Honestly
Category: Motivational
It’s Never Too Late
In 1955, 52-year-old milkshake machine salesman Ray Kroc took a job at a small Californian burger chain called McDonald’s. At the time it had just eight restaurants. In 1961 he bought the company and turned it into one of the world’s biggest businesses.
When Someone Gets Rich …
“I want to be rich.”
This is a statement every single human being said once in his life, if not loudly, then with himself. Everybody wants to be rich, the poor wants to be rich and the rich wants to be even richer.
Some people are born rich and some people become rich because of hard work, of luck and sometimes a combination of both (hard work + luck) and few times because of illegal work.
But no matter how someone gets rich, they suddenly start thinking they are or became more intelligent and wiser and start seeing things from a different perspective and much better than someone standing next to them and looking from the same angle, which unfortunately most of the time is incorrect.
I don’t know why, but suddenly the whole world looks so simple for them, they start asking for problems because they think they have the solutions for everything. They allow themselves being philosophic and throwing life theories to the right and to the left and whenever they are present in a room, they believe they are the most clever person in that room. Even sometimes they convince themselves they are from a different mankind than the regular and average people.
For those who are born rich, I am sure if we take everything from them and ask them to start from scratch without any resources, sadly most of them won’t make it, even to 1% of what they have when they were born rich.
For those who became rich, no matter how hey did it, please don’t forget that few days back, you were still one of those average class people.
Many of friends who read my blog will feel concerned, I have friends who were born rich and friends who became rich, please don’t take personal.
And as a friend said to me back 12 years ago, “nobody believes me because I am not rich”.
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Personal & Financial Freedom
We all have the dream of freedom and its possession and mostly financial freedom. We want to be free in everything we do in our life, in our daily struggle to feel better, have more free time to spend with our families, more money to feel free buying anything we like, freedom to feel safe, freedom to travel to exotic destinations and relax endlessly under the sun while grabbing a cold cocktail full of crushed ice.
Then comes the fear of not being able to do anything related to this personal and financial freedom that we are all seeking. Mainly because of the social pressure surrounding us, because of our daily job and its killing routine, because of the family stability (for the married people) and the bills dropping inside our mailbox at the end of each and every month, because few are those who want to get out of their comfort zone and take risks by leaving their secured jobs and by throwing themselves into new ventures in order to get more freedom.
And after doing so, many will be facing the new reality that being in a new venture on your own also means less freedom at the early stages. You will have to spend more time on your project(s), work on holidays, your close family might end up seeing you even less, your friends will hate you for not spending time with them. You will miss your gym class and eat less or sometimes even eat more junk.
Then whenever someone is ready to take the leap of being on his own, most people fall into the trap of differentiating between being self-employed or owning and running their business and there is a big difference between the 2 things.
Being self-employed does not need you to leave your daily job, if you are a graphic designer you can always manage getting some external projects and deliver them on time, you can also be a consultant and run few market researches during the weekend and write a decent report about the product in questions, or you might be a fashion designer who can draw some nice wedding dresses and email them to the big name designers who hire part timers.
But when you plan to own and run a business based on a dream of yours that needs to be funded, that is something quite more complicated than designing a logo from the comfort of your lazy boy. Consider the anxiety of pitching VCs, the hours you will spend writing and picking the right words for your presentation, the endless questions you will be asked about your idea and always wonder why these strangers should trust you and pour a million bucks into your bank account.
This can and will be the most important sales call of your life, because you need to sell yourself before your idea, then you leave that big conference room expecting an answer and start hitting the “send & receive” button of your outlook zillions of times and grab your smartphone every 2 seconds to check if that lucky email landed in your inbox.
Then the company is formed, the money starts pouring and you start spending it, now you are even more anxious about the results your business will deliver. You try everyday harder to make sure you are on the right track of your business plan, you spend long nights thinking of your next killing strategy just to be ahead of your competition, you keep thinking about people who will copy your idea, you surely want them to fail but they will always be there giving you hard time, but if have the real passion for what your doing, you will surely succeed and enjoy your success.
Definitely, there are many people out there who trust or will trust you, and as Steve Jobs said: “keep looking, don’t settle“, until your dream come true.
And if ever you make it one day to the freedom territory , don’t and never forget how you got there and consider giving back to exactly the same people who are seeking their freedom with the same attitude you had when you were a seeker of freedom yourself.
The Fisherman & The Businessman
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.
As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish.
The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”
The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.
“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”
The fisherman continues, “And after that?”
The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”
The fisherman asks, “And after that?”
The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”
A classic Brazilian story, probably also present in other cultures.
Destiny Secret
“Once you decide what you really want out of life and work, your mind will be your only obstacle and your only competition!
When you start to believe and trust in yourself and in your own unique passions, you will conquer your mind’s self-limiting beliefs. These limiting beliefs are the only roadblock or obstacle that can hold you back from getting all of what you really want.
Once you have made the decision to overcome your fears, conquer all of your self-doubt, and win the battle of your mind, you will accomplish everything you have ever envisioned.
Your mind will have ignited a fire in your heart to execute your plan by taking daily actions in pursuit of your goals. As you experience this, you will become an unstoppable force of power, fully capable of achieving more success and freedom than you could have ever imagined.
Once you have done this, you will literally Create Your Own Destiny!”
Patrick Snow
www.CreateYourOwnDestiny.com
Mistakes
The day God created earth, Adam was the 1st guy to make a mistake by taking the apple from Eve, while most of us call it the 1st humanity sin, let me call it a mistake.
Soon we will be 7 billion on the planet (http://krix.me/sB5tjl) which means more mistakes are in the process and not one single mistake looks like the other.
People are so creative when they make mistakes, no matter the age, the gender or the color, mistakes are costly, sometimes very costly.
There are lots of quotes about mistakes, here I will just pick one:
“Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later a collection of mistakes is what is called experience.” ~ Denis Waitley
The biggest mistake is when you trust the wrong person and unfortunately, take things for granted. Then you start regretting, which definitely wont take you anywhere but to more sorrow moments until you get to the point of being strong, as being it, is your only option.
At the dawn of 2012, I have seen many people making lists of resolutions, and the top winner is the “starting a diet this Monday morning”, I am really sorry for saying this, but new year resolutions are BS, as they only work for few hours or maximum for few days, then they are gone with the wind.
I have never seen someone talking about mistakes (making or not making) in their new year resolutions, and you don’t necessarily need to mention this loudly. Just think about it when you are alone, about your job, your life, your family, your friends, the strangers you meet everyday on the streets and sometimes about the devil that salutes you while wearing Prada.
Live and learn, and yes, based on the above quote, i am more experienced now!
How to Deal With Crappy People
I am reading my 1st ebook in 2012 called “I was blind but now i see” by James Altucher and I would like to share with you an excerpt about crappy people.
There are only four types of people. If you understand in advance how to deal with each of these four types you will be infinitely happier. Ultimately, interacting with the four types in the way I describe below will make one fit firmly into the first type, however difficult it is. That’s the goal. You don’t want to go through life unhappy.
#1 Happy.
#2 People in pain.
#3 Good people.
#4 Crappy people: People who will do you harm, no matter what you do, for no reason at all. They never will get it. They will say and do things to you and they will never ever understand how evil they are.
And you will hate them. HATE THEM. And they knock on the door of your brain at three in the morning and they want to yell at you. And you yell back. And they yell back. And on and on. All day. All afternoon. The ongoing conversation with the shittiest people in the world. They will torture you, kill you, rape your wife and slit the thoughts out of your mind and not even care because they think they are doing the right thing. You know who I’m talking about. Because you have a good 20 or 30 of these in your life just like I do. They might even be former friends, relatives, neighbors, bureaucrats, whatever, whoever, whenever. They swoop down on your life and are just plain crappy and they won’t even know it.
Sometimes, in a weak moment, I think to myself: What if I run into them again? How badly I will hurt and destroy them. Maybe just casually walk up to them and smash a glass over their head so their nose is broken, glasses broken on the floor, blood all over their face. Arm broken after I hold the elbow and stomp on it.
STOP!
This is the worst category. I’ll tell you one more anecdote. Two seconds ago someone posted a horrible comment on my blog. I won’t repeat it. Racist, mean, rude to me, whatever. I deleted the post, blocked the user, blocked his IP address. And then I was going to send him an email telling him what I thought of him. I was angry. Then I stopped myself. You have to stop yourself.
Remember this: When you get in the mud with a pig, you get dirty and the pig gets happy.
There is only ONE only way to deal with these people in a way that will make you happier instead of sadder. ONE WAY. And it always works. COMPLETELY IGNORE THE EVIL PEOPLE:
- Completely ignore them.
- Don’t think about them.
- Don’t talk to them.
- Don’t write them.
- Most important: Don’t give them advice. They will NEVER listen to your advice. It’s arrogant and stupid to think they will. It will only lead to more cycles of pain for you. The goal for me is to stop all cycles that cause me any pain at all. Giving advice to crappy people will only result in more pain for you. That’s the only possible result. Much better to be happy than to flush knotted up brown advice down a toilet that caused you agony to push out. This is hard.
- Most important: Never gossip about them behind their backs. Just completely disregard. We don’t care about their happiness or how evil they are. We only care about you. Its hard to do. Never ever talk about them behind their backs. Repeat this 500 times. This is hard also. Because it’s an addiction.
James Altucher is an American hedge fund manager, author and blogger.
Altucher is the founder of StockPickr, which was sold to TheStreet.com in 2007. He also was the founder of Reset, a developer of websites for entertainment companies (including HBO, Miramax, New Line, BMG, and Sony), which he sold in 1998.
He was a weekly columnist from 2004-2009 for The Financial Times, and wrote articles for The Street.com Seeking Alpha, and Daily Finance. He frequently appears on CNBC, and has written several books on investing. Altucher is a frequent guest contributor to The Daily Ticker feature on Yahoo! Finance & TechCrunch.