Wednesday, November 4, 2015

I'm a self-made millionaire, and here are the 10 best pieces of advice I can give you about money by Steve Siebold

I'm a self-made millionaire, and here are the 10 best pieces of advice I can give you about money

Steve Siebold, Contributor

Jun. 24, 2015, 1:32 PM

Jeff J Mitchell / Getty Images

About six months ago my wife and I decided to turn our North Georgia summer retreat into our full-time residence.

We decided to make a few changes to the property now that we would be living in it year-round.

As I was getting into my car one morning, three of the workers paused from what they were doing and stared me down.

I stopped and asked if everything was ok, and one of the men said, "It's not fair. You have this beautiful home and a nice car while we are stuck doing hard labor for just a little more than minimum wage."

I approached the men, and we ended up speaking about building wealth for more than an hour. I shared with them that life wasn't always this good, and at one point I was $50,000 in debt and didn't know how I would climb out of it. The men shook my hand and thanked me for sharing my insights.

Fast forward to this morning and I was again about to get into my car. A man driving a truck down the street stops in front of my house and yells, "Mr. Siebold, I took your advice and started my own company. I have five employees working for me and business is booming. My family and I are experiencing freedom like we never thought possible."

He continued, "Please share your words of wisdom with others."

So moved that this man turned his life around, I'm now going to take his advice and share the takeaways from that conversation six months ago:

1. In a free-market economy, anyone can make as much money as they want.

2. Your background, highest level of education, or IQ is irrelevant when it comes to earning money.

3. The fastest way to make money is to solve a problem. The bigger the problem you solve, the more money you make.

4. Don't listen to the naysayers who tell you that life is supposed to be a struggle and that you should settle and be grateful for what you have.

5. Expect to make more money. For this one you have to think big. $100,000, $500,000, or why not $1 million?

6. Lose the fear and scarcity mindset and start seeing money for all the good things: freedom, opportunity, possibility, and abundance.

7. Being rich isn't a privilege. Being rich is a right. If you create massive value for others, you have the right to be as rich as you want.

8. Don't wait for your ship to come in. You're not going to be discovered, saved, or made rich by an outside force. If you want a lot of money, build your own ship. No one is coming to the rescue.

9. Stop worrying about running out of money and focus on how to make more.Constantly worrying about money is no way to live. Dream about money, instead.

10. Stop telling yourself that getting rich is outside of your control. The truth is that making money is an inside job.

Just like the man working at my home six months ago who was frustrated over his finances and held a grudge against the rich, you too have the power to change your financial situation. Maybe you've been living in debt for years or maybe you've just dreamed of having more; it's all possible if you make the decision and really set your mind to it.

Steve Siebold is author of "How Rich People Think," and a self-made millionaire who has interviewed more than 1,200 of the world's wealthiest people.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

26 time-management tricks I wish I'd known at 20 by Jenna Goudreau

Most people learn time management the hard way: by trial and error.

Étienne Garbugli, a Montreal-based product and marketing consultant, distilled the lessons he wishes he'd known when he was 20.

He created the following presentation, posted to SlideShare, which we've shared here with his permission.

This is an update of an article originally posted by Max Nisen.

View As: One Page Slides

Etienne Garbugli

Saturday, October 3, 2015

OK, So You Failed. Now What? by TASHA EURICH

January was a tough month for sports fans in my home state of Colorado. On January 11, in front of a shocked, sold-out stadium, the Denver Broncos lost the AFC playoffs to the Indianapolis Colts, 24-to-13. Coloradans had barely recovered from the Broncos’ spectacular 2014 Super Bowl loss, and not getting to play in the 2015 game seemed incomprehensible.

Back at Broncos headquarters, General Manager John Elway shared this bewilderment, remarking, “I don’t know why we didn’t have more fire.”

Now, Elway’s team is at a crossroads. What should the Broncos do next? And what can leaders learn about bouncing back from failure?

1. Failure is a likely outcome of any risk.

Recently, an aspiring author asked me, “How have you become such a successful writer in such a short time?” I think my response surprised her: I burst out laughing. Like most writers, for every success, I've experience at least ten failures: Ten bad ideas for every good one. Ten nonproductive minutes of writing, for every productive one. Ten rejections for every acceptance. But she doesn’t see my failures -- she just sees my (completely nonrepresentative) successes.

When we fail at something, it’s easy to look around and conclude that everyone else is winning while we are losing. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Even the most successful among us fail every day.

Take Zhang Xin, a renowned, self-made Chinese billionaire. She transcended her humble beginnings as a factory worker in Beijing to become a real estate magnate worth more than Oprah Winfrey. And, she reports, “I fail every day. It appears to [others] that [my business is] doing quite well, but … we’re still having challenges every day. That’s just life.”

Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, considered one of history’s greatest leaders, had a long list of spectacular failures: His abysmal 1915 Gallipoli campaign, his disastrous Gold Standard budget, his calamitous invasion of Norway. Given the very nature of the risky decisions he had to make, there was no prayer of perfection. The more you succeed, the more you’ll fail. Period.

Here’s the point: Failure is a basic element of the human experience. It happens to everyone. You’re not alone. So, the first thing you must remember is: Don’t beat yourself up. It’s just life.

2. Failure doesn’t guarantee learning.

Think of the last time you failed—what was your first reaction? Perhaps you felt embarrassed or upset. Maybe you wanted to downplay the failure or blame others. Science tells us that such biases and knee-jerk reactions can impede our ability to learn from our mistakes.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably heard about the train wreck that is Dov Charney, former CEO of American Apparel. Charney was recently ousted from the company he founded out of his college dorm room. For years, his sexually inappropriate behavior was the company’s worst-kept secret. He would wander the office in his underwear. He admitted to sexual relationships with female employees as young as 18. And, starting in 2011, he faced multiple sexual harassment lawsuits. At one point, he even acknowledged that he had a problem.

Many wondered why Charney hadn't been fired sooner. I think there’s a more intriguing question: Why on earth didn’t Charney wise up and change his behavior? The writing was clearly on the wall. He just couldn’t -- or wouldn’t -- read it. In fact, like a bad ex-boyfriend who can’t take a hint, he’s still trying to get the company to hire him back! Talk about not learning from failure. (Face palm.)

Charney’s story is a dramatic reminder that failure doesn’t earn us automatic wisdom. Instead, we must engage in a deliberate process to examine it. So, the next time you fail, have your own FailCon. Ask, What went wrong? What factors did I not take into account? What assumptions was I making that turned out to be incorrect? What could I have done differently?

To paraphrase Henry Ford, the only real failure happens when you don’t learn from it.

3. "Failure" means an automatic reset.

J.K. Rowling, the best-selling author of the Harry Potter series, believes her biggest failure was the seed of her success. Rowling has said she hit rock bottom when she found herself an unemployed, divorced, single mother. Did she become afraid or hopeless? Probably yes, initially. But, ultimately, she decided that her failure meant “a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than I was.”

In most cases, failure is an automatic reset button. On our goals. On our behaviors. On our attitude. It purges all of the nonsense and gets us back to what truly matters. And, typically, the more epic the failure, the more powerful the reset.

Let’s turn back to the Broncos. Like Rowling, they’ve probably hit rock bottom. As a result, this season’s oppressive expectations won’t spill over into next season, (This year, “Super Bowl or bust” was the motto on the field, and sports anchors touted the team's expected Super Bowl victory before the pre-season had even begun.)

I’d wager that these expectations were a burden for the Broncos, a team whose members used to relish their position as underdogs. This season, they struggled from week to week and seemed to be having less fun. Perhaps this season’s failure will help them get back to what made them great -- so they can get the fire back.

In the movie Apollo 13, Ed Harris’s character famously declares, “Failure is not an option.” That might have been true for his crew, but failure is also an inevitable part of life. And whether you’re an NFL executive, a CEO, a politician, or anyone else, the failure you experience will be far less important than what you choose to do next.

Saturday, September 5, 2015

The No. 1 mistake investor makes

Flickr / Feeling My Age

Markets all over the world have been getting rocked, and it would be easy for investors to hit the panic button and sell their stocks.

Big mistake.

History shows that panicking during bouts of volatility is the most classic mistake an investor can make.

Investors should stick with their investments through market corrections, Brian Belski of BMO Capital Markets wrote on Friday.

"We believe investors who are trying to time entry and exit points in anticipation of a potential market correction are taking the wrong approach," Belski said. "We have always subscribed to the simple notion of sticking with your investment discipline and taking the good with the bad since the hard data suggests it is very difficult to successfully time the market over long periods."

A correction occurs when the market falls by 10% from a recent high. That's about where we found the S&P 500 not long ago.

Trying to figure out the sharp moves in the market ends up getting investors in trouble and jumping out of the market when the going gets tough can lead to missed opportunities. Here's Belski and Roccanova:

"We believe most investors have a tendency to sell into the weakness and then wait too long to get back in after the market recovers. And there have been plenty of studies that show the negative consequences of missing just a few good days for investment performance – meaning even the slightest misjudgment could have huge portfolio performance implications."

In fact, based on a chart in Belski and Roccanova's note, returns after corrections like we're experiencing are pretty good, with an average 19.9% growth in the S&P 500 over the following 6 months and 31.4% over the next 12 months.

BMO Capital Markets

Additionally, panic selling can cost you. Bank of America Merrill Lynch's Savita Subramanian found that investors that sold off after a 2% drop and bought back in 20 days later underperform the overall market big time.

If anything, investors may want to slowly add to their positions and take advantage of dollar-cost averaging.

If not, it may pay to just stay calm.

The No. 1 Management Mistake

August 31, 2014 | By: Greg McKeown | No Comments

SHARE PRINT

A friend of mine is an executive for an organization with global reach. He is intelligent and driven, but constantly distracted. At any given time he will have Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and multiple IM conversations going. The majority of them are useful in some way. Yet, in the back of his mind, he knows there are more important deliverables to get to. But the days slip by and he finds himself working all weekend to catch up. Staying up Sunday night until the early hours of Monday morning has become his modus operandi.

He told me, while checking his Blackberry again, that it results in having no social life. It’s so bad that he tried having his EA pull all of the internet cables on his computer. But there were still too many ways to get online. When he was struggling to complete a particularly big project, his brother took away his Blackberry and left him at a motel with no internet access. Yet, even there, he still found a workaround within 10 minutes using his ancient Nokia phone to check his email. Eventually, after eight weeks of almost solitary confinement, he was able to get the project done.

Why do otherwise intelligent people find it so easy to be distracted from what really matters?

Social media did not create the problem of distraction, but it is clearly an amplifier. Indeed, a study [PDF] by Clifford Nass et al. at Stanford showed that heavy media multitaskers aremore susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli than light media multitaskers. Heavy multitasking may encourage even heavier multitasking because it leads to a “reduced ability to filter out interference.” Could the part of our brain that is processing deeper cognitive thought actually be atrophying in the process?

None of this would matter if activity and reward were linearly related. But we live in a world where almost everything is worthless and avery few things are exceptionally valuable. This is a counterintuitive idea. After all, the idea that 50% of results come from 50% effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet, research across many fields paints a very different picture.

As far back as the 1790s, Vilfredo Pareto observed this nonlinear pattern in Italy, where he found that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people. Much later, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, called the insight the “Pareto Principle” and applied it beyond economics. In The Quality Control Handbook, Juran called it “The Law of the Vital Few.” His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing audience in Japan, where the country had been producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting the quality processes, the phrase “Made in Japan” gained a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.

Distinguishing the “trivial many” from the “vital few” can be applied to every kind of human endeavor and has been done so persuasively by Richard Koch, author of several books on how to apply the Pareto Principle to everyday life. Indeed, the examples are everywhere.

Think of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand, who discovered that just 700 words make up two-thirds of our language (further validated by Zipf’s Law).

Think of Nathan Myhrvold, the former Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft, who said (and then confirmed to me in person for this article), “The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10x or 100x or even 1,000x, but by 10,000x.” It may be an exaggeration, but it still makes the point that effort and results do not share a linear relationship.

Once we unlearn 50/50 logic, a whole set of behaviors become instinctive. We start scanning our environment for what is really essential. We eagerly eliminate the nonessentials. We say no to 1,000 projects in order to say yes to the one that is exactly what we are looking for.

Just think of Warren Buffett’s philosophy, quoted by Mary Buffett and David Clark in The Tao of Warren Buffett, “You only have to do a few things right in your life, so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.” The authors continue, “Warren decided early in his career it would be impossible for him to make hundreds of right investment decisions, so he decided that he would invest only in the business that he was absolutely sure of, and then bet heavily on them. He owes 90% of his wealth to just ten investments. Sometimes what you don’t do is just as important as what you do.”

First, Do This.

To get started, I recommend a simple action list.

1. Before you leave the office today, write down your top six priorities for tomorrow on a Post-it note.

2. Cross off the bottom five.

3. Write down your priority on a Post-it note and put it on your computer.

4. Schedule a 90-minute window to work on your top priority — preferably the first thing of the day.

5. Every time you are about to check email, Facebook, Twitter etc., write down what you are about to do.

The cumulative impact of this small change can be profound. Indeed, I just received an email from an executive about a member of his team who has a particular tendency to want to do everything. Interestingly, this team member is the most productive member on his team. When he was young, he learned to push past his tendency. For a step-by-step guide for applying this to longer term thinking read If You Don’t Design Your Career, Someone Else Will.

Here are two videos. The first is five minutes from a recent interview I did with Stanford University about why it is that otherwise successful people don’t break through to the next level.

The second is a very funny video with “a handy tip” for those of us who are easily distracted.

Most of us just haven’t fully learned how to eliminate the nonessentials.

But we can.

- See more at: http://gregmckeown.com/blog/1-management-mistake/?utm_content=bufferc7ab9&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#.dpuf