Tag: success

4 quick steps to building wealth

1. Find something you can do well and (at least moderately) enjoy doing.*
2. Do it.**
3. Try to save some of the money you make doing it.***
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3.****

I think that may be it. What do you think?


Creative Commons License photo credit: woodleywonderworks

* Notice I didn’t use a phrase like “doing passionately” or “doing because you love it.” You don’t have to love it, but you have to enjoy doing it enough that it is not annoying to you. If you love helping people, maybe working as a nurse’s assistant is enjoyable. If you have a passion for music, maybe owning a record store would be fun. If you have a love of football, maybe being a sports writer is enough. You don’t have to be Brett Favre, always “having fun out there.”

**It helps, obviously, if you enjoy investment banking or building fantastic dot-com startups instead of making rag dolls for the neighborhood kids. However, I don’t think you can discount loving doing it. If you want to make rag dolls, figure out a way to get rich doing it. Launch a rag doll company, or write a how-to on the internet. Somebody got rich on Cabbage Patch Kids, after all.

***As I’ve pointed out before several times you’re always better off thinking of more ways to MAKE money than SPEND money. At the same time, UNLESS you are investing in your wealthbuilding (spending money to increase your skills or education or to grow a business, etc.) you’re better off spending no more than 99% of your income. The difference between spending 99% of your income and 101% of your income is the difference between getting richer and getting poorer, any way you look at it.

****I hope that the general theme of wealth and ‘becoming rich’ doesn’t always come off as a crass pursuit of one more dollar. I realize, for example, I might have made a lot more money continuing to claw up the corporate ladder, but I felt so drained and lifeless doing it that I had to quit (see step #1). I like the idea of doing something more-or-less enjoyable, while making money doing it. It may sound childish, but if you work hard at something that makes you miserable you have to wonder whether you’ll be able to continue doing it well enough to succeed. Something you like doing - even something you just TOLERATE doing - is a better option. If you become wealthy doing it, so much the better; life is easier when you have a little money in the bank.

from homelessness to success

From Peter King’s Sports Illustrated Monday Morning Quarterback column several weeks ago, I’ve got a little piece of the article pulled out for a random article here on brip blap, and I don’t know if the fact it’s a football-related piece will appeal or repel … but give it a chance and enjoy, anyway.

 

If you weren’t rooting for the interim San Francisco coach against Arizona in the meaningless game of the weekend, you should have been. He was the defensive line coach of the Niners when Mike Singletary got fired last week, and when the Niners picked him to finish out the final game of the season, all of the Bay Area asked, "Who’s he?” A football junkie, that’s who, who never took no for an answer to a career he just had to have.

Looking for a coaching job when an assistant strength coach job at Charleston Southern dried up in 1995, he moved home to Pittsburgh. No football team was hiring. He cleaned floors at a department store, then worked as a sales rep for a food distributor. Hired as a lowly volunteer assistant at Catawba (N.C.) in 1997, he sold carpeting to get by and lived in his car because he couldn’t afford housing. Hs reputation as a defensive line technician got him a gig in NFL Europe, which he held ’til 2006. The Niners hired him for Mike Nolan’s staff in 2007. "I’m a football coach,” he said last week. "I’m Jim Nobody from Nowhere. I keep my spoon in my soup. I don’t eat anybody else’s soup. I just do my job.”

West Coast scribes heard a collection of those gems last week. The Niners consider him a long-termer, and they hope the next coach hires him to stay on. It was fun to watch him Sunday. The FOX cameras caught him smiling more than the rest of the coaches in the league smiled all season, collectively. And his team-for-a-game rewarded him with a 38-7 rout of the Cards, many players hugging him afterward, thrilled for him. "At least they didn’t throw me in the trash can,” he said.

Pressed to talk about how he felt and what was going through the mind of a guy who lived in his car for weeks so that he could VOLUNTEER to coach football, he said, "It was just — that was just football, and you see those guys with smiles on their faces, and that’s — pure football, and just playing football and having fun and going through, you know … One football game is like an entire life. The ups, the downs, the turns, the curves, you know, you go through all of these things through a whole game and the team has to do it together and stay together, you know. So, I’d really just like to talk about what these guys accomplished today."

I thought that was an awesome piece from King.  It’s easy to get weepy for these "extreme" stories of last-to-first, and why not?  We loved the ’91 Braves, the ’99 Rams, the Paul Potts; all of the people who came from nowhere to become famous or successful.  It appeals to the best desires, I think, in most of us – to see people improve their lot in life, to hope for the same ourselves and (I hope) to generally rejoice in the success of others.  Let us hope.

how to become a successful consultant

I’ve preached the gospel of “going it alone” for years on this blog, and I stick by it. I’ve seen far too many of my colleagues hung out to dry by the corporations they work for to think that being an employee is a good career path. But being a consultant has one ugly secret, deep down at its core: in order to be a successful consultant (monetarily, not actually effective) requires that you first spend your time in the dirty, ugly trenches as an employee.

I’d like to say it isn’t true. I’d like to think a really gifted, talented person with an eye for change could leap out of college and start helping people as a consultant. I’d like to think that the tools for communication would naturally be there for some of these people: comfort speaking in front of large groups, the ability to write clearly and directly, the personal confidence to sell products and relate to decision makers without trepidation.

In my experience: nope, doesn’t happen.

I’m a good public speaker. I can sell. I can work a technical presentation and apply complex principles to difficult problems. I couldn’t have done any of this, in my opinion, without the years in the trench: the years I spent hammering away, unrewarded, at Big 4 firms and multinational corporations. What they gave me was, at the same time, invaluable and a curse. They let me work hard. They put me in front of very senior management or executives at clients before I might have been ready to deal with them. They asked me to navigate politics, presentations, negotiations and calculations without a net. I sweated a lot of 11 pm nights at the office working on presentations so I’d be relaxed and able to throw them off without much trouble today.

If you’d like to be a consultant - a REAL consultant - with a grasp of your subject and the sort of calm, unhurried patience you see in the most polished advice-givers, let me give you a tip: spend a decade getting your brains beaten in by a consulting firm or a corporation. There’s no better training for confidence than to have your confidence challenged, pushed and tortured for years. It’s sad but true. If you work out, the true muscle-building activity takes place on the rep where you “fail” - the rep where you can’t lift the weights one more time. That’s the point at which new muscle mass - scars, really - build up your muscles and increase your strength. Being pushed to prepare that presentation or asked to analyze that acquisition on short notice is what will make you a better consultant.

There is no shortcut. When I was hiring for a multinational corporation, I didn’t look to independent consultants two years out of MBA school. I looked to the Big 4 and other consulting firms. Why? Not because I had any love lost for them (I didn’t, at all) and not because they had the best prices or even the best people. I did it because I knew these were people who had been pushed since day 1 at their firms to fail. The “upwards or out” mentality is useful even if you’re not in a corporate position. You’re either increasing your skills and widening your contact pool or you’re heading out. This is the philosophy of the Big 4. Up or out. It makes sense, even while it’s a sad way to live.

So if you think about becoming a consultant, think about putting in a long time in your chosen profession as an employee first. Get that job at an engineering firm, or hospital, or accounting firm, or whatever. Make sure you can cut it. Once you’ve stopped failing, or struggling, maybe you’re ready to sell yourself as a consultant. Just don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that there is no job bigger than you or tougher than you; as a consultant, you have to be constantly aware that eventually “the one” project will arrive where you can’t quite keep up. And that’s when those ugly skills and pathetic abilities - staying up late and working while everyone else is out at the local bar - will come in handy.

wealth and intelligence


When most of us were younger, we were told to do well in school - make good grades, impress the teachers in order to get good recommendations, do extra credit. Scoring well on the ACT or SAT meant a lot. Proving that you were smarter than the average bear somehow indicated future success. Yet intelligence isn’t always a marker of success - at least success as measured by wealth. Wealth is not, of course, the only measure of success - far from it - but it is a measure accepted by our society as at least a general measure of overall success.

Intelligent people are often gripped by what I’d call (technically) “smart people stupids.” If you’re an intelligent person, it’s quite easy to imagine a variety of outcomes to any given set of circumstances. If A happens, then B or C or even D might occur. Wondering whether “slim chance event D” might occur can drive an intelligent person nuts - you might sit around wondering how you would deal with situation D; would reaction D.1.1 be appropriate, or D.1.2? How will this affect you 15 years from now?

Over the last ten years I’ve started to believe that intelligence - at least as far as the ability to imagine future events based on current circumstance - can be a crippling factor in the pursuit of wealth (and happiness). Someone who doesn’t have the ability to imagine positive outcome X may also be able to avoid thinking about negative outcome Y - and therefore be freed from worrying about the result of their actions. Worrying about the future is a heavy burden; not worrying about the future would be liberating for most of us.

I know people who don’t worry - like I do - about long-term wealth. They assume that they will have “made their nut” at some point - whenever they make it. Whether it’s the blissful ignorance of uncaring or fewer smarts I don’t know. I would assume that not worrying about the future is an overall net plus. It may put you into some pretty bad situations, but at least you won’t worry about the outcome.

I suspect that being intelligent and being wealthy will always be unrelated. Just because I can play the piano, for example, doesn’t make me smart or stupid. It just marks me as a good piano player. I don’t think wealth accumulation can be associated with intelligence for much the same reason - it’s a skill, just like musical ability, or sports ability, or the ability to learn and speak foreign languages. You can’t think your way into it - you have it or you don’t.

photo credit: swambo

(originally posted 3/09, in different form)

take small risks

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Listening to an interview on an ESPN podcast a couple of weeks ago (I forget which one), I heard a commentator bring up an interesting point about point-after-touchdown tries which I thought made a good life lesson, too. The point was this, in a nutshell: in football, when you score a touchdown you get an “extra play” in which you can kick the ball for one point or run, throw or pass it for two points. Kicking is ridiculously easy - the success rate is 99% or something along those lines. The two point option is much tougher, with a much lower chance of success. The better result needs to be practiced when it can be practiced - so why isn’t it?

But the commentator asked this question: since the preseason games were meaningless games, why didn’t coaches use the opportunity to practice the much riskier two point option and get better at it before the real games began? Another commentator offered up this response: “nobody wants to be the first coach to do that, but if someone did, everyone would quickly follow.” He continued, “But nobody wants to fail making those two points, even in a meaningless game, because it would be embarrassing.”

Crazy, right? But why do we all do the same thing - avoid the meaningless risks?

As you move through life you’ll have a lot of opportunities to take a chance on something. Sometimes it’s something big - quitting a job, starting a business or buying a house - and sometimes it’s something that will make little difference in the long run: pitching your boss on a new idea you had or asking the beautiful wallflower to dance. Why don’t people take advantage of the small risks in life to practice their decision-making skills when they get a big chance?

It’s easy to take a risk on a small choice - don’t get the bleu-cheese burger at Houlihan’s, get the Shrimp-Ka-Bob. Don’t get a Pepsi, get an RC. These are the kind of risk-taking moments we all avoid but should take in order to advance in life. If you get an RC and hate it, fine. Go back to Pepsi. But exercising that muscle - that risk-taking muscle - will make you a better person, whether you actually take those risks or not. Taking those risks opens you open to possibilities, and possibilities are endless once you are willing to accept them.

photo by hellolapomme

linklings, too old for the factory edition


Another week goes by and another spate of bad job news. I’m beginning to suspect that I may be in the “old enough to be difficult to hire” category - many of the manager positions I’ve looked at quickly turn me down. I doubt it can be my qualifications or me personally - since many of my applications don’t even make it to the phone interview stage - but perhaps they think “senior manager guy’s gonna want big money.” Or maybe my last five years consulting on Wall Street don’t look as nifty as they did a year ago - hah. I’m casting about for direction, and still hoping that one of the consulting contracts I’ve got very strong leads on will work out, so I can avoid reentering job world. I don’t feel that I want to do it, and of course that mindset doesn’t help, either.

When you are moving, life drifts into a bit of stasis. A lot of ideas about starting this or doing that get paused and filed away with “I’ll get that done after we move.” I’ve been meaning to start an LLC - but now I think I’ll wait until I’m closer to moving to Florida. I’m going to pursue some sort of certificate education (teaching? financial planning?) at one of the local colleges… down there. I’m going to start a small business, hopefully, doing some kid’s party entertainment - but now I’m just researching and won’t get started.

Of course this is just procrastination. I could start all of these things today if I felt pressure to do so. But with so many things to organize for the move these ideas seem destined for the shelf for the time being. I doubt it’s a characteristic of a successful person, but then again maybe I’m just being organized and prudent. Time will tell.

Some links for weekend reading:

My Tenant: “I’ve Lost My Job and I Can’t Pay You…”: Words that would give any landlord a sinking feeling.

Can One Choose Not To Participate In A Recession?: This is an interesting idea from the always-interesting (if not, in my opinion, always correct) Dave Ramsey.

Your Home Office: Ideas To Set Up Your Place of Work: Oh, to have a home office. I know, I am wishing for more space and a bigger home, and I know that’s verboten in the personal finance blogosphere. I sincerely hope that sometime in the future I’ll have a place with a room that can be devoted solely to work (and by work I mean blogging, writing and consulting). With a door. The door is key. Having a computer in a corner of the open-floor-plan living area is in no way conducive to getting work done during the day or putting yourself in a work mindset. My office, however, would not need to look like Gore’s. Yikes.

How Long Does It Take Your Broker to Answer Your Call?: I only have experience with three brokerage firms in the last 5-6 years. TD Ameritrade (where I keep my retirement and brokerage accounts) is terrific. They answer the phone almost immediately, and I have yet to have any trouble with my account (I say that while furiously knocking on wood).

Did You Miss the Stock Market Rally?: I don’t think March was a real rally, to be honest. I think we’ll see another dip, and I need to see one more strong runup before I’ll believe the market troubles are over. And I have to vent on a pet peeve: the market and the economy are NOT the same thing. The economy’s going to be in the dumper for a while. The market may come back long before the economy does - and by the economy I mean jobs, productivity, real estate and so on.

The 80/20 Rule and How it Applies to You: The Pareto Principle is a great way of looking at almost everything in life - if you don’t know what it is (but if you read this blog, I am sure you do), check it out.

Taking Control of Your Life By Finding Balance: I probably worry far more about balance than I should.

Poll: Generation X Feels Unprepared for Long-Term Care Costs. Are You Prepared?: I’m not. I’m one of those people who’s buried his head in the sand a bit on long-term care.

How to Save on Digital Services: We drop a LOT on digital services, although much less than we did. Probably the biggest waste? A landline, which we need because of (a) a security system and (b) we use DSL, so it’s cheaper when bundled. I’d love to have nothing but high speed internet and a Roku Digital Video Player.

How To Become An Expert: It’s true that 10,000 hours of practice will make you an expert, I suppose, although I’d argue that you may not need to be an expert to be successful - these are two different things. Practice does work, though. I’ve been learning to juggle and after spending one hour mastering the basics, I’ve been doing it every day when I have a few free minutes. 10,000 hours will be a long time in the future, but the 5-10 hours I’ve put into practice have already made me a decent three-ball juggler.

And so it begins …: Jacob is doing what a lot of us aspire to and “retiring” early. Extremely early, hence the name of his blog. Jacob’s blog is thoughtful and doesn’t focus solely on any one aspect of his life. Although he takes a different approach than I would in many areas, I’ve found his blog thought-provoking, which is the best reason to read any blog.

Why Achieving an MBA is No Longer My Goal: What? Don’t let too many people hear this - someone else decided that going into debt for a degree he didn’t really want or need wasn’t worth it because his real-life experience in building a company was - gasp - more interesting and more profitable. My master’s degree in accounting is nothing more than a resume padder at this point - think that corporate income tax course I took in 1994 is worth anything now? The code’s changed so many times since then it’s ridiculous. I didn’t mind getting my master’s since I got a free ride (graduate scholarship and a teaching assistant stipend), but would I go $40,000+ into debt to get one now? No way. MBA’s aren’t worth what they were 20 years ago.

I Am Just A Blogger, Damn It!: Amen.

4 FREE Videos for INO TV!: If you have any interest in trading actively - which I wouldn’t for retirement savings or the bulk of my investment accounts, but do engage in with smaller amounts - here are some free technical videos.

photo credit: TheeErin (great photo! — Steve)

the appearance of competence

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Throughout my career I’ve met competent people, and I’ve met incompetent people. Sad to say, but the ratio’s been tipped largely towards incompetent people. Competence isn’t necessarily a measure of success, and vice versa. I knew a CEO who couldn’t figure out email; his secretary printed out emails for him and he hand-wrote replies for her to type up. He was very successful, though. I also knew a coworker who was technically brilliant in my field (accounting and auditing) - he was exceptionally intelligent, good with computers, skilled in languages and a tremendous team-builder. He hit a dead end in his career about ten years ago and can’t find a job today to save his life.

What’s the difference? Is it ass-kissing? Is it being in the right place at the right time? Is it simply showing up first and leaving last? What’s the magic formula in the world of employees to be known as a success, and not merely competent? I think it can be summed up as “appearance.”

“Appearances” doesn’t mean physical appearances. Being physically attractive might help a bit, but I’ve seen plenty of beautiful women and handsome men get canned, and plenty of less-attractive people get promoted. Being clean and neat doesn’t hurt, but being sloppy and dirty won’t kill you, despite what you may hear from “how to get that dream job” articles. Showing up in a suit and tie is enough. It doesn’t matter if the suit’s a bit wrinkled.

“Appearances” mean demonstrating competence at the right time. If you labor away for months at a huge project and turn it over to your manager when it’s time to pitch it to the boss, you will earn nothing. The boss will think your manager did the right thing and your manager will resent you and fear the possibility that you’ll expose the fact that you did all the work. Appearances means that you’re not the guy sauntering out of the office with a spring in your step on the busiest day of the quarter. Look the part - or slip out the back door.

That’s not to say you can get away with being incompetent (unless you’re a politician). The CEO I mentioned was brilliant at marketing and promotion for the company, so his lack of technical expertise didn’t mean much. He had probably learned at an early age that he didn’t have much skill with computers, and said “oh well.” He demonstrated overwhelming competence in other areas, that made him appear competent overall.

I’m a jack of all trades, and master of few (or none). I tinker with web coding, I know international accounting rules, I learned four foreign languages and speak two well. The only area that I have the appearance of competence in (if you ask me) is that I can run a project well, be it a two-hour meeting or a six-month audit. I could step into a board of directors’ meeting and run it like I owned the place, and that one skill propelled me up the food chain in the corporate environment faster than many of my colleagues who could recite chapter and verse of accounting regulations. The appearance of competence - speaking clearly, making eye contact, remembering people’s names - meant more than actual competence. I wasn’t bad with accounting, or the technical details of my trade - but I knew which skills paid the bills.

As I look at the current financial crisis I can’t help but think I’m seeing some of that “jack of all trades” characteristic in the CEOs of some of these failing companies. They were the guys who led. They projected competence. They might not have curled up with a technical treatise on derivatives at night, but by God they had a team including guys who did and they were managing them! They made the quick and firm decisions and they didn’t worry about the details. They were big picture guys. They probably assumed that the guys bringing them the numbers knew their stuff. They were wrong.

So in the end we’ll all pay the price for being a country that values the firm handshake and the leadership qualities over the nerd in the corner with the numbers and the arcane skill set. It’s an oversimplification, I know. But this mindset controlled our economy for years: the idea that creative finance could lift the economy up, that mundane “building stuff” was better suited to developing countries. We’ll pay the price for a long time for assuming that the appearance of competence actually MEANT competence. Let’s just hope that it’s time for the revenge of the nerds, and that people who understand the details are finally taking over.

photo credit: chuckp

i saw what you spent last summer


Rich people talk about ideas. Poor people talk about other people. I doubt it would come as a surprise to anyone that successful people - and by successful I mean happy, or rich, or respected - concentrate on ideas and the future. Unsuccessful people - poor, unhappy, dissed - concentrate on what others have or don’t have.

I fall far more often than I’d care to admit into the “poor people talk about people” category, but I’m going to do it now. It’s easy, now that times are bad. Wondering how this family manages or that family doesn’t is an easy pastime, and it serves a purpose - in examining others’ failures and successes I’d like to get an idea of how I can achieve those successes and avoid those failures. People who looked like they were living the high life are reduced to desperation - after a layoff they seize the first available job with a massive paycut. Others who seemed to be struggling are calm, patiently waiting for the right opportunity.

During The Crisis (we can all-caps it now, right?) the distinction between the narrowly rich and the stable middle class is on display in stark black-and-white - with few shades of gray. I know much better today which of my neighbors are TRULY rich and which of them were just spending themselves into appearing rich. The lifting of the curtain surprised me. An old saying says that you can’t judge a book by its cover, and you can’t. I’m sure that many of our neighbors thought we were struggling before The Crisis. My old Pontiac sat in the driveway in the midst of Mercedes and SUVs. We have a punky little 21″ TV we bought with American Express Membership Rewards points.

But now I am nervous, but confident that everything will turn out alright, while neighbors seem to be panicking. I don’t think I’m gloating, although I’m human and probably am, a bit. I am no poster boy for frugality, for sure, but I make (well, made) six figures, didn’t buy things I didn’t need, and did my best to manage my money. I don’t have the latest phone. I took public transportation instead of driving and paying tolls and parking. I didn’t go into debt for anything other than my home.

I still lost work due to The Crisis, just like all of my neighbors. We will all suffer as the money dwindles - some sooner, some later, but we’ll all have things we’d like to buy that we can’t. It sucks, because we were all middle managers in the Wall Street world - finance managers, audit managers, salesmen, IT guys. None of us deserved to be beaten down because of the idiocy of our executives, but so be it - we lived and died by the sword. And in tough times, your financial weaknesses - which could be kept hidden in good times - are laid bare for the world to see.

photo credit: kimberlyfaye

what to do if you like your job but hate your career…

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…or vice versa.

You may be thinking about changing your career path. Maybe your “career” - the actual work you do - no longer appeals to you. Or maybe the work environment (long commutes? corporate offices? 9-to-5 hours turning into 9-to-8 hours?) has lost what little fascination it once held for you - we’ll call this “the job”. People often confuse the two; I did. You may love your career but dislike your employer or the location of your office. You might be a graphic designer who works for a big firm in a large city with a long commute; you still want to work in graphic design but you want to work from home or you want a freelance structure.

You might, however, dislike the career but enjoy the job. One of my ex-colleagues fit this mold. He was dismissive of the actual career we had (working in the finance area of a Fortune 500 company) but he loved the corporate environment - the business travel, the office politics and most importantly being able to tell people he worked on Wall Street. He was willing to endure his career so he could enjoy the job.

There are two more categories, of course - people who hate their career and their job, and people who love their career and their job. If you hate both, what are you doing reading this article? Get your resume out there or start studying for a new career, but do something. You don’t need to quit today - in these tough times everyone needs to be putting away as much money as they can to prepare for a long job search - but if you hate where you work and what you do you’re going to be miserable; if not tomorrow, soon.

If you’re lucky enough to love where you work and what you do, you probably aren’t reading this article, either! I am sure that a minority are lucky enough to love their career and enjoy the job environment they work in. Those happy few have what the rest of us want (even if we don’t know it yet).

What to do if you like your career and hate the job

If you like what you do, but you hate your co-workers or the commute’s too long or the hours are too long or the pay’s too low, the solution is easy: find a new employer or go out on your own, but stay in your field. I did this about five years ago; I thought I was good enough in finance to stick with it as a career, but I wanted to slow down on the hours and the travel and the politics. Becoming a contract consultant let me continue in a familiar field but detach from the parts of the job I didn’t like. If you like what you do but you simply hate the environment - for whatever reason - the job is easier to change than your career. Get a new job - find a new employer, find a non-traditional way to earn a living in that field, even start your own business. But there is no need for additional education, or starting over in a new field, or rebuilding your network. All you need is to move on to a new job.

What to do if you like the job and hate your career

If you enjoy the office, but you don’t like what you’re doing while you are there, you are in a much tougher position. If you like your employer, but you don’t like your career, you have to ask yourself what you like about the job. If you like the work environment because of your co-workers or the comfy cubicle you’re sitting in or the good pay, you are in a position that most people would envy. If you bothered to tell anyone that you wanted a change from a “great job” just because you didn’t enjoy the actual work, most people would tell you you’re crazy. “Suck it up!” “Everyone hates their job! Be glad you have a nice-paying job! And you have a Dunkin’ Donuts in the building!”

Don’t let that stop you from making a change - that is not the way to think. Letting people tell you that you should hammer away doing something you hate just because it pays well or you enjoy Thursday drinks with your co-workers is a dead end. You will never succeed at something you hate; it is hard to face 30+ years of toil at something you do not enjoy. Many people do it, of course. In America, the Protestant work ethic has created an image of selfless toil - the idea that work is meant to be endured, not enjoyed. We are fortunate in the Western world that we don’t have to believe this image. You can find something you enjoy doing. You can recreate that environment you love, but this time you can do something that you love in an environment you love. Just reading that sentence ought to fill your mind with possibilities - how could you not succeed if that were the case?

How do you know which is which?

For years (I think) I disliked my career but I didn’t mind my job, and sometimes I even enjoyed it. The travel and the business perks were enjoyable. I didn’t enjoy what I did, but I never realized it until I had been doing it for years. I never got “in the zone.” I never stayed a few minutes later out of interest. I never read about my field in my spare time. When I switched from being an employee to being a consultant, all the trappings of “the job” were gone. The staff, the title, the business class travel, the business dinners at fine restaurants - they disappeared. I was a consultant - no staff, no title. Nothing was left but my career, and when I looked at it I realized the only thing about my career and my job that remained to motivate me was the money; nothing else.

If you can’t bear to look at a magazine about your field, or read a few news articles about your career you don’t like your career. If you can get caught up in what you do (you can enter that mythical “zone” by talking about what you do or preparing for a big meeting) but you can’t get out of bed in the morning because you dread seeing your boss one more time or listening that idiot Larry in the next cube drone on in the staff meeting or eating in the commissary with your co-workers, you hate your job. Get moving, and get out.

Don’t ever despair. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the decision to build it probably was made in a day. If you let each day echo into tomorrow, soon your life will be filled with nothing but echos of your yesterdays.

photo by Stewf - some rights reserved

a shockey storey


photo credit: jenn_jenn

Once upon a time there was a promising young lad entering the big time. He had a bit of a temper, but he was extraordinarily gifted at his business and was sought after by one company after another. He came on board with several other young promising lads, and combined with the older leaders of the company where he began work, the executives expected great things of him.

From the beginning, though, the lad had trouble. He grumbled about his responsibilities. First he had too many for such a young lad, then the wrong kind for such a promising lad, and then too few for such a talented lad. Nothing was ever his fault - his teammate didn’t give him the reports he wanted, the manager of the team didn’t give him the right types of work, the head of the company just didn’t click with him (but never the other way around).

But one year, things got even worse. The lad moaned and complained and the whole company suffered. Then tragedy struck - the lad fell ill and it turned out he wouldn’t be able to work on the big sale that was coming up that year. As he sat on the sidelines, his colleagues rallied and the slow unassuming lad who took his place did what was needed and didn’t complain. His colleagues were so pleased not to hear the incessant whining and complaining that they rallied and had an unbelievable year. They won one big sale after another, finally defeating even the Foxboro, Massachusetts branch in landing the biggest customer of the year.

So you would think the young lad would learn his lesson, and come back humbled. Without him, his colleagues had rallied to take the lead in their company. The young manager of the team had become a true leader, and they had succeeded beyond all expectations. They were happy… except that they dreaded the young lad’s return. He complained and fought with the managers, all before he had started back to work.

Finally, the company had enough. They transferred him to New Orleans in exchange for some muffalettas and daquiris for the next Cinco de Mayo party. Relaxed and relieved to be rid of the gifted, talented young lad who nevertheless simply never fit in and never worked as part of the team, they prepared for another run at the big sale.

And the moral of the story…

Don’t be your company’s Jeremy Shockey.

learn to think bigger

Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance


Creative Commons License photo credit: marfis75

When beginning any sort of ambitious self-improvement project - be it paying down credit card debt, investing, losing weight or reading the 100 greatest books of all time - you should have a clear idea of when to cut your losses and try a different path.

I have seen many people attempt to avoid quitting at all costs. You know the type - your friend who insists on watching the movie to the end. Your cousin who will eat the same brand of pizza that gave him heartburn last time. People who furiously pay down debt by directing every last penny to paying it down while eating Ramen noodles. Being someone who can stick to a goal and achieve it is admirable. Being someone who sticks to a goal that has ceased to benefit from that goal is foolish.

The best example in terms of personal finance can usually be found in investing. Many investors will establish a pattern of investing that suits them, and then defend that pattern to others (and to themselves) even if it doesn’t work. A good example is index fund investing. The conventional wisdom is that it cannot fail. The truth is that it’s the investing pattern with the best possible return for a non-knowledgeable investor, but even then it’s subject to a number of caveats. If you happened to be withdrawing your money now, the last eight years would have been essentially 0% returns on those funds. A dividend-paying stock, or better yet an investment in a single company that had a great run over that time (think Google, for example) would have been far better.

A foolish consistency - an attempt to hew to a failed philosophy - is going to be the road to failure for most of us. If what you’re doing isn’t working, it’s unlikely that it’s going to improve. I know that persistence is considered to be a virtue, but in investing or life it isn’t. You have to admit that what you’re doing isn’t working sometimes, and try to find an alternative. In investing, this is called cutting your losses. If you invest 10,000 and lose 2000, you need a 25% gain to recoup your 20% loss. Think about that.

So think bigger. Think about moving past goals. Think about ambition and think about money like something new, every day. I’m constantly reevaluating my goals and my ideas about how to generate (and grow) my money, but not as much as I should. If you get to a point where you’re comfortable, you’re in bad shape. Life requires growth, in one form or another. Think bigger.

6 ways to become famous

About a month ago, before I started problogging, I was walking in midtown Manhattan when I saw a strange sight: a young woman walking down the street singing at the top of her lungs. She was not particularly striking, but she looked about the same as most of the current pop stars if you took off the celebrity- makeup-artist applied makeup. Her voice was quite good; I’m not a fan of R&B music but she was belting it out well enough that I could appreciate the quality of her voice. I like music, and I listen to a lot of it in a lot of different genres. She wasn’t bad.

On the other hand, she looked crazy as hell. If you aren’t familiar with the modus operandi on New York city streets, here it is: if you see someone doing something crazy you just move on. You don’t stare, you don’t alter your walking path; you treat the guy screaming about the Queen of England’s control of the drug trade like you’d treat a lamppost - you just keep going. To notice is the cardinal sin. But I noticed. Maybe she was crazy, maybe she was just happy and didn’t care and maybe - just maybe - she was taking a chance on walking through Manhattan, a place lousy with movie stars and agents and whatnot (we were near the MTV studios, for example) and putting her voice out there where someone might here it.

I like this idea and choose to believe that’s why she was singing. Maybe that’s the key to being famous - being oblivious to the embarrassment. Was Britney embarrassed putting on that schoolgirl’s uniform for “One More Time?” That’s possibly a bad example… she doesn’t appear to have the embarrassement gene - but that’s one way to get famous: have no shame. Here are six more ways to get famous:

  1. Work hard. A lot of overnight success is the result of years of hard work. George Clooney spent 10 years acting in bad shows like “Facts of Life” and “Roseanne” before hitting the semi-big time as part of an ensemble cast in ER. His first movie role (The Peacemaker) was a bomb. He kept at it and today, of course, he can snore on camera for 90 minutes and have a hit.
  2. Get noticed. Look at Paul Potts. Take a shot by singing opera in a pop music contest. Get out there and do something different.
  3. Go off-road. Robert Kiyosaki said investing in index funds and worrying about debt were the marks of a poor person’s mentality. Whether you agree with him or not, it did get him noticed. Take a position different enough from the norm - and defend it well - and people will notice.
  4. Be successful. Warren Buffet is a clever guy, but let’s face it - the reason we listen to him is not his sparkling wit or his charming personality (both of which he has), but the fact that he is the richest man on the planet. If you succeed in your field, people will notice.
  5. Aim for a good hook up. Whether it’s landing the rock star hubby or the rock star agent, making sure you make the connections may make up for a lot. Johnny Depp got his start in acting while he was a struggling rock musician because his wife, a makeup artist, had a famous client who told Johnny he’d hook him up for acting gigs if the music wasn’t working out for him. That client? Nicholas Cage.
  6. Trust in yourself. If you want people to notice YOU, love yourself. If you project confidence, happiness, intensity and success people will love that. Take Kurt Cobain. He was obviously a guy in a lot of personal pain. Yet at the same time, when you heard him sing you heard a titan; he projected a massive, overwhelming personality through his music that made him a star. It never made up for the struggle in his personal life, true, but it was clear he knew what he was doing musically.

So if you want to be famous, be a little crazy. Sing out loud, introduce yourself to the friend of a friend of a friend who knows a producer, write a book. Not everyone wants (or needs) to be famous, but fame’s just like anything else in this life; if you want it badly enough and work hard enough to get it, you have a good chance at it. Just don’t forget your buddy Steve.

Creative Commons License photo credit: dtcchc