Amir's Lifestream - tagged with goals

Get Lucky by Quitting

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:05:00 -0500

I had a friend in high school who was proud of himself because every time someone told him that he should quit smoking, he told then that he wasn’t a quitter. We all grow up learning that quitting is a bad thing and that you should stick things through. If you think about it, that’s pretty bad advice. When you ask a kid what he wants to be when he grows up and he says Superman or a Garbage man, do you push him to keep to his plans? Absolutely not! So why do we put so much emphasis on not quitting? Quitting can be one of the greatest things in the world. Quitting bad habits, quitting bad things in general that just aren’t working or quitting things that don’t really apply any more. If you start doing something because of a goal that doesn’t exist anymore, then you could be wasting your time if you continue just to finish. Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Bill Gates and many other very successful business people quit school because they realized that it didn’t apply anymore and would be a waste of their time. High school is designed to give you a foundation for your education and college or university is designed to give you the tools to build a career. If the potential career that university can offer you doesn’t compare to a business that you built while in school, there is no reason to stick it out and lose out on your business just to say you finished school and you didn’t quit. You have to make goals for yourself and plan around them. Create short term goals, medium term goals and long term goals and work to accomplish them. At a certain point, you’ll probably look at one of your long term goals and realize that you don’t want it anymore or it doesn’t apply anymore. At that point, you have to take a look at what you were doing to move towards that goal and re-evaluate whether you should still be doing it or quitting it. If you are working on a project and nothing is working out for you, you have to be very honest with yourself about sticking to the project. By quitting, you free yourself up to new potential projects. If you stick to it, make sure it is because you believe in the project and you believe you can succeed. If not, you’re just being stubborn. Lastly, if you continue to do things just because you’ve always done them, chances are that you are missing out on a ton of luck. You need to take a look at everything in your life on a regular basis and figure out what needs to stay and what needs to go. Job – I enjoy it and I’m building my career – Keep it. Smoking – making me sick – Quit it. Family – I like them and see the benefit of having them around forever – Keep them. Bad Friends – They bring me down – Quit them. By taking this look at your life, you’ll see more opportunities to get lucky. By quitting the things that are bad or don’t belong, you are freeing up more time and energy to get lucky. It’s a win-win. Image: tungphoto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Similar Posts:

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Being a College Dropout can be a Great Thing

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:32:00 -0400

I just wrote an article on Temphunt’s Blog where I threw out a thought about where formal education is going. I mentioned that in the 1950’s, parents (and others) gave kids the advice to “go to school and get a degree so that you can get a good job”. In the 1970’s parents started adding “getting a bachelors degree” to that advice. Today, a graduate degree is equivalent to what a bachelors was back then and a high school diploma was in the 50’s. Steve Jobs just resigned as the CEO of Apple and I was really disappointed with the headline that the Montreal Gazette chose to use for their feature on him. The headline was something to the effect of “from college dropout to visionary”. They said “dropout” like it was a bad thing and he was a visionary even when he was in college. I’ve been thinking about the value of formal education and I believe that there is value in it but I don’t think that it is the end all and be all. College can be a place where you learn about yourself, find out what you want to do in life and study to get a degree which will hopefully open some doors for you. I’ve had several arguments recently where people were so adamant about how important it was to get a college degree. I feel that they’re just missing the forest because all the trees are in the way. Think about it. Why should you get a degree? The answers you will get are probably, “to open doors”, “to get a good job” or to “get a career”. You always hear stories about athletes in college who consider dropping out to play in the professional leagues. There are always naysayers who criticize them for dropping out of college but if making money and opening doors is the reason for the degree then why would they consider staying if they are offered a position on a professional team which will give them a better job that will make more money than anything they can possibly make with a college degree and they will be doing something that they love. You may say that they might get injured and then be stuck with no options. That’s not true because professional athletes buy disability insurance that will take care of them for the rest of their lives if anything ever happens to them. Besides, if anything happened to their career, they can always go back to school and start where they left off. Not everybody is professional athlete material but finding a career that doesn’t need a college degree is not limited to athletes. Some of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time are college dropouts such as Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple Computers), Michael Dell (Dell Computers) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). I see the value of a college degree but I also see that if a college student can start a business or find a career that will get him closer to his ultimate goal than the degree can, he should probably drop out. Sticking around would probably just be wasting his time. If your goal is making money, there is no reason to stick around college if you found a career or started a business that is already making you more money in college than you can make at your highest earning potential with a degree. What I am saying is think about your ultimate goals and work backwards from there. Don’t just follow advice because everyone tells you to do it and everyone else is doing it. Wake up and focus, if you look hard enough, you’ll notice that the trees are part of the forest. Do you agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Pic Cred: laughlin Similar Posts:

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Never Turn on your Computer Again Without an Agenda

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:54:00 -0400

When you sit down and turn on your computer, do you know exactly what you are about to do or are you just turning on your computer because it is something to do? I constantly find myself sitting down at my computer without a clear agenda and goal in mind only to end up checking everything online that can possibly be checked. My email, my website analytics, my stock portfolio, my social networks, and anything else that may pop into my head at the time. What I find is that I end up using wasting a ton of time because I don’t have any agenda or plan to follow. I could probably get away with checking my email three times per day and checking my analytics and portfolios once or twice per month. I use social networks for a few reasons so the frequency of my using them would depend on the situation. I use them to stay in touch with people, to network, to promote myself and to learn about new features and applications. The point is that myself, along with much of the rest of the world gets lazy when we are in front of a computer.

Productivity is not Measured by Hours Some people feel productive if they sit in front of a computer all day long and answer a few emails. A great day would be when you participated in a long chain of emails that came to a conclusion. In reality, that “productive” day could have been accomplished in a fraction of the time it took but so much time was wasted between each check of the email that it seems like you never stopped working.

Productivity is measured by accomplishments For me, a productive day is a day where I waste as little time as possible and accomplish something that will bring me closer to a goal. Sometimes that goal is finishing a project or a major piece of a project for a client or securing a new client altogether. Sometimes it’s doing something to promote myself or my business. No matter what it is, it is measured in accomplishments, not time spent on my computer or number of emails answered. The same can be applied to your personal time. When you come home from work, do you turn on the TV? Do you go online to surf the net? I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with doing either of these activities but I am saying that you should know what you are getting into. For example, instead of just turning on the TV, consciously decide “I need to relax so I’ll watch 2 shows”. Instead of just going online, decide “I’ll check the news and then see who’s online to talk to for the next 30 minutes”.

Unless….. Unless… you just want to “waste time”. But, if you’re reading this blog, you probably don’t want to waste time. This blog is about getting lucky and finding opportunity in everything that we do. You can’t find opportunity when you keep doing the same thing over and over. As the Albert Einstein so eloquently put it, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. When we turn on the TV, we end up watching the same types of shows, often while zoning out. When we spend time on social networks, we end up spending time with the same friends and sharing the same type of content with each other. If you want to get lucky online, participate in new conversations on open networks like Twitter or finding new types of content through sites like StumbleUpon. Just make sure that before you log on, that you decide what you will be doing and for how long you will be doing it. Otherwise you just get sucked in. If you have an agenda before starting something, even as simple as checking your email, you will end up saving yourself a lot of time that otherwise would have been wasted. Then you can squeeze more activities into your day, be more productive, accomplish much more and get really lucky. Pic: Grahambones Similar Posts:

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