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cruz-regina-d-journal · 4 years

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07: Goal Digger

When we are talking about goals we usually think of something we want only for ourselves. It’s exciting to think of what you can be in the future and what you will have as well, but sometimes some people tend to forget that we still need to make an action before we get something we want. We keep on saying that we want this and that but we don’t even make a move on how to get it. Honestly, the past “Regina” was like that. My mind focuses only on my desires, and we can relate this to Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory which are the id, ego, and superego. Our id says “I want it now!” as our superego says “You still can’t have it because you don’t have money yet”, they battle around our mind until our ego says “Okay, kids, let’s study well, find work, earn money and buy what we want”. In every goal we have, there is always a process that we need to get into. We can’t have anything in an instant! Even at opening our phone, we still need to wait and do something in order to open it, and that is to press the power button. In life we also have actions like opening the power button, but the thing is we need to open ourselves. We need to step out of our comfort zone and find ways on how to achieve our goals.

Since I was a kid, my parents buy me planners and notebooks because I love writing, drawing and putting my goals in it. I have this one perpetual planner that I still update whenever I want or got something, and it always gives me this wonderful feeling at any time my plans worked or have gotten well than I expected it to be. And today it really took me a long time to know what I want to have; maybe because I feel down due to this pandemic and my family experienced a huge deal of a problem related to this year’s stumbling block which made me worry about my future. Nevertheless, I’m glad that we’re now okay and I finally conquered those mind-boggling thoughts. The pictures here show my short and long term goals that I’ve been thinking since June 2020. I’m sharing this things to you because I think I will be needing your support and guidance 😁 Let’s bring each other to the top!

SHORT TERM GOALS

OBJECTIVE 1: Grow a Plant

TIME FRAME: August 28, 2020-October 5, 2020

RESOURCES: Shovel, seed, pot, healthy soil and water

TASKS:

Choose the right container for your plant and put the healthy soil in it.

Plant the see at the proper depth and water it with a room-temperature water.

Maintain a consistent moisture and keep the soil warm.

Apply fertilizer every week, give the plant enough sunlight and circulate air.

SUCCESS CRITERIA: Be patient and don’t forget your tasks!

REASON: I’ve been trying to grow a plant since I was in elementary, but I don’t know why they always wilt. I love plants but I don’t think they love me 😢

OBJECTIVE 2: Bond with my Friends and Family

TIME FRAME: March 2020-July 2020

RESOURCES: Love, happiness, understanding and self

TASKS:

Focus your time with them.

Don’t use phones, engage with them through personal interactions

Make them feel loved/important and laugh with them

Always listen to their stories and respond appropriately

Treasure the moment

SUCCESS CRITERIA: Make time with them and don’t forget to enjoy it!

REASON: As I entered college I noticed that I rarely bond with my other friends and my family because I’m studying at Manila during weekdays. I don’t have a free time whenever I go home to Cavite because I use my weekends for doing my school works and sleeping to regain the energy I’ve used during school days. I feel sad that I failed to divide my time for academics and for enjoying life. And now that it’s finally over, I think that this is a great opportunity to recoup my scantiness.

OBJECTIVE 3: Eat Eggs 5x a month

TIME FRAME: August 13, 2020-October 13,2020

RESOURCES: Eggs, pan, plate and utensils

TASKS:

Eat egg once every week.

Ask your family to not cook eggs for you when you’ve eaten once that week.

Avoid eating soft-cooked eggs.

Find an alternative food when tempted.

SUCCESS CRITERIA: Self-regulation

REASON: My asthma will kick me when I eat too much eggs! 😢 I have an allergy for excessive food, and I want to practice myself to eat egg once a week so that I can restrain myself without any trouble or some kind of temptation.

OBJECTIVE 4: Be a Reading Volunteer

TIME FRAME: September 2020-November 2020

RESOURCES: Book, camera and other gadgets

TASKS:

Pick books that have good life lessons

Look for the age recommendation and mention this

Record yourself reading

Let people see the book you’re currently reading

Put emotions as you read, let your audience feel what the characters in the book are feeling

Engage with them even in a recorded video (ex. asking questions)

Think of a line that will make a great impact to your audience regarding the lesson of the story

SUCCESS CRITERIA: Enjoy and engage with your audience

REASON: I am a member of PNU Reading Society and I want to officially become a reading volunteer to help students with their lifelong literacy skills that will empower their learning and also to support those people who are falling behind about reading.

OBJECTIVE 5: Buy new Optical Glasses

TIME FRAME: January 10, 2020: 1:00PM-3:00PM

RESOURCES: Money, optical frame and receipt

TASKS:

Go to Starfinder Optical Shop at SM

Go to SoYou section and look if there’s a discount (if there is)

Choose an optical frame. Keep in mind the shape of the lens you wat and need, and also its weight

Give the chosen frame to the sales rep. and get your waiting number

Wait for your ophthalmologist to call you before you go in the room

When called, sit properly and let the ophthalmologist check you eyes

Perform the said activities

Observe the weight of the lenses

Make sure that you picked the right graded lenses

Wait for your optical glasses for 1 hour (and so)

Present your receipt to the sales rep. and wait for him/her to give your glasses with free case

Wear your glasses to see if it’s okay and check if there’s any damages before leaving

Note: Don’t forget to say thank you!

SUCCESS CRITERIA: Be patient, honest and critical thinker

REASON: I need new glasses because my current one is kind of dirty and is not accurate anymore as months pass by. Inaccurate graded lenses will make me suffer to headaches and dizziness making me hard to study and move.

LONG TERM GOALS

OBJECTIVE 1: Graduate from College

TIME FRAME: July 2019-November 2023

RESOURCES: Perseverance, Time Management and Patience

TASKS:

Always listen to your professor/speaker

Engage with people around you

Do your tasks correctly as instructed and submit it as soon as possible

Make a to-do list

Take important notes and organize them all

When there’s an exam, review 2 weeks ahead the test day

Ask questions for clarifications

Join organizations and seminars

Grab once in a lifetime opportunities

Cry but stand up again when you fail

Believe in yourself

Dedicate yourself to your course

SUCCESS CRITERIA: Grit

REASON: Honestly, I want to graduate with latin honors but something struck me and thought that to graduate from college should be my main goal. Honor rolls are just bonuses of your hard work. It is obvious that I want to graduate from college to help my family and give them things that they need and want as well. I want to give them a thank you gift for providing me everything that I needed for years.

OBJECTIVE 2: Open a Business

TIME FRAME: January 2025-January 2029

RESOURCES: Money(Capital), manpower, product/service, promotion, patience, determination and connections

TASKS:

Think of a business that is unique where many customers will be attracted

Create a solid business plan with your chosen strategy

Make a website or Facebook/Instagram Page about your business

Be approachable to gain customers

Advertise your product/service

When the business grew bigger, register your business name at the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI)

Remember to always check your financial status

SUCCESS CRITERIA: Patience, Analytical skill, Accounting, Problem Solving and Communication & Negotiation

REASON: I was an ABM student before and I want to make use of my skills to help my family and those people who need financial assistance. Opening a business was also part of my dreams. Not only that it will help me to gain more money for my post-graduate, but I want to invest my small money from my teaching profession to something that I can make use to the present and future. Nevertheless, having a business will not stop me from teaching.

OBJECTIVE 3: Become a Doctor

TIME FRAME: August 2024-November 2028

RESOURCES: Money, grit, school supplies, experiences and books

TASKS:

Look for a medical school (preferably: De La Salle Medical and Health Sciences Institute)

Take the MCAT (Medical College Application Test)

Focus on your studies to be a Psychiatrist

Earn a Doctor of Medicine and complete your residency

SUCCESS CRITERIA: Patience, Empathy, Focus, Practical & Decision-Making Skills and Time Management

REASON: I had this late bloomer moment. Before entering college I was confused on what I really want to be. Not that I am boasting but I had this mindset before that any courses will do because I thought I can do everything. My top choices are Architecture, Accountancy, Teaching, and Medical. I chose teaching since there’s a time that I became super inspired of my Senior High School professor and I noticed that from the past few years of my life, I never experienced a class with an excellent Filipino teacher who really took a course of Filipino, and that’s why I want to became one. As I became a BFE Student, I still want to pursue my medical dream. I want to be more useful to my people even if it will take me thousand years to be a 100%.

OBJECTIVE 4: Buy a New House

TIME FRAME: July 2024-July 2026

RESOURCES: Money and communication

TASKS:

Know your budget for your house and stick to it. DON’T EXCEED TO YOUR ESTIMATION!

Research subdivisions or areas that are accessible to buy your needs and public transportation

Get prequalified and preapproved for credit for your mortgage

Find a nice and approachable real estate agent

Start touring to subdivisions or areas that you already searched (Make sure to check every detail of the house especially the water and electrical system and always consider the people who will live with you)

Make an offer

After building the house, get a home inspection and check if there are structural damages before transferring (if there are, contact your real estate agent)

Make sure to pay your monthly bill and coordinate your paperwork

SUCCESS CRITERIA: Hard working, Critical Thinking, Observance and Patience

REASON: I don’t want to be dependent of my family’s money and belongings. I want to buy my own place for my family, and if blessed, I am glad to share my payments with my partner to build our new life together. If my parents want to stay with me, I will let them stay there as well, but if they prefer to stay at our old house, then I’ll support for the renovation of our old house.

OBJECTIVE 5: Live a Healthy Life

TIME FRAME: August 2020-August 2025

RESOURCES: Healthy food and balanced diet

TASKS:

Be physically active

Eat a healthy rich diet

Drink vitamins

Do yoga and exercises

Make time with friends and focus in the present

SUCCESS CRITERIA: Self-regulation and willingness

REASON: I have a weak body and I want to practice a healthy life until I get used to it and became my normal habit. I am not a fan of junk food but I still think that I’m not living a healthy life today because I refuse to exercise. But now that I noticed that it is important to take care of yourself and we need these kind of things to prevent us from being sick, I finally told myself that I have to change this kind of lifestyle and start to be healthy; not only physically but also mentally.

#Ethics #Goals

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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New story in Business from Time: Many Companies Won’t Survive the Pandemic. Amazon Will Emerge Stronger Than Ever

The pandemic has upended businesses across the world, but it has been very good for Amazon. Every lockdown “click to purchase” nudged the company a little further toward utter domination of online shopping as total e-commerce sales nearly doubled in May. But if bigger was better for everyone, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos would not be appearing before Congress on Wednesday for an antitrust hearing.

Charlene Anderson, and sellers like her, are one reason why he’ll be there. Anderson is among the many merchants who sell goods on Amazon — and who together account for more than half of sales on the site. But they pay, too: Amazon charges Anderson a $39.99 monthly fee to post her knitting and craft supplies on its site, and it takes a cut of about 30 percent on each item she sells. Anderson’s seller experience has worsened during the pandemic as Amazon exercised the power of what she calls “dictatorship” over the vast internal marketplace it alone controls.

In mid-March, for example, Amazon notified sellers that during the pandemic, its warehouses would accept only household staples, medical supplies and “other high-demand products,“ but it failed to explain how it determined what it would accept. Anderson could still send some colors of knitting bags to Amazon warehouses, but not others; she could send one size of knitting needles, but not another. Some sellers saw their sales evaporate; others paid USPS or other services to ship orders to customers, while still paying Amazon’s monthly fees.

Even after Amazon lifted that order, boxes of goods that Anderson ships to a warehouse still sit on loading docks for weeks, she says, and when Amazon unpacks them, it miscounts the items, an error that takes Anderson days to remedy. The company sends customers the wrong items, then allows them to leave negative feedback on her seller page despite the error being Amazon’s, says Anderson, who is 63 and lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In the Facebook group she runs, Anderson says some sellers worry that the raft of problems will lower their internal scores on Amazon so much that the company will kick them off the site.

But where else can they go? “What are we going to do, protest and not sell on Amazon?” Anderson asks. “Right, I’m just going to kill my whole business. They have you and they know they have you—if you go, they’ll just find someone else to sell those products.”

Consumer spending on Amazon between May and July was up 60% from the same time frame last year, according to the financial data firm Facteus. The company’s extraordinary power — it has 38% of the e-commerce market, trailed by Walmart with 6% — was under scrutiny well before COVID-19. But the lockdown that boosted the company’s dominance also threw into higher relief its consequences for other businesses.

That’s increased interest in updating federal laws written more than a century ago to correct the distortions of monopolies on an economy. Bezos is appearing before a Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, part of an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee into online platforms and market power. The hearings are asking: in the age of Big Tech, how big is too big? New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway, a longtime critic of Amazon, says it’s helpful to think of Amazon’s Prime membership service as the kind of massive competitive advantage once enjoyed by railroad barons. With its extensive logistics and delivery network, Amazon not only has the eyeballs of millions of households, it is the company that ships, packs, and delivers what they buy.

“Amazon already owns the rails into 115 million households in America,” says Galloway. “Do we really want one company to be the arbiter of all commerce?”

Roy Davidson Charlene Anderson, who has sold items on Amazon for 20 years, says relations with the online giant have suffered as its power grows.

Economic crises have a way of creating winners and losers. Procter & Gamble thrived during the Great Depression by doubling down on advertising; Target expanded after the 2001 recession and saw profits grow 50%. Before the pandemic, Amazon represented around 4% of total U.S. retail sales. But with the new habits formed during the pandemic, UBS predicts that by 2025, e-commerce will make up one-quarter of total retail sales, up from 15% last year. The firm also estimates that 100,000 brick and mortar retail outlets will close in the next five years. “Consumers are increasingly shifting towards online shopping,” analysts wrote. “Many of these shoppers may not get back to in-store shopping when the current state is over.”

Amazon, which refused to make an executive available to comment on this article, casts itself as a friendly giant in its ubiquitous messages to consumers; it spent nearly $7 billion advertising itself in 2019 (more than double what Walmart spent). According to Ad Age, that made the company the biggest ad spender in the U.S. last year. But Amazon also sells advertising — $3.9 billion worth in the first quarter of 2020, up about 44% from a year earlier. The ads appear on Kindle, on Amazon Prime TV and on Amazon.com, some of them purchased by the same small sellers already paying to be listed on Amazon but afraid of getting lost on the site without additional promotion.

Because of the way e-commerce works, advertising on Amazon is essential for just about anyone selling on the site. According to marketing surveys, when online shoppers are thinking of buying an item, about half go straight to Amazon and search for the item, rather than Googling it or visiting another website. Most don’t scroll beyond the first page of results, so for sellers, it’s essential to be featured on that first page. They can hope that positive reviews lead Amazon’s algorithm to put them there, or they can buy ads.

Amazon is now the third-biggest digital ad seller in the United States, following Facebook and Google. And as it consolidates its grip on e-commerce, it can charge more for ads on its site. Buyers now compete with each other in an auction for keywords related to their products; the more people that are competing, the higher prices go. Revenues from advertising in the first three months of this year were up 43.8% from the previous year and 359% since 2017, according to company earnings reports.“It begins to feel like they’re playing chess, and they’re thinking three to four steps ahead,” says Andrew Lipsman, a retail analyst at market research firm eMarketer. “The more I think about Amazon, the more I marvel at it.”

So do investors, who saw its stock as a haven in a treacherous equity market. Amazon has gained half a trillion dollars in market value just this year, and shares should climb even higher when earnings are reported on July 30 if, as analysts at Goldman Sachs predicted, company revenues in North America show a jump of nearly 50% from the previous year. Bezos, already the richest person in the world with a net worth of $178 billion, could become the world’s first trillionaire by 2026.

That kind of concentrated wealth invites the stark comparisons embodied by people like Susan Bengel. One of the 175,000 employees Amazon hired during a pandemic that cost 40 million American jobs, Bengel, 62, had been living in her car before she started working at an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania in late March. She told me she recently got an offer from UPS, but she stayed with Amazon despite difficult conditions that include being on her feet for entire night shifts. UPS couldn’t match the pay or benefits she gets at Amazon, Bengel says. “It’s a monopoly, but they provide well,” she told me after one shift, in which each worker received a Chick-fil-A boxed dinner and bottle of hand sanitizer courtesy of Amazon. As stores close in her hometown of Wayne, Pa., she turned to Amazon to buy what she needs, including new shoes and back braces to get her through her shifts.

Lindsey Wasson—Getty ImagesPeople wearing masks outside the Amazon campus in Seattle, Wash., on April 30, 2020.

For Amazon shoppers, there’s not much not to like, apart from the unease at feeding a behemoth that competitors say is gobbling up their customers. Amazon argues that it’s not a monopoly, since it competes with brick and mortar stores for sales. “There’s a single retail market of which online is one channel. People do not shop exclusively online,” an Amazon spokesman said in a statement. But stores without Amazon’s logistics network are finding it impossible to compete. While Amazon was hiring tens of thousands of new workers, Jeff Curtis was running around his Maine bookshop, Sherman’s, scrambling to fulfill online orders much as Bezos had done in the mid-90s during Amazon’s early days selling only books online. But Curtis was by himself, because his store was closed to comply with stay-at-home orders. He says the state denied his request for special dispensation to bring in workers to help, even as Amazon was allowed to have on-site employees fulfill its own rush of online orders. Curtis has already decided to permanently close one of six branches of his store and is worried he may have to close another. It is the way of the world Amazon has built. Kathy Gonzalez, who runs two retail stores in northwest Florida, says she’s tried to offer shipping for furniture and other items she sells, but the cost is so high that people turn to Amazon, where shipping is free.

“If you want to be able to reach customers online, you’re essentially compelled to be on Amazon’s platform, but Amazon’s platform is not a place that you can succeed,” says Stacy Mitchell, the co-director at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “With this sudden surge in online shopping, all of that has been magnified.”

Its mammoth size gives Amazon advantages available only to itself: One of its companies, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a cloud computing platform that lets companies rent space on a network of servers. Its $35 billion in sales in 2019 (up 36% from the previous year) provided a financial cushion that let Amazon subsidize grocery delivery, expand its network of warehouses, and dare to offer one-day shipping without worrying about huge losses. The company now has 1,223 buildings covering 278 million square feet in its global logistics network, up 82% since 2016, according to MWPVL International, a supply chain and logistics consulting firm, and it’s still expanding at an “unprecedented” pace,” says Marc Wulfraat, founder and president of MWPVL. It built or announced plans to build 49 million square feet of logistics space in the U.S. between March and July alone, he says.

Amazon’s deep pockets are also ensuring the company’s ability to operate during the coronavirus in a way no other company can. Bezos said in late April that Amazon was investing $4 billion in coronavirus-protection efforts, including personal protective equipment for workers, enhanced cleaning at facilities, and development of its own COVID-19 testing capabilities. Galloway calls this the first “vaccinated supply chain,” and says it will help Amazon further dominate competitors as more people choose to buy and sell products through a service that has invested in being virus-free.

Amazon also continues to invest in technologies that will further consolidate its grip on e-commerce. In June, the company said it would spend $1.2 billion to acquire Zoox, a startup that makes self-driving vehicles, which could help in its delivery services. Amazon is expanding its fleet of cargo planes as other airlines lease them for cheap, the better to lessen its reliance on FedEx and UPS. It invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Rivian, an electric car company, and ordered 100,000 electric vans from the startup. In July, Amazon said it would open more cashier-less Amazon Go stores.

“Some people—and I’m one of them—only buy something if it’s on Amazon” says Brandon Fishman, CEO of VitaCup, which sells vitamin-infused coffee and tea both in retail stores and online and which saw a 35% increase in its Amazon sales in March and April. Fishman says it’s cheaper for him to sell his products in brick and mortar stores than to sell them on Amazon, because of the cut Amazon takes for packing and shipping. But he doesn’t want to miss out on e-commerce customers, who are his most loyal. More than half the people who buy VitaCup products on Amazon return to the site to buy more.

“Third party sellers would say it’s a deal with the devil,” says Galloway, the NYU professor. “Amazon brings us a lot of revenue, and we become addicted to it, but every year our economics get worse.”

In April, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon had been using data from third-party sellers to determine which items were selling well, then making private-label versions of the same products to compete with the sellers’ products. (Amazon said such a practice would violate its policies, and it vowed to investigate.) Other sellers have alleged that Amazon does not take down counterfeit versions of items sold on its site; they suspect that the company does not want to lose the fees it collects from both legitimate and non-legitimate sellers. (Amazon says it invests “heavily” in prohibiting the sale of counterfeit products, using automated systems to help ferret out counterfeits, and that 99.9% of all pages visited by customers did not receive a notice of potential counterfeit infringement.)

During the pandemic, sellers say, communication has worsened and Amazon has slowed its response to flagrant problems on the site. Charlene Anderson says she can’t sell a knitting gauge because the picture is inaccurate on Amazon’s catalog page; she has been trying the problem fixed for three months. In July, Anderson says, Amazon told sellers it was going to restrict how many products they could keep in warehouses based on a performance metric. The ups and downs of the pandemic have meant that while Anderson’s sales were down in the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, they’re up about 3% now. But some sellers in the Facebook group she runs report their sales are down more than 50%. Most frustrating for all of them is the inconsistency; they have no idea when Amazon will change the rules again. “We hate having to deal with all of this, but to build our business, we have to,” Anderson says.

Amazon says its platform allows anybody to make an income in an otherwise challenging pandemic economy, and that it is working to help sellers while meeting increased demand from consumers. “Our commitment to our selling partners has never been more steadfast,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. In the twelve months ending May 31, 2020, small and medium-sized businesses sold 3.4 billion products, up 25% from the same time the previous year, according to a report Amazon released July 21. Amazon says the average American small and medium-sized seller had more than $160,000 in sales during that time, though it did not provide averages for how much these sellers took home after expenses.

Amazon is now valued by the stock market at $1.5 trillion, a figure that dwarfs the GDP of Saudi Arabia. The very thing that has made it so successful during the pandemic—its size and the many layers of its businesses—is what has given it so much leverage over sellers, workers and governments. Existing antitrust laws are designed to protect the consumer from predatory pricing. That orientation has shielded Amazon, because the company in many cases saves consumers money, but it is being questioned by scholars, and now lawmakers.

Critics say that regulating or breaking up Amazon will be better for merchants on its site and also, in the long term, for the economy. The rate of start-up creation in the United States has been falling for years; there is some evidence that this is because big companies like Amazon use their size to force smaller competitors out of business, or prevent them from being created in the first place. If small manufacturers and retailers had a fighting chance in competing with Amazon, they might help reverse the decline in start-up creation. New businesses in America are much of what drives the country’s productivity and economic growth, raising its standard of living and spreading wealth and jobs.

Historically, antitrust enforcement has helped upstarts; Companies like Google arose in part because of government antitrust action against Microsoft in the 1990s; the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s helped launch a technology renaissance.

“A key component of our success as a society is this very basic notion of checks and balances,” says Galloway, of NYU. “We’ve tried to avoid dictatorships, we try to avoid monopolies. We don’t have a judge, we have a judge and jury. And we believe in the wisdom of crowds.”

Charlene Anderson agrees. She says she and other sellers don’t want Amazon to disappear. If that happened, they would lose their income source and their access to millions of shoppers. They just want better communication with Amazon, more democracy, less dictatorship. “Amazon is not transparent at all,” she says. “Amazon will not tell you anything.”

Wednesday’s hearing before the House subcommittee on antitrust law will test that allegation, and more, as Congress peaks behind the curtain of one of America’s most successful companies. The next question is whether it has the tools to do anything about what it sees.

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itsfinancethings · 4 years

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“Amazon already owns the rails into 115 million households in America,” says Galloway. “Do we really want one company to be the arbiter of all commerce?”

Roy Davidson Charlene Anderson, who has sold items on Amazon for 20 years, says relations with the online giant have suffered as its power grows.

Lindsey Wasson—Getty ImagesPeople wearing masks outside the Amazon campus in Seattle, Wash., on April 30, 2020.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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