Long time readers know my views on going to University. So I've just started reading 'Choose Yourself' by James Altucher and came across this passage that I thought might be of interest to a few of the punters.
Note: excuse the formatting, I copypasta'd from a PDF and am not about to spend 15 minutes deleting double spacing, etc.
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I recently visited an investor who manages more than a trillion dollars. You might think a trillion dollars sounds impossible. I did. But there?s a lot more money out there than people let on. It?s squirreled away by families who have been hoarding and investing and reinvesting for
hundreds of years. And this trillion dollars I speak of belonged to just
one family.
We were high up in the vertical City of New York. His entire office was
surrounded by glass windows. He brought me over to one of them.
?What do you see?? he said.
I don?t know, I thought. Buildings.
?Empty floors!? he said. ?Look at that one. Some bank. All empty.? He
pointed at another building. His fingers scraping across his window
like?I don?t know?whatever a spider uses to weave its web. ?And that
one: an ad agency or a law firm or an accounting firm. Look at all the
empty desks. They used to be full, with full-time employees. Now
they?re empty and they will never fill up again.?
I spoke with several CEOs around that time and asked them point-blank,
?Did you fire people simply because this was a good excuse to get rid of
the people who were no longer useful??
Universally, the response was a nervous laugh and a ?Yeah, I guess that?s right!?
And because of the constant economic uncertainty, they told me, they
are never going to hire those people again. Recently I joined the board
of directors of a temporary staffing company with $700 million in
revenue. The year before they had $400 million. That growth occurred
in a flat economy. I now can see firsthand and immediately what parts of
the economy are hiring full-time and what parts of the economy are moving toward using more temporary workers.
I?ll tell you the answer: ZERO sectors in the economy are moving
toward more full-time workers. Everything is either being cut back,
moved toward outsourcing out of the country, or hiring temp workers.
And this goes not just for low-paid industrial workers, but middle managers, computer programmers, accountants, lawyers, and even senior executives.
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If you're smart, you will discourage your children from wasting their time and money going to Uni and encourage them to either go into a trade (you can't outsource plumbing, carpentry and electrical work to India) or get a job doing monkey work and save and invest as much as possible, so their futures are assured. Even better, encourage them from a young age to start businesses.
Note: excuse the formatting, I copypasta'd from a PDF and am not about to spend 15 minutes deleting double spacing, etc.
---------------
I recently visited an investor who manages more than a trillion dollars. You might think a trillion dollars sounds impossible. I did. But there?s a lot more money out there than people let on. It?s squirreled away by families who have been hoarding and investing and reinvesting for
hundreds of years. And this trillion dollars I speak of belonged to just
one family.
We were high up in the vertical City of New York. His entire office was
surrounded by glass windows. He brought me over to one of them.
?What do you see?? he said.
I don?t know, I thought. Buildings.
?Empty floors!? he said. ?Look at that one. Some bank. All empty.? He
pointed at another building. His fingers scraping across his window
like?I don?t know?whatever a spider uses to weave its web. ?And that
one: an ad agency or a law firm or an accounting firm. Look at all the
empty desks. They used to be full, with full-time employees. Now
they?re empty and they will never fill up again.?
I spoke with several CEOs around that time and asked them point-blank,
?Did you fire people simply because this was a good excuse to get rid of
the people who were no longer useful??
Universally, the response was a nervous laugh and a ?Yeah, I guess that?s right!?
And because of the constant economic uncertainty, they told me, they
are never going to hire those people again. Recently I joined the board
of directors of a temporary staffing company with $700 million in
revenue. The year before they had $400 million. That growth occurred
in a flat economy. I now can see firsthand and immediately what parts of
the economy are hiring full-time and what parts of the economy are moving toward using more temporary workers.
I?ll tell you the answer: ZERO sectors in the economy are moving
toward more full-time workers. Everything is either being cut back,
moved toward outsourcing out of the country, or hiring temp workers.
And this goes not just for low-paid industrial workers, but middle managers, computer programmers, accountants, lawyers, and even senior executives.
----------
If you're smart, you will discourage your children from wasting their time and money going to Uni and encourage them to either go into a trade (you can't outsource plumbing, carpentry and electrical work to India) or get a job doing monkey work and save and invest as much as possible, so their futures are assured. Even better, encourage them from a young age to start businesses.
