Goalsetting for beginners. Part 2 - Habits.

This is part two of “Goalsettings for beginners”, please read part I, if you haven’t already done so.

In this article we’re going to talk about habits. Now that you know what your goals are, we want to make this journey towards reaching them, as easy as possible, don’t we? And to accomplish this, we’re, among other things, going to replace the bad habits with good ones.

When you are starting a project (and that is exactly what this is), you need to somehow track how far you are going, and in which direction.
It’s like, when you are saving money to buy a particular item, and then once in a while, you go and check your savings balance, just to see how you are doing.
And before the process is even started, you take a look at your budget too see how much you can spare every month, right…?
This is exactly what we are going to do here. For now we’ll concentrate on the “personal developing” goals.
You know your goals now. Last time we defined your goals. And did without any limitations
You’ll have to be completely honest to your self now. Where do you stand in comparison to where you would be when you reach your goals?

Checkpoints.
(Just a quick note, I sadly left out in the former article.)
For now we’ll use a weight loss example. Let’s assume my first goal is to loose 20 pounds. Then it would be pretty easy to track my progress along the way, right? All I had too was to get up on the weight once every week and write down the result on a piece of paper. But how would I know if I were keeping up with the schedule?
What I need to do is to create some checkpoints along the way, let’s assume that it is possible to loose 2 pounds a week, without starving. Then off course there is no need to set the deadline of my goal a year from now. Let’s say 25 weeks, assuming that the last 5 pounds will go away a bit slower than the first 15.
Now I now, that my checkpoints is to loose 2 pounds every week, and if I do this, then I will reach my goal in 4 moths give or take a few days.

Well, surely it isn’t that simple with all goals.

If my goal were to be better at speaking in public, then it’s a bit harder to track and to evaluate my progress… well, that’s doesn’t mean it is impossible.

What I should do in that case is to create another type of tracking. Let’s say, that right now I am able to give a speech in front of two people, if there were three, then I’t would be almost impossible, to even say hello. Then let’s say my goal is to speak in front of 100 people within a year. Now I am able to define some checkpoints. One could be “in three months from now, I am able to give a five min. long speech in front of 10 people.”

As always it is important to get these things down on paper. I would recommend a journal, dedicated to personal development.

Environments.
You need to understand that your environment has a great deal to say when you are breaking habits. If I had a lot of junk food and several candies in my house, then it wouldn’t be very difficult for me, when I was vulnerable, having a bad day or whatever, to go absolute crazy, and eat everything I could find.
Therefore, what I would need to do now, is to replace all unhealthy food with healthy ones. Instead of chocolate and candy, go and buy lots fruit and low sugar candies.
Instead of frozen ready to cook fast-food, I could spend a day once a week, cooking, packing and freezing healthy ready to cook meals.
Instead of hanging out on McDonalds, I could join weight watchers. Got the point?

Alternative habits.
So back to the real deal.
Now we shall define you bad habits, and do something about them.
I want you to do this now. Take a piece of paper and write as the title your very first goal. Draw a line, dividing the paper in two. Write BAD / GOOD.
Below BAD, you must write any bad habits concerning this goal, you could imagine. Do a brainstorm. Foe example, if we stay with the example above, a bad habit could be “eating to much junk-food” or “always using the escalator, when one is available”.
Get going now.

Okay. Fantastic. Next step is to take each and every bad habit, and replace it with a good one.
On the top of my list is “too much junk food”, what could be done here. To find a suitable replacement, again I need complete honesty. To kill a weed, you need to tare it up by its roots.
I need to find the source of why I do eat too much junk food. It isn’t because it tastes good, cause it rarely does, at least not when compared to “real” food. So it must be because I find myself hungry at times, where I either have nothing else to cook, or simply because I am too lazy too cook, after a hard day of work.
A replacement candidate would be, “always have fruit at home” or “use one day a week to cook healthy fast food, and freeze it”.

Now do this: take each item on your list, and find an alternative. An alternative, there, besides help you quit the bad habit, also helps you get a step closer to your goal. Every day. Do this NOW.

Great. Now you have a list of every one of your bad habits, and what to replace it with. It should look like this:



You’ll need to do this with all of your goals. Take time to do this today. Don’t procrastinate it. If you aren’t able to this right now, then do it tonight when the kids are sleeping or whatever keeps you from doing it now.
Off course it would be overwhelming to replace every one of your habits by sunrise tomorrow, therefore, what you need to do, is take one at the time. Maybe you are able to kill two each day, or perhaps you’ll need a week for each one of them. I have no way of knowing this, only you do, so take your time, but only as much as needed. Eliminate each and every one of them, starting right now.

Keep up with your progress.
You don’t need to hang these pieces of paper up everywhere in your house. Just keep them in a safe place. And make a commitment to yourself, right now, that you once a week, will keep track of your progress. A great way of doing this is to write a journal. Write one section about what you have accomplished in the last week, and what you have learned from you mistakes, and then write one section about what you are going to do next week. Sunday would be a good day to this I assume.

Motivation and willpower.
Here at the end, I will just leave a quick note about motivation.
When you are going to change your habits, the first period of time will always be difficult, at some point you’ll be tempted to go back to your old habits. In the very beginning your motivation will give you an abundance of willpower, but willpower is like adrenalin. It will only give you a boost, at some point it will run out, and then you’ll only have your motivation until it is reloaded again, so to speak.
This is why the whole thing about environmental changes is so very important. It helps you keep on track, to make it easier for you to move forward, rather than take one step back.

I really hope that this will get you a bit closer to reaching your goals, and if you have any comments, dont hesitate, leave a comment.

Until next time… enjoy your life, you’ll never experience anything longer than that. Have fun.

How to get rich - part 3: The new marketplace.

This is part three of the “How to get rich” series. The title is actually a little deceptive. The purpose with these articles is despite the name, not to give you a quick all-in one solution, but to change the tought patterns inside you. And make you realize, that working 9-5 is not the only alternative. That said, I don’t want to encourage you to go and quit you day job just yet. Wait at least until you have found out what work for you, and what doesn’t. Lets get started.

I have this friend, he is a greengrocer, and he is always joking around. One day, we were talking about business, and he was joking as usual, and told me, that I should join the greencrocer business.I’ve told him that I didn’t know anything about greengrocering or vegetables and fruit by the way.He laughed and said some very obvious yet very intelligent words; “All you have to do, is buy some bananas for $1 and sell them for $2”… That makes sense right, and its very true.

But this is, at level one anyway, active income. You actually have to be in the store or the marketplace yourself. At least until you’ll get someone working for you.To learn more about active and passive incomes, please read this article.

Websites like eBay make very easy to buy low and sell high. You could actually buy something very cheap, and then resell it on an internet auction, and if the products are popular enough, the prices will rise as you sleep, literally speaking.
If you spend a couple of hours surfing on eBay and similar sites, you’ll find, that a small percentage of the traders in there, are very serious, they have a lot of auctions going on at the same time and their products are very popular.
Of course, eBay is not the only way, but it will save you a lot of effort getting traffic to your site.The traffic is already there…This is not meant to be a guide on how to use eBay, since you are reading this, I assume that you are a fairly intelligent person, and you’ll figure out how it works.

What to sell:
Actually you could sell anything. If it has value for you, it will have value for others also.Take a look in the basement, the garage or anywhere you store all of your…well junk. And then experiment with selling, at least you’ll get rid of some of that old stuff you’ve been hanging on to for decades. When you are ready, take this process to the next level.
The next level is to buy stuff, with the intention of resale in mind. From here this is actually up to you how far you want to take this.
If you are good at carpeting, and just want this as an hobby to start with, go to local garage sales, find furniture there is in need of a loving touch, repair and resell.If you want to go big, then contact some of the big Asian companies, who specializes in shipping new technology abroad. The possibilities are unlimited.

There is nothing new to all of this. We have been doing this since the stone age, where we traded a nice club for a piece of fresh meat, and later on started to use nice stones for value markers. Now we are talking about dollars, but the principles are the same.

I’ll ask to to leave a comment if you find this reading interesting or have any questions. I’ll also request that you take a quick look at the ads in the sidebar, and should you find any of them interesting, please click it, since this is what keeps this blog alive.

Bye for now…

Online poker

Later this month I will write an article about alternative ways to make a living.
If you haven’t read the articles labelled “How to get rich” I suggest you do that soon.

I was actually not sure about posting this article or not. This is a very difficult subject, and poker can be somewhat dangerus if you play without your head, so to speak.
I’ve been playing online poker for a couple of years now, starting as a hobby, but soon I started to dig a bit deeper, read some books, and then realized that I was making a profit.
In this article I will introduce to you, some basics guidelines, and provide you with a couple of great links. If you are not familiar with the rules of the many pokergames I suggest you take a look here: Poker rules.

Isn’t poker gambling?
Poker is gambling. But that doesn’t mean it is a bad thing. Poker is one of the only two game, where you can beat the house (e.g. the casino) in long run. The other one is Blackjack.
If you take a game like roulette, or the one-armed bandit, the house will always win in the long run.

I can almost already hear you say something like “…but in roulette, there is a fifty/fifty if you go with black or red all the time, isn’t their?” You’ve seem to forget about the green field my friend. Roulette has a slight advantage. But enough to make the house win in the long run. It’s all mathematics. In poker this is different. Sure the house win, but the terms are a little different.
Lets take an online pokersite for example. They take somewhere between 2-5% of every chip put on the table. But it dosent really matter, if you play correct all the time, you will win in the long run.
But it isn’t easy. It requires discipline, among a lot of other things.

The mathematics of poker
This is it. It is all mathematics. If you stick with the matemathics. You cant go wrong.
I will not go into detailed explanations on how to play poker correctly. But I will provide you with links and some very readable books to get you started.
There is also a lot of software out there, there is designed to help you making the right decisions, and track you play, and thereby eliminating any flouds you may have.

Tools
These are some very recommendable tools, some of them I used in the beginning, some of them I still use and some I just occasionally to make sure I am still on the right path.

• Pokertracker (This is very recommendable, takes some time to learn, but if you like statistics…)
  
• Calculate’em (Pure methematics, helps you make the best decisions)
  
• PokerAceHud (This is an add-on to pokertracker, and will give you stats on the other players at the table)
  

David Sklansky is one of pokers best aurthors, at least in my opinion. Check his books at Amazon
You should be a little carefull about reading Doyle Bruson's "super system" and "super system 2", these are greats books indeed, but doyle has a very aggressive way of playing, and that might confuse you in the beginning.

Links

• Bonuswhores.com will help you build a bankroll, with the smallest start amount possible.
  
• 2+2 forums has a lot of analyzing and finding the best possible play going on. Worth a visit.
  
• Bet365 is a great place to start, and this link will give you rules in a way you can understand.
  

Outro

As mentioned above, this is a very short introduction to online poker. Poker is one of many way to make an alternative income. Please remember to never play for money you cant spare. Set aside a fixed amount each month, and DO NOT use any more. Remember poker is a game of skills not luck, but luck is a factor and so is bad luck. Only if you always make the correct play, you will win in the long run.

You need to fully understand these concepts if you want to make a profit from online poker:

• Bankroll management
  
• Deposit Bonuses
  
• Table selection
  
• Starting hands in various positions
  
• The mathematics in poker
  
• Thight-aggressive playing

I’m not trying to either encourage or discourage you from playing poker, but it you want to make it more than a hobby, you need to know what you are doing.That’s all for now… have fun!>And please leave a comment if you did find this usefull.

How to get rich... Part 2: Passive vs. active income

I’ve read an article not to long ago from Steve Paullina’s website.
And it reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of for a long time.
The terms passive and active incomes.

The idea with this article is to make you realize that there other ways to make an income, than trading you working force for money.

Let’s take a look at the two terms:

Active income is when you are doing a task and then get paid once.
Passive income, is when you doing a task and then get paid again and again.

Artists have a passive income. Take a musician for example.
He will work hard in a period without getting paid, to make an album.
When it’s finished, he will be paid, for as long as his album sell.
Take the Beatles for instance, the survivors still receive a pay check once in a while, for music they created decades ago.

Say you have a bakery.
You bake a cake. Sell it for $5.
You hire another baker, to bake the same cake. But you’ll only pay him $3 to bake it.
Now you made yourself $2. Say you hire ten bakers. They bake $10 cakes, and you’ll make $20.
This is passive income. Sure in this particular case, there are other expenses such as electricity, rent, taxes and so forth. But you get the idea right…

Another example would be, to make a website. Say 1% the visitors, would click a banner ad.
And, just for the example, you’ll get $1 for each banner click.
If you had 100 visitors each day, then you would make $1 each day. This is also passive income.

Basically what you have to do is to somehow copy this idea, and make it your own.
I assume that you are not a worldwide known artist, and that you are somehow interested in blogging and internet, and since you are taking the time to read this, I also assume that you are interested in passive income.

Adsense:

Now you are familiar with the term passive income, if you want to take this further, please notice AdSense box in the sidebar, on the top of that box, is a link “adds by Google.”, please click there, and you will be redirected to a website telling you everything you need to know, about getting the most out of your blog.

If you enjoyed this article, please leave a comment and check the Google links in the sidebar, and see if something looks interesting.

And most importantly have fun…

How to get rich… - part 1: the 10% rule

 In the next couple of post we will try to define richness. And give you a new perspective of the possibilities there are available today.

What is richness?
First we need to define richness. For most people, the answer is: “Lots of money”. But that’s not all. What good is millions of dollars, if your health had suffered a great deal while earning them, or of you had to work so hard, that your family left you?

Richness is not only a matter of money in the bank, but also a question of:

- Health.
- Family and friends.
- Travel
- And achieving your goals.

All of these areas of your life have to be somewhat complete or fulfilled, before you truly feel rich.

Money:
For now we will focus on the money. Not that this is the most important area. But we’ll cover the other later.
First if you haven’t read my article Goal settings for beginners, I strongly encourage you to do so.
This will give you some techniques and help you achieve whatever goals you may have.

10% rule:
The first concept we’ll use is the 10% rule.
Basically it’s like this:

Take 10% of what you earn and save them.
Take 10% of what you earn, and earmark it for giving away.
Take 10% of what you earn and use it on you.

Now you can properly hear your inner voice saying “this is not possible, I cant set aside 30% of my salary”.
Well, you have to. What usually happen is, that the more you earn the bigger your expenses will be.
And therefore the sooner you get started, the easier it is.
It is much more harder to set aside $1000 from $10.000, than $100 from $1000.

Why it is so important to save?
Richness is a state of my mind, among other things. And when you know you have money put aside, it surely gives you this feeling of richness. And another very important benefit, is that the 10% gives you an opportunity to invest.

Why is it so important to give away then?
First of all, it feels really nice to give someone you love something.
Next when you are giving, it creates a very special and important feeling inside of you. The feeling of having more than enough.

And last but not least. You are important. You really need to buy something nice for you. After all you are the one who has been working hard for the money. So go get yourself something nice. Maybe something you’ve been wanting for some time now.

That’s all for now. Next we’ll take a look on the term passive vs. active income. Stay tuned.
Bye for now.

Categori: Finances

Goalsetting for beginners

 What are goals and why define them?

We all know what goals are, but why are they of such importance?
When you make a shopping list, you do that, because you want to make sure, that you return from the supermarket with the right groceries.

See this as making a shopping list, you want to make sure that you get what you want.
Life is like a big supermarket, and this is your shopping list…


And that’s why it’s so very important to write them down on a sheet of paper.
The answer my friends, is blowing in the wind. No seriously, the answer is commitment to your goals and to get you to keep moving towards achieving them…

Preparation.
What you need for this first step, is some sheets of paper, 5 pieces should do.
And get a marker or pen of some kind.

How to define your goals:
I will post some examples while we go, so you have an idea of what to do.

I’ve decided to write this as a step-by-step guide; the idea is that you should write your goals down while reading this.
So go find some blank pieces of paper and a pen. NOW.

Personal Development:
First we are going to define your goals. So what I want you to do now, is to take a blank piece of paper. Write Personal Development as the title.
Next, use a couple of minutes to write down some things you would like to change in your life.
Write at least 9-12 things.
Note, that you should not write things concerning your financial situation, neither that you want a new car or similar.
Get going RIGHT NOW.

Finance and career:
Fantastic job. Now we are going to define what you really would like in terms of career and finance.
It’s the same process as before. Define 9-12 financial goals on a blank piece of paper. Title it financial goals
Get started now.



Material things:
Well, there is nothing wrong about being a bit materialistic some times.
And help yourself now, please.
Imagine you are an 8 year old kid, with 30 minutes in toysRus. Take everything you can.
Don’t be shy, whatever you would like. GO!

Fantastic. Now, let’s move on to step 3.
Right now you probably have a lot of goals on these three sheets of paper.
Let’s narrow it down a bit.
Take the first sheet, the one with Personal development in the top.

We are going to sort all of these goals.
Pick the three things there are most important for you, and put a circle around each one of them.

Do this with every one of the three papers.

Now. Take a new piece of paper, as a title you should write something like “My Goals” and this particular date next year.
Then start copying the three most important goals, from each piece of paper, to the new one.

Now you should have something like this in front of you: (The xx.xxx.xxxx is the date)



Almost done…

This is actually one of the most important steps.
You’ll need to associate some feelings to every goal.

Take a look at your list, take the first goal, in my case “Be better to speak in public”, you’ll need to put words on the feelings you’ll have, if you had already reached you goal, ex. “…if I had my new car today, I would feel free, because it could take me anywhere I would like to go, and I would fell happy and in control when I were driving in it.”

Do this with everyone of the nine goals on your list, there is no need for you to write this down. Just do it inside your head!

The next and final step is to hang it somewhere, choose a place, where you will see it every morning.
The refrigerator is a good place.

Now, every morning, before you go to work or what you do, take five minutes, look at the list, say out aloud, every goal, and how you would feel if you already had achieved it.
This is a very good way to start you day, and it will help you to keep on track.

If you feel like, do it once more in evening before going to sleep, or even a third time in the middle of the day.

Congratulations. You have a list of nine goals to achieve within a year.
If you follow the directions and keep on track nothing is impossible.
Remember it is not important how far you get everyday, the most important things is that you keep moving, constantly and in the right direction.

Enjoy life, and achieve your goals. Please.

Gategori: Personal Growth

Rules...?

A lot of these self-help gurus out there, claim that you, by listening to their cd’s and audio, can change your whole life, in as little as 30 days or less.

When you start to work on yourself and your personality, it is important to understand, that you are not a new person before next dawn. These things takes time. But we do change all the time. Small changes. The key is to control these changes and to make sure that you are moving in the right direction.

Just remember that this is a life long journey, and try to enjoy it all the way…

I will in the following try to slighty touch these subjects; you could, if you like, call the some sort of guidance rules:

· Accept the situation, the way it is.

· Take responsibility.

· Go to work on youself, not others.

· Create or build a self image that you like.

· There is no such thing as failure.

· Hang around people who already are successfully.

· Know the difference between short- and long term satisfaction.

· Keep growing.


Accept the situation the way it is:

To change something, or to make a difference, you have to look at the realities.How else, should you know what to change?

Take a craftsman, he is building a garage, he got 15 square feet to build at, but back home, he made a sketch of a garage measuring 10x20 feet.

If the craftsman won’t accept realities, and start building anyway, his project will fail (well, nor exactly, but more on that later…)

The same applies when you are going to change something in your life, or something about your personality, if you don’t know (or wont accept) the situation as it is right now, you will find that the road to success will be harder and longer than needed.
If you have the map, and know your destination, but have no clue what so ever, of where you are right now, it will be quite difficult to end up at the right destination.
Either you could find out where you are on the map right now, or you could just start walking, but chances are big, that you are going in the wrong direction.
So therefore, first priority must be to find you exact location, and be true to yourself.
Only then will you be able to move yourself in the right direction on the path of life…

Take Responsibility:

When you know where you are, and where you won’t to go, take responsibility for your own life. No one else is going to do this for you. You are the ONLY person who really cares about you.
And you are the only person, who can make these changes you want to make.
Accept that this is you life, and this is where you are now.
Make a commitment to yourself, about what you want to change, and that you are going to move in the right direction. Every day. It really doesn’t matter how fast you are going to be there, the only thing that matter, is that you are moving a bit closer every day.

Go to work on yourself, not others.

It is so much more easy to change one person, than it is to change the whole world.

Therefore you need to focus on working on you, and not others.
Thereby not said, that you shouldn’t pass on what you learn on you way, just try to remember your goals, and set yourself first.

Build an inner photo of a perfect you, and keep moving towards it:

Later, on this blog, I will write an article to cover this subject in more details, but I will slightly touch the subject now.
It all depends on setting goals. This is a technique where you will visualize youself as you would like to be, on all areas. Body, mind, finance and socially. When you have created this image in your mind, you’ll be able to see it infront of you, when times get rough, or when you have doubts about your path…
You could compare it to IKEA furniture. Inside the box is a lot of pieces, and a step by step guide telling you what to do. But sometime, you just need to know what it should look like, when finished.
This is what your self image is all about. Knowing what you are moving towards.
But in the near future I’ll write an article explaining what to do in details.

There is no such thing as failure:

Remember the story about the craftsman. Well all he has to do, to eliminate failure in this particular case, is to take a step back, look at the situation and learn something from it. Then suddenly it isn’t a failure anymore, but a success. In this case he could easily learn, to be more prepared, and visit the building grounds and measure, before going back home and start drawing. This will save him a lot of work in the future.
If you eliminate failure from your inner dictionary, you have are already taken a giant leap towards your goals. It is so much more easier to do things and take some changes when you know you can’t fail.
Think about, and from now on, everytime something didn’t work out as planned, learn from it.
Next you could ask yourself: “If I know I couldn’t fail, what would I do”?

Hang with people who already have success, and are as you want to be:

If you spend some time with those who are as you would like to be, then after a while, you’ll start thinking like those.Take and old married couple for instance. They are actually starting to look like eachother, both in looks and in their way of thinking. There are a longer scientific explanation for these things, we wont go so far today, but the point is, that people have effect on each other.
Both negative and positive, by the way.
So it might be appropriate, to mention, that while you should focus on, spending time with creative, energetic and fun people, try at the same time, to eliminate anyone with a negative influence. Don’t worry, it will happen automaticly over time, but why slow the process…

Learn to know the difference between short and long term effects:

Imagine that you are going to eat a whole plate of chocolate. The short term effect, is that it gives you some kind of satisfaction. It tastes good. It melts on the tounge. Delicius.

But after the whole plate, and maybe even a couple of haour later, your enercetic niveau are falling, you starting to feel tired, your bloodsugar is going low.
If you ate a plate of chocolate every day, imagine now, what lang term effect this would have on you, on lets say a year from now…
Not good right.
If you consider these three effects on your body, mind, healt and so on, evertime you are going to do something (not only eating), then you’ll probaply find, that a lot of your actions, may have a nice short term effect, but what about the long term effect of your actions?

Keep growing:

This part almost speaks for itself.
Try to move a bit closer to your destination every day.
As I wrote a bit earlier, it really doesn’t matter how fast you are moving, as long as you are moving. And in the right direction offcourse.
Try to learn something new everyday, and learn from your mistakes, and thereby eliminating failure from your life.

Keep on going, and have fun. Enjoy life...