Philosophy and Ethics

Having been in different life and business positions, I have pretty much developed my own mind set in multiple things. I would like to share some of these ideas because it may benefit someone someday in making their own decisions and this will also reflect somewhat my personality in writing.

Business

No Risk No Gain Not Totally - There are always risks one needs to take in order to gain a wealthy reward, however I believe you can also gain while minimizing your risk by making informed decisions and research.

Sales drive sales but it does not drive long term growth - Once you have devalued your products once, people will have the discounted price as the benchmark for their purchases. Products will be hard to sell at normal price and you possibly would lose sales in the long run.

Contracts are important - Having everything black and white is very important as project size grows. It ensures smooth process of what ever is going on.

Your Team, You're living with it - There are many situations where you can't choose your team, you still should push the team forward even if you're not the lead and not let differences stop the team's development. Everyone works as one and if there's someone slacking, you need to be straight forward about it. His or Her responsibilities are your responsibilities.

Think long term not just short term - What happens today will affect what happens tomorrow. What you do now should be for the long term benefit. Working from short term to short term may not leave you with much gain to prosper from.

Not everything = profit - Ideas are great, but not all ideas are fresh. If you think it makes money, probably someone else already has done it. Developing the idea further and make it unique is the way forward. Don't stop at the idea.

Ethics

Charge for what you think is fair - There is no point in charging someone more than the work you put into something if you are very capable of completing the work at a lower cost than competitors.

The Fine Line - You always need to draw the line somewhere in terms of liabilities to protect yourself and your clients.

There is no free lunch - In the long run you can not provide everything for free as a provider of services and makes it unfair to your clients. You always should have a clear view point of what you can provide free and what you can't.

Communications - Communicating with clients is very important. You should always keep in direct contact with your client during the process as the product at the end of the day is theirs to keep. As much as it would go against conventions of some software engineering philosophy, I believe for things like website building, it is important to produce something the client likes.

Not 100% Not Done - University trains students but because of the way the grading system works, people would have incomplete systems. This is probably one of the worst mentalities that you get out of university, where incomplete is OK. If things aren't done, you need to get it done.

Interested in doing does not mean motivation - It takes a lot of motivation to initiate self projects, I applaud those who are able to do them. When there are no clear gains, the only thing that drives the thing you want to do is motivation created by yourself.

Give to those in need - Being charitable is important in life, always what if you were in that position or if you know someone affected by it. You're not going to be able to change the world with donations but at the very least you have started driving change.

Education

Education is Not Everything - Education is not the end of the line. I've personally have had my ups n downs in education but at the end what really matters is that you learn how to apply your knowledge. We live in an age where we have great resources to reference from thus it is more important to know how to search for answers than knowing the answers off the bat.

Failure is not the end of the world - Don't be disheartened by failure and always look forward and understand what you did wrong and fix it.

Life Changing Moments

Don't Drink and Drive - My Maths Teacher in High School passed away in a car accident involving a drunk driver.