Design with Intent
Awesome PDF book that will make you think about all sorts of aspects in your business.
Neat idea, free PDF... will differently (definitely) make you think. HT to Lucas.
Share on FacebookThe 10 Rules Great CFOs Live By
The following is an excerpt from Your Life & Your Money.
Your actions speak so loud, I can’t hear what you are saying.—SCOTT FEHER
1. Always take responsibility and accountability for your financial affairs. Take responsibility for your role in all your affairs, not just financial. Do not blame others. Understand that you can’t change people. You can only make the necessary adjustments and changes to better prepare yourself for your next fi nancial investment or transaction. It’s easy to blame others, but your role is the only one you can take responsibility for!
2. Master your expenses. If you don’t, you’re destined for financial failure. Manage your expenses and you’ll pay off your debt faster and have more to invest for your future. That future is in your hands. Invest wisely and you’ll be able to retire comfortably. Remember, if you can’t afford something, don’t buy it!
3. Develop a mission statement and improve it annually. It’s vital to put your individual or family mission statement on paper. It’s a commitment to you! Be true to your mission statement, and all the rest falls into place. This will force you to dig deep and fi nd out what’s really important to you and your family. Know thyself—what a present to give yourself. As you track your improvements annually, make bigger goals to achieve every year!
4. Track your expenses, taxes, and investments with quarterly reviews. Staying on top of these important items will ensure that you become and remain a duly diligent CFO. If not you, then who? Meet with your spouse quarterly to track these and any other items that are part of your mission statement. Make sure you’re making marked improvements. This is also a good time to communicate how everything is going, and to hold each other accountable to the mission statement. It’s also an opportunity to make any necessary adjustments for the next quarter. Keeping up with these items will become easier over time!
5. Read books and business journals to become financially savvy. I recommend reading one fi nance-related book every three months. There are so many great books and journals to read. I suggest that you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal or Investors Business Daily for a couple of months to get a feel for what’s going on out there in the fi nance world. You might think it’s boring, but as the CFO you need to be well-read. Read a variety of business journals to find the one that best fits your personality. Then make it a perennial daily read. I like the Wall Street Journal because it covers more than just financial topics. I know a lot of people who like Investors Business Daily better. Everyone has a favorite for various reasons. Wake up fifteen minutes earlier or spend fifteen minutes at night before bed to read, read, read!
6. Meet with all your consultants (financial advisor, CPA, insurance agent, and estate attorney) semiannually or annually. Please take this seriously. Keeping in touch with your financial, legal, and tax professionals is vital to proper planning for the following year. I recommend a meeting with your CPA and financial advisor every November to see how you can benefit from any tax advantages, such as exercising capital losses to offset any capital gains, or possibly harvesting any gains for the following year. Your CPA needs to be very proactive prior to the New Year. There’s usually very little a CPA can do for you on April 15 to implement tax strategies from the previous year. I repeat: make sure you visit your financial advisor or CPA every November to plan for the upcoming New Year! Also, visit your insurance agent every year to check that your car, home, and life insurance policies are in order, and to confi rm that all necessary insurance policies are in place. See your estate attorney every two years to make sure that your family trust is current with any new estate tax laws. If you do all of the aforementioned tasks without the help of a professional, make sure to track and check them all just as a financial or tax professional would.
7. Don’t invest in any product or service that isn’t aligned with your mission statement or that you don’t understand. As a financial advisor, I am solicited regularly by wholesalers who want me to sell different products and services. Many of these products would incur too much risk for my clients, and therefore I would not present them. If I’m interested, and the product or service is aligned with my clients’ mission statements, then I begin to research vigorously. I read through the prospectus, research online, and discuss the product with other advisors who sell it. Then I watch it for three to twelve months. There’s no rush, since I represent products and services on a large scale, and people are depending on my recommendations. Who relies on your research and investment strategy? You do. Your family does. Do your homework, and make sure that you or your advisor thoroughly research any hot stock or mutual fund tip or offer. Make sure that this hot stock or fund is aligned with your mission statement and risk tolerance no matter how good it sounds. Remember, this book is about you knowing you, and being a smart investor, not a careless gambler!
8. Don’t allow fi nancial mistakes to hinder your progress. When you do make mistakes, forgive yourself and move on. I know many wealthy people who’ve had their share of financial hardship. Meeting thousands of people in my career has allowed me to survey many different levels of wealth. The very wealthy usually learn from their mistakes, and use them as motivational steps to reach a higher level of wealth. Even in their darkest moments, they stay true to themselves and believe that they’ll improve their lot in life. On the other hand, I’ve met people who live paycheck to paycheck, and have let their past financial mistakes become their permanent life story, thereby keeping themselves from achieving financial greatness. It’s such a fine line that it’s scary. Allow yourself to make financial mistakes, and never, ever give up on you or your family.
9. Your word is your bond! Hold yourself accountable. Integrity is essential in all your affairs. When you say you’ll do something, you need to follow through. If you don’t, how will you achieve your goals? When you design your mission statement, and you and your spouse agree to hold each other accountable for taking care of each other’s assignments or chores, then it’s important to be there for one another. If you’re single, be there for yourself. In either case, it’s vital to follow through on your word and on your promises to yourself. Is there anything more important than keeping your word? Rare is the story of financial success or goodwill in which people do not keep their word.
10. Having it all depends on YOU! If you don’t take care of your financial affairs, who will? It doesn’t matter if you’re a paycheck-to-paycheck family or a very high-net-worth individual. You have to follow the laws and principles of sound financial money management or you’ll eventually end up in a place you never intended.
Lastly, I wish you all the best in your endeavors to become a quality CFO, and I pray that you fulfill all of your dreams. Always stay focused on preparation, and the rest will fall into place. Your future is up to you.
If not you, then who?
Share on FacebookAvoid the Blame Game—Take Responsibility for Your Financial Affairs
The following is an excerpt from Your Life & Your Money
We must become the change that we want to see in the world.—Mahatma Gandhi
We live in an age of delusion. It seems to be the inherent nature of mankind.
Our biggest delusion is a sense of entitlement. It permeates our country. People delude themselves into believing everything is fine while engaging in behavior that’s definitely not fine. Then, when something goes wrong, they stand there blankly and do nothing about it, expecting somebody else to pick up after them! Everywhere you turn, people are blaming everybody else for their problems.
Look around. It’s everywhere—in our neighborhoods, schools, big business. There’s the chain smoker who sues the tobacco company. Or the overweight, overfed cheeseburger eater who sues the hamburger chain, claiming that their food made him fat. Or the guy who drank too much, left the bar and then crashed his car, who blames the bartender for serving him too much alcohol.
Are you kidding? The next thing you know, the government will be bailing out all the homeowners who double- and triple-dipped into their home equity and are upside down, plus the brokerage houses that bought lousy loans and the banks that accepted those loans. Oh, wait—that’s happening too!
Worst of all are our politicians. They believe they can print money and manufacture prosperity.
I’m not making this up, it’s true. What in the heck is happening? And why is it happening? The answer is simple: it’s much easier to blame others than to take responsibility for yourself.
The Delusional Trap
We delude ourselves when we’re uncomfortable with accepting things the way they are as opposed to the way we want them to be. When we act on the way we want things to be instead of how they actually are, we make bad financial decisions and create painful problems that often end up hurting many others.
People become ensnared in the delusional trap when they create financial trappings in their lives without noticing or acknowledging or, even worse, deliberately ignoring reality. They’re afraid to face their financial lives head—on with brutal honesty. They’ll do anything to avoid the consequences, often at the expense of other people or businesses, and when it’s too late, they take down a lot of innocent people with them.
Every time someone claims bankruptcy, overspends on credit cards and repeatedly refi nances their home, they are lying to themselves and being negligent and disrespectful of their fellow humans.
As my dear friend Willy M. Nieman put it, delusional thinking is defined as:
1. Telling yourself a lie
2. Believing in that lie
3. Acting on that lie
The Sub-Prime Debacle
For a vivid example of how our entire society is ensnared in a delusional trap, look at the sub-prime debacle. As I write this, we are seeing millions of foreclosures nationwide, and it’s probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better. How did this happen? Let me give you my version:
In response to considerable housing discrimination against minorities and the poor, Congress over the years has been trying to make amends. It passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) of 1974 which made it unlawful for any creditor to discriminate against any credit applicant on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, marital status or age. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 further mandated that no lending institution could discriminate within various low-income and minority neighborhoods nationwide. Failure to comply subjects a fi nancial institution to civil liability for actual and punitive damages.
Talk about the road to you-know-where being paved with good intentions. Banks were accepting loan applications that in ordinary times they would have thrown in the trash. The reason was that as soon as the banks issued the loans, they could package them up and sell them to brokerage houses, which in turn packaged the loans and sold them as mortgage-backed securities.
The banks and securities fi rms were making so much money that they fell into a delusional trap themselves, believing the less-than-stellar securities they were manufacturing actually were sound. Nevertheless, the euphoric mood allowed many people to buy a house for the first time despite less-than-ideal (or sub-prime) credit.
To buy what most times were properties they could not afford by any conventional yardstick, many fi rst-time homebuyers of primary residences and rental properties used adjustable rate loans, which had low fixed rates for the fi rst two or three years of the mortgage. After that, their monthly payments increased signifi cantly.
What happened next shook the world—although anyone not deluding himself could have predicted the mess: those sub-prime adjustable loans started adjusting. For example, people paying $2,700 a month for their mortgage were receiving new mortgage payments at $3,400 to $3,600. And the monthly payments kept rising.
Borrowers began to default. Eventually, so many of these loans went into default that the capital structure of many brokerage firms, banks and hedge funds worldwide became questionable. The financial soundness of the world’s banking system and the ability to create the credit needed for the world’s daily economic functioning was being called into question.
Governments around the world had to bail out troubled financial institutions, leading to credit cutbacks and the recession we’re in now.
Everyone was deluded: the government, banks, loan brokers, securities firms and the sub-prime borrowers themselves. The problem spiraled out of control because there was so much money to be made in believing that a fantasy—taking on more debt than anyone could afford—somehow would work out.
A Solution
When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.—THE DALAI LAMA
The mortgage mess can teach us valuable lessons.
First, we must take responsibility for ourselves. Once you get the hang of it, it’s liberating. Yet taking complete responsibility for yourself is tough, which is why most people would rather blame others or deflect responsibility.
If you get anything from this book, it’s that taking responsibility for your own actions is the key to success and fi nancial and emotional well-being.
You will become empowered by taking full responsibility for your actions and for your role in all situations. If you blame and judge others without looking at your own actions, you will lose the essence of authentic accountability. It takes courage and practice to look at yourself first and foremost in all of your affairs, but it builds character in you and goodwill for your family, your friends, and your community. That’s what I call making a positive impact in your life!
Once you start taking responsibility, you’ll start noticing positive changes. You will feel empowered. You won’t waste time and energy on what someone else should have done. You will stay consistently focused on your role in all of your affairs.
By taking responsibility, you may be surprised to discover that you weren’t as much of a victim or as innocent as you initially believed. That realization is both humbling and enlightening, and it’s where your inner awareness takes place. Can you imagine how much better the world would be if all of us were accountable and took responsibility for our actions?
Let’s start wiping out the cobwebs of delusional thinking by asking a few questions. Do you overspend? Do you have a savings account that will last for three to six months in the event of an emergency? Do you know what your monthly expenses are? Do you know what you are invested in and why?
You probably don’t, and we’ll be giving you the tools to answer those questions over the course of this book. The fact is we all suffer from delusional fantasies, just some more than others. Notice how I use the word “suffer.” Suffering is usually the result of delusional thinking in any financial aspect of our lives. Some psychologists might say that this behavior is a necessary mechanism to cope with certain situations. They might be right. But when it comes to your financial affairs, nothing could be further from the truth. If you don’t meet your financial affairs head-on, you will eventually suffer. The more honest we are with ourselves in all of our affairs, not only the financial ones, the better off we will be, because we will always know who we are, what we are, and what we stand for.
It takes courage and bravery. But the rewards are worth it. If you don’t take care of your financial affairs, who will?
Share on FacebookThe Corporate Conscience
GR - Seth Godin
There isn't one.
Corporations don't have a conscience, people do.
That means that every time you say, "It's just my job," or "My department has a policy," or "All I do is work here," what you've done is abdicated responsibility--to no one.
It's convenient and even comfortable to blame the anonymous actions of many working in concert on a evanescent brand or organization, but that starts you on an inevitable race to the bottom. Organizations have more power than ever before. They are better synchronized, faster, and possess more tools to change the economy and the people in it than ever before. And the only option available to the rest of us is for individuals to take responsibility (it's not given) for what they do and how they do it.
The very same tools that permit organizations to synchronize their efforts are now available to you and to me. I guess the question is: will we use that power to humanize the systems we've created?
PS It's not just about being a good citizen: when bad behavior comes back to hurt the company, it hurts you, too.
Share on FacebookRaise My Taxes, Mr. President!
Good read I found in Newsweek by Fareed Zakaria on August 1, 2010.
We can’t afford the Bush cuts anymore.
For the last few months, we have heard powerful, passionate arguments about the need to cut America’s massive budget deficit. Republican senators have claimed that we are in danger of permanently crippling the economy. Conservative economists and pundits warn of a Greece-like crisis, when America can borrow only at exorbitant interest rates. So when an opportunity presents itself to cut those deficits by about a third—more than $300 billion!—permanently and relatively easily, you would think that these very people would be in the lead. Far from it.
The Bush tax cuts remain the single largest cause of America’s structural deficit—that is, the deficit not caused by the collapse in tax revenues when the economy goes into recession. The Bush administration inherited budget surpluses from the Clinton administration. What turned these into deficits, even before the recession? There were three fundamental new costs—the tax cuts, the prescription-drug bill, and post-9/11 security spending (including the Iraq and Afghanistan wars). Of these the tax cuts were by far the largest, adding up to $2.3 trillion over 10 years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly half the cost of all legislation enacted from 2001 to 2007 can be attributed to the tax cuts.
Those cuts are set to expire this year. The Republicans say they want to keep them all, even for those making more than $250,000 a year (less than 3 percent of Americans). They say that higher taxes will hurt the recovery. But for months now they have been arguing that the chief threat to the economy is our gargantuan debt and deficit. That’s what’s scaring consumers, creditors, and businesses. Given a chance to address those fears by getting serious about deficit reduction, though, they run away. Look by contrast at British Prime Minister David Cameron, a genuine fiscal conservative. To deal with his country’s deficit, which in structural terms is not so different from America’s, he concluded that he would have to raise taxes as well as cut spending.
The Democrats, for their part, are also running scared, proposing to keep all the tax cuts except those affecting the very rich. But they were opposed to these tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. If they were a bad idea when budget deficits were small, why are tax cuts a good idea when deficits are in the $1.3 trillion range?
The idea that the average American is overtaxed is a nice piece of populist pandering. In fact, federal taxes as a percentage of the economy are at their lowest level since the presidency of Harry Truman. Chuck Marr and Gillian Brunet of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have calculated that a family of four at the exact middle of the income spectrum will pay only 4.6 percent of its income in taxes. Remember, almost half of the country pays no income taxes at all. The top 3 percent of Americans contribute almost 50 percent of federal income taxes.
The simple fact is this: all the Bush tax cuts were unaffordable. They were an irresponsible act of hubris enacted during an economic boom. Conservatives thought they would force us to shrink the government. But with Republicans controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, did reduced taxes cause reduced spending? No, they led to ever-increasing borrowing and a ballooning deficit.
We have one of the smallest governments among all the rich countries in the world. Yet we refuse to pay for it. (Yes, health-care spending is the big exception and, yes, we will have to get those costs under control.) I understand the fear that this is not a good time to raise taxes. But the impact of marginal shifts in tax rates on growth is pretty unclear. Clinton raised taxes in 1992 and ushered in a period of extraordinarily robust growth. Bush cut taxes massively in 2001 and got meager growth in return. Three tax cuts enacted since the financial crisis have done little to spur growth. In any event, if timing is the issue, Congress could extend the tax cuts for a year but then let them expire. Better yet, spend money on far more efficient ways to spur job creation, such as tax credits for jobs, which the CBO estimates would create four to six times as many jobs as would tax cuts.
I don’t like our current tax system. It’s unwieldy, taxes the wrong things (income instead of consumption), and is filled with loopholes that are legalized corruption. But we are not going to create the perfect tax code today. We have in front of us a simple, easy way to bring America’s fiscal house in order, reduce our dependence on foreign borrowing, restore U.S. credibility and power, and give us a stable revenue base from which to make key investments for future growth. All we need is for Congress to do what it does so well—nothing.
If I could, I would have highlighted the last couple paragraphs in full. Taxes as a percentage of the economy are at their lowest level since the presidency of Harry Truman. Some of the tax cuts were irresponsible, in a time when the economy was greedily propped up by our own desire. How do you get out of debt? You PAY it off. I agree with Zakaria that our current tax system needs a fix, but it won't happen anytime soon. I don't like how 50% of America doesn't pay income tax, either by mooching or by tax loopholes. I really don't like how the top 3% is footing almost 50% of all federal income tax. Our tax system definitely needs to be re-evaluated.
How to Build Confidence and Overcome Fear
“How to Build Confidence and Overcome Fear” is a post of Get Rich Slowly, one of the largest personal finance blogs out there. Thought this was a great post not just for finance but for relationships, as confidence is a really important trait in dating/marriage.
Last week I did something that scared the hell out of me. I stood in front of nearly 200 financial planners and I talked to them about why financial blogs are a good thing.
I’m a confident writer; I’ve been doing this long enough that I know my strengths and my limitations. I’ve had enough feedback to understand that I’m an effective communicator — when I use the written word. I’m less confident as a speaker. I don’t have time to pause to formulate my thoughts. I’m not able to edit. I’m afraid of being trapped in a corner without being able to talk my way out. Basically, I’m scared to speak.
It would be easy to simply refuse the opportunities that come my way. When somebody asks me to speak in front of a group, I could say “no”. When radio and television stations call for an interview, I could say “no”. But for the past two years, I’ve been following my own policy to say “yes” to new opportunities (so long as they don’t violate my personal code of conduct).
To say “no” is to live in fear. My goal is to continually improve myself, to become better than I am today. One way to do that is to do the things that scare me, to take them on as challenges, and to learn from them — even if I fail.
The magic of thinking big
In mid-November, a local station asked me to appear on live television. “I realize it’s short notice,” the producer wrote, “but we’d love to have you on the show if you’re available tonight.”
It’s one thing to say that you want to overcome your fears, but it’s another thing to actually do it. Fear is real. When I was asked to appear on live television, I was frightened. I remembered my disastrous interview with a Seattle radio station in early 2007. I thought about recent taped television interviews that I had hated. I was afraid of what might happen.
But I also thought about the things that had gone right. I thought of how my speaking skills had improved over the past year. I thought about my enthusiasm for frugality and personal finance. And then I thought of the book I was a reading, a book that I had bought for $1.29 at the local thrift store.
The Magic of Thinking Big was a huge bestseller during the 1960s. Written by Dr. David Schwartz, a professor at Georgia State University, the book contains dozens of practical hints and tips (and many anecdotes) to illustrate the power of taking risks to achieve big goals. Schwartz argues that nobody will believe in you until you believe in yourself.
So when the television producer asked if I wanted to appear on his show, I thought big. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll do it.” I acted confident, but on the inside I was frightened. What I needed were techniques to boost my confidence and to overcome my fear.
How to build confidence and overcome fear
Without self-confidence, we have a tendency to make poor decisions. We make choices based on fear instead of what is best for us. If you lack confidence, you might fill your life with self-destructive behavior. You might work at a job you hate. You may allow yourself to get deep in debt. You may find yourself moving from one bad relationship to another. Without confidence, you don’t allow yourself to pursue your dreams.
In The Magic of Thinking Big, David Schwartz argues that all confidence is developed. “No one is born with confidence,” he writes. “Those people you know who radiate confidence, who have conquered worry, who are at ease everywhere and all the time, acquired their confidence, every bit of it.”
Confidence is built slowly, one success at a time. I’ve learned that in order to overcome fear, I need to employ a variety of techniques. Here are a few that I’ve picked over the years, and which I’ve used to help myself get out of debt, and to develop the courage to speak before groups or to appear on live television:
- Don’t dwell on failures. Draw from the things you’ve done right. My talk last week was far from perfect. But if I dwell on the things I did wrong, I’ll psych myself out of future opportunities. I’ll be scared to say “yes” when somebody asks me to speak. Instead, I’m trying to focus on the things I did right so that I can emphasize them in future presentations.
- Rehearse a positive outcome. Before my live television appearance, I watched clips of similar interviews on the same show. (I’m not a regular television watcher, so this was new.) I arrived at the station early, so I sat in the car, closed my eyes, and imagined the interviewer asking me questions about the subject. I imagined joking with her. I imagined it as a positive experience.
- Don’t procrastinate. Procrastination promotes fear. When you’re afraid, thinking is your enemy. Act. Do what you think is best, and do it quickly. The longer you take to act, the more time you have to talk yourself out of it, the longer you have to imagine the things that might go wrong. It’s not enough to hope. Take action.
Here is a psychological principle that is worth reading over 25 times. Read it until it absolutely saturates you: To think confidently, act confidently. — from The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz
- To think confidently, act confidently. You’ve heard the phrase “fake it ’til you make it”. Research has shown that faking confidence actually leads to the real thing. If you’re in a situation where you’re not sure what to do, act like you know what to do. Act confident and you will become confident. (Note that this isn’t license to be a jerk. It’s not a license to lie.) Schwartz says that we can change our attitudes by changing our physical actions. He recommends five specific behaviors: sit in front, make eye contact, walk faster, speak up (offer your opinion), smile.
- Think like the other person. Remember that people are all the same. We each have the same fears and the same desires. Underneath, most folks are pretty nice. When you’re in an uncomfortable situation, put yourself in the other person’s shoes. While prepping for my talk last week, I used this technique to plan what I was going to say and how I was going to say it. I talked with a dozen financial planners to find out their concerns, and tried to address them in my talk. By doing this, I removed the fear that I wasn’t addressing their interests.
- Maintain a positive mental attitude. In Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, the authors write: “When [a person] is wrapped in the warm, secure belief that he will do well, he is actually able to do better than he knows. His defenses are relaxed; his guard down; he is able to stop spending emotional energy protecting himself from the possible hurts of failure; instead he spends his energy reaching for the probably rewards of success…Confidence has had a measurable effect on him — it has brought out the best in him.”
- Get off your “but”. In Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, David D. Burns offers a variety of suggestions for building confidence and overcoming fear. One of these is to learn to defeat a case of the “buts”. Schwartz calls this excusitis, the “disease of failures”. Burns says that the best way to deal with excuses is to argue with yourself. Every time you say, “I’d like to save money, but…”, come up with a rebuttal to counter the argument. Keep going, fighting every excuse you make.
- Visualize success. In Feeling Good, David Burns also encourages readers to visualize success: “A powerful self-motivation method involves making a list of the advantages of a productive action you’ve been avoiding because it requires more self-discipline than you’ve been able to muster. Such a list will train you to look at the positive consequences of doing it.” For example, if you’ve been holding back asking for a raise, make a list of only the positive possible outcomes. Once you’ve made the list, fantasize about your life after receiving the raise. Focus on the positive outcome that success will bring you.
- Look sharp. A lot of us experience poor self-esteem because we don’t like the way we look. But we exacerbate the problem when we dress sloppily or are not well-groomed. I’m not pointing any fingers. My friends and family can readily attest that I’m one of the worst culprits. I’m often unshaven, dressed in sweats, slouched at my desk. Why? I lack self-confidence. But when I have an important meeting, the simple act of putting on nice slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie can change my mindset entirely. Take care of yourself.
- Do the right thing. if you do the right thing, and you do it well, what do you care what other people think? Successful people will always have critics. Learn from the critics or to ignore them, but don’t let them bring you down. Do the right thing, and confidently own the consequences.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. — from Dune by Frank Herbert
- Keep things in perspective. I know a woman who is paralyzed by what other people might think of her. She’s always on pins and needles, waiting for some cutting remark. Even small things in innocuous conversations become huge things in her mind, rebukes for imagined transgressions. This sort of thing saps any chance at self-confidence.
- Don’t seek perfection. Remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good. This is a huge problem in my own life. Somewhere along the way, I’ve become a perfectionist. I only want others to see me at my very best, whether it’s on the blog, on television, or even on Twitter. But this perfectionism takes work, and it saps my confidence. Do you know anyone who has ever been perfect? Me neither. Do your best and let go.
- Read the success literature. Research others who have succeeded. Self-help manuals get a bum rap, and many of them deserve it. But not all of them. There are many fantastic books out there that offer advice on how to improve your life. Read them. Learn from the experience of others. (I’ve found 50 Success Classics to be a powerful motivator [my review].)
- Don’t compare yourself to others. Be yourself. I’ll tell you a secret. There are a lot of personal finance blogs out there. I don’t get to read them as often as I used to, but I do try to make the rounds once every week. Sometimes when I do this, I feel like giving up. I feel like quitting. I lose confidence. “I can’t write that well,” I think. “I can’t cover retirement investing as well as Jim did.” Comparing myself to others is counter-productive. It only makes me feel inadequate. Who cares what other people write, or how well? What’s important is simply producing the best work I can. All I can be is myself.
The techniques I’ve listed are effective, but here’s the thing: No list you find on the internet is going to magically make you more confident. No list is going to take action and grant you instant CSS skills, or give you extra money, or grow your savings account, or make you a better writer. In order for these techniques to be effective, you have to act on them. You have to pick one or two and practice them. Then move on to another pair and practice those.
It’s important to put these tips into action. Do something, if only for ten minutes a day. Tell yourself that you’ll move toward your goals for ten minutes a day. If you don’t succeed, do it again. Keep going until you do succeed. Never give up.
Further reading
I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it takes to develop self-confidence. If you, too, have struggled with this, I encourage you to borrow one of the following books from your public library. (These are the books mentioned in this article.)
- The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz
- Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns, M.D.
- How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
- Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone
If you simply want to find more web reading related to this topic, check out the following:
- Zen Habits: Conquer the fears lurking in the dark corners of your mind
- Get Rich Slowly: The power of “yes”: A simple way to get more out of life
- The Simple Dollar: Investing in yourself: Self-confidence
- Soul Shelter: The magic of thinking big
The Magic of Thinking Big — the book that inspired this post — is outstanding. It’s sold millions of copies in the fifty years since it was published, and no wonder. On the surface it may seem like touchy-feely feelgood stuff, but deep down, it’s built on strong psychological principles. Here’s Tom Butler-Bowdon’s summary of the book.
Share on FacebookWe Are What We Choose
"We are What We Choose"
Remarks by Jeff Bezos, as delivered to the Class of 2010
Baccalaureate
May 30, 2010
As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially "Days of our Lives." My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we'd join the caravan. We'd hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather's car, and off we'd go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.
At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!"
I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
This is a group with many gifts. I'm sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I'm confident that's the case because admission is competitive and if there weren't some signs that you're clever, the dean of admission wouldn't have let you in.
Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonish ourselves. We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we'll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we've synthesized life. In the coming years, we'll not only synthesize it, but we'll engineer it to specifications. I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton -- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.
How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?
I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles -- something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I'd been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn't work since most startups don't, and I wasn't sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I'd been a garage inventor. I'd invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn't work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I'd always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.
I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, "That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a good job." That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn't think I'd regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I'm proud of that choice.
Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life -- the life you author from scratch on your own -- begins.
- How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
- Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
- Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
- Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
- Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
- Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?
- Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
- Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
- When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
- Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
- Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!
Share on FacebookExcellence in the Ordinary
'We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.' - Aristotle
'Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.' - John W Gardner
'The people that win are those that have excellence in the ordinary.' - Unknown
ordinary: commonly encountered; usual. Of no exceptional ability, degree, or quality; average. the stuff you do daily
This is kind of a paraphrase to one of Dave Ramsey's podcast rants. I totally agree. He can be a little much at times.
Do ordinary stuff everyday with Excellence! Stop your whining. Grow some and get to work!
- It's hard to execute the excellence in the ordinary when the suns out and the surf is up
- It's hard when you had a fight with your boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband & go to work and smile and do your work with excellence
- It's hard when there is only an hour left on Friday
- It's hard when you're sick (actually you should be at home)
- It's hard when you've not slept enough the last week
- It's hard when your vacation/event/party is looming
- It's hard when you're broke
- People can do it in flashes, but its hard for people to do it every single day, day in and day out.
- You control your attitude. Unless you are a child. There are 33 year old children that cant control themselves. They have a temper. Everyone they turnaround they cuss somebody. Every time they turnaround they roll their eyes, they never have anything good to say to anybody. And then they cant figure out why they cant prosper.
Can you do it every single day, every single hour, every single minute? It is training, training your mind. It is behavior. It is your decision. These decisions become your habit. Habits with your employees, employer, spouse, friends, family. If one minute you are smiling and the next minute you are cussing out your employees, and then you cant figure out why they dont work hard.... you are not a leader. It is not hard to figure out. Nobody wants to follow somebody who is bipolar and cant make up their mind if they are a good guy or not. IT ISNT HARD. but it is hard. It isnt hard to grasp what we are doing, but it is hard to be have excellence. Do the ordinary things, every single day, every single time. with excellence. Excellence with the ordinary.
(This will give you energy. Energy to win in Finance, Business, Family, Friends, Relationships, you name it. There is no energy in losing.) Think about it.
Share on FacebookIs everything perfect?
Man, Seth Godin is a freaking GENIUS!!! I love almost every post from him. Here is another that I like.
Greetings have traditionally been an acknowledgment of the other person. "I see you." "Hello." "Greetings."
Then, we moved on to, "how are you?" or even, "how's business?"
Recently, though, our performance-obsessed, live-forever society has morphed the greeting into something like, "please list everything going on in your life that isn't as perfect as it should be."
In a business setting, this causes bad prioritization decisions. The owner of the bar says to the manager, "how was the night?" and the response is, "the cash register came up $8 short." Suddenly, there's an urgent problem to be solved. How to replace the eight dollars and who do we fire?
If the question instead had been, "what's up?" (as in literally up) the answer might have been, "well, there's a big party at table 12, another going away party. They've been buying champagne all night. And Mary told me she set a new record for tips. And the new beer we added on tap is..."
Highlighting what's working helps you make that happen more often.
Perfect is overrated. Perfect doesn't scale, either.
I'm not proposing you endorse theft or ignore the bad news. But it's clear that one more going away party on table 12 is going to make up for that one piece of bad news, every time.
Share on FacebookThe paradox of promises in the age of word of mouth
Great post on spreading word of mouth by Seth Godin.
Word of mouth is generated by surprise and delight (or anger). This is a function of the difference between what you promise and what you deliver (see clever MBA chart to the right--->).
The thing is, if you promise very little, you don't get a chance to deliver because I'll ignore you. And if you promise too much, you don't get a chance to deliver, because I won't believe you...
Hence the paradox. The more you promise, the less likely you are to achieve delight and the less likely you are to earn the trust to get the gig in the first place. Salespeople often want you to allow them to overpromise, because it gets them through the RFP. Marketers, if they're smart, will push you (the CEO) to underpromise, since that's where the word of mouth is going to come from.
I have worked with someone who is very good at the promising part. She enjoys it. And when the promises don't work out, she's always ready with the perfect excuse. This is a great strategy if you have a regular job and the excuses are really terrific, but if you need internal or external clients, it gets old pretty fast. It certainly doesn't lead to the sort of word of mouth one is eager to encounter.
Surgeons have this problem all the time. They promise a complete, pain-free recovery and work hard to build up a positive expectation, particularly for elective surgery. And the entire time you're in bed, in pain, unable to pee, all you can do is hate on the doctor.
This is one reason why recovering from failure is such a great opportunity. If you or your organization fail and then you pull out all the stops to recover or make good, the expectation/delivery gap is huge. You don't win because you did a good job, you win because you so dramatically exceeded expectations.
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