Martin

This is an awesome way to visualize and think big!
Thanks to Mark Sham for recommending!

Jim

This interview was done in July this year. Jim Rogers was spot-on on the USD's sucker rally. He is a genius yet down to earth. Maybe I should look to wear a bow tie..

Rogers

Here's the point of view of my Financial Idol, Jim Rogers, who's a genius by any standards.

Jobs

I've been thinking about the paradox of finding a job, and it seems completely broken to me.
Consider a few facts:

1. The traditional way to get a job is to send a boring resume in response to as many posted jobs as you can. Your resume will be scanned, sorted, and, if it doesn't stand out too much, a person might look at it.

Then you go for a job interview and try to be as coglike as possible in your malleability and desire to fit in. If random acts are working in your favour, you get the job.

2. Then, the big Fortune 1000 company that hired you complains that all their people act like cogs, don't care enough, aren't creative in solving problems, and don't push the status quo.

3. Then, the big Fortune 1000 company realises that as long as they've got interchangeable cogs, they ought to just move jobs offshore, because that's cheaper; or, the company doesn't do that, succumbs to Wall Street pressure, and either cheats on their numbers (and gets caught and tanks) or doesn't cheat, (and gets bought or folded and tanks).

Something's wrong here.

Let's start with one assumption that has changed in just a generation.
You might think that big companies are the backbone of our economy. In fact:
It turns out that 100 percent of all job growth is now coming from small companies (under five hundred employees). In fact, the big companies are shedding jobs, not adding them.

That wasn't true for our parents. It's true for us.

Also true: More likely than not, the best jobs, the most interesting jobs, and the most secure jobs are found in small organizations.

Conclusion: Fitting in to get a job for the big guy is a bad strategy for everyone.

Heal The World

Here's a song that proves Michael Jackson is way ahead of his time. This theme of spiritual awareness and to act for the greater good was written and sung more than ten years ago. And its still relevant today.

Be it for global warming, anti-war, anti-terrorism, famine, impoverished children, or refugees, the idea to heal the world relates. Even till this day.

This post is dedicated to Ms Lo Hwei Yen. Our country's first victim of terrorism in Mumbai, India.

Below is the lyrics and a quote from Michael Jackson taken from his album "Dangerous".



There's a place in your heart
And I know that it is love
And this place
Could be much brighter than tomorrow
And if you really try
You'll find there's no need to cry
In this place
You'll feel there's no hurt or sorrow

There are ways to get there
If you care enough for the living
Make a little space
Make a better place...

Heal the world
Make it a better place
For you and for me
And the entire human race
There are people dying
If you care enough for the living
Make a better place
For you and for me

If you want to know why
There's a love that cannot lie
Love is strong
It only cares with joyful giving
If we try
We shall see
In this bliss we cannot feel
Fear or dread we stop existing and start living

Then it feels that always
Love's enough for us growing
Make a better world
We make a better world...

Heal the world
Make it a better place
For you and for me
And the entire human race
There are people dying
If you care enough for the living
Make a better place
For you and for me

And the dream we were conceived in will reveal a joyful face
And the world we once believed in will shine again in grace
Then why do we keep strangling - wound this earth, crucify its soul
Though it's plain to see
This world is heavenly
Be GOD's Glow

We could fly so high
Let our spirits never die
In my heart
I feel you are all my brothers
Create a world with no fear
Together we cry happy tears
See the nations turn their swords into plowshares

We could really get there
If you cared enough
For the living
Make a little space
To make a better place...

Heal the world
Make it a better place
For you and for me
And the entire human race
There are people dying
If you care enough for the living
Make a better place
For you and for me

Heal the world
Make it a better place
For you and for me
And the entire human race
There are people dying
If you care enough for the living
Make a better place
For you and for me

Heal the world
Make it a better place
For you and for me
And the entire human race
There are people dying
If you care enough for the living
Make a better place
For you and for me

There are people dying
If you care enough for the living
Make a better place
For you and for me

There are people dying
If you care enough for the living
Make a better place
For you and for me

you and for me
you and for me
you and for me
you and for me
you and for me
you and for me
you and for me
you and for me
you and for me
you and for me
you and for me


The Dance
Consciousness expresses itself through creation. This world we live in is the dance of the creator.
Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on.
On many occasions when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred.
In those moments, I felt my spirit soar and become one with everything that exists.

I become the stars and the moon.
I become the lover and the beloved.
I become the victor and the vanquished.
I become the master and the slave.
I become the singer and the song.
I become the knower and the known.
I keep on dancing then it is the eternal dance of creation.
The creator and the creation merge into one wholeness of joy.
I keep on dancing...and dancing...and dancing, until there is only... the dance.

By Michael Jackson

P.S. The video shown above is not the original MV. Originals unable to embed.

Habits

Today had been one of those ineffective days where nothing much was accomplished. Such waste of valuable time. Somehow I disliked the way I had spent time, compared to the knowledge to invest it in a useful manner.

Thus, upon reflecting, I'm going to remember it as the day I lost to procrastination and to commemorate this day - I'll dedicate this post to myself of yesterday.

I hope you'll remember this lesson and be the Warrior you're meant to be. AHO!


Habits are the things we do naturally and automatically without thinking. They've been conditioned into us and come directly from our unconscious mind. Changing our lives starts with changing our habits, our automatic responses.

Behavioural scientists tell us that we can recondition or form a new habit within twenty-one days.
Success isn't by chance, luck, or some capricious God who rolls the big success dice and selects favourites at random. (Lucky is a good name for a dog but a poor excuse for success)

Success is about healthy habits, little things done correctly over time, that become big realized goals.
The absence of strong, positive habits can topple even the strongest pillar.

Make a commitment to develop good habits no matter what's happening around you - even when you're faced with tragedy.

Good habits and time are inseparable, aren't they? If you have an antagonistic relationship to time (you resent its laws), it only stands to reason that your habits will be erratic.

Time is a sacred, precious commodity that we've all needed, wasted, argued, and tried to bargain with. Napoleon Hill said that time will not tolerate indecision. In short, it's our greatest ally or worst enemy.

First, let's get one thing straight. Managing time is never going to happen.
All you can do is manage the way you relate to time.

I hear a lot of people say, 'Time flies when I'm having fun.' Not true. 'I just don't have time.' Again, not true.
Time is time. A day is a day. It's twenty-four hours.
A week is a week. A month is a month. A year is a year.

Time is nothing if not consistent. You cannot save time; you can only spend it or invest it. Tick, tick, tick.

The fact is, you have all the time there is. We all do, so stop fighting against it.
When you say you don't have time to work out, for instance, what you're really telling me is that working out is currently not important enough given everything else you've got on your plate.

How you spend your time, like how you spend your money, tells me what you value most.

If you're truly passionate about your intention, you'll focus your time on it, often to the exclusion of other activities.
If you're spending thirty minutes daily checking your voicemail, sixty on e-mail, 120 driving to and from work, does that get you closer to your goals?

Only you know, but you might want to start paying attention... or risk paying with pain.

Once you start working with your six action items, you'll notice that less you deviate from your list, the quicker you'll realize your goals.

Suddenly (and hopefully) those lesser activities will have less and less fascination for you because you'll see that they steal your dreams moment by precious moment.

Let's talk about Alchemy. Alchemy is the transmutation of one thing into another, moving something from one state of evolution into the next.
That's what we're going to do with your time. contrary to popular belief, a disciplined and organised life is actually a liberated life.

With your discipline, you're transmuting what was once chaotic and random into something organised and directed. This new directed energy can be focused like a laser into creating what you want.

Keep pushing. Keep moving. You're growing and expanding, as are your results. Yet it's a good bet that you'll be hitting some common roadblocks and stalling.
Yes I'm sure you're tired of writing this down. It seems redundant.
But you need to grab your attention by the scruff of the neck.

Besides, what could be more important right now than developing new habits - new ways of thinking and acting?

Wealthy people have the ability to give themselves a command and then follow it.
It's a true test of personal integrity and self-worth.

The greatest promise you'll ever keep is a promise to yourself. How much self-worth can you have if you're not honest with yourself?

If you can't count on yourself, how much can you expect others to respect and value you?

How can you expect to control universal energies if you can't even control your own energy?

Wealthy people - and I'm talking about those with Harmonic Wealth - don't waste time knowing what they want one minute and then allowing themselves to sink back into fear or doubt the next. That only attracts confusion and anxiety.

Great achievers focus only on their visions and fire those visions with wisdom, courage, and commitment, regardless of their current circumstances.

They know it's only a matter of time before their visions come into physical form. They know that the stronger their belief, the faster they'll attract the results they desire and replace their old programming.

The path will present itself. Don't get caught up in next week. Don't even get caught up in tomorrow. Get totally immersed in today.
You have your vision; you have your picture.
Now give it 100 per cent of your focus right now.
Get in the flow and go for it.

Incline II

CrossFit is a tribe of slightly crazy (okay, really crazy) fitness fanatics. These are people who on any given day will do a routine like this one:



And they'll do it in a timed competition against thousands of people around the world. On the day I checked their site, more than four hundred people had posted their times on this particular workout.

There are certification course across the country and they are invariably sold out weeks or months in advance. A growing cadre of certified trainers are opening gyms around the world, each gym finding its own new members of the CrossFit tribe, all coordinated by the central Web site.

The CrossFit tribe is strong and getting stronger. And it's largely the work of Greg Glassman, otherwise known as Coach. Coach has built the CrossFit tribe from scratch, inspiring and cajoling and laying down the rules. No coach, no tribe.

Glassman innately understands hoe to run a tribe. He pushes them to the limit every day. He creates an environment where the tribe not only wants to share news and ideas and camaraderie with one another, but is able to. And the tribe grows because individuals proudly segregate themselves and speak up on behalf of the tribe, simultaneously recruiting and hazing new members.



Compare this to patientslikeme.com, a Web site I discovered via an article in the New York Times.

Here's a tribe that appear leaderless. There are more than seven thousand ill people, each sharing all the details of his or her diagnosis and current health status. From dosages to side effects, the group is building an ever-growing database of real-world data about treatments for Parkinson's and other debilitating disease. And they're supporting one another with enthusiasm and comfort as they go.

There is no Greg Glassman or Oprah Winfrey cheering them on. They cheer one another on - and who better, because no one can appreciate what they're going through more than they can.

But the founders of patientslikeme.com are leaders nonetheless. They found a tribe that desperately wanted to communicate, and they gave them the tools to do so. They made the tribe tighter. That's leadership as well.

Leaning in or backing off, but not doing nothing.

Incline I

Groups create vacuums - small pockets where stasis sets in, where nothing is happening. Imagine a cocktail party in its early stages, where everyone is standing around, waiting for something to happen.

Or a marketplace before it opens, filled with shoppers but with all the stores boarded up, with nothing to create energy or excitement.
There are no tribes here, only isolated individuals in groups with no motion.

Leaders figure out how to step into those vacuums and create motion. They work hard to generate movement - the sort of movement that can transform a group into a tribe.

A student can sit in a classroom and accept what the teacher is sending out, then do the work and get by. Or she can take initiative and lead. She can provoke and question and ask for more.

A Marketer can offer a product, take orders, and move on. Or he can use interactions with prospects to create something more, to surprise and delight and generate far more than just a customer who got her money's worth.

This posture of leaning in is rare and valuable.
In the spring of 2008,I (Seth Godin) announced a paid summer internship for students. More than 130 well-educated students from all over the world applied.

As an experiment, I set up a private Facebook group for the applicants and invited each one to participate. Sixty of them joined immediately.

No tribe existed yet - just sixty strangers in an online forum.

Within hours, a few had taken the lead, posting topics, starting discussions, leaning in and leading. They called on their peers to contribute and participate.
And the rest? They lurked. They sat and they watched. They were hiding, afraid of something that wasn't likely to happen.

Whom would you hire?

How could the lurkers imagine that doing nothing would increase the chances that they'd be selected? Were they hoping that they'd meet someone interesting or discover something new by just watching?

The experiment was perfect in that there were no externalities, no side discussions, no special cases - just sixty or so people, each demonstrating behaviour that came naturally.

Not all leadership involves getting in the face of the tribe. It takes just as much effort to successfully get out of the way.
Jimmy Wales leads Wikipedia not by inciting, but by enabling others to fill the vacuum.
My leadership of the internship application process involved setting the stage and stepping back, not pushing at every step along the way.

The one path that never works is the most common one: doing nothing at all.

Nothing at all feels safe and it takes very little effort. It involves a lot of rationalizing and a bit of hiding as well

The difference between backing off and doing nothing may appear subtle, but it's not.
A leader who backs off is making a commitment to the power of the tribe, and is alert to the right moment to step back in. Someone who is doing nothing is merely hiding.

Leadership is a choice. It's the choice to not do nothing.

Lean in, back off, but don't do nothing.

Faith

The only thing holding you back from becoming the kind of person who changes things is this: lack of faith. Faith that you can do it. Faith that it's worth doing. Faith that failure won't destroy you.

People who challenge and then change the status quo do something that's quite difficult. They overcome resistance of people they trust, people they work for, people in their community. Every step of the way, it's far easier to stop and accept thanks for finally giving up than to persist and risk the humiliation of failure.

So why do it?
Faith is the unstated component in the work of a leader and I think faith is underrated.
Faith goes back a long way. Faith leads to hope, and it overcomes fear. Faith gave our ancestors the resilience they needed to deal with the mysteries of the (pre-science) world.
Faith is the dividing line between humans and most other species.

We have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, faith that Newton's laws will continue to govern the way a ball travels, and faith that our time in med school will pay off twenty years from now because society is still going to need doctors.

Chris Sharma is able to to do a dyno on a rock face one hundred feet above ground because he has faith that it'll work out okay. If you watch kids learning how to dyno, you'll see that the secret to developing the skill isn't about building their muscles or learning some exotic technique. It is merely about developing the faith that it'll work.
"Merely," of course, is a huge step. It's nothing but a few neurons' worth of faith, just the knowledge that you can do it.

But without faith, the leap never works.



Faith is the cornerstone that keeps our organizations together.
Faith is the cornerstone of humanity; we can't live without it. But religion is very different from faith. Religion is just a set of invented protocols, rules to live by.
Heretics challenge a given religion, but do it from a very strong foundation of faith.

If religion comprises rules you follow, faith is demonstrated by the actions you take.
When you lead without compensations, when you sacrifice without guarantee, when you take risks because you believe, then you are demonstrating your faith in the tribe and its mission.

Beliefs II

Here's the secret about your mind. While the thoughts and beliefs you hold in your conscious mind are vital to attracting what you want, the programming and beliefs you hold in your unconscious mind hold even more weight. As I said... they're stronger than your willpower.
Willpower, no matter how strong, is on and off, while your unconscious programming runs 24/7.

Your unconscious is where the totality of your programming, your total belief system, resides. Your unconscious mind created the story of you for many years before you were developmentally capable of bringing conscious thought to the process.

Your unconscious mind is the emotional, receptive part of your mind. Nothing is ever forgotten here: your unconscious stores it all beneath your conscious awareness. Although you can learn to access it through meditation, visualization, relaxation techniques, rapt observation of reoccurring results, and the like.

High achievers learn to use their unconscious mind properly by planting the empowering seeds of their vision, intentions, and pictures into their consciousness...
Whatever seeds you plant in the garden of your unconscious mind will spring forth, bringing actions that attract the same kind of result.

Your goal is to reprogramme your total belief system so that your conscious and unconscious mind work in tandem to move you forward.
Constantly observe your results in the physical world (they're mirroring back to you your unconscious beliefs by the minute), and continuously train your mental focus to lock onto new beliefs and realities.

Beliefs can do one of two things: they either move you forward or they hold you back. The problem is we're often held back by beliefs we don't even know we have!

William James, the father of modern psychology, said, 'Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.' He claimed that one of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can change the quality of his life by changing the quality of his thoughts.

Beliefs I

This will be the first of a series of articles based on the teachings of Celebrity Author James Arthur Ray.

What you believe you'll achieve is the driving factor of your results: your lack of abundance in terms of money, piece of mind, relationships, physical health, or anything else. This is the cumulative effect of your current total belief system, which is exactly what it sounds like - the totality of what you believe, your habits, experiences, values and assumptions.

Most people try to change their results by dealing with the effects, throwing new solutions at the results, thinking they're going to change things. But if you want to change the results, you must deal with the cause. You have to change what you believe.

One of the reasons it's so hard to change what we believe is that we don't understand how those beliefs got into our heads at the first place. Why do we believe what we believe?

Well, for one thing, our unconscious programming and our overidentification with the culture around us keeps many of us from creating an independent sense of self, our unique identity. It's a rare individual who begins operating authentically by living a more closely examined life.
If we want to change our total belief system, we need to bring our unconscious beliefs into our consciousness, examine whether they are true or useful, heal them, change them, and release them if they're not.

It was Socrates who stated, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.'

Your programming comes from deep-seated values, beliefs and assumptions that are fixed or locked into your consciousness. Again, most of these are gifts you received at a very early age from your parents, grandparents, teachers, religious sources and anyone else in authority, typically during the ages of three to eight.

Sociologist Morris Massey conducted exhaustive research on personal values and found that most of our core level values lock in at the age of thirteen and rarely if ever change. What that means is that most of the people you interact with on a daily basis are thirteen-year-olds walking around in thirty-, forty-, or even eighty-year-old bodies.

According to Massey, your values only change if you experience what he called a significant emotional event, or SEE - something that rocks your world and causes you to step back and reconstruct your viewpoint.

Most often your conscious mind isn't aware of everything your unconscious mind is putting out, yet your programming, or total belief system, continues to operate as though everything you think or believe is literally true. It's not.

Thankfully, because you've chosen your own beliefs to start with - even if you did so unconsciously - you can now learn how to choose new ones consciously for new results.

Predicament

Thanks to a tribe mate, I've found this again. (Tot I lost it)
Here's some life's lesson to take in and breathe..

11 Ways To Integrate The Lessons Of Predicament Into Your Life:

Breathe. Breath is life. Invigorate your whole body by breathing deeply into your core. Be purposeful in this practice.

Stay present. The divine exists in the NOW. Neither the future nor the past holds the key to lasting peace and happiness.

Gratitude. Practice being grateful for what you already have.

Expand. Include everything that is. Any amount of separation you choose causes suffering.

Connect. Deep connection is what we all long for. Connection to the divine force in everything is the key to success. Be the example.

Speak your truth. Never forfeit the truth for acceptance. Always follow your heart.

Be BIG! Playing small serves no one. Be compassionate and show up fully.

Look after yourself. Your body is your temple. Fail to support it and the results will show in everything.

Serve others. Be will to give it all away. In the end, all things return to the source from which they came.

Be humble. Let the Divine in all things shine forth by giving life space to show up fully.

Open to receive. Allow the love you see to find you.

Tribes

Here's an excerpt from the book Tribes by my fav author Seth Godin.

A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea... A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.

Tribes are about faith - about belief in an idea and in a community. And they are grounded in respect and admiration for the leader of the tribe and for the other members as well.
Do you believe in what you do? Every day? It turns out that belief happens to be a brilliant strategy.


Three things have happened, pretty much at the same time. All three point to the same outcome:

1. Many people are starting to realize that they work a lot and that working on stuff they believe in is more satisfying than just getting a paycheck and waiting to get fired (or die)

2. Many organizations have discovered that the factory-centric model of producing goods and services is not nearly as profitable as it used to be.

3. Many consumers have decided to spend their money buying things that aren't factory-produced commodities. And they've decided not to spend their time embracing off-the-shelf ideas. Consumers have decided, instead, to spend time and money on fashion, on stories, on things that matter, and on things they believe in.

So here we are. We live in a world where we have the leverage to make things happen, the desire to do work we believe in, and a marketplace that is begging us to be remarkable. And yet, in the middle of these changes, we still get stuck.

Stuck following archaic rules.
Stuck in industries that not only avoid change but actively fight it.
Stuck in fear of what our boss will say, stuck because we're afraid we'll get into trouble.
Most of all, we're stuck acting like managers or employees, instead of like the leaders we could become. We're embracing a factory instead of a tribe.

The irony is that all of this fear used to be useful. Fear of change is built into most organisms, because change is the first sign of risk. Fear of change in a huge factory is appropriate when efficiency is the order of the day.
Today, though, the fear that used to protect us at work is now our enemy; its now the thing standing in the way.

Fear's an emotion, no doubt about it. One of the strongest, oldest, and most hardwired.

What's interesting about the folks I meet who are engaged and are clearly heretics is that they've actively talked themselves out of fear. I mean, the fear is still there, but it's drowned out by a different story.

It's the story of success, of drive, of doing something that matters. It's an intellectual story about what the world needs and how your insight can help make a difference.
I believe you can talk over fear, laying out a game plan that makes the fear obsolete. It's not about some clever tactic or a better way to write a memo to your boss. It's about making it clear to yourself that the world is now demanding that we change. And fast.

Wait.
We need to stop again. It's clear that just a few paragraphs aren't going to be sufficient to undo a lifetime of having fear beaten into you.
So stop for a second and think about this... the only technique or how-to or inside info is this: the levers are here. The proof is here. The power is here. The only thing holding you back is your own fear.

Not easy to admit, but essential to understand.

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