narcissist but I do suffer narcissistic victim syndrome and that I live with my narcissist. I told her I was having a hard time with forgiveness with the other girl because if she was going through a divorce because her spouse cheated why would she do that to another person. The therapist was to ask her.
So I took her advice and I sent the message. She responded. We had a completely adult conversation she stated she begged my husband not to cheat but he led her to believe we were in an open marriage. She reassured me going for she would not be a bother anymore and I thanked her.
Fast forward a couple of days I get a follow on my instagram from a girl I use to work with. I have spoken with this person in years but i remembered her because she was so nice. So I sent her a private message that literally just said hello how are you? She responded as if I was trying to get intel out of her regarding my spouse and was so nasty. I sat there crying not understanding why this person was so mean and spouse what is it. I said this girl we worked followed me and I sent her message saying hello and she goes off about you what the hell are you telling me people. He said nothing I am not telling anybody anything.
So I messaged her back to shut the conversation down and showed the screen shot of where she followed me and I wasn’t even following her. I told her not to make up lies about my husband then she sends me a screenshot of her and my husband convo he had villianized me to her. I thanked her for the message and blocked her. I fwd a screen shot of the message to his phone and set in silence. He responded “Yeah? And? Be sure to bring that up to your therapist too. Way to send us a whole step backwards because you can't talk to me like an adult. I lied about not knowing because I wanted to see how far you would take it.”
The goodness out of all this is I am no longer a contingent and next month will have health insurance again to start back my infusions treatments to determine why my blood levels are low fingers crossed it is an iron deficiency.
Am I the asshole for wanting a divorce?

Some of you may know I host Trial runs (on and off stream) every week to help players get their points and playlist completion, and have been doing so since the FH4 days.
For the first time, I ran into a CLAN of RAMMERS - and you will not believe the extents they went to without seeing it for yourself.
I see posts on here and other social medias all the time about how people hate the Trial because of rammers - in the comments here, I have linked a video I shared today, that shows the gameplay of what happened, but also educates people on the Forza Code of Conduct, and how to report players violating that conduct.
This is something that needs to be publicized, and I'm hoping if enough awareness is brought to this, it will help clean up the community.
Get your popcorn, enjoy, and please share the video to ALL of your FORZA friends!
Hope everyone is well. See you in Retrowave - Stevio

Some of you may know I host Trial runs (on and off stream) every week to help players get their points and playlist completion, and have been doing so since the FH4 days.
For the first time, I ran into a CLAN of RAMMERS - and you will not believe the extents they went to without seeing it for yourself.
I see posts on here and other social medias all the time about how people hate the Trial because of rammers - in the comments here, I have linked a video I shared today, that shows the gameplay of what happened, but also educates people on the Forza Code of Conduct, and how to report players violating that conduct.
This is something that needs to be publicized, and I'm hoping if enough awareness is brought to this, it will help clean up the community.
Get your popcorn, enjoy, and please share the video to ALL of your FORZA friends!
Hope everyone is well. See you in Retrowave - Stevio

Hi everyone!
So I was talking to a this girl for a few months and it was going really well until she started having some home issues and mental health issues and things like that so she wouldn’t reply as frequently or as “lovingly” and my friends suggested I should just text her about it because you can’t make anything work without communication. For context, she is autistic and can struggle with replying to messages if she has a lot going on in general. So like I said it was all going really well we clicked super quickly and we messaged all the time and everything until recently when she went colder with me and that sent my brain into overthinking mode and I tried to surpress my irrational thoughts because I have an anxious attachment type and she needed the space away from me but there were a few times I couldn’t help but message because everyone was saying it’s what I should do and yesterday my brain just couldn’t keep it in any longer and I asked if she thinks we’d ever be anything to which she said this:
“I JUST DONT KNOW ATM WITH EVERYTHING GOING ON AND WHAT HAPPENED BEFOREEE ECT MUMS SURGERY AND MY MENTAL HEALTH I DONT THINK I'LL HAVE ENOUGH TIME OR EMERGY”
I replied with the truth that one of my friends told me to just ask her straight up and anything but a yes means she doesn’t care and doesn’t see it going anywhere so I shouldn’t put my energy into one girl which made me overthink and send the message to which she replied with:
“he doesn't know about me and my issues though so not reallyyyy his place to say it's completely different with me compared to a 'normal' person i just have lots on my plate to deal with and i'm going to struggle to have the time to go out, meet, talk ect because mums surgery recovery time is like 6 months and i'll be the only one home so i'll be doing everything”,
I then replied saying that I’m sorry and that I really really like her and need to stop listening to what other people say and to just trust her. She then replied to that saying:
“i just think we'd be better of as friends atm don’t be sorry i just don't think the timing is right with everything going on you're still very important to me and i appreciate everything you've done and how much you've helped me”
My response to this was that I didn’t think I could only be friends because I care about her a lot and want to be there for her and help her through the hard times and that I’ll wait for her as long as it takes to get through everything etc etc to which she waited a few hours and sent me a message that I never managed to open in time because she blocked me on everything before I could ever read it and as soon as she blocks me it disappears. So now I’m trying to move on but she’s stuck on my mind and I don’t want to because she is an amazing girl and I want to be there for her and I felt like we had a good connection but my own insecurities and attachment hit me out of nowhere and my brain needs to know what she said in that last message before she blocked me but I can’t know without asking her which would be doing the opposite of what she wants and needs and it’s not letting me move on well because she could’ve said anything.
I cut out my full messages and things plus some extra back story to not make it too long so I guess I’m asking for any advice? She meant a lot to me and I didn’t want to push her away this much by becoming needy and doubtful. I’ve also been struggling recently with just not enjoying things in general and not enjoying life as much because I don’t live near friends so there’s not much joy around me until I go see them. Any advice and thoughts are appreciated thank you! 19M for reference sorry for the read 😭

Third year student about to qualify and currently on management placement in a nursing home. Wasn’t my cup of tea but I’ve managed with what I could and most of the time I get on ok.
Been having some issues that really brings down my morale and makes me dread to come in. I have last sign offs in my book that my other placements wanted to be done at my management. Mentor 1 is ok, but they informed me that some carers didn’t know if I was counted in the numbers, which I confirmed that it shouldn’t be the case. Some carers still expect me to be on the floor at all times for personal care, but I have other priorities as well to do my nursing care. I have never turned down people asking me to help with doubles or give a hand when there’s chaos going on, but I think it’s ridiculous the amount of personal care I have had to do which has affected me learning things like their online systems for notes and care plans as well as contacting external health services, which I still feel like I can improve this. There’s a lot that I have missed out to learn and witness from health visits because I have been busy with personal care tasks.
Mentor 2 also has asked me to be on the floor with the carers to “get to know your patients better” which I honestly felt was insulting. I have been proactive in getting to know residents and their families to the best of my abilities despite being there only over a month, and they have good rapport with me and there haven’t been any complaints raised about me. Mentor 2 also has a habit of rushing me with tasks and scolding me for not chasing things up right away despite me having to juggle personal care, making sure carers are supported and do nursing tasks/run for meds.
I’ll be honest and say sometimes the vibes are not it and it’s baffling to see grown ups act so cliquey.
The manager has even told me I should be on the floor with the carers despite me being on the floor 75% of the time and the other 15% is me running around crazy trying to do the jobs that the nurses need to chase up on. They also told me if I have concerns with carers not understanding my role as a student then I should have that conversation with them, but that feels like it isn’t my place to say as I have no authority. It just feels overwhelming and I’m almost being used as an assistant at times instead of an almost qualified health practitioner.
Sadly I feel like I cannot seek support with my personal tutor or university with this as my mentor is my reference for my NQN application and I wouldn’t want to be at a disadvantage if they are pissed off that I have put in a bad word. I spoke to the PEF about what should be expected of a management student at a care home and they had informed me I had leadership roles to prioritise, but it’s basically impossible trying to allocate tasks to people that are twice your age and don’t respect you. I understand burnout and short staff are big factors to these clashes in staff, and I leave in the summer, but I genuinely hate this placement experience and feel not like I am ready to finish up.
Is there any way to deal with these issues that won’t affect the rest of my time here? I’m at odds with how to approach this without a confrontation.

Recently had to sorn my car as I didn’t realise the law around continuous insurance for taxed vehicles. (I’m a young driver and a student so I wanted to be able insure my car on and off) took them 8 months of me doing this (completely unknowingly) and then I got a letter in the post threatening fines / criminal record if I didn’t insure/sorn my car within 28 days or if they see my car is taxed but uninsured again.
Anyway I’m back for summer and my MOT is due so I want to get that done. However because I’m a young driver the insurance policies available to me are extremely limited in the first place and my go-to best value insurance will not cover an untaxed vehicle full stop.
Can’t tax my vehicle (or take it to MOT) without an insurance policy so I need to purchase extortionate temporary insurance to do that all for a day. But then I have to wait the standard 2-5 working days for my car to show as taxed on the online database, else my normal insurance provider will probably reject my application.
TLDR My question is this: can I get away with leaving my car functionally taxed but uninsured for 2-5 days whilst I wait for my car to show as taxed online? (obviously I wouldn’t be driving it) or do I have to suck it up and pay hundreds (literally) for a whole week of temporary insurance to cover me for that processing period.
Bit stuck over what to do about this because I don’t want to fork out hundreds for no reason but I also don’t want to get fined. Surely there must be some leeway because people have to switch their insurance policies all the time right?

I'm looking to take a break from my Vet Tech program.
I recently lost my health insurance, and in turn lost all of my medications and therapy. My mental health took a huge hit because of this. I have other stresses in my life such as bills, looking for a better paying job that has better benefits, etc.
My concerns about taking a break are these:
Will I have to pay the rest of the tuition for my program? I already have student debt from dropping out of college before, I don't need more debt.
Will I be able to pick up where I left off at a later date?
I'd like to finish my program but the stress of everything is really effecting me. I need time to sort myself out.
Any help or advice is appreciated. Please no sarcasm or snide remarks. I have enough going on as it is, I'm just looking for advice.

During the height of my high regard for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), among the movies of which I had been a major fan were the Captain America releases. At least two of them. The third film in this mini franchise - 2016's "CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR" proved to be a major disappointment for me. However, when I heard that Disney and Marvel Films had plans to air a miniseries about the characters Sam Wilson aka the Falcon and James "Bucky" Barnes aka the Winter Soldier, I must admit that I felt a renewed interest in the franchise again.
When I said a renewal of the MCU franchise, I meant it. Aside from a few movies like "ANT-MAN", "BLACK PANTHER", "CAPTAIN MARVEL" and "ETERNALS"; the MCU had become a major disappointment for me ever since the release of 2015's "THE AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON". One might ask . . . what about the MCU television productions that aired on the Disney Plus streaming channel? Aside from one production that I somewhat liked and one that I loved, most of them have been disappointing to me. Unfortunately, I have to include this follow-up to the Captain America movies, "THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER".
Set six months after 2019's "THE AVENGERS: ENDGAME", "THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER" followed former war veteran/Avenger Sam Wilson, who has resumed working the for the U.S. government, while using his role as the Falcon. When the government recruits Sam to track down and deal with a group of enhanced anarchists known as "the Flag Smashers", former World War II veteran/HYDRA tool/Avenger James "Bucky" Buchannan aka the Winter Soldier decides to join Sam in his mission, due to his lingering guilt as a former HYDRA assassin and their shared experiences as Steve Rogers' close friends and battling Thanos and his army.
Since "THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER" had aired on the DisneyPlus channel in six episodes, I had seriously considered ranking the episodes. But like Season three of the Marvel Netflix series, "DAREDEVIL", the more I watched "THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLIDER", the more it disappointed me. Aside from complaints about its pacing, the limited series had received a great deal of praise from critics and fans alike. Because of this, I believe it was one of the most overrated productions in the MCU history. People had seemed so focused on little moments and scenes that very few had noticed how the series' narrative seemed to be all over the map. For example:
~\Sam Wilson~* - This limited series is supposed to be a follow up to the events of "ENDGAME" in which Sam had received the Captain America shield from an aging Steve Rogers, a sign for him to take up the latter's costumed role. Was this an attempt by Marvel Films/Disney to make Sam a more relevant character? If so, why? Why did a MCU character have to replace Steve as the new Captain America to be more relevant? Why not allow Sam to continue as the Falcon, only push his role to the forefront as one of the franchise's new leading characters? Some might accuse me of not wanting a black man as Captain America, a topic that was brought up in the series. Frankly, I never wanted another character - regardless of race, gender or ethnicity - to become the new Captain America. That includes Bucky Barnes. Allow Steve Rogers to fade into the background and let Sam (as the Falcon) shine as one of the franchise's new leads. However, the die has been cast. One can only sit back and see if moviegoers are willing to accept Sam as the new Captain America.
Perhaps the MCU had to make Sam the new Captain America in order to make him more relevant. Why would I say that? The showrunner for "THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER", Malcolm Spellman, came dangerously close to shoving Sam into the role of the second lead or worst, a role he has been since his debut in 2014's "CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER" - a supporting character. During the series' first three or four episodes, someone other than Sam (either Bucky Barnes or Helmut Zemo - two white men) made decisions that allowed the plot to move forward, not Sam. He was simply regulated to being an observer or reactor. The series even managed to undermine Sam's decision not to support the Sokovia Accords in "CIVIL WAR". In thee 2016, Sam became the first Avenger to speak out against the Accords and declare his intentions not to sign it. Yet, according to Bucky in this series, Sam had merely followed Steve's example in rejecting the Accords. And Spellman did nothing to allow Sam to correct this misconception.
~\James "Bucky" Barnes~* - One of the few aspects of "CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR" I found enjoyable proved to be the interactions between Sam Wilson and Bucky Buchannan. Despite their lingering jealousy and competition over the role as "Steve Rogers' best friend", the pair's interactions proved to be very entertaining, thanks to the screen chemistry between Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan. Unfortunately, Mackie and Stan could not save "CIVIL WAR" for me. Nor could they save "THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER", due to its problematic writing. A good deal of that writing surrounded Bucky's character. I have so many questions about his role in this series. For example:
-Why would any official of the Joint Counter Terrorist Center allow Bucky to visit and question Helmut Zemo, the man responsible for the U.N. conference bombing in Vienna, in "CIVIL WAR"? That made very little sense to me. Surely the JCTC authorities remembered how Zemo managed to brainwash Bucky into making his own prison break in "CIVIL WAR"? Also, Bucky was on parole for his activities as a brainwashed HYDRA assassin. Yet, the JCTC had allowed him to visit Zemo? Surely, the showrunner could have allowed Sam, who was serving the U.S. government again, to be the one to visit and question Zemo?
-How on earth did Bucky managed to evade being arrested and charged for helping Zemo escape from the JCTC? The U.S. and other governments should have been suspicious of Bucky after learning about his visit to Zemo.
-Bucky came off as an arrogant school jock, who thought he was entitled to get his way - especially in his interactions with Sam. I found it hilarious that many fans had criticized John Walker aka Captain America aka U.S. Agent for such toxic behavior. Yet, they had turned a blind eye to Bucky's own behavior. And so did the series - up until the last two episodes. Why did the showrunner allow Bucky to get away with this behavior toward Sam for so long without any complaints from the latter?
-I did not care how Bucky had bullied his way into Sam's mission without the latter's consent. What I found even more annoying was the U.S. government's decision to allow Bucky to join Sam's mission after that ludicrous "therapy session" they were forced to attend together.
~\Racism -~* A good number of MCU fans had complained about the inclusion of racism in "THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER". I had no problems with this direction, considering the story was about Sam, an African-American man, becoming the new Captain America. However, I had a good deal of problems with how the production explored the topic of racism.
The story of Isaiah Bradley, Marvel's second Captain America, had originated in the comics. In the MCU, he was a Korea War veteran whom the United States Army used as one of several unwilling African-American test subjects for their version of the Super Soldier serum. I realize that both Marvel Comics and the MCU had attempted to use Bradley's experience as a metaphor for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The problem is that I cannot see the U.S. government and the Army - both racist organizations in the early 1950s - be willing to risk the possibility of creating a non-white super soldier. Despite the recent desegregation of the Armed Forces in the late 1940s. And both the government and the Army had been more than willing to use white soldiers in other experiments.
After saving a group of black American super soldiers from a prison camp, Bradly was imprisoned by the U.S. government for thirty years. I saw nothing wrong with this twist in the character's narrative, until I remembered two things - Bradley had been able to free his fellow soldiers without anyone's help; and nearly sixty years later, Steve Rogers managed to break into the Raft and free those Avengers who had refused to sign the Sokovia Accord. Why was Bradley unable to free himself from prison? This is the man who had defeated the Winter Soldier by breaking the latter's metal arm. And he was not powerful enough to make a prison break, let alone evade capture?
I had assumed Sam's difficulty in becoming the new Captain America would stem from the government's reluctance to recruit a black man for the position. That would explain their decision to recruit the blond-haired John Walker instead. But the series never really made it clear whether political racism had played a role in Walker's recruitment. The series also had James "Rhodey" Rhodes had paid Sam a visit, emphasizing the importance of the new Captain America being black. As it turned out, Sam's own insecurities about becoming Captain America had more to do with him not initially assuming the role. There was also that interesting scene outside Bradley's Baltimore home where the police arrested Sam during verbal argument with Bucky. Although the cops backed away when they recognized Sam as an Avenger, they ended up arresting the parolee Bucky for missing his required therapy appointment. This scene was supposed to be a case of racial profiling. But . . . we might as well be honest. In the real world, the police would not have backed down from hassling Sam. What I found more disturbing was the production's handling of Bucky's arrest. Once the police discovers that Sam was an Avenger; they turned to arrest Bucky for failing to show up for his missing his therapy session. Not only did the police arrest Bucky with a more gentle behavior, they did so, accompanied by Henry Jackman's mournful score, something that did not accompany the moment of Sam being arrested. Were the audiences expected to notice the hypocrisy and racism in the police's handling of the two men? Expected to feel sympathy for Bucky? Or both?
The last episode featured a scene of two black kids playing with toy Captain America shields. Someone had commented that the shields (especially in the hands of non-white children) represented hope to the future of race relations in the United States. Why? How? This country had a biracial president for EIGHT YEARS. Yet, U.S. racial policies have remained problematic even to this day. I can say the same for other countries. The so-called symbolism of this scene only reminded me of how human beings put so much faith in imagery and symbolism. And this strikes me as a FALSE FAITH. Why was taking up the mantle of a costumed hero that had been previously occupied by a white man, the only way for Sam Wilson to become relevant within the MCU franchise? What was wrong with him being "the Falcon"? Sam becoming the next Captain America was not going to save the U.S. in regard to race relations - not in real life and not in the fictional world of the MCU. Looking back on the series, the series' only scenario that seemed to expose racism in a realistic manner, proved to be Sam's failure to acquire a bank loan for his family's fishing boat in Louisiana.
~\Sharon Carter~* - I am certain many MCU fans are aware of this. One of Marvel Comics' most iconic couples happened to be Steve Rogers aka Captain America and Sharon Carter aka Agent 13. She also happened to be the great-niece of Peggy Carter, Steve's love interest during World War II. Portrayed by Emily VanCamp, Sharon was first introduced as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in "CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER" as a potential love interest for Steve. Despite Sharon's appearance in the following Captain America movie, "CIVIL WAR", their romance never really developed. Many blamed the lack of chemistry between VanCamp and Chris Evans. I never had a problem with their screen chemistry. I had a problem with the lack of relationship development between Sharon and Steve. And I blame Kevin Feige's decision to transform the third Captain America film into a third (and badly written) pseudo Avengers movie. The change in the film's narrative, along with Sharon's failure to appear in "THE AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR" and "ENDGAME", left no opportunity for Sharon and Steve to become the romantic pair they had been in the comics. Instead, Sharon became a fugitive from the U.S. government after helping Steve and Sam hunt down Bucky, moved to Madripoor, a city-state with no U.S. extradition and became an embittered criminal known as "the Power Broker".
After "CIVIL WAR", nearly five years had passed before Sharon appeared in another MCU production - namely this series. And what happened? The franchise, with Spellman, ended up completely destroying her character by transforming her into the villain known as Power Broker, the criminal leader of an Indonesian city-state called Madripoor. After helping Steve and Sam acquire their suits and equipment in order to go after Bucky in "CIVIL WAR", Sharon lost her job with the C.I.A. and became a fugitive. She eventually moved to Madripoor, a city-state with no U.S. extradition, to evade capture, survived Thanos' Snap and became an embittered criminal nicknamed "the Power Broker" in order to survive the new world.
What really pissed me off about Sharon's arc between "CIVIL WAR" and "THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER" is that her development into a major villain all happened OFF SCREEN. Off screen. Apparently, screenwriters for "INFINITY WAR" had written a draft that included Sharon in the movie. But according to Christopher Markus, he and Stephen McFeeley could not imagine scenes featuring Steve and Sharon trying to make it work in an apartment, because the 2018 movie did not have time to focus on their personal life. Why did Marvel simply fail to allow Sharon to be part of Steve's vigilante team - like Sam and Natasha Romanoff? I mean . . . good fucking grief! And why did Malcolm Spellman believe the only way Sharon could be interesting was to become a villain in "THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER"? This was his idea of improving Sharon's character?
~\Helmut Zemo aka Baron Zemo~* - Why did Malcolm Spellman, Kevin Feige and the MCU thought it necessary to bring back Helmut Zemo, the Sokovian-born villain from "CIVIL WAR"? What role did he play in "THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER"? I realize that Bucky, of all people, visited the incarcerated Zemo to acquire information on who had created the super-soldier serum that empowered the Flag Smashers. But why did he believe Zemo could provide the answer? Because he thought HYDRA was involved? Bucky or Sam could have searched for information from sources other than Zemo, who had been incarcerated for . . . what? Eight years? Eight years. Zemo managed to become something of a crowd-pleaser, thanks to Daniel Brühl's performance. Otherwise, I found his presence in this series unnecessary.
~\The Big Bad~* - Why on earth did it take this series so long to finally reveal the main villain's identity? At first, the series hinted the Flag Smashers, led by Karli Morgenthau. However, the series tossed other potential candidates for the Big Bad before viewers - John Walker, Helmut Zemo and yes, Sharon Carter. But in the end, Morgenthau and her group proved to be the main villains.
The Flag Smashers were a group of empowered people who believed the world was a better place between Thanos' Snap and the Blip (resurrection of those who had died during the Snap), when Humans around the world managed to unite and form a borderless society, one in which people helped others without any thought to nationalism and bias. Thanks to the Avengers, the world resumed its conflicts between nationalities and other groups. In other words, the borders returned.
Frankly, I have nothing against this ideal. Only Ms. Morgenthau and her followers resorted to violence and terrorism to achieve their goals. Does this sound familiar? It should. The Flag Smashers proved to be another example of characters with a progressive goal, resorting to extremism and becoming villains. This seemed to be a growing trend within the franchise, which I believe began with Erik "Killmonger" Stevens aka Prince N'Jadaka in 2018's "BLACK PANTHER". Since then, the MCU has not looked back at its growing roster of progressive villains. Perhaps I should not have been surprised. The franchise's ambiguous portrayal of an unconstitutional document like the Sokovia Accords, should have been the wake-up call. It seemed as if Kevin Feige, Marvel Films and Disney Studios had finally exposed themselves for the faux progressives they pretend to be. Frankly, this form of villainy has become tiresome to me.
After writing this article, I had considered ranking the six episodes featured in "THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER" anyway. But I decided against it. My dislike of the series made it impossible for me to even bother. Being a fan of the first two Captain America movies, I had truly hoped this series would redeem the franchise. Unfortunately, it proved to be just as disappointing as "CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR". Pity. Perhaps the fourth film, "CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD" will do the trick. I hope so.

my dream has always been to work with animals but i've never been sure id make it. I've been dealing with a lot of mental health issues for the majority of my life and never once planned on making it out like to my gcses or attend college but now thats changed. I kind of have a plan, i know what GCSE grades i need, what college to go to and when in university to study zoology however due to the fact i am still struggling with my issues it has caused me a great amount of memory loss, constantly being tired and overly anxious unable to concentrate i have missed YEARS of learning by not being entirely all there. I am trying to get back on medication and back into therapy, what i need to know if anyone in veterinary care understands? were you always good at school, getting amazing grades or did you struggle? feel like a massive idiot? but managed to learn and remember things? obviously you go to school for years to learn everything you need to but rn its impossible for me to pass. Without passing i wont be able to do any of that at least not any time soon. I need Grade 7 biology, physics and chemistry along with maths, english and a couple others. I have a year (im aware i could always do my GCSE's years from now but id like to get my life sorted cuz currently i feel i dont have years left of my life). I'll be doing them around May 2025, do you have any tips or advice for me? how to study, what to do to look after myself and etc? im not looking for mental health help, i js feel alone in this. Was it always easy? as a child were you amazing at science. I feel i am meant to be working with animals, id love to save them especially wild animals but it feels impossible, i need hope and motivation to get me through this. Not only for me to stay alive and fight through my struggles but so many animals need help and it'd give me purpose knowing i have a chance to save them. I hope this makes sense. Thank you !!

This might be a slightly philosophical post. But the aim is to get to the bottom of what you should be truly doing. To truly get the most results.
There seems to be a MASSIVE amount of conflicting information online about how to do this.
“Do stuff that moves the needle forward”
“Do stuff that brings in revenue”
What does this truly mean though. And is it even the right thing. That’s the purpose of this post, to uncover.
When I’ve spent my time on actual needle-moving forward things, like taking business from 0 to revenue, doing all offer development, operations, sales process, marketing myself, it generally has taken me about 6 months to fully ‘try out’ a business idea I’ve had.
Most times it hasn’t worked.
Either it wasn’t profitable. Or there was a big problem somewhere.
I believe fundamentally it’s because I’m moving too slow.
Because it usually takes me around 6 months to ‘validate’ whether a business has good potential.
When you haven’t sold it or developed expertise in it yourself yet.
And I would say about 5% of the time it does work.
So if it takes 6 months and only 5% of the time it works (where you bring in revenue, no major issues), and each time it doesn’t work you try a new variation of it or something new based on what you learned, then it might take 10 years of trying different things to get the business to work.
Which sounds like it takes way too long.
So I thought about how the top companies move much quicker.
What separates them and my strategy.
And realized they simply had much more people on their team.
If you think about any successful organization who has achieved great things, and is world-leading, usually there is not 1 person on the team.
There seems to be a correlation between number of people on the team and speed of progress they can make in business.
Which goes against what most conventional startup wisdom tells you, most small business content creators etc all tell you to do it all yourself.
Which I’ve done for quite a few years and it’s gone so slowly in terms of overall progress.
If you should ‘do everything yourself’ then most Fortune 500 companies would’ve had single founders, and 1 person on their team. But the vast majority of successful Fortune 500 companies had co-founders.
And most successful businesses I know of, had co-founders.
And as they succeeded, they got more people on the team, and these people helped bring more success, then they brought more people.
Obviously there can be bad staff and not everyone contributes to the success of the company.
But I do believe, based on this, and observing top companies, that generally the more successful they are, the more people were involved with bringing about the success.
Which completely contradicts most information given to startups about ‘lone wolf’, ‘go it alone’. If that were true, Google would have 1 employee. Apple would have 1 employee.
And they would have never gotten off the ground.
Anyway, I may not have explained this perfectly but I do strongly believe the more & higher quality people are working together on something, the stats show these companies tend to do better, and successful companies you see often have more people than less working on them.
From the very beginning and now.
Regardless of the stage they were at.
So going based off this information, that the more people, the better, I have hired 30+ different people for different roles. Over the past few years. Across different businesses. To help speed up the progress in different areas.
From marketing roles, sales process roles, web development, app development, customer service, delivery of services.
And I would say there have been maybe 1 or 2 of them where I was actually happy with the result.
Most times, I would hire someone to do a job, and they didn’t do the job well, despite saying they were experienced.
And showing past examples of their work. And telling me everything I wanted to hear about how good they were.
It would often be that they would end up performing badly in the KPIs I set for them, giving many excuses, asking for help/questions/not solving anything on their own.
And just so many other problems. Like when there were multiple people at the same time on a team, working on the same project, they would blame each other and no one took responsibility despite clear responsibilities.
All telling me how other staff were bad and they were good, but getting conflicting info from all staff where they blame each other for everything so it’s difficult to know who to trust and who is being truthful.
Oftentimes not being reliable or doing what they were clearly asked to do.
Oftentimes trying to outsource the work I game them, to other people and not caring about the quality.
At my expense.
So I lost lots of clients, had low performing areas in the areas I hired for a lot of the time.
To be fair, things happened faster the more people there were.
But they often needed much more from me than they were contributing.
Like they always wanted to get paid more, for doing less work, weren’t reliable, did low quality work, didn’t hit KPIs, missed clear deadlines, always gave excuses, blamed others/external things, always asking how “I” wanted their job to be done, to the point where I was having to literally tell them every single thing to do and become an expert at their job myself, and show them how to do what they were put there to do, or do it myself, and still get a low quality result from them.
Anyway, the list goes on in all the problems I have experienced hiring people.
It really seems like a minefield.
But there were 1-2 people who did actually do well, who were responsive, who did what they committed to do, who hit deadlines, who did what they were asked, who didn’t give excuses. Who were actually honest hard workers who figured out how to solve problems and actually do the job that was asked from them.
Because of the amount of people I hired and the very low % of people who seemed to do their job well, it made me think that I am probably the problem here. If so many people are doing a bad job and not doing what they were actually hired to do. When most other companies seem to succeed at hiring people.
Then it must be a problem with myself and how I am hiring and managing them.
So it makes me think I need to level up in how I hire and manage people.
I’ve tried lots of different businesses and variations of them and some have done okay, some have not.
Mainly the most success I’ve had is in my own freelancing, where I don’t have other people on my team.
Because it’s kind of turned into a headache working with others. Who just seem to have mostly never been able to deliver what they promised without it becoming pointless to hire them in the first place with all the work I’m doing on their behalf and trying to pick up after all the problems and failures they’ve done.
So I’m not sure exactly what to spend my time and resources on.
I have money saved up from freelancing.
Where I can continue to hire people.
But I do feel I’ve had many many bad experiences.
And I believe it’s mostly my fault. Maybe my training, my hiring, my management, at places along the line I’ve not done it well enough.
I’ve tried to make improvements each time but it has kind of seemed like luck to get people who do actually do their job well.
I genuinely want to hire people and succeed in this.
Because if I can successfully work with people to achieve outcomes, rather than relying only on myself, I can build a real business and not just do freelancing.
In freelancing, I was able to make $3k-5k/month but it was very stressful and I hated speaking with clients, and was constantly stressed.
I generally really don’t like socialising with people. Including clients and staff.
And staff often try to get me to socialise unnecessarily so they can avoid doing their job, and pull me away from mine.
So trying to make it work.
I want to make it work with hiring people because if I can do this, I can make 10x-100x-1000x faster progress with other people on the same team.
But I do have a very bad track record so far. So it’s kind of painful returning to it and continuing to have bad experiences.
But at the same time I know it’s me who’s probably at fault because there can’t be this many bad people I’ve hired and it surely can’t be this bad for everyone.
I think the reason is that I’ve been better at managing myself and doing things successfully solo throughout my life.
Like I’ve achieved very good things in solo sports, in academia, and in many areas that don’t require a team, but often become frustrated working in a team.
But I don’t want my business success to be limited to 1 person.
So I truly want to make it work in improving my ability to manage (ideally a large amount of) people in a way where they can actually deliver and it work well.
Because I was capped in freelancing to making $3k-5k/month because I couldn’t take on more clients because I was undercharging and overdelivering and couldn’t handle more due to being massively stressed out and hating it. I was able to work with less clients at times and charge higher, but they never wanted me to ‘outsource’ my work to others or bring on a team, and I felt bad about it because had bad experiences where I had felt like I let clients down, and oftentimes they told me they had hired me because of me, and not wanted me to ‘outsource’ the work.
But I want to make it work.
Building a real business with a team. Not just doing freelancing and relying just on myself.
So I have time and money and resources to put into this.
I have 1 staff member currently who is unproductive. But we have an equity deal so it doesn’t cost me money for them to perform. But costs me lots of time and their performance is extremely weak. Don’t even want to go into detail, but it’s a nightmare. Their performance is about 1/10 but I believe I can raise their performance if I improve my ability to raise their performance.
Anyway. I want to build a team, but not sure exactly what activities are best ways to spend my time.
If I am physically making improvements, I feel I am slowing down the business progress.
Whereas I want to hire and manage people.
I’ve built training so that this co-founder is able to hire people. And these people can use the same training to hire people.
But I don’t currently have training to enable them to manage people.
My fear is that without training, people just ask unlimited questions on how to do something in their role and it becomes pointless to have hired them because I have to do everything they should have done to do it, so they basically just become a robot following very specific instructions. Rather than a human being who can achieve things independently.
So for example, if I made this training, it would take up all my time, whereas I have savings I’ve accumulated from freelancing which I can put into either having the co-founder manage staff, or have the co-founder make management training at the same time to enable more and more staff to hire and manage new staff. To achieve overall objectives and KPIs.
Or I could have the co-founder hire someone to make the training.
Then that frees up my time, my co-founders, time and only takes financial resources to accomplish.
What I want to achieve, is a scenario where I can give staff KPIs and objectives, and they are enabled to hire and manage people who can meet these objectives. Independently without my help required.
They give feedback, and I have a system for feedback to internal improvements can be made based on staff feedback.
Without it being unfiltered, it’s structured and organised so people can’t just get unlimited help/training/whatever from me.
Where they should be able to take actions, iterate, learn, improve, and act as independent thinking people who can achieve objectives themselves. Or within a system where it’s not all tied directly to me.
E.g. I have direct reports going to me.
But they have direct reports who go to them.
Previously I had a system where I did this, but then staff at the bottom of the hierarchy would ask their managers questions, and the managers wouldn’t know the answer so would then ask me the questions, and so jumping over the managers and making me deal with everything.
Whereas I want to build a system where people can make business progress in their specific area, independently without everything going to the CEO. Only important/urgent things are feedbacked to the CEO.
This way I believe much faster progress can happen.
Because I won’t be bogged down by exponentially growing problems.
Like with how it works in any successful organisation.
Tim Cook has only a handful of direct reports. Who each only have a handful of direct reports. And so on.
He’s making the most important decisions, dealing with what’s most important and strategic, with top authority, dealing with everything as a birds eye view, but not doing every employee’s job for them, teaching every employee how to do their job. Picking up the pieces after every employee misses their deadlines, doesn’t do their work, gives excuses, does poor work that doesn’t help the company.
Even in any successful organisation. Each unit/person is making their own decisions, taking their own action, learning from it, practicing themself at improving, gaining their own experience, not all relying on 1 person, every single person in the organisation, just for them to do their job.
In successful organisations, people at every level experience new problems all the time, and don’t need to contact the #1 person at the top just to deal with it.
They come up with a solution and go for it. And iterate. Learn, try to do something better next time. And there’s a constant learning/feedback process going on across the organisation which everyone takes part in, not just 1 person doing every part for everyone.
I believe this structure of modelling what actually successful organisations do is the correct way. Because they’re successful for a reason.
Not this ‘hustle grindset’ BS in the startup/business world where lots of information seems to be saying the wrong thing. It just makes no sense to make every single person 100% reliant on you for them to do their job.
Anyway so I’m thinking about what I should do with my time.
What I want to do, is tell my co-founder what to do, which involves hiring and managing people who do things that move the needle forward in the business, as defined by me, and some of those people also hire and manage people. To have an exponentially growing system of people growing the organisation. And a communication and feedback and learning system and autonomy within the system itself so it can take action, learn, grow, thrive. As a system within itself.
I believe if hypothetically, I did everything myself, then it takes about 6 months to ‘validate’ whether a business has good potential, and 5% of the time it does. So if I do everything myself, I believe it will take me 10 years to get a business off the ground.
But if I utilise my money and time more efficiently, I can have as many people working on each part involved in validating these businesses as possible.
I don’t know if that is lazy or smart.
I believe it’s both. But mostly smart. Because I believe I can convince, hire, organise, manage people to either work on equity deals or pay in a way where businesses can realistically bring in profit.
My co-founder does very little of what I ask him to do.
And he wants me to be doing individual things.
He objectively is financially and intelligently very poor and has very minimal skills or experience.
Not to be offensive. Just to paint a picture. So since there is conflicting information everywhere in the business world and you need to choose who to trust, I don’t trust what he believes.
Objectively I am much richer in all these areas than him.
So I used to operate on a democratic system with them. But it’s kind of like, in a vote for president, if you have 80% of the population being easily controlled by the media and being very dumb and easy to sway and manipulate into believing anything, and they vote for things which are objectively dumb and go against what the smartest and objectively most valuable people vote for, I don’t want to be held back by a dumb population having authority or being listened to, if they have a clear, long track record of making very bad decisions.
If you were to take business advice from a homeless person with no experience, money or intellect, or a Fortune 500 CEO, who let’s say objectively has massive experience, money, intellect and success. Then I would probably take what the CEO has to say.
If you had to listen to what a scientist vs 12 year old had to say about a scientific topic, you’d probably want to listen to the scientist who studied the topic and is well respected in their field.
So I believe it would be dumb for both of us, if he made decisions, objectively.
But at the same time it’s difficult to truly know what the truth is.
The Fortune 500 CEO could be telling you what you want to hear, and could have an incentive to lie to you to send you in the wrong direction with bad business advice so you don’t become competition to them, and the homeless person could be honest.
The scientist could be trying to gain fame and get attention to themself to build their career on a lie and fake experiments whereas the 12 year old could be a science savant.
So it’s difficult to truly know what the truth is.
If I should listen to him or myself.
Objectively.

1. I believe if I spend time building the business via this logic I’ve described above, it can grow much faster, with unlimited people working on it and performing well, if the necessary improvements are made.
   
2. And I believe if I were to do the individual things necessary to do it, it would take 6 months to ‘validate’ each’s potential. I.e. try everything in that timeframe to make it work, build a good service/product, build good sales process, build good marketing, deal with customers, etc, all on your own.
   

Whereas in the first option, other people could do all these things.
Human development over history has happened due to the input of millions, if not billions of people.
There wasn’t 1 person who did all the work to get Carnegie or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to gain the success they’ve achieved.
They all build an empire off the backs of others.
Did the slave owners do the slave work themselves when they brought slaves to America? No.
Does Elon do all the individual parts necessary to grow the company? No. He leads and controls the people in order to do that.
Does Mark Zuckerberg single handedly get Facebook off the ground? No. There were 10+ people involved. He stole code from others. Who sued him.
All of these people had exponentially growing staff as the company grew, as fuel to grow the company.
So if you have the money and strategy to lead them to success, I believe it surely is possible.
So long story short this is a long rambling piece of writing but I believe there’s very little impact 1 individual person has on the success of a company. Controlling and amassing an army of people who build the company up and contribute to the company sounds more true.
Does 1 person do everything involved in every sports team? No. Each player plays their respective part. Directed by the coach/manager.
Does 1 person do everything involved in musical orchestras? No each musician plays their part. Directed by the conductor.
And so on.
If you can build an exponentially growing team of staff who effectively work together, bring others on, take action to grow the business, learn from mistakes, make improvements, are highly motivated, are led successfully, it can achieve great things. I feel like it’s a delusion that individual people single-handedly grow companies without others.
So what should that person spend their time doing?
Doing all the millions of things necessary to grow the company? Or bring and manage others who some make progress themselves, some bring and manage others, to gain more and more resources to make progress at faster and faster rate.
Do successful people really have only 1 person responsible? No. They have teams of people behind them.
So trying to do the work of 1,000 people as 1 person sounds 1,000x as hard as getting 1,000 people to each do the work of 1 person.
So if you can finance the growth of the company via hiring others.
Let’s assume I can finance this exponential staff growth. Then surely I should do it right?
Like if I were to compete with 1 person trying to grow their business, and I had 1,000+ people, all doing their jobs effectively, being organised, working as a system not all relying on me, the competition where it’s 1 staff member on average would get beaten.
And surely any excuse you could give, I could just hire someone to solve that excuse.
Like “oh but what roles do you hire these people to do?” well I could hire someone whose role is to figure out what roles they should do. “But what if x?” well I could hire someone whose role is to solve that too. And so on. “Oh but do you have enough money to pay these staff?” Yes. And I can hire people whose job is to bring in money. Whether it’s fundraising, raising from
Did Hitler fight WW2 with 1 person? No. He fought it with millions, if not hundreds of millions of people.
Did Amazon/[insert any Fortune 500 company] get to their size today from having 1 staff member who did everything? No. They had thousands if not hundreds of thousands of staff.
Did any successful mom and pop shop/small business get to their size today from 1 staff member? No. They are one of the largest employers in the USA. Which means they hire a lot of people. Successful mom & pop shops generally have more staff the more successful they are.
Armies generally have more success the bigger and more effective they are.
Companies generally have more success the more staff and more effective the staff are.
So surely we shouldn’t hold ourselves back, to use the example of war, it’s like trying to go to war with others who have hundreds of thousands of people in their army, with just 1 person, yourself. Who is going to win? Them.
How are you going to compete with companies with way more staff, and way more effective staff than you? You would have to become exponentially more effective as 1 person which I just don’t know if it’s realistic.
I think it’s more delusional to believe that 1 person can do as well as 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 or more people who are each as effective as that 1 person.
So if you were to win, you would probably want to expand your army/staff and make them more effective, rather than try to make yourself somehow perform on the same level as armies/companies with thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. It’s just delusional to believe you can beat them in my opinion.
In business, you’d have to be extremely skilled at hundreds of different skills, spend 10+ hours on 100+ individual areas of the business each week to compete with 1,000+ staff who, if performing effectively, would crush you.
This is just my thoughts.
Am I being delusional? Come on…
I just feel like this is the way. Just look at the most successful organisations in history. Was it 1 person?
No, 1 person cannot realistically win a war against 100,000+ people. No matter how good they are. They would need to be top 0.00000000001% in skill in the world at what they’re beating the other side at.
Could 1 footballer beat a football team of 100 people of equal ability than them? No.
Could a company of 1 person outperform a company of 1,000 people? No.
So I believe if I can solve the ability to do this, I can grow a team of unlimited size to conquer and beat any problem thrown at us.
It’s just down to control of people.
Money doesn’t exist.
Even biggest most successful companies in the world mostly didn’t get there on their own.
I believe less than 1% of Fortune 500 Companies were bootstrapped. Or something similar.
And this is what I’m saying.
People in the small business/entrepreneur world tell you you need to have everything yourself.
How are you going to outfinance, outcompete companies on complete other levels without acquiring these resources from others? Just relying on yourself.
How could 1 person get more financing/investment in a company from investors compared to 1,000 of equal ability.
It’s never 1 person ‘beating the world’. Or beating the industry on their own.
Maybe if your aspiration is to be an average business.
“Oh but you should do what is best at each level, and it’s different for each level. Start just by yourself until you get X revenue. THEN hire people”
…..Well if you struggle to get X revenue on your own, how are you ever going to hire others?
The others help you grow the revenue in the first place.
I feel like the small business world is too overreliant on the founder and delusional about the capabilities of 1 person when competing against units 100-1,000x + bigger than them.
Come on.
Anything you want to compete in. In business.
Generally you already have competition.
And if you manage to somehow “spot” something they’ve “missed”, they could just copy you and wipe you out with their massive resources anyway.
In my opinion you need to expand your resources as FAST as possible.
Not this BS “oh wait until you get X profit on your own to hire other people”
Well if you’ve only made good profit on your own as a freelancer, and you’ve spent a lot of years trying to get a business off the ground solo, what are you meant to do?
“Oh just make it work” Great advice.
I just feel like there’s too much delusion into what it actually takes.
In a job or as a freelancer. It’s easier to make $3k-5k/month revenue because you’re only competing against individuals.
But when you try to compete against other businesses to make $3k-5k/month profit, you’re competing against businesses with 10x-100x the people, the money, the resources, the everything, to beat you.
So how are you meant to realistically beat them on your own? Without expanding your resources as quick as possible.
So because of this I believe if 1 person on their own is somehow meant to take a business from $0 to $10k/mo profit, then surely it will happen quicker if more people, of equal ability, are trying to make the business $0 to 10k/mo profit.
To be honest I don’t know what the truth is. This is just what I believe the truth is.
Because I’ve consumed so much wrong information from people acting like they have the correct advice in business.
All Youtube videos, articles, courses, claiming to make you successful in business, when in reality it’s just advice that sounds either easy to say or easy to hear.
Like it’s easy to say as a comment to this post, a response that takes 5 seconds to write, like the first thing that comes to your mind, like “just figure it out on your own”. But that’s not necessarily the truth, it’s just easy for you to say as a commenter. Comments aren’t necessarily the truth.
And on the other side business advice is easy to hear. Like “work on your own, make $1m/month, move to X country, live the life, working 2hours/day” which is just pure delusion. And most of the time the content/advice’s purpose is to benefit the business who made it, not the receiver of the advice. Because it’s selling a course or they have ad sense so they just want maximum engagement and views.
And anyone who is successful in business doesn’t need to give any advice. Because they’re applying the advice. Not giving it. Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos etc have no strong incentive trying to help others get to their level because they could just make an extra $10M-100M from spending the same time/energy/resources giving advice into growing their business.
They’re never gonna have advice that would help you beat them because otherwise they would’ve applied it themself.
And they are actually incentivized to not want others to truly succeed. Because it means more competition for them and less success for them.
So 99%+ of info online just seems like it’s not true.
I’m trying to figure out what is true and what isn’t.
Honestly though it’s difficult to even trust what anyone says in business. Any advice or feedback. For the reasons given.
Because 99% of feedback is either from people who haven’t truly grown a successful business, or it’s not related to you, or it involved luck, or it’s just like a motivational quote they tell you, or it’s a snarky comment they tell you.
It’s only helpful to them. And you are actually their customer or viewer or their entertainment. Not a successful business yourself. Because it’s just all misinformation that all contradicts with the truth.
So not even sure if it’s worth trying to get advice or if it’s all just pointless, just to figure it out myself from experience, trial and error and learning from my own thinking than relying on any other thinking.
Anyway do you think this is just crazy and I’m going crazy or is there any truth to what I’m saying?
Let me know your brutal honest feedback

yet another shitty blogpost since i cant help it. i like the weather. very much. but i cant stop feeling shackled down. what is there possibly to do in a shitty city where i live. i wish i lived in the countryside. but not the boring ones we got here. [batchest warning] i mean the ones in japan. (or other countries). where you live right next to foresty hills. i know anime is fake but i will post a few pics of what i mean. on second thought, im too lazy. just search up non non biyori scenery on images. or from other shows. so im listening to some ambience thing (is it asmr?) about japanese counrtyside and the comments translate to that they miss the countryside (proof that countryside = very nice). so yes i detest the city. but unfortunately jobs are also in the city.
main point of this post:
so like most of the people do, i imagine. to cope with it. instead of going for a peaceful joyful life surrounded by nature in a nice country, i will try to get a job here, in this lifeless citycountry with rude normie inhabitants, one that earns good enough (dont need a lot since i will live alone), and without much stress and with free time (this isnt too much to ask where i live (i think).). and i will focus on hobbies, and levelling up the hobbies. and try to get dopamine that way to cope with all of this. yes i got life figured out feelsokaybutactuallybadman.
comment prediction: just touch some grass bro! forszenbuzin. ive been thinking. maybe a vacation (trip to somewhere) would help. since i havent gone anywhere in a long time. but 1) im not poor, but rarely spend money on non essential stuff. travelling is so expensive. and 2) if i go, it will be fun, but i will not last forever so will probably feel shittier afterwards.

This might be a slightly philosophical post. But the aim is to get to the bottom of what you should be truly doing. To truly get the most results.
There seems to be a MASSIVE amount of conflicting information online about how to do this.
“Do stuff that moves the needle forward”
“Do stuff that brings in revenue”
What does this truly mean though. And is it even the right thing. That’s the purpose of this post, to uncover.
When I’ve spent my time on actual needle-moving forward things, like taking business from 0 to revenue, doing all offer development, operations, sales process, marketing myself, it generally has taken me about 6 months to fully ‘try out’ a business idea I’ve had.
Most times it hasn’t worked.
Either it wasn’t profitable. Or there was a big problem somewhere.
I believe fundamentally it’s because I’m moving too slow.
Because it usually takes me around 6 months to ‘validate’ whether a business has good potential.
When you haven’t sold it or developed expertise in it yourself yet.
And I would say about 5% of the time it does work.
So if it takes 6 months and only 5% of the time it works (where you bring in revenue, no major issues), and each time it doesn’t work you try a new variation of it or something new based on what you learned, then it might take 10 years of trying different things to get the business to work.
Which sounds like it takes way too long.
So I thought about how the top companies move much quicker.
What separates them and my strategy.
And realized they simply had much more people on their team.
If you think about any successful organization who has achieved great things, and is world-leading, usually there is not 1 person on the team.
There seems to be a correlation between number of people on the team and speed of progress they can make in business.
Which goes against what most conventional startup wisdom tells you, most small business content creators etc all tell you to do it all yourself.
Which I’ve done for quite a few years and it’s gone so slowly in terms of overall progress.
If you should ‘do everything yourself’ then most Fortune 500 companies would’ve had single founders, and 1 person on their team. But the vast majority of successful Fortune 500 companies had co-founders.
And most successful businesses I know of, had co-founders.
And as they succeeded, they got more people on the team, and these people helped bring more success, then they brought more people.
Obviously there can be bad staff and not everyone contributes to the success of the company.
But I do believe, based on this, and observing top companies, that generally the more successful they are, the more people were involved with bringing about the success.
Which completely contradicts most information given to startups about ‘lone wolf’, ‘go it alone’. If that were true, Google would have 1 employee. Apple would have 1 employee.
And they would have never gotten off the ground.
Anyway, I may not have explained this perfectly but I do strongly believe the more & higher quality people are working together on something, the stats show these companies tend to do better, and successful companies you see often have more people than less working on them.
From the very beginning and now.
Regardless of the stage they were at.
So going based off this information, that the more people, the better, I have hired 30+ different people for different roles. Over the past few years. Across different businesses. To help speed up the progress in different areas.
From marketing roles, sales process roles, web development, app development, customer service, delivery of services.
And I would say there have been maybe 1 or 2 of them where I was actually happy with the result.
Most times, I would hire someone to do a job, and they didn’t do the job well, despite saying they were experienced.
And showing past examples of their work. And telling me everything I wanted to hear about how good they were.
It would often be that they would end up performing badly in the KPIs I set for them, giving many excuses, asking for help/questions/not solving anything on their own.
And just so many other problems. Like when there were multiple people at the same time on a team, working on the same project, they would blame each other and no one took responsibility despite clear responsibilities.
All telling me how other staff were bad and they were good, but getting conflicting info from all staff where they blame each other for everything so it’s difficult to know who to trust and who is being truthful.
Oftentimes not being reliable or doing what they were clearly asked to do.
Oftentimes trying to outsource the work I game them, to other people and not caring about the quality.
At my expense.
So I lost lots of clients, had low performing areas in the areas I hired for a lot of the time.
To be fair, things happened faster the more people there were.
But they often needed much more from me than they were contributing.
Like they always wanted to get paid more, for doing less work, weren’t reliable, did low quality work, didn’t hit KPIs, missed clear deadlines, always gave excuses, blamed others/external things, always asking how “I” wanted their job to be done, to the point where I was having to literally tell them every single thing to do and become an expert at their job myself, and show them how to do what they were put there to do, or do it myself, and still get a low quality result from them.
Anyway, the list goes on in all the problems I have experienced hiring people.
It really seems like a minefield.
But there were 1-2 people who did actually do well, who were responsive, who did what they committed to do, who hit deadlines, who did what they were asked, who didn’t give excuses. Who were actually honest hard workers who figured out how to solve problems and actually do the job that was asked from them.
Because of the amount of people I hired and the very low % of people who seemed to do their job well, it made me think that I am probably the problem here. If so many people are doing a bad job and not doing what they were actually hired to do. When most other companies seem to succeed at hiring people.
Then it must be a problem with myself and how I am hiring and managing them.
So it makes me think I need to level up in how I hire and manage people.
I’ve tried lots of different businesses and variations of them and some have done okay, some have not.
Mainly the most success I’ve had is in my own freelancing, where I don’t have other people on my team.
Because it’s kind of turned into a headache working with others. Who just seem to have mostly never been able to deliver what they promised without it becoming pointless to hire them in the first place with all the work I’m doing on their behalf and trying to pick up after all the problems and failures they’ve done.
So I’m not sure exactly what to spend my time and resources on.
I have money saved up from freelancing.
Where I can continue to hire people.
But I do feel I’ve had many many bad experiences.
And I believe it’s mostly my fault. Maybe my training, my hiring, my management, at places along the line I’ve not done it well enough.
I’ve tried to make improvements each time but it has kind of seemed like luck to get people who do actually do their job well.
I genuinely want to hire people and succeed in this.
Because if I can successfully work with people to achieve outcomes, rather than relying only on myself, I can build a real business and not just do freelancing.
In freelancing, I was able to make $3k-5k/month but it was very stressful and I hated speaking with clients, and was constantly stressed.
I generally really don’t like socialising with people. Including clients and staff.
And staff often try to get me to socialise unnecessarily so they can avoid doing their job, and pull me away from mine.
So trying to make it work.
I want to make it work with hiring people because if I can do this, I can make 10x-100x-1000x faster progress with other people on the same team.
But I do have a very bad track record so far. So it’s kind of painful returning to it and continuing to have bad experiences.
But at the same time I know it’s me who’s probably at fault because there can’t be this many bad people I’ve hired and it surely can’t be this bad for everyone.
I think the reason is that I’ve been better at managing myself and doing things successfully solo throughout my life.
Like I’ve achieved very good things in solo sports, in academia, and in many areas that don’t require a team, but often become frustrated working in a team.
But I don’t want my business success to be limited to 1 person.
So I truly want to make it work in improving my ability to manage (ideally a large amount of) people in a way where they can actually deliver and it work well.
Because I was capped in freelancing to making $3k-5k/month because I couldn’t take on more clients because I was undercharging and overdelivering and couldn’t handle more due to being massively stressed out and hating it. I was able to work with less clients at times and charge higher, but they never wanted me to ‘outsource’ my work to others or bring on a team, and I felt bad about it because had bad experiences where I had felt like I let clients down, and oftentimes they told me they had hired me because of me, and not wanted me to ‘outsource’ the work.
But I want to make it work.
Building a real business with a team. Not just doing freelancing and relying just on myself.
So I have time and money and resources to put into this.
I have 1 staff member currently who is unproductive. But we have an equity deal so it doesn’t cost me money for them to perform. But costs me lots of time and their performance is extremely weak. Don’t even want to go into detail, but it’s a nightmare. Their performance is about 1/10 but I believe I can raise their performance if I improve my ability to raise their performance.
Anyway. I want to build a team, but not sure exactly what activities are best ways to spend my time.
If I am physically making improvements, I feel I am slowing down the business progress.
Whereas I want to hire and manage people.
I’ve built training so that this co-founder is able to hire people. And these people can use the same training to hire people.
But I don’t currently have training to enable them to manage people.
My fear is that without training, people just ask unlimited questions on how to do something in their role and it becomes pointless to have hired them because I have to do everything they should have done to do it, so they basically just become a robot following very specific instructions. Rather than a human being who can achieve things independently.
So for example, if I made this training, it would take up all my time, whereas I have savings I’ve accumulated from freelancing which I can put into either having the co-founder manage staff, or have the co-founder make management training at the same time to enable more and more staff to hire and manage new staff. To achieve overall objectives and KPIs.
Or I could have the co-founder hire someone to make the training.
Then that frees up my time, my co-founders, time and only takes financial resources to accomplish.
What I want to achieve, is a scenario where I can give staff KPIs and objectives, and they are enabled to hire and manage people who can meet these objectives. Independently without my help required.
They give feedback, and I have a system for feedback to internal improvements can be made based on staff feedback.
Without it being unfiltered, it’s structured and organised so people can’t just get unlimited help/training/whatever from me.
Where they should be able to take actions, iterate, learn, improve, and act as independent thinking people who can achieve objectives themselves. Or within a system where it’s not all tied directly to me.
E.g. I have direct reports going to me.
But they have direct reports who go to them.
Previously I had a system where I did this, but then staff at the bottom of the hierarchy would ask their managers questions, and the managers wouldn’t know the answer so would then ask me the questions, and so jumping over the managers and making me deal with everything.
Whereas I want to build a system where people can make business progress in their specific area, independently without everything going to the CEO. Only important/urgent things are feedbacked to the CEO.
This way I believe much faster progress can happen.
Because I won’t be bogged down by exponentially growing problems.
Like with how it works in any successful organisation.
Tim Cook has only a handful of direct reports. Who each only have a handful of direct reports. And so on.
He’s making the most important decisions, dealing with what’s most important and strategic, with top authority, dealing with everything as a birds eye view, but not doing every employee’s job for them, teaching every employee how to do their job. Picking up the pieces after every employee misses their deadlines, doesn’t do their work, gives excuses, does poor work that doesn’t help the company.
Even in any successful organisation. Each unit/person is making their own decisions, taking their own action, learning from it, practicing themself at improving, gaining their own experience, not all relying on 1 person, every single person in the organisation, just for them to do their job.
In successful organisations, people at every level experience new problems all the time, and don’t need to contact the #1 person at the top just to deal with it.
They come up with a solution and go for it. And iterate. Learn, try to do something better next time. And there’s a constant learning/feedback process going on across the organisation which everyone takes part in, not just 1 person doing every part for everyone.
I believe this structure of modelling what actually successful organisations do is the correct way. Because they’re successful for a reason.
Not this ‘hustle grindset’ BS in the startup/business world where lots of information seems to be saying the wrong thing. It just makes no sense to make every single person 100% reliant on you for them to do their job.
Anyway so I’m thinking about what I should do with my time.
What I want to do, is tell my co-founder what to do, which involves hiring and managing people who do things that move the needle forward in the business, as defined by me, and some of those people also hire and manage people. To have an exponentially growing system of people growing the organisation. And a communication and feedback and learning system and autonomy within the system itself so it can take action, learn, grow, thrive. As a system within itself.
I believe if hypothetically, I did everything myself, then it takes about 6 months to ‘validate’ whether a business has good potential, and 5% of the time it does. So if I do everything myself, I believe it will take me 10 years to get a business off the ground.
But if I utilise my money and time more efficiently, I can have as many people working on each part involved in validating these businesses as possible.
I don’t know if that is lazy or smart.
I believe it’s both. But mostly smart. Because I believe I can convince, hire, organise, manage people to either work on equity deals or pay in a way where businesses can realistically bring in profit.
My co-founder does very little of what I ask him to do.
And he wants me to be doing individual things.
He objectively is financially and intelligently very poor and has very minimal skills or experience.
Not to be offensive. Just to paint a picture. So since there is conflicting information everywhere in the business world and you need to choose who to trust, I don’t trust what he believes.
Objectively I am much richer in all these areas than him.
So I used to operate on a democratic system with them. But it’s kind of like, in a vote for president, if you have 80% of the population being easily controlled by the media and being very dumb and easy to sway and manipulate into believing anything, and they vote for things which are objectively dumb and go against what the smartest and objectively most valuable people vote for, I don’t want to be held back by a dumb population having authority or being listened to, if they have a clear, long track record of making very bad decisions.
If you were to take business advice from a homeless person with no experience, money or intellect, or a Fortune 500 CEO, who let’s say objectively has massive experience, money, intellect and success. Then I would probably take what the CEO has to say.
If you had to listen to what a scientist vs 12 year old had to say about a scientific topic, you’d probably want to listen to the scientist who studied the topic and is well respected in their field.
So I believe it would be dumb for both of us, if he made decisions, objectively.
But at the same time it’s difficult to truly know what the truth is.
The Fortune 500 CEO could be telling you what you want to hear, and could have an incentive to lie to you to send you in the wrong direction with bad business advice so you don’t become competition to them, and the homeless person could be honest.
The scientist could be trying to gain fame and get attention to themself to build their career on a lie and fake experiments whereas the 12 year old could be a science savant.
So it’s difficult to truly know what the truth is.
If I should listen to him or myself.
Objectively.

1. I believe if I spend time building the business via this logic I’ve described above, it can grow much faster, with unlimited people working on it and performing well, if the necessary improvements are made.
   
2. And I believe if I were to do the individual things necessary to do it, it would take 6 months to ‘validate’ each’s potential. I.e. try everything in that timeframe to make it work, build a good service/product, build good sales process, build good marketing, deal with customers, etc, all on your own.
   

Whereas in the first option, other people could do all these things.
Human development over history has happened due to the input of millions, if not billions of people.
There wasn’t 1 person who did all the work to get Carnegie or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg to gain the success they’ve achieved.
They all build an empire off the backs of others.
Did the slave owners do the slave work themselves when they brought slaves to America? No.
Does Elon do all the individual parts necessary to grow the company? No. He leads and controls the people in order to do that.
Does Mark Zuckerberg single handedly get Facebook off the ground? No. There were 10+ people involved. He stole code from others. Who sued him.
All of these people had exponentially growing staff as the company grew, as fuel to grow the company.
So if you have the money and strategy to lead them to success, I believe it surely is possible.
So long story short this is a long rambling piece of writing but I believe there’s very little impact 1 individual person has on the success of a company. Controlling and amassing an army of people who build the company up and contribute to the company sounds more true.
Does 1 person do everything involved in every sports team? No. Each player plays their respective part. Directed by the coach/manager.
Does 1 person do everything involved in musical orchestras? No each musician plays their part. Directed by the conductor.
And so on.
If you can build an exponentially growing team of staff who effectively work together, bring others on, take action to grow the business, learn from mistakes, make improvements, are highly motivated, are led successfully, it can achieve great things. I feel like it’s a delusion that individual people single-handedly grow companies without others.
So what should that person spend their time doing?
Doing all the millions of things necessary to grow the company? Or bring and manage others who some make progress themselves, some bring and manage others, to gain more and more resources to make progress at faster and faster rate.
Do successful people really have only 1 person responsible? No. They have teams of people behind them.
So trying to do the work of 1,000 people as 1 person sounds 1,000x as hard as getting 1,000 people to each do the work of 1 person.
So if you can finance the growth of the company via hiring others.
Let’s assume I can finance this exponential staff growth. Then surely I should do it right?
Like if I were to compete with 1 person trying to grow their business, and I had 1,000+ people, all doing their jobs effectively, being organised, working as a system not all relying on me, the competition where it’s 1 staff member on average would get beaten.
And surely any excuse you could give, I could just hire someone to solve that excuse.
Like “oh but what roles do you hire these people to do?” well I could hire someone whose role is to figure out what roles they should do. “But what if x?” well I could hire someone whose role is to solve that too. And so on. “Oh but do you have enough money to pay these staff?” Yes. And I can hire people whose job is to bring in money. Whether it’s fundraising, raising from
Did Hitler fight WW2 with 1 person? No. He fought it with millions, if not hundreds of millions of people.
Did Amazon/[insert any Fortune 500 company] get to their size today from having 1 staff member who did everything? No. They had thousands if not hundreds of thousands of staff.
Did any successful mom and pop shop/small business get to their size today from 1 staff member? No. They are one of the largest employers in the USA. Which means they hire a lot of people. Successful mom & pop shops generally have more staff the more successful they are.
Armies generally have more success the bigger and more effective they are.
Companies generally have more success the more staff and more effective the staff are.
So surely we shouldn’t hold ourselves back, to use the example of war, it’s like trying to go to war with others who have hundreds of thousands of people in their army, with just 1 person, yourself. Who is going to win? Them.
How are you going to compete with companies with way more staff, and way more effective staff than you? You would have to become exponentially more effective as 1 person which I just don’t know if it’s realistic.
I think it’s more delusional to believe that 1 person can do as well as 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 or more people who are each as effective as that 1 person.
So if you were to win, you would probably want to expand your army/staff and make them more effective, rather than try to make yourself somehow perform on the same level as armies/companies with thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. It’s just delusional to believe you can beat them in my opinion.
In business, you’d have to be extremely skilled at hundreds of different skills, spend 10+ hours on 100+ individual areas of the business each week to compete with 1,000+ staff who, if performing effectively, would crush you.
This is just my thoughts.
Am I being delusional? Come on…
I just feel like this is the way. Just look at the most successful organisations in history. Was it 1 person?
No, 1 person cannot realistically win a war against 100,000+ people. No matter how good they are. They would need to be top 0.00000000001% in skill in the world at what they’re beating the other side at.
Could 1 footballer beat a football team of 100 people of equal ability than them? No.
Could a company of 1 person outperform a company of 1,000 people? No.
So I believe if I can solve the ability to do this, I can grow a team of unlimited size to conquer and beat any problem thrown at us.
It’s just down to control of people.
Money doesn’t exist.
Even biggest most successful companies in the world mostly didn’t get there on their own.
I believe less than 1% of Fortune 500 Companies were bootstrapped. Or something similar.
And this is what I’m saying.
People in the small business/entrepreneur world tell you you need to have everything yourself.
How are you going to outfinance, outcompete companies on complete other levels without acquiring these resources from others? Just relying on yourself.
How could 1 person get more financing/investment in a company from investors compared to 1,000 of equal ability.
It’s never 1 person ‘beating the world’. Or beating the industry on their own.
Maybe if your aspiration is to be an average business.
“Oh but you should do what is best at each level, and it’s different for each level. Start just by yourself until you get X revenue. THEN hire people”
…..Well if you struggle to get X revenue on your own, how are you ever going to hire others?
The others help you grow the revenue in the first place.
I feel like the small business world is too overreliant on the founder and delusional about the capabilities of 1 person when competing against units 100-1,000x + bigger than them.
Come on.
Anything you want to compete in. In business.
Generally you already have competition.
And if you manage to somehow “spot” something they’ve “missed”, they could just copy you and wipe you out with their massive resources anyway.
In my opinion you need to expand your resources as FAST as possible.
Not this BS “oh wait until you get X profit on your own to hire other people”
Well if you’ve only made good profit on your own as a freelancer, and you’ve spent a lot of years trying to get a business off the ground solo, what are you meant to do?
“Oh just make it work” Great advice.
I just feel like there’s too much delusion into what it actually takes.
In a job or as a freelancer. It’s easier to make $3k-5k/month revenue because you’re only competing against individuals.
But when you try to compete against other businesses to make $3k-5k/month profit, you’re competing against businesses with 10x-100x the people, the money, the resources, the everything, to beat you.
So how are you meant to realistically beat them on your own? Without expanding your resources as quick as possible.
So because of this I believe if 1 person on their own is somehow meant to take a business from $0 to $10k/mo profit, then surely it will happen quicker if more people, of equal ability, are trying to make the business $0 to 10k/mo profit.
To be honest I don’t know what the truth is. This is just what I believe the truth is.
Because I’ve consumed so much wrong information from people acting like they have the correct advice in business.
All Youtube videos, articles, courses, claiming to make you successful in business, when in reality it’s just advice that sounds either easy to say or easy to hear.
Like it’s easy to say as a comment to this post, a response that takes 5 seconds to write, like the first thing that comes to your mind, like “just figure it out on your own”. But that’s not necessarily the truth, it’s just easy for you to say as a commenter. Comments aren’t necessarily the truth.
And on the other side business advice is easy to hear. Like “work on your own, make $1m/month, move to X country, live the life, working 2hours/day” which is just pure delusion. And most of the time the content/advice’s purpose is to benefit the business who made it, not the receiver of the advice. Because it’s selling a course or they have ad sense so they just want maximum engagement and views.
And anyone who is successful in business doesn’t need to give any advice. Because they’re applying the advice. Not giving it. Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos etc have no strong incentive trying to help others get to their level because they could just make an extra $10M-100M from spending the same time/energy/resources giving advice into growing their business.
They’re never gonna have advice that would help you beat them because otherwise they would’ve applied it themself.
And they are actually incentivized to not want others to truly succeed. Because it means more competition for them and less success for them.
So 99%+ of info online just seems like it’s not true.
I’m trying to figure out what is true and what isn’t.
Honestly though it’s difficult to even trust what anyone says in business. Any advice or feedback. For the reasons given.
Because 99% of feedback is either from people who haven’t truly grown a successful business, or it’s not related to you, or it involved luck, or it’s just like a motivational quote they tell you, or it’s a snarky comment they tell you.
It’s only helpful to them. And you are actually their customer or viewer or their entertainment. Not a successful business yourself. Because it’s just all misinformation that all contradicts with the truth.
So not even sure if it’s worth trying to get advice or if it’s all just pointless, just to figure it out myself from experience, trial and error and learning from my own thinking than relying on any other thinking.
Anyway do you think this is just crazy and I’m going crazy or is there any truth to what I’m saying?
Let me know your brutal honest feedback

I have browsed this subreddit and the guide and kind of have an idea of the process. I guess this post is to enquire about other people's experiences in a similar situation to me regarding timelines, inland vs outland applications, etc.
So, I (US Citizen) am married to a Canadian (she's dual, Canadian/US now, after emigrating here a few years ago.) We have a child together (2yo). As a family, we live together in the U.S.
The plan originally had been to start and raise our family here in the U.S. But now that we have our daughter, the call to move to BC where my wife is from is very strong.
The issue we are debating is applying for my PR from within or outside Canada.
Applying from outside: We submit our application and I can continue to work and earn a paycheck while application is being processed (could take 1-2 years?). The issue is, I work in law enforcement- the job is taking a toll on my mental health, where we currently live has my wife pretty unhappy, and the job is not conducive to a family with regards to scheduling. I miss my kid, man. But, the pay is good, and by continuing to work while the application is being processed, we have insurance, health coverage, etc, and we can set ourselves up for success and hit the ground running in Canada (BC ain't cheap!). ...just dunno how I'll do another 12-18 months of this job.
Applying from inside: Again, a long time to process application, but get to live in Canada and spend time with my daughter as a stay-at-home Dad while PR is being processed. But, I wont be making money (Wife will tho), and with regards to Healthcare- I don't think I would be eligible, at least for a few months? I'm healthy, but there is always that 'What if' factor. Also, if we go this route, we have to get to Canada first, which means quitting my job, trying to cross the border with all our stuff, and possibly getting denied entry due to intent to emigrate without PR status? I'd be jobless at that point...
Some other 'background' info: - Wife's job is remote at a US based company, with processes to allow for international work, including in Canada. This includes processes for taxes, benefits, etc.

• Our daughter is US Citizen currently, however, my wife has started her application for her Canadian citizenship (through her, as a naturalized citizen). This can take 4-5 months, but will most likely be processed before my PR gets processed - so no need to add our daughter as a dependent on my PR application?
  
• My wife has family in B.C., so we will have an already established community there and short term housing (lower mainland and Van Island)
  
• I have an Masters in Education (8+ years as a teacher, but no teaching 'license'. I taught ESL and at university level.) Also, as noted above I have experience as a first responder, both in EMS and Police. Im only listing these credentials because I've heard that certain work experience and qualifications can expedite the PR application process?
  
• Once on the ground, I intend to go back to teaching or maybe join one of the trades.
  

So, Reddit, if you were in our shoes - what would you do? What route would you take? Are there any other factors/ considerations that I haven't thought of?

Pretty dramatic/stupid, but I can't stop seeing myself like a big piece of nothing, far away from feeling like I deserve to be liked. It's not that I think I am a bad person, I consider myself pretty decent, but when it comes to personality I feel like I have none and I'm telling people that I like and do things now that I actually used to years ago, I try to convince myself too. idk if I'm scared of doing them (high expectations) or simply don't feel that I like them anymore. I don't trust my feelings, I think that my husband is going to start cheating on me anytime soon (I have no proves, it's just a feeling, I don't think he really likes me, I think he just doesn't want to be alone). I don't consider myself someone sexually attractive although I know my body is decent, I can't see myself being sexual in front of my husband or anyone, I cannot dance in front of anyone without quickly feeling ashamed and overthink, I feel like my husband's porn addiction took a little of my motivation away. I don't think I can talk about this with him, I don't feel like I can talk about anything real with anybody. I started therapy some time ago but it didn't work, again. I got a book about inner work, thinking that those tools might help me and my relationship with my husband to get better. But I'm loosing faith. Somedays I think that if I stay positive I might find some peace of mind. Looking at my diary, for years, I have been writing the same problems in different ways. I'm sure it requires work and patience but I'm not going to be 24 forever and I want to stop feeling like I'm wasting my life.

Hello, I am currently going through a diagnostic process for ADHD. I have utilized some tools at home to self-diagnose with Autism, and am unsure about having a formal diagnosis on my records. My concern is coming out of this process with Autism on my records.
What is the legal landscape like for having a diagnosis in the United States? I’ve seen there are 8 states that require people who are diagnosed placed on a registry. I have also heard about Autism diagnoses being used to place people in conservatorships, get them denied from life insurance, as well as remove their rights as parents in divorce proceedings. Are there any othemore instances now, or in the future (post november presidential elections) that having an autism diagnosis on my records could be more damaging than helpful?
I live in NC currently and am from Florida. Asking about the landscape both for state and federal law/politics. If y’all believe this topic is better suited for another place please let me know, any info helps.

It’s been a week and a day. She was ten, but it was still a complete surprise. We had walked a mile every day preceding the vet appointment that indicated acute pancreatitis with complications. The following hospitalization and few days at home after were full of ups and downs. She was miserable, her liver enzyme levels did not go down, she wouldn’t eat, forcing meds in her was torture for all of us. Still, I read posts on canine pancreatitis groups of dogs who make it and grapple with our decision to let her go. I feel angry certain medications weren’t introduced sooner and that I didn’t know enough early on to advocate for her.
I’m grateful for my dog co-parent and other pets, who I am grieving alongside. I’m grateful her passing was peaceful and of course for every single moment we had. But I join everyone here in profound pain, as great or greater than every human loss I have experienced. Everyday moments punctuated by her absence. Every routine and easy turn of phrase startles me and brings me to tears.
Our other dog, brother, our good boy, has taken to sitting on her spot on top of the steps of the back deck, where I am sitting now. Where she protected us from every bird and airplane. In her last days we all took turns sitting with her here. I hope she haunts us from her spot. I keep expecting to see her here.
I’m not sure what the point of posting this is except that it helps to write my grief among people who know the true depth of love and loss of a pet, who don’t think it’s crazy to be so affected by “just a pet.” She was better and closer to my heart than almost every human I know, and my heart is broken. My heart is with all of you going through the same.

Im a slytherin but some of my friends say i give ravenclaw 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️ ive also gotten gryffindor on a few tests

Hello everyone. One of the biggest barriers of entry for me to getting to start Accutane is the cost. It really was demotivating to see how much everything costed as a 19-year-old that didn't really have much money. In the U.S., everything seems so expensive, and without health insurance, it almost feels impossible to start.
For reference, I'm based in Florida. This should help you save money in ONE or TWO factors of cost. Maybe all three factors, considering you do exactly what I have done. Here are the 3 factors.

1. Monthly Consultation
   
2. Bloodwork
   
3. Purchasing the Accutane
   

CONSULTATION
Normally, the consultation cost for an in-person visit is beyond $100. I use an online, U.S. based service called Honeydew. This service, if prescribed with Accutane, is $65 a month. You have a one on one video zoom call, discussing your acne, how you're going to start, and the next steps.
Also, I can give you guys 2 months free of the service. It gives me 2 months free as well, and actually, a referral was the way that I basically covered 2 months of the cost. So, you're saving 2 months of money on a consultation. It will apply after your first month. No, this isn't an ad, I'm just really happy with this service actually being here. Here's the referral link, if y'all do want to try. I also want 2 extra months free lol ;)
https://honeydew.referral-factory.com/gv2VWm
BLOODWORK
Bloodwork costs can also be very expensive without insurance. If you get your bloodwork with Quest Diagnostics, you can save so much money just by ordering it through JasonHealth. How it'll work is simple.
You start with Honeydew for the consultation.
You then get a paper that they send to you to print out, providing the test names and a way for Quest Diagnostics to send Honeydew the test results.
You then order the blood test through JasonHealth. The blood tests that Honeydew asks of you are the following.
Hepatic Function Panel
Lipid Panel, Standard
This is $33 through JasonHealth. I did this and it worked flawlessly. When you buy the blood test, you will get another paper to print out. Bring this to the Quest Diagnostics lab you chose, and you're set. You pay online, and WILL NOT pay at Quest Diagnostics.
PURCHASING THE ACCUTANE
Through Honeydew, they will ask where you want your prescription to be filled out to. Go on GoodRx and search for the cheapest option for isotretinoin. Just provide them the address of the location you'd like to get your prescription given the price. I pay $75.
YOUR MONTHLY COST (AVG)
Let's assume a 7 month course. Bloodwork with Honeydew isn't every month. This is what they specifically said to me. "As long as everything in WNL (within normal levels), you should just need lab work done at month 3 and then can skip labs until 4 weeks post-treatment."
So, you have 3 blood tests. $99.
You have 7 months of consultation: $325 (including the referral).
You have 7 months of accutane: $525
This runs down to an AVERAGE of $135 every month. Remember, some months, you will not pay for bloodwork or consultation.
Even though the price isn't "pretty," it sure is A LOT better than what it would've been without all of this. This is just the price I have to pay.
LINKS TO EVERYTHING.
Referral to Honeydew
JasonHealth
GoodRx

I'm 15 and have 3 siblings, 17, 11 and 1, and although I have an older sister, she's irresponsible and immature so my parents have forced it on me to be the 'good influence' because they can't do it themselves. My parents argue alot and have an unstable relationship, fucking one minute and breaking up the next. I don't like my parents as people, they both vent to me about each other and are way to open with me and not trying to hide things from me, leading to me knowing my mum sleeps with other men, sometimes my dad pushes her for to do it constantly even when she refuses at first. its made me resent them both heavily.
They decided to have another baby, (a month after they told us they were divorcing) who was born premature. My dad works 7-5 with an hour commute. So whilst my mum was spending all day up the hospital seeing my baby sibling, I was parenting my younger brother, making his lunch and dinners and making sure his homework was done and in bed on time for a month.
I love my baby sister, I love getting her dressed and playing with her. Recently both my parents have been taking advantage of that. Asking my to have her got 5 minutes whilst they tidy, and leaving her with my whilst they tidy, bathe, and cook. They both know I hate saying no so they use that and make me feel guilty when I do because I rarely say it. Both my parents call me the 3rd parent in the house because how much I do. I spend more time with the baby than my dad does, my mums gone out tonight and my dads just asked me if I'd like to earn some money and have the baby whilst she's gone, even though I've just had her for an hour. I said no and he just said alright then like I've just told him to fuck off or something. he does this all the time, he can't have the baby for more than 5 minutes without asking for help, I've learnt to so everything whislt holding a baby and he can't have the baby and go on his phone without complaining. I'm so tired of this house.