The saying goes “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. In the short term, the plans give a pleasant feeling – “everything okay”. Later it may appear that only sweet little keeper who procrastinate conceal. If the list never implemented plans ruin your mood and your confidence.
Who still wants to change his life this year, here are some tips to increase the
Get into a comfortable position and imagine you are looking at a good-sized TV screen on which the story of your life is being played. Spend a few moments looking very closely at yourself as you are now; then, on a sheet of paper, jot down answers to
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.
I was looking through some health magazines the other day, reading the articles, and started thinking about my own heath. First, if you are going to read those magazines don’t bother looking at the pictures because I don’t know anyone my age who looks like the pictures, I’m never going to look like those pictures, so what’s the point? My twenty one year old nephew looks like the pictures in the magazines but he eats McDonalds seven days a week, and in none of those article could I find anyone saying McDonalds seven days a week leads to better health. So, I thought about what it means to be healthy and fit, and how to stay healthy and fit. My first thought was smokers, forget it, you will never be healthy and fit until you quit. So Quit! Quit cold turkey, take a pill, where a patch, get hypnotized, go to the desert for a month and isolate yourself but quit. I know its a nasty addiction and near impossible to quit, but quit. I know, I know, you’ll put on ten pounds, so be a little fatter cause sooner or later cigarettes will kill you and its better to be fatter than dead. Ok, now that we have smokers out of the way lets talk about you and me. I don’t know about everyone but most people I know don’t want to run a marathon, they don’t want to spend two and half hours a day in the gym, lifting weights and running the treadmill. And even if they did they don’t have the time. And if you are like me then you like to eat, and not little rabbit portions, but you enjoy a good meal. In fact I enjoy good meal far more than I like working out, I look forward to going to good restaurants, I never look forward to going to the gym. And I like sitting on my couch watching sports, and when I do I like to munch on things, Nacho’s, wings, popcorn, in fact one of my favorite things is watching football on a Sunday and munching out.
And despite that I like eating far more than working out, and it is an effort to get me to leave my couch when a good game is on, I am very healthy. And I just don’t say so, I get all A’s from my Doctor. When I was younger I loved playing sports, but I just can’t do that all the time anymore. As an adult you just can’t find the time or even energy to do what you did when you were younger, but you need to find something you enjoy doing, or at least can tolerate and try to do it for at least an hour five or six times a week. For me, I play basketball in a league once a week, and we practice once a week on weekends, I also have found while I don’t love spinning ( bicycle class indoors) I don’t hate it, so I try to spin three or four times a week at my health club. My wife tries to walk/run on the treadmill at least five times a week for an hour, usually before the kids wake up. I have friends who get up and run a few miles everyday, totally not for me, but they love it. I have other friends who do Yoga or Pilate’s, the simple truth is there is some form of exercise out there that everyone can participate in to maintain good health. Am I in great shape? No! Do I have a six pack of abs? No! But I am healthy and I feel good and I have the energy, and I know that exercising the 5 to 7 hours a week is the main reason.
Eating, ugh, my main weakness. I love to eat, and I love crap. I would rather eat a hamburger, milkshake and fries than do anything else. And I love Pizza and candy, and Italian food, and Coca Cola and the aforementioned Buffalo Wings. And I am never giving any of them up, I’m just not going to eat them that often. Temptation is the root of all evil, so whenever I can I just stay away from the places that serve them. And that’s the best advice I can give, if you love to eat like me, don’t give it up just stay away. Because the truth is for most people diets don’t work, even when they do they eventually end and people go back to the bad eating habits they had before. The simple answer is develop better eating habits, try to eat salads, and chicken, and fish. Drink as much water as possible, try to stay away as much as possible from bread and butter, eat fruit and vegetables. I’m not saying anything that anyone does not know, we don’t need all the magazines and the pictures to show and tell us what to do, most intelligent people already know, its just hard. What I am saying is I am probably going to eat Pizza and wings on Sunday when watching football, but that means the rest of the week I’m being careful. I’m going to have my burger, shake and fries but probably only about once a month. I’m going to come home at night and eat the healthy meals my wife cooks and not complain because I want to stay healthy. If I go to a restaurant I am going to have my roll and butter, but only one not the whole basket, and nine out of ten times I am going to order chicken and fish. This is the life I have carved out for myself, I get to eat the foods I love just not as often as I would like, I don’t diet but they don’t work for me anyhow, they just make me hungrier. I get in my workout five to seven times a week and while I don’t love it I have made it part of my routine. My picture isn’t going in any magazines anytime soon for my body, but I am not overweight and I feel great. And at the end of the day, that’s what it is all about, feeling good and getting a clean bill of health. So workout, go easy on the crappy foods, stay healthy, but do the things you enjoy just in moderation.
These are crazy economic times, the Dow Jones went from 14,000 to 6,500 and back to 10,000. If you own a home you have seen the value drop from 20% to 50% depending on what part of the country you live in. This is the first time in modern history that home values have dropped nationally, yes, various pockets of the country’s homes have had down economic times before, but that has been region specific based on unique economic conditions in each area. But this is the first time that American’s have seen a national drop in what has been historically their largest and safest investment.
In the last ten years Americans, and the world have seen two huge economic bubbles; first, the Nasdaq/tech bubble of the late 90′s and more recently the worldwide housing bubble. The first merely caused a routine recession, the latter almost caused a Depression, unlike one we have seen since the 1930′s, and we are still not totally in the clear yet. But what makes these bubbles different from the one’s of the past is technology and media. The availability of information through televisions, wireless, and the Internet available to everyone has expanded these bubbles to the general population. Plus, the advances in technology has given the ability to almost everyone to participate. The advance of the Internet has given almost every person instant access to day trading further fueling the bubble of the Nasdaq, and the advances in technology allowed most people to participate in the housing bubble, by allowing fast underwriting and appraisals through technology. So our economic bubbles now affect all people not only the professionals and Wall street.
So how do investors and ordinary workers who have pension plans and 401k’s and savings to invest protect themselves, and even more important how do they make money and save for their retirement? The simple truth is the average investor should never have been participating in these bubbles. When investing the plan should always be for the long term, and yes I know it is difficult to avoid investing in things when your friends and neighbors are doubling and tripling their money on a matter of months, sometimes weeks, but you must resist. Perhaps, the two greatest investors of our generation or any generation for that matter are Peter Lynch, who ran Fidelity mutual funds for decades, and the world’s richest man Warren Buffett. Both have very simple and similar theories on investing. For Peter Lynch, it was invest in what you know and what you use, and what you like. If you worked on your house as a hobby and went to Home Depot, that is something you used and liked, if you bought Home Depot stock you understood what you were buying. If you got up in the morning every day and ate Kellogg’s Raisin Bran or went to Starbuck’s everyday it was something that you used and understood. But buying Cisco Systems that powers the Internet through systems the average man doesn’t understand might be a stock an engineer might buy but probably not a Postal Worker. Now, just cause you used these items, that meant it was only a potential investment. People still need to do their homework, check out management, earnings, timing. For many investors mutual funds are a far better way to go, but the same principles apply, invest in areas that you understand.
Mr Buffet’s theory is very similar, invest in businesses and concepts you can understand. his largest holdings are Coca Cola, pretty simple concept, Wells Fargo a bank, American Express, the credit card industry isn’t going away you lend and get paid back interest, Geico the insurance company, again pretty basic. He also owns See’s candy and Dairy Queen. he is the every man of investing, his philosophy is to invest in things that are used everyday and that are easy to understand. And he has stood the test of time. In the late 90′s, Mr. Buffet’s holding company Berkshire Hathaway was under performing the markets for the first time in his career. The critics said he had lost his touch, the 70 something year old had not kept up to speed by not investing in technology. Mr Buffet called it a bubble, that he didn’t understand the companies business models, that in many cases could not understand what they did, his critics said he was thru. The Nasdaq crashed in 2000, Mr. Buffet is the world’s richest man. In 2008, the market crashed, Mr. Buffets net worth dropped by 50%, critics said his buy and hold theory was dead, while the Dow Jones Industrial tanked, Mr. Buffet bough more Wells Fargo, one of his largest holdings at 20 dollars a share, it’s now 31 he bought General Electric at 13 it’s 17. he bought Goldman Sachs at 115 it’s 190 and the list goes on. He buys great companies, he does not worry where the markets go on a day to day basis because he believes if you do your homework and buy great companies over time you make money. But he doesn’t buy all the time, he has one last credo, buy when most are fearful and sell when most are greedy, because markets are imperfect and tend to overreact to human emotion.
When investing stay away from the hottest trends, you are not an expert. Ten years ago most people I knew were buying tech stocks and making a fortune, the problem was they thought they were stock market geniuses. They weren’t they just caught a bubble. And most people who think they are smarter than they are don’t know when to get out and buy more and more and usually with borrowed money. A guaranteed recipe for disaster. And for all those people who thought they were overnight geniuses in the stock market, most lost all their investment in the end. The same thing held true with the housing market. Five years ago most people I knew were buying homes and trying to flip them. or some bought multiple homes with easy credit and borrowed money and thought they would be the next Donald Trump. The people that were the real experts made a fortune and got out, but the average investor, most had too much leverage and too much greed, for them, it ended up a disaster.
None of this means investing is wrong, or trying to flip a home is a mistake. It means don’t ride trends, don’t think you know more than you do, it means do your homework and buy what you know. If you want to try and by homes or apartments for rental income, know the area, don’t use too much leverage and invest for the long term and make sure you can hold through the rocky times because they always come. The same holds true for the stock market. There are no get rich quick schemes that work, all they will do is get you poor quickly. If returns seem to great to be true they probably are. If people tell you it’s different this time, I promise you its not. It is your money and your future be careful with it, be smart, invest carefully and remember successful investing is a marathon not a sprint.
