What would you like to do?  Do you have ambitions to change the world?  Do you aspire to make a difference? Start with yourself.  Make a difference in yourself today.  In previous posts I’ve talked about mindset and making changes.  What does that mean to you?  Does it mean that you have to learn something else before you can act?  Maybe, but taking the time to learn something else may be a distraction from the underlying need to simply do something else.

Taking action, doing something, being different, are all surefire ways of interrupting your routine of sameness.  Are you going to sit there and wish your life were different? Or are you going to take some different (only small) steps and make your life different?  Sameness in action leads to sameness in results.

After I got laid off from my last job in a successful 35 year career, I knew I had to do something different.  Indeed, I could well have just sat around and waited for the phone to ring.  I also knew that that wasn’t going to happen — at least at my age.  So I stepped out and did something different.  I acquired a new skill set and I created a business that I’m proud of.

You can do that, too.  You don’t have to go into it fulltime.  You can start small — just a couple of hours a week, but those will be very important hours that can change your life.  Follow this link and see if there’s something that speaks to you.  Click here now to open the door to new opportunities.  Make a difference — to yourself, to your family, to the world at large.

To those who like the theory but lack the ability, fair enough.  It’s kind of like telling a Little League batter to face off against a Major League fast-baller by saying, “It’s easy.  Just keep your eye on the ball and let the ball hit the bat.”  If you’ve never done it, it’s hard.  But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.  After all, if you’re reading this, you’ve learned English, one of the most difficult languages on Earth.  You learned it, and you don’t even know exactly how you learned it.  Fortunately in the realm of human performance, the word “Impossible” rarely means impossible.  More often it only means, “I don’t know how to do it yet.”

To those who think that it’s completely and utterly absurd, I invite you to look a bit deeper into the part of you that says that.  Is it coming from a place of cynicism?  Is it from your own thoughts or is this something that you were taught? Tony Robbins says that cynicism is a gutless response.  It takes no guts to be a cynic.  All you have to do is sit there and wait to be proven wrong.  It’s a completely passive response.

But let’s look a my suggestion logically.  You need money. There are only so many hours in a day, and even if you worked all 24 of them, you’d only make so much money.  You can do the arithmetic yourself to calculate how long it will take to get you the money that you think you need.  However, if you invested in yourself and learned exactly how to leverage the power of the Internet, you could create a little (or big) marketing machine with minimal effort.

It comes down to this, your financial growth will necessarily come down to your personal growth.  Your personal growth comes from your mindset.  If your mindset limits you, it’s time to grow.

Making changes list this in times of stress can be a daunting task.  Go here to remove stress from the equation.

You can click here for a quick head start on how to begin to build your Internet opportunities.

As I’ve said in other posts, you have to know, really know, how much trouble you’re in.  (Look at this post to review.) What is your level of debt? What does your cashflow look like? Then you have to figure out what to do.

Most people think that their only asset is their time.  That is, they think only in terms of trading hours for dollars.  But you know something? There are only 168 hours available to you in any week.  That’s all.  So no matter how many of those hours you are willing to work, there’s an upper limit on the amount of money you can bring in.  Do you make minimum wage?  Do you make $20 per hour? $50?  $1000? $10,000?  The upper limit is easily calculable.  Therefore, the rate at which you can get out of the hole is equally easy to calculate.  (By the way, you can’t work 168 hours per week.  The absolute most you can do realistically is somewhere around 80.  And that leaves time for precious little else.)

So what do you do?  The solution is nearer than you might think, but it will take some serious rethinking!

My mother told me when I was a kid that the essence of success was to “work smarter not harder”.  It took me decades to really understand — and more importantly, to put into practice — what she was talking about.  The trick is to leverage yourself.  Imagine this: if you could be in two places at the same time, you could earn twice as much money as you do now.  What if you could be in four or eight or 100 places at the same time?  You could earn four or eight or 100 times what you’re earning now.

“How do I do that?” I hear you ask.  The answer is that you clone your expertise.  You leverage yourself and your knowledge.  Take a skill that you have and teach it to someone else and get them to pay you for it.  Over and over and over again.

Over the coming days, I’ll be posting several entries on getting going in the world of selling your skills on the internet.

Day-to-day financial stress can get you down.  Go here for a way to short-circuit stress.