"It's okay, you're still young and have plenty of opportunities."

"Youth is capital—just go for it, you can afford to lose."

Do these words sound familiar and somewhat reasonable? I used to think so too.

But later I found this is a trap—a big one!

Does being young mean having opportunities? Not really. Most people in this world never seize an opportunity in their lifetime. Weren't they young once? Of course they were.

Youth is not capital, unless you sell manual labor or rely on looks. But Amazon is definitely not an industry where you can make money in those two ways.

The biggest harm of these sayings is that they sound positive and make you feel better when facing failure, but precisely because of that, they can numb your ambition and make you give up too easily and accept failure.

In fact, an ordinary person does not have many chances to fail, and the poorer you are, the fewer failures you can afford.

Failure doesn't only mean failing in business. In career development, if you work at a company for six months or a year without achieving anything and finally leave in disgrace, that is also a failure.

So never casually enter an industry or pick a company just to make a living because you think you are young. Ask yourself more: Are you really learning? Are you happy? Are you willing to stay in this industry long term? Then decide.

If you are determined to work in Amazon operations and hope to grow, there are basically three paths.

Vertical development:

Operations Assistant > Trainee Operations > Junior Operations > Senior Operations > Manager > Deputy General Manager > General Manager/Partner

Develop professional skills vertically, from operations assistant all the way to senior operations, becoming an industry master—in short, no one understands operations better than you. This path suits people who can stay focused and dig into techniques and details.

Horizontal development:

Operations Assistant > Operations > Supervisor > Manager > Deputy Director > Director

Develop multi-dimensional skills. Besides operations, you also understand marketing, design, product development, promotion, and so on. In short, you know a bit of everything—not deeply specialized, but definitely not bad. More skills never hurt. The path can go from operations to operations manager, director, and other senior positions. It suits people with strong self-learning and communication skills.

Start your own business:

The threshold for cross-border e-commerce entrepreneurship is not high, so many people choose to be their own boss.

But being a boss comes with risks proportional to rewards. The world is fair. People with strong execution and decision-making skills can give it a try.

You may think many bosses seem to know nothing and believe you can do it too. But no—when those bosses you think know nothing talk about how they started, they know far more than you can imagine.

So if you want to start a business in the future, study and improve steadily, and build up experience. You should first go through one of the two paths above; otherwise, becoming cannon fodder is highly likely.

Source: Dabao Off-site Promotion