In my previous entry I introduced the idea of selling your knowledge as a way of virtually cloning yourself, with the purpose of selling that knowledge for real money. To many, that may sound like a great idea in theory, but may not seem realistic or achievable — particularly to those who have never done it. And to many others, it may sound absolutely absurd altogether.
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.
So, if you’re in trouble financially, what are your alternatives?
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.
Without oversimplifying too much, I view the question of maintaining one’s body weight as matter pretty much of arithmetic. Leaving aside the question of nutrition (a topic I’ll take up in a future post), if you eat more calories in a day than you burn in a day, you’ll gain weight. If you eat fewer calories in a day than you burn in a day you’ll lose weight. Everyone with me here? (Aside: I know that a 200-calorie Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut is not exactly equivalent to a 200-calorie lean turkey burger with a tomato slice, but for now I’m just talking about “calories” — i.e. “fuel”.)
So now you’ve decided to restrict your fuel intake. That’s a good thing. However, if you wanted to lose weight by only restricting the fuel intake, how long would it take to lose weight? Consider this: a pound of stored fat contains about 3500 calories. That means that one pound of fat has more than two full days’ worth of “fuel” for a “normal-sized” person. That means if you’re 10 pounds overweight, you have 20 full days of unburned fuel inside you.
Would you like to speed things up? I knew you would. The obvious thing to do is to boost your “burn rate”. Any level above your “normal” activity is a boost of your burn rate. If you’ve been sluggish for a while, you will need to start slowly AND under medical supervision. With a gradually increasing exercise program you will begin to consume more calories from your stored reserves progressively faster.
Then there’s the question of the flab. It’s one thing to lose the fat. It’s another thing altogether to increase muscle mass. A well-designed regimen will increase your muscle mass, which will boost your metabolism, which in turn will accelerate the rate of fuel consumption (i.e. fat burning). The really cool thing is that once your muscle mass gets to a certain percentage of your body weight, magic begins to happen. Your metabolism is going so fast that you actually burn fat while you sleep. How cool is that?
If stress is keeping you from making a new beginning, go here for a quick shortcut.
Click here for assistance in going from flab to fit.
Given the media frenzy over less-than-wholesome celebrity relationships in recent years, you might feel inclined to measure your own relationship against an arbitrary media-imposed standard. This can lead to a tendency to over-analyze our personal (i.e. intimate) relationships. “Is he/she really the one?” “What if I meet someone else?” or the more threatening “What happens to me if he/she meets someone else?” Whether you’re watching Sex In The City, or Oprah, or even Rachel Ray, you’re going to be challenged about the perceived quality of your relationship.
Honestly, do you really want a gaggle of Cosmo-swilling malcontent Manhattanites implicitly casting aspersions on your relationship?
You can “what if…” yourself to death. Sometimes all that over-thinking can get in the way of just being with the person you love. Every couple has “issues” from time to time, and most of the time you just work through them. If you’re in a rut and you don’t like it, don’t complain to your girlfriends. Don’t complain to the guys in the bar or on the golf course. Tell it to the only person in the universe who can actually do something about it: YOUR PARTNER.
Set up a special time. Book an appointment with each other if you have to. Make sure the kids won’t disturb you. Then begin at the beginning. Say what’s on your mind. Be honest. And be fair. Do NOT threaten. Yes, it may feel uncomfortable. Give your partner the opportunity to respond. Yes, it may feel uncomfortable. It’s okay if you cry. That goes for the men, too. If a relationship is good enough to fight over, it’s good enough to cry over. Yes, it may feel uncomfortable. Do it anyway.
When you’ve achieved the breakthrough that inevitably happens through healthy encounters, then get ready for some good “make up” sex.
When the stress of the relationship gets to you, you may be able to find some relief here.
Click here for the fun and sex part.
With respect to your health, on a scale of 1 to 10 where are you? Really? Answer honestly.
Are you doing things to yourself that you would really rather not do? I read an interview with actor Ewan MacGregor a few months ago. He had been something of a hell-raiser. He chain-smoked and drank alcohol as if every day were going to be his last. (I’d bet that if he weren’t an A-list celebrity, he might well have been an overeater, too.) Then after he and his wife had children, he reconsidered his bad habits and their potential impact on his life. He decided that he would take action then and there to stop doing things that would likely prematurely shorten his earthly time with his kids. His motivation to quit smoking was stronger than his desire to smoke. These were behaviors that he had chosen to do and which he later chose not to do.
The same is true whether we’re talking about overeating or taking drugs. Addiction is a major obstacle to health. But you already knew that.
When we want to stop engaging in behaviors that are not good for us, the first thing we have to do is to admit that we are deriving some positive benefit from the behavior. For example, what are the positive impulses satisfied by smoking? Well, depending on the person, they might include relaxation (“I smoke to relax”); they might include time alone (“I can’t smoke at the office. I’ll go outside.”); they might include status in a social caste (“All the cool people smoke.”). For every smoker the list may be different. And note that this has NOTHING to do with the negative effects of smoking on the body. People smoke for positive reasons.
The same is true when weight loss is the issue. Every obese person overeats for positive intent. If they could get their positive intentions met another (healthier) way, they’d do it.
What are the positive intentions behind your negative behaviors.
Are your negative behaviors signs of stress? Click here for a way to deal with stress.
