Faith is everything!

This maybe Controversial!

A friend believe that we should NOT be planning for our life. When we plan for our life, it means that we do not trust God (I am not preaching here. Just keep your spiritual orientation to yourself.) Human wisdom is limited, so, just live life happily. If you plan too much, you are worrying. Worrying is wrong.

I am sort of half agree with what he is saying. I believe that we must have faith. I believe that we must not be too worried. As I said yesterday. Worry means Fear, Fear can kill! But, I believe we need to do something to create our own destiny. I don't want to mix spiritual orientation with my topic here but yet it is difficult not to.

When you plan and execute your plan, you must have Faith in it. That is something I believe. How successful you are going to be depends on how strong your faith is. How strong you faith is determines how strong your WILL POWER will be.

Does that sound logical?

To Your Success!

Fear Can Kill You!

Today, I want to talk about FEAR!

I heard about this cruel experiment done on a prisoner who was condemned to die. He was told if he would consent to an experiment and lived through it, he would be freed. He consented. They wanted to see how much blood a person could lose and still live. They arranged that blood would apparently drop from a cut made in his leg. The cut made was very slight, from which practically no blood escaped. The room was darkened, and the prisoner thought the dropping he heard was really coming from his leg. The next morning he was dead through mental fear.

Don't let Fear Kill You!

Today, our biggest challenge is to conquer our own Fear. We almost Fear Everything. We Fear of Losing our Job! We fear of not able to make our family happy! We fear of not having enough money to retire! We fear of our children not being able to coupe with their future! We fear our investment will go wrong! We fear our parents will fall sick! We fear we may fall sick! We fear of the sky will fall down! What else we can't fear?

We must make our choice: Stop Living In Fear!

When you feel Fear is your inner self. You need to overcome it consciously. Don't be worried if you have stress. Some experts said stress is good. It keeps you going. Have faith in yourself.

Survival Skill #14: Stop Living In Fear!

Reality & Positive Thinking

What is really Positive Thinking? How do you differentiate it from Fantasy?

For example, if you are jobless and you dream of making $5,000,000 in one year. Is this Positive Thinking or just Fantasy? Is this realistic? Compared to hoping to make $50,000 in one year, which is more realistic? Well making $50,000 in one year is something not too difficult to achieve. It is realistic. It is not a Fantasy. You said. Basically, nobody will laugh at you when you said that.

But, human need to be Pushed to achieve more. We need some Pressure to move us ahead. Small amount of stress is healthy for us. That's what many health experts said.

So, what really is Positive Thinking? Is it about denying that there are rubbish on the floor even if you physically seeing them all over your living room? I don't think so. To me, Positive Thinking is about knowing that there are rubbish over the floor and Thinking that you can clean them up in an hour and you actually start cleaning them up. I belive by Taking Action and cleaning them and thinking that you will be able to finish the work in an hour (not afraid of failure) is Positive Thinking.

It is all about setting Realistic Goal, Taking Action and Not Afraid of Failure. These are the 3 components of Positive Thinking. While you set Realistic Goal, you can stress them a little bit. For example, instead of targeting $50,000 in one year, maybe you can stretch it to making $350,000 in 3 years. This is also Realistic since it gives you more time to achieve a much higher goal. You can take on multiple jobs to do that. You can find a few contracts and engage someone else to help you to achieve it. Stretch your imagination and make consistent effort towards achieving it.

I am going to make at least $50,000 in next 6 months. I already have leads and potential contracts at hand. I just need to execute them.

Survival Skill #13: 3 Components of Positive Thinking

What is your plan B?

As you can see that this blog is primarily targeting at employees after 45 rather than self-employed to business owners. I guess, this is the majority of the group now but, it is fast shrinking for people above 45. The reason is obvious.

You need to make a choice. One is to fight on by improving yourself, stay relevant, stay young (behaviourally) and be more competitive (maybe slight ruthless). Another option is to execute plan B. Phase yourself towards self-employed or owning businesses.

Recently there are many people choose options like full-time stock trading, currency trading, real-estate agent, insurance or financial planning, franchisees and some small services outfits.

All those are viable businesses and are exceptionally good for middle-age people who wants to have more control over their time and paying more attention to the family's non-financial needs.

Ask yourself, what is your plan B?

If you are thinking of doing it after working hours, you can consider Internet based Home Business. Selling on eBay, Google Adsense etc may be a good start to make yourself acquinted with the new way of doing businesses in this New Era.

Survival Skill # 12: Execute Plan B

My First $5,000 in 10 months

No Big Deal, you said!

Of course! That was what I used to earn in half a month.

Life is such, my friend. You can look at your own life basically in 2 ways. One is to feel bad about whatever happens and curse them along the way. Or you can enjoy every bit of it and look to improve it inch by inch.

I think, I adopt the second approach. You must look at every inch of progress and celebrate along the way. When the times are bad, every little bit counts. As you enjoy your journey in life, you look at your next nearest target. For example, what is next? Maybe another $15,000 in next 2 month! Patience will pay off. There are so many things in life needs time to develop. You choose the right strategy. The problem comes when you have only one thing to work on and no other alternatives. You will feel the pressure the push it to make it happen faster then it should.


Survival Skill #11: PATIENCE

More Positive Thinking

To add on to the topic that I talked about yesterday, I've also realised from many books that I read that success is all about POSITIVE THINKING. If you think you will be successful, you will. The key is the will power. It is very important to keep your spirits up and influence people around you to stay positive. You should do this to your family, especially.

When my wife was retrenched, she told me of her colleague's plight. This colleague of hers (let's call him Mr. B) is a man of late 40's. His wife is not working and his eldest daughter has just entered the local university 3 months ago. He has another younger daughter. The company gave them one month notice for the retrenchment. When he broke the news to his family, his wife and his daughters all cried. My wife was telling me that she could not understand why they need to cry. For his daughter is old enough to go and make some money. Do some part-time work like giving tuition (this is a popular part-time job for undergrads in Singapore) can make quite a fair bit of money. I did that when I was in my undergrad days too.

Well, I think it is OK to cry and let out and get over with it. The only problem comes when you cannot move on. This AGAIN calls for POSITIVE THINKING. Both my wife & I came from very humble background we did not feel that bad when we were both retrenched together (with 10 days). We both worked in different companies. Her retrenchment, as I said, was known 3 months ahead. The bosses were talking to them of various options. That was very kind of them. I was given 4 days to hand-over and go. I guess we had both been through difficult times before, another setback does not count much to us??

Anyway, with the help of his colleagues, Mr. B quickly found another job and settled down. Do you know that if you are sincere, you can get help easily. Mr. B is a very sincere and simple person. Most of his colleagues are more than willing to help him even though they themselves are not in any better situation. Look, your friends are not that selfish, after all.

My point is that we should not be overcome by these kind of short term setbacks. There are many ways to make a living in life. If times are really hard, you can always manage your expenses.

But if you stay POSITIVE, you will pull through.

Survival Skill # 6 (I emphasise again): POSITIVE THINKING

You are what you think you are!

Don't lower yourself. Do you believe that the Almighty created you just want to see you suffer? That cannot be! Whichever your spiritual orientation, believe that you are not created to be miserable. Your parent did not want you to come and suffer. They still do not. Unless you have been very unkind to them, of course! I hope that is not the case for you!

I had mentioned before that you must know your self-worth. Your mission in life. Maybe it is to make a million bucks in next 5 years? If so, starting thinking about how to make that million bucks. Stop self-pity and move forward. One thing we must learn, especially after 45, is that we need to know how to ignore negative forces. There are positive forces all over but unfortunately negative forces are more pervasive. It is very easy to get negative, when you don't watch yourself carefully.

I said this because I had experience this many times. Fortunately, I had been reading motivational books more frequently of late. If you are born with strong mind or lucky enough to be trained with strong will, you do not need much of these motivational books. I have some friends who are naturally strong and they are good and successful. However, there are many many more friends who are easily "attacked" by negativity. They will complain at the slight challenge in front of them.

I encourage you to read motivational books. There are many free ebooks on the Internet if you subscribe to some mailing lists. One of my favourite is "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill. A true Classic that I only read it recently. When I saw the book title previously, I didn't want to touch it because I thought it was like a scam book. After reading it I realised that this book has been written way before I was born! This must have been the earlist motivational book around?

Remember, you are what you think you are!
My survival skill #6 Positive Thinking