BUSINESS LESSONS 2: Limited Human Relations

In business, a businessman should act, move and think like a businessman. You should be trustworthy or at least appear to be worthy for anybody’s trust otherwise no one will engage business with you.

How should a businessman act, move and think like a businessman?
To act, move and think like a businessman is no easy task. It is always saddled with a great burden which will certainly limit the ordinary human relation.

Pleas be guided by these recommendations:

1. Limit your shame and embarrassment. Say an absolute NO on matters not necessary to business. Don’t be carried away by personal relations, business is business. Don’t yield to a request by reason of personal relations alone, think always of the business advantage you might gain therefrom – don’t compromise.

2. Limit trust and confidence. There is NO real friends in business; you only have the clients [consumer], the partners, the providers [producers] , the agents. All of them are ready to take advantage against each other when opportunity comes. Nothing prohibits them to betray you at a right time. In business, absolute trust and confidence is only a worthless whim; it is not really required to effectively run a business.

3. Don’t be deceived by the “love” trap. Businessmen usually get an “easy” girl to fill their feelings of emptiness or the need to be loved. This is the first ingredient for disaster. The errors of some businessmen is that they think of their business too much but they don’t think too much about their “love”, they will get that “love” in a hasty manner based on the delusion that they were so busy with anything more important.
Businessmen, please be guided by these line of thought:
a.) Businessmen does not really need love, they need profits and gains.
b.) If they need love, it does not mean a hasty prepaid love. Search for a better and “true love”, dont’ entertain the illusion that you are too busy and that you have no time. A real businessman has full control and absolute management of his time, not a slave of time.
c.) If they need prepaid love, it does not mean a compromise to the business. Love does not mean a ruin to the business. If money can buy “love”, it means that money is much more important than “love”.
Oftentimes, the business bankruptcy is not caused by misadministration or mismanagement BUT by the lover’s squandering – lover that has no regard on the hardships of business efforts.

4. Limit frequent and casual connections. Frequent and casual connections will create an unnecessary personal intimacy if tolerated.

5. Trust NO ONE even your partners, clients, providers and agents. Always be ready on their infedilities; be ready to replace them and to look for alternatives when they bring misfortunes or when they no longer serve their business functions. They are just humans with human motives and betrayal capabilities.

6. Always be suspicious on all dealings and business transactions. When business presentations suggest an extreme gain on your part, there is a greater percentage that it is a deception. Evaluate it properly and reject it when necessary, don’t be tempted by the offered gains for it is only a cheap bait. Remember, business is not only about discussions on gains.

7. Don’t agree on any dealings just because of a friendly smiles and gestures. Human being can always change the appearance in accordance with his purpose.

8. If business concepts are still not clear with your apprehensions, consult an impartial businessman or any business expert. However, to produce a more convincing findings, ask a second opinion from another consultant to double check the reliability of the business expert’s opinion.

9. Close supervision maintains and upgrades the efforts. Don’t allow business agents and associates to take absolute control on their jobs. Issue orders and policies from time to time according to business demands. Failure to abide the issued orders or policies is an insubordination.

10. A businessman should have a firm attitude. An attitude which signifies that you knew your function more than anybody else; an attitude which signifies that you cannot be dictated what to be done.

11. Don’t tolerate and don’t accept flatteries. They are just playing the weakness of human emotions. A businessman should be rational and practical, NOT a conceited animal. Business losses follows flatteries.

12. Don’t yield on the powers of tears. The greatest mistake of mercy is NOT the smiles of the proponent but the tears of those who pity. Businessmen should be aware of this. Tears may be equated with tears but not with money.

If friendship and other special relations will be destroyed in the name of business, abandon that business. BUT if friendship and other special relations will destroy the business, abandon those friends.

IN ALL KINDS OF BUSINESS, TRUST HAS ALWAYS BEEN A GREAT MISTAKE [2005, by PWA]

Barrister79 expresses his gratitude to the businessmen who continued to exchange ideas with generous considerations, THANKS!

BUSINESS LESSONS 1

There are many things to consider before starting a business. Business is not just a wild experiment nor a result of a “guess and try” approach. Many aspiring businessmen failed because of the failure to abide some standards in business preparations.

The great edifice to establish in building a big business is not on its commercial location but in the deep of the person’s mind – the thinking. Before starting ANY business, we should be guided by these standards:

 1. Knowing our capabilitites to handle inconvenience and endurance to any form of difficulties; Business is something which is dealing with different people, papers and procedures.

2. Knowing the kind of business you want to start; Don’t start something which is proven by others to be a good business, it is possible that it is not good for you.

3. Know your financial capability to sustain the expenses of your business in a long term; There could hardly be an instant gain taking into considerations the capital and other business expenses.

4. Know your financial condition and connections in relation to your desired business; Any businessman cannot live without the co-existence of others.

5. Know in advance the common, the rare and the special problems that may be encountered in the business you choose; Knowing it in advance facilitates your thinking on its possible remedies.

6. Know the place of business. Know the clients or the profiles of any prospective consumer. It will give you the hint on the extent of your business in a frame of time.

7. Expand your knowledge on the other EXITS of expenses. This will help you prepare some unknown business incidents.

8. Don’t borrow more than you could pay. It will surely destroy your business. Design a strategic method of payment if your rely too much on your borrowings.

9. Don’t employ many workers. Numbers of laborers doesn’t count, it is on their cooperation. Make an updated seminar or any lectures for them and the business.

10. In fine, it is important that you know the following:

       a.)  The business you want to start

       b.) The business problems

       c.) The business place and environment

       d.) The business finance and the expenses

        e.) The business disciplines  and firm attitudes

       f.)   The business frauds and legal matters

        g.) The expansions and investments

This is for lesson 1

WAR: My Elegy

This was written on March 17, 2003, 12:08AM, by Paul Whelmer Alforque 

Iraq was attacked by the United States with high explosives that cost the lives of many innocent men.

                       “Oh War, drink our blood and our tears; consume all our flesh and our memory”

At this moment, indeed, this world is threatened by the ideals and aspirations of the civilized barbarians of the era. Although claiming to be an intelligent being, our warriors prefer to grasp their desires with no valid reasons at all – they eagerly justify warfare by employing the logic of passion and anger and hatred and unestablished fabricated causes. This is an undesirable nightmare of man – war is an insult to the human intellect; this is a clear devotion to arrogance and a blasphemy to the harmonious and civilized society of man.

Instead of searching the formula of joy in peace and good life, we are in fact personifying the image of hell.

Oh god of war, my ordinary understanding and mind cannot give me the reason why these highly educated war-lover animals could not find any remedy for the avoidance of disaster BUT would rather choose the most dirty of all the games – war.

To the casualties of war, search one’s own god and if an actual peace could not be attained – let there be peace in your mind, the only best remedy, indeed.

War has become a phenomenon of human affairs; a phenomenon which was created by the iron hands of aggressions AND nurtured by the nutrients of foolishness and passion; war is the biggest game played by the bullies.

WAR, how awful you are! You are killing hens which lay golden eggs! Nothing we can do for thou art real, and easily be provoked by public expectations.

Now, by our mistakes, we will be flourishing in the air all our bad histories to be displayed in the heart of the all future generations, mistakes that will be engraved in the walls of human memory – allowing them to tell tales of all our unbearable whims and caprices printed in bloodshed.

So be it.

THE FIRST CONSPIRACY: Hermeneutic Analysis

Paul Whelmer Alforque, Departamento de Filosofia, 1997, Camara de Pensador.

The Honorable Magistrates, before this dignified institution, I submit the structure of my thesis anchored on the third chapter in the book of Genesis, focused on the Fall of Man, which says:

Genesis 3

The Fall of Man

 1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ “

 4 “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

 6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

 8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”

 10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

 11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

 12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

 13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
      The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

It is my stand, as could be inferred from the text, that the first great conspiracy took place in the Garden of Eden. I based this perspective on the following circumstances:

One, it is in the book of Genesis wherein Adam and Eve committed the first sin that engraved in human soul.

Two, the Garden of Eden was supposed to be a safe place designed by God for the prime pure human beings and their offsprings.

Three, the Garden of Eden is a paradise for Adam and Eve where God communicate directly to man.

Four, that God being the supreme being has absolute control over the paradise which is designed for the sinless being such as Adam and Eve.

Five, that Adam and Eve were totally innocent before they ate the fruit, having no knowledge of any foolishness nor of any sin of any kind.

Six, that the fruit of the tree of knowledge, when taken, shall give them the malice which capacitates them to discern what is right and what is wrong.

Seven, that prior to the taking of the fruit, Adam and Eve is essentially ignorant on the concept of good and evil, because their minds are supposed to be opened at the time they will be tempted to eat the fruit.

Based on these premises, Honorable Magistrates, I come to an honest yet logical perspectives, that:

One, God is not intending man to exercise their freedom because they have no freedom of choice between right and wrong considering their lack of knowledge on what is right and what is wrong. Adam and Eve were really destined to FALL because they cannot use their good judgment on the pretext of their innocence.

Two, the unfortunate fate of Adam and Eve was really God’s plan. God being the supreme being has an absolute control over the entire paradise, it is within his power to drive off and disperse the Serpent who made the temptation.

Three, with the preordained knowledge that the minds of Adam and Eve were NO MATCH to the shrewdness of the Serpent, yet God allowed the Serpent to occupy a particular place in the paradise and authorized it to communicate with Adam and Eve.

Four, by these virtue, it is my contention that the First Great Conspiracy in human history may have been taken place in the Garden of Eden; Adam and Eve being the victims of the whims and caprices of God and the Serpent, and God and the Serpent being the conspirators and partners of their game out of their own boredom.