To start off, my dad used to be my hero growing up, when I was a kid and he was deployed over seas I would cry for him to return, and even with his anger issues and yelling against me and my two siblings I stilled cared about him but in 2014 we would move and my family arrived my dad planned on divorcing my mom, he planned this by holding onto out furniture as to wait to get my mom kicked out of the house so we had to me and my sister had to wait for our furniture my brother would be lucky as he went to college as we were moving, but me and my sister didn't go to school intill our furniture arrived. During that time we were using air mattress while my dad wasn't in the house, at the time I thought our furniture was just taking a long time to arrive as we moved from Hawaii and my dad was just out of the house for a while as this happened before when my parents had a fight, and even when me and my sister went on visitation I thought it was temporary intill my dad told us they were getting a divorce. I was sad but didn't also fully realize the situation, it wasn't intill my dad got a apartment after renting a room in a house that my anger for my dad started as after my and my sis helped bring things in he told us "I'm sorry for your mom being such a monster". After that situation would be 5 long years of visitation and him trying his hardest to get full custody while my mom would get none, luckily that never happened but he tried everything even using his sister(aunt) to sit us down when we were at Christmas visitation and ask "what medication my mom took to make her act this way" this even made me hate my aunt who up intill this point I had a decent relationship with. But my dad wouldn't stop there from calling the police on me and my sister to force us into visitation, to poking me till I had a bruise when I refused to talk to him. He even forgetting my age, when we argued and thought i was a year younger. Everything he did just made me hate him even more, but even now 5 years after I turned 18 and didn't have to see him anymore I still wanted to reconnect as I had a hole from not having a father, intill I was about to message him on Facebook and saw in 2020 he made a shirt during covid saying to make sure you wear a mask and that he need to outlive his ex-wife. I just don't understand why he hated her so much my mom did nothing to deserve this and during the divorce never said a single bad thing about him, yet he claimed she was alienating us against him, when it was him that alienated us against him. And even though he remarried and didnt even invite his kids it made me angry, and even though i wouldnt have gone it still makes me sad that he doesn't try more to reconnect besides sending me and my sibling post cards and money, that were most likely money my grandfather left us, as he told my brother about it, but my grandfather never used a lawyer and trusted my aunt to do the right thing, which my aunt is another story. I don't even want money, all I ever wanted was am apology for all the wrong he has done. There is more to the story but it's already long enough, I want to still message him but not to reconnect but to now confront him, though I dont know if I should.
Sorry for the long post.

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

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 been crying since Wednesday and since my introverted ass doesn't have any friends I thought this might be a good way to vent out.
On Monday evening my brother went to spend the night at our aunt's place. He went back home the next morning, and at 10 he started saying he wasn't feeling well. He couldn't describe exactly but he complained the whole body ached. They took him to a clinic and they suspect malaria so he was given some malaria drugs. Later that evening he became worse, so they took him back again to the clinic as he was crying that he was in pain. They took a taste and nothing was found, so he was given some pain meds and told to still take the malaria medication.
In the morning of Wednesday, he woke up his knees, elbos and eyes swollen and he was crying, one could tell he was in a lot of pain. They took him to St. Luke's Eldoret where they did a CT scan, but they said they couldn'tsee anything. At this point he is crying and in excruciating pain. So they do more tastes but nothing is found. The doctor's finally suggest he be put in a coma so they could go deeper into his body. They proceed and a 10+ tubes are inserted into his body.... a few hours later, he is pronounced dead. Later a close examination of the CT scan reveals that he might have had a case of rheumatic fever which had remained mild while doing the damage.
He was a sweet little boy who loved animals to death. He was very sharp in school and had even started writing simple computer programs. Thinking about how much pain he went through breaks me little by little. To make matters worse we now have this huge hospital bill (Ksh 1,345,00, around $1100) that we need to clear before they release the body. I am completely shattered and don't know what to do. We do have a small fundraising but that is not showings any positive outcomes.
Anyway, to you, an online stranger, thank you for listening. Stay safe.

Hello I need advice.
I do not like being touched. I don't like hugs and I don't like if people stand really close to me. If I can help it, I try to communicate these at social/family events but I do tolerate a certain amount in public because it seems that can't be helped. It feels akin to those gag toy packs of gum that vibrate/shock you when people touch me. When poking people in middle school was a big thing, I always poked really hard because when I got poked it hurt so I thought everyone was just jabbing each other.
Anyways, I don't like physical contact. That's covered. My husband's teen brother is autistic and almost 100% non verbal. My mother in law says his IQ is 37 and his mind is that of a three year old. These are her words but I don't know how else to describe him. He climbs all over anything and he's very physical especially with his mom and for whatever reason, me. He likes to get less than an inch from my face and screech loudly. He tries to grab my hair or my arms but I don't let him but he does it to his mom. Hell pull her hair in all kinds of directions and even straight up slap her. She mostly just deals with it.
I don't want to do deal with this, though. I don't like constantly being vigilant in case he comes up from behind to do it. I haven't tried telling him because his mom says he won't understand. I use physical body ques like I would with my dogs which honestly seems to work a little but I know next to nothing on how to proceed with this.
Simply not going isn't the best option. I don't want to be rude or hurtful either. But I need my space respected.

I have been crying since Wednesday and since my introverted ass doesn't have any friends I thought this might be a good way to vent out.
On Monday evening my brother went to spend the night at our aunt's place. He went back home the next morning, and at 10 he started saying he wasn't feeling well. He couldn't describe exactly but he complained the whole body ached. They took him to a clinic and they suspect malaria so he was given some malaria drugs. Later that evening he became worse, so they took him back again to the clinic as he was crying that he was in pain. They took a taste and nothing was found, so he was given some pain meds and told to still take the malaria medication.
In the morning of Wednesday, he woke up his knees, elbos and eyes swollen and he was crying, one could tell he was in a lot of pain. They took him to St. Luke's Eldoret where they did a CT scan, but they said they couldn'tsee anything. At this point he is crying and in excruciating pain. So they do more tastes but nothing is found. The doctor's finally suggest he be put in a coma so they could go deeper into his body. They proceed and a 10+ tubes are inserted into his body.... a few hours later, he is pronounced dead. Later a close examination of the CT scan reveals that he might have had a case of rheumatic fever which had remained mild while doing the damage.
He was a sweet little boy who loved animals to death. He was very sharp in school and had even started writing simple computer programs. Thinking about how much pain he went through breaks me little by little. To make matters worse we now have this huge hospital bill (Ksh 1,345,00) that we need to clear before they release the body. I am completely shattered and don't know what to do. We do have a small fundraising but that is not showings any positive outcomes.
Anyway, to you, an online stranger, thank you for listening. Stay safe.

I F(18) currently in college taking up psychology. I have college friends whom I love and admired but it's not always easy since we also have our bad days, may tampuhan, bangayan and problems but at the end of the day we still manage to laugh and be strong. So here's the problem Myfriendk let's call her Susan is in a relationship with her boyfriend for 2 years. The problem is her boyfriend is very toxic. May time of the week na half day lang ang class namin ni Susan while the others still have one class in theafternoon pero gusto pa namin makasama ang isa't isa kaya we stay in the school and wait na matapos ang klase nila. Pero her boyfriend got too possessive. She would label my friend a cheater just because Susan stayed with us kasi nong time din na yun ay pasahan na ng RRL Kaya nag mamadali kami. Maraming beses silang nag aaway at palagi akong nadadamay kasi gusto ni Susan I prove sa boyfriend nya na nasa school lang kami. I tried explaining din sa guy na nasa school lang naman kami whole day naka tambay sa library talking and sleeping (wag tularan) at wag na kamo syang mag overthink kasi ako lang naman kasama the whole entire day maski sa pag punta sa canteen at CR. But her boyfriend got worsts and hindi namin matiis na saamin sya nagagalit ug pinagbubuntunan kami ng galit pag nag aaway sila. We tried talking to her too but she just wouldn't listen since she loved the guy so much.Then one day we went out to eat we invited her and her boyfriend since dala din naman nong iba kung friends and boyfriends nila. They both gave excuses na di nga makakapunta pero walang nagawa si Susan nong pinuntahan namin sya sa bahay nila para makapag picture kami pero di din naman nag tagal. But when we got home Susan told us na nag hiwalay na sila. Inaway pala sya ng boyfriend nya kasi nakipag kita sya samin. She got too tired and decided to let go. syempre ang saya namin sobra. kumain kami sa labas na hindi nya nagagawa kasi maskin pagkain lang sa Jollibee eh pinagbabawalan sya eh gusto uwi agad. For the first time I saw her genuinely happy. Pero nag uusap sila now nong ex nya at naghihingi ng second chance. Mag babago daw yadayada. I told her na Wag mag tiwala agad. My other friend let's call her Carol is very vocal na ayaw nya na mag balikan sila nong guy ganon². Recently nag chat si girl na gusto nya ma meet namin si guy at makausap. I told her supposed to be labas na kami sa isyu nila since relationship nila yun atlsila na mag dedecidekungj ipagpapatuloy or hindi. But she wanted us to be involved. She wanted to hear "our opinion" I told her na kung yan man sana ready si guy samga sasabihin ni Carol since she won't hold back. Nag set na din ng time next week para kausapin nga daw namin yung guy kung magbabago ba talaga ganon ganon.eh nag post si Susan na bibigyan nya si guy ng chance. Nagkasagutan sila ni Carol. Carol doesn't want her to give him another chance kasi ayaw nya masaktan si Susan. As much as possible if she can she will do anythingtpara di lang maka make ng huge mistake and friend nya. I understand Carol and her intentions pero I also explained to Carol how we could never control someone's decision. I told her it's her life it's her relationship. Let her be kung masaktan man sya she brought it upon herself. We did everything pero gusto nya bigyan ng chance. I even consulted my mother about the matter sabi ny mama ko na "A mother can't even force her child whom she would pick to arry kayo pa kaya na friends lang?" I admit Carol has a point and I can feel her sincerity but diba labas naman na kami dapat sa problema ni Susan? Since we advised her already. Carol told me na hindi daw nag mamake sense yung pinagsasabi ko na hayaan si Susansna mag desisyon. also nag chat si Susan sakin at pinapapilidawd sya ni Carol kung kami or yung ex nya na sinabi ko naman kay Carol na hindi naman yun taman kasi friends are supposed to be together through ups and downs. She's willing to throw away everything if hindi sumunod sakanya si Susan kasi wala daw syang friend na hindi nagpapaturo. I can't take it anymore that'swhy I'm writinghhere. Can you guys give me some advice on what to do? I tried putting myself in their shoes na it's draining me in the process. What's the best possible way to end this? Is Adulting supposed to be this hard? Anyways to Susan and Carol if ever you read this. I hope you guys can calm down a bit and maybe we can all talk this out tomorrow. Please don't be too harsh to it's my first time writing and I really need your help Thank you 🥺🫶 -pagodnaINFP

I want to run something by you because I’m out my depth. We go to the same college and are about graduating. I was considering going to a university in Texas for my masters and she’s also university searching. Anyways what I said is how the state of Texas, USA does not allow abortions or marijuana. And I think any of those things may come in handy.
She’s upset. She’s saying that because I didn’t use us or we that means I’m implying it’s sex with other people and I’m telling her of my plans to have sex with other people which she thinks it’s weird. I don’t think it’s a normal inference to develop from my statement
As far as I’m concerned my thoughts on the matter are restricted to the exact words used there. i don’t think I’m responsible for the meanings you’re implying especially when I’ve explained the meaning I intended. I wasn’t thinking of sex or a pregnancy or anyone in particular just that a state with abortion laws might be useful
She also said that the statement implies I’m not including her in my plans for my future which I think is crazy cuz she were considering a school in Australia. I didn’t hear us and we then.
We’ve been together for 3 years and I think I’ve done the most I can while being realistic about a future with her. I say while being realistic because my dad has certain plans for my future which he’s made fairly clear. In my country there’s a compulsory country service period you do after university. My father wants me to skip it and go do my masters abroad immediately. She might do it. I use might because she isn’t sure yet. I do want to have a relationship with her post university but I also understand there’s a chance that might not happen. We’re really young and life’s unpredictable but wishfully thinking I’d love that. She’s convinced that I plan on dumping her when I get the chance. At first it was a quirky, cute insecurity but years later, after reassuring her consistently I feel out of my depth especially now we’re about graduating. It’s as though she’s finding everything she can to support her beliefs

Does anyone have any suggestions on a masters program that specializes in studying ADHD. I’m sure I’d have to get a masters in psych with a focus on ADHD. Or if there is any other way to become someone who specializes in helping people with ADHD please let me know.
I’m looking for schools specifically in the US, I’m open to learning about anywhere but am leaning towards schools in TX or NYC.
More info on career goal: I’ve struggled with knowing what I want to do in my life for a while. I came across some people online who specialize in ADHD coaching. I don’t know how popular this is but I’ve struggled with chronic ADHD my entire life and never heard of this. I want to be someone who specializes specifically in adult ADHD. I feel like theres many resources for kids out there, especially when it comes to helping navigate school. But I want to study and help people with adult ADHD. ADHD and it’s effects can change with age and when your brain develops. I’ve struggled so much in my adult life even with a diagnosis at a young age and going to a school that specializes in learning differences. I want to learn more not only for myself but in order to help others because i know i can’t be the only one out there who struggles to the degree i do.
Any advice on how I can make this my career would be much appreciated!
Thank you!! :)

I was 15 and oh so cool I had a 21 year old boyfriend. He was also my first actual boyfriend past the carry my books and hold my hand kind of thing.
For years I pushed it away. Even after I hit adulthood I excused it. I was more mature and responsible than most at 15. I had to be. Due to childhood abuse I had been raising my little brother (10 years difference) for 5 years. It was school and him only. I took him with me when I babysat for money because I had been buying my own school supplies and clothes since 12. I got home from school, waited for him to get home, then went about my day. He would get off the bus and we would walk down the road to the 3 kids I watched (3:30 pm to 5pm on school days, 6am to 5pm when there was no school, and every other Friday night 7pm to midnight for their parents date night, something I had started doing when I was 11). I would make dinner over there for the 3 kids and their parents getting it on the table just as they were getting home, my brother and I would walk home and I would make dinner for him and my younger sister once we got there.
Then I would set about cleaning the house. There were 6 of us but my older sister was the golden child. She was frequently out with friends or doing after school extra curriculars (something I never had the time or money for) and my younger sister was "too little" to do chores which wasn't true.
After that I would do my homework and I still managed to take honors courses and graduate early. So you see, I genuinely believed I was not the same.
When I became an adult and had my first child I refused to think about it. I refused to remember much about my teenage life. It was awful so why should I? On top of that I didn't have time. I worked 60-80 hours a week, spent every free moment I had with my husband and children (which wasn't enough). Even with my work schedule I managed to go on field trips, always have some baked goodies around, I was a sticklier for the 45 minute tucking the kids in routine I had (talking about their day, picking a couple songs to sing, reading, etc). My house was spotless, we were always going somewhere (petting zoo, regular zoo, fishing, swimming, movies, etc).
I have 3 children now, I'm in my 40s, and unfortunately i have been waylaid by a host of chronic conditions. I sit at home, on the couch, I do as much as I can with the kids to still make their childhood full of memories as I did their sister (10 year age gap between #1 and #2 due to my fertility issues), but it is not nearly as much as I am unable to. A lot of it is reading together, talking together, or me sitting outside while they enjoy themselves running around or riding a bike.
This leaves me with an inordinate amount of time to think. And think I do. For awhile I dwelled on what was so wrong with me that I was the scape goat for my family. Why I was so unloved. And I fought thinking about that.
Recently I have been thinking about how I was absolutely groomed. And groomed so hard that when he dumped me after 6 months his 24 year old friend was able to step in and I never saw an issue with it. I so much so did not see an issue with it that years later, when I was 17, I ran into both of them in a completely different area (the odds right) and I started seeing the one that had been 24 when I was 15 again. So now I was 17 and he was 26. And I was not just shy of being 18. I was just turned 17 (was no longer living at home, had been tossed away as though I meant nothing).
I was groomed so hard that I could stand up and yell it to the streets that it is grooming. That I would hurt someone for so much as thinking like that about my daughters, and in the same breathe tell you what happened with me was fine.
Only it wasn't fine. More than 25 years later I am finally putting it into perspective, and it was not fine!
The worst part is, at one point, a friend (also roommate) convinced me to make a police report about it. Even though I would insist it was fine. It was still within the statute of limitations. I was 17, she had convinced me to stop seeing the 26 year old and to file a report. I was sitting on the couch and an officer arrived. I think I might have taken it seriously but the officer did not. He commented "oh so this is like a revenge report because the guy dumped you". I told him the guy did not dump me, i broke things off because everyone else insisted it was grooming. It started when I was 15 and he was 24 and since it is statutory rape my friend insisted on calling. The cop berated me for wasting his time and left. I shoved it way down after that. I was a waste of time.
I keep thinking about it now. I have panic attacks thinking about it. I thought about counseling, but when I tried to file that report all those years ago I was berated like that. I don't know if I am making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe it really wasn't that big of a deal and because I have so much time to dwell on it I am making it into this huge thing.

Im 27M, lifting since mid 2023 and have been doing starting strength and looking to transition to gzcl now for something new but not too different. Imo im naturally weak (i was the absolutely 0 sport, 14hrs of video games per day during school holidays kinda kid) so i basically started from the bar for all lifts except deadlift. These are my prs (all 5RM):
squat: 105kg/231lb
bench: 63.5kg/140lb
ohp: 42.5kg/93lb
deadlift: 157.5kg/347lb
weight: 80kg/176lb -> 93kg/205lb
i was making good progress on squat but purposely stopped at 105kg (i couldve gone further) because i felt like it was gimping my bench progress by tiring myself out, so i maintained my squat in an attempt to improve my bench. At some point i just stopped doing ohp so i could increase my bench volume which worked for a short time, but eventually got plateaued at 63.5kg.
I am decently tall (183cm/6ft) and with a very large arm span (196cm), so bench and ohp have always been a massive struggle for me (evidently by my lift ratios lol). Ive been losing motivation and have been working out less frequently recently, so i need something new that has a greater focus on upper body. I came across gzcl which seems similar enough to starting strength in terms of lifts, but adds extra volume and accessory work which i think will help me.
With this context, i have a few questions:

1. i see the basic workout guide gives T3 exercises as alternating lat pulldown and db rows. are there better accessory exercises i can use to specifically improve my bench/ohp?
2. are you just meant to do a single T3 exercise (of 3 sets) per workout?
3. How difficult are T2/T3 exercises meant to be? I did my first workout of gzcl today on the T1 bench/T2 squat workout, and holy shit 10x60kg squats were killing me by about rep 7 being totally winded (but legs feeling fine). Is this just a thing ill get used to because of only ever having done 5 rep sets on SS? on a similar note, how hard should i be going on T3? should it be as difficult as going for a pr on T1 or should i take it a bit easier?
4. I always wear a belt on heavy squats and deadlifts, but should i wear one on T2 squat/DL? is this a personal preference thing?
5. Ive still been making linear gains on 1x5 deadlift, adding 2.5kg every 5-7 days without any issues. Would there be any issue substituting this into the gzcl T1 deadlift days? its working and i kinda dont wanna fuck up my momentum by introducing higher volume deadlift that im not used to. i still plan on doing t2 deadlift as programmed.

Any other general advice is welcome too, thanks
​

I want to run something by you because I’m out my depth. We go to the same college and are about graduating. I was considering going to a university in Texas for my masters and she’s also university searching. Anyways what I said is how the state of Texas, USA does not allow abortions or marijuana. And I think any of those things may come in handy.
She’s upset. She’s saying that because I didn’t use us or we that means I’m implying it’s sex with other people and I’m telling her of my plans to have sex with other people which she thinks it’s weird. I don’t think it’s a normal inference to develop from my statement
As far as I’m concerned my thoughts on the matter are restricted to the exact words used there. i don’t think I’m responsible for the meanings you’re implying especially when I’ve explained the meaning I intended. I wasn’t thinking of sex or a pregnancy or anyone in particular just that a state with abortion laws might be useful
She also said that the statement implies I’m not including her in my plans for my future which I think is crazy cuz she were considering a school in Australia. I didn’t hear us and we then.
We’ve been together for 3 years and I think I’ve done the most I can while being realistic about a future with her. I say while being realistic because my dad has certain plans for my future which he’s made fairly clear. In my country there’s a compulsory country service period you do after university. My father wants me to skip it and go do my masters abroad immediately. She might do it. I use might because she isn’t sure yet. I do want to have a relationship with her post university but I also understand there’s a chance that might not happen. We’re really young and life’s unpredictable but wishfully thinking I’d love that. She’s convinced that I plan on dumping her when I get the chance. At first it was a quirky, cute insecurity but years later, after reassuring her consistently I feel out of my depth especially now we’re about graduating. It’s as though she’s finding everything she can to support her beliefs

Hi everyone! So I just want some input from other people on my situation. So the other day I had the most freak accident ever where I legit jumped on the spot and broke my foot. The doctor at the hospital got a good laugh because I have a video of me just jumping on the spot and then going down and they said they didn’t understand how a 24 year old could have broken her foot so easily. But my issue is that I just got hired in a school board (in Ontario) as an OT and I am supposed to start substituting this Tuesday, but I am now in a cast with crutches. I know I need 10 days before the end of the school year. Do you think that this will be an issue for substituting elementary classes?

For those that don’t know, when the show was originally airing the characters had journals on the Degrassi web site where they would write about what was going on in the episodes.
I know there’s a lot of discussion about Emma and Jay in the ravine here, and I found a copy of her journal entry from the time that I thought was pretty interesting and sheds some light on how the writers were viewing it. Here it is:
“Now that I got my parental gatekeepers off my back I can update my journal in privacy. It must be almost 3 in the morning -- not the best time to get caught sneaking back into your bedroom through the basement window. We're supposed to have a "talk" tomorrow, but I'm trying to think...is there anything else I'd rather NOT do? Don't think so. I don't even want to hear their questions, because all I can do is lie.
As if I'm going to tell them I was in the ravine, in Jay's van, doing the thing you have to do to get wrist-enhancing accessories. As if... But it's not like I'm super happy about it either. I know that people will call me a sl*t or whatever if they find out what I did...oh gawd I can just imagine Manny's reaction...and it's not even like I really know why I did it, or why I went to the ravine with Jay to begin with. Maybe I just wanted to be somebody else for a change. Not the person my friends, parents, teachers and everyone thinks I am. I just wanted to be different. Not better or worse, just different. And the person I was would never have done what I did earlier tonight. I'm just not sure what that makes me right now. Probably worse. Or what that makes me and Jay -- and if there's something to that I'm not saying I wouldn't do it again. Definitely worse. I don't care.
Ugh! It's sooooo late! I wasn't lying when I told my mom I couldn't sleep since Rick shot Jimmy, then got shot and died in the hallway right in front of my eyes. But of course I knew it would make her back off, for a while at least. So what if that's not the whole story. Do I have to tell her everything that I'm doing, thinking and feeling all the time? I'm not sure myself. Good night. If I don't get some sleep tomorrow's school play will have Dracula seducing a sleep-deprived zombie instead of the fresh and innocent Mina I'm supposed to bring to life.”

My girlfriend and I were together for two years, part of it was long distance. We were previously good friends for 5 years, then she was the one that caught feelings and pursued me first. During our relationship she always told me things like “I’m the one”, we talked about how we would get married and grow old together, she made so many promises that she was 100% sure of me and that she’d never leave. She would say things like “we’ve known each other in every lifetime”. We got together even though I was leaving for a masters study, she said she thought she’d never do long distance again but for me it was worth it, bc she was 100% sure I’m the guy she wants. I left a week after we got together, and I was gone for about a year. During that time we visited once a month, it was always great. I eventually moved back and we spent another year together in person. I’m sorry if this post is too long.
She ended things about a month ago. During the breakup she gave me very vague answers so I couldn’t get the closure I needed. I decided to reach out a week after the breakup to ask why she did it, and what she said killed me inside.
She said that she knew we were compatible and I’m an amazing person but felt like she was settling for me, and she didn’t want to live her life like that when she thinks she can find something better. She said she believes in that soulmate connection with one person when you know deep inside you that this is “it”, and she didn’t feel like that with me, she didn’t think I was “it”. But we did say to each other during the relationship that this was “it”, she told me so many times that I’m the one, so I don’t know how a flip just switched in her brain. She also said she realized she didn’t love me in the way “real love” is, and maybe she just loved the idea of me. She said she always felt the need to be accepted and loved by people and I made her feel like that. She said when you truly love someone you’d sacrifice things for them, and she wouldn’t sacrifice things for me. She said she was forcing herself to be comfortable around me, and it wasn’t the type of comfort that it should be with “the one”.
How the fuck does it take you two years to realize you don’t love someone in the way “real love” is? Especially after all the emotional intimacy we shared. How could you be uncomfortable with me? I was her first kiss, her first hand hold, she said she was saving those things for the right person and she did them with me. Why would she feel like shes settling for me when she’s the one that pursued me first? She went all out to “get me” and be in a relationship with me. Am I really the type of guy that gets settled for? That hurts like hell. She said she was having all these thoughts during the last 4 months of the relationship. But literally a month ago, I felt that she’s been a bit cold, and I asked if everything was okay. She said “nothings wrong, I’ve been really stressed with school/work. But nothings wrong with us, maybe something’s just wrong with me with all the stress. But we’re good, that doesn’t mean I don’t love you or that I’d ever give up on us, I’d never do that. Don’t worry I still love you and I’ll always be here.” She said that word for word. So she was lying to me? Why would you lie instead of communicating openly? If she had told me she was having those thoughts it would’ve been easier for me, but she gave me that reassurance and then blindsided me a month later. I told her it’s normal to lose feelings in a relationship after a while, that eventually that initial spark or honeymoon phase ends, and that’s when the real relationship starts and you work on building a life together. Love eventually becomes a choice and not just a feeling. But she said she wouldn’t lose feelings with the right person. Now I’m the wrong person when she literally told me a million times that we were always meant for each other. I told her I think she’ll end up being disappointed when she realizes there is no “one” person that gives you that magical feeling for life, you eventually reach a point where you have to choose that person everyday. Relationships are hard and most of them end up losing that initial spark, but it’s an opportunity for a new kind of love to blossom, a love based off commitment and loyalty to each other. That’s the only way a relationship can last forever. And during our relationship we even acknowledged that fact together and we told each other that if the feelings fade we will always choose each other no matter what happens. It makes no sense to me. And if she actually lost feelings and fell out of love, that’s fine. But to say she never loved me in the way “real love” is, that makes no sense to me and it’s killing me inside. Have I just been blind and stupid the entire relationship? How does it take TWO YEARS to realize that? She said to me, “maybe you can choose someone and settle for them and learn to love them, but I believe there’s one person out there that is meant for me and when I find them I will know it deep inside me.” Yea, I believed that too. I believed it because I thought it was you. Just because I chose you doesn’t mean I’m settling for you or learning to love you. I thought you were meant for me. It’s so ridiculous I don’t understand, she used to be so sure that I was the one, she knew it deep inside her that I was. And now she’s saying that when she finds it, she’ll know. Well you knew it with me and now you don’t.
Part of me understands why she lost feelings, we didn’t really have a strong base. We were together for only a week before I left for a year. I feel like it wasn’t enough time for the physical attraction to build up and to get to know each other in person. By the time we visited each other, a lot of time had passed and the spark wasn’t the same as the beginning, it was kinda awkward at first. We got into a serious committed relationship talking about future marriage, before we ever hugged each other. She was scared to kiss me, maybe that’s why she said she was forcing herself to be comfortable. But eventually we kissed and it was great. During the visits it felt like everything was going great and that our relationship was getting stronger. I didn’t think that she was uncomfortable. I feel like if we had done all the intimate things in the beginning, we would have a base to build off of and the spark would be alive.
Also I keep blaming myself and wondering what I did wrong. I’m just certain that it’s my fault, that I made her lose attraction. Maybe I wasn’t manly enough or attractive enough. Maybe I was too boring or uninteresting or too “stable”. Being in love with someone basically means you have to be sexually attracted to them first, that’s what separates family love from romantic love. Maybe I didn’t do enough to keep her attracted to me, so she felt like she lost feelings. It was really hard with the distance. I tried, I really tried. I would always flirt and tease her, I tried not to let the relationship feel like it was a platonic friendship over time. I was always confident and “manly” with her, I stood my ground when she did things I didn’t like, I wasn’t needy. We sexted and video called all the time. I always planned amazing dates. I tried to keep the fun alive. I don’t know what else I could’ve done to keep her attracted. I truly feel like if we had been in person the whole time, it would’ve worked and she would’ve still been attracted to me. It’s just different when you’re there physically. But we both knew this, we acknowledged that it was gonna be hard and the feelings may fade, but we said we’d always choose each other no matter what. Maybe it was inevitable with the distance, but at the end she said it wasn’t because of the distance, she believes with the right person the distance wouldn’t matter. So I just wasn’t the right person for her, I was for a while, but I let her lose attraction for me. Your view on love and attraction may differ, but I learned that it’s the guy’s responsibility to keep a woman attracted, it’s about how he acts and behaves that keeps her attracted. So it’s my fault she lost attraction, it’s something I did. For example when I look back at the first visit, a mistake I made was asking to kiss her instead of just going for it. She said no, maybe because I came off as unconfident and that turned her off. I was so nervous during the first visit because there was so much expectation built up inside my head. Maybe that prevented me from being able to genuinely enjoy myself around her and attract her. Eventually though, we got comfortable with each other and we kissed and it was great. I felt the spark was there. I don’t think she met someone else, I asked her and she said no. Yea maybe she could’ve lied, but i know her and I don’t think she would do that. She said “you know me, I would never allow myself to do that while I’m in a relationship. The reasons are solely because I don’t feel in love with you anymore.”
We hit a little rut near the end because we were both very busy, but I didn’t think it was concerning because she always gave reassurance and made it seem like everything is fine. It feels like shit hearing that someone was settling for me. Why wasn’t I enough? I keep looking back and thinking what I could’ve done different to keep her attracted. I keep nitpicking at myself and feeling insecure about the way I am. She was so sure of me in the beginning so I must’ve done something along the way to make her lose feelings. She let me tear my walls down and trust her fully, then she left. It feels like I’m not worthy of love because she saw something in me and decided she didn’t want me. What hurts the most is that to me, she was “it”, to me she was the one. And she said that to me too and I believed her. I felt that she truly meant it when she said that. She would tell me she was always attracted to me and had feelings during our friendship but she “locked them in a box” because she was too afraid. She even told me that I was a walking green flag and that I was perfect and I did nothing wrong. It hurts to know she thinks that yet she still decided she didn’t want me. It kills to know that one day she’ll get married, he’ll get to hold her and kiss her and have a family, and it won’t be with me. I can’t stand the thought of her being intimate with someone else. And it’s the thought that, whoever she ends up with, will be better than me in a way. She will love him more than she loved me. He will make her feel what I couldn’t make her feel. And I’m blaming myself so much that I couldn’t make her feel like that anymore. I’m grieving the future that we both planned together. I feel so betrayed, I feel like shit. Most of all I just really miss her, we knew each other for 7 years and now we’re just strangers again.
I’ve been hurt before, I’ve had a few breakups, but this one hurts the most. I don’t know what it is about this girl that makes me feel like I’ll never find anyone better. I know that time heals everything but I feel like this has damaged me on a deep level, I feel like I can’t let my walls down again. I don’t want to love again and risk getting hurt. I can’t invest myself fully into someone if I’m always afraid they’re going to blindside me. I know a breakup shouldn’t define your self worth, but it’s just the idea that the person I loved doesn’t see herself spending her life with me anymore, that makes me feel really bad. It’s the thought that she saw something in me that made her decide she doesn’t love me. She analyzed our relationship and thought “I want someone better”. The thought that it’s my fault, that it’s something I did. I didn’t have enough “game”. I couldn’t keep her attraction high. I can’t stand the idea of her getting married one day and finding her “it”. Of course I want her to be happy but I’d be lying if I said that doesn’t kill me inside.
Nobody is perfect but she was close to it. She’s such a rare breed, she had everything I wanted in a woman and it’s so hard to come by. I wish I had a reason to hate her but she’s genuinely an amazing person. She did nothing bad to me, we barely fought and when we did it was very gentle. Our entire relationship was pretty much perfect up until the end. I’ve never been with someone that was this compatible with me. She’s the kindest human, she’s intelligent, she’s very mature, she’s beautiful inside and out, she’s very warm and gentle. And the fact that she’s such a sweet and genuine person makes it way harder. If she had cheated or something I think this would’ve been easier on me, because I’d see her as a bad person. But she’s not a bad person. It hurts way more knowing that she was feeling like she wanted to end things, but at the same time she was trying to convince herself to love me, because she didn’t want to hurt me. She didn’t want to break her promises, she was trying so hard not to, but in the end she couldn’t lie to herself anymore. Why do I have to feel like someone has to convince themselves to love me? Why does someone have to force themselves to believe I’m the one? Why can’t anyone ever just truly believe it with their entire soul, that they want to be with me. When I asked for reassurance and she told me she still loved me and would never give up, she was trying to convince herself because she didn’t want to hurt me. It was all lies. Every “I love you” in the last 4 months was a lie. I feel like such an idiot that I was sitting there for the past 4 months thinking that everything was going great. She was just faking her affection the whole time. Imagine hearing that someone was forcing themselves to love you. No one was forcing you! The exit door has always been open, no one forced her to stay, no one forced her to pursue me in the first place. I told her many times that I just want truth and transparency in our relationship, yet she hid all of those things. She said she hid them because she cared about me and didn’t want to hurt me, and she was trying to make it work. But if she truly cared for me, she would know that I deserve honesty, I deserve to know the truth even if it hurts. I don’t deserve to live in a lie. If she cared for me she would let me go find someone who truly loves me, instead of just pretending to love me. By lying, she was only caring about herself, to relieve herself of the guilt. The breakup would’ve been way smoother if she just told the truth from the start, but now I feel like an idiot who sat there for 4 months thinking that everything was going well, when in reality it wasn’t.
There’s so many things I loved about her. I loved the way she cries during every movie, she thinks she’s too sensitive but I think it’s beautiful to feel your emotions that deeply. I loved the way her face lights up when she smiles. I loved how she would call me just to tell me silly little things about her day. I loved her curiosity and wonder for the universe. I loved how she would run into my arms when she saw me. She just understood me, and I understood her. I can’t hate her, I wish I could, but I just love her with all my heart. I don’t think I’ll ever stop. Even when 20 years pass and I’m over this and we’re both married to other people, I will still love her and wish the best for her. I miss her so much, I miss talking to her. I know we can't be friends, but I really wish I could still have her in my life. But I shouldn't wish that I guess, because she decided she wants to live her life without me in it. I can’t believe she could decide to lose me forever when she always said she could never live without me.
The worst part is, I reacted to the break up very emotionally. I showed how hurt I was, I wrote a long paragraph, and I brought up all the promises she made. That was a mistake, it probably killed any ounce of attraction she had left. If there was any chance of her coming back or realizing it was a mistake, I destroyed that chance. I made it look like I can’t live without her. I didn’t beg for her back at all, but I kept pushing for answers and explanations. I asked her what I did wrong and stuff, and that made me look super desperate. I should’ve just accepted the break up immediately and cut off all communication. Maybe then she would’ve thought about it, she would wonder why I wasn’t upset and have second thoughts about her decision. It would make me look more attractive in her eyes. But no I ruined it forever. Now all I want to do is salvage some respect, to make her see me as a valuable person. Not as someone who can’t live without her. Deep down I really want her to have a change of heart, I want her to feel re-attracted somehow, after having some time and space away from the situation. But I ruined her image of me. Now I’m looking back and analyzing every little thing about our relationship and wondering what I should’ve done better. I realized I made a lot of mistakes, which at the time I didn’t think were mistakes, but now looking back it’s probably my fault she lost attraction. I didn’t do enough.
I told myself during the relationship that “everything is temporary, don’t get too attached, life can change at any moment”. I know those things because I’ve learned my lessons from the past, but this is still killing me. I know almost everyone has been heartbroken, I’m nothing special, every human has been through this before. I just need to hear that it wasn’t my fault or that I’ll find someone better eventually. I’m blaming myself a lot right now and I keep thinking that she wouldn’t have left if I had been attractive enough. I generally consider myself a confident person but this has set me back a lot, it’s ruining my self esteem. Maybe I have attachment issues that I need to work on. I know that time will heal this, but right now I can’t imagine myself finding someone that’s better. I feel like the idea of “the one” has been ruined for me. I want to believe it, but I don’t think I do anymore. Even if I find another person who I think is the one, there’s always the possibility that they will change their mind. There’s always a chance that all of their words and actions were just lies. A lot of people get into relationships because they love the idea of being in love, not because they are actually in love with the person.
Thank you for reading this far, I know it’s a long post. I needed somewhere to vent, I don’t have many people to talk to. When I cry, I cry alone. And during the act of crying I start to hate myself for being such a bitch. I know it’s perfectly okay to cry and feel your emotions but it’s hard to escape the conditioning that I’m used to. I have friends and family but, I can’t express my emotions the way I did in this post. People have their own lives and worries and they don’t want to deal with someone’s silly heartbreak I guess.
TL;DR - my gf and I broke up a month ago, she said she was settling for me and that I wasn’t the “one”, even though she made promises and assured me that she wouldn’t leave. I keep blaming myself and wondering what I did wrong.

I just started a new leaf in the last two weeks after years of putting it off. I got a cheap no-contract gym membership, a decent pair of sneakers, and started going two days on, one day off. I only work out for an hour, an hour and a half at most This consists of 75% cardio (mostly walking and occasional jog/run intermittent), and then I do like 3 sets of 10 with light settings with the long row, tricep press, seated leg press, glute kick back, torso rotation, and rotary torso machines.
I’m sweating all the way through but I’m overweight and I’m on lithium and have PCOS and hypothyroidism. I need to lose weight, simply put. However, now I feel like I’m consistently irritated with my partner on the off days. I’m speaking my mind more and it’s starting to feel dangerous to my relationship. I’m happy after I work out but is it worth it? I don’t want to hurt my partner or become unstable and I don’t want more meds, I’m on an insane cocktail other than the lithium as it is. I stopped drinking, smoking 🍃, all of it. I just want to be healthier. At first I kept asking him if I seemed (hypo)manic and he said no, but I’m afraid I’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of disordered thinking here.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m in fight or flight because my older brother is in a bad spot (former felon with addiction relapse and is potentially losing his housing) and I’m feeling a lot of pressure to help him but I don’t have anything that’s mine due to my own episodes. I don’t have a job. I’m in school but I’m almost done and it’s so hard to find a job right now, especially if you don’t have a car and have shitty credit and all your other family members who could have co-signed with you are passed. My partner won’t share financial things like with me because of my mental health history.
I feel stuck, and scared, and alone. My brother was supposed to be the one I could fall back on, but now he’s so vulnerable and needs me, and even though I’ll do whatever it takes to responsibly help him, I can’t rely on him to help me back.
I do therapy, go to the doctor, and I wanted to exercise to get even more stable, but it feels like everything is falling apart. Why would exercise, and so little of it make it worse? How are people with bipolar supposed to be healthy?
I don’t know, thoughts are appreciated.

Yes, you read it right. I got a few admits and I will not be joining any of the colleges. Will be dropping MBA in general, as I have other plans. But, as I bid this community goodbye, wanted to give back in any tiny way possible.
P.S. Do not expect to see anything new here, and feel free to ignore!
Profile; GEM 9/9/9 - T10 Engg college, Work ex: 3yrs, CAT: 99.5X, XAT: 99.2X
I had registered for CAT on the very last day, with absolutely no idea of what the exam is, or if I am even planning for an MBA. As November came closer, I decided to give it a shot as an MBA would be something that suits me. I looked around to ask friends in IIMs on how to prepare with 15-20 days to go. Everyone had different strategies so I sat down to find some material. Everything seemed vague until I started checking out previous-year papers. (I personally have given 2 mocks, and solved all slots '19-'22). The patterns that evolved over the past decade, the most likely pattern for this year, and figured how I have around 1.5 mins per question to reach a rough score of 100. (I decided upon this as the fair average to be in the top 0.1/0.2 percentile based on results from '21-'24) While I state this simply, I did go through a lot of videos from creators, to Quora, to this very subreddit to get my information. And I must say that the first-hand accounts from here helped me all along.
Remember; CAT is strategy first, ability second kind of exam. I will keep different disparities out of this post, but would ask everyone to see this being based on bucketing. Yes, your gender, category, school-marks, UG field, all matter, but then don't think the entire pool is your competition. The percentile system makes one think like that, but it isn't the case. The competition is WITHIN your own bucket, find the scoring needed there. That math will go a long way and will keep you away from unnecessary excuses and debates.
General strategies:

- set an ideal score in mind, everyone would want highest possible but set a realistic number in mind. Aim should be to score equal in all section. Give mocks/prev year papers, find weakest section, compensate for loss there by gain elsewhere. - if strong in VARC, practice completing whole thing in 40mins (whatever the section time is), else tackle in order of strongest module first (RC/ordering/summarising/fill sentence). - in QA, put a hard limit of 1.5-2 mins per question when practicing. Choose only the sections/problems you are comfortable with, learn to solve them in the exam constraints first. There is no need to know everything, this isn't boards. - in DILR, know that 1/4 is enough, 2/4 is good, 3/4 and you can afford huge mistakes in VA/QA, but being able to solve 3/4 probably means you are very strong at reading and math, so no need to think here. 

I went on to give my CAT, and post that is when I got involved here the most. I was active when this community had 14k~ members, so it has grown significantly, in ways good and bad. But that's not the point. There are all kinds of people here, and therefore you should be able to find whatever you need amidst all the noise.
I had applied for top 10ish colleges based on my personal suitability (+All checkboxes in CAT form ). Adding links to their interview experiences/transcripts here;
IIM A, C, FMS - NO call [A and B have non-public criteria, but generally B has more weightage to experience, while A has for diversity. C and especially FMS need raw marks in CAT]
SPJIMR - my first interview experience, got kicked out of round 1 IIM K - admit XLRI BM - admit IIM B - PGP + PGPBA admit IIM I - admit IIT B - waitlist in 20s but opted out to not block seat IIM L - admit IIFT - will probably get IIM Mumbai, IIM Shillong, XLRI HM, IIT Delhi - filled interview forms but didn't attend All other IIMs - skipped entirely
I cannot give any specific advice on interviews as things to work upon vary greatly from person to person. You can go through the above links, and ask questions if any, I will try to answer them.
I hope this post is of help, And all the best for your plans!

I am an expat.
We left India for several reasons, but for me the biggest perk was that our child will get better education abroad..or so I thought. The approach to learning here is far too casual.
I used to fear subjecting my daughter to rote learning. Now I realise, in some cases it is actually useful. Specifically talking about math, memorizing fundamental concepts is essential to building a strong base (including memorizing tables).
This is what happened at our playground today:
9 yo girl: I am going to my home country for 2 month break. I don't know what to do with our pet.
10 yo girl: Put it in boarding. It's 50 (in our local currency) a day.
"So how much would I have to pay?"...crickets....
I told them to multiply 50x60. She said, why? After explaining why, she asked how..I asked her to think...and both girls kept trying to multiply the zeros but were getting confused. So I told them to leave the zeros and recite 5 times table. They said "what table?"..Anyway after a lot of back and forth, I had to give them the answer. They were 10 and 9. (btw...I called up my 8 yo niece to ask the same qs. she took some time, but gave the correct answer without help).
Another boy, 12 yo, was adding 9 to a number to check how much he had spent. I was amazed to see he was counting 9 on his fingers, so I said why don't you just add 10 and subtract 1. He looked at me like I was speaking Russian.
Here they don't teach tables. They teach count by 5s, 2s, etc. So, if you ask a child what's 5x6, they will have to mentally recite the count to arrive at 5x6. Similarly, children draw a blank on a lot of core concepts of Mental Maths.
The entire approach to education abroad I feel is casual. Kids don't have weekly tests, revisions, spot quizze etc (at least not till middle school, I am not aware about HS)...Sometimes a little pressure is actually good to keep them on their toes. I am not saying Indian education is perfect but I feel it is superior on a lot of counts.
My child is only 6, but I fear she might fall behind. We are paying an eye watering amount for her schooling, but I have to supplement with CBSE books at home and teach her myself.
I often wonder if moving back would be better for her education (although there are a lot of other factors to consider such as a the quality of life here, amazing opportunities in extra curriculars etc). It's a complicated decision.

My family is pretty poor or rather tends to save their money instead of spend it. Reason for that is my old dad. He has pretty much seen everything and doesn't have the need to travel anymore. My Mother goes on vacation every two years or so to thailand to visit family, alone. I never learned the language so i wouldnt be able to communicate at all. I always thought it would be such a waste for me to go since it's so expensive. So, I never actually went on vacations. Biggest City i've seen was Berlin because of our school trip. I've never even seen the ocean, or rather remember seeing it (I saw it in Thailand when I was a baby). Never been to a beach or left germany.
This Week my Boyfriend left to a vacation with his Mom, to Miami to visit family. My mom is currently also in Thailand. My Bestfriend is going to her first vacation without any parents with another friend to the netherlands tomorrow. I feel so alone and I don't know what to do about it???
My boyfriend has been sending me pictures, facetiming me, telling me they're going to the beach now and i really genuinely want to feel happy but I can't. I don't want so seem like an ass so i just say "Wow nice, send me pictures, i miss you". His family in Miami is pretty wealthy too, driving luxurious cars. I can't help it but to feel Jealous. Miami is such a dream city. I've always wanted to go to the states, let alone see a beach. Just a few hours ago he asked me "Would you want to visit Miami?", while showing me the skyline on Facetime. All I was able to say was "Hm, yeah idk". I am happy for him, but heck do I wish I was there with him.
I don't know if I should mention it to him. I don't want to destroy his vacation but he's been asking why i'm so emotionless when i talk to him. I do have hobbies, but i can't convince myself to do them. I feel so alone doing anything. I feel horrible knowing my close people are out on vacation while i'm rotting in bed having to work next week starting at 6 am.
Not only this but I also have severe attachment issues to my boyfriend. We've been together for now a year and a half but it's still so bad. This is the first time we're apart for a while and I feel horrible. It's just all of these small factors added together make me go insane. Being poor sucks.
I am desperately asking for advice on how to deal with these feelings and if or how to tell my boyfriend.
TL;DR: Never been to vacation since family is poor, boyfriend now visits his rich family in Miami and I feel mad and jealous. At the same time my attachment issues are making it worse. Emotionally overwhelmed how do I handle this?