How each person handles authority, or succumbs to the authority in their life, has a major impact on their financial hardwiring. This’s because your financial hardwiring is a partial imprint of your psychic apparatus. If you could think of circuits on a computer’s motherboard for a moment as your financial hardwiring, then the microchips and transistors on the board would be your experiences. Those experiences fuse onto the mind’s motherboard, and they help to determine the dominant forces in a person’s psychic apparatus. Our psychic apparatus molds and shapes itself based on our experiences.
Separate your sheet of paper into two separate columns. On that paper, write the old saying, and write down the ways in which you lived your life according to this old belief that’s ingrained in your mind. Then, on the right side, rework the belief. Rework it so that it serves you. Poke fun at it if you have to, but do this exercise. After you reword the old belief, write down the reasons why you’ll live by the new belief from now on. Go back to your financial goals to look at the reasons why you wanted to achieve those goals. Reference those reasons why, and write down reasons why you must live by the new beliefs. Write down why you must rewire your financial hardwiring. Keep these new beliefs with you, and each month, come back to them when you repaint your financial picture and reset your goals. Don’t have New Year Syndrome when it comes to doing this work. The problem is that it’s easy to ignore hidden beliefs and debt when you choose not to look at it. When you tuck it under a rug and push it away, your ego can do a lot to help serve itself in these situations. Don’t allow this to happen. Don’t allow your ego to run your life in this manner. Make sure that you do each of these exercises, and you put your heart into it. Don’t just do it for the sake of doing it; do it because it matters. It matters because it’s your future on the line. It’s so important to manifesting a bigger and brighter future for yourself and your family. Realize how important your financial hardwiring is, and work on rewiring it. At first, it will be hard because you’re exposing the truth that your ego doesn’t want you to see. But, eventually it will get easier to see; the ego will shrink as you become empowered with the truth. If you can think back to anything that you overcame in the past, think about how you built awareness to where you were, versus where you wanted to be. It makes all the difference, and assessing and reassessing it is critical. You must constantly see where you are, versus where you want to be. You must always do this; it’s one of the most important parts of the process. It’s one of the most important parts of the millionaire method. The Millionaire Method: How to get out of Debt and Earn Financial Freedom by Understanding the Psychology of the Millionaire Mind by R.L. Adams Schedule Time for Writing
Hopefully by now you’ve figured out that you need to make time to write instead of winging it. That means you’ll choose a specific time to write each day and then commit to it. This daily time commitment is the first of the building blocks to creating a successful writing routine. I like to write in the morning, a half hour after I wake up. I devote an hour to writing, five days a week, taking weekends off. This works for me. You will want to play around with times of day until you figure out what works best for you. You’ll want to try writing at different times of day. Later on, we’ll talk about the importance of tracking how much you got done and how you felt about your writing. This will help you determine what time works for you. You may have to work around your work and personal schedule (kids, relationship), carving out time that works with the other demands in your life. This requirement may override your personal preference for writing. Take all of these factors into account as you choose a time . Once you’ve determined what time of day works best for you, you will need to set aside a specific time slot for writing each day. I suggest you reserve an hour each day, but you may need to set aside more or less time, depending on how much time it takes you to achieve your daily word count goal. Once you’ve determined how much you can achieve in a set amount of time, you will want to add this to your daily schedule. Habit 4: Track Your Writing Routine Good writers work in blocks of time, refusing to be distracted while they are “on the clock.” They also carefully track their time, occasionally evaluating what environmental changes influence their ability to produce quality material at top speed. To do this, you will want to master two writing habits: Writing in blocks of time and daily tracking your writing word count. Writing Habit Mastery - How to Write 2,000 Words a Day and Forever Cure Writer's Block by S.J. Scott Set a vision: Why do you do what you do? I suggest you watch Simon Sinek’s excellent ‘Start With Why’ TEDx talk to help you think about this. Define the big “WHY” to create your vision, the “why” that’s going to keep you going when you just want to give up. Set a goal: Does freedom mean $1,000 a month to you or $1,000 a week? What do you need to feel you’re free and happy? Set a goal for your annual revenue, e.g. $50,000, and profit, e.g $35,000. Set objectives: No goal ever achieved itself, so break your goal down into key objectives.
For example, to reach your revenue goal your 3 main objectives might be to: 1) Build an engaged community of 500 email/ blog subscribers through regularly blogging about XYZ; 2) Create an online video training course; 3) Create a two-tier consulting service package and gain three new clients per month. Set a budget: Based on your goals, you need to figure out your budget. Use my $100 breakdown near the beginning of this chapter and factor in any specific costs such as investing in software for landing pages, video creation and editing, or blogging optimization. Also factor in copywriting and design services. For the above example, let’s make it $500 total. Set your revenue streams: To reach your $50,000 revenue target stated above, it helps to break this figure down into monthly and weekly targets, for example, $4,134 each month and $961.54 each week. In order to break even on your initial start-up budget, you need to sell just over $500 worth of something. You might get one sponsor for your blog for two months, sell 20 copies of your $25 video course or get 2 new coaching clients at $250 per session. Now run the numbers on what you need to sell each week to be profitable and you’ll soon see if your revenue figure is achievable. Set a timeline: You need to hold yourself accountable to deliver on your goals and objectives. When you break down your revenue streams, you must put a timeline next to them. If you don’t they will not take on any sense of priority or urgency, and procrastination and perfectionism are the enemies of any business. The Suitcase Entrepreneur: Create freedom in business and adventure in life by Natalie Sisson 1. In planning, the “middle” is gone. You only have to define two points: where you plan to be 10 to 25 years from now and what you have to do in the next 90 days. The latter point requires real time data and an executive team that can face the brutal reality of what the data is saying and then act accordingly. You don’t want to fall in love with your own one to three year plans. 2. Keep everything stupidly simple. If your strategies, plans, decisions, systems, etc. seem complicated, they are probably wrong. 3. The best data is firsthand data. It’s why the entire executive team of GE comes to Crotonville each month to “teach.” Hanging out with GE managers from around the world along with key customers (letting customers attend Crotonville sessions is key to GE’s value proposition) lets the top executives find out what is really going on. It circles back to point #1 and the importance of real time data. And aligning with the importance of having only a few priorities, Jack Welch, the retired CEO of GE, had only four #1 priorities the entire two decades he was GE’s leader. Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm by Verne Harnish When our mind ''knows'' something, it doesn't see the need to focus a lot of attention on it anymore. If you have had certain beliefs for a long period of time, you have grown so accustomed to them running your life that you don't even register they are there anymore. This is great if all of your beliefs are completely empowering and are continuously improving the quality of your life. In my experience however, everyone, and that includes some of the most successful people in the world, have beliefs they can change or tweak in order to improve their lives. Most people have a lot of negative and self-defeating beliefs they are completely unaware of, and because self-mastery is a continuous process and not a destination, there are always positive changes to make. We are constantly thinking the same thoughts and entertaining the same beliefs. As a result, we are manifesting the same experience of life again and again. Studies show that up to 90% of what we say, think and do is the same that we have said, thought and done the day before. The Mind-Made Prison: Radical Self Help and Personal Transformation by Mateo Tabatabai My new rule for wealth:
I am wealthy when I can maintain the life quality I currently have for 12 months without having to work. I am wealthy when I have the time to travel, exercise, study and meditate without being limited by a steady job. I am wealthy when I am healthy enough to exercise 4 times a week and do the things I love (martial arts, yoga, dancing) without any physical restrictions. I am wealthy when I have at least 2 ideas I can work on in the areas of life I am passionate about. I am wealthy when I express my love to my family and friends whenever I speak to them. When I first did this I suddenly realized that I was in fact already wealthy. I also had the realization that even if I suddenly won the lottery, my life really wouldn't change that drastically! When I changed my rules in the area of wealth, it also became a lot easier for me to acquire additional wealth. Since I was already wealthy, I was behaving and feeling like someone who is wealthy. Do you think it is easier to acquire wealth when you already know you are wealthy? All of my rules are constructed in a way that I am in control of whether or not they are fulfilled. For example, one of my criteria for wealth is: ''I am wealthy when I express my love to my family and friends''. I am in control of whether or not I do this and it is important that you set your criteria in a way where you are in control. If my criteria was: ''I am wealthy when my family and friends love me'', I would be setting myself up for failure because now the control is no longer in my hands. What if my friend was angry and yelled at me one day and if my rule for love stated that someone who yells at you doesn't love you? I would mistakenly come to think that he didn't love me. At this point I will not only feel my friend doesn't love me, but I will no longer feel wealthy either. This is the power of rules and it is important that you set them up in a way where you are in control. I once heard someone's rule for success, which I immediately adopted. His rule for success was: Everyday alive and breathing is success. Talk about setting yourself up for SUCCESS! What happens if something in the external world happens and my rules for wealth are no longer fulfilled? Well, I just go ahead and change the criteria I have for that given rule. I am an expert meaning maker and I play in the world of meaning in whatever way will give me the most positive emotions and the highest quality of life. The Mind-Made Prison: Radical Self Help and Personal Transformation by Mateo Tabatabai If I was handed $100 today to start a business, here is how I would invest that money:
What Cost A great domain name from NameCheap $10 one off Domain hosting from Hostgator $6 monthly WordPress Design (use Elance or oDesk) $50 one off Logo design (through fiverr.com) $5 one off Mentoring by a successful entrepreneur $10 lunch PayPal Account to receive payments $0 e-Junkie account to sell digital products $5 monthly 3 Social Media profile designs (Fiverr.com) $15 one off Total Spent $96 There are plenty of services that let you build a business for next to nothing. Take advantage of them. No need to break the bank is there? In fact, you should make your biggest investment in yourself: The Suitcase Entrepreneur: Create freedom in business and adventure in life by Natalie Sisson The first step to becoming a master of meaning is to fully recognize that none of your beliefs and meanings are absolutely true. Sure, I might have meanings that I believe very strongly in (like the theories I am sharing with you in this book), but I also accept the fact that my human brain is fallible and that I can very well be completely wrong in many of the things I believe. Are you willing to try on the ''no truth'' frame of mind for a couple of days? If you don't like it, you can always come back and pick up your old truths again. When you have this frame of mind, you no longer have any reason to try to convince others that your beliefs are true.
''Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing. You see things not as they are, but as you are.'' Eric Butterworth Most people are completely unaware of the rules they have in the different areas of their life. Even the people who are somewhat aware of their rules usually make two mistakes: 1. They choose criteria that aren't measurable. Let's say one of your criteria of being rich is ''When I have enough money so that I can live my ideal lifestyle without having to work''. With a criteria like that, you are setting yourself up for failure because your idea of the ideal lifestyle is going to change over time. 2.The second mistake people make is that their criteria is so far from where they currently are, it is going to take a lot of hard work and time to get to the point of fulfilling them. Sure, it is great to have big goals, but if your happiness or sense of wealth is dependent on a really big goal, you are cheating yourself from feeling those emotions during the journey towards reaching your goal. The Mind-Made Prison: Radical Self Help and Personal Transformation by Mateo Tabatabai In advocating spontaneous composition with little or no revision, Kerouac was demanding more discipline, not less; the writer, like the athlete or the jazz musician, was to commit himself to daily and endless practice in letters, journals, and “sketching,” as Kerouac called his fast-as-hands-can-print transcriptions of his immediate surroundings, all training for the moment of performance.
The skills of improvisation, devalued in the modern industrial West, were to laboriously unlocked, like prisoners buried in a cave led by a perilous route back into the light. Nor did the fact that Kerouac’s work was openly, unabashedly autobiographical, that he staked everything on an ethos of almost physical intimacy in which the somatic self’s fluctuations defy the censorship of the mind, bringing the narrative “I” as close to himself as possible and abolishing the traditional distance between author and reader, mean the result was life, not art. The true story of postwar America in all its speed, tomfoolery, and sorrowfulness, Kerouac believed, could only be told as interior monologue and confession. Buddhism promised Kerouac a world where wanderers could fashion their own religious order, one more ecumenical than Christianity ever devised, a special form of the gathered church, “big wild bands of holy men,” in Kerouac’s words in The Dharma Bums, “Zen lunatics” bringing the “vision of freedom of eternity” to all creatures and sanctifying a way of life fast disappearing in America: the way of the vagrant, the hobo, the bum. The “Dharma” in Kerouac’s title meant “truth,” but the word “Bums” held an older and deeper It summoned up the Depression images of his boyhood Kerouac loved, men traveling “with nothing but a paper bag for luggage,” as he put it in Desolation Angels, “waiting in line for coffee and donuts…forag[ing] in riverside dumps looking for junk to sell,” an image with a long pedigree in American life and popular culture The Dharma Bums (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Jack Kerouac I have only written, in every line I have composed in my professional life, about things I have done, and the risks I have recommended that others take or avoid were risks I have been taking or avoiding myself. I will be the first to be hurt if I am wrong. When I warned about the fragility of the banking system in The Black Swan, I was betting on its collapse (particularly when my message went unheeded); otherwise I felt it would not have been ethical to write about it. That personal stricture applies to every domain, including medicine, technical innovation, and simple matters in life. It does not mean that one’s personal experiences constitute a sufficient sample to derive a conclusion about an idea; it is just that one’s personal experience gives the stamp of authenticity and sincerity of opinion. Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies, particularly those called “observational,” ones in which the researcher finds past patterns, and, thanks to the sheer amount of data, can therefore fall into the trap of an invented narrative. Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter—it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea. Students pay to write essays on topics for which they have to derive knowledge from a library as a self-enhancement exercise; a professional who is compensated to write and is taken seriously by others should use a more potent filter. Only distilled ideas, ones that sit in us for a long time, are acceptable—and those that come from reality. It is time to revive the not well-known philosophical notion of doxastic commitment, a class of beliefs that go beyond talk, and to which we are committed enough to take personal risks. Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow is one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is not just an aim but an obligation. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
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