Mind the Beginner

There are more and more things these days, simple tasks and skills that people just have any more. Knowledge that hasn’t been passed on or something, basic skills. If you can’t do these and so pay others to do it for you, it’s going to cost you loads of money and you don’t even get to have complete control. As an added bonus you don’t even know what needs to be done so they can overcharge you. These skills are so basic that you should feel insulted because I claim you can’t do them, and feel ashamed if you can’t do them. I’ll start of with a list of computer-related stuff, basic maintenance. Yes a computer needs maintenance!

Computer skills

1. Properly install a program if needed

That doesn’t mean blindly clicking “okay” and “yes” at every pop-up. The program might be installed, but where to exactly? Will there be shortcuts? (and where), is that language pack installed you won’t be needing?

2. Removing a program if needed

It’s not enough just to locate the folder (in c:/program files most likely) and delete it. This is the equivalent of letting Australia sink into the ocean and forgetting to tell everyone it’s no longer there.

3. Defragmenting your hard disk

Imagine your hard drive is a kitchen. Defragmenting is like doing the dishes, cleaning up, throwing away broken and used things and leaving everything tidy. Fail to do so and in time you’ll have a heap of clutter you can’t find anything in. You clean your kitchen after using it right? Why don’t you clean your hard disk after using it? It won’t do so by itself.

4. Know what cable goes where

It’s not so long ago that people used to ask me where they should insert a floppy disk. Knowing that made me the computer geek. These days there’s a bit more to it. Take a look at the back of your desktop computer. If I unplug every cable there, can you put them back? If you have a laptop, at least you know where to plug in the power, but where do USB, DVI, HDMI, Firewire, PS2, audio and perhaps the VGA cables go? If you can hook up your pc, you can hook up your TV, DVD and everything else.

5. Cleaning the case on the inside

Having unplugged everything you can open up the case. You should never do this unless the power is off! (or you know exactly what you’re doing). Computers cool themselves with air, and so the computer case is essentially a vacuum cleaner. It’s always sucking in air and dust. This dust builds up, covering everything with a nice insulating blanket. If you do not clean this your computer will heat up, your fans will wear out faster and just maybe, you might short-circuit something. Opening up a laptop is generally a bad idea though.

6. Know what all the components are

You know what the keyboard is and the mouse. The screen shouldn’t be to hard either. But once you open the case, can you point out the motherboard, the CPU, the hard disk and the memory modules. This is basic stuff just like finding your car battery and the dipstick to check the oil with. (Both are also basic things to know by the way). Why do you need to know these things? It works, so why worry? You don’t want the garage to do a complete engine overhaul when you have a flat tire. Your power supply has a fan, if that one doesn’t work it most likely has nothing to do with your hard drive now does it. And now the help-desk wants you to bring in your system for a re-install of your operating system. Go figure.

A bit of a mix between software and hardware skills here, and there are many other things you’d think are essential. Sending a mail, adding an attachment, basic file management, setting up a wifi internet connection. You might even thing HTML is basic and everyone should know how to upload a file using ftp and how to download a movie. (Pirate Bay anyone?) Let’s not make things to hard to begin with.

Food skills

Let’s continue with some skills concerning food. I could not hope to cover all the bases here so I’ll give you a general direction in terms of simplicity and basicness:

7. Boil an egg,

Yes you may laugh, but do you know how get a soft boiled egg? can you peal it without having the shell stick? It’s basic. If you know how to boil an egg, northing’s stopping you in boiling rice, potatoes or vegetables.

8. Fry an egg.

If you can’t do this you’d better not try anything more complicated, like baking pancakes. Breaking the egg on the side of the pan without getting shell in the pan is of course essential. Frying the egg with success means you can fry other things too. Brilliant.

9. Brew a decent cup of coffee

I can quite easily brew a cup of coffee that will cost me 25 cents and tastes better than anything you can find at Star Bucks. Let me make this perfectly clear, senseo (or any other pod system) does not produce coffee. At best it’s a black warm liquid what was passed through what was collected off the floor at the coffee-grinding factory a year ago. We’re so used to drinking bad coffee we no longer know what coffee should taste like and now will drink just about anything without question. Coffee that has been preground and is not “best before” some date, Is actually so old it has lost most of it’s qualities. When it comes to vegetables you go to the farmer’s market, demanding fresh vegetables. But with coffee you’ll settle for anything. Why?

10. Brew a decent cup of tea

Just like coffee, brewing tea is actually a basic skill, with a few key bits in there. It’s not just dunking a teabag into boiling water and letting it steep for an undefined period of time, judging by colour. The steep time and water temperature are actually quite different in different tea types, as is the colour. Sounds logical doesn’t it? The wrong temperature (to hot) will get you a very bitter tea, likewise with to long a steep time. Keep temperature and steep time in mind.

11. Wielding a knife

You can buy just about anything pre-sliced at the store. Up to and including tomatoes, lettuce and mushrooms. Nicely packaged in plastic and probably a bit dried around the edges. Not only are you adding to pollution with the plastic, but you’re also spending more money because you don’t chop things yourself. It really isn’t all that hard to use a proper kitchen knife. And remember: A dull knife is far more dangerous than a razor-sharp one. Let the knife do the work for you, don’t use force. Sharpening a knife is not exactly a basic skill, but very useful and will guarantee you that you’re blade is sharp. If you can cut things yourself you can buy your vegetables at the farmers market, saving even more money.

Technical skills

12. Basic bike maintenance

You know I’m Dutch right? And that we Dutch people have more bikes here than actual people? Almost every bike here has a simple dynamo that provides power for lighting. He’s a basic scheme for lighting from a battery:

As you can see the bulb sits in a holder with two contacts on it. With a bike it’s a single contact and a connection to the frame of the bike. The loop back to the negative pole of the  battery (or with a bike, the dynamo) is made through the frame. There are only a few components here and very few things that can go wrong. Most common are a broken wire, a broken bulb or a bad/no contact.

Now I’m a student at the science faculty. A faculty where people know basic physics. A place where people would know how to connect a battery to a bulb. And even there, perhaps one in four bikes doesn’t have working lights on it! People would rather buy those fancy clip-on LED lights than repair their bike lighting. And as the battery runs out they buy a new one. Don’t get me started.

That is part one of bike maintenance. The other two skills I think are essential are: being able to repair a flat tire (will cost you $10-$15 to let someone do it for you, 10 minutes and 20 cents do to it yourself) and adjusting the brakes. That’s no more than a few turns of a nut and last time I checked, brakes are very useful to have function properly. A small side note goes to maintaining proper tire pressure.

13. Changing a light bulb

It’s the classic. A household light bulb is easily replaced, just remember that a bulb will stay hot for a while. Can you change a light bulb in your car though? It’s mandatory here (In many countries of the EU) to have a spare set of bulbs and fuses with you in the car. I wonder how many people here would actually know how to replace those though.

14. A few car skills

Assuming you know how to pop the hood, let’s have a look under there. Where is the battery, the brake fluid, windscreen wiper fluid and the oil dipstick. The fusebox might be in there somewhere too, along with the back sides of the lighting, you can change the bulb from there. The car manufacturers provide you with a nice owners manual they expect you to read, the car-salesmen pray you don’t. It’s all in there and knowing those basics will save you a lot of money.

15. DIY

If you ever bought a piece of furniture at IKEA you must have seen the manual they supply. These people believe you have about the cognitive capabilities of a shrimp. They offer a very easy manual for you to assemble whatever it is you bought. But do you realise that every DIY job is about as easy as assembling something from IKEA? Look up a manual online if you must and after just a few tries you’ll be able to drill a hole in a concrete wall and using a spirit level mount a bookshelf to the wall perfectly horizontal.

Skills of the mind

16. People skills

Talking to people, talking with people, accepting when you’re wrong and admitting it, complimenting others and saying thank you. You get the idea don’t you?

17. Curiosity

Without being curious you will learn nothing. All the skills above are learned within minutes if you are curious however. I bet you can learn everything on this list within a week! They aren’t basic skills for nothing now are they.

18. Patience

There are skills that will not be learned within a week, the people skills I mentioned might prove a bit hard to do in a week for some. But if you’re curious enough and want to learn than you will learn. It’s simple, but it takes time.

19. Common sense

Common sense is highly underrated. A lot of knowledge handed down simply doesn’t hold up to common sense. Did your parents teach you that you should dress warm when it’s cold outside and should never go outside with wet hair? You might catch a cold right? The common cold is a virus transmitted through saliva mainly (coughing). There is no link between being in cold weather and catching a cold. It’s more likely to do with people huddling up in winter and closing all sources of fresh air like windows. One sick person in a huddle with other people and no fresh air. Got it? If you can think you can deduct what’s really going on with common sense.

It doesn’t take that long to learn

There are so many simple things out there that you can learn within an hour or less that it’s very strange that we pay others to do them for us. Would you rather stay ignorant and have others laugh at you behind your back because you can’t do a simple thing? Or are you going to take matters into your own hands. These simple skills is what will make you confident to take on bigger things, these simple skills will save you a lot of money, these simple skills will make life easier.

It’s all so simple, don’t you agree? This list is far from complete, If you think a skill should be in this list, please do share it with us all in the comments.

Like so many students I have a student loan, it’s not pretty but it’s there. It’s a statistically sound assumption to say that you have some form of debt too. Especially if you live in the USA. Although I don’t know my exact amount of debt to the cent that is a figure that keeps haunting me. But you know, there are two types of people with debt:

1. Those who are fully aware of their financial situation
2. Those who have a vague idea at best

Either you know you have a debt, how big it is, and what it’s doing from week to week or you have no insight in your financial situation. The reason I don’t know my exact debt is because I’m not to good with numbers. A click of the mouse will bring me to GNUcash. A totally free accounting program (Linux, Windows and OS X) that lets me keep track of every single cent I spend, earn and is otherwise added or subtracted from my assets and liabilities.In big red numbers is my student loan, down to the last cent. GNUcash lets you keep track of everything, in as many categories as you deem necessary. Form big ones like that student loan down to small ones like cash you find in the street. (Do you leave free money on the ground? I sure don’t!)

Keep track

As mentioned in “Your money or your life” it’s vital to “keep track of every cent that comes in to or goes out of you life”. It’s so important that on one page alone it’s printed three times, in bold. (Page 67 if you want to see) and I couldn’t agree more. The benefits are clear:

• You’ll never wonder at your balance again, and have no idea where it all went
• You’ll know exactly how much came in this month and how much was spent
• These two combined let you see if you live below your means
• You learn where your vices are if you have them.

Setting up GNUcash takes a little bit of time and the learning curve is a bit steep in the beginning but it’s a really easy program after the initial setup. No fancy layout, it’s minimal and does only what it’s supposed to do. You can generate graphs for just about anything but the most useful one is income vs expenses. Three collumns per period show you how much came in, how much went out and the difference. If the difference is chronically negative you’re having a serious problem. if it’s always positive, you’re living below your means. This is where you want to be for it’s no more than common sense to spend less than you earn right? The amount you don’t spend you can save for a rainy day or pay off that debt. If you manage to live below your means habitually your debt will decrease and in time you will no longer be haunted by that negative figure. Knowing your ghost makes it all the less scary.

If you have no clear idea on your financial status: Start keeping track as of today!
(Yes, every single cent)

I promise you, although it’s hard at first you will get better at it and soon it will become a habit, a very healthy one.

Some more reading:

The Four Noble Truths about Money

Winning the Lottery by being Frugal

The Defective Consumer says: Eat your vegetables

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If you’re not interested in effective writing or have mastered the skill of writing skip this blogpost. If you’re like me and always on the lookout for tips to make things more effective, this one if for you!

Block quotes are one of the three attention-grabbers when scanning an article to see if it’s worth reading. Read the blogpost to discover the other two.

Yesterday I dug up and old syllabus from my previous education as therapist. It was about effective writing and there were some nice pointers in there I really want to share with you. Over the years there have been a lot of blogposts and entire blogs on writing effectively. But as of yet there is one rule in my syllabus that I haven’t found out there yet. It might be, it might not be, at least now it’s here on this blog.

The rule of seven:

• No more than 7 sentences to a paragraph
• No more than 7 paragraphs to a chapter
• No more than 7 chapters to a text

With a margin of 2 on all these.

The word count

Simple isn’t it? But there is more of course. The maximum length of a sentence that  people can comprehend is related to education. It’s bit harsh but people who didn’t finish high school can’t handle sentences the way academics can. If you want to write a text that’s readable for everyone sentences should be no longer than 10 words. High School drop-outs can take 14 words and 24 words is a suitable length for academics. It’s not set in stone but it’s a good guideline to keep in mind when writing. Who is your audience? It’s quite easy to overestimate your readers.

Combining these two rules we get between 1250 and 7290 words to a text for everybody, and 3000 to 17496 words for academics. Somewhere in the order of 7000 words seems the ideal length for the typical eBook and 980 for a blogpost. All these are rough estimates of course but using these you can expect that an eBook over 17500 words long will surely be a bit on the long side.

Improving readability can be done by including underlines, bold, and italics but especially underlines are not a particular good idea in blogposts. After all, links in blogposts are almost always underlined and you could send the wrong signal. A text full of underlined words at first glance would seem like a text full of links. It could get even worse if you underline a word and make it blue as well. Now surely your first impression is that it’s a link. Did you try and click it?

Subheadings

are another way of grabbing attention and dividing a text to improve readability. It draws the attention and effective subheadings will almost lure the reader deeper into the text. The title of the article is the first thing people see and so that too should grab attention while covering the essence of the article. Not to long and definitely to the point, it should leave the reader with the feeling of “I need to read this”. These aren’t all the tools you have to write effectively. Blogreaders are a special breed of readers, they want the information in quick, scannable bits and are always in a hurry. As a blogger you can help your readers with that and provide highly scannable content.

One of the easiest things to scan is the:

• The list
• it’s short
• easy to scan
• and provides structure
• see what I mean?

Chances are you already scanned the list before actually reading the blogpost. Together with the subheadings these are two of the three most scannable features in any blogpost. The last one you’ve probably already scanned as well before deciding to read this post. It’s the block quote at the beginning of this blogpost. These three text-based eye catchers are what grabs you at a first glance. (Four if we count the title of the blogpost.) That leaves us with one non-text eye catcher that is absolutely crucial. A picture is worth a thousand words and doesn’t increase the word count! A bad picture or no picture at all will seem dull and uninspiring. The right picture makes or breaks a blogpost.

The closing line to a blogpost is where you make your statement. Use all the tools you have, make your blogpost scannable, make a clear statement, and don’t forget to write both a good opening and closing  line, they really matters.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards – Soren Kierkegaard

In my previous post the Truth had a central role. In this blogpost again the Truth is an important thing. The Truth after all is what is right now, this very instant. And as soon as you think about it you’re thinking about the past. You can’t even pin the word “now” to actual now before it becomes past. Trivial though it seems this means that you can’t capture the moment. All you can do is accept it and live in it without trying to fight it.

So many people out there are constantly looking towards the future or the past to identify the perfect moment to do something. Mostly that moment was in the past and if you’re lucky you might find a moment in the future that’s perfect for what you want. The problem with that moment in the past of course is that you can’t relive that moment although you might understand the lessons and take that with you into the future. The problem with the future is that it’s distracting from the now.

Living forward is all there is. One moment after the next, following each other at instant speed. Trying to understand is dealing with the past, trying to look into the future is distracting from what is happening. We continuously hunt down the precious moments in our lives, but we’re always late or early.

Living without dealing with past or future robs us of all meaning it seems. I recall a fellow student of Cheng Hsin a few years ago who described trying to be perfectly in the now, the more he tried the less he was actually doing because almost all tasks were either dealing with something from the past or preparing for the future. Eventually he decided to give up in being perfectly now because it was boring and unproductive. He took things so far that he wouldn’t even brew a cup of coffee because brewing was preparing for the future event of drinking the coffee. This lasted for only a few hours before the decision to give in and act “normal” again. Possibly it’s the caffeine addiction that pushed him over the edge.

Preparing for now is impossible, preparing for the past senseless, preparing for the future a shot in the dark. That shot in the dark is your best guess out of the three options and is a very good idea indeed. Study the past and understand, prepare for the future and brew that cup of coffee, just don’t forget about this moment.   …to late… it already passed.

A bit more reading on the subject:

-Time-place dissonance and the quick fix

-The prison of the mental world

Before you read this take a look around…

Did you have a quick look around the room, your desk area and perhaps even your desktop? Is it cluttered? Are there things there that you haven’t used in 2009? Things collecting dust that somehow just keep put but have no actual use?

Seriously, is there anything there you just spotted that you didn’t use for a whole year? The obvious question to ask as soon as you spot something like that is “Why is it still here?”

At least, that’s what the minimalist would ask himself. Always striving to make things less cluttered and as an added bonus easier to keep clean and tidy. I did that very thing this weekend and it resulted in the removal of two bookcases from my room, books included. That’s 2/3 of my shelf space and of course a drastic reduction of things to dust.

To keep things from looking to empty I rearranged what was left and added a two-seat sofa. Although I live in a single room at least now I have proper seating which means that the bed (which was also my sofa) can now be used exclusively for what it’s meant. The TV is no longer easily visible when sitting at my desk and it’s impossible to watch from the bed.

What happened here is something that might seem very insignificant but actually is nothing of the sort. We humans tend to combine just about anything we do and most of the time it’s not very productive at all or at least we aren’t mindful of what we are doing:

• Eating and watching TV
• Trying to fall asleep and watching TV
• Studying behind a PC…. with Internet (social media etc.)
• Studying with the TV on
• Working and playing

Now all of those save one are things you actually don’t want to be doing to often. Very soon you’ll have the habit of eating while watching TV and don’t notice you’re emptying a whole bag of crisps. It’s just suddenly empty. I’m sure you’ve had that happen at least once. The same goes for trying to fall asleep with the TV on. Your retina keeps getting bombarded with light. A great way not to get restful asleep. Sure, most people claim they can’t sleep without the TV to “help them”. But that’s because they have a different problem: The bed is not the exclusive domain of sleep.

The Pavlovian Bed

Humans are creatures of habit and as such we associate things with one another. We get Pavlovian reactions to things. When I was young my parents didn’t allow me to have a TV in my bedroom. A very wise choice when I think back, of course at the time I couldn’t disagree more. You see, my bedroom was used for but a few things and my bed for only one. So as soon as I went to bed my body knew it was supposed to go t sleep and so triggered all the necessary responses. My eyes closed and I was asleep within 20 minutes or less. Reading wasn’t part of the sleeping ritual, or rather it was but not while having my body in a horizontal or half-seated position. Bed = sleep and nothing else.

In later years I got that TV I wanted, now I could watch TV from the comforts of my bed. How wonderful. My body disagreed of course because now it got it’s signals mixed up. Was the bed for sleeping or for watching TV? Or should it do both things at the same time, and not doing a very mindful job of either. The bed was no longer the exclusive domain of sleep.

Distractionless Internet

The same goes for your workspace, your desktop, your sofa. Is a sofa meant to be used for a quick nap? Why not use the bed for that one, at least you won’t fall asleep during the movie because sleep isn’t triggered by the sofa. Homework/studying and your RSS reader or Internet browser? Though far more subtle preferably these two shouldn’t mix either, unless you need the Internet to study. And be honest here (talking to myself) do you really need social media, IRC, music and the TV on to study? Nope, most of the time all you need is your textbook, a piece of paper to make notes, previous notes and in some cases a computer to write something. (or in my case, write code). There are but few reasons to keep connected to the Internet while studying and all of them have an inherent danger of distraction. Wikipedia for instance is a great resource to help clarify things, but it’s all to easy to become distracted and before you know it you’ll be reading about the history of bonsai trees. IRC is a great way to keep in touch with fellow students and ask questions when you are stuck. If you can use it exclusively for that purpose, brilliant. If you get sucked in to idle chatter and random uselessness, better examine what it is you had planned and if what you are doing is part of that plan.

It’s hard to keep things separated, to have a clear idea about what something is for. Is your bed the place to sleep? If your desk the place to work and your sofa the place to watch TV? Or is eating at your desk, sleeping on the sofa and watching TV from the bed the way things go.

Books and Dust Bunnies

So what do the bookcases I mentioned have to do with it? Well, the bookcases were not only holding books, there was other stuff in there too. And everything in there hadn’t been used for at least the whole of 2009 and I had the dust bunnies to prove it. Getting rid of the bookcases made room for proper seating and relocation of the TV. Now watching TV is a major time suck mind you. So what better way to notice that than to make it impossible to watch from anywhere but the designated seating.

Concluding I’d like you to have another look around for two things:

1. Are there things there that you didn’t use in 2009, if so ask yourself why they are still there.
2. Do you have designated (preferably exclusive) area’s for your most important your activities?

I challenge you: For this month, use your bed only for sleeping – if you’re not sleeping, don’t be in bed – and please do tell me about your experiences.

Money, both a blessing and a curse on this planet. For better or for worse we’re stuck with it and it will dominate our lives in one way or the other. Only relatively recently I started learning about money and how to manage it. Now you probably know that there are numerous brilliant blogs about money management and frugality online. They all have the four noble truths about money in common. In this blogpost I’ll try and give you the basics of money all in one simple overview. You could see this blogpost as “Money 101″. Once you know this stuff money will be your friend.

The First Truth: Money can be spent

Well, this is very obvious and you probably do it every single day. Getting you to part with your money is what it’s all about for just about every part of the world economy. Spending more than you earn is a definite way to trouble and spending money on things you want but do not need are a sure-fire way to get more and more clutter in your home. Minimalism can not be maintained this way and if you like minimalism it’s a good idea to have a good hard look at your spendings. If something really a need? or is it jut a want and could you easily do without. Now I don’t want you to never indulge in impulse buys, just keep them in check and know when an impulse buy is only that, an impulse. Gaining control of this is very powerful and will reduce clutter (and spendings). Leaving you with more money in your control.

The Second Truth: Money can be saved

Saving money is almost always a good idea and it’s the natural choice if you end up spending less than you earn each month. Saving money can get you one of two things: a bigger reserve that will earn you interest (and we all know the power of compound interest) or a larger amount of money that can help you get something big you unexpectedly need (a washing machine for instance), note how I’m not saying something big you want. A buffer so to speak.
How far you take the savings is up to you but if you’re really into saving you might reach the crossover point one day. That elusive point when the yearly interest on your savings is enough to pay for all -yes all- your needs. How cool would that be, being able to pay the rent or mortgage with nothing but the interest on your savings. It would mean you’d have the option to stop actively pursuing an income and sit back and relax knowing that you’ve crossed over.

Reaching this point is mostly for those who work hard and save hard. Relaxing after reaching crossover almost always makes these people miserable so they choose to keep working and saving.

The Third Truth: Money can be invested

While saving will make you roughly 3% on a yearly basis if you’re lucky, investing money can and most often does generate a more significant interest rate. With some experience and know-how you could generate 10% a year, but that would mean you’d have to actively (let someone) manage your money. Investing can be done in “paper” (stock-market) which seems to be a rather iffy idea at the moment. You could also invest in real-estate, a slightly sounder idea sometimes. You could think about “flipping” homes. That is, buying a house for x dollars, spend y dollars fixing it and then selling the property asap for x+y+z where z is every last dollar you can squeeze out of it. After that you can choose to invest in another property, adding z to your investment sum. A tried and tested way of making money for anybody willing to do the hard work and taking the gamble of buying a lemon.
Investing money is roughly translated as “letting money work for you”, where saving is just letting it sit there. A bigger gamble but with potentially greater rewards. Of course flipping homes is just an example. You could invest in very small things, perhaps dabble a bit in stocks or help someone with a start-up, becoming a stakeholder or angel investor if you can. Investing is a risk, you might make a loss and you can’t have immediate access to your money. If those things don’t form a problem for you, investing is the way to go in trying to reach crossover. (They should have called it game-over…)

The Fourth Truth: Money can be donated

Yes, that’s the last option you have. (We’re not going to discuss stuffing it in an old mattress) Giving money away directly through charity can be a very fulfilling way to make an impact with your money and it’s just for this reason that a lot of people who can manage it do give away money. If you have enough anyway why not, right? You could also opt for the giving away of presents if you don’t like to give away “numbers”.

Spend it
Save it
Invest it
Donate it

Every choice has it’s benefits and disadvantages. It’s all up to you to decide what you want to do with your money. Just remember, it’s always up to you what you do with your money and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. If you want to save, who are those people from the marketing department to tell you that you -need- that latest gizmo.

I’ll tell you one last secret about money (and things in general): If someones opinion is that you don’t matter just because you don’t own this-or-that. You should ask yourself how important that opinion is to you. You are not your possessions, never was and never will be. Walking down the path of materialism will never reach an end: One Hummer will be beat by two Hummers or a Ferrari. A Ferrari is of course nothing compared to a yacht. It’s a never ending race of ridiculousness and false needs.

Identify true needs and spend what is needed. Save, invest and donate what you don’t spend. If you consistently spend less than you earn you’re on your way to crossing over and have a buffer for a rainy day. That’s money for you, and actually it’s so obvious that I keep wondering how I managed to spend so many years not knowing.

Now you know the four noble truths about money, it’s your friend.

Do you every lie awake at night thinking about what you would wish for if you ever got three wishes granted? At some point in our childhood I’m sure we all have these thoughts. Some smart kids usually make sure to wish for more wishes. Others just end up with the cliche’s of “rich” and “famous”. A bit more creativity gets wishes like “speaking all the languages in the world” or “being able to play this or that instrument to perfection”

Some of these wishes are totally unrealistic, you can never hope to master every language nor can you master several martial arts. Unlimited wishes – or actually any wishes at all – are unrealistic.

Other wishes though are skills actual people do have. Take playing an instrument for example. To master is takes countless hours and that is where most people throw in the towel. We’re so used to getting things on a silver platter that having to work for something seems to cause an allergic reaction. So we drift off into another dream about wishes and what we would wish for.

What would you give to make those wishes come true? What would you be willing to actually physically do? Would you toil countless hours, read all there is to read and fall on your face time and time again because you didn’t quite get things right yet? No probably would not now would you, that’s why you wish for things to come to you the easy way.
But lets just be honest here, things very rarely come to us that way. Every single thing does take actual work to get. Talent is one thing, but without making proper work of it the talent will mean nothing.

You can wish for all the talent in the world and perhaps you even already have talent. What sets people apart though is the willingness to go the extra mile and work hard to develop that talent or perhaps work really really hard without talent just because they want to accomplish something.

How many wishes does it take to get where you want?

Zero

Because wishes are highly overrated. All it takes is countless hours of faceplanting. Do I hear you ask how many that should be? The answer to this one should be a constant “one more is always better” because you never know what that latest (greatest?) faceplant will teach you. Take a fall, take another one and after you dust yourself off hit the dust again for good measure. No wish will ever come true, at least none of those involving skill.

Does all this sound depressing? Lets turn things around a bit.

If aquiring a skill takes countless hours, but there are people on this planet with those skills that means those hours aren’t that countless. You’ve probably heard of the 10,000 hours idea stating that it takes that many hours to master something. All you have to do is make those hours and you will get the skill.

Now that’s a lot of hours so lets have another round of thinking: How many people really do invest all those hours? Just a few, it’s even safe to assume that investing just 1000 or 500 hours is somewhat rare. Invest 1000 hours (or should I say 1000 faceplants?) in the skill and you can be sure that you’ll be better in it than most.

Most of the skills we want, we want just so we can show them off. Faling flat on our face isn’t exactly showing-off material so we wish, and wish. Hoping the skills will come but the failure will not. Start showing off the failures and the skill will be there, its just the other side of the same coin.

Show the skills and you show the coin…

Failure is a part of every day life for without it we wouldn’t be learning at all. Failure is level zero so to speak, it’s where we start from, we have nothing, no achievements, no successes. From this starting point we embark on a journey to get where we want to be. Without exception this is “better”, “successful”, “loved” or perhaps “being worthy in the eyes of others”. (Nobody goes forth in life trying to be miserable after all, we all have our golden dreams.)In the eyes of others is a very important statement here for we usually want things not for ourselves but so we can show others that we really are somebody. If bragging about ourselves to others would not get us higher up some social ladder would we still do it just or ourselves?

The single biggest hurdle to get over is to accept that we are utter failures in life when we start out. We can’t even take care of ourselves now can we? Diaper changes, meals served to us and all kind of other things. We don’t have control over anything, not even our own body (yet). The more we learn, the more we gain control over our own actions. The more control we have to more responsibility this brings along with it. But you -as avid reader of this blog and other blogs on personal development and lifestyle design- already know this don’t you? They say knowledge is power and most certainly knowing that, with more control comes more responsibility equals more power. You’re in control of your own actions every single day. Again this is old news if you’ve been reading about personal development.

Acceptance

Accepting the current failure is the big hurdle, getting over it can be done by realizing that you have the control to change things. You’re not a victim of your own life or a victim of circumstance. With enough knowledge (power) you can change just about anything. It might not make you a millionair rock star, but you can have a very comfortable life if only you take control and not let life slip through your fingers. Life isn’t that bad actually once you get properly acquainted with the way the game is played

But still, I haven’t written anything you didn’t know already now did I? For you see, that’s the problem with all these development blogs. We keep beating about the bush on that one issue that seems so hard to grasp: You are responsible and so it’s up to you to make the change.

Same old stuff, different day

We bloggers can write all we want and you can read every single blog out there on the subject. Fact is that reading is not the same as actually taking responsibility. I could write all I want about the major changes in my life, how I made the changes and how I’m on my path to where I want to be. Many bloggers do the same and their posts are always a great hit with the readers. Reading about how we live our lives and how we do things might give you some ideas, but reading alone will not change your life. Taking (blog-inspired) action is where the control is. Even if you do manage to take control failure will always be a part of the game of life, it’s here to stay.

I know I really enjoy reading about others traveling, about Leo planning to move to San Francisco, Alan’s latest adventures, Carl’s new blog, Sean’s escape from the 9-5 and all those other cool people out there. But the fact remains I’m not traveling, moving or having adventures. I’m just a blogger and a dreamer. I’m not where I want to be so in that respect I’m a failure. But at least I know it and want to change things. I’m not a victim, I’m responsible for my own life and so it’s up to me to make the change… I got myself into this mess, now I’m getting myself out!

Nothing new to report here, you know all this stuff

…so turn off the screen, get off your behind and start acting responsible. And you know what? It’s not about being worthy in the eyes of others. It’s about being who you want to be, regardless of others. I have nothing new to offer you, nothing that deep inside you don’t already know.

Are you with me? Let’s see what’s next. A new adventure is never far away, that’s life for you.

There I was, sitting on a chair in the cafeteria listening to a fellow student bragging about lack of sleep, a hangover and all other things related to “student life” (At least, according to that student..) Although on the surface it looked like I was listening and interested in fact was I really felt a bit sorry for him. He didn’t manage to gather enough points last year to pass so he was back in year one… “I could have made it, if I got up earlier but at least I could stay up till 5 am!” “It must have been that entire bottle of tequila!”. He made all sorts of claims that sound “master” (their words..) on the surface but when you start thinking about them a bit harder are actually well…. just stupid.

I’m quite sure everyone knows someone who took part in this college life. I wonder what those students are trying to achieve, some sort of fame? Perhaps they feel very insecure about themselves and need to boast about what they see as accomplishments.

A big problem with these accomplishments in student life is that most people act as if they are interested in such things. I myself too pretend, just to blend in and not attract to much attention to myself. Sometimes it’s better to keep a low profile. I’m convinced however that there are more people out there who think these accomplishments are really not something to boast about at all. In my mind I can’t help but smile and wonder if the others are smiling as well because of this strange chest-beating game.

So what are accomplishments you have bragging rights about?

That all just depends on who you’re talking with, but in honest truth nobody likes a bragger save other braggers. If a bragger finds another bragger the game can truly begin.The stories take a life of their own, reaching sky high at times. And with the aforementioned issue of pretending we all seem braggers at time so stories soar.. In the heat of the moment the stories become somewhat ridiculous and not very plausible at all. In the strange and twister world of corporate life the bragging actually continues: Cars, trophy wives, bonuses. Materialism of the purest kind.
Now what would happen if all those stories were written down and checked against each other? Or worse, if those written records were to become public? Would your family, your boss or your co-workers be amused? What if those records surfaced ten years from now.

Remember my fellow student? In ten years he just might be working for some IT firm. Wearing a suit and having tons of responsibilities. How would the client feel if they knew he had trouble attending class, getting up in the morning and meeting deadlines because reaching the bottom of a bottle was more interesting. Would all those accomplishments still be so great?

Are there stories others do want to hear?

There are so many things you could talk about with others but it’s always a question if it’s something they want to hear. Now if they know a little about listening chances are you won’t know that they don’t care for your stories. It’s always going to be a compromise unless you share a genuine interest in the topic being talked about.

It’s always a good choice to speak less and listen more… you never know what you might learn about others. People do give away a lot about themselves through smalltalk. (And I give away a lot through blogging….)

Last Friday I had a quick 6 tweet chat with Cath Duncan from Mineyourresources about the concepts of learning, change and discomfort. It put me on a train of thought that also brought to mind a quote I posted earlier from Leito Atreides (yes, Dune):

Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

Cath and I agreed that when you know how your mind & body habitually reacts to change,  and don’t fear that, then change can be quite comfortable. In that case it’s called learning and the more discomfort of mind & body you can endure the more you learn.

Or in other words, wake up that sleeper, hand him a strong cup of coffee and snap to it.

Somewhere down the line learning got a bad taste to it. Learning was something you did in school and was no fun at all. The same went for reading, an activity related to learning and so it’s no fun. That you’re reading this blog tells me that you at least don’t mind reading and probably have no hard feelings against learning as well.

Learning however, is giving your mind a really hard time. All those new things it’s got to master, making sence of things that seem nonsensical on all fronts except what our higher reasoning thinks about it. But our brain does not get that. Take learning to play the guitar for instance. You know you want to make music, all your brain gets is that you’re trying to make your fingers do things it’s not used to do and it hurts your fingertips. Anyone in their right mind would not do something that they know will inflict pain or other forms of discomfort. It takes some effort to get your brain to do those things that are outside its comfort zone.

See your brain a bit like a muscle. Or rather, see it exactly like a muscle. If you use it and push it, it will get stronger. Using your brain can be done in a lot of ways of course. Take your pick:

• Learn a new language
• Play an instrument
• Go an entire day without using your dominant hand
• Try a new type of food
• Start a blog
• Read a good book
• Rearrange all the furniture in your room
• Take up caligraphy
• Install a different OS on your computer
• Break a habit
• Take up touch typing (for the pro’s: on a Dvorak or Colemak layout)
• Basically anything that will change the status quo

The status quo is the sleeper

Keep the brain awake and always find new ways to make your brain a bit uncomfortable. It can handle it and will adapt.