Once you have an understanding of your own mortality, you either try to ignore it or you think about ways to avoid it. Ignoring it is easy for most people; the drone of American Idol or the smell of another Big Mac are probably all defense mechanisms against awareness of the end.  Avoiding it is tougher, although the most popular solution (reproduction) is easy for most people.  Feeling that part of you will live on in your descendants is a good defense against that self-knowledge.  I found it was an oddly comforting thing which I didn’t expect when having children.  That feeling intensified as I started passing down stories about my deceased relatives to my kids; you’re almost performing some sort of Matrix-like implantation of memories into the next generation.  The memories will fade away generation by generation, but the increasing ease of creating near-permanent media (pictures, videos and so on) provide the cues to spark those memories.

Setting the question of whether children satisfy the desire for pseudo-immortality, you have to turn and look at Stonehenge. Some people got together a long time ago and said “let’s build something.”  We don’t know exactly why, although it was probably some sort of place of worship or sacrifice or celebration.  But we do know someone built it, and in a way the builders put some small part of themselves into that structure which is still sitting there.

Not everyone will build Stonehenge or paint the Mona Lisa. Not everyone will even go to the effort to trace their family tree more than 100 years into the past.  Many people won’t care, and retreat to ignorance.  Many people will care, and cling to their children as proof ‘they’ will live on forever.  Many people will turn to religion and the promise of an afterlife, but even if true it will still be a different life from the life they know.  The happiest people, I think, will build.

Most of us are terrible at building our Stonehenge. I have not created anything of much permanence yet in this life.  I have not built anything, or written anything of any significance, or started anything I expect to last much past my time here.    I suppose I could prepay hosting fees to Godaddy.com for the next 100 years and hope they stay in business and bripblap.com would be here for a while.  But I haven’t started a company, or written music or a novel.

And this is why I try to remind myself to focus on creativity. It’s easy to get up, go to work, eat a sandwich, come home, watch TV and go to sleep.  I’ve been doing more of that than I should, recently.  Doing nothing is a comforting white noise masking the lack of creation in day-to-day life.  Small changes can make a difference.  Even planting a few seeds will make you feel better than your favorite TV show.  Stonehenge wasn’t built in day; the builders must have missed entire seasons of “Druid Idol.”  But we know they were here.  How will people know you were here?

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stonehenge is an original article from the website brip blap.

I want to take a simple example. If your parents paid for your college education, do you have an obligation to pay for your children’s college education, or does the “college education obligation” reset at zero each generation? One line of thinking would be that it is a gift, given by your parents to you. You have no obligation to pass on the gift. Another line of thinking would be that you are selfishly failing to repay the assistance you received.

To complicate it even further, what if you think it’s a mistake? What if your grandparents put themselves through college, paid for your parents, who then didn’t pay for you because they thought their grandparents came out better for working their way through college? I know that may be a bit of a stretch, but it’s possible. But by increasing the “generational obligation” are you increasing expectations unreasonably?

A college education is one thing, but take material items. I was given a brand-new car as a high school graduation present. Does that mean I owe my children new cars? Should I only give it to them, if, like I did, they receive full scholarships to college (and therefore didn’t need any of the money that my grandparents and parents had thought I might for school)?

I don’t plan to buy my kids ‘fancy’ cars or send them to school. Plans change, of course, as do circumstances. But the concept of a generational contract – something that is owed – is odd when you think of it, because in a sense you have no choice in it, and due to your own circumstances you may not have the ability to live up to your obligation. Even if my parents had paid for me to go to a private college (say, $10,000 per year at the time) I am not sure I would be able to do the same for my children – if in 18 years the same school would cost $40,000 per year. Or more.

In the best circumstances, people love their families and will do anything for them. But does that mean giving up career choices? A choice of a place to live? If you have ailing parents in the future and they refused to move, would you give up following your career or even just living in a place of your choosing to stay near to them? If your parents raised you in a particular religion or ethnic culture, do you have an obligation to at least introduce it to your children?

I can imagine that some people look at the level of obligation implied by children and get a little queasy thinking about everything they will owe to them. It’s not the first thing you think about in regards to children, but it is one of the things to consider. And your parents (and other older relatives) will rely on you when they are older for support and care and even “continuing the family traditions.” In some senses, one of the hardest things may be to break these expectations – to not raise the kids Catholic, or tell your parents you are moving to California when they don’t want to leave their home in Chicago. Knowing what your choice will be in these types of situations, before you have to make it, is probably worth considering.

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our debt to the future and past is an original article from the website brip blap.

Can citizens in western societies strive for wealth at the same time society tries to be ‘fair’? Let me give you a few situations, and in each case think whether society is being ‘fair.’  Fair is a loaded word, but just assume for the time being it means that all people have equal outcomes for similar actions.

1. A college graduate, well-educated about personal finance and the economy, decides to burn through everything they earn right now, saying “Why save for later? I’ll have fun now and hell with consequences.” Should society be responsible for his medical care and living expenses when he is 70 and can no longer work or care for himself adequately?  If someone chooses to smoke and doesn’t insure himself, does society owe him health care?
2. A child is born with 50 different health problems (heart, congenital diseases, you name it). The cost of keeping that child alive is monumental, exceeding even the most generous insurance benefits. The cost of keeping that child alive cripples not only the family but put a strain on the local doctors, etc. who effectively donate their time to treat her. What if the cost of keeping that child alive until she’s 25 will be astronomical, and that cost could immunize or treat hundreds or thousands of children who need it? What obligation does society have to help this child at the expense of others?
3. Taxes on earned income in America (wages, etc.) are significantly higher for the middle class than for someone in the lower class (more than 40 percent of the US population pays no income taxes). Many people feel that is unfair (depending on your political and economic perspective). However, someone who lives off earnings from investments may pay 15% or less on their earnings, significantly less than a middle-class married couple who work as employees. Is it fair that employees – most of the middle class – pay a disproportionate share? And would it be fair to tax investors (“the rich”) more, but not tax the poor and middle class more?

Those are just a few examples of how a wealth-building society can be unfair. You have your own reactions to the scenarios above. Here are mine:

1. I detest this attitude. His attitude will take money out of my pocket when he is older. But in western society, particularly in the US, the care and treatment of the elderly, the ill and those simply unfit to care for themselves  are often left to the state. Should we have means testing for these people? “You didn’t get a decent job with good health insurance and keep your health up in your younger years, so to hell with you now that you’re old and have heart trouble? Live on the street because you didn’t save up.”  As much as we might growl that in a moment of anger, I doubt anyone is prepared to see these people sleeping on the streets.
2. I knew a child like this. She was a lovely, happy and intelligent child who suffered from an incurable genetic condition that meant her chances of living to be a teenager – much less an adult – were minimal. I knew her years and years ago and I have no idea what happened to her. The logical line to take would be to say “no, society has to follow the principles of the herd and Darwin and the devil take the hindmost” or “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one,” but unless you are a serial killer, devoid of emotion, it is impossible to meet children like her and not imagine society moving heaven and earth to care for her. Even if the chances of her living to be an adult are slim, she deserves her chance at whatever life she can have. My higher insurance premiums that may have resulted from that? Please.
3. I am routinely infuriated by taxes. I am, however, not an adherent to the “no taxes” philosophy; a society that provides public services like police, postal services, libraries and a military has to raise revenues. They may not be spent wisely, but I can’t throw out the $800 screwdrivers with the public libraries – there will be good and bad. But I do realize that the unfairness in the system – the loopholes, the imbalance in taxation which favors investing income over wage income – may not benefit me now but it will when I am financially free. I plan to be one of the people living off my investments, earning no wage income and avoiding my fair share of taxes. So if I want to build wealth, why should I rail against this system? I intend for it to benefit me in the end. So I throw myself into battle against my 1040 again this year, struggling forward in anticipation of crossing the financial finish line. If I finish it – against the relatively daunting odds, considering I have no singing talent, ball-shooting ability or parents named Hilton – will I become a “raise my taxes to even things out activist”? Er, no.

Fairness is an overused (and misused) word. There is no fairness in a free, capitalist society, nor – when you stop to consider it – does anyone want complete fairness. Inequalities in the system are what allow wealth to be built, or care to be given to the exceptional, or even to allow for the occasional idiot. A fair society would not allow elderly poverty, but it would not allow for financial freedom, either – it would demand equality of outcomes. It would not have plastic surgery for starlets, but it would also not have medical treatment for children dying of expensive incurable diseases. A fair society would increase the burden of taxation on everyone without increasing benefits for the most needy. Human society being what it is, the concept of fairness will always remain just that – a concept. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

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is life fair? is an original article from the website brip blap.

By Curmudgeon

You may have read on Steve’s blog a few weeks ago that I spent time in the hospital for a potentially life-threatening condition.  It was my first time overnight stay in a hospital since I had my tonsils removed, almost forty years ago.

It was a seminal moment in my life; I had never had a health scare before, and as such things go, this one was fairly serious. Among the contributing factors where the stresses of my day job, which at extreme levels can produce damaging enzymes that wreak havoc with internal organs.  My typical work week over the last two years lasted eighty hours, including weekends.  I did too much, drank too much, and kept my stresses inside, until my body cried enough.

Steve has a wonderful post that first attracted me to his site – 8 Steps to a Six-Figure Career. Through my day jobs, freelancing, and independent consulting, I’ve made six figures since 1992.  Last month, I suddenly came to the realization that a six-figure income was a poor goal to strive for if it were killing me to achieve it.

So I quit the day job, which was the source of 80 percent of my income. I am now entirely dependent upon independent project work for my income.  I don’t know how I want to spend the next ten or fifteen years of my working life, but I do know that it’s not going to be as an office slave, working for The Man.  My plan is to spend at least through the middle of next year working on discrete projects no more than forty hours a week, until I figure out what I want my future to look like.

In one way, it is easier for me than most people. I never got into the race to have the most toys (well, I did own a classic Corvette, years ago), and year after year saved around a third of my gross income.  Money is not a problem, although I would prefer keeping the portfolio largely intact until later in life.

However, in other ways it is more difficult. Unlike Steve, I don’t have a discrete and definable set of skills in a single recognized field.  Over the last 20 years, I’ve had a number of different jobs in several very different career fields.  No recruiter would touch me for contract or permanent work.

Also, I am not a sales person. My social skills are probably below average, and while I have to spend a lot of my time interacting with others, it takes a bit of energy and focus on my part.  Yet I have to market my difficult-to-define services, write proposals (I’d always undervalued my independent work when I didn’t have to make a living off it), and close deals.

Well, a month later, it seems to be working out just fine. It turns out that I know more people than I thought, and others are reaching out to me with offers of projects.  I have several thousand dollars worth of short term projects over the next month, and later in January begin a medium term contract that by itself should make up for most of my forsaken income, while working far fewer hours.

Even though it puts me on the road for another possible six-figure income in 2010, it’s not a goal, or even a desire.  In planning the tradeoffs of your life, don’t trade off your health for money.  It’s a bad deal.

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Assessing What is Important in Your Life is an original article from the website brip blap.

I saw the movie “The Bucket List” and, to put it charitably, I sneered. It was a tear-jerker, a four-hankie sobfest and I didn’t care for the moralistic tone.  Yet the more I thought about it, I wondered why it was such a bad idea, despite the silly movie.  Why shouldn’t we have a bucket list?

Depending on what day of the week you catch me on, I’ll have one of three ideas about the reason for human life:

1. Continuation of the species (with the admittedly naive caveat that it should be continued AND improved, not just continued)
2. Creation of art, exploration of the universe and better understanding of humanity (and all life).
3. Maximization of one’s own self-development (ideally for the benefit of all but ultimately for your own benefit).

#1 and #2 aren’t easy – but #3 is a bear. I’m not even going to link to it, but if you visit Steve Pavlina’s blog and read about his experiment with polyamory (extending love to other people not your spouse) you’ll see that you can make things very difficult for the ones you love in the name of “self-development.”  If you go off to meditate on the mountain for a year, fine, but if you have three kids, or a sick parent, or a dog, then maybe self-development’s a bit selfish in the short run.

Be that as it may, I think that you can’t neglect any one of these three reasons without a little bit of loss. You don’t have to have kids, for example, to help with reason #1 but you should put some effort into the betterment of mankind “after you.”  You don’t have to create art or discover Planet X, but you ought to somehow move humanity’s knowledge forward to support #2.  And you don’t have to become a self-centered ass to address point #3, but you ought to spend a little bit of time on making yourself a bit better than you were a day/week/year ago.

My bucket list is ill-formed. I have a few things that I have always dreamed of, which probably sound tedious…but they are mine…

1. I’d like to visit the Forbidden City. Despite being a frenetic world traveler, I’ve never been to China, a country I’ve read about endlessly.  Why?  Dunno.  I have no racial/ancestral/etc. connections to China, but I’ve always been curious about it.  Singapore’s the closest I’ve been.
2. I’d like to visit the Gobi Desert. No reason, other than wanting to see it.  I’ve been to Siberia already, so you’d think I’d have had my share of desolate areas, but no.   I would like to stand in the desert and proclaim that these three things are best in life:  to vanquish your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women (bonus points for identifying the pop culture reference).
3. I’d like to write a book. Why?  Because I like to think of myself as the type of person who could write a book.
4. I’d like to run a marathon.  I am in horrible running shape (although I still bike long distances).  I know I could do it, though – when I was running on a frenetic basis I could run half-marathons without much effort.
5. I’d like to see my grandchildren (not as much of a given as it might be for other, younger, parents – I’ll be 74 when Little Buddy is the same age as I was when I had my first child).  Small thing, but then again, a big thing.
6. I want to visit Bubelah’s childhood home in the former Soviet Union. And I want to take my kids to Moscow.  Why?  Because that city almost screams with history, both personal and global.
7. I’d like to take care of Bubelah in her 80s (no small accomplishment since then I’d be in my 90s).  That’s a bucket list item that’s almost in the bucket, just not quite..

etc.

Anybody can put together a travel list, and it’s odd that most “bucket lists” I see are highly concentrated on travel and skydiving. I could give less of a hoot about skydiving/surfing/etc. – that’s just not me.  Other “must do’s” aren’t on my list, either.  I don’t have much desire, for example, to read “Crime and Punishment.”  I’d LIKE to be the type of person who had that on my bucket list, but I’ve started that damn book a half dozen times and every time I fall asleep before I’ve hit the 100th page.

One thing I do know is that although some of the bucket list items don’t require a dime to accomplish, many of them require a fair million dimes to accomplish. Money’s not necessary to buy happiness, but if you want to visit China with kids (i.e. hostels and super-budget travel being out of the question), money’s going to make the journey easier.

So while I’m not the guy who’s going to sniffle if I never parasail or eat monkey brains (had the chance, took a pass), I do think I’d benefit from making a list and starting to check it off.  Maybe I’ll start today. Maybe you should, too.

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the bucket list is an original article from the website brip blap.

Who doesn’t like to sit around and daydream? I daydream about going on a cruise again. The fact that I daydream about cruises surprises me a bit: I like to think of myself as an adventurous traveler and cruising is not the same as hiking the Gobi. Another person who might be surprised is Bubelah, who probably thinks that I’ve become allergic to vacations since we’ve had kids. But it’s my daydream, and although I can direct my thoughts towards visiting Suzdal, I guess I’m the guy with black socks, sneakers and a t-shirt that says “My wife is a Parrothead, too.”

It’s just a mental break.

Most corporate offices don’t allow access to Gmail or Facebook or, well, anything related to life on the web in the 21st century. I understand, because they’d like to imagine that your “outside” life slams shut the second you walk in the door. The same boss that expects you to check emails “in case of an emergency” while you’re on vacation would turn around and fire you for taking a few minutes a day to send an email from your Hotmail account to your sister who’s going in for a root canal. Such is life.

I tried getting around this mindset once in a while by carrying my little Asus EEE with me to work and taking my lunch at the local Einstein Brothers. I don’t NEED to check email that frequently but taking myself off the clock for a walk to a pleasant little shop with wifi and bagels and some muted jazz is a nice break from flickering fluourescent lights and Outlook. Eating a bagel melt (turkey, tomato and cheddar) with iced green tea and checking in on Brizzly, Disqus and yes, Gmail, is a moment of fun in an otherwise boring-yet-profitable day. And no, I don’t charge the client, although I should: they benefit from me being sharper, less distracted and more alert after going for a nice brisk walk in summerlike mid-October Florida.

It’s a mental break.

Like most parents, I’ve gotten bored with all but the most charming children’s books from time to time. I’ve made up a continuing series of stories revolving around the land of Vegetaria (where Mr. Potato and Ms. Carrot deal with the bumbling-and-grumpy Mayor Pickle, and occasionally visit the Black Castle, home of the Smurfs). I also frequently tell stories about the Big Bad Wolf, who has adventures ranging from the mundane (a light is burnt out! time to go to the light store and ask the Grumpy Old Troll what kind of light bulb we need!) to the weird (he takes a blimp to the clouds and has a picnic in front of the Castle-in-the-Clouds).

It’s a mental break – for me.

What does it mean?

I don’t think of myself as being that creative, but I can tell a children’s story like nobody’s business – off the top of my head.

I don’t think of myself as being subject to the same mental flagellation as a corporate employee – and I give myself permission not to act like one.

I think of myself as one type of person – but when I let my mind wander I’m not that kind of person.

When I let my mind go to the person I am instead of the person I sometimes mistakenly force myself to think I am.

That’s cool.

photo by Darren Shilson

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the cruise, the bagel and the black castle is an original article from the website brip blap.

I know I’ve said this before, but I’ve never had any debt in my life other than a mortgage and a one-time, ill-advised car loan that I paid off three years early. I have taken advantage of “0% down until 2011″ types of offers, but I’ve always taken the money needed to pay for the item, set it aside and treated it as if it was already spent. I just don’t do debt.

Would you seek advice from a guy who’s been skinny his whole life – about dieting? I guess you might. Plenty of people are “experts” in things they’ve never experienced. It’s not a prerequisite for dieticians to be a formerly obese person. Conversely, a formerly obese person might not be the best person to ask about dieting. For all you know, they got a gastric band and lost weight without ever learning self-discipline.

Would you take ‘get out of debt’ advice from someone who’s never been in debt? Or career advice from someone who’s always been a career coach and never actually held down a job? Can someone actually be a high school guidance counselor if they’ve never been anything but a high school guidance counselor?

I’d like to think I’m an expert in quite a few things. The guys on CNBC and writing at the Wall Street Journal might also like you to think they are experts. Maybe they are. Maybe I am. I have never taken a course in personal finance. Maybe they haven’t, either. Certification helps – CPA, JD, etc. – but often we assume people are experts because of the way they talk, or dress or because other people tell us they are. But let’s assume we’re talking about “real” experts – people who do understand a particular subject.

Why are experts smarter than we are? They aren’t. They spent more time on a subject, studied more, worked harder or even just experienced something sooner than we did. I can give advice on getting out of debt but I’ve never done it myself. I can talk about the procedures anyone needs to take to get out of debt: stop incurring new debt, spend less than you earn, start paying down the debts and then (optionally) learn how to earn more. Can I talk about the psychology of ‘getting out of debt?’ Freezing the credit cards or cutting them up seems almost childish to me, but I realize that to many people it’s a moment of victory, of success. Someone who’s been thin all their lives might look at my advice on weight loss and think “sheesh, why didn’t he just put down the damn Doritos before he got so fat?” It’s not that easy.

Finding an expert therefore becomes a struggle. In money, should you trust Dave Ramsey, Robert Kiyosaki or Suze Orman, very successful people who are, in part, trying to make money off their advice? Should you trust bloggers, who trudge along the same streets as you? Or CNBC reporters who entertain while they analyze? The ability to trust is different from person to person. By nature, I’m cynical and tend not to trust. By profession (auditor), I tend not to trust.

The lesson: the only expert in your own life is you. If you are lucky, you have trusted advisors without agendas who want to help you: spouses, relatives, friends, teachers or colleagues. At the end of the day, though, don’t assume that someone who isn’t in your shoes can tell you how to lose weight or succeed at work or get out of debt. Take some responsibility for making yourself into an expert.

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how to make yourself an expert is an original article from the website brip blap.

When I started blogging, I took great pains to obscure many of the facts about my identity. For some reason many personal finance bloggers seem to prefer anonymity, and I saw no reason to buck the mold. A few choose to disclose a lot. The longer I have written, though, the more it’s become clear to me that there are very few successful anonymous bloggers and writers (although there are some). I’ve discussed this in a previous post.

But one of the side effects of my decreasing state of anonymity has been a chilling effect on my ability to write about my current (or even recent) client workplaces, robbing me of something that had been a rich source of material at times. I don’t think it’s a great loss – in some senses it’s a relief, since some of those articles tended to the negative – but I have struggled a bit to come up with writing.

There are other subjects I won’t go into as I’ve made the blog more personal and less anonymous: politics, family and religion. Politics is a tough area to avoid. I’ve seen other bloggers claim not to be interested or not to care, but if you’re blogging about personal finance, politics is interwoven into every single thing you write. If I’m talking about my desire for a public health care option, I don’t think anyone’s going to be confused about where my politics are on that issue. If I’m talking about my opposition to the stimulus or cash-for-clunkers, though, I muddy the issue. And you know what I take out of that? Better to stick to specifics instead of trumpeting support for Senator Payola or Governor Sexscandal. I have my strong opinions, but I can express them without touting a party line.

Religion, again, goes without saying. I know (and respect) several Christian personal finance bloggers. I would like to say I know several Jewish or Buddhist or Muslim personal finance bloggers, but I haven’t really come across anyone who evangelizes their views of personal finance using religion. I haven’t seen anything like “Non-Church-Going Personal Finance” or “The Atheist (or Agnostic) Dollar.” It might just be that those types of people don’t want to blurt that out, or they don’t associate their religion with their finances. But since I consider myself agnostic, at best, I don’t see much point in potentially alienating some and giving a false sense of kinship to others.

Family is also tricky. I include almost anyone related to me in this category: in-laws, distant aunts and uncles, Bubelah, the kids. I’m not dooce. I never wanted this blog to be “Steve’s family life blog.” You can throw friends in this category, too. I have strong feelings about family, children and friends and how they interact in one’s life. I have religious relatives. I have relatives who have drastically different political views. I have relatives who simply don’t want to be mentioned on a public forum like this blog.

By taking some of the big issues in my life off the table I hit a brick wall for a while. I’m trying to regain my feet, but I think I have a valuable lesson to learn out of all of this, and maybe it helps to share it. I’ll demonstrate via an anecdote from a conversation I’ve had three times recently, twice with coworkers and once with Bubelah. We were discussing children, and how they make life more fun but at the same time start causing tremendous stress in terms of care: the need to feed and clothe and educate and protect little humans. They take away so much free time that it’s easy to start thinking they interfere with your personal development. They don’t. I guarantee that everyone, no matter how busy with kids and work and life, has time to improve themselves. You can drop to the floor and do 5 pushups. You can read a self-help book while you’re in the bathroom. You can eat something healthy for lunch. Kids don’t make you stop doing all of that: you do.

How does that relate to life? It’s easy to write about your own experience. Hell, a lot of writers make that their entire career. It’s easy to look within, especially if you write on an anonymous blog. That’s not to say that anonymous writing is bad or dishonest. But as you identify yourself, you have to reexamine not only what you write about, but how you write. If you become a small business owner, you have to put yourself out there more than you do as employee #4369 at MegaCorp. That’s a kind of transparency. Every time you put YOU out there instead of an surrogate you’re forced to change.

stunning photo by AMagill

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side effects of transparency is an original article from the website brip blap.

This is my first 9-11 away from New York, which brings an odd sense of relief and loss. I won’t sit here and write that it was an ennobling experience for me.  Nor is it one that is lessened by the passage of time.  It was awful, and time won’t change that.  I can still see the first tower fall while I was watching it, standing in the penthouse of my office tower in midtown.  I can still remember the phone calls that almost had the sense of goodbyes that I made to family and friends – the promises that I would seek out and take care of my little brother and the awful, grinding, as yet unchanged sense that everything was now changed for the worse.  I can still remember looking up at the fighter jets roaring over Manhattan, and the dust choking our lungs as we walked through streets empty of cars.  The American story, as it was up to that point, had turned a page.  Year after year, I’ve felt the same.

Being gone I still feel a pang, and maybe it’s even a little bit worse this year.  I still remember the sense of violated privilege – we’re Americans, you assholes!  How can you do this to US!  We are New York.  Suddenly I’m not part of that we anymore.  It’s almost bizarre to think of the way I thought that somehow – even after my years of living in Russia amidst the cowardly terrorist attacks there – that America was above it all, and that New York should have been even further above it all.  Well, wrong.  We weren’t special, and I wasn’t special.  Our country and city – like countless others – was nothing more than a victim.

So I don’t know how I feel. It’s been eight years, a long time in a lifespan.  In the grand scheme of things, I’ll cynically say it’s not a statistically big deal.  Natural disasters and wars have killed many, many more people than were killed on 9/11.  But it’s still there in my memory, harsher and more real than Katrina or tsunamis or the Iraq war.  I still remember walking near ground zero a few day after 9/11, covering my mouth, picking up trash, crying at “have you seen…” posters.  I still remember the Salvation Army and the outpouring of help from every corner of the city.  It’s not the kind of thing you’d set aside very easily, or quickly.  It hurts me that it turned into such a sideshow under the ‘leadership’ of a cynical and devious child of privilege in the years afterward.  It still hurts me that we don’t have a decent memorial to that day, too, despite politicians’ mewlings about making a proper tribute.  Do it now.

Leave it at this:  it was awful, nothing will ever make it less awful. I’m still sad about it and no doubt you are too.  I don’t think I’ll spend a day for the rest of my life in early September without thinking of a clear, beautiful morning that started with such promise, and ended in such horror for so many. It’s still fitting to weep.

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated…As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness….No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” – John Donne, Meditation XVII

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and once again, forced to reflect on that day is an original article from the website brip blap.

Maybe it’s one of the celebrities: Suze, Dave, Donald, Robert.  Maybe it’s a historical figure:  Washington, Peter the Great, Salk.  Maybe it’s a sports figure or a business leader.  Maybe you can even point to someone less well-known like a community leader or a charitable great.  We all have someone whose success – no matter in what area – we admire.  The problem comes when you spend so much time studying and thinking about others’ success and give up on your own.

It doesn’t take long on the internet to find dozens of different takes on the ‘right’ way to achieve success. Try ‘make money without a job‘ or ‘lose weight fast‘ or any one of a number of subjects.  I’d argue that research in any area becomes counterproductive in a hurry.  Listening, for example, to Suze AND Dave is overkill.  The basic information comes through from either of them.  If your formula for success is to listen to Trump or Orman, though, you’ll have to make a quick decision, because in many ways the two are incompatible.  That ability to sort through the crap – in a hurry – is what makes you either successful or merely a success junkie.

Look at finance. I had a bit of a revelation about finance (along with a few other subjects) a few days ago.  Personal finance can cover a million subjects:  Roth IRA versus Traditional IRA is a good example of quibbling at the edges.  I imagine a lot of people spend a lot of time on spreadsheets and reading up on the requirements before tentatively taking the leap one way or the other.  For most of us, that time is not time well-spent.  Whatever time you save trying to identify the highest online savings rate bank, for example, is time you could have spent trying to earn more (or spending more time on your family, or charity, etc. – whatever has the most value for you).

Robert Kiyosaki has great advice for getting out of debt. Yes, Mr. Rich Dad.  I forget which book it was, but the advice seemed far more relevant than all of the strategies I’ve heard from the get-out-of-debt gurus.  His advice?  Loosely phrased, figure out how much money you need to pay for essentials:  food, shelter, transportation.  Then go online, set up automatic payments equal to your net income less the essentials, and have those payments go to your debt.  Then go out and figure out how to make more money.  Get a promotion, a better job, start a side business, etc.  Earn more than you spend.

In accordance with the Pareto Principle, I can usually identify a single action that will help me reach a goal far faster than the next four actions might. Example?  Losing weight.  You can try lots of fancy diets, read dozens of books, or you can take a simple, direct action:  stop eating meat.  Stop eating bread.  Stop eating something.  Worry about tinkering and fiddling later.

Some people will decide they want to get fit by getting online, looking up area gyms, calling around for a good price, going out and buying workout gear, scheduling a babysitter or taking time off work, waiting for a weekend and so on.  You know what someone who really wants to get fit does? Drops down on the floor right now and does pushups. Some people will launch a business by researching cool names, agonizing over an LLC, trying to assemble long lists of customers, networking and ordering business cards.  Others will start working on a product first, then worry about all that other stuff later – after they have revenues locked in.  Which kind of person do you want to be?

I think tremendous value can be identified from the stories of successful people. I’ve gained a lot of understanding of the qualities necessary to succeed from reading, and one quality is an inquisitive mind that is open to all knowledge – but that mind is also ready to throw out the junk ideas in a hurry, too.  I can assure you that almost anyone you know who is successful – and again, I’m talking about success in a broad sense, from relationships to finance to fitness to spirituality – doesn’t worry too much about preparation.  A success junkie, on the other hand, doesn’t really want to succeed.  He just wants to watch others succeed.  He sits on the sidelines and waits for his chance.  The secret? The chance is always there – it’s waiting for you, you aren’t waiting for it.

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are you a success junkie? is an original article from the website brip blap.