Where Does the Time Go? I Know

Ever lay your head down at night and ask yourself, "Where does the time go?" I have the answer.

A recent report by the Council of Research Excellence revealed an alarming statistic: Adults are exposed to screens - TV's, computers, cellphones, etc. - for about 8.5 hours on any given day. It goes on to say that TV is the dominant medium.

Ball State did a study that found the average American adult was exposed to five hours and nine minutes of live TV each day. 

Do the math.  That is 1879 hours a year or over 46 (forty hour) work weeks per year!

Imagine the impact in a lifetime if you would invest that time into your relationship with your spouse, spending quality time with your kids, reviewing and planning your finances, investing time and energy into your career, working out.

How much more could you get out of life if you made a better investment choice of your time?

You may be thinking, I don't watch 5 hours a of TV a day! I challenge you to track it for a week. Add up the hours, multiply it out over a year and determine if there is a priority change that could lead you down a more prosperous path.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Determined to reach my goals in multiple areas of my life, I decided account-ability would provide me the kick I needed. I talked to a good friend and my brother to hold me accountable in different areas.

In the business part of life I committed to being in the office by 7am everyday, planning my night the day before so I have clear, prioritized direction, and lastly I committed to workout everyday this week. I chose a consequence that would be painful enough to get the action I needed. My love language is the Benjamin Franklin. I owe a $100 bill for everyday I do not meet the three commitments I made. 

As you might guess, I am 3 for 3 since our meeting!

My brother and I are meeting in Vegas in 45 days with our families for some sun and pool time. We committed last night to a "fitness duel-off". We will determine the winner by a combination of things like measurements, percentage improvement, and who looks best with their shirt off by the pool. This means I have to lay off of my straight Coca-Cola diet and drink more water and choose healthy meal choices. It means that I will need to really hit it hard in the gym and not just assume that by being around others who are fit and sweaty that it will rub off on me.

At times it seems pathetic that I need to play these games to get where I want to go in life, but I have learned through experience that I am not able to push myself hard enough on my own.

Stephen Covey said it best when he said, "Accountability breeds responsibility".

Is there somewhere in your life that you could work with to push eachother to be your best self?

What the Fish Can't See

I have spent the last few days reflecting on a conversation I had with my mom the other night who just returned from China. She came back with a renewed enthusiasm about the opportunity that surrounds us. She reported that with the recent lift of communism, the Chinese citizens are seeing opportunity everywhere. She commented on the positive energy and vibe in Beijing. They recognize the freedom they have to create the lives they desire. They control their own future.

It is easy to get complacent when we have had it so good for so long. Just as the fish can't see or appreciate the water he swims in, we can't see or appreciate the opportunity that we have. With freedom to work where we want to work, study what and where we want to study, and spend our money how we want to spend it, it is laughable that we whine about our circumstances when we only have ourselves to blame.

We are a sum of our thinking, decisions and actions.

Take that fish out of water for about 10 seconds and I can guarantee that water is all it will think about. Maybe it is time for us to take a quick trip to a third world country to enable us to see the opportunity we are swimming in.

Is it a coincidence that the Russian ancestry group ranks first in the highest percentage of millionaire households per capita? Although the Russian ancestry group accounts for only about 1.1 percent of all households in America, it accounts for 6.4 percent of all millionaire households. It is estimated that approximately 22 of every 100 households headed by someone of Russian ancestry has a net worth of $1 million or more. 

James Allen said it best in As a Man Thinketh, "As a being of Power, Intelligence and Love, and the lord of his own thoughts, man holds the key to every situation, and contains within himself that transforming and regenerative agency by which may make himself what he wills.”

Abe Lincoln's Formula for Prosperity

So much wisdom in this piece. These are great principles to live by when building a company, a family, or a community.

• thrift is the precursor to prosperity
• we all need to work together to be successful
• cannot spend more than you earn
• initiative and independence build character and courage
• teach a man to fish and he will fish for a life time

As I prepare for the birth of my first child in September, these are the lessons that must be taught to provide them any chance of success. Imagine a child raised on these five principles, how different would our world be if we reverted back to good old fashioned common sense.

 

They Are Not Your Friend

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Bank of America is raising interest rates on 4 million US Credit Card customers who are carrying a balance. This means that even if you have always paid your account on time, you can expect your rate to go up if you don’t pay off the balance at the end of each month. WSJ reports:

“Starting with June account statements, any credit-card customer who carries a balance and has an interest rate below 10% will see his or her rate jump into double-digit territory.”

“The bank's move follows similar rate increases that other banks, including Citigroup Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co., and American Express Co. have implemented in recent months. The banks, facing rising delinquencies, blame the economic turmoil. Many have been tightening the screws on people with less-than-perfect credit, but now they're pinching a broader range of customers who have good credit records, but carry a balance.”

The underlying lesson is that credit card companies are not your friends, even though they lay down the red carpet on your first date. They appear so generous and helpful and always seem to ride in on the white horse at the perfect time. Whether it is at the department store when you have way too much stuff in your arms and they generously offer you a 10% discount for becoming their friend or when a 0% balance transfer arrives in the mail serendipitously to convert your Citi card at 29.99% to a lower rate.

Having spent much of my own life racking up credit card debt, I have a new vantage point now that I have made a commitment to pay for everything in cash. Hindsight is 20/20. If I couldn’t afford to pay cash on the spot, how could I afford to pay for whatever I was buying with 29% tacked on top? The math does not work, but I guess it is because I never stopped to do the math. I was having too much fun shopping.

I once heard a catchy little phrase that helped me to see what I was actually doing,

Buying things I do not need

With money I do not have

To impress people I do not know

Tomorrow I will share a strategy to get out of debt as quickly as possible, because as we have seen, the furnace is only going to get hotter with major credit card companies turning up the heat.

Interesting Way to Save Money...

A Couple of More Ways to Save Money:

1. Bake your own bread by hand

2. Knit your clothing

3. Wash your clothes using a washboard to save electricity

4. Don't wash your car to save water and soap

5. Shave every third day to save cost of razors

6. Use washable diapers if have young children

7. Drink powdered milk

8. Hang your clothes to dry

9. Eat with your hands

10. Cancel cell phone and only use a landline

Money as a Symbol

A friend of mine owns a coaching company, Sensible Coaching, focused on helping people with money. Her unique talent is helping people and their relationship with money.

She wrote a great article titled “Money as a Symbol” that has some very thought provoking observations.

“We assign meaning and significance to money that is purely arbitrary. We act as if money has will and volition on its own. We blame things on money, and, even more amazingly, we assign responsibility to money. Money seems to be responsible for ideas like “Rich people aren’t as nice as poor people” or “I always struggle with money”. The way these concepts are expressed makes it seem like money itself is the responsible party, and not the humans involved in the process.”

She then goes on to point out that many words in our culture simultaneously hold sway over both money and our sense of who we are. A few examples are:

Worth and worthy. No mistake here. Notice how often we seem to tie our worthiness to our worth. We even speak of “self worth”

Credit. We use the word “credit” to imply validity and trustworthiness, even to give praise. And then there is that whole issue of your credit when it comes to how much you can borrow. Have credit cards changed the way we think of the word “credit”?

Broke. Here’s the big one, if you are broke, are you broken? Many people feel a direct connection here, as if being broke truly does make you a broken human being.

I have had thoughts such as these at times in my life. With reflection, I have learned that money cannot buy me happiness or make me a good or likable person, just as it cannot make my unhappy or unlikable. I look at money as fuel I need to live the life I desire, and like any other fuel, it can run out at times and you can certainly get more.

I grew up with a phrase from a wise mother that was oft repeated, usually after I broke something or wrecked a car… “It is only money, let’s go make more.”

She understood what money was and what it was not. Money is the easiest of life’s problems to fix. 

Lessons From the Men's Urinal

I recently ran across an experiment conducted in the men’s room at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. Authorities had etched the image of a black housefly into each urinal. As women can attest to and most men would sheepishly admit, men don’t pay much attention to where they aim, which can create a mess. However, if they have a target, something to aim for, their attention and therefore accuracy are dramatically increased. According to the man who came up with the idea, it works wonders. “It improves the aim,” says Aad Kieboom. “If a man sees a fly, he aims at it.” Kieboom, an economist, directs Schiphol’s building expansion. His staff conducted the fly-in-urinal trials and found that etchings reduce spillage by 80 percent.

The results are shocking when we have something to aim at. Prior to the target, the men didn’t even pay attention. With a target, attention increased and results improved by 80 percent. Doesn’t this same lesson apply in all areas of our life?

What if in our careers, we had an income target? Not the one the boss sets for you, but one that matches your prerogative and ambition? Wouldn’t your attention increase? You would have a better filter in which to run your actions through, quickly realizing that much of what we do in a day will not increase income. This income target, etched in your mind would surely increase your aim, focus and results.

What if in our finances, we had a short-term, mid-term and long-term target to aim at? Wouldn’t you pay more attention to what you were spending your money on? If there was a way to keep those targets in mind every time you went to make a purchase, don’t you think you would increase your results by 80 percent? 8 out of every 10 times you would be able to make a more grounded decision on need versus want.

What are you aiming for?

“Most people aim for nothing and hit it with amazing accuracy.” – Joe Niego

Successful Habits Formula

“Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconscious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character.” – Steven Covey

While re-reading The Power of Focus by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen I came across a section they call The Successful Habits Formula. It is really pretty simple, yet I have learned that it is through small and simple things that the great things come to pass.

The Successful Habits Formula

1.      Clearly Identify Your Bad or Unproductive Habits

Make a list of them, everything from watching too much TV to sleeping too much to not working out. Write beside it the long term implications of that habit, be honest with yourself.

2.      Define Your New Successful Habit

This is usually the opposite of the bad habit. Read instead of watching TV or getting up early to work out instead of sleeping in and not working out. Most importantly, write a vivid description of the benefits of the action.

3.      Create a Three Part Action Plan

What are things you could do that would implement the new habit. Using the working out example: get a gym membership, develop a workout routine and schedule, get a friend to meet you at the gym as an accountability partner. Make sure you are being accountable to someone. I have found this to be key.

It is very important that you prioritize these new habits and start with ONE. If you attempt to do multiple habits at once, you will eventually run out of self-discipline and return to mediocrity.

If you only changed one habit per quarter, imagine the difference you would see after only one year. Imagine a life of that!

Steve Prefontaine said it best and I have tried to make this my mantra “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.”

It Is Not the Critic That Counts

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt, Paris - April 23, 1910

I have this quote hanging on the wall of my office and hope you find it as inspiring as I do.

How Are You Dealing With Change?

This recession underscores the harsh consequences of the failure to understand and respect the fundamental truths of the marketplace.

Two of these truths are:

1. real estate and stock markets are cyclical (they go up and down)
2. the marketplace is constantly changing due to technology, demographics, economics and politics

As I look around at different people, those who are the most afraid are those who are most lacking knowledge. They don’t understand the drift of the marketplace. They are completely dependent upon their employer for their ability to eat. They have abdicated the thinking and planning of their future to their boss. They have taken competitive learning out of their life since college and are “hopeful” that everything will work out or return to how it was.

"Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure." Confucius

Now is the time to prepare for the future. Life is not going to get easier, we need to learn to make it easier. We need to take the responsibility upon ourselves to learn and think and strategize and act powerfully. We cannot rely on someone else to figure it out and then “hope” that we fit into the plan.

The world will never be the same and as far as I am concerned that is great news. It is the change that creates new opportunity and the person who is prepared will reap the rewards.

“Luck favors the mind that is prepared.” - Louis Pasteur

Here are some sources for learning:

The Aji Network – I have been in courses with them for 3 years and it has completely changed the way I think - http://www.theajinetwork.com/index.php

TED.com – source for tons of educational videos, all free - http://www.ted.com/

MIT OpenCourseWare – MIT has made available all of their curriculum for free - http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

Insightful Magazines – most are fee now online – Fast Company, Inc, The Economist, Business Week,

Read Books – ask those around you that are successful what they are reading – libraries are still free!

Can You Hand Me That PledgeHammer?

One of the topics that I have been passionate about for sometime is the need to build successful habits to reach your potential. Dr. Tony Schwartz teaches in the Power of Full Engagement that we have a finite amount of self-discipline and therefore we can only set out to change a limited number of things in our life at a time without running out of energy.

Ever wonder why you are not the only one who has failed at keeping 29 different New Years Resolutions? He says the solution is to build habits. Habits once effectively established no longer take self-discipline to keep going, but rather energy to break.

An important part of building these new habits is being accountable. I recently ran across a website that does just that, helps you be accountable.

www.PledgeHammer.com

Pledgehammer.com is a site that helps you keep your promises. They do this by making your pledge public and asking you to decide on a deadline as well as a financial incentive. Should you not succeed they ask you to donate money to a charity you choose yourself. This way your unsuccessful pledge may help to save the rainforest or support families in third world countries, making it not all that unsuccessful after all.

I thought it was a very interesting idea and one that can certainly help in an area that I believe we all could use help in.

Money Can’t Buy You Happiness…or Can It?

“Money can’t buy you happiness…but it can buy you a Waverunner,” said the comedian to start his routine.

I couldn’t say it better myself. Last night, my wife and I had a conversation on this very topic. Fortunately, we both agree that money cannot buy you happiness. I spent 2 years in Brazil on a mission for my Church and experienced poverty beyond comprehension for this day and age. What shocked me was the observation of the families who lived in it, often times were happier than the wealthy American families that I knew back home. To prove I was not in some spiritual fantasy land, I certainly experienced families in the depths of poverty that were absolutely miserable and unhappy.

The lesson I learned is that the two are disconnected. Happiness and pleasure have been used interchangeably in the English language and I think they are very different. Pleasure is short term, and I know first hand that money can buy you pleasure. What I have yet to see is the case where money bought long term happiness.

What money can do is enhance an already happy existence. Yesterday I talked to one family who went camping over spring break. Now, I happen to know camping was the recreation of choice because it is virtually free. By the way it was 45 degrees and raining! I know of another family that went to Mexico for the week and stayed in a beach front villa. All things being equal, I’ll take the Mexican trip to paradise please.

That leaves us all with some thinking and planning to do. First and most important, what is happiness? How do I achieve it today, tomorrow and twenty years from now? Secondly, what is my ideal life and how much does that cost? How will I fund it?

How Does That Math Work?

I spent some time with a very bright money manager yesterday and he shared something that I had never noticed or more importantly understood.

For simplification purposes, I will show you 4 years of stock market returns. We will start with $100,000 in our account and then I will specify a certain stock market return for that year and then the next years balance will be a result of that previous years return. Let me show you:

Year 1

Starting Balance $100,000

Stock Market Return -50%

Year 2

Starting Balance $50,000

Stock Market Return +100%

Year 3

Starting Balance $100,000

Stock Market Return -50%

Year 4

Starting Balance $50,000

Stock Market Return +100%

Year 5

Starting Balance $100,000

In this example, we had 2 years that had a 100% return and 2 years that had a -50% return. If we were to calculate the average rate of return for those four years you would get an average 25% rate of return. In reality, you finished with the same amount you started with, $100,000, no where near a 25% rate of return.

The numbers that are thrown around in your mutual fund and 401k prospectus are designed to help you, but do not tell the whole story. More time must be spent really understanding your numbers because your ability to retire depends on it.

Take your investment accounts statements out and figure out how much you started with, how much you added, and how much you have now. Do the math, you’ll be shocked at the results. (If you don’t know how to figure it out, go find someone who does, or spend 20 minutes on google. It will be time well spent)

What Is Your EVE Ratio?

EVE is an acronym for education versus entertainment. I was tipped off to a company called iLearningGlobal that talks about this EVE ratio.

They suggest that your future “destiny” depends greatly on your EVE ratio. I am not sure I agree with the word choice "destiny" but maybe destination. 

Most people spend far more hours and money on entertainment than they do on education and yet remain perplexed at how unsatisfied they are with the results or destination they have reached.

Did you know that the average U.S. household watched TV for 8 hours and 18 minutes a day from September 2007 to September 2008, which is a record high since the days Nielsen Co. started measuring television in the 1950s.

What is your EVE ratio? Take one week and add up the hours of each. 

Are you shocked at how little time and money you spend on improving yourself and your ability to build the life you desire?

The great Zig Ziglar said, “You don’t have to be great to start, but you do have to start to be great.”