An Argument With My Partner: The First of Many to Come

My partner Ming and I are very different people.

Let me give you an example of how.

Before we started this business we spent a long time doing the necessary research. We spent time writing up a business plan, collecting market data and talking to the right people about it.

Yet, having worked in an investment bank twice in my life, I insisted that we build a financial model to predict the profitability of the business in the future.

So, with the help of Boss Lepton, I worked out a financial model on Excel.
As time passed, I tried perfecting the model by adding more variables to it to derive better predictions until there finally came a time where Ming said

"Listen... F*CK the model ok? They're all assumptions at the end of the day and few things in our business is going to work out the way we assumed it would be".

Ming was right.
The saying goes that the less educated you are the better an entrepreneur you would be and it comes from precisely this reason.

The more educated tend to over-analyze and when you over analyze any business, it will never turn out to be profitable enough for you.

Now, without Ming what I would've done (or at least try doing) was to build a kick ass state-of-the-art financial model that could predict how much our earnings would change even if the cute girl down the street decided to buy herself a new pair of shoes instead of our product.
What Ming would probably have done without me was... to not build a model.

But together, we had the best of both worlds and left the worst behind.

Our personalities complement each other but of course, they sometimes also clash.

Just yesterday we had our first significant argument.

It all started with a tiny mistake that Ming made in his work.

For me, it wasn't so much the tiny mistake he made in his work.

I just expected Ming to take responsibility for his mistake and move on because I had always believed that if you never took responsibility for your mistake, you'll never learn from it. But Ming on the other hand had another good point.

He expected me as a partner to not rat on about this mistake and just take the required measures to move on; something I had better learn to do in future when we make more mistakes and when the mistakes get bigger.

Both were reasonable expectations.

But you can imagine how they ran into each other.

Yet, the weird part about the argument was not the argument itself but rather the way we felt after the argument. Shortly after the argument when things were getting very emotional, Ming had the wisdom to say
"Ok look, I need some time to cool down... call me back in an hour".

In the time between hanging up the phone and calling him back I had a very weird feeling.

One of my girl friends used to tell me that I am always very nice to my friends and people I know in every way that I can be but when people upset me, I can be unreasonably forgiving and write them off my life.

Suddenly, whichever friend that upsets me would become no more than a casual "Hi Bye" friend to me and to be honest, I often did it subconsciously so it never affected me.

The only exception for this is of course... when I have fights with my girlfriend (which I seldom do) Pic info: My baby, the only person in the world I would never shout at

and now.. this...

Ming was the first to mention it when I called him 3 hours later
"F*CK MAN, Do you know you're like my girlfriend now?

After I argued with you I felt very affected by it".

and then it hit me that I felt the same.

My mind was affected by the argument so much that I could barely concentrate on my work.

Instead, I kept thinking about what to say to him next and how I should apologize since I knew the way I talked to him before was wrong.

We kissed and made up in the end (not literally of course).

So there you have it everyone.

Meet my new girlfriend. His name is Ming.

He can be very bossy. But he's worth it.