Jarmaine Ee | Episode #84

Well, it's quite fascinating what you mentioned.

And I think, you know, the questions are very simple questions, but they're very revealing.

Revealing about what's really important for somebody and something that they need to go and understand.

And I think what you just mentioned, unfortunately, most business owners, entrepreneurs, and I'm one of them, we're just so busy with life.

We don't actually tend to slow down and start thinking about, yeah, why am I really doing this? Because we all think, well, we're doing this so that we can provide our families.

But unfortunately, and maybe you have heard this cliche, I've sat down with a lot of business owners that literally spent their life and their health chasing after money so that when they retire, they're now spending all of their money getting back their health and life.

And it's kind of unfortunate that we lived in this, I would call it a hustle culture where we're all chasing after this thing.

And we sometimes don't even know what that is.

Do you find that kind of through the revelations that you've had that you see that? Yeah, I

mean, so I'm 35 this year and a lot of my friends who graduated from a really good university, most of my friends are golden handcuffed to their job.

I talk to them about, hey, you make quite a lot.

Yeah, taxes are high and all that, but you should have a lot of freedom to do the few things that you say you want to do.

And what ends up happening is that we are so caught up with, you know, the opinions of the five to 10 people that we talk to the most, right? And it gets us into this trend of maybe buying things that we don't need and keeping up with the Joneses or keeping up with the private schools and things like that.

I actually want to take a step back here about being a business owner.

So...

At the time when I was living in New York, my mom had a job and she was working as a VP of imports for a freight forwarding company.

And I told her at 59 years old at the time, hey, you know, you always talk about traveling the world.

Why don't you do that? well, I don't have enough days off.

I have responsibilities.

I have 80 people under me.

I've got all the shipments that I have to deal with.

And I just say, hey, look, you're not getting any younger.

So I know your knees work really well now, but at some point, if you wanna climb up the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, it's not gonna be as easy.

So why don't we start thinking about how to wind down the intensity of your work, but still do something you enjoy, because she loves her work.

And so we started a company together, right? We took her skills, what she was best at.