Think & Create

By Brian Tracy

Organize Your Life Around Your Family, Your Career and Your Personal Goals
You need to stand back on a regular basis and analyze yourself, your life and your time usage. You need to become a master of your time rather than a slave to continuing time pressures.

Your Most Precious Resource
Time is your most precious resource. It is the most valuable thing you have. It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can only be reallocated from activities of lower value to activities of higher value. All work requires time. And time is absolutely essential for the important relationships in your life. The very act of taking a moment to think about your time before you spend it will begin to improve your personal time management immediately.

The Starting Point
Personal time management begins with you. It begins with your thinking through what is really important to you in life. And it only makes sense if you organize it around specific things that you want to accomplish. You need to set goals in three major areas of your life. First, you need family and personal goals. These are the real reasons why you get up in the morning, why you work hard and upgrade your skills, why you worry about money and sometimes feel frustrated by the demands on your time.

Decide Upon Your Goals
What are your personal and family goals, both tangible and intangible? A tangible family goal could be a bigger house, a better car, a larger television set, a vacation, or anything else that costs money. An intangible goal would be to build a higher quality relationship with your spouse and children, to spend more time with your family going for walks or reading books. Achieving these family and personal goals are the real essence of time management, and its major purpose.

How to Achieve Your Goals
The second area of goals is your business and career goals. These are the “how” goals, the means by which you achieve your personal, “why” goals. How can you achieve the level of income that will enable you to fulfill your family goals? How can you develop the skills and abilities to stay ahead of the curve in your career? Business and career goals are absolutely essential, especially when balanced with family and personal goals.

Personal Development Goals
The third type of goals is your personal development goals. Remember, you can’t achieve much more on the outside than what you have achieved and become on the inside. Your outer life will be a reflection of your inner life. If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and your career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development. You must build yourself if you want to build your life. Perhaps the greatest secret of success is that you can become anything you really want to become to achieve any goal that you really want to achieve. But in order to do it, you must go to work on yourself and never stop.

Action Exercises
Here are three things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, develop the habit of stopping on a regular basis and thinking about what is really important to you. The more often you stop and think, the better decisions you will make.

Second, decide clearly upon your personal and family goals. Write them down. Discuss them with others. Be clear about why you are doing what you do.

Third, take some time to think about your career goals and the steps you will have to take to achieve them. Do something every day that moves you forward in all three areas.

By Brian Tracy

Why People Buy
Fully 84 percent of sales in America take place as the result of word-of-mouth advertising. Some of the most important sales promotion and sales activities are those that take place between customers and prospects, between friends and colleagues, in the form of advice and recommendations on what to buy, or not buy, and who to buy from.

Join the Top 10%
The only way that you can be among the top ten percent of salespeople in your industry is by having your existing customers selling for you on every occasion. Because of the importance of mega-credibility in selling, your customers must be happy to open doors to new customers for you wherever they go.

Never Prospect Again
All top salespeople eventually reach the point where they seldom have to prospect because their customers do much of their selling for them. When you live your life consistent with your personal and business mission statements, both fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, your sales career will soar, as will your sales results and your earnings.

Be Clear About Who You Are
One important point with regard to vision, values and mission statements: be gentle with yourself. It has taken you your whole life to become the person you are today. If you are like everyone else, you are not perfect. You have lots of room to grow and improve. There are many changes that you can make in your character and personality in the course of becoming the excellent human being that you aspire to. But change in your personality will not come easily, and it won’t come overnight. You must be patient.

Persist Until You Succeed
The reason that people grow and become better and better over the course of time, is because they persist gently in the direction of their goals and dreams. They don’t expect overnight transformations. When they don’t see results immediately, they don’t get discouraged. They just keep on keeping on. And you must do the same.

Put Your Ideas Into Action
Once you have a clear idea of the person you want to be and the kind of life and career you want to create, just take the first step. Read your mission statements every day as you go about your activities, think of the different ways that you could practice the virtues and qualities that you are in the process of incorporating into your own personality.

Remember, it is only your actions with regard to other people that really demonstrate the kind of person you have become. And if you persist long enough, you will eventually shape yourself into the exact person that you have imagined.

Action Exercises
First, treat every customer as if he is going to be a great source of word-of-mouth advertising for you. Remember that every person knows about 300 other people.

Second, resolve to become better and better in your dealings with others but be gentle with yourself. Behave every day in every way the best you can be and you will be sure to get results.

By Matt Furey

Let’s play a game. Just for a moment I’d like you to pretend that I’m going to give you some money.

You have two choices in this game:

The first choice, I give you one million dollars right now.

The second choice, I give you one dollar, and I double it every day for 30 days.

If you’re like most people in this country – and the world – you’d take option number one.

And what a foolish mistake that would be.

Why? Because if I give you one dollar today and double it every day for 30 days, at the end of 30 days, you will have been given over $500 million.

In fact, the total after 30 days would be $536,870,912.

And if you could hang on for one more day, you’d have over a billion bucks – $1,073,741,824.

Most people, without thinking, would ask for the million up front. They want INSTANT GRATIFICATION. Yet, as Chinese philosopher and martial artist Deng Ming Dao once inscribed to me in a book, “In discipline lies freedom.”

I was recently reminded of this when I read Joachim de Posada’s sensational book Don’t Eat the Marshmallow… Yet. 

Don’t Eat the Marshmallow… Yet has already sold over two million copies – and there’s no end in sight, because it teaches the “sweet” secret of success that few have the guts to share.

The book begins with a Stanford University study.

A group of children were put in a room, and each one was given a marshmallow. A researcher told the children that they could eat the marshmallow right away – but if they waited 15 minutes before eating it, they’d get another one as a reward.

Then the researcher left the room.

Most of the kids ate the marshmallow immediately. But when researchers tracked the group over many years, they found that those who held out turned out to be much more successful as adults.

It wasn’t because they were smarter, cuter, had better genes, or were more skilled. It was because they had the ability to delay gratification.

What about you?

Do you “eat the marshmallow”? Or do you do that which will bring greater prosperity your way?

Each month, when you receive payment for work performed, do you pay yourself first and force yourself to save at least 10 percent of it? Or do you do the easy thing and pay everyone else first, so there’s never anything left to invest in your future?

In the evening, do you eat the marshmallow by watching hour after hour of television or gossiping with friends? Or do you save the marshmallow by reading, writing, exercising, or working on a plan to get ahead and stay ahead?

Do you invest in information products that will help you learn how to improve your economic situation? Or do you eat the marshmallow by blowing your money on fancy food and entertainment?

Two choices.

Which will it be?

By Marci Shimoff

Is the state of the economy getting you down? Now, more than ever, we need to learn to be happy from the inside out – what I call Happy for No Reason. Here are four tips to get you started:

Know you’re all right in this moment.

Stop and take a breath. Look around and ground yourself in what’s actually happening right… this… second. Motivational author and speaker Eckhart Tolle calls this the power of Now. It anchors you to a place of inner calm.

Don’t believe everything you think.

When you start to spin out and “awful-ize” your situation, interrupt the downward spiral of worry and anxiety by questioning your negative thoughts. Just because you think something doesn’t make it true.

See that what truly matters isn’t in the bank.

This is an opportunity for all of us – as a nation and as individuals – to re-evaluate our priorities and values and go beyond materialism. What do you need to be happy? When you dig deep, you’ll find that meaning in your life, not money, is at the top of the list.

Switch from me to we.

You want to feel wealthy? Give of yourself! It doesn’t have to be money that you contribute. Simply look around and see if there’s a need you can fill for someone else. Switching from “me” to “we” is a guaranteed happiness booster.

Join the ranks of the resilient and become Happy for No Reason. When you build a refuge of unshakeable peace and well-being inside, you begin to turn things around – not just for yourself, but for every life you touch.

by Chris Widener

You know, whenever you are going to make a major change and begin to undergo a different lifestyle, it is probably good to make a massive move in that direction. Think about it. As the old saying goes, “If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got!” So if you keep on living the way you are living, you will keep right on with the life that in many ways you wish was changing! So how do you change your life? You change what you are doing!

This is the basic idea behind the military’s Boot Camp. You know the drill. This is where they take a bunch of 18-year-old kids who think they are in pretty good shape, both physically and psychologically and they put them through six weeks of misery! But the misery is intentional!

All of the hard work and physical and mental exercise they put the young folks through is to strengthen them and to prepare them for the jobs they will be performing later on. Could you imagine if the military took a lackadaisical approach and greeted every new recruit with, “Welcome to the Army. We are going to work you easy into your new lifestyle. You can get up tomorrow around ten and brunch will be served at eleven. Come as you are.” No way! They get them accustomed to drastic and massive change because they want them to have drastic and massive change in their lives. The only time they ever got up at four a.m. before was to go fishin’! Now it will be every morning!

So what about a life boot camp? Is it possible? Is it something we could, or should, try? I think for many people, the idea of a six-week period of drastic change would be great for them. Even if they didn’t live that way the rest of their lives they would still probably make a major shift in the direction they want to go and would be happy with the results they would receive.

So here are some thoughts on ways you could go through a life boot camp. Give it a try for six weeks, just like in boot camp, and see if it doesn’t make a difference in your life. As always, if you are going to do something physically, contact a doctor and if financially, contact your financial advisor before beginning anything.

Health.

Try getting up a half hour earlier and going for a walk or a run every day. Perhaps you just skip a half hour of television at night and do it then.

Try cutting out desserts or other favorite fattening foods.

Emotions.

Make contact with a broken relationship and begin to get together with them to restore your friendship. 

Take time each day, even if just for fifteen minutes to sit quietly in silence or with some soft music just to quiet your spirit.

Finances.

Don’t make any new purchases that aren’t essential for six weeks.

Take any extra money you get and pay it all toward your debt. Every nickel!

Spiritual.

Attend your local family of faith for six weeks in a row.

Take time each day to listen to some spiritual music or read good faith building literature. (This can probably be combined with the time you take for emotions)

These are just some thoughts for you. I am sure you can come up with some of your own. The idea is to make a drastic step in the right direction. Maybe you do all of them; maybe you combine just a few. The goal, however, is to put yourself into a life boot camp situation. That is what will help you change and make you strong!

Come on soldier, the trumpet is blowing!

by Ron White

His name was Jason Dunham and he was a corporal in the United States Marines. The story picks up with Jason as he was talking with the men in his unit. They wondered whether a person could jump on a grenade and survive by putting it under his helmet. Deep down they all knew that it most likely wouldn’t work, yet on the streets of Baghdad all topics of conversation can soon become quickly exhausted and hypothetical solutions to real-life problems can pass the time.

Unfortunately for Jason Dunham, the circumstance that he had hypothesized about arrived just a few weeks later. However, fortunately for his unit, Corporal Jason Dunham was there. In this life and death scenario, there is no time to think. There is only time for fight or flight. Jason chose fight and performed above and beyond the call of duty. He threw his helmet and body over a grenade and gave his life for his friends. Jason was nominated for The Congressional Medal of Honor. He was 20 years old.

Your stance on political matters or world issues is irrelevant in this scenario. Jason did not do this for you. He did not do it for the people of Baghdad. He didn’t do it for the U.S. government or a politician. He did it for the men beside him, period.

To give your life for your friends is perhaps the greatest thing one person can do for another. It is also one of the rarest acts of civilization.

In 1981, shots rang out and bullets screamed through the air to pierce the flesh of the 40th President of the United States. No sooner had the gun powder been ignited than secret service agent Tim McCarthy stood up as straight as a board and extended his arms to make himself a large barrier between would-be assassin John Hinckley and President Reagan. While others ran for cover, Agent McCarthy stood looking directly at his potential death with firm resolve. Tim was shot square in the chest and, believe it or not, that was exactly his goal. As he positioned himself spread eagle to take a bullet for a man, an office and a nation, others cowered in trembling fear. Because of amazing grace, agent McCarthy survived.

What causes men and women to lay down their lives for another? It takes a lot. First and foremost, it takes a realization that life isn’t about you. It is about making a difference, about making an impact and about giving.

Jason Dunham and Tim McCarthy were able to respond the way they did because:

- They decided how they were going to respond long before the event occurred.

- They were not selfish people – the farthest you could be from selfish, as a matter of fact.

- They realized that life was not about them; it was about making a difference – it was about others.

I hope with all my heart you are never placed in a situation where you have to choose between your life and those around you. Yet, every day you are in situations where you have to make choices. You must decide right now how you will respond.

The lesson to extract from the lives of Corporal Dunham and Agent McCarthy is that of an overall attitude on life. That attitude, simply put, is that it is better to give than receive. It is honorable to view the lives and well-being of others above yourself. If we can take any pearl of wisdom from the extraordinary lives and attitudes of these two men, it is that making an impact on the world is not always about recognition, power, money or personal gain. Sometimes the greatest success is one who gives himself up so others can succeed. That is the mark of the ultimate high achiever.

Decide today how you will respond in your moments of crisis – whether it is financial, personal or life and death. As you plan your actions, remember the selfless lessons of Corporal Dunham and Agent McCarthy.

By Brian Tracy

Everyone has critical skills and knowledge that are important to many other people in the company.

Use Better Titles for Each Person

Some years ago, when I started in business, the job of the receptionist was to answer the telephone and direct the callers to the appropriate people. Today, however, her job is far more complicated and, therefore, more important. Since she is the first contact that most customers have with our business, her personality and temperament are extremely important.

Think About Your Customers

The prospective client who telephones begins forming an impression of us the instant that the telephone is answered. Then, because our companies are doing so many things, she must tactfully ascertain exactly how the caller may be best served and who is the best person in the company to direct the telephone call to.

One Person Can Make the Difference

In many cases, there are requests for further information, and follow-up telephone calls go through our front-office manager. Her ability to handle these calls effectively, to direct calls to the right people, to take accurate messages, and to act as the core person in a network of communications makes her job so important that it is essential that she sit in on all staff meetings and be aware of everything that is going on. 

Keep Yourself Informed

Your job in your company also requires that you know a lot about what is going on everywhere else, as well as being thoroughly conversant with what you do. And the fastest and most accurate way of keeping current with what is going on is to develop and maintain a network of contacts, an informal team of people within your workplace who keep you informed and who you keep informed in turn.

Encourage Participation and Involvement

The old methods of command and control now exist only at the old-line companies, many of which are fighting for their very survival. Today, men and women want a high degree of participation and involvement in their work. They want an opportunity to discuss and thoroughly understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. People are no longer satisfied to be cogs in a big machine. They want to have an integral role in achieving goals that they participated in setting in the first place.

Build a Top Team

Being a team player is no longer something that is optional. Today, it is mandatory. If you want to achieve anything of consequence, you will need the help and cooperation of lots of people. Your main objective is to structure everything you do in such a way that, because you are constantly cooperating and working well with others, they are continually open to helping you achieve your goals.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, recognize that every person in the company is essential to the smooth functioning of the organization. Take time regularly to discuss their jobs with them and understand what they do.

Second, identify the things that you do that can really affect the work of others. Then, look for ways to do your job so that you help others in every way possible.

By Ted Peroulakis

Conventional buy-and-hold stock investing is not working in today’s market. Trading E-Minis is a great alternative, because you can take full advantage of the market’s volatility. 

You can easily make money in a market that is going up or down. You can, for example, make a bundle if you go “long” or buy an E-Mini contract and the market goes up. And if you go “short” or sell an E-Mini contract, you can just as easily make money when the market goes down. This adds an entirely new dimension of opportunity for investors.

An E-Mini is an electronically traded futures contract on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) that represents a smaller version of a standard futures contract. E-Mini contracts are available on the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, S&P MidCap 400, and Russell 2000 indices. One example: The E-Mini S&P 500 futures contract is one-fifth the size of the standard S&P 500 futures contract.

E-Minis have a low margin requirement, which makes trading them easy and affordable. You can get started for as little as $500 per contract. And because standard stock and index options currently have high premiums due to market volatility, your leverage and profit potential is higher with E-Minis.

E-Minis allow investors with small amounts of risk capital to participate in the Dow and S&P 500 at a fraction of the cost of purchasing the actual stocks outright. You would have to pay thousands of dollars in commissions alone to buy all the stocks in the S&P 500, for example. But by buying an E-Mini S&P 500 futures contract, you can participate in all those stocks for a commission of less than $10!

Bottom line: Start trading E-Minis if you’re looking for an exciting, highly versatile, efficient, and economical way to capitalize on the daily swings in the stock market.

By Bob Bly

What products and services sell best in a recession?

Hint: This is not a trick question. The answer is the one that immediately popped into your head when I asked it.

Before you started over-analyzing this…

The products and services that sell best in a recession are the cheaper ones. That’s right – the ones that cost less.

I recently read in a biography of Milton Hershey that he believed his business was recession-proof and depression-proof because he sold an affordable product. He reasoned that, even if a person couldn’t afford new shoes or a new car or a vacation, they could always afford a nickel for a Hershey’s chocolate bar. (That was the price in those days.)

Milton Hershey was right.

According to an article in Ad News, as the economy continued to tank in the fourth quarter of 2008, the Hershey company increased its advertising budget by 23 percent. And as consumers switched from expensive premium chocolates they no longer felt they could afford to Hershey’s, the company’s net income for the fourth quarter of 2008 rose 51 percent to $82 million.

Similarly, with the restaurant business in its worst slump since 1991, McDonald’s worldwide sales rose 7.1 percent in January 2009. Diners may not be able to afford steak anymore, but they can still afford a Big Mac.

I have found the same thing – consumer preference for lower-priced goods and services during an economic downturn – to hold true for the two little businesses I run: information marketing and freelance copywriting.

In my online publishing business, my low-priced products are e-books selling in the $19 to $79 range. My mid-range products are DVD and audio CD albums selling in the $100 to $150 range. And my high-end products are multimedia programs selling in the $300 to $1,000 range.

In recent months, my customers have clearly been telling me that (a) they are worried about money, (b) they really appreciate my reasonable prices, and (c) for now, they prefer offers for low-priced products.

They are not asking for special discounts or “recession sales.” They just want me to focus on offering products that sell for under $100, which seems to be the magic recession-proof price point for my market.

Whenever I advertise mid-range or high-priced products to my customer list, I always get at least one e-mail from a reader telling me she wants to buy the product… but can’t because she has lost her job!

If you are an information marketer, I suggest that, rather than fighting this trend, you accommodate your customers by:

Expanding your product line, especially with the lower-priced products (like e-books).

Offering your readers more free content (such as special reports and teleseminars).

Bundling products into packages that enable customers to get related materials at handsome discounts (e.g., buy two e-books, get the third one free).

I am also finding that offering low-priced service options works for my freelance copywriting business.

To make $10,000 as a freelancer, you can either do one $10,000 project or five $2,000 projects. These days, I am doing a lot more $2,000 projects for clients who want to continue their marketing but are focused on controlling costs.

For instance, I am saving my clients money by helping them do more marketing online and a bit less offline. We are also using marketing methods that can be tested at minimal cost before rolling out the campaigns (e.g., small test mailings of 1,000 instead of 10,000).

One thing that has worked especially well is a new service bundle I call the “Starter Package.”

Normally, I charge $500 an hour for consulting. With a 10-hour minimum, payable in full in advance, that works out to $5,000 – affordable in normal times, not so affordable during an economic crisis. With the Starter Package, I offer new clients 90 minutes of my time for a flat fee of $750.

There’s no reduction in my hourly rate. I merely allow people to start working with me for a lower initial commitment.

I picked 90 minutes deliberately. Not only is it enough time to give prospects a taste of how my advice and copy can benefit them, but it comes in at a price point under $1,000. And that is within the comfort zone of a new client who doesn’t know me all that well.

More important, the Starter Package shows prospects that I empathize with their desire to cut back on spending and have designed a service to accommodate their smaller budgets.

Interestingly, what usually happens is that, after reviewing the Starter Package offer, prospects call me to get a quote for the full service they really want. And more often than not, that’s what they choose to go with.

So while I don’t actually do a lot of copywriting and consulting under the Starter Package arrangement, it makes prospects more comfortable with me as a vendor who respects their budget concerns and limitations. And that’s been keeping my freelance business active and profitable.