There are some interesting comments in the post The Importance of Being Smart and here I’d like to discuss one of them. It’s a comment by Chew: I have something to add to being smart. It’s about beginning with the end in mind. No amount of smartness can outsmart the need to begin with the end in mind. I love it. I don’t know about you, but I often find myself in such a situation. When I need to achieve a goal, I often frame it as achieving the goal in a certain way. As a result, I exclude other ways to achieve it. This, I’m afraid, is a common problem. When people need to get a task done, they tend to do it in the most obvious way or the way that most other people do. This is a bad idea because by definition following the crowd means being average. That’s why it’s important to begin with the end in mind. Instead of taking the most obvious route, take a step back and get a complete picture of the goal. Then ask yourself: what are the possible ways to achieve the goal? Notice that the question is not whether or not there is other way because there are always other ways. The question helps you find new possibilities you might never think of before. You can take the concept further by questioning the goal itself. Why? Because a goal is just a way to achieve an even bigger goal. Just take acquiring arrows as an example. Acquiring arrows is a way to achieve the bigger goal of winning the battle. So you should ask yourself: is acquiring arrows necessary to win the battle? What are other ways to win the battle? Thinking that you need to acquire arrows without considering other options means that you don’t begin with the end in mind. You can still move further because winning the battle is a way to win the war, but you get the idea. Applying this principle in your life will give you interesting insights. Just look at something that you do and ask yourself the bigger goal you want to achieve through it. By keep questioning you will eventually find the ultimate goal of your life. You should then work backward and find the best way to accomplish your goals at each level. Here is an example: Let’s stop at this point. You should now work backward by asking this question: From your answers you might realize that you don’t need to buy stuff to be happy. Instead, there are other possibilities. Let’s say that the best answer you find is giving. Then the next question is: This way you begin with the end and move backward to the point where you are now. Beginning with the end in mind is important. Not only will it help you find more creative ways to achieve your goals, but it will also help you find the right goals in life. Photo by muha
A: To make money
A: To be able to buy what I want.
A: To make me happy.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Achieve Goals by Beginning With the End in Mind
Free Passive Income Resources
Passive income is our key to financial freedom. The more passive income we generate, the less dependent we are on our job. At one point, when our passive income exceeds our expenses, we can stop working anytime we want and still live the lifestyle we desire. That is financial freedom. But passive income takes time to build. You can’t expect to start working on it now and be financially freedom next year unless you are very lucky. So the best time to start is now. The earlier you start working to build your passive income, the sooner you will reap the results. That’s why I put together this list of free passive income resources. There are a lot free passive income resources out there, but I put only the useful ones here. I hope this list can be a starting point and a companion in your journey toward financial freedom. The list starts with the definitions followed by the e-books, articles, and audio resources. Definitions E-Books Articles – General Articles – Internet Marketing Articles – Miscellanous Audio Bonus – Recommended Books While collecting these resources, I noticed that there are several books which are often mentioned regarding passive income. These books are not free, but I add them here in case you want to learn more about the subject. I have read all of them except the last one. Here they are:
Personal Analytics: The Next Big Thing in Self Improvement?
Recently the idea of personal analytics hits me more and more. What is personal analytics? It’s a way of making decisions in someone’s life based on numbers. You measure certain aspects of your life, analyze the results, and make decisions based on them. It started about two years ago when I read an excerpt of the book Super Crunchers. The book talks about how smart companies “act by numbers.” Instead of making decisions based on intuition, they make decisions based on what they measure and calculate. For instance, they use mathematical models to accurately predict how the customers will behave in certain situations and adjust their operations accordingly. This way the companies can directly make the right decisions without wasting their resources. The book even says that those companies know about your preferences better than you. Reading that made me think: is it possible to apply that at individual level? Can individuals live by numbers? Can someone make decisions for his life not based on intuition but based on facts? If we can apply that, that will be a great leap forward. Just like the companies, you will be able to optimize your life to get the most out of it. As it turns out, some people already do that. They already live by numbers to optimize their lives. My favorite example is Jim Collins, the author of Built to Last and Good to Great. Here is what The New York Times wrote about him: And in a corner of the white board at the end of his long conference room, Mr. Collins keeps this short list: Creative 53% Teaching 28% Other 19% That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do. These aren’t ballpark guesstimates. Mr. Collins, who is 51, keeps a stopwatch with three separate timers in his pocket at all times, stopping and starting them as he switches activities. Then he regularly logs the times into a spreadsheet. That’s not all. From the same article: Oh, he sleeps with vigor, too. He figures that he needs to get 70 to 75 hours of sleep every 10 days, and once went to a sleep lab to learn more about his own patterns. Now – surprise, surprise – he logs his time spent on a pillow, naps included, and monitors a rolling average. “If I start falling below that,” he says, pointing to the short list on his whiteboard, “I can still teach and do ‘other,’ but I can’t create.” Isn’t that amazing? He carefully measures certain parts of his life in order to improve them. He makes his decisions not based on memory or intuition but based on numbers. Jim Collins is the best example I’ve found so far of someone who is living by numbers. But will personal analytics be a common phenomenon? Well, there is one difficulty here: the data-gathering process. A company has a lot of resources to measure almost anything in its operation. It can set up a separate division to do just that. But an individual has limited resources. You have only yourself to do everything. I’m sure many people won’t be patient and diligent enough for that. Even those who do must be careful not to spend too many resources on it at the expense of the real, productive work. Because of these difficulties, only a few people like Jim Collins apply personal analytics effectively. Fortunately, it may change in the future. There are new products coming out that make it easy for you to gather data. One good example is the Nike+ system: Veronica Noone attached a small sensor to her running shoes and headed out the door. She pressed start on her iPod and began keeping track of every step she took. It wasn’t a long run – just 1.67 miles in 18 minutes and 36 seconds, but it was the start of something very big for her. Since that day, she’s run 95 more times, logging 283.8 miles in about 48 hours on the road. She’s burned 28,672 calories. And her weight, which topped 225 pounds when she was pregnant, has settled in at about 145. Noone knows all of that thanks to the sensor system, called Nike+. After each run, she can sync her iPod to the Nike+ Web site and get a visual representation of the workout – a single green line. Its length shows how far she’s gone, and the peaks and valleys reflect her speed. Products like Nike+ make data gathering effortless. We can expect more and more products like that emerge in the future. When that happens, you can easily measure many aspects of your life and use them to optimize your life.
Friday, August 28, 2009
12 Essential Lessons to Maximize Your Personal Strengths
Identifying your strengths and building your life based on them are essential for success. Without knowing how to recognize your strengths and maximize them, you may waste a lot of time doing the wrong things. Can you imagine spending years of hard work only to realize at the end that you have poured your time and energy (not to mention money) into the wrong things? That’s why I believe these 12 lessons on maximizing your personal strengths are important. I summarized these lessons from the bookNow, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton. Rather than writing a review of the book, I’ll directly give you the gems in the form of these 12 lessons. First of all, let’s be clear about the definition of strength used here: a strength is consistent near perfect performance in an activity. You have strength in something if you consistently achieve near perfect performance in it. This definition is important to bear in mind, as we go through the lessons. So here are the 12 essential lessons to maximize your personal strengths: 1. Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses You will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses. Capitalize on your strengths, and manage around your weaknesses. Managing around your weaknesses will free you up to hone your strengths to a sharper point. 2. An ability is a strength only if you can fathom yourself doing it repeatedly, happily, and successfully Besides consistently performing it successfully, you should also derive some intrinsic satisfaction from the activity. 3. Organize your life around your strengths Organize your life around your strengths so that these strengths can be applied. Find or carve out a role that draws on these strengths every day. This will make your life more productive and fulfilled. 4. There are three raw materials of strengths: talents, knowledge, and skills Talents are your naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior (more in lesson #6). 5. The most important of the three raw materials are talents Talents are the most important because they are innate whereas skills and knowledge can be acquired through learning and practice. 6. Your talents are enduring because they are somehow “hardwired” into your brain Basically, your talents are the strongest synaptic connections in your brain. It is the path of “least resistance” in your brain which makes you naturally tend to go that way. 7. There are two kinds of knowledge: factual and experiential Factual knowledge is content. For example, when you start to learn a language, factual knowledge is the vocabulary. Factual knowledge won’t guarantee excellence, but excellence is impossible without it. It gets you into the game. Experiential knowledge is the knowledge that can be acquired only through experiences. It teaches you what works and what doesn’t. It cannot be taught in classrooms. Instead, it’s something that you must discipline yourself to pick up along the way and retain. To build your strengths, you need both kinds of knowledge. 8. Skills bring structure to experiential knowledge A skill basically is the formulation of all the accumulated knowledge into a sequence of steps that, if followed, will lead to performance – not necessarily great performance but at least acceptable performance. It enables you to avoid trial and error and incorporate the best discoveries directly into your performance. A skill is designed to make the secrets of the best easily transferable. 9. The key to building your strength is to identify your dominant talents and then refine them with knowledge and skills It’s essential to understand how to distinguish your natural talents from things you can learn. The first thing you should do is identifying your natural talents. After that, you should acquire the required knowledge and skills to refine your talents. 10. Practice doesn’t (necessarily) make you perfect You can’t reach near perfect performance in any activity you choose just by practicing. It also requires certain natural talents. While you can always improve your performance with practice, it might not take you to consistent near perfect performance. Unless you have the necessary talent, your improvements will be modest. 11. A sure way to identify your talents is stepping back and watching yourself for a while. Watch yourself for a while when you try an activity. See how quickly you pick it up. See whether you become absorbed in the activity to such an extent that you lose track of time. 12. There are four clues to help you identify your talents More specifically, look for these four clues to identify your talents: Having read all the lessons, there are two questions you should ask yourself: If your answer to any of these questions is no, you’d better takeaction before it’s too late.
Knowledge consists of the facts and lessons learned (more in lesson #7).
Skills are the steps of an activity (more in lesson #8).
It is the combination of talents, knowledge, and skills that creates your strengths.
What are your spontaneous, top-of-mind reactions to the situations you encounter? These top-of-mind reactions provide the best trace of your talents because they show where the paths of “least resistance” in your brain are.
For example, when you hear that your employee cannot come because his child is sick, what is your first reaction? If your first reaction focuses on the ill child because you care about her, you may have a talent of empathy.
Your strongest connections are irresistible. They exert a magnetic influence, drawing you back time and again. These stronger connections will keep calling out to you, demanding to be heard. If you want to discover your talents, you should pay them heed.
The speed at which you learn a new skill provides a telltale clue to the talent’s presence and power. Whatever the skill is, if you learned it rapidly, your talents may be at work.
Your strongest synaptic connections are designed so that when you use them, it feels good. So, if it feels good when you perform an activity, chances are that you are using a talent.
How to Make More Money Fast!
Let’s start from the beginning by answering a basic question: what is money? Steve Pavlina in his book Personal Development for Smart People has a good answer: So the amount of money you earn is proportional to the amount of value you contribute to the society. What you need to do to make more money is simple: contribute more value to the society. There’s a catch though: the one who determines the value of your contribution is the society, not you. In Pavlina’s words: Your income depends on the social value of your work, not the personal value. Personal value is whatever you say it is. Social value, however, is determined by social consensus. So here is a key principle: To make more money, contribute more social value. Here are several things you can do to contribute more social value and thereby make more money: First of all, you should identify your personal strengths. What are you naturally good at? Working on your strengths will give you much more in return than working on your weaknesses. So it’s essential that you identify your strengths. Action list Further reading By identifying your personal strengths, you should find where you can be very good at. For example, you may find that you can be very good at playing piano or programming. What you need to do is improving your skills there until you reach world-class level. That way you can provide tremendous value to others. To improve your skills, you need to do deliberate practice. Here is a good explanation of deliberate practice: Deliberate practice refers to a form of training that consists of focused, grueling, repetitive practice in which the subject continuously monitors his or her performance, and subsequently corrects, experiments, and reacts to immediate and constant feedback, with the aim of steady and consistent improvement. It is generally accepted that this form of training calls for approximately 10,000 hours of concentrated effort if one is to achieve the optimum level of expertise. Action list Further reading Aside from the skills you choose for your deliberate practice, you need to have other skills in your skill set. These skills complement your main skills and help you provide something unique (see point 5 below). You don’t have to be very good at them, but you should be good enough. Action list Your network is essential in helping you make more money. There are two reasons for that: Of course, to expand your network you must be willing to help the people there. Action list Further reading What value can you contribute to the world that others can’t? Answering this question isn’t easy but it will help you differentiate yourself. So take the time to find your unique value proposition. Action list After finding your unique value proposition, you need to get the message out to your target audience. If people don’t know you then they won’t come. For that reason, you need to build your personal brand. By building your personal brand, people know what they can expect from you so they will come to you when they need it. Action list Further reading Opportunities often come in unexpected ways. You need to open your eyes and see what is around you. That’s how you improve your luck: Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they’re too busy looking for something else. Lucky people see what is there rather than just what they’re looking for. Since they are observant, lucky people often see things that other people don’t. Action list Further reading When you see a need, look at what you have (your skills and network) and find a way to provide a solution. The broader your skill set and network are, the more likely you will find something. Your solution should be customer-oriented and satisfy the customer. If the customer is satisfied, she may spread the word about you. Action list I read about it in the blogging context, but it applies to making money as well. One of the best ways to provide more value is by building on the value you already provide. This is smarter than starting from scratch because you can leverage what you have. Action list *** Applying these tips will take time, but it will help you make more money in the long term. Like Moliere said: The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.
1. Identify your personal strengths
2. Do your deliberate practice
3. Diversify your skill set
4. Expand your network
It can connect you with those who need your solutions. It helps you find opportunities.
When someone needs something that you can’t provide, turn to your network to find those who can. Or find someone whose skills complement yours.5. Find your unique value proposition
6. Build your personal brand
7. Open your eyes for opportunities
8. Provide customer-oriented solutions
9. Build upon what you build
