brip blap» inspirational

the whole life sabbatical (part 1 of 3)

Steve — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:00:55 +0000

Have you ever just wanted to chuck it all and walk away? To just walk away from your commitments and responsibilities and start over again somewhere else? Why didn’t you?

I started thinking about the practicalities of walking away from my entire life of responsibilities after learning an acquaintance had done it. I divided my responsibilities up in a few different groups: work, family, finances and life. Each one has different implications in terms of walking away, and before anyone thinks I’m about to start discussing walking away from your family or your finances – don’t worry! I have a different mindset, and hopefully it will become clear what I’m getting at in parts 2 and 3.

First of all, what ARE your responsibilities?

Work: Chances are good that you work for a living. Maybe you are an employee, or a freelancer, or a small business owner. Your responsibilities for each of these types of work are similar but not the same. If you are an employee, you work at a business. Maybe you serve customers, or work in a group, but for the most part you have nobody who relies on you for their livelihood; the company pays their paycheck, not you. If you are a freelancer, nobody depends on you for their livelihood but customers may rely on you, particularly if you function almost as a “part-time” employee for their business. The most responsible position of these three would be a small business owner. If you have employees, you have people who depend on you.

Family: If you have a spouse, or elderly parents or children or any close family you support (or help support) you have a tremendous responsibility to them. You may share that responsibility (for example, if you are married and have kids you and your spouse both provide overlapping types of support) but in many cases this dependency is total and desperate (think elderly parents or newborn children). How easily could you walk away from family (or even close friends who are like familiy)? People do it all the time. Divorce and abandonment are extremes. I’m thinking more of cases like this: do you bring your aging parent who requires almost-around-the-clock care to live with you if you are able? Or do you send them to an assisted living/nursing home facility? It sounds cruel, but should you neglect your other family to care for someone who probably needs better care than you can provide? It’s a difficult question.

Finances: You have commitments to be paid – rent, mortgages, taxes, utilities and so on. Some are less critical than others. Your cable TV is a fairly mild commitment you could end without much worry. Your electricity? Less so. Your taxes? I wouldn’t advise it – we can’t all be Wesley Snipes. This area is fairly clear cut morally, although there are gray areas – would you walk away from a mortgage if your home plummeted in value, in order to get a fresh start? I would, but some people think this is irresponsible.

Life: You have responsibilities to things in your own life that cannot be pushed aside. Food must be eaten, health must be maintained and medical care is sometimes necessary. You can switch from caviar to tuna fish, but you can’t stop eating. You can decide to stop taking multivitamins, but if you suffer from diabetes you’ll still need insulin. You may even have responsibilities to your friends, your neighborhood and your church/temple/mosque/etc., but these could vary so much it’s hard to make an overarching simplification, and I wonder if those are truly responsibilities. I suppose if you are a community-centric person they might be. I will argue that you have almost no other responsibilities. Do I have a responsibility as a citizen for certain things? I guess so. Voting, jury duty, paying taxes and so on are all “national” responsibilities, but let’s face it – you can walk away awfully easily from most of those. Whether you should is another question.

So did I miss anything? And don’t tell me it’s impossible to walk away from any of these commitments, because you can, without a doubt. These are the major areas of obligation in most of our lives, other than a sense of civic duty. In the next two parts I’ll talk about (1) whether you could walk away and (2) if walking away would make you happy. We all say we want freedom – but do we?

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the questions you need to succeed in business

Steve — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:00:48 +0000

These are not my original thoughts, but they are a great list of questions if you’re interested in providing a service (a blog, a business, consulting – basically any service you can think of):

What needs do people have that I can fulfill?
What trend or trends are present here?
What opportunities do they present?
What are the current gaps in the marketplace?
What is the insight that can lead me to create greater value in this segment?
How can I leverage what I know about this category or industry that makes sense for my [work] and my brand name?
How can I test the efficacy of my idea?

These ideas came from Thomas Edison, inventor of a couple things (!), and they are remarkably applicable 100 years after he said them. I am trying to apply these ideas to my thought process about future work after my current career winds down.

What really kills me – and this happens more and more often – is how much inspirational and quite frankly useful stuff has already been written. So much of what’s written about inspiration, getting rich, etc. has already been covered better and earlier. Even what I’m trying to write about has probably been covered better by people like Ben Franklin already. It’s amazing how “The Secret” is not really a secret – it’s there and it’s available, we (and I include myself) just don’t take advantage of it.

The simplest, most straightforward ideas are right there. They are public domain works. You don’t need to buy anything. You don’t need to attend a seminar. It’s all free already – the concepts behind wealth and health and happiness. Don’t buy another self-help book, just hit the Internet. In 10 years it will all be monetized and privatized, but right now it’s the biggest treasure trove of free information the world has ever seen…

(photo credit by ishrona)

6 Ways to Salvage your New Years Resolutions

Guest Writer — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:00:02 +0000

We’re less than a full month into the new year. Did you make any resolutions? If so, how’re they doing?

If you’ve already broken your New Year’s resolution, don’t be too hard on yourself. It turns out that the odds were stacked against you. A study in 2007 by Richard Wisemen from the University of Bristol showed that 88% of people who make New Year resolutions fail to keep them.

Those are pretty dismal numbers when you consider it. A lot of people break their resolutions and feel depressed. But as the Japanese proverb says “Fall 7 times, stand up 8″. So, how can you salvage your new year’s resolutions?

Remember why you made the resolution: It came from somewhere. So take a moment and try to reconnect with the original impulse. Life distracts us, so try to focus past the distractions and find what you had desired.
Discard the resolutions that don’t come from you: Too often we resolve to do the things we think we should do, rather than the things we want to do. When you have no personal attachment to your resolutions, it’s a lot easier to break them.
Reschedule your New Year: January is actually a bad time to start many resolutions. If we take weight loss as our example: gyms are more crowded than ever before, and the weather isn’t always friendly towards going outside and exercising. If any of these things are impacting your resolutions, why not wait until the spring? Good resolutions are a challenge, but there’s no reason that you shouldn’t stack the odds in your favor.
Redefine your resolution: Try taking your goal and breaking it into smaller increments. For example, if you want to lose 36 pounds in the year, instead set yourself a more achievable goal of 3 pounds per month. This gives you a number of smaller goals that you can achieve and celebrate, helping you build momentum and retain your focus, even as you move towards achieving your larger overall resolution.
Make use of your support network: We live in a world more connected than ever before. This means that supportive friends are as close as the smart phone in your pocket or the nearest computer. By sharing your resolutions with your support network, you gain people to help you when you’re struggling and who can celebrate with you while you succeed.
If at first you don’t succeed…: We get too focused on failure. If you could change your behaviour without any problems then you wouldn’t need to make resolutions in the first place. If we learn from our mistakes, then we give ourselves a far better toolkit for long-term success than we would if we had succeeded without any problems or challenges.

Guest post by Alex Conde of Searching for Happy, a blog about the simple search for happiness we all face. His series of Happiness Experiments study some of the popular theories on finding happiness.

Photo Some rights reserved by Koshyk

the itch that never ends

Steve — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:00:16 +0000

Imagine your wrist is itching right now. It’s the kind of itch that just has to be scratched – it doesn’t matter what you are doing, because the urge to scratch rises up and blocks your ability to concentrate on almost anything else. I am sure you know this feeling – the sudden intensity of the itch narrows your vision to a tunnel. You stop, you scratch, you resume whatever it was you were doing.

Now imagine that keeps happening. Again and again. You itch at random all over. Your nose itches, you stop and scratch and take ten steps before your knee itches. The aggravation becomes unbearable – every few minutes another urge to scratch, another pulsating itch.

But after a while, a funny thing happens – you are so consumed with scratching and itching that you realize that you can ignore some of the milder itches. Your mind blocks them out, because otherwise you’re just in a haze, waiting for the next tickle on your shoulder or your ear. You realize, hey, I can block these itches out.

Before long, you are blocking out more and more of these urges to itch. After a while, you can ignore almost all of them. Your mind learns how to block bigger and bigger urges, until only the most pressing itches needs scratching. One day, you realize that although you still itch all over, you don’t need to scratch anymore. You have conquered the urge and no longer have a knee-jerk reaction when it strikes.

This is more or less the way you need to approach spending if you’re in debt, or eating if you’re trying to lose weight, or getting over a bad habit of any kind. It may seem like an oversimplification but that’s what it is. Your mind is an amazing tool (but also a dangerous one) but you are its master.

photo credit: Sugar Pond

the movement of content

Steve — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 02:55:54 +0000

One of the problems I have with writing here at brip blap tends to be the question of “what to write?” I’ve never made this a blog that covers the subjects that many personal finance blogs cover: what credit card should I get? Should I invest in an IRA or a Roth IRA? I don’t think anyone who reads this blog is looking for the answer to this type of question. You’ve probably already formed your own opinions on that and there’s no need for me to add to that internal discussion. There are many other, better blogs looking at the details of picking the best high yield savings account. I wish I was one of them – those are lucrative subjects – but it’s not to my interest and I don’t really want to write about those topics. Not that there’s anything wrong with writing on those subjects – there’s a place in this world for writing for money, just like there is a place for working for money. People who can write well AND write for money are blessed (I’m looking at you, Stephen King and John Grisham).

So when I think of what to write, I think “what should I write that (a) entertains me and (b) entertains others and (c) might be profitable.” C is a distant consideration. I leave C to guest writers and sponsored posts. B is much more important. I do like it when people enjoy my writing and comment on it. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t, I think. So I do write to that. But I’ve realized over the last year that A is the most important by far, especially in combination with B. Why? Because of Facebook and various other social media.

Many bloggers like the “sense of community” and “feedback” they get while writing, but I felt this sense and this feed much more back in 2007 before Facebook and Twitter took hold. I don’t feel it much today. Today real conversation doesn’t take place on blogs, or on websites – it takes place on Facebook or Twitter or a few other key social media sites. I used to share links heavily on this blog, but whereas a few years ago this was the first place I’d share them, now I’m more likely to share those links on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or other networks. I’m more likely to engage with commentators on Facebook than I am even on my own site, because of course I spend time on Facebook, not here on brip blap. I participate in forums rather than on individual blogs. I’d argue that even the huge blogs – the Lifehackers, the Consumerists, etc. – aren’t really able to hold onto “regulars” anymore. I read many blogs, but I seldom comment on them. I might share links from them, and comment on them – but it’s going to be on a social network.

So the movement of content has created a question: where should content live? I like having brip blap as its own independent website. But is that the future of sites like mine? Or will they eventually move to Facebook, or some other social platform, where most of the readers and “likers” are already engaged and focused? I think they will. My blog exists in Facebook already, for example. You can read it in Facebook, comment on it in Facebook and never leave Facebook. That’s fine. If I integrate my personal account with my brip blap page at some point, you’ll see a wild flood of extra content – my “brain dump,” so to speak – appear. A lot of my content has moved to social networking. I’m posting my thoughts bit by bit rather than in long drawn-out posts like this one. It’s probably the future. There will be long-form writers forever, of course, but many people are transitioning to a short-form style of reading that won’t want to read 700+ word articles.

I’ve shifted my reading over the past 5 years. I still read books – but on a Kindle, that promotes “disposable reading” (I give up on books rapidly if I don’t like them). I don’t read blogs as much as I used to (my RSS reader accumulates them for search if necessary). I don’t write as much here because I spend a lot of time writing elsewhere – emails, Facebook, Twitter, forums, etc. Content is constantly being produced by people like me and you, but it’s shifting and changing. After a brief “golden age” of people scattering across the web looking for content we’re again reconsolidating. It’s neither good nor bad – it just is. Content is moving to where the readers are.

Photo Some rights reserved by MR photography.

thoughts on early retirement

Steve — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 09:44:44 +0000

My family has been gone for a few days, visiting family in New York, while I stayed here to work. It’s been an interesting experience, being alone, because I haven’t had this much time to myself in quite a while. I’ve attempted to spend my time doing productive things, although today, many of the productive things have involved doing something where I can watch football while I do them. One of the activities today was baking bread from scratch. This was an interesting experience. I had watched Lara make a number of variations on bread – items such as pizza crusts, pastries, and assorted cakes and muffins. But I myself never actually attempted to make bread. It’s strange, because my son has been baking bread at his Waldorf preschool for years, and it doesn’t really seem like that difficult. Be that as it may, I have never actually attempted to make bread. So today I thought, why not?

So I baked some bread. Today, following instructions I found on the Internet, natch. It worked fairly well. I was able to make a decent loaf of bread, with a nice hint of garlic and onion, because I like that kind of bread… salty and flavorful, not hearty and/or sweet. You may wonder what the point of this is. I am not a big do-it-yourselfer. I generally think that when you spend a large amount of time trying to do something like this that you could expend a small amount of money on, you probably are not spending your time in an optimal way. But then again this weekend, my thoughts have been turned toward the idea of minimalism, frugality, environmentalism, simplicity, and lifestyle design. Why, you may ask? Because of something I read on early retirement extreme this weekend.

I know I have mentioned early retirement extreme, a blog about retiring at an extremely young age, several times in the course of my own blogging “life.” It is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the best blogs about this lifestyle. It is not the only one of course, there are several others: brave new life and Mr. Money Mustache leap to mind (both are excellent and you should be reading them). All of these blogs, of course, have
Your Money or Your Life a book written back in the 80s although revised recently, as an inspiration. But early retirement extreme is probably the best-known of the current financial independence blogs. The author of the blog, Jacob, announced this weekend that he was leaving his early retirement to go into a new job as a quant trader. I won’t go into the details of what a quant trader is, although I have friends in that industry. Google it (or quant/quantitative analyst).

To me, any job in the financial services sector is the exact antithesis of an early retirement. The hours are long, the office politics are brutal, the pressure to perform is immense, the positive impact to society is (in my opinion) minimal at best and negative at worst. Your ability to pursue what you want will be limited by the firm’s immense demands on your time and expertise. But be that as it may, it is an immensely challenging field and I understand why someone like Jacob, with a PhD in physics, would be entertained at the thought of engaging in the challenge of trying to conquer this field.

I myself am not engaged in an early retirement lifestyle. I have not made the choices which would enable me to retire at an extremely early age. Until the mid-90s, I was engaged in a career quite typical of most American corporate mid-level management. I chose in the mid-90s to disengage from this lifestyle as much as I could (mentally) and became a contract consultant, which allowed me to design a much simpler lifestyle, which involved much less travel, much less involvement in corporate politics and less concern over the need to constantly deal with bosses and subordinates. But I do aspire to some of the ideals of the early retirement movement. I drive a 10-year-old car, which I am not fond of, but I intend to continue to drive. Why? Simply because I don’t believe there’s any compelling need for me to buy a new car. I do not like to buy things. I have attempted to live in a “simple-ish” home. We attempt to eat simply, mostly vegetarian and organic and locally grown. I don’t have cable TV. I don’t play video games. We read a lot in my household. We have a garden that Bubelah takes good care of. But after all of that back patting of myself, I realize that I have a long ways to go before I meet any of the ideals of an early retirement ideology.

So it is jarring to me to see that one of the proponents of the early retirement lifestyle has abruptly left this lifestyle after achieving it so efficiently. But I understand. I have spent most of my blogging life reading heavily about hedonic adaptation. I’ve written about it several times, although I have never made it a main focus of my blog. But be that as it may, hedonic adaptation is probably one of the key measures for understanding yourself . No matter how miserable you are – or how happy you are – your current state is what determines your happiness. If you are miserable today and things go a little bit better tomorrow, you will be happy. If you are happy today and things go a little bit wrong tomorrow, you will be miserable. This is just human nature. If you buy a toy today, hedonic adaptation teaches us that you will be less satisfied with it as each day goes by. This is fine. People are like this. I am like this.

But I have realized, after reading a lot of the comments on early retirement extreme.com about Jacob’s decision to leave the ERE lifestyle, that I do need to concentrate more fully on a singular goal, and that singular goal has to be finding a point at which financial independence allows me freedom of choice over my actions on a daily basis. This is critical. I enjoy many parts of my job. I had an extremely busy week this past week, but it was also very satisfying: I was able to set up a system for my client that exactly met their needs and made them quite happy. I had a great feeling of accomplishment from that. Now, but that in balance with this idea: I enjoyed making my client happy, but how can I weigh that against the fact that I was working late most evenings and was not able to spend much time with my children. Granted I spend more time with my children than I would if I was traveling heavily, but it was an uneven solution to the question “what is your ideal lifestyle design?” I’d like to make money, do interesting work and work with people I like….and have lots of spare time for my family (and, frankly, myself). And the only way this will happen is if I achieve financial independence.

Unless you are familiar with the early retirement general philosophy, much of this may pass over your head. But I think you get the idea. There was a guy who espoused retiring early and showed how to do it, who then found that in retirement he needed to go back to work. It seems a little hypocritical when I first read it. But it’s not…. the idea is that you would like to put yourself in a position where you can do exactly what you want when you want to, even if that means you want to return to full-time work in a new field. I certainly can’t do that right now. I would submit that probably 99% of Americans cannot do this now. So if you have access to a blogger who has been able to do this, and he’s written a detailed guideline on how to achieve that same level of success, that’s a good guide map regardless of what he’s doing now. I’m going to pay more attention to my plans to retire early, personally. And when I say retire early, I don’t mean to quit working. I simply mean to be able to work when I want to, in a way I want to, with people I want to, with companies I want to and how I want to.

I think that’s sufficiently heavy for Monday. Get out there and do what you do with pride, and with a focus on doing it so well that someday you won’t HAVE to do it, you’ll WANT to do it because people love what you do so much that they will throw money at you. Nice daydream, huh?

Photo Some rights reserved by mikebaird

PS I composed this post with Dragon Naturally Speaking (which I reviewed before, here). It took about 5 minutes of editing, mostly for punctuation, but by and large it got my speech. The geek in me appreciates the lack of typing.

25 quotes on perseverance

Steve — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 11:20:14 +0000

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” -Winston Churchill

“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.” – Walter Elliott

“No man is ever whipped, until he quits — in his own mind.” – Napoleon Hill

“I do not think there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.” – John D. Rockefeller

“When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein

“With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable.” – Thomas Foxwell Buxton

“Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance.” - Samuel Johnson

“Energy and persistence conquer all things.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Even after a bad harvest there must be sowing.” – Seneca

“For all things difficult to acquire, the intelligent man works with perseverance.” – Lao Tzu

“The characteristic of a genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.” – Thomas J. Watson, Jr.

“Thankfully, perseverance is a good substitute for talent.” - Steve Martin

“Saints are sinners who kept on going.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

“If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.” – Buddhist Saying

“Paralyze resistance with persistence.” - Woody Hayes

“My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.” - Abraham Lincoln

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.” – C. S. Lewis

“My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.” - Hank Aaron

“The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.” - Henry Ward Beecher

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, ‘press on’ has solved, and always will solve, the problems of the human race.” - Calvin Coolidge

“What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” – General Dwight Eisenhower

“Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance.” – Dr. Samuel Johnson

“If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying. “Here comes number seventy-one!” – Richard M. Devos

“Keep on keeping on.” - Edgar Allen (founder of Easter Seals)

You can also check out 25 quotes on ambition here on brip blap.

Photo Some rights reserved by Dominic’s pics

How Much Does It Cost to Die?

Steve — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 01:44:24 +0000

When I first started looking at this, it cost anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 to die in New Jersey (note that I said “to die”, not “to kill someone” – we weren’t all captains in crime families in the Garden State where I used to live, although we did have our fair share and even some favorite sons). I haven’t done the same calculation for Florida, but I work on the (possibly naive) assumption that Florida should be cheaper.

Nobody wants to confront their own mortality, of course. My guess is that it’s probably right down there with cleaning septic tanks and reading children’s toy assembly guides on everyone’s list of least favorite things to do. But you have to stop and think about it for a second if you have a family – and even if you don’t.

If you are single, you may not have life insurance. If you are married, you may not even have started working on this yet. If you are married with children and don’t have life insurance, you need to go talk to an agent rather than reading this post. But life insurance may not always cover all of the costs, and you may leave behind a huge financial hit to your loved ones if you haven’t prepared properly. There is nothing more grim than planning your own funeral down to the last detail… except leaving your loved ones to do it for you. Think about a few of these things:

1. Burial? Cremation? A flaming ship pushed out to sea, Viking-style? You have to make your wishes known. You may assume that you’ll be buried in the family plot or have your ashes scattered to the winds, but have you told anyone about that? Can you imagine leaving that decision up to someone else, particularly in a moment of grief?

2. Taking care of the costs should not be a concern for your survivors. Can you imagine being a spouse or a parent or a child and trying to talk to a funeral director while doubled over in grief? Is that going to be a time that they need to be making decisions about money? Make sure that you take care of picking out a casket, or a mausoleum, or an urn or whatever it is you will need – but don’t leave that decision to your survivors.

3. Have money set aside as “go to hell” money. Make sure that you have an emergency fund well-funded or a separate account altogether (a “disaster fund” maybe) so that nobody has to worry about going to work or taking care of flying relatives into town – those details should be taken care of without worrying about the cost.

A confession – I haven’t been as diligent about doing these as I should have. I know I should, since I have a good example in the family. My grandfather had taken care of every single detail of his funeral 30 years before he died, to ensure that when he did absolutely no pressure to determine anything would fall on my grandmother. It was a brave thing to confront his mortality at such a young age (in his 40s) and certainly made a world of difference for all of us when he passed. He had expressed all of his preferences, leaving almost nothing to the imagination.

So just remember “worrying about death expenses” as item #675 on your list of a thousand things you need to plan for but haven’t yet.

(photo credit: robin.elaine )

your stuff or your life

Steve — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 09:00:44 +0000

Years ago, on a weekend visit, I spoke to a friend of mine from a Middle Eastern country while our family was visiting with his family. We spoke over a huge pile of Legos and the Bert-n-Ernie Garage and a full set of Thomas the Tank Engine trains (although, in all fairness, most were gifts). He was reminiscing about how he grew up with practically no toys: he and his brothers made toys out of wire and twine and cans and sticks. I spoke about my childhood – less simple, but still free for the most part of electronic gadgets. We watched a Euro 2008 match on satellite TV while we spoke, drank German beer and checked other sports score on my high-speed Internet laptop. Then my friend lamented the fact that while his mother had managed to support his whole family and grandparents on one salary, it just wasn’t possible anymore.

It is. Take out the imported beer, the satellite TV, the piles of children’s toys, the second car, the computers, the high-speed internet, and so on and it is. It’s amazing how within the span of one generation we’ve added so many “extras” – but at the same time Americans are now working harder than any other industrialized nation, even more than the infamously hard-working Japanese. I may exempt the Internet from this equation, simply because what I pay for access – a $600 Toshiba laptop and a high-speed cable connection – are worth it in terms of information and learning and entertainment. Other than that, though, we have added so much to our lives that we’ve lost sight of the fact that we don’t need most of it.

Yet at the same time America is unbearably wealthy by global standards. We have calories (not good ones, but calories nonetheless) available in almost unlimited supply for almost no real cost – Americans spend less of their salary on food than any other nation in the world. You can buy enough Cinnamon Toast Crunch to feed a family of four for a day for $10. Even the poorest people in America can afford television; and despite the recent increase in gas prices, we still have some of the cheapest gas in the world and almost no-one is too poor to afford a car.

I don’t automatically assume that “having things” makes anyone unhappy, any more than I assume having things DOES make someone happy. Americans are uniquely blessed with a regulatory environment that is still wide-open by global standards, and the remnants of an entrepreneurial spirit that lives on despite 50 years of creep in governmental control. Yet at the same time a gap has opened up that shows that the materialistic society has limits. I have made no statistical studies, but I have so many acquaintances who are loaded down with material goods who are desperately unhappy and apprehensive about the future that it seems to be a trend. I’m not exaggerating, either – these people have possessions that would have convinced me, in my youth, that they were multimillionaires. So progress has been made in the material world, but something – somewhere – was lost.

I don’t know what the answer is, because the Internet and cable/satellite TV and clever toys and gadgets like MP3 players have not seemed (and that’s the key word) to be EVIL. I enjoy my Blackberry, a lot. Could I live without it? Of course. Does it enrich my life? It sure did yesterday, when I listened to a fascinating interview on it, showed my kids a music video they loved and found an address I needed. But is it part of a slow trickle of gadgets-for-money-for-time that have robbed me of the deliberate life? That’s something each of us, in the wee hours, have to decide for ourselves.

photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

the scrambled egg theory of productivity

Steve — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 10:42:27 +0000

Physics tell us that one of the laws of the universe is this:

You can’t unscramble an egg.

Think about it. It can’t be done. You can freeze liquid water, then heat it and turn it to gas and back to water, but you can’t unscramble an egg. It just won’t unscramble. Hit it with gamma rays, do whatever you want and it won’t unscramble.

The same principle applies to finance. If you spend an hour of your life earning $20, then you spend that $20 on a CD, it’s gone. Your life is gone. If you spend two hours getting a listing ready on eBay and you make a profit of $1.34 selling a CD, that time is gone, too. Was it worth that $1.34? Was the initial purchase of the CD worth $20? That time is gone, and that egg can’t be unscrambled. The money out – unless you spent it on something that will return to you like education, or an investment – is money gone. In the cosmic sense, it has been scrambled.

Your time works the same way, too. Every time you watch TV, for example, you lose a piece of your life. Whether it’s worth it or not is up to you. I’ve seen many movies that inspired me, or made me laugh. That might have been a good use of my time. Everyone needs to relax and be entertained from time to time, but you do have to choose how to spend your life. I know it may sound like an obsessive focus on money, but that is time you could have been working on your education, or coming up with money-saving ideas, or studying investments. Watching an episode of Gilligan’s Island for the third time is not what Benjamin Franklin would have done.

Tony Robbins has a good bit about watching reruns of programs: he says we have two driving forces in our life, the desire for surprise and the desire for consistency, which are constantly at war. We want to watch a funny TV show for the second time because we know it’s funny; but we also hope something new will happen or we’ll see something we missed before. The chances of both of those desires being met decreases each time you see the same show in reruns. As he says, if you ever watch any TV show or movie more than once – get a life. And trust me, I do this all the time. I have seen The Matrix and The Russia House so many times I can practically recite them – but I do know it’s time wasted. This tendency to watch movies multiple times is one of the main reasons my family cut the cord.

So the next time you think about buying that CD or wasting time “making money” on eBay or seeing “that great episode where Gilligan breaks the Professor’s coconut-powered radio” just ask yourself if you really want to scramble that egg. Time is short, and it always – always – moves forward.

photo credit: swanksalot

Friday quote: changing yourself

Steve — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 10:00:16 +0000

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

- Leo Tolstoy

I’ve written before about why I don’t watch the news, political or otherwise. I do get some news – I check the local news to make sure there’s not a road closing near me or a new farmers’ market I should be aware of. I include myself in the large pool of people who dream of change throughout the world – ending American wars! fixing Wall Street! ensuring equality for women throughout the developing world! ending poverty! etc. I’d love to see these things happen, but the simple fact is that it’s unlikely that my individual efforts would affect ALL of these things. With concentrated effort and a lifelong focus, I could affect one of these things, perhaps. But I, like so many others, focus on changing the world (to little effect) and miss focusing on changing ourselves (at great affect).

I’ll suggest that there is no greater first step to changing the world than changing yourself. Make yourself better and you’ll be better able to serve the world. Get more fit – live longer. Get richer – be able to give more. Get smarter – provide more help. It’s easy to see that self-improvement is the first step to take in serving others.

This post is as much a reminder for myself as it is any sort of advice for others. Remember, with me, that improving ourselves is the first step in improving the world, as Tolstoy pointed out.

Photo Some rights reserved by R’eyes

how I became Russian

Steve — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:00:32 +0000

Patrick, of Cash Money Life fame long ago tagged me to give my best financial move in college. I posted this long ago, but it’s worth reposting. How I came to become a Russophile is an interesting story – I think.

(me, in St. Petersburg, circa 1997)

Learning an “exotic” foreign language, and how it changed my life.

If you read this blog, you probably know that I’m a Russophile. I lived in Moscow for several years, I can read/write/speak Russian fairly comfortably and my wife is Russian. Even more: I have been interested in Russian long before I “knew” Russian or Russia. Key the computer geek theme music: I mentioned that I was a finalist in the International Science Fair: I wrote, in Basic on a Tandy Color Computer with a cassette-tape drive, a very primitive artificial intelligence program that reliably translated English into Russian, grammatically correct. I even had to develop the Cyrillic font. I did all of this after buying a Russian grammar book at a public library for $.10 and using it to set it up – I didn’t know Russian at all. Pat, pat, pat on the back, Steve. Score one for geeky computer boy. The US Army liked my program, gave me a commendation and took the code. What happened with it after that, I dunno.

Anyway, after the ISF my interest in Russian waned. I always joke that my ancestry is German with a little German mixed in. Even though the Original Blap Ancestor ventured to the new world in the 16th century, my paternal ancestors clung to German ways and traditions and language. And I mean they clung. To the best of my knowledge, my dad was probably part of the first generation of Blaps to speak English at home rather than German. So in high school and college I had a strong motivation to take German, and I did. I loved it. I had a great teacher, and I spent a summer semester in Germany as an exchange student. To this day I speak, read and understand German quite well.

But I always liked foreign languages in general. I took French and Latin as well and decided in my sophomore year that Japanese would be a good challenge. Keep in mind that this was the mid-80s: Japan appeared to be well on its way to becoming the dominant economic power of the 21st century. We know now, in retrospect, that Japan’s economy tripped and stumbled and has never really recovered, and China and India are now careening past it, but at the time it seemed that Japan might become an economic superpower at a minimum and THE economic superpower if everything fell right.

I decided to take Japanese. It was a new course at the University of Mississippi, where I went to school (yes, we had Japanese courses in Mississippi) – only one class was offered. So on registration day I woke up and strolled over to the registrar only to find that it had filled up in minutes and no slots were available. I was disappointed, but I still wanted to take a language. I thought Spanish might be useful, but boring (I didn’t care for French when I learned it – romance languages don’t appeal to me). I skipped through the catalog until I saw Russian and remembered my little project at the ISF four years earlier. And best of all, it was at 10 am so I could sleep late – back in college I had yet to discover the benefits of waking up early.

Russian was fantastic. The teacher was a guy straight out of PhD school, passionate about the subject and the culture. He invited his students to his home, showed us Russian movies, introduced us to actual Russians (quite the novelty in the Deep South in the 80s, let me tell you – we were in the midst of the cold war and that was amazing) and managed to get Russian food. I loved the intellectual challenge of the language – a different alphabet but more importantly a language completely removed from the European languages’ interrelationships.

So why was this a good financial move? I’ve already mentioned it in 8 steps to a six figure career, but here it is in a nutshell: it gives you instant credibility as a smart person (deserved or not). Employers and contacts and almost everyone I meet expresses shock that I can speak Russian, read it and write it. I don’t think it demonstrates much intelligence, personally. Language acquisition is more of an inborn skill, I think. But I do think that learning Russian demonstrated some intellectual curiosity and the fact that I stuck with it indicates some intellectual discipline. I have benefited hugely in my career from knowing Russian. It meant that I was plucked out of obscurity as a junior staff member of a Big 6 (now 4) accounting firm and hurled into the middle of the mid-90s Russian economic explosion. It opened up opportunities I would never have had as just another staff person.

But that’s not the biggest part of it. Without developing my Russian skills I wouldn’t have met, pursued and married my wife. Maybe if I had taken Japanese I would have lived in Japan, developed a fondness for all things Japanese. Hard to say. But I do know that the decision to learn Russian set in motion the life process that brought me to where I am today: with a wife who is focused on the same things I am, personally and financially. So that’s actually the single biggest reason why that was a great financial move.

So what was your best move?

friday quotes: improving on others

Steve — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 10:00:53 +0000

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.
Socrates

I sometimes feel that I’m improving on the work of others without actually contributing anything new of my own, because I read a lot. It’s not true, of course – this blog represents my thoughts and my writing, and I haven’t copied anyone’s thought processes (other than my own) in posting here. But I do feel from time to time that I’m just borrowing the ideas of others in posting.

I wrote recently about the importance of the creative act and about early acquisition of skills. I had that message reinforced strongly while watching an infinitely forgettable music video yesterday. It was a live video of a rock group. It was one of those “life on the road” videos showing them on the bus, setting up for the show, meeting the fans, yada yada yada. If you know me from reading the blog for a while you might guess it was in a foreign language, and you’d be right. But the moment that impressed me was when a young fan, standing in line for an autograph, finally met his “rock heroes” and shouted out in a foreign language that they didn’t understand that they were the central meaning of his life (loosely translated).

Now, I understand teenage hyperbole. I also understand media craziness – I’m sure the video was cut just so. But I was struck by the fact that this teenager was so influenced by this band that he told them they were the meaning of his life, knowing they didn’t speak his language. He leaned forward over the autograph table and gushed. He didn’t expect them to understand, he just wanted to thank them. Isn’t that another tribute to the power of the act of creating art?

I’d like to meet someone who doesn’t think that it would be fulfilling to create something that would prompt someone else to cry, hug, jabber when they met the author of that something. I’d love to be in that situation. I think most creative types would, too, and most non-creative types are just looking for a chance to do the same. It’s why we all post on Facebook. But if you want a chance to express yourself, just ask. There’s lots of people – like me – who are willing to help. The world needs more – not less – opinions!

aluminum boats

Steve — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 10:00:02 +0000

Here’s a quick and simple game for kids. Give them some aluminum foil – an equal amount for each kid. Tell them to design a boat, and then take the boats outside and float them in tubs of water. Start adding pennies to each boat, and see which boat can hold the most pennies before sinking.

The lesson which the kids will learn is that large, flat and wide boats float better with pennies in them than small, narrow and steep boats. I read about this game in my mom’s blog – she’s a gifted teacher for young kids and presents them with these challenges that are appropriate for young kids. I’d argue most older people would struggle with this challenge, too.

When I was substitute teaching as a gifted teacher back in college*, I executed a plan laid out by the teacher (who, coincidentally, was my mom): here’s an egg, here’s a lot of paper, let’s go to the second story and construct a device that will get the egg to the ground without breaking. It’s a tough challenge! But kids managed to do it every year.

You can give anyone a challenge. As a kid, it’s easy to rise to it – everything is new and you WANT, desperately, to overcome. You’re going to apply yourself and overcome it, because you’re excited to learn, to challenge, to overcome. I think most of lose that feeling over the years. A challenge becomes an irritant, not a possibility. You just want things to go away instead of wanting to beat them. I know I do from time to time.

But life is full of challenges, and to live life fully you have to attack those challenges with the assumption they are solvable. Otherwise, you’re just going to take the path of least resistance and end up disappointed and frustrated. Build a great aluminum boat, and watch it float.

*I was a substitute junior high teacher throughout college and a college instructor for 3 years – I fully intended to be a teacher, and I’ve taught hundreds of hours of classroom time. So I say I was “a teacher” although I was simply an itinerant member of the profession.

Steve Jobs – an obituary

Steve — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:00:07 +0000

I’m sure I’ve made it clear during the four years I’ve written here at brip blap that I’m no fan of Apple. I don’t like the pretentious nature of their advertising, their closed source software, or the fawning attention paid to their products that command a tiny percentage of the market. But when I learned of Steve Jobs’ passing yesterday, I realized that I did admire him. He created something that people love. He should be admired for that. How many of us have created things that others love passionately? I’d desperately love for brip blap to be admired as deeply as so many people admire Apple.

Steve Jobs was a brilliant man, but the thing I admire most about him was that he failed several times and kept coming back with greater success after each failure. Even though it’s legend now, think about it: he got fired from Apple, the company HE founded. He went from there to Pixar, a company you might have heard of, and then back to Apple, resurrecting them from near-irrelevance.

By all accounts he was a good person, creative, and even though I’ve never loved his products, I’ll miss him. Rest in peace, Steve.

Here are three great quotes from his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.“

And the best quote – which reflects the largest part of the aspirational goals of my life going forward:

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.