Internal management team

I heard this over podcast of Harvard Business Review -

Each person's perspective is limited, since we usually don't have a group of advisor that know us well and have the right aspect and available to us, it is an worthwhile strategy to have some "Internal Management Team"

CEO - set the vision, lead the charge, adjust the strategy
CFO - make sure the resource is there, be prudent and efficient with the resource
COO - make sure all the procedure is established and followed and production is effective

Board - Watch over the "big picture", heed the danger, take the long view, the sure I do the right thing, not just doing things right

Often we have to put ourself in one of these role so the overall operation is meaningful and productive.  And hopefully, lead us to peace and joy.

Financial Independence and Financial Knowledge

I started investing rather young, right out of grad school.  I carefully put away 30% of my earnings every year for four years.  I bought two houses and several stocks.  It was terrible.  I was too naive and too lazy to learn.  I lost most of my money in stock and lost one house to foreclosure.  The bad credit followed by for 7 years, during my time in the doctoral program.

I was lucky enough that I cash out most of my remaining stock in 1999 for another house in Monterey and escaped the dot com stock bubble. I restarted my investment in 2003. Not until I stared study the necessary book, take the necessary risk, avoided the typical pitfall that devour the typical investor: greed and fear.  I read several books on stock and real estate, follow closely WSJ, forbes and Money and fool.com.  Between 2003 and today 2013, I started with less than 100K, now is 10X more.

The total time I studied is less than 3-400 hours.  The hourly rate is more than $1000!  I cannot believe I did not spend some time earlier in financial study, I probably wasted at least 3000 hours in college on games and useless chats.  Everyone should know the basic of investment.  It might not be as important as life and death, but it is definite results in rich or poor.