Ah, that’s the thing. First, I don’t think I’ve actually talked about a couple simple facts about blogs. Like the simple fact that when you write something interesting, and your blog is linked into the web properly you can attract traffic. Where would the traffic come from? Here is a horribly incomplete list:

• Search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN;
• MyBlogLog and similar blog communities;
• “Social Networking” sites such as Squidoo, Facebook and twitter;
• Other blogs - If you comment and participate on other blogs, people will visit you;
• Offline promotion. A simple card with tear-away tabs with your URL can be effective;
• Online advertising - free ones like Craig’s List, and paid ones like Google adwords.

One other thing I’m pretty certain of is this: Many people want to use things like blogs, Squidoo and Twitter. They can write or put up audio or video. But the technical things involved in setting up a blog can keep a blog from happening.

That’s a problem that I want to help people with. Come check out my email newsletter; and feel free to write any time to let me know what type of blogging issue you could use help with. You can leave a comment here, too, if you like.

Cheers,
Tim

Here’s a question I like to ask people - it’s quite interesting. So here is that question…How old will you be when you die? Now, please don’t be offended. It’s a quick, easy question really. How old do you see yourself getting to? 70? Maybe 64? I want to see at least 100. My grandmother has recently turned 98. How about you?

Now, one of my theories about this is that if we reduce our stress, both total stress and sustained stress - things like horrible traffic stress - we should live longer. There are lots of ways to reduce stress. For example, my wife and I like to avoid traffic now. When possible, we don’t schedule meetings at 9am. By shifting them to 10am, we get to drive on nice, virtually empty roads. Ok, so there might still be some traffic, but you get the point. 40 minutes driving versus 15 minutes. Less fighting over your space on the road; less chance of dings or real accidents. I think that will have a positive effect over time.

We’ve also moved recently to a place that seems like a village. And the amazing thing is, we only live about 5 minutes from our old condo. We had no idea this entire area of town existed until we went out house hunting. Truly amazing. The feeling now as we drive off the main road and back through the tree-lined neighborhood to our little corner of the world is distinctly “peaceful”.

One more idea is this - reduce the monthly built-in cost of your life. Raise the monthly built-in income you have.

I know that this idea can be painful, or almost impossible for some people to think about. Some people do “need” a large BMW, a couple vacations a year or a second house. But if you are able to just give up on the “keep up with the Joneses” mentality, I think you’ll improve your life. I really think it can help you to live longer. And if you spend 10 years stressed out, versus 10 years without that stress. I’d consider that to be a lifestyle improvement. Even if it doesn’t help us to stretch out our lives, it will make the life we do have more enjoyable.

Well, I’m happy to show you that’s not the case. If you have something to say, just say it. You don’t need a big deal and a thousand words. Just pass on something that will be helpful or interesting, or that you just need to get out. So, here’s my example of just that - short and sweet, yeah?

By the way, who remembers the song, “Kisses Sweeter Than Candy”?

So what I’d like to suggest is that writing a blog can be a great way to get a biz going, even before you have any real idea how to start a biz for yourself. Maybe you don’t really know how to run a business. Maybe you don’t know how to make money, but you do know an idea or topic you are passionate about. Maybe you have some great skills, but you use them at your job - and you know you do NOT want to depend on those skills in your business. Maybe you just know that having a blog can be a great way to run a business. There are people that have a blog as the center of their business, with affiliate links, paid blog posts and other monetization methods providing them a workable living.

Whatever the reason, here is one major argument I would like to put forward. You can start a blog for like $5 a month - on your own domain! Yes, you can start even easier on blogger.com and hundreds of other places. But believe me - you WANT your own domain. If you don’t know why, trust me, ok? The short explanation is that when you do get noticed by the search engines, if you have a blogger.com blog, then you will be building blogger.com’s already awesome ranking a little stronger. They won’t really notice! Build your blog’s popularity on your own domain, and your Alexa and google rankings can become quite respectable. That helps bring visitors, and visitors click on links. Visitors clicking links cause sales to happen just like the birds and the bees.

But enough of the gory details. My point is this - if you have something you’d like to write about, and writing isn’t akin to having a tooth pulled, then it can be a great start of a business. You could talk about your pet cats, and eventually help people evaluate all the goodies they can find in the local pet store and online to keep their cats happy, and to make your pet-owning experience more convenient. You might not understand how to turn your writing into a business at first. That’s okay. If you do some writing, and if you do a few things that help other people run across your writing, then you’ll make some friends. You’ll gather a flock of people that like to hear what you say. Later when you figure out a focus and business to run, you’ll be very grateful that you’ve got that flock of friendly people out there, scattered around the world listening to what you say.

Let me try to explain my idea like this. Say you know you want to get involved with motorcycle sales. [I still really miss my Honda VFR I had back when I lived in Singapore!] Maybe you figure out pretty quickly that for the business setup and funding you’ll need, it will likely take you 12-18 months to really get started. At the same time, say you have a friend who happens to be working on a new magazine - about motorcycles. You realize that writing an article or two for the motorcycle magazine can really boost your credibility. And when your friend asks if you can help to drive up readership, you realize that you can interact with a lot of people in your future marketplace while talking up the magazine.

Now, what if you were able to leverage some of your writing and new friends to get your motorcycle business up and running in 12 months? Do you think you might get special rates to advertise with your friend? And do you think your business would benefit from all the magazine readers that heard about you long before your cycle shop even opened?

That’s what I mean about starting a blog helping you with starting a business.

But there are a few more benefits I think you might get from this approach. First of all, what if it turns out you’ve picked a bad topic to write about? Say you start writing, all excited. You put up 3 or 4 posts on your blog. You ask a few friends to take a look. And then it becomes hard to write. Say you find yourself avoiding your blog. I saw a statistic recently that many blogs die in less than a month. Maybe your first blog dies of rather natural causes. Let’s look at that. What would you lose in that situation? Well, if you were paying $5 monthly for the blog, you’d be out around $5 - maybe as much as $15 when you realize that your blog has died.

Now, if writing and blogging seem to be the problem - the unnatural activity for you - then maybe authoring a blog for yourself is not such a great idea. I’d say that would be a valuable and inexpensive lesson to learn so quickly, cheaply and easily. Keep in mind that a blog is still very doable for you; just search out the various ways that you can get content for your blog without writing much or any of it yourself. Two methods are using PLR articles and outsourcing the writing. I will write about these soon; drop an email if you’re anxious to hear more about this way of building a blog for yourself.

On the other hand, maybe you love to write. Maybe you have strong opinions on your topic. Maybe it just isn’t something that you want to write about enough to keep a blog going. Did you think you could develop a business built around the topic of your blog, more or less? Yes? Well, let me ask you a question then. If you’ve hit a roadblock writing about your topic in a short 30 or 60 days, is this really a good area of business for you? Do you have enough passion about this topic to get other people excited about becoming your customers? Or, did you just learn a lesson for less than $15 about a potential business topic that doesn’t keep you consistently interested?

Let’s say you decide that is the case. You might be passionate about a topic, but not really crazy about fighting in the marketplace to build a business around that topic. What then? Well, here’s one idea. Take the blog you’ve written, throw it all away, and start up a new blog. Cost to you - $0. Kick off a new blog, hopefully picking a topic that is more suitable and long-lasting for you to write about. Hopefully you collected email addresses on your first blog, so you have some people you can notify about your new blog right away. And start writing. You’ll have learned a bit about blogging from the first experience, right? Again - if we call the first experience a failure (not my view of it, by the way…you learned a lot of things for very little real cost!), let me again stress that it should have cost you the price of a domain for 1 year plus 1 to 3 months of hosting. That’s a cheap lesson to learn. In fact, it may not cost any more than a meal at McDonald’s, or a couple lattes at Starbucks.

Ok, enough talk about the things that might go wrong. What if this really works out for you? What if you do hit on a topic like the blog about your pet cats, or a blog about motorcycles in Madrid - and you can later make money based on your blog. You might be wondering what kind of money you can make from a blog. Well, here are three ways that people make money.

First, you can add links to products - recommend things that you use, or that you believe to be helpful - and you can make money as an “affiliate”. There probably aren’t a lot of things that you cannot get affiliate commissions on anymore. Having a blog about pet cats, you might add links to 4 or 5 cat books from Amazon. You can link to an eBay store that has electric cat boxes. You can post an entry to your blog talking about the expensive toy you just bought your cat - and the fact that the bag laying on the floor got played with more than the $23.92 “Your cat will love it!” toy you carried home in the bag. If you provided a link to that $23.92 item, I’m sure that somebody would buy one periodically. This can grow into the thousands of dollars per month. Don’t get too excited by that, though. Figures over a few hundred dollars monthly require work, and all profits require a measure of patience.

Now, maybe that blog is going fine for you. But let’s say that your pet dies of a heart condition 6 months later. (I love cats. I have 3 at home. This is just a “for instance” scenario.) Would you want to continue your pet cat blog? I’m not sure if I would want to. What then? Well, here’s a second way to profit from a blog. You can sell it! Careful, though - you must have your blog on your own domain for this to work. There are various ways to complete the deal. Done right, you can sell a blog for 6 to 12 times the monthly income you get from it at the time of sale.

For a third idea, you might find after a period of time that you have some valuable advice for cat owners. Maybe you have a rare type of cat, or a type that has it’s particular problems that you’ve learned to solve. One thing about the Internet is that there is always room for an information product. You might write a simple PDF document, which you could sell for $5 or $42. You could get testimonials or actual content interviews with veterinarians or cat breeders - and add $5 or $50 to your product price. Now, to make this exciting - could you actually provide some loving guidance to other cat owners? If so, maybe you could launch a membership site for them. Membership sites can be free. But then there are memberships that are $997 monthly! I haven’t gone to look, but I am sure there are some $100 monthly pet membership sites out there already. The Net is a really big place!

So how does this idea of starting with a blog sound now? It is definitely possible to take a half-baked idea, and get to work writing. While the ideas for a business are percolating in your brain you can already be establishing some blog posts. People love to find an informative site on a topic that touches their heart. You might just develop a warm market of blog readers while your half-baked ideas are being developed. And believe me – writing about a topic can help you to develop your initial ideas into something much more concrete and specific. And while you are writing, the people you attract to read your blog can assist you as well. You can test your ideas out on them. You can get their feedback to your blog posts, and you can put a survey on your blog. Effectively, your readers can help you with market research.

For more details on how to actually put this plan into action, leave a comment, drop me an email, subscribe to my Get Your Biz Going email list - or do all of those. But do take some action. And take advantage of the community here on the Internet - stop back here and see what other people have said as well.

Actually, I just like it. How about you? Now, some of you are thinking that reading a blog or two and checking on your next vacation is fine, but nothing more. I understand that. Or you might be unsure, curious, maybe thinking that getting something going on the Internet would be exciting. But scary. I guess this will be for you, then. I’d like to help calm your fears a bit, give you a few ideas, and help you to take some action.

First off, realize that the Internet is most like the new medium for moving information, as in….radio, then TV, now the Internet. Have you heard about Web 2.0? That’s like the original Internet, but with interactive communities for people to share their thoughts and experiences. You can find out what websites a friend has bookmarked; you can shoot a video of your new grandkid on a phone and upload it to your Blog; you can subscribe to a podcast series from Stanford on Social Entrepreneurship - and iTunes will sync that to your iPod or iPhone for you automatically. I like to use an FM transmitter and listen to those things in the car while I’m driving. I heard Zig Ziglar mention that you can get the equivalent of a master’s degree by listening to quality audio material for a year or two while driving.

So if we think about using the Internet for a platform to build a business, or to provide an additional channel for a business, we run into a big problem. Basically, the Internet is huge, yet a lot of websites sit out there and starve and they never get people to visit. Some people put a lot of time into building up a beautiful website, and spend a lot of money on that. That approach is as flawed on the Internet as it is anywhere. Unless the money you are spending helps to support a decent plan, the money is potentially being wasted. If so, this also wastes time. And I’m sure you can relate to the emotional stubbornness created by spending a pile of money supporting an idea. It can create a huge blind spot.

Let me explain it this way. Las Vegas was started as an awesome entertainment area, but it wasn’t going to get any visitors, was it? Part of the success plan had to include the transportation and the attraction of visitors. They didn’t start off with the Luxor out there, did they? No - they got things started, and they split their resources between building an amazing entertainment environment and attracting the visitors that would happily exchange their money for hotels, food, blackjack and shows.

Think for a few moments about the phrase, “building a business”. Isn’t that what I just described? The alternative is to build some amazing website with all the bells and whistles, maybe some wonderful flash, blah blah blah…. But if that amazing site is effectively as visible as a glittery signboard in a remote area of the desert, all that perfection will need a LOT of remedial promotion to bring interested visitors to it. The results in that situation would likely be disappointing for a period of time. The point is that putting more stress on starting a small Internet business, and growing that business by responding to its marketplace will normally produce better business results. And it can definitely be less emotionally straining.

But how do you design a business using the Internet? Actually, that’s not much of a problem. If you start looking for business ideas, they are everywhere! That is part of the problem with the Internet. There is just too much! Search on certain things, and you get no results. Search on other topics, and you can get 5 million results! Google and other search engines generally do a great job of providing us good results first. But, that is not always the case. And there are definitely a few whole classes of low-value website out there basically designed just to transfer dollars from us into the website’s coffers. You need to filter what’s out there, consider the source of the information, and generally be a bit discerning. The same things you do if you are watching the news, reading a newspaper or a magazine, or hearing someone interviewed on the radio. We don’t automatically trust the information on an infomercial, do we?

One thing to realize about this overwhelming number of sites and sources of information is this: We are people. People trust people. We may respect the Encyclopedia Britannica, but that is really just a set of books that contain facts. When we want to use the information, we want to be able to turn to a trusted expert. If we hear contradictory information, we’ll likely believe our trusted expert more often than not. They filter and sort and help us process all the chaotic plethora of information that is out there. Any one person can only be really good at a certain number of things. In most other things, it’s good to have a trusted source of information and advice. That saves us time, lets us trust the information that we allow to enter our brains, and that gets stored in our own amazing storage devices - our brains.

So how do we select a business model for the Internet? I suggest that we become an expert to a group of people, our customers and visitors and readers. We limit our focus and get good at solving some problem for those people. And we get to know our customers and respond to their needs. There are lots of ways to make money from a situation like that. We can sell things like books or Playstations. We can sell information, maybe in the form of a PDF, a series of phone conferences, or a podcast subscription. We can run a seminar, give training, or provide a service.

But realize that we are now talking about marketing. So let me tie all this together. One of the basics of marketing is to identify your target audience. Target them, learn about them, talk to them in a way that leads to good communication. Ask your market what they need, how you can help, and what they want to spend their money on. If you build a business with these basics in mind, you won’t likely build a perfect website with amazing sales and entertainment potential when you’ve got no audience and market. That is, unless you have a very good plan for launching that site with a big bang. You are more likely to provide things that your market wants to spend its money on, and enhancing that business over time.

This should help solve the overwhelming volume of “help” available on over a billion websites that exist already. If you know that you’d like to develop a training site to help people establish a successful account service business, then you can safely ignore a lot of things. You will have identified whole classes of websites and information as noise that you can virtually ignore. If you haven’t identified a market and a problem that you’ll solve for that market, then you may end up listening to all the promises and ideas, investigating all the glitzy, hypey sites, and you could spend years on doing research.

I hope this is making sense. If you want to establish a business that uses the Internet, then…well….you’ll have to do many of the same things that you’d do to establish a business or a shop without any Internet components. There are some markets that are hugely more successful online than they can be in today’s world using any other communication medium.

For now, let me leave you with one suggestion. For those of you that have ideas to share, that can talk or write about some topic of interest to you, I have a suggestion. Start out sharing your ideas, putting them out there in writing and audio. Maybe have phone calls or Skpe calls with others. Practice presenting your idea, and conduct some market research in the process. Develop some of the skills that you can use later to run a business that uses the Internet.

How do you do those things? Well, start a blog. Establish a podcast. Become involved in forums and other peoples’ blogs by adding your comments. This networking can lay the groundwork for a support group, or even partners, for your business as it develops. You can also start to find an audience. So, start a blog. Start writing. If you find you’re having trouble adding to your blog after 2 or 3 weeks, reflect on that. This gives you a chance to modify or completely change your “topic” or market before spending any significant money. More importantly, you don’t have the emotional stubbornness and blind spots caused by deciding on a course of action, and putting $100,000 behind that idea. Somehow it is much easier to adjust our direction when our total investment has been some time, and maybe $100.

If this approach appeals to you, then subscribe to get more of these ideas. My Get Your Biz Going email sequence deals with this topic. It gives you suggestions. You’ll see some of the ideas in action. You are reading my blog, but - maybe you have NO idea how to get your own blog started. Maybe you have a website and a few products, and have traffic, but you’re having trouble turning those pieces into sales. The idea is to get the groundwork in place to grow a business using the Internet. Join me to Get Your Biz Going. Another way to say that is - Create Your Own Newsletter. Let me help you change your momentum - and get it going!

A bit of fun - and a Naked Baby…(video)
Would you like to see what some real people have accomplished on the Internet? Some of the big numbers? Heck, I don’t even care - you really just need to see this video! It’s fun - it’s creative - and it has great rockstar appeal. Turn up your speakers. Naked Baby, Big Money Video

You see, many times people speak with others. They use words that everyone understands. Still, there is not true communication and understanding at the end of the day.

I’ve learned some of those lessons personally. For a number of years I worked in Technical Support, working with a complex million-dollar software package. A large part of my job was getting into the head of my business-savvy and maybe computer not-so-savvy customers; and when they’d found a genuine issue with the software, I’d then have to translate the message to send to the developers in another country. The challenge was not just getting the message of the problem across. I also had to make sure to convey the urgency created by the problem and the business needs of my customer. It was all English, but I assure you that there were misunderstandings!

At the same time, I have to agree with a lesson that Robert Kiyosaki teaches. Although his real father was an educator, including serving as the head of education for the state of Hawaii, he says this lesson came from his rich dad. Plain and simple, his rich dad said that words were important. Sometimes they have very precise meanings. Most of the time, people are rather loose in their use of words. Rich dad repeatedly worked to teach Robert to learn and carefully use words based on their precise meanings.

So why the discussion of misunderstandings and the “correct” meaning of words? Well, let’s talk about “financial freedom” and wealth. Are those two basically the same thing? Are they related, but subtly different concepts? My fear is that I’ll go on talking for years, and while I have one picture in my mind, you’ll have another picture in your mind.

Here’s the thing. Financial freedom and wealth are two very different things. We can use another concept, net worth, while discussing these two. Now, I’m not really that concerned with the academics of these things. I’m concerned with the goal each of us has in our heads, and in our hearts. I’m going to suggest something here, and it’s based on a simple progression.

My suggestion: We must work to increase our net worth, striving to achieve the peace and satisfaction of financial freedom. Once we’ve gotten there, we have a lot of options. The real challenge is to keep working on your increasing net worth. Now, you could stop - there would be no need to go further. If you’re satisfied with your standard of living when you have achieved financial freedom, why not retire? You’ve earned it!

But, I think we can all do a lot more than that. Since there will be no need to work, you will have a lot of time free, or at least under your control. What will you do with your time? After a bit of a breather, I believe we should all take the skills we used to achieve financial freedom and push onwards to achieve a measure of wealth.

So - what DID I just say? Well, here’s my attempt at giving a layman’s explanation of what I just suggested. Here goes.

Financial freedom - Having residual income sufficient to pay all expenses of ones life - without the need to work.

Net Worth - The value of our assets less the value of our debts. (Being debt-free does not qualify you as being financially free. You do still need at least $1 to eat, right? You might need some cleaning supplies. Most of us put fuel in a car. Living is NOT free!)

Wealth - Having an abundance of assets.

Ok, I did look up “wealth”. Here is what mirriam webster.com says “wealth” means:

abundance of valuable material possessions or resources

I think that all is worthy of saying again, in a different way. So here goes, and I’m going to try to be more clear.

We all start with a particular financial situation. The whole world naturally strives for “good” things. But I’ll also suggest that the world is naturally abundant. We should all be working to create wealth, and to share the abundance we experience with others. We should also be generous as we are achieving wealth, and find a way to make a difference in the world. A great way to achieve wealth is to find a cause to contribute to, and become better and better at contributing to that cause - both with our actions, our capabilities and our resources.

So one virtually lifelong mission is to increase the assets we have so that they exceed the debts and expenses that we have. We should continue this and strive to create a situation where we do not have to work in order to maintain our life at an acceptable standard. But stopping there forever, while very good for our inner peace and stress levels, would just be selfish! We can contribute to the world!

True, donating our time is a valuable way to contribute - and when we are financially free, we’ve got complete control of our time. The bills are all taken care of! But, let me suggest something. In addition to contributing our time, if we can also create the wealth necessarey to establish a foundation, or simply donate a couple million dollars - then we can contribute in ways, and maybe in places, that we cannot contribute with our personal donations of time. I feel that the world can be changed for the better if 1 or 2 million people take up this type of cause in the next 10 year.

So that’s my formula for financial success. If you have any comments, let us all hear them!

So if we think about starting at point A, wanting to get to point B, then how does this apply. To keep things simple, let’s call Point B the following: no need to work; savings and automatic income cover expenses - and insurance and other hedges are in place to counteract tragedies.

I would suggest that the first big stone is to increase our assets - our collection of things that have the capacity to make us money. Our education gives us the chance to increase our income from employment - it is an asset. A condo or an office building, if it provides income net of taxes, mortgages, maintenance, vacancy and all other expenses - if the result is a positive cash flow, then it is improving our net worth. With enough improvement, in both raw assets and in monthly cash flow from those assets, we will reach the first plateau of achieving wealth - not having to work in order to maintain our lives indefinitely. The cash flow we have will handle the bills and outflow, and we no longer have to work for money.

Now, this is one of the big stones. I’ll leave to the side other big ones like family and contribution to the world for now. I’m not suggesting that you should leave them out for a period of time - doing that tends to eliminate your family, and eventual financial achievement cannot take the place of a family you have lost due to neglect. We need balance.

What is this ‘big stones’ idea? Well, here is a paraphrasing of the story Stephen Covey shared. If you take a large canning jar and you fill it with the normal things that take up our lives – sand, a few pebbles, drizzle in some oil and then poor in water – you’ll be amazed how much water you can still get in the jar after the other things have gone in. But when you’re done, you’d still have these big stones – the truly important things in life – sitting there lonely on the table.

Do the same thing again, but put the big stones in first. Now add the pebbles. Pour in the sand. Add water. Wow! Putting the big stones in first doesn’t really eliminate much of the other things – they still fit somehow. And YOU GOT THE BIG STONES in there!! That’s the message – put the important things in first. The other details will fit. In 10 years, it’s the big stones that will matter. Get them in there!

So from whatever situation we are in, we need to move towards having the assets and cash flow so that our “ability to pay bills without collecting another paycheck” grows from x months to 6 months, 11 months, 32 months, and eventually INFININTE months.

Keeping this simple, then, we want to find ways to eliminate our large leakages of money. On the other hand, we want to identify those activities that will lead to having those assets that will provide cashflow for our financially free life. There is a lesson I learned back in college while selling books door-to-door for three summers. At first I would arrive in an area and simply look at the houses. From the way the houses looked, I would try to judge the people and their financial situation.

It took a while. But eventually I came to this conclusion: There are people with beautiful cars, beautiful houses, amazing vacations and golf club memberships who are dirt poor. They are living on “financial red line” and everything is just ready to explode in their faces. Although they make good money, it is ALL being spent. It doesn’t matter what it’s spent on - it just is gone. Nothing is left. And this continues month after month.

But then you do hear the stories about little old ladies who never had much, but they ALWAYS saved something. And at some point she started to invest. And she got better at it. Yeah, it might have taken that person 50 years. But at the end of the 50 years, they have 2.79 million dollars of IBM stock and 13 apartment buildings.

The difference in these two is that one feels compelled by social status and other pressures inside themselves so they spend and spend and spend. The other one does without just a bit, and continues to do that. Over time, she’s able to acquire something that helps her progress faster than simply saving will allow. At some point she’s got an apartment building, and things start to progress faster. Maybe it took her 20 years to get the first apartment building. No matter - she is not concerned with what she’s missed out on. She’s concerned with the outcome and with assuring a good future for herself. And she plods on.

So back to us. The lesson I’d suggest from the little old lady that we should apply is this: Do we really need that shiny new car? Do we need the shiny new car with the fancy hole in the roof, the upgraded rims, the 12-speaker stereo? There are ways to save serious chunks of cash by not having some of the upgrades; by acquiring a pre-loved model, etc. Do we really need to take a vacation in France? Could a more local car and hotel vacation be sufficient, and save us perhaps $3000 - or $12,525 over a 2-week period? If we cook steak at home, could we save $250 over going out to a restaurant?

I’m not talking about the “clip coupons and go to the car wash on Tuesdays for their 15% off morning deal”. You can do those things, too. What I’m talking about is learning about our approach to those things that have a big impact on our money. I’m talking about a choice of a $1720 or a $2720 mortgage; a $298 or a $982 or a $1415 car payment; an extra $27,500 club membership - which adds a monthly burden of a couple hundred dollars. Once in a while, just “needing a break” can put a big $8000 dent in our credit cards.

If you look back on the last 5 or 10 years, where does the money go to? The big money. And when have you been able to say no to some nicer, bigger, shinier gizmo and still feel good? At the end of the day, our money comes and goes based more on emotion than most of us realize. When we decide to buy a new vehicle, often we think more about the sunny day driving with friends or family and all those great things that will be possible with the vehicle. We really don’t want to be bogged down realizing that we’re adding a payment that will be with us every month for the next 3, 5 or 7 years. That’s not pleasant. Change channels - back to that sunny day, and the winding road - is that the ocean? Ah…mmm…sea gulls, the beach…

Have you also heard the other set of statistics? 95% of people get to retirement age and they don’t have enough money to support themselves. This has been reported in the US; it’s been reported by government agencies in Malaysia. Though I haven’t gone to look, I expect that this is one of those universal truths. If anyone has any numbers for Denmark, Australia, Yakutsk or Andorra, please leave a comment to update us all. I don’t expect the number to vary too much. And it doesn’t really matter. Let’s just take this as a slice of reality. To enjoy retirement funded by our own dollar, we need to shoot for being in the top 5% of the population. hmmm….

So, I know that could be a shock. But if I can reach a few people every few months, and if they can redesign their expenses, income streams and their financial plans based on something I say - HOORAY!! Have you read the book, “The Millionaire Next Door”? One example it illustrates is of two individuals that make over $900,000 US annually. The analysis in the book says that one of these people lives as if they make only US$225,000. The result is that they have $675,000, less taxes, to invest, save and grow their net worth. The other individual, I believe it was a doctor, actually spends a bit more than he makes each year. Net worth for him was barely fluctuating. That story scared me. It’s possible to make almost $1 Million in a year, and NOT improve your net worth. Ouch!

But let me get back to the gist of this discussion. I can’t share all of the information I gained from a 10-hour seminar. But the summary of it is this: There have been a couple VERY large changes in the way that money works. The assertion was that there is a humongous change happening right now. The world’s masses have made their living by seeking employment for years - hundreds of years. But the world is changing, and the masses will be earning a living from the new information economy.

Another fact I’ve heard recently is that the amount of information accumulated in our world is doubling now every so many months, something like every 18 months. What that means to me is that there is TOO much information. We all have to adapt. Those of us aiming to be in the 5% group of financially free (actually, financially comfortable) people in 10, 20 or 35 years will need to keep this in mind. While it will still be very possible to achieve financial freedom via traditional means, it will be quicker and more efficient to make use of new trends. Gaining skills in information age profits give us a higher margin of error when something unexpected or unfortunate happens.

What’s really going to happen in the next 10 years? How about the next 20? Few of us will make a change that the whole world will notice. But if we quietly make sure that we’re not part of the “normal” group - the 95% - then we will be a special part of history. And if we can teach enough lessons to our next generation or two so they can slip into that top 5% as well, I doubt that we need to worry about the history books. My hope is that by not having to worry about money, we and our next few generations will have the time to make a difference that the world will notice. And I for one have faith in people. I have faith that after 5 or 10 years we will all get around to contributing to the world once we’ve got our family’s finances sorted out for the next few generations.

One thing is for sure - doing things that “make sense” to the people we deal with every day will likely get us into the popular group, the group of the 95%’ers. How does that sound to you?

In a recent discussion, someone mentioned that they simply wanted to break clean, and start to act in a new way. He wanted to look at time differently, and seemingly just wanted to start in that moment. I don’t think things work quite like that. We’ve all got habits, and habits have strong momentum. Breaking out of a habit is tough. Habits work and propel us to certain actions without the need for thinking; they are automatic. Thought habits are the same way.

If we’ve spent years thinking about reducing debts, it’s hard to look at our financial situation differently. We might become convinced that “enhancing our net worth” is a much better thing to focus on and saturate our mind with, as compared to being obsessed with getting out of debt. The Secret suggests that the brain can’t really process a complex idea like “get out of” debt - it just ends up with the debt part of the idea. Debt. Debt. Debt. The word will echo around, rattle around and just inhabit the brain.

If we’re going to have an idea bouncing around in there, rattling things around, why not have it be something we want? That way, if you do get in a conversation with someone, what are you likely to ask? “Say, do you have any ideas how to reduce debt?” Or, “Chris, what do you know about improving net worth?” I’ll make the bold statement that you’ll have two totally different conversations based on these leading remarks!

And can you see how the thought habits you have will tend to move your words closer to one or the other of those two remarks?

This same type of “thought gravity” affects the way we think and talk and act and relate to the world in other parts of our lives as well. Here’s an interesting exercise. Take a few minutes and write down some ideas about some of the wealthy people you know of. Are they kind or cruel? Stingy and self-centered or generous and contributing to the world? Did they gain their wealth honestly, or is there a bit more than a little conniving and fast footwork behind their accumulation of money?

Now, take a look at what these ideas say about how you really feel about wealthy people. Does it paint a picture that you want others to associate YOU with? Do you want to become one of those people?

If the answer is no, then you may never get to the point of being wealthy! Your subconscious mind wants to protect your from harm, pain and bad things. If your subconscious mind understands that wealthy people are bad (because you’ve spent years practicing that type of thinking), then your subconscious may well “protect you” from being wealthy. Let’s say you did amass a few million dollars, and you started to think about the amazing things you could do by starting a foundation. There’s a real possibility that before you’d have time to fund that foundation, that your mind would “rescue” from the bad situation you are in, and cause you to lose all that “bad” money.

We have to be able to paint a picture in our mind of where we want to go. And then the hard part - we have to be able to see OURSELVES standing IN the picture, living there as part of the world that created the picture, and as a true part of it. If we can’t seem to imagine ourselves doing or being a certain thing in our mind, there may always be a distance between us and that goal we have for ourselves. We may never arrive at the goal.

So reflect once in a while on how you react to the things that happen. Are there patterns? If you had a choice, would you change some of those patterns?

Now - make a choice.

When I graduated from college, my Bachelor of Science degree was in Computer Science and Spanish. Not a very normal combination, I think you’d agree.

Last night I finally, after maybe 6 months, got myself in motion again on a personal project - learning Mandarin. It’s part of a life goal to speak at least 10 languages. My aim is to speak each one well enough to be mistaken for a native of the respective country. It has been flattering each time I’ve had someone in Mexico believe that I’m from Spain. It’s likely that the Spanish gentleman I was speaking to in Manila was just being nice, but he also said I sounded like a native of Spain.

The real point of this is that my life goal, while important to me deep inside, gets pushed aside all to often - and for months at a time. Urgent things get in the way. Some weeks and months seem to get lost to paying bills, or a broken hip, or moving - to a new country, or just to a new neighborhood. Does this ever happen to you?

So I’m working on balancing out the things that are pressing on me today, and this week - and this year. I’m balancing that out with my need to make progress on this life goal. Part of the reason I haven’t made progress on this goal is that I put myself down too much. There’s a part of me that feels that I don’t deserve to complete this goal. It’s time to get over that! Once I can speak Mandarin relatively well, that will put me at 3 languages.

(Side note - My grasp of the Malay language here in Malaysia is not very strong, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever count that as one of the languages I’ve mastered.)

My sincere hope is that this experience - picking up and making progress on this life goal - will be a very large experiential learning lesson for me. It should help tip the balance on how I value myself and the use of my time. Deep inside, this should help to accelerate my ability to accomplish bigger, and admittedly, selfish goals. Since I believe that I have things to contribute to the world, it’s actually more selfish to not reach my goals and transcend them as quickly as possible! My worldly contributions will begin to kick in that much sooner.

One idea that pops into my head once in a while is that an hour a day should be enough to learn a language really well in 18 to 24 months. Well, maybe I’ve got an advantage there. Although I am a “white boy” from the US of A, I’ve already studied 2 foreign languages. I’ve got some language learning skills as a result.

But like any project, anyone should be able to pick up a new language or two. I can’t imagine a person not getting a good level of mastery of a new language they might pick up and study for 2 years. It’s really a matter of diligence and continual, small efforts. Well, that and some good materials that fit in with the way to each person learns, and the ways that effective language learning is accomplished.

I think that simple idea applies to a lot of life. I’ll dedicate a small amount of time, but work on my Mandarin consistently. So you see, this is a personal project I’ve chosen to learn the lesson of slowly accomplishing much more intimately. But if learning a language in 2 years is slow, how slow is not learning any languages in the last 10 years?

Do you speak Mandarin? Do you speak Spanish or Portuguese? Are you learning any of these?

What personal life projects are you working on? Are you making progress? Or is the urgency of life crowding those things out?

What gives you peace and satisfaction? What are you grateful for?