Newsletter for May 2004:
Time Money & Life Balance - Part 2 - Money
Contents:
- This Months Thought
- Time, Money and Life Balance, Part 2: Money
- Quotes of the Month
- Strictly Business: The Value of Working HARD!
- Humor: Amazing Factoids
This Months Thought
Do yourself a favor and master the art of money. Treat it as an honored guest in your life, one who will quickly flee if you do not treat her well, but one who will stay and enrich your life beyond measure if you treat her with care and respect. This is not difficult, but it is an art most of us have never mastered. Study money and encourage it to stay once it has come to visit.
Time, Money and Life-Balance, Part 2: Money!
Last month, we began this series on Time, Money and Life- balance by looking at time. As I stated last month you cannot manage time. Your only choice is how you manage yourself so you use time effectively.
This month, we turn our attention to Money, and the good news is that there is an abundance of money, and it is all around us! Many people will earn hundreds of thousands to several million dollars during their careers, so there is plenty to work with. And, it can be replaced, managed, and invested to create even more! The only stipulation is that you are fully responsible to manage it well.
This can be difficult, because money is not "real". Money is simply an invention, or a concept, that allows us to quantify the value of our contribution to society. I read a story on diamond mines the other day, and while they earn millions of dollars every day, one man pointed out that this is a "miracle of marketing" since we don't use diamonds for any practical purpose. They are merely pieces of compressed carbon. But society values them very highly because we like diamonds!
The ancient rule is that to earn more money, you must produce more of what society values. To make more, contribute more.
Secondly, to become wealthy, you must invest some of the cash you receive as "seed" to produce even more money. Most people will never earn large amounts of cash, and even if you do, taxes and temptation make earned income the LEAST efficient way to achieve wealth. A far more effective path is through investment.
Saving five or ten percent of your income and investing it over time is a simple, powerful and nearly full-proof recipe for wealth. It's simple, but not "easy".
We live in a consumer society that encourages us to spend every penny we earn, and even a bit more. I recently read that Americans get 3000 marketing messages per DAY! No wonder we spend until the money is gone.
The road to riches is paved with small, consistent investments that accumulate over time. Einstein referred to compound interest as the "eighth wonder of the world." The cost of your morning latte, invested daily, will make you rich in 30 years. There is no mystery here.
Money wants to grow. It wants to flow into the hands of people who treat it well and use it wisely, but most of us have never mastered the art of managing money and becoming rich.
Fortunately, there are thousands of books and dozens of magazines available to help you. There are classes and workshops, professional advisors and other resources all around us, and yet most people have never seriously studied money, and that's a shame.
Do yourself a favor and master the art of money. Avoid or get out of debt. Spend less than you make. Save the difference and invest over time. Treat money as an honored guest in your life, one who will quickly flee if you do not treat her well, but one who will stay and enrich your life beyond measure if you treat her with skill, care and respect. This is not difficult, but it is an art most of us have never mastered. Study money. Learn to invite it into your life, and encourage it to stay once it has come to visit.
Quotes of the Month
"Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved." – Jeremy Kitson
"If you are clear about what you want, the world responds with clarity." -- Loretta Staples
"People begin to become successful the minute they decide to be." -- Harvey Mackay
"Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step." -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Strictly Business: The Value of Working HARD!
Memorial Day is the last of this month, a time when most of us try not to work at all. We relax, go to a ball game, or have a barbeque. Most of us have a very mixed set of attitudes toward work, and it shows.
Americans are widely thought to work more and harder than any nation on earth. I've always wondered who arrives at those statistics (I suspect it's an American), but we do work extremely hard. We work long hours, and we take fewer vacations and holidays than any European nation. We love work!
And the truth is that our great wealth, our great industries and our service economy are the result of hard, hard work.
In "The Millionaire Next Door", Stanley and Danko note that most self-made millionaires work about 60 hours per week. The top 10% in any field work more, do more, and stay longer than their colleagues. Hard work is the necessary "in-put" for most of the "out-puts" we desire! There is just no way around it.
Now, I'm all in favor of working smart, and I try to be as efficient as possible. I'm also in favor of taking time off, of doing work that feels a bit like play, and of balancing work with relaxation, recreation, and the "pursuit of happiness".
But in the end, and over the long-run, our income is proportional to how hard we work. Ultimately, success is always the product of how much we get done and how well we perform.
Fortunately, for over 200 years, most Americans have worked very hard and we celebrate and luxuriate in the fruits of their labor. We enjoy tremendous wealth because others have worked extremely hard. Here's to them. And here's to working hard, working smart, working effectively, and when necessary, working just a bit more.
Humor: Amazing Factoids
I love totally useless stuff like this! Did you know that:
More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.
The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabet.
The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language...try it!
No word in the English language rhymes with month.
Shakespeare invented the words 'assassination' and 'bump'.
"Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand, "lollipop" with your right.
The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with.
The words 'racecar' and 'kayak' are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.
TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters from only one row of the keyboard.
There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."
There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs five times: "indivisibility."
The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is "uncopyrightable".
A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
Rodger Blaker is a Personal Coach who supports people in their desire to bridge the gap between where they are today and where they want to be! For info on resources for your success, visit: http://www.rodgerblaker.com
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