Archive for November, 2009

sunrise
The word self-improvement becomes synonymous with success, only if the tips you are really following, fetch you some improvement in your life style. The improvement may be in terms of your financial growth or your health or in your relationships. Read through to unravel the simple methods to improve you to the greater heights.

Start with where you are and what you have!

This above line may sound very familiar. But it is important that you should remember or never forget this line when you get up in the morning. Many times you want to start a new venture or even simply new practice in your day-to-day life. For example many of us want to stay fit. So we want to hit a gym. But most of us will not immediately work-out the plan. They will say themselves that let me start on the first day of next week which will grow to month or even a year. Like this, you may want to meet your parents or want to say sorry to your friend and the list continues. These are little things but they make huge differences in your personality and in your life. Do it today.

Don’t blame the things around you:

As long as you are still alive, you are capable of changing and growing. It is you who is responsible for everything which is happening to you. So don’t blame the things around you for your failure.

Take up the responsibility for your own growth:

Life gives us lots of opportunities. But we are not saying ‘YES’ to that. Many a time you want to take up a challenging assignment. And the next moment you will think about the hard work that needs to be put on that task. And also you doubt your ability. So the result is the hesitation, a thief of success. Take up the new challenges. Be open to the new things. Try your hand in adventures. These things will automatically show the path to the growth and self-satisfaction.

Don’t live in fear:

Do you know more people are more scared than you? So never let the fear factor swallow your success. Don’t compromise often with a phrase “if you were”. Stop praising about the great souls. Be the change you want to be.

Rise before the sun:

Last but not least. Wake up earlier and plan the day and at least move an inch daily.

• Self improvement is the act of improving yourself. Understanding yourself is a difficult task, but it is the first step of self improvement. First recognize your strength and weakness. If you realize yourself, you can work to improve yourself. This will help you to believe that you are proficient.
• The major key for your success and happiness is to believe in you. You learn to love yourself and trust in your capabilities. Think that you are very special. Believe that you can change the world and can attain your great destiny.
• Dream big and work hard until you make it to be achieved. Believe that nothing is impossible. Your family and your friends will light up your life. They are a grand resource of motivation.
• Every day you may feel fear to do some things. Living a bold life gives you a confidence. Just break the walls around you.
• When bad things happen in our lives, try to change them. This may leads to falling in to depression. Make yourself allow the things that you cannot change, you will become happy.
• Ignore the persons who are trying to break your motivation.
• You want to encircle yourself with positive optimistic people who love you. They lift you up and give confidence along your troubles.
• Kindness has a tendency to come back. Be generous with your smiles and many other things. Try to help others. You may be in need some day and people you know will come to assist you when they recognize that you would do the same for them.
• Be ready for everything that will approach your way. Build yourself up before people bang you down.
• Write down the jobs you want to attain in each day. Tick them off when you complete them. If you can’t do all things, it doesn’t matter; move that task to tomorrow’s list.
• Getting up early and eating breakfast will give you a good start for the day.
• You need energy throughout the day to achieve your goal.
• You can also do some exercise in morning. If you live with other people you can attempt to make use of this opportunity to get everyone together at the table to eat in the mornings. This is a nice way to start the day.
• Enjoy your life! You will feel a lot better when you realize how great your life is!

learnedeconomy
We hit an economic recession, a near depression was in view in September of last year, we have had government bailouts, a burst of the real estate bubble, a stock market crash, devaluation of the dollar and over 10% unemployment, these are the headlines of the last year. Hardly a day goes by when these headlines are not hitting us in the face, and while all of those are very real, the question is what really hits home for the average person? There is the old saying that when your neighbor loses his job you are in a recession, when you lose your job it is a depression, and I believe that. During this recession, the number of people who were forced to file for Bankruptcy in Detroit is overwhelming. When someone has lost their job any economic advice is easy, cut back on everything you can and try like hell to get a job. It’s easy advice, and not always so easy to do. But the question is for those of us who still have jobs but are dealing with some very real consequences of this economic slide, how do we deal with it? I am not her to give economic advice, lets leave that up to the professionals, if you can even find one anymore. I am just here to share my thoughts on the issues, how I have dealt with some of the things I have been faced with.

The first thing that i have done is cut back, and that is the obvious place to start. Last fall and winter, during the economic melt down I was petrified, I had seen my retirement accounts fall by north of forty percent with no end in sight, I didn’t know if my job was safe or anyone’s job for that matter. So I would say from October through January I spent on nothing except my children and even that was kept to a minimal. But around February I realized living scared was no way to live at all, so we began to do things again. My wife and I went out to dinner, even to some of our favorite restaurants, but we scaled back, our dinners were less expensive and less frequent. For spring break we decided to take our kids away, but we went somewhere that was driving distance, and found incredible deals on the internet. This year the lease on my car was up, so I go a less expensive car to save more. My wife’s lease is up this year and we will do the same thing. I am very concsious of saving more money than i have in the past, I think for the first time in my life I was scared into believing that things will not always be good, and while I have always been a saver, I probably was not as careful as I should have been.

One of the big issues we have faced is our home, we our one of the one’s that is “underwater” in our house. The truth is the financing was so cheap and interests were so low we may have like many others bought more home than we could afford. Now, we didn’t do any 100% financing but I did only put down 10% on my home, the truth is we should have bought less and put down more. Also, we bought in 2006 near the top of the real estat market, and we did a seven year interest only loan. The good news is we have four more years of these payments before our loan becomes an adjustable mortgage. it was a big mistake, we should have bought with a 30 year mortgage at a payment we knew we could afford forever, but we fell into the trap of finding our dream home and over extended ourselves. Hopefully home values will go back up, and we our trying to save so that we can put more down if we need too, or that the banks will work with us. I don’t want to lose my home for several reasons. First, I believe most people want to make good on their debt, I gave a commitment to pay for something and if I can I will honor it. Second, although I was stupid in the way I financed the home my intention is to live here until my kids are grown and we retire, so we had a long term plan of twenty years or longer. Third, we love our house, it is our home, and I believe most people feel this way, they did not buy it as an investment first and a home second, quite the contrary, most people did it the other way. This is our home and we intend to keep it.

These are some of the issues that we have faced. Fortunately, although we lost a lot in our retirement plan it has come back quite away. We will be more prudent with it in the future, probably less stocks and more fixed income investments. We like many others hoped maybe our retirement fund would grow and maybe make us rich, we saw great returns for a while. Now, our goal is what it always should have been, to keep it safe and let us retire with it. Again, we our concentrating on saving more money, to get us through those so called “rainy days.” And finally, we are dealing with the issue of our home, that is our main concern but I believe that we can work our way through it. I have learned a lot the last two years, nothing lasts forever, when things are too good to be true they probably our. And most important, live within your means, not what is inflated, not by what you think you will be able to afford, but by what you know you will be able to afford.

ririanHow many real friends do you think that you have? That’s a question I have been thinking a lot about lately, have you ever posed the question to yourself? Think about it, are you popular? Kind of in between, maybe a little shy? Do you think that you have dozens of friends or maybe just a few? I would bet the answer would really surprise you if you thought about it. I guess the first thing to be is to define what a friend is, is it someone you just hang out with, if you’re a girl is it someone you shop with or if you’re a guy is it a golfing buddy? If you’re single, is it who you go out with, and if you’re married is it the couple or couples that you spend time with? I bet most people have experienced losing what they thought was a really good friend, the person somehow really disappointed them, maybe it was a betrayal of some kind. We have all been through it in one way or another, the “friend” didn’t act in the way you were certain that they would, some form of trust was broken. So the real question is, were they ever really a friend to begin with? Think about it, the truth is, we just really misjudged that person, they were most likely never the person we thought they were to begin with, people rarely change so this breach of friendship must have come from a character flaw that was always there. The truth is, we probably just didn’t see it, the other parts of the relationship hid the flaw, maybe they were great fun or really funny, or maybe they were the person who was always available to hang out with,or maybe the chemistry just mixed well. But when the pressure was on, when you needed that friend to deliver the real act of friendship, the character flaw emerged.

And in the end isn’t that what true friendship is really about? It’s about the character and trust that is needed when the pressure is on, maybe when its not so easy to be a friend, maybe when that person has to choose your friendship over something that might be important to them, or maybe something not even that important. So, my question is, how many friends do you have that are really like that? How many people will be there when you need them through thick and thin, and not just when it is convenient for them? How many people do you really trust to do the right thing when it is much easier to do the easy thing. I thought about this question, when I started I thought I had fifteen close friends, and about fifteen other friends. Of course it was being burned by one friend that started the process for me. I discovered I probably have far fewer true friends then I thought. I counted, at the beginning of the process I thought I had fifteen “real friends” by the end I was down to six, I realized I just couldn’t count on the others, if I really needed someone, if I was in trouble, who could I count on to be there for me? The number was six, the others are still my friends, I still enjoy their company, but at the end of the day I need to know who is going to be there for me. It was an interesting process, almost a cleansing, I think everyone should examine their friendships.

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