What do you think? It depends whether they're in person or not. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's true. The last one I was going to set up for you, and then I realized it was an introduction. Okay, I think this could get started then. Okay, so welcome everyone to this science centre of Taiwan Studies special lecture. Today we'd really be delighted to welcome Gary Price, who's first ever saw us talk. Or first ever in person saw us talk. So Gareth is now based at Duke University where he teaches in the linguistics programme and is also a member of the Asia Pacific Studies Institute. He got his PhD in linguistics from the University of Essex in 2009. That was what most of us first met. Gareth, he was part of the European Taiwan Studies Conference in Bokke, back in 2006. So it's kind of a really nice finding meet Gareth again in person. Although we did meet him online when he gave us online talk for us in 2021, on his book Language, Society and the States on Colonisation to Globalisation in Taiwan. The book was came out in 2019 and it paid back in 2021. I know it's a book that we do include in our Culture and Society in Taiwan class which I can see a few of you have taken. Gareth is going to speak for about 40-45 minutes and then we'll have lots of time for discussion. And again, we're really delighted that by chance we've got this theme of migration in Taiwan to become our kind of main themes. I think it's sort of like our third or fourth talk on this topic. So let's give Gareth a great big welcome in person to ourselves. Thank you. Thank you for that very kind introduction. Thank you for having me here today. It's lovely to be here and it is nice to be here in person and not just online. On a screen here. So this is the the title of the talk today. Privileged Outside is a Sociolinguistic Investigation of Foreign Communities in Taipei. And there we are. So the outline is here. I first ventured to Taiwan in 2001. I stayed until 2007 and apart from a couple of semesters here and there back doing my master's at Essex and my PhD at Essex and back for field work for two or three years. I've been back to Taipei and Taiwan on various trips here since then. My last book was on the politics of language in Taiwan, but I've always been fascinated by language and migration. I'm particularly interested at the moment in foreign populations in Taiwan and specifically I'm interested in migrants from the global north conventionally, though problematically known as expats. I should emphasize how problematic and I'm going to scare quotes for expats here, how problematic the term expats actually is. It's a demonym that refers to a group of people but it artificially distinguishes elite migrants usually from the global north from other migrants. In popular and academic usage it is often used and under theorized and rejected by some and ardently embraced by others and I use it in quotation marks to demonstrate just how unstable it is and at the same time how the term expats is reflective and productive of certain socio-political cultural and sociolinguistic realities. It's a problematic term. You'll hear me use expats. You'll hear me refer to northern migrants from the global north. I use those terms interchangeably here but expats is something at the heart of this research here. Today we're going to look at the expats research projects just to overview some of the research questions the methodology here. I've got some theory from sociology, anthropology and geography and some theory from sociolinguistics I'm hoping to marry the two happily and then I've got some data from interviews with northern migrants in Taiwan and that's the talk and I've got some very tentative conclusions about what some of this might mean here. The data that I'm presenting today is part of a wider project looking at expats in Taiwan and Thailand and from refugees to tourists people move in different ways and for different reasons across the globe impacting tens of millions of people directly and indirectly. Traditionally, migration studies more broadly that's in sociology, anthropology and geography has focused on flows from the global south rather than from the global north. There are good reasons for focusing on flows from the global south the majority of migration is from the global south or within the global south and these flows from the global south give rise to some of the most profound humanitarian challenges that we face in the world today. The emphasis on migration are from the global south the emphasis has changed slightly in the last about decades a little bit longer than a decade or so and there's a recognition that if you ignore migration from the global north you actually elide the complexity of human migration sort of more broadly here and we'll come back to that point about why study migrants from the global north and I've got some work to look at on that here but the study of migrants from the global north is still something of an each field in migration studies. The key thing here is that migrants from the in the broader scheme of international migration migrants from the global north are inherently more privileged than migrants from the global south and that is because these privileges are mobilised as various forms of capitals here and these privileges include privileges based on citizenship, passport visa regimes, transnational class position and often though not always rates at the same time privilege is always relative and this project examines the interplay between privilege and precarity manifested in material challenges biopolitical controls and estrangements from nations, cultures and languages of origin as well as difficulties integrating linguistically, culturally into their new societies here. So structurally migrants from the global north are more privileged but that privilege is always relative and the way it's distributed in individual cases at micro levels is something worth investigating here So here are the research questions here we'll look at this first one mainly today, I'm moving out of my camera spot here so I have to face across this is the main question we'll look at it how do northern migrants co-construct their migration trajectories and experiences narratively, discursively and semi-autically in online and offline spaces here that's the main question we'll be looking at today here how and why do they learn the languages of their host societies that's an important dimension of what we'll look at in some detail today here how do they talk about precarity and privilege in the context of lived meanings, this is more complex and we'll do less of this today this is still a sort of work in progress exactly how that sort of plays out how people talk about it and negotiate that those interplays there I've got some data on the next question how do they articulate the distinctions between migrant and expat or emplace themselves between different and sometimes conflicting transnational conceptions of home here and there's another question here which we won't get to today where perhaps in the Q&A you might want to ask me about it it doesn't quite fit in what I'm doing today here but it's an important question here there are expats people who identify themselves as expats who don't come from the global north and come from the global south and the question is how in this sort of research do we situate those voices in the research as well but that's again that's sort of a work in progress I've got some interesting data from Taipei on this actually but it's still one of the aspects of the work in progress here its qualitative data is ethnographically informed I've been monitoring social media sites including Facebook groups and pages blogs and forums certainly in the last social media has been around expat communities sort of coalesce in online spaces in really interesting ways and perhaps connect in interesting ways here I've then done quite a lot of in-person interviews with migrants from the global north and some from the global south this is convenience to snowball sampling adverts on Facebook groups that's sometimes gone well and sometimes not which is another methodological question that we can explore I was out in Thailand in 2019 of course the pandemic comes along and sort of stops all that and I'm going back to Thailand in this summer and then I'll be in Taiwan hopefully next summer to do more interviews here so if I've got 32 open-ended interviews 16 from Taiwan and Thailand about an hour and a half in length and they're open-ended and semi-structures and I'm aiming for about 100 interviews all told for the book project these are not statistically representative populations they're snowball sampling and convenient sampling means that they but this is qualitative work I put it emphasise that not quantitative statistical work here I've got a thousand media texts collected which I'm still going through in the process of looking at as we go on why study northern migrants well I said I'd come back to this well for me personally the answer to this is that I am or I was a northern migrant in fact I live in the United States now so to some extent I still am a northern migrant I kind of in some senses I still am but I've been in this position and I've sort of inhabited this space and this well I was saying earlier but actually I wanted to look at this for my PhD but really the theory wasn't there at that point here there's various answers to this have been proposed in the literature here Sarah Penn's work here the focus on the global south is a reproduction of a skewed image of migrants and immigrants as non-western, non-white non-elite subjects here and put another way leaving northern migrants out of the picture contributes to the invisibility of privilege in international migration and it's that invisibility which defines its power here and that leads us on to the second question this is about migration in general here this is from the sociologists British sociologists here that that it's related to this and it's in a broader sociological sense here studying elite privilege is important because if you construct well really constructing a narrative solely around the characteristics and problems of the most disadvantaged people and places does not address how the power and privileges of the advantages of the advantage are organized here and once again the invisibility of privilege is key to how it operates as a logic of power in this sense here and I think these two quotes speak to each other in really important ways to define kind of the research project and they're kind of relatively recent kind of the theorizations in sociology and migration studies more broadly which brings us on to the theoretical foundations here I draw from geography sociology and anthropology as well as the social science backgrounds here as well as from sociolinguistics as a hodgepodge of theoretical frameworks here from geography the mobility paradigm here human mobility implicates both physical bodies moving through material landscapes and categorical figures moving through representation of spaces representation of spaces linguistically and more accurately sociolinguistically defined not just in the languages we speak but the discursive cultural frameworks we use to make meaning to make sense of our worlds and our lived experiences here so we're not just people that just move that movement migration mobility has social meanings and the particular sort of meanings that are amenable to analysis arguably from a sociolinguistic point of view here more here from sociology and anthropology here two paradigms that come from these disciplines here the notions of high-skilled migration and lifestyle migration these are related to the mobility paradigm in geography and they explain how and why migrants from the global north tend to move in distinct but also similar ways compared to the better studies migrants from the global south and in particular high-skilled migration here is not fundamentally dissimilar to labour migration more broadly in that high-skilled migrants move for employment reasons there are differences in the sense that the work of high-skilled migration is usually better paid than local salaries so there's a distinction there the cultural capital of migrants such as educational qualifications language skills and passports are valued in specific ways visa categories often privileged for high-skilled migrants and crucially from a policy perspective high-skilled migration is often more palatable in the eyes of public opinion I've got to show you something here this is pure research so take that as you will people tend even if they oppose migration more broadly people tend to view high-skilled migration more positively even when they look at migration more broadly so you can see where privilege is working here in particular sort of ways here which is some important caveats here this is not to say however that all high-skilled migrants are from the global north nor that all migrants from the global north are high-skilled migrants so that's important that's the caveat there but through structural constraints and media, political and lay discourses migrants from the global north become indexically linked with high-skilled migration and vice versa high-skilled migrants migrants from the global north become associated with each other in popular imagery and sort of high-skilled migrants become these categorical figures based on citizenship native language transnational class position and often but not always race as well so if we have a look that one there this is less of a this is less of a paradigm that relates to Taiwan and it does relate in more concrete ways to Thailand but this is lifestyle migration this is not moving for employment in the same sense as high-skilled migration this is chasing the good life often people retirees for example or they're living on other sorts of income here they're not in general moving for work global nomads arguably fall into this category to some degree in that global nomads are not moving specifically for work reasons but they are moving they work in different places so they fall into a grey area here but this is some research here and there's a considerable body of work and looked at Croucher probably the first one was arrived in 2000 and looked at British in Spain Croucher looked at Americans in Mexico and then Hayes looked at Americans in Ecuador Botcherals looked at British retirees in Thailand and so on and so forth here and this one book first socio-linguistic analysis of this phenomenon and that's the Richard Lawson's book on the British in France which came out a few years ago and that's the first to explore the socio-linguistic dimensions of lifestyle and migration so as you can see there is some work in sociology anthropology and geography but there's less work in the socio-linguistic dimensions of it and I'm hoping to fill that gap and we'll get to socio-linguistics in a second here I'm not sure how many people are socio-linguists here hooray hello so I'm not going to go I'll give you a pot of history of socio-linguistics here the three concepts that I'm using from socio-linguistics that is scale complexity and mobility here so what used to happen is that socio-linguistics or socio-linguists in the mid 20th century would go to rural communities and they would invariably look at non-mobile older rural males called Norms and they were these folks here they were they were the most conservative speakers in that they were likely to preserve forms of their older dialects here and so these were the most conservative speakers they were preserving forms of older dialects that were spoken and socio-linguists were sort of interested in this here but this was kind of deeply criticized from the 1960s here onwards it failed to capture large segments of the population including women and young people and it failed to capture the dynamics of internal migration that were happening and this was especially in the UK and the US where the discipline was burgeoning you know post-war internal migration that was happening here and sort of cities became the new focus of socio-linguistic research there's Le Boeuf Wolfram and Trudgill among others and migration across cultural research begins sort of in the 70s, 80s and then continue with Rampton study in 1995 that's less important than the fact that it's taken to 2017 for a route ledge handbook on migration and language to come out which is that's not to say that something has just started happening but it's taken a while to work to colour less in socio-linguistics in terms of language and migration here it's always sort of scattered and this handbook the work in this handbook is influenced by the Mobilities Paradigm which we looked at from geography just a few slides ago and in the social sciences we're more broadly here a little bit before this handbook Blomner turns his attention to socio-linguistics and globalisation in 2010 drawing on the notion of language is less static systems and more as repertoires and these repertoires consist of language or bits of language but also semiotic resources systems of signs but reconfigured the way identities and cultures are constructed, co-constructed negotiated and in some cases resisted as well here while not always new practices the ways of conceptualising them are new and this changes our understanding of what it means to belong here and this is from Kegarajah introduction to the handbook in the place of territorialised and static ways of talking about language and social practices we are now adopting constructs that index their mobile, hybrid and constructed nature here so those notions of scale, complexity and mobility I'll talk for a couple of minutes just about these notions of scale, complexity and mobility here that can be put to work in the study of boundary migration more broadly but including in migration from the global north first we have scales and scales can be spatial or temporal space or time and often they interact they're both spatial and temporal scales particularly when we think of globalisation as the compression of time and space together here so scales can be we've got some chronotopes here I'll get to that in a second these scales exist in layered ways in Blomett's term here a linguistic utterance or semiotic sign interacts across different scales of time and space another way to think about this is how any piece of language is both spatial and temporal and often in multifaceted ways here and if this seems slightly theoretical at this point hopefully the data will show why this is a useful theoretical construct here complexity is a little bit more grounded here and it means that social categories such as citizenship or national identity but also race and gender and so on can no longer be statically linked with language practices this is to say that we can no longer take for granted the relationships between categories and language practices and in some senses we can't even take those categories as stable any more here there is in particularly contemporary verbalisation perhaps this has been true for longer an instability in the supposedly stable social categories of national identity and citizenship and things like that that doesn't mean sort of post-modern anything goes we're not quite there yet but we have to sort of think about kind of complexity as an analytical lens for what we're talking about here and when we think about scale and complexity we can think about mobility not just as people moving or migrating but the ways in which they move through different scales different levels of social and linguistic complexity and different semiotic and linguistic repertoires by repertoires I mean thinking about language not as static named systems such as Chinese or Taiwanese or English but overlapping and open-ended systems the notion of repertoires also extends to registers and styles which from a sociolinguistic perspective is about what language we use to talk to different people including levels of formality and things like that so registers and styles so how we speak to Grandma for example is not how we speak to our friends friends in the street for example there's shifting in different registers and styles here and these can be expressed through narratives about migrants and migration spoken or written discourses and the deployment of different semiotic resources and learning and speaking or speaking about non-native languages I use that term advisedly and different levels of competence in languages which are being learned in the migration process here alright so I'm going to get to some data very very shortly here and I just want to talk briefly here about some work that's already been done on Taiwan by Lampe Char who's at National Taiwan University Sociologist you might know her global Cinderella's more than this paper here and she did this fantastic paper on this in 2011 I came quite late to this research here and I won't do it justice by summarizing it here but the gist is that she explores privilege and precarity in what she calls Westerners in Taipei and it's a seminal paper in the global in global north migration studies lots of citations of this paper here it's not as theoretically developed as some of the more recent work but that's because it was so seminal that it was path breaking at the time and it's contributed to the theorization that has happened since then here and so I diverged from it in the sense that it's not really about language in the same sense as I'm using the term language or discussing the concept of language here Lampe's talking about language as a cultural capital that in her terms can be flexibly converted and into economic capital as English teachers or language workers but this work is a useful point of departure and a useful point of comparison from here and I particularly like her quote here that the macro structural constraints and intermediate institutions challenge the glorious image of free-floating cosmopolitan as she puts it here so let's go back to the research questions here let's look at these again these aren't or shouldn't be isolated from each other understood as overlapping and relational here and so we're going to look at some of these questions and some of this in relation to the the data that I've got here and I've got we'll start with this question and put this question here how do northern migrants construct or co-construct their migration trajectories and experiences narratively, discursively and semi-autically in online and offline spaces here there's a quote from DeFina saying telling stories is a way of sharing and making sense of this is about narratives telling stories is a way of sharing and making sense of experience in the recent or remote past and of recounting important emotional or traumatic events and the minutiae of everyday life stories are essential to relaying moral values and social norms and teaching them to children they are central to the construction of individual and collective identities and are used to index ways of being and social identifications here furthermore stories carry weight in important institutional encounters such as employment and immigration processes and I think that really captures what narratives do and the data I'm going to present now for a few minutes here I'm very much concerned with those narratives and how people talk about their migration experiences in this case from the global north and migrants from the global north who end up in Taipei here here's a migration narrative here this is from Lisa it's from a much longer it's just a snippet it's from a much longer interview of over an hour and she's a 28 year old white woman from the USA talking about her migration to Taiwan and she says so first and she's talking about graduation here I didn't know what to do so I became a substitute teacher I was in that public school system for a while and then I decided to come over here I was traveling I was backpacking in Europe and then I heard it's really easy to get a job over here if you just come so I was like okay let me try it so I came over here two weeks later I was the director of a preschool so I said okay sounds great so it's working in the office there and managing those English teachers and this is a snippet from a larger narrative here narratives are constructed along temporal scales of time and narratives are constructed in temporal ways here and we can see what's happening here you've got you argue I was struggling for the British for that there we are I told you I said I'm a northern migrant so what a wonderful crop that was so we've got back to temporal scales here we've got burst and became was for a while and then and then I was traveling was backpacking and then so I came two weeks later I had you can see what's happening here this different temporal markers first and then for a while two weeks later that structure the narrative as unfolding along a sequential temporal axis we can also see time marked in the tense of verbs there's past tense narratives are constructed along temporal dimensions and they often make events appear more sequential and less complex than they are in reality and in particular they can make events seem causative so what sort of makes something sort of happen here and this is just a snippet me sitting down over a coffee with my interviews here and letting them talk in these open and semi structured interviews and what you could have dive into the data and pull out the data there's this interesting sort of stuff sort of happens here and there's temporal scales there there's also spatial scales here I was in that public school system come over here backpacking in Europe just came over here working in the office there and these are all spatial constructions here these constructions locate people or actors and events in space and time and I'm highlighting the spatial dimensions here because they serve to position the narrator in space and demonstrate the roots traverse between one place or space and the current place or space here once again these are constructed as sequential and unbroken paths when migrant roots are often more complicated with that said it may be the case that routes for northern migrants are more sequential and unbroken than for migrants fleeing poverty or atrocity such as undocumented migrants or refugees it may be that the decision to move and the process of carrying out the migration is easier when privileged migrants can traverse visa systems and of course this often overlap between space and time since these dimensions are often interrelated here I hope that's convincing enough we've got a couple of things here so what's happening here we've got two occasions where Lisa quotes herself so I was like okay so I said okay and they look very very similar with so introducing the quotative I was like or I said and okay proceeding what is quoted and they serve I think to position the narrator as an active agent in the migration narrative Lisa agrees to certain things happen happening they don't just happen to her yeah okay and so she's kind of constructing herself as an agent and this might be different from more privileged migrants than less privileged migrants here in terms of agency and structure we'd have to look and see how that plays out we've also got here I'll skip that bit but we've got you know and you know here these are really interesting these are really really really interesting here where are we here it could be the throw away we say you know you know in conversation all the time right but they're used in conversation commonly but on a different level it could be that the interviewee in this case Lisa is involving the interviewer in this case me in the co-construction of objective knowledge about the reasons for migration it's the interviewer me is invited to share in the telling of the narrative the interviewer is the interlocutor in a story and the interview becomes an important space and time for the interviewee to position themselves more generally within their own scales of space and time here yeah and so there's there's um there's that there and this comes up quite a bit and I'll show you some of the data where it comes up here here's Herbie, he's 45 he's a white man American they say that some people come here because they can't make it in their own country and they say that I don't necessarily agree with that I think the people that come to Taiwan are looking for adventure, looking for fun there are some idiots, idiots running away from trouble of course you know I think people feel like they have freedom here and for all the things that people complain about I think they also get that they're privileged enough privileges directly kind of talked about here and so there's that to think about here once again if we look at the temporal scales there's less here in terms of time dimensions come because there's causatives there looking there's different verbs verb forms there here and more interesting is the spatial dimensions here people come here in their own country come to Taiwan, idiots running away from trouble have freedom here and these are all spatial dimensions that are in the evident in the narrative in the narrative here these positions they're all used to describe the motivations of northern migrants and this position northern migrants is moving seamlessly from one place to another on the basis of motivations and factors that they have agency and control over and once again it might be the case that this agency control is a distinction between privileged and less privileged migrants and something I want to explore a little bit further in this research here Lisa quotes herself Herbie quotes others so we've got they say they say people feel like people complain about and so here we can see both narratives both Lisa's and Herbie's narratives are heteroglossic in back teens terms they are multi voiced it's not just other people's voices narrate the experience of migration as much as the narrator's voice does one significance is that Herbie is co-constructing the motivations of northern migrants in particular ways that challenge more negative assessments that people whoever they are make we don't know if this is Taiwanese people or other northern migrants we're not sure who these people are here they who they say here but we can see there's a relative positioning here between Herbie's voice and versus the voices of others in this particular dynamic here and once again you get you know and you know here yeah that co-construction of the narrative with the interviewer you know what I mean you know what I'm saying and that's that's that one here moving on thinking about how do northern migrants learn local languages here I've got a quote here and I basically say and that's your Mandarin language proficiency sort of improved this is to how are you taken to be sort of kind of how does the Chinese get you around society here as a foreigner has been long enough to speak the language what's the sort of attitude to connect to someone who doesn't speak the language can you sense a difference not great interview technique with all those questions I have to be honest there but Tim takes it in his stride here and answers the question British and he answers the question here well yes I do can you sense a difference here answers my final question here but at the same time you know you say oh your Chinese is so good so that kind of attitude the Taiwanese people will have so you kind of always got that to a certain extent oh your Chinese is so good so now I'm kind of well doesn't really mean that or it's being polite you know but it's helped me get around a lot of social situations right sure and that's another thing about the XTAC community that kind of person don't know is his voice and I don't mean to be too critical about it that stays here 20 years and can say half a dozen phrases and that's it so this I love this we can see that he's been there for 25 years he quotes the evaluations of Mandarin speakers while also describing and narrating specific linguistic interactions in Mandarin it's also how Mandarin speakers evaluate his competence that is the heart of his relation to the language here this is difficult to interpret the whether or not it's polite or whether or not it's being a genuine compliment with his Chinese here it's difficult to interpret these cross-cultural norms and their expression in and through language in terms of kind of politeness here but ultimately Tim's linguistic abilities have helped him get around what he calls social situations meaning the day-to-day cultural and linguistic interaction with Mandarin speaking local Taiwanese people here and he uses and we've got I've sort of said this about this one here so there's that one there and he uses another thing and that's another thing which I think kind of introduces sort of an evaluative observation about certain members of what he calls the X-Bat community even though Tim later on tells me that he doesn't like the term X-Bat he actually says I prefer the term migrants and yet he will talk about the X-Bat community and this is an example of how this term it moves it's a very mobile term in and of itself people will use it but then they will distance themselves from it and then they will adopt it in certain contexts and not others here and and and and his evaluations of certain members of the community are personified in the category or categorical figure of that kind of person in this case it's based on language competence here and the lowering of the voice it's not we're not sure who's going to overhear this we were at Huashan Park outside but he lowers his voice on the recording and anyway so there we are here and we've got you know and you know those things turn up again there's little bits of language turn up and they're doing quite a lot of work a lot of co-construction happening there here this is something else speaking localised a lot of varieties here Liam is a white male American 50 years old I mean I've been with people guys for years in Beijing studying Mandarin and then you hear the talk and they sound like a textbook right sound like I don't sound like any and what he's trying to say here I speak with a little bit of a twang or a drawl which I think is valuable has some benefits I think people might rather hear that than a textbook right and he goes and I won't read that you can just sort of have a look at that one there but this excerpt here which we'll look at for here highly metalinguistic this is language that is used to talk about language like any language not all varieties of Mandarin are of a value equally in Taiwan's sociolinguistic marketplace here Liam describes his own Mandarin speech as having a twang or a drawl the notions of twangs and draws are not linguistic concepts they are social evaluations of usually used to describe certain varieties of English rural and non-standard varieties of English are described as having twangs and draws here and he maps these evaluations of English onto varieties of Mandarin here that evaluative observations that are used for English are mobile and he's mapping them onto Mandarin varieties here which is again how these terms and these concepts are moving around here and he goes on here to discuss expats who don't master any more than basic Mandarin in this case those who cannot say hello or thank you after 10 years plus invoking a temporal scale also Liam talks about linguistic competencies associated with level of education highly educated people motivation didn't want it and then he seems to accept that language learning is difficult for some people when he says that didn't get it this competence or lack of it is key to integrating into the Taiwanese society by connecting with local people for Liam here and we've got here right it's not you know we've got right right right here which is doing similar work I've got this one here and you communicate with your family in Mandarin so you've got I won't read that I'll let you read it quicker than I can I can say it some interesting things going on here some judgments here Nathan is in 2029 here the temporal scales or the space and scale here spatial scales are really important here Taiwanese originally from here from Changhua so you speak he's the local born in Taipei poor Taiwanese and there's the association between location and space and what people speak or what people are expected to speak and how those marrying into a Taiwanese family he's sort of internalized some of those ideologies of language that link space and place with what and registers and styles and different language varieties varieties here and I've got and I've pulled this one here Taiwanese if I was going to study anything that's going to be more Mandarin Taiwanese would always like it's kind of like a luxury that I don't need and the interesting thing is that under the Gaomingdang the association of Taiwanese was very much not with luxury but with inferiority and through the Mandarin spread campaign and Mandarin spread policies for almost 50 years and so there's a sort of a jarring juxtaposition there between that ideology and then the notion that's kind of prestige or functionality and perhaps this is indicative of Nathan's status as a privileged outsider and that's what I'm trying to talk about here today it's the key to better integration into Taiwanese culture and specifically he's extended Taiwanese family but learning it requires time and effort and that's possibly why he frames it as a luxury that he doesn't need here. Last last last bit of data here and then I'm going to wrap up home and away we've got Herbie again here so is this home then yeah it flips so when I I can't remember the exact time but your world flips when you go home and you feel like this is kind of weird you know like you're not it's not really seven years nine years I don't know when it was I mean for me I think about it in more recent terms I live in Palm Grove which is like this resort resort area kind of with a huge pool and hit shit like that right and so when I go home I have to sleep on my mum's couch in my bed that was on the floor in the corner with my mum pulling out the room and you know shit like that so it's like like why do I want to come home to Ohio that too that's supposed to be my vacation when I'm living in a vacation area you know like with a pool and all this stuff yeah and so I feel like it's flipped to where whatever but there was a time before that then I knew that this was my home and Ohio was the place I used to live you know what I mean so if I had to guess seven years we've got temporal we've got spatial dimensions there which is really interesting here your world flips the world flips on an axis spatial dimension here home resort area the floor and the bed on the floor and we've got different spatial dimensions here these locations can be countries or regions at the macro level as well as corners of rooms where one's bed is at the micro level here and this emplacement of home varies from the general to the specific here and there are the obviously when you're talking about home you would expect spatial dimensions people to talk about space when talking about conceptions of home here but there are also temporal dimensions here we've got when the exact time when seven years nine years recent terms don't know when when I go home when I'm living time there's a time before that vacation which is a temporal that's a time a delimited period of being off work there's a time before that I used to live seven years here and we see the temporal construction of home in this narrative as well here and once again you know it turns up here you know you know you know what I mean that work of co-construction in the interview to narrate arguably conceptions of where home sort of is here alright, okay that's me wrapping up here conclusions well the theoretical framework of this research project is unfolding and the conclusions I can draw from a few short excerpts are only really very tentative here nonetheless I think several things can be said the first is that northern migrant trajectories and their experiences are amenable to sociological and anthropological analysis through the languages, discourses repertoires and narratives that they deploy here here we've seen primarily short narratives in which migrants tell stories about how and why they and other northern migrants moved where they call home the language varieties that they used and how they interact with and integrate into their new cultures and societies second the macro structural affordances and constraints towards mobility are reproduced are produced and reproduced contested and negotiated at the micro level of conversational interaction even in the somewhat artificial context of the interview this interface between the micro and the macro is important social scientists often see this as a duality or opposition the micro and the macro or have done but as the great sociolinguist John Gumpers teaches us in Monica Heller's words that you can't actually have one micro versus macro you can't actually have one without the other and you certainly can't explain social process without some place for social process to happen social process thus takes place in interaction here and finally this research has a different emphasis than Lam's 2011 paper being as it is grounded in sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological approaches to interaction mainly but it seems to confirm and significantly benefits drawing on her broader sociological theorizations we can see how the subtle interplay for charity and privilege are manifested in and navigated through small narratives alright, thank you yeah, fantastic, Gary really great to kind of get a sense of that joy or feel of something that we've been missing so much over the last few years it also reminded me that about 10 years ago we had a program in New York where we had a version from Taiwan that we never managed to get with a chapter on Western migrants in Taiwan we had some proposals but it never really happened and I wasn't actually aware of Lam's work so I need to go back and look at that let me just start with one question that you didn't really have a chance to touch on that was about the case selection of this overall project I was curious about why you chose Thailand as your second case and not somewhere more comparable I was immediately thinking of somewhere like Japan, South Korea so that was let me start with that question so I was looking for somewhere that was definitely in the global south and Thailand falls under that category there the global north to global south flows where you and this is a tricky question where you locate Taiwan is a much trickier question. Lam actually does put Taiwan in the global south and I think that's you know so what I wanted to look at was somewhere nearby somewhere sort of Southeast Asia that was definitely in the global south and that way you can compare movement from the north to the south and arguably within the global north as well that's good I'm very enjoyable talk it reminds me at one level of Siegmund bombings I think the distinction between the elite who can travel and be tourists wherever they want to and have an agency over where they go and the vast majority of migrants who don't if we focus as you have done on telling stories, the narratives we've got one or two follow-ons I think I don't want to perhaps any narrative will tend to have some point that means resolved and then some denouement in it and any narrative will take a kind of who the audience are that's been talked to so you have described how the narrators talked about their lives careering from one place to another verbs but it ends up in their analysis being a career move it's a sort of elevator pitch trying to justify what they've done to the particular audience that they're with now from their point of view like an uber expat not only are you positioned so that you can move easily from one place to another whether it's your place of research but you've acquired the language and you can comment you're in such a position you can comment upon what others have done so I wonder to what extent the responses would not have included so much etc if the interlock future had been somebody else or you'd ask them in the United States or their home territory or you'd ask people who had moved to Taiwan and then decided it wasn't for them and then gone back so the denouement of the story might be the final question you asked so is this then your home is that what's happening or expat is somebody who's in exile but whose attention is to their real home which is where they came from so to what extent are these people trying to put down roots to what extent are they concerned about their children's schooling and their children's educational development whether they're going to be subject to conscription or not as it would be was these parameters coming into play and it's not criticism of anything you said I think it's an encouragement to look into these complicating factors they are great questions and avenues for further research I think that the positionality is always sort of key and grounding yourself on figuring out where you sit in all this is something that is probably a whole chapter in and of itself methodologically and I wonder what and I wonder if some comparative work can be done to sort of see whether or not some of those like you say returnees who found out that Taiwan wasn't from there what sort of stories they tell and things like that versus people who put down roots and things like that they are really good questions I don't have good answers for them right now but there's certainly sort of things to think about and thank you my focus on stage is primarily Korea but a lot of what you showed today I have a friend a friend who studied English at the University one of her colleagues there was an American who lived in English at the University for 10 years and she said it cannot even last for a cup of coffee in Korea now I'm not going to argue so many other examples but it's not just people who write English at the North Island emigrants come into East Asia and certainly in Korea because I love the language of Russians just by chance I don't think they would like that and so I wonder as your research goes into migrants from the North whose first language is not English because language is a culture of life and their experiences and perceptions are going to be different that's a really good question and there's a few dimensions to that the language this started out as actually being called the Anglophone Diaspora and then I quickly realised that wasn't going to work at all here but the interviews are conducted in English but not a lot but there are quite a few of my interviewees have Russian as a first language that's migrated to the States and then speak English as a second first language I've got I'm just trying to think who else I've got I've got a Spanish speaker but using English again as an L1 so I think what I'm trying to get out there is it sort of comes down to a lot of this is facilitated and migration is facilitated by English as a global language and perhaps that's sort of a theoretical paradigm that explains a lot of this mobility and a lot of this migration just a couple of questions to you guys what in terms of your sample selection how long did people actually have to be in Thailand or Taiwan to actually be in the sample and did it have to be work or would students also potentially be in that sample so it was over one year so and I do have students but I've got one I think student and that data isn't here but what I'm trying to do is to narrow down that selection criteria for the research that I'm doing moving forward and that's something I've got to think about kind of who gets included and that sort of thing and that's something that I will sort of think about for you Thank you so much it's fantastic I really learn a lot and I've got so many questions I have to be very selective You focus on spatial and temporal sort of perspective looking at interviews I wonder how about the gender factors and the age group factors how that influence their experience and their their migration experience can I ask the second question sorry also a very simple one have you asked them about how they define themselves are they expat or are they migrants because that's quite important how they define themselves so which one should I answer first I'm going to answer the second one first so yes I have I haven't shown that data here but I do sort of say to people how do you feel about the term migrant versus expat I frame that in different ways in the conversation it's usually not quite as blunt as that but people are very happy to talk about it and they will narrate and they will tell you that they don't like the term expat even though they've said they're using the term expat throughout the interview not all but it patterns in complex ways so I'm not sure and that sort of patterning in complex ways leads back to the first question gender and age I don't have enough data yet to see kind of how gender and age pattern yet once I have a hundred interviews they know that might those questions and thinking about how those narratives unfold and not is something that I've got to think about but it seems that just by looking in the time history that seemingly the male is the dominant group so I'll just pick up also from yours seemingly actually quite a few older age groups rather than young men yes so in my sample men are over-represented and I don't know why I know partly why that's because we know so yes so they are over-represented I know that that's because they are over-represented as a population in Taipei but I also wonder if women don't want to sit down with a strange researcher in a coffee shop there could be that at play as well but I can't find that out it comes back to I think race in particular is one of these categories that privilege and privileged mobilities draws on and in particular sort of ways here I would like to have more people of colour in my sample certainly thank you thank you so much really interesting talk kind of related to that question you just brought up privilege and this is the the topic besides that little bit where it said the person who said that the privilege was enough the privilege enough the privilege enough I was wondering what if many of you did talk about privilege at all or had any brought it up in their narratives or did they feel privileged so it's a question that is on the research questions specifically about the interplay between privilege and precarity and I often framed that in terms of can you tell me about your experiences of privilege can you tell me about your experiences of discrimination and people were very happy to talk about that there's a lot of data in the data that I've got hours and hours and hours and thousands of words tens of thousands of words to go through here and so that is how you talk about it and they're quite happy to talk about it and in general people will tell you that they feel more privileged than discrimination but discrimination does exist but that's that whole talk in and of itself which is probably, I should call it privilege outsiders too but yes that's a great question thank you my question is quite methodological especially on online resources what kind of online resources you're trying to collect on social media but more importantly what the role of online if you use the space metaphor what the cyberspace what's the role of cyberspace in your field is it a part of the site or it's a supplementary resource for your in-depth interview in your site that is a good question I think drawing on the spatial metaphor as you say I see it as an extension of the physical space of where these migrants are located and the reason this is thinking off the top of my head the reason why I would think that is that communities coalesce online much as they would do in bars or coffee shops or other kind of spaces as well and they coalesce online and they look like or they feel like spaces that are an extension of the physical space but that's something to think about did you find any differences in the trend particularly thinking about the precarity element was that coming out more in the online discussion than actual the face-to-face discussions yes the main difference between online and offline spaces is that people are much nicer in person and so the people do complain online and they complain and they give rise to that precarity and that sort of thing during the pandemic I've been looking at these Facebook sites for the last two years now quite a lot of activity in Thailand but Thailand as well and people got stuck in place and these biopolitical controls and material challenges sort of are evident that people talk about online and perhaps less so in offline spaces in my perception that the social media posting sometimes is quite like out of the context or lack of storytelling in that way how you cook with your fascinating narrative analysis it's really eye-opening to me but how you cook that way of analysis to the online resource yes so narrative analysis doesn't always work or at least you have to do different things to make it work for online comments and posts and things like that that requires some methodological sophistication in terms of thinking about what is actually work I've got over a thousand posts that I'm still sort of going through that's a big but there isn't quite a lot of social linguistic work on sort of how online communities talk and narrate and co-construct their experiences and that digital discourse has been around for a decade or more so I draw, I do have resources in social linguistics to draw on thinking about digital discourse yes thank you I want to focus on your idea of co-construction first three quick anecdotes firstly when I went to doing feed work in rural Taiwan it was assumed that I was not only you got one, an American a toka, big nose but also that I was a Mormon missionary and thinking about the history of expats in Taiwan, those who went as Christian missionaries are probably quite important secondly 25 years ago I was on airplane from Bangkok to Taipei sitting behind two people talking to each other in fluent Thai, in fluent Thai names it was only when we were getting off the plane I realised we were both African and they were talking so I would link that to the sort of precarious migration where just a few years earlier if you had got a job in Taiwan you were confined to a certain area it was like an inverse of the treaty port's freedom for expats and then thirdly in those days when you went through the airport to passport control you went through what it said aliens by that way that sort of changed still called aliens so my wider question is the extent to which there have been changes in perceptions of expats and experiences of expats since 2001 to 2007 that aligns with the changing nature of Taiwan people going as tourists or as students or for other reasons lifestyle choices elsewhere including to the PRC and the change in nature of immigration sort of thing dealt with in your series so what extent can you fit in to describe another easy question into those wider processes of change so this has given me some pause and I have thought about this and what and those the danger with doing this as it is is that these migrants become lankers and free-floating cosmopolitan and I think that they become dislocated from wider structures and processes in Taiwanese society perceptions as well in Taiwanese society and that is problematic I think so one way to remedy that is to talk to sort of Taiwanese people think of northern migrants as well I mean that few research for example the one that looks at high-skilled migration for example that graph I showed I'd be interested to see how that quantitatively worked in Taiwan as well for example whether or not I've got the resources to do that is a different question but I think that somewhere and not just somewhere I think throughout the project or throughout the book project locating those wider structures and processes in there is going to be important but then I have to do the same in Thailand and I'm less familiar with Thailand in terms of in terms of I don't have however many years experience in Thailand but yeah it's definitely something to that's given me some thoughts here and that might mean doing different things with it but I haven't quite worked out yet whether location works or whether location lives if you like so back to the have you thought about how you're going to actually structure the book? I don't think with Ryan talks one of the key decisions is what are the big chapters and are you going to look at Taiwan and Thailand together in comparative chapters or separate chapters so you kind of I know for me in my last book structure then was that a real key moment are you there yet? I've got one that I've used to get grants with and as it stands they are comparing both migrants in Taiwan and Thailand together in so thematically structured in terms of of how they so all together and thematically structured rather than side-by-side comparisons here so I've got an idea of how the book is structured and I'm quite happy but it's not just for external purposes it is actually sort of I think it sort of hangs together but I think it will change yeah I think it will change yeah Just thinking about the overseas community in Taiwan one of the big components is overseas or American Taiwanese I was wondering do they fit in? I don't know and I think it's really I think you I think because of the relationship between Taiwanese Americans for example with Taiwan either through citizenship or through visas sometimes not and also questions ethnicity and language competence or lack of language competence I think that to look at that population in detail I've got to be asking very specific and different questions that I perhaps framed other interviews with that's that's yeah and I think that will throw up a whole sort of set of dimensions worth exploring So I think just about maybe one final question if anyone want to come in or if you come back if not then we should have a pause in our Taiwan studies discussions because of course we do have another Taiwan studies event at 3 o'clock organised by the politics department we've got two politics PhD students one talking about gender politics political representation political party relation between Hong Kong and Taiwanese political parties 3 o'clock I can't remember which room oh 4 4 2 6 4 4 2 6 so that will give us an hour and a half break but before that let's give another very big round of applause for the migration discussion we've got one on the main 31st and we'll kind of give you a reminder for that as well


What I really resonate with in the field of economic psychology is the fact that you can contribute to a better world because you learn about the depths of financial scarcity and inequality. My name is Jokam and I am a student at Economic Psychology Masters at Tilburg University. These topics are vital in understanding the psychological meaning of economic decisions we make and to understand its impact on society as a whole. Economic psychology is crucial in today's world because it explores our decision-making processes behind the economical decisions we make. And these are vital to understand the roots of financial scarcity and inequality and to create a more equal economic system and eventually help people. What I value the most about the program was the steel focus because the first half was dealt into financial decision-making and behavior while the second half were concentrated on marketing and consumer analytics and eventually it led me to pursue a career in marketing. Another great benefit of the program is the practical assignments and the long internship you take part as a student and it provides you with a hands-on experience in a real business setting and also you get a taste of what your work life will look like. Tilburg is a great city that offers a vibrant and affordable student life. My days were well spent enjoying sports in the morning and getting coffee with friends and socializing afterwards before I dedicate my time to study in the library. One of the things I most enjoyed was the great campus of Tilburg University. You can study in the library, have coffee with friends, have your lunch because the campus offers you everything you need. With the diversity of this field with an open mind and curiosity and make the most of your time in Tilburg both academically and socially your journey here is not just about learning theories but understanding their real life implications in shaping a fair society.


As a med student it was normal for me to wake up at early hours such as 4-5am so I could do my typical student responsibilities but also have time to run a side business workout as well as keep up with my personal obligations. And because of all the things I was able to balance, I thought that that 4am was needed. In fact, my entire blog started with a post to wake up at 4am for 21 straight days. And because of the sensation of getting more things done, I thought these early hours would become my thing for the rest of my life. But then sure enough, life happened. I started residency where it was normal for me to work on average 60 hours a week. I got married, I got a dog, and I definitely needed some rest. And so over the past 3 years I got away from that student who was waking up at 4-5am and more so somebody who was waking up at 6-7am or even 8am and still have time to be a full-time doctor, run a full-time business with 8 employees, have time for my personal relationships as well as my personal fitness is right in the marathon. And so in this video I want to talk about how you can still be productive without having to wake up early in this 3 step process, let's get into it. So step number one is to identify your big task with reverse targeting.  During my college and med school days I would wake up with this inclination of getting more school stuff done, but then my first task would be things that weren't really that helpful, such as taking notes or watching lectures that I was behind on. But the truth of the matter is that these actual activities never really moved the needle of how productive or how smart or how ready I was for a class, it just made me feel more busy and thus productive. And so to help me make this transition where I was waking up later, having longer quality sleep, but also not sacrificing how much I was getting and doing, the first thing I had to do was to work in reverse. And so a lot of years in medical school I realized my focus really went to what's the first thing I need to do every single day that in case the rest of the day went to utter crap and I couldn't do anything, I would still feel productive in the needle of moving forward. So if I was studying for a board exam, the first thing I would need to do is to actually do practice questions and review them. I got those two things done, even if the rest of my resources weren't able to be covered, that was a success. If I wanted to really boost up my CV, then instead of like jumping into a lecture to catch up, the first thing I could probably do is to work on a research project for like 30 to 40 minutes as soon as I wake up and feel that sense of progress and momentum. And even nowadays as a full-time physician, but still making these YouTube videos, sometimes I have like this urgent drive of, oh, maybe I should wake up at four or five to like script a video and then record it as soon as the sound comes up so I can feel productive. But I realized I was sacrificing on sleep, especially when I'm working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And so now the first thing I need to do is I'm okay with waking up at 8am. The first task I need to do is script the videos. And then as soon as the video is scripted, I can just go ahead, look at the camera and start recording. So after hearing that, I'm curious, comment down below. What's that one task that you want to get done on a daily basis that's actually going to help you move the needle going forward, help you build that momentum, help you feel productive and not just busy. And once you've identified the big task that you really need to get done at the start of the day, the next thing is to really evaluate your wasted hours. Even on our best days, even the most productive people have things that they consider to be time wasters. These are typically things that we do when our energy or focus is low. For me, that obvious time waster is when I find a new show on Netflix, I just binge it, whether it be shows like Squid Game or Money Heist, all great shows, but I managed to find myself spending two to three hours a day to actually just finish the entire series in one go. And yes, while I'm enjoying myself while actually watching the episode after two to three hours of pass by, taking a step back, I realized that the time actually wasn't that valuable to me. And on the flip side, it's a good reminder that if I can dedicate two to three hours on binging and Netflix show or whatever it may be for you, whether it's binging videos on YouTube or spending hours on Instagram, if you can do that, then it's really not lack of time that you have that gets in the way of productivity. It's just a lack of what you're giving your time to and to illustrate this, all of us have 24 hours in a day. And if you actually get the recommended eight hours of sleep and then dedicate 11 to 10 hours, spending on academic or your personal job, then you still have five hours dedicated to do maybe two and a half on daily stuff like eating and just hanging out with people.  Now, sometimes it may not feel like you have an extra five hours to yourself or even two and a half. That's because sometimes those small bits of time, the things that you're doing such as car trips, transportation, waiting in line and waiting for things to happen really start taking up the small chunks of that two and a half hours. And so for me as a physician to make sure I was productive, I was really identifying those small hours within that two and a half hour window where I was not really doing anything. For example, I may have a 30 minute block where it was really easy to say, I watch YouTube or I go eat or I like watch something on Netflix. But instead of saying, oh, maybe I can respond to some emails or start working on that research project or learn about something new, read this journal article that's been on your to do list for so long as a student that may be spending some time doing some flash cards while you're waiting in line for your Chipotle or Starbucks or whatever you like to do. Or if you are waiting for the next class to do, maybe you can go ahead and make sure the notes that you've created for your prior class are formatted that way when you get home, you don't have to spend that extra time doing so and you can get right to reviewing and studying. And if you do this process day in and day out, you really start to find those micro minutes that you can actually increase the quality of the time. So for example, as a med student, it was really normal for me to use my drive back and forth from the hospital and from school to just listen to music. But nowadays actually use those small bits of 1020 minutes to either listen to a podcast, listen to the audio version of a YouTube, listen to an audio book, or just literally keep silence of the actual drive and think about how the day went. So then I can reflect on how I can improve, whether it be in both academics or my life as a physician. And as a bonus tip to highlight how much time you're wasting, one of the things that I started to do was downloading an app that could actually show me how many times I was unlocking my phone or spending time on Instagram. For example, I'm using an app called StayFocused, which I've talked about in prior videos. And basically says that so far as the making of this video, it's at 330 p.m. I've already unlocked my phone 84 times. I likely have not done 84 productive things on my phone. So there's like an inclination of just checking things to check it. But those small minutes and seconds start to add up again, those could have been used to do something so much more productive. And then that save time could actually be spent on me getting some more rest. Now step number three has to be one of the biggest game changers. As soon as I realized my biggest task, as well as the small bits of time that I was wasting, the next big thing that you can do to help increase your productivity is to start minimally planning. Initially as a student, I was a big proponent of doing something like this, where I would have lots of different activities, we're not a sticky note or a piece of paper, there'd easily be seven to 10 tasks. And I would feel optimistic that I could get all of them done. But I found on those days where I'd have 10 items and I get through seven, if I couldn't get those last three, I felt unproductive or at least didn't feel successful. But on the flip side, if I had only four tasks and I got all four done, even though I had time to necessarily do more things and be more busy, I felt more productive and felt the needle moving forward. And also could feel myself realize that yes, you can actually do four tasks a day, consisting of longer than you can do seven out of 10 tasks. So now when I work with students one on one, especially if I find a student who is over committing and under delivery, biggest challenge I give them is, okay, you have to limit yourself to three tasks that you have to get done today. Those are the minimum things that you have to get done. After that, it's your choice if you want to spend that extra time resting or not. Those three things.  So for example, if you're a student studying for a big exam, you may spend the start of your day actually doing a review or doing practice questions where your latter two sessions may also be on needle moving tasks such as reviewing things on a whiteboard or reviewing the questions that you missed early in the day.  If you get those three things done, it was a productive win. You can give a check mark for the day and then if you haven't, you really have to ask yourself where your focus went. One of the biggest lessons that came away with having a later wake-up time is that productivity is truly a feeling of progress and so it's more detrimental to get four out of ten versus three out of three things done daily. Now productivity is one of those things where the same small tips are going around. It's really hard to understand how to put them into action. So if you're a student who is struggling with not having free time and not knowing how to most effectively use the time you actually are studying, one of the things I recommend is checking out the time mastery courses, a 10-part program where literally step by step I show you one, how do you increase that free time and then two, when you have less time to actually get that studying work done, how do you become more effective? And then finally three and the most exciting by far is how do you repeat the process so then one we can go from 10 hours to nine hours and then eight hours to seven hours to five hours which is ultimately what I was at the end of medical school. So again if you're struggling with really understanding how to manage your time and you also are starting to realize that I simply can't do this for the duration of my academic career, I need to become more efficient, I need to become more effective, definitely consider checking out the time mastery program. If you check out the link down below to the med school domination bundle, time mastery courses is actually included at no extra cost within the bundle itself as well as so many other courses and programs that we have for you here at the MD journey. So once again, if the strategy that the episode started to give you some ideas how you can be more productive, again without waking up early, if you want to understand a little bit more things of how to stay motivated, have you more productive, check out the link down below. If you want to learn how to work one-on-one with us and actually improve both your studying your productivity and so much more, definitely consider checking out the medic night program. But if you guys did enjoy this episode, I would be super grateful if you just take a quick second to hit that like button, hit that subscribe button notification bell if you haven't done so already, as well as drop your comments and questions down below so I can make sure I can help you on your medical journey or whatever journey you're on, but doing it with less stress. With that being said, friends, if you did enjoy this video, then check out this video on how you can use onky like a pro, as well as this entire productivity playlist of all the videos that we have for you on the MD journey here. But as always, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully that was a little help to you guys on yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.


Here's why most online businesses fail. Okay, you're concerned. You're gonna start an online business or you already have an online business and you're worried that you're gonna fail. You should be because most online businesses fail because of some very simple reasons. In this video, I'm gonna share them with you so you can learn from them so that you don't fail and we're starting right now. Hey, thanks so much for visiting me or my channel. My name's JR Fisher. I've been selling online since 2009. I have sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products. And on this channel, I answer those questions. This channel is for you. This is your channel. This is the channel you come to to get answers to online sales, whether it's digital products or physical products. I've sold them both and I share with you how to do it. If you have questions about any of these things, put it in the comments below. Let me know and I'll try to get those answered for you and help you out. If you've had some successes, also put that in the comments below so that you can share with other people and they can be successful too. Don't forget, if you haven't done so, make sure you subscribe and turn on bell notifications. Turn on all bell notifications. You'll become part of the Fisher family, the VIP group that gets notified every single time I do one of these videos. Now let's jump right into it.  And according to some of the statistics here, 42% of all startups fail because they failed to analyze their actual needs of their customers. And another 28% of startups fail because they burn through all their cash. So there's a couple of things to be learned from this. Number one, make sure there's a real need for whatever you're doing out there. And it's pretty simple to figure that out by just looking around, look at social media. And number two, don't overspend. Don't go and hire somebody to do everything. I didn't hire anybody to do anything in the beginning because number one, I didn't have money, okay? And number two, I wanted to learn it. Make sure you wanna learn these things, stay inquisitive. Now, how do we avoid some of these things? Let's jump right into this. The number one reason that people fail online is because they didn't analyze the needs of their customer. So it's so super important to do this. And it's really easy to do too. You not only need people who need your product, you need enough people who need your product, okay? That's where some people fall down is there's always gonna be a need for almost anything out there. You know, maybe it's how to make a stock on a shotgun, okay, out of wood. Well, there's gonna be some people who are gonna wanna know how to do that. I don't know if there's enough people that wanna know how to do that to where you could put a business around that. You'd have to sell other products. You'd have to do other things. So you wanna go out there, whatever your idea is, whatever your product is, make sure that you find other companies that are doing well at it, okay? A lot of people are like, no, I wanna find something that nobody else is doing. I'm the only one. If you're the only one, you know, you may be a super genius or everybody else has tried it and it doesn't work, okay, so don't think you're super genius. It's better to start off with a product that a lot of people are selling and having success with because at least you know there's a market out there. Number two is not having a user-friendly website. Oh my God, I have gone through so many websites over the years and different levels of websites and we use WordPress and we use Magento and I've used Shopify before too and I also use Cartra. Cartra not really being a website but I put sales pages there, sales funnels there, that type of thing, my courses. So I still use all of these things and if it's not user-friendly, if it's difficult to navigate, you've got a problem. I have a friend who is in the financial advice industry. She's been in it for years and they had somebody do her website the other day and they were supposed to be the financial experts on doing websites and lo and behold, when they got the website, it didn't work on mobile. Huh? Yeah, it didn't work on mobile and I was like, well, I don't wanna say her name but I said, hey, this is where 70% of the people are operating now is on mobile. She says, yeah, I know. And I said, and this is also one of the reasons I like to do a lot of my own stuff and I have knowledge in those areas because I know what to ask people before they work on something. She didn't know to ask if it would be mobile-friendly. I'm sure they're gonna get it fixed but I'm also sure they're gonna charge her more money because she didn't ask this question upfront. So it's really important, guys, that your user experience is really good. During the pandemic, Yelp came up with something and we ordered from a lot of restaurants and there was a little button at the bottom there and it says, order from this restaurant. It was really cool when you click the button, it says, order for delivery, order for pickup and I think it was through Grubhub that did it and it's really seamless. You can just do a few clicks, the menu's there, click, click, click, click, use your Apple Pay, use your credit card, whatever and you can put your order in. They were on top of stuff. They made it easy and I'm sure that really propelled Yelp to the next level because nobody was using that before and then when coronavirus hit, everybody wanted everything delivered and they were smart enough to react to it. It's those businesses that are smart enough to react to make that user experience easy for the customer that do well. Don't have a crowded website.  Have a few simple things on your website just to get people going and they can click on menus and categories to go to other areas. Make it simple. Number three is not having excellent customer service and I don't mean customer service. I mean excellent customer service where the person will go overboard to help the customer. That's what you wanna do. I know Zappos started off with that and they ended up selling out for, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm just crazy man. But they were a shoe website and they would do things like tell all their employees that they could talk on the phone as long as they wanted to a customer. People would call up and say, hey, I just watched this soap opera and in this one scene, this lady was wearing these shoes and they were beautiful. I don't know where to get those shoes. Would you happen to know? And that person in customer service would actually look up that particular episode of that particular scene and look at the shoe and find the shoe with the customer online, locate the shoe and say, here's the shoe I can provide it to you. Now that's customer service. That's customer service. They weren't worried about just selling that customer at the moment. What they were worried about is the overall customer experience and that's what you need to be worried about too. Number four, not having a good social media presence. And when I say good social media presence, there's a lot of prongs to this. It's being there. Number one, you gotta be there. It's engaging with your customers. My wife does dog training and she has a great group. You may wanna check that out. The art of pet parenting. That's on Facebook so you can check that out. But she's really good about interacting. People ask her a lot of questions and she's really good about answering those questions. And she genuinely cares. Don't fake caring. Don't do that. Make sure you really care. And then your social media presence is also important in as much as you don't wanna post anything controversial. Don't post your political views. Don't post your religious views. Don't post any of that stuff. There's no point in it. There's no point in it, guys. All you're gonna do is get into conflicts with other people, I promise you you will. And you'll be associated with that and your business. Do you want that? I know I'm not gonna name them, but a couple of major businesses have posted their political views online and it's come back to bite them, okay? So you don't wanna do that. The next thing is not effectively managing your company money, okay? If you are spending too much, if you are buying too much.  It doesn't come in like that online. I know I've had a lot of dips in my income and a lot of peaks in my income. And since I know that, I always keep a few months, probably a lot more than that, a couple years of income so that I know, or at least access to income, credit, whatever, so I know that I will remain in business.  If you make $100,000 this month, don't spend it.  Now once you've got some months built up, some years built up of income, then you can spend a little bit more. To this day, I don't spend that much. I mean, I'll splurge every now and then go to a nice restaurant and do something like that, but I try to watch my money. It's so, so very important. Now, if you've got hundreds of millions of dollars and it doesn't matter, enjoy yourself. Buy whatever you want, okay? Most people don't get to that level and they do have to at least watch their money. The next reason they fail is because of their team, okay? If you've got a bad team, and I used to manage car dealerships and I had managers that worked for me, I was a general sales manager, and they would often come to me and tell me how bad their salespeople were. They said, I have terrible used car salespeople. I have terrible finance people. I have terrible new car salespeople. And I would just look at them and go, well, then it's your fault. I mean, if you manage people and they aren't good at what they do, whose fault could it possibly be? It's probably theirs. They hired wrong, they didn't train right, they didn't manage right, they didn't motivate correctly. So when you're thinking about the people that are gonna work with you, whether it's virtual employees, which we have some virtual employees, or whether it's people that work with you every day, you know, you've got a number one, hire right. You've got to hire correctly. You've got to train correctly. You've got to give the right expectations. You can't get mad at somebody when they didn't perform and you didn't tell them how to perform or you didn't train them correctly. You didn't tell them how to perform or you didn't train them how to perform. Okay, so that's super important to know that and you've got to motivate them correctly. And motivation comes in many forms. It comes with compliments when they're doing a good job. Don't be afraid to compliment somebody. It comes with pay. You've got to pay, you know, the people what they're worth or more than what they're worth, okay. That'll make them reach a little bit. Bottom line is, if you've got a bad team that can tear you down, if you've got a great team that can help you build up your company. The next thing is not watching your product price and cost, okay. This is so very important. I know I need to adjust some prices on some of our canned meats and our survival food company, but look at the pricing, look at the cost. If you're, I'll give you an example here. Let's say you're selling a course for $497. It's a digital course and nobody's buying it, but you're selling it for $497. What do you think the first thing you should do is? Maybe reduce the price, okay. You know, I was talking to my wife the other day and we had a funnel we were thinking about and she has in place and she's selling her front-end product but the upsell is not selling. So, you know, my immediate thought is reduce the price of it. Just reduce the price of it. It's a digital product anyhow. It's not making you any money if nobody's buying it and if you lower it and some people buy it now you've got money coming in. Now it will make all your ads profitable. So guys, think about this. Also on the flip side is maybe you're not charging enough. A few years back I wasn't charging enough for my survival food. I started doing, you know, penciling out all my costs and warehouses and back then I had a huge warehouse that I was paying for and you know, I looked at it and I'm like, well I can't make any money. I'm not charging enough. I've got to up my prices. So I up my prices. Now it's been like five years since I've up my prices and I think it's time to do it again, okay. I've done it on one of the products and it's selling fine. So I might as well do it on all of them. I just haven't gotten around to it which I've got to, no excuse. But that's something that you really want to think about. Make sure you always analyze your cost and your pricing on a regular basis. If it's not selling maybe you need to lower it. If it's selling really good maybe you need to up it. Test these things and check your cost and pricing. And the last one I think is the big one and that's lack of commitment. Lack of commitment. What is commitment? Commitment is saying I'm gonna make this happen. Period. I'm gonna make this happen. If you're running ads on YouTube and they're not doing well then you need to read another book. You need to take another course. You need to try another ad. You need to do a different video. You need to try a different audience. You just keep doing it over and over and over and over till it does work, okay? Commitment is not starting a business and working two hours in the morning and then going to the beach surfing all day. Now that is a lifestyle and that can be achieved by selling stuff online. However, you can't start off with a lifestyle. You start off with a business.  I have, I think, enough money but I wanna have enough money for years and years and years and years and years, okay? So I'm gonna keep working. I'm gonna keep working hard. I'm gonna keep doing things and I'm committed to making that happen. Even on the days, I don't feel like it because here's the truth. Most days, I don't feel like it. And, you know, my son did personal training for a while and he said he would get people.  I really like to eat. You don't understand. I don't like working out. I don't enjoy it. And he would just laugh and say, yeah, I like eating too. And I don't really wanna be sore and have to work out either. However, I'm committed, okay? To this day, he's still committed to that, still in good shape, okay? So you've gotta be committed. That lack of commitment will kill a business quicker than anything you've ever seen in your life because you could have everything else in line and lack of commitment, lack of just saying, I'm gonna make sure this happens. I'm gonna do whatever it takes. If it takes two hours fine, if it takes 24 hours fine, I'm gonna make it happen. You can't put a price tag on that, but that will make you successful or kill your business. I hope you found this video helpful. If so, give me a thumbs up, thumbs down if you didn't. 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