Contrarian Expatriate wrote: ↑August 8th, 2020, 9:08 am
It really takes a special kind of STUPID to prefer being a mere player on the football team rather than an OWNER of the team.

But this is part of the backward thinking of those who have low-tier goals and outlooks in life.
LOL are you serious now? This, said by someone who spent 25 years, maybe 30, being a tiny, hopeless and aimless cog in the US government machine. What kind of team were you playing for, at my age? Did you really have a "powerful life", or you were sitting there stamping papers and encoding data into a PC screen, daydreaming on when you would be free to do "your thing"?
I told you many times before: you worked 25/30 years on that horrible job for the reward of a surefire pension for the following 15/20, testosterone damage permitting. Your choice. But it's extremely stupid and hypocritical to now pose as a wealthy, successful and youthful "businessman" just becase you discovered the "pleasures of life" well in your 50s.
There is clearly a time for everything. This is my time to work hard for my passion, to follow my choices, which are 1) get some international experience, 2) get on my last stage before I am an Exec and 3) have the kind of fun any 32-yo gets (and should get) in a country like the Philippines. Yes, I left my family businesses a few years ago after getting my parents' blessing, which might be unusual for people like you who only ever went in "for the money" but not for the rest of us.
When I will be back to my family businesses I will be an Exec with 10+ of international exposure and enough experience, connections and capital to start my own restaurant of restaurants, as every culinary pro worth their salt do. I will have the full support of my family, people I could live and die for and trust blindly.
Yes, having a stake in a business is a viable option, we have the majority stake of a winery in Romania, in the Iasi region, and it's doing great, but my cousin and his Romanian wife and far from "passive investors": they are there at least one week a month and they went through some significant ups and downs before things took off for good.
And here's another profound delusion of yours: that you can be an "owner" while having near-zero skills in the industry, without putting at least some of your own sweat and blood to see the business develop, grow and give you that passive income you keep talking about. The more you bang the drum about all these businesses that give you revenues, dividends, the more I am convinced that you are either talking about those idiotic MLM/pyramid schemes that have no other social utility than enrich the guys at the top, or you're plain making sh*t up
Contrarian Expatriate wrote: ↑August 8th, 2020, 9:08 am
If you ever wondered why you’re in such a horrible, grinding, profession instead of leading a powerful life of economic plenty and leisure, it’s because your thinking is ridiculous. But I guess if I had nothing bigger to look forward to in life, I might delude myself that way too. The pinnacle of your life is eventually going back to your little coffee shop (if it even really exists) and becoming the worker boss one day to count the pennies of profit.
There’s a reason why you left that job. You hated it and it sucked, so don’t try to come off as some small business guru when you couldn’t even survive in that world of all work and no play.
Either of us must live in a parallel reality. I never realised that I am in such a horrible, grinding profession. Yes, it's not an easy profession for someone who, or whose family, hasn't been in the trade. Waking up at 4 or 5 in the morning to help my dad with the baking, have a shower and go to school, and this everyday for 7 or 8 years, including weekends, is no joke. No joke when your friends hit the disco on a Friday night and you can't go because you need to wake up early on the busiest days of the week. But you know the old saying,
what doesn't kill you make you stronger, and that's the kind of backbone that made the first years as a commis and a station chef, bearable, possible.
So,
you can take your powerful life of economic plenty and leisure and shove it up where there's no sunlight 
You are simply a mediocre paper pusher with no skills and no class. For as much as you talk about ambition, success and wealth, you chose a
path of least resistance kind of job and you feel on top of the world because you went to a seminar by Kyosaki or one of the usual phoney gurus and became an instant business expert?
The "little coffee shop" is 3 restaurants, 3 bakeries/patisseries and a brand that everybody in my town and the neighbouring ones has loved and trusted since the 60s. This is all stuff money cannot buy. The feeling that you must be doing something good because people show you genuine respect.
Something you just can't even begin to understand, let alone appreciate.