Today I’ll share with you two techniques that will help you find the positive in any situation.

To do this, I’ll give you a personal example and then show you the method I would use to find the positive.  On Friday I was sacked from my job with immediate effect.  It was very sudden, I had no prior warnings and it meant my main source of income was turned off.  Now many people would consider this to be a negative experience, but I’m instead choosing to make it a positive one.

Why is seeing the positive so important?  Because being positive is empowering.  A positive mindset allows you to see all sorts of opportunities that you would otherwise miss if you were in a negative mindset.  When your positive, you ready to take action.  When your negative, you just want to stay in bed and give up.  Which one is best going to help you move on?  If you get your car stuck in the mud far from home, you need to be thinking of ways to free the car and actively try to free it.  Believing that you can free the car is the first step, because otherwise what is the point in even trying if you know you can’t succeed?  A negative mindset keeps you stuck, where as a positive mindset helps you move on.

Framing

The first technique is called framing.  You frame any objective situation with your subjective beliefs and these beliefs can be either positive or negative.  Your frame is essentially how you view the situation and it’s unique to you.

As an example, when I was choosing which university to go to, I really wanted to move out of my village and go and live somewhere completely different.  The village was boring, dull and the people were all the same.  So I moved to a completely different part of the UK, to a town in the South Wales Valleys.  One of my friends saw this town as a complete dump.  It was an old coal mining community, full of run down buildings, rows of terraced houses and a very dodgy road system.  But coming from my well kept, neat and tidy village, I loved the place.  It was interesting, full of character.  It was exactly the place I wanted to move to.  However, after four years of living here, I can understand where my friend is coming from.  It is run down, the streets are messy, it’s a much poorer area and there is more crime.  Now when I go back to my old village, it’s paradise!  The place is so peaceful.  People have pride in their village to the point where they ensure their flower beds are immaculate.  It’s a perfect break from the chaotic Valleys.

Despite me seeing these places in a compeltely different light, they haven’t changed at all, they’ve been the same all along.  What has changed is the way I have framed them – based upon my belief of what is good and bad.

So to reframe a situation, place or event, see it from another persons point of view.  If someone enjoys the job you hate, find out why.  Everything has a positive and a negative.  How you frame it depends on which one you view.

So what’s positive about being sacked?

• I’m free – I can go anywhere I want without having to get permission to do so.
• I have so much more time on my hands to do worthwhile things I really enjoy doing.
• I have an opportunity to find an even better job.

Who says a job a good thing anyway.  have you ever thought about opening your own business and becoming your own boss.  Well now you’ve got the perfect opportunity to do just that!

If you still can’t see the positive, seek out people who you know will have a different point of view, and see how they would frame your situation.  Understand the merit of their perspective.  For example if you have just lost your job like me, take a look at my article on why you should never get a job.

Focus

Now that you understand effect your subjective beliefs has on labelling a situation either positive or negative, now it’s time to deal with the objective facts of the situation.

Our brains have to deal with a constant stream of input.  If we paid attention to everything around us, we would go crazy because we wouldn’t be able to process with the shear quantity of information available to us at any given moment.  Instead, we focus our attention on what we perceive to be important.

Going back to my example of moving to the Valleys, there is a lot more litter on the streets than the village I moved from.  You could frame this as an opportunity to educate people on the effects of littering, but if your not the teaching type, you would find it difficult to reframe this to be positive.  Not impossible but it would be out of reach for many people.

Another example with me loosing my job, my income has dropped by around £1,300 per month.  I could reframe this as a positive by appreciating the challenge ahead of me, or if I was a Zen Buddest I might be content with the lack, but most people would find this every difficult, if not impossible, to see as a good thing.

There is positive and negative all around us, and what you can’t reframe a negative to a positive, instead choose to focus on the positive aspects of the situation.  I’m not saying to ignore the negative, you should heed its message.  But you shouldn’t place much attention on it.  You don’t open a letter multiple times, so why open an negetive thought multiple times if you have already gained its message.  It’s message may be important, but after that it will only weaken you.  Instead focus on the positive.  Positive message are just as important as the negetive, if not more so, and instead of weakening you, they strengthen you.  Focusing too much attention on the negeitve is the mental equivalent to physical self harm.  Give yourself a break.

* * *

I hope you find these two techniques useful for finding the positive in any situation.  As you re-wire your thought patterns to positivity, you’ll find seeing the positive gets easier and easier. It’s always there, you just need to find it.

I’m genuinely excited by the road ahead of me which has come from loosing my job.  I have just launched an online shop selling soft toys, I have a website to improve sleep and cure insomnia, and I have this blog to share my thoughts along the say.  Yes I’ll have less money in the sort term, but I know that I will look back at this in the future and see this as a pivotal turning point, where for the first time I have been able to focus full time on my online businesses.

I like to think of my life as having chapters, when one opportunity is exhausted and exchanged for a brand new opportunity, and so the cycle continues in the ever changing story of life. But if I were to apply this analogy to finishing university, I would say it marked not the end of a chapter, but the end of an entire book. The purpose of this article is to help you, or someone you know though the transition from full time education into the real world.

It look some time for it to fully sink in that I really had completed full time education – it had been such a driving force in my life. All my major life changes had revolved around education. From going to first school, middle school, high school, sixth form and then finally university. It feels like there has to be another step on the education ladder. And there is, and some people take it. But taking on more full time education at this point is, for many people, just a delay tactic before facing the inevitable. Before jumping into the world of work.

When I finished university, I finally realised what the whole point of all this education was. It was purely to prepare for this moment. The moment when you’re forced to stand on your own two feet. For years you live under your parents roof. They provide you with food, pay all the bills, and your full time education shines your path, making sure you are achieving your best.

But now you’ve finished full time education, you’re on your own. How hard this will hit you depends on your circumstances. If you’re still living at home, then your parents will still probably look after you, you’re not going to starve. But if like me, you studied away from home, in a different country, then yeah – you’re on your own. And instead of your university making sure you’ve got proper housing and that you’re all okay, you’ve only got the government to go to for help, and the government aren’t exactly the most willing to offer a helping hand.

For me, I had to move out of my student property overseen by the university and into private renting. Thinking I was soon going to get a well paid job with my shiny new degree, I signed the contract on a spacious apartment in a nice area of South Wales, 5 minutes from the beach. Maybe this whole “world of work” thing wasn’t that bad after all!

There was only one problem – I couldn’t find work. And I don’t mean I couldn’t find a well paid job with my new degree, I mean I couldn’t find a job at all. Nothing. Maybe I was just unlucky graduating at the time of a recession. But it doesn’t look like the economy is going to be back on track anytime soon.

Thankfully I had around £4000 in savings, but I knew that wouldn’t last, and it didn’t. Determined not to move back home, I decided to ask for help from our friendly government. The problem is I wasn’t even given enough money to balance my outgoings. If I didn’t have those savings, I would have been screwed. And also, getting help from the government requires you to lose all sense of self respect while you get paid a pittance and are expected to feel not worthy of their help. If you’re thinking the world of benefits is like getting given free money, believe me it isn’t, they make sure you pay for it emotionally.

The only job I could get was a Christmas temp job shelf stacking at a well known butt slapping supermarket. This job literally lasted around 5 nigh shifts and it took them 6 months to my wages in full – but only after constant phone calls and then finally a visit in person.

Making things worse, my lovely beach apartment grew mould. It started with a patch, but then literally covered the walls of every since room. This had happened before, my nice neighbour in the apartment above told me, to the last person who rented. I had reported the first sighting of mould around 4 months pior to the whole place being engulfed in the stuff, but nothing had been done. To cut to the chase, I refused to pay the rent, and the landlord claimed I was the one responsible for creating the mould problem, and demanded that I paid to fix it. It looked like the case was going to go to court, but after a lot of correspondence backwards and forward, and with the rental agency taking the side of the landlord, the decision was made by a third party that I was not to blame, although I still had to pay the rent I owed. The landlord is now as we speak offering the apartment for rent to new unsuspecting victims.

The reason I speak of these problems is to emphasize that no one will come to your rescue. If you had money problems in while at university, there will be someone you could speak to who you could arrange a loan with. If you had problems with the house, the university’s housing association would be onto the landlord like a ton of bricks. Outside of university, don’t expect a nice person from the government to fight your battles. It isn’t going to happen.

But finally after the mould issue, I found a new house to rent and I’ve been here now for around 1 and a half years without any major problems. It isn’t the best house in the world, but it doesn’t have mould, and that’s a start.

I also found a job and one that actually uses my degree. Again it isn’t the best job in the world, but its more than I know a lot of other people have, and its a start.

When you’re thrown into the world after university, don’t expect to have nice things straight away and don’t expect a smooth ride. You’re going to have to work for everything you get. Yes its difficult and frustrating. But that’s the whole reason we decided to incarnate in the first place. If it was a walk in the part, there wouldn’t be much point in it.

Living in the real world requires you to stand on you’re own two feet and start from scratch. It’s dunting but it can also be incredibly rewarding to get something you have worked hard for.

Two years on from finishing university, I finally feel a little settled. I have the bases covered and I’m no longer fighting lengthy battles for survival. I’ve carved out a humble life, which isn’t perfect, but is a nice start.

Upon entering the world of work you begin to get a full grasp on the very mechanism in which you have been trained purely to acquire to say alive – money. My next task in life is to master money so that I can do what I was with my own time, where my time is no longer traded for cash by the hour. I plan to set up my own business, and I am in the mist of doing so.

Some people chase money their whole lives, but the goal isn’t to have as much of it as possible, it’s to become financially free, so you can move on to you’re next major life challenge. I believe the challenge after money is to really crave out for yourself a true sense of purpose. But that’s taking us way off topic.

I hope this has helped you prepare for finishing university or college and get a gist of what it’s like on the other side.

Okay, after complaining on Monday that despite being all round awesome at the Internet and technology in general, that I just didn’t understand the whole point of social media, I’ve gone ahead and got myself a brand new twitter account for this website!

It’s not my first twitter account to be honest, I did have a generic Twitter account that I used to post random tweets every month – it was never really very active and didn’t have much point to it. It was a complete fail basically.

But hopefully this one will fare better! I’m not quite sure what I will use it for, probably to post anything inspirational that comes to mind, and to use as like an RSS feed to let people know of new blog posts. Other than that I’m not quite sure. Hopefully it will help marketing this website in some way.

The main reason why I want to really understand Twitter is to use it to promote my new soft toys business when it launches at the end of the month and to connect with customers.

I really do see the potential for Twitter in that sense, but until now I haven’t really thought of a real use for it. I mean if I really wanted to be social, I would just meet friends in the real world. I’ve had Internet only friends before and it just got kind of annoying that I could only talk to them with a keyboard through MSN Messenger. It just didn’t compare to having real conversations in the real world. So I just shyed away from all Internet socialising since. But I’m really curious to see how well this Twitter thing goes.

I do have a Facebook account so I kind of understand the idea behind it. My soft toy business will have its own Facebook page but I think I can handle that given what I already know about Facebook. I mean… You can’t really connect to the global community with Facebook because you are limited to only sharing stuff with your “friends”. You can’t do a global shout out and get reposted like you can with Twitter, and no global trending topics either. It’s much more conservative and segregated. Kind of like a gated community where only your “friends” are allowed.

Right so I’m going to give twitter a go. My goal is to use a hash tag somewhere appropate, retweet someone cool, have someone follow me, have a conversation with someone, upload a profile picture and most importantly post interesting stuff semi-regularly.

So if you would like to help me with my mission to understand Twitter or just have pity, FOLLOW ME!!!

It’s fair to say that I’m pretty Internet savvy. I’ve used computers since I was 4, was a regular on the Internet by the year 2000 and in around 2002, developed my own website forum. I’ve seen technologies come and go, from the 56K modem, to the very first external ADSL router to the all in one wireless hubs we see today.

I’m also really on the pulse with smartphone technology. I’ve been an avid user of the old Windows Mobile and I was an early adopter of Google’s first Android phone.

The Internet has changed a lot. I remember when it was the norm to structure a website around tables and CSS was considered the future. I’ve seen the adoption of Web 2.0 and the rich media experience we all take for granted.

But there is one Internet technology I really haven’t ever understood, and now I’m starting my own online business, I fear that if I don’t learn it fast, I’ll soon get left behind. That technology is social media.

I remember how it all came along. First it was Friends Reunited. Well I was in High School when that was popular, surrounded by all the people I really cared about. I was happy to let that slip by.

Then MySpace came along. The cool people had MySpace pages or whatever they were called. I remember going onto a MySpace page of a girl in my class. It had a black background with pink text, with about two dozen animated gifs. The page was buzzing with activity and took around 2 minutes to load. But I really didn’t see the point in making a page myself. I was making websites at the time and making a glitzy about page which I could share with my friends didn’t really interest me.

And then Facebook was the place to be. I thought it was going to be like MySpace, so I avoided it until I was persuaded to join it while at university. It did kind of make my social life a bit easier having everything in one place, but for the most part it was just a big bulging distraction. I don’t really care about looking at other people’s pictures and I didn’t care about uploading my own to get comments. I got sucked into reading status updates for a period but I really don’t know how that benefited me in any way. Facebook just became a procrastination tool. Eventually I just stopped using it. I just didn’t see the point. People had my mobile number, they knew where to find me. I just didn’t see the point in having an online portal full of old friends.

Then somewhere in between all that Twitter came along. Now instead of friending someone be able to read their status updates, you only needed to browse to their page. Suddenly you’re able to see what celebrities are up to.

And now Google+ has come out…

I really don’t get it!!!

But I need to!!!

Soon I’ll be launching an online soft toy shop and so having a Facebook page and Twitter account is standard for any savvy Internet marketer. So I’m going to have to learn how to use them both. Going to be avoiding to Google+ for the time being until it becomes more popular. I don’t know of anyone who has a Google+ account who doesn’t use Facebook as well.

The Internet has got social and I feel I have somehow fallen behind. It all started so well. I used to post on forums and had my own successful forum that I posted on. I talked a lot on MSN Messenger. That’s social, right?

The thing is I kind of got bored of interacting more online that I was in real life, so I simply turned the tables. I stopped the Internet forum posting, stopped talking on MSN and interacted with actual people in the real world instead.

And now somehow talking on the Internet has become the norm!

I have this blog yes (which no one reads) but people have gone a stage further, they have video blogs on YouTube. If you’re either funny or good looking, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a huge following, just by randomly talking about your every day life.

I think its because people have always wanted to know what everyone around them is doing and some people can’t bear to be outside of the loop. That’s why Heat magazine is so popular. People need the gossip! But the Internet has made our world so much smaller. Now instead of needing to know what the people in the village are up to, you need to know what the people on the Internet are up to, who could be from the other side of the world. And services like Facebook and Twitter make this possible.

It must my some type of instinct, to want to know what everyone around you is up to. It probably helped with survival long ago when you needed to know if someone was diseased or something to say away from them. This instinct probably got chosen with natural selection to be passed down the gene pool. But now that you can see or hear people from around the world, that instinct to know everything is working on overdrive.

The annoying thing is that although I find it nice sometimes to know what other people are up to, most of the time I really don’t care. I usually don’t have any problem with being different, but for my website marketing to go well I need to move with the rest of humanity.

So I guess I should add a new Facebook profile picture, add random status updates and comment on other peoples photos pretending I care. It all seems a little sad, but if you want to be popular on the Internet, it seems that is what you have to do. Or it would at least give you a better chance.

If anyone reads this and can help, please write a comment below!

We live in a crazy world. While we might try and control what is happening around us, we must ultimately surrender to the notion that it is something you have no real control over. Instead you must aim for what you can control – yourself. When we can finally master ourselves and achieve that blissful state of inner peace, what the outside world does around us no longer holds any relevance – we transcend it.

Let me just paint a picture of exactly what is happening in my world right now.

I’m sat here in my small bedroom / office. The people in the house opposite me appear to be having a birthday party – judging by the happy birthday banner in the window. Gathered outside are around 30 people of all ages who seem quite happy to literally scream at each other. Not because of they’re angry or annoyed, it appears that’s how they normally talk when they’re in large groups.

Because of this noise, the dog belonging to the neighbors to the left of my house is barking non stop. This isn’t really abnormal – the dog sometimes barks until 1am. You are guaranteed to hear it bark every day.

Its just gone past 7pm as I write this, so I know it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse as the night goes on. the only I’m able to think is because I’m wearing the best ear defenders I could buy – but I can still hear the dog barking. I’m probably going to have to fall asleep with these things on.

I’m currently living in a semi detached house, so I share a wall with the neighbors on the right. These houses seem to have been made out of cardboard judging by the thinness of the walls, so I can either hear them watching TV in the downstairs rooms or either again watching TV in their bedroom or their son talking on his Xbox. Basically, all rooms that share a wall with these neighbors are never used because of this noise.

Now I’m actually grateful because I know things could get a lot worse – at least the neighbors don’t enjoy base music, like the people opposite me do.

It seems everything where I live is noisy. There’s a scrap metal van that comes around that makes itself known with a insanely loud tannoy with the guy singing “scraaapppp iyyyoooooorrnnnn”.

Even the ice cream van is loud. Seriously, I’m 23 and this is the 5th area I’ve lived in – I know I’m not being unreasonable! This ice cream van plays its music at ear shattering volumes. You sure as heck don’t want to be standing next to it when it starts playing its tune.

And did I mention another house opposite me owns one of the loudest off road bikes I have ever heard, and before that a quad bike, that they are insistent on revving for around 10 minutes?

Maybe this is normal – but this level of daily noise just isn’t something I had been previously exposed to before moving here. My childhood was spent in a small village in detached house in the middle of the country, which in terms of noise is the polar opposite to where I am now!

Sometimes I wonder if these people even know what it is like to be silent. Maybe they think it’s boring, and that it’s something that needs to be filled with sound. Or maybe they just don’t know what it is?!

To me, silence is one of the most spiritual, divine atmospheres you can witness. You can just let thoughts flow through you. Allow the divine to speak to you. I’m convinced that the reason why I have my best ideas in the morning is because I have been bathed in silence for so many hours.

Silence is a key catalyst for the mediative and hypnotic arts. Anything that requires you to access your inner self.

It’s something that – for once – doesn’t add to life. Its not something you can identify as a thing. You can’t add silence. It’s absence, not presence, that creates it. It’s something we gain when we have less of, rather than more of.

But as long as there are other living things around us – silence isn’t something we can directly control. We can try and reduce the noise by, like what I’m doing right now, wearing ear defenders, but that’s not a true fix. I can still hear things and these bulky things will eventually annoy me. I can’t wear them forever. One reason is that they make my ears incredibly hot!

To really enjoy the benefits of silence and be in control of this divine state, we need to master our inner peace. So that what’s outside of you is removed from your awareness. Outside may be a rock festival, but inside you can be calm.

It’s one thing to find inner peace on top of a mountain but what good is that if you can’t maintain it when you travel down the mountain and into the city.

These noisy neighbors are my teachers. They’re teaching me the art of inner peace. Without them I wouldn’t be writing this and nor would I have contemplated it.

Inner peace is the goal of many religious practices and I can really understand why. The ability to stay calm and be your own person when everyone around you is running around screaming and shouting. The ability for you, and only you, to let in only what you want to let in and feel only what you want to feel. That is true self mastery.

I’ve come a long way. When I first moved here I really wanted to kill that barking dog (despite being a vegetarian). I really hated those neighbors for watching their TV (despite them being completely entitled). I couldn’t understand the shear lunacy of people screaming and shouting, beeping their car horns at 11pm (despite the fact they are probably just having fun). I’m trying to justify their behaviour here, but I wouldn’t make any difference if they were in the right or if they were in the wrong, there still wouldn’t be anything I could do about it.

We can’t control the external factors in our lives. We can try, but in the end if the world wants to yell outside our front door, there is little we can do to stop it. But we can control our own emotional reactions and thus our own state of mind. But for now, thats a skill I’m probably going to have to learn the hard way!

Most people think that getting a job and climbing the career ladder is the only way to succeed in life, but I believe getting a job is the perfect recipe for creating a life you hate, and that you don’t get half as much benefits out of a job that people have come to believe they do.  I think it is time people wake up from the notion that getting a job is the sensible approach.  Here’s 8 reasons why you should never get a job.

1. You can’t choose who you become

Studies have shown that you become more like the people you constantly hang around with. This is because these are the people in your circle of influence. As they share with you their thoughts, viewpoints and feelings of the world, they rub off on you. And as you share your opinions of the world with them, you refine your opinions based on their feedback.

This is why it is so important to choose very carefully who you hang out with because the more you be around someone, the more you will become like them. If you’re employed, you don’t get this choice.

At work, you constantly have to be around people who you simply wouldn’t given the choice. Who you hang out with also has a huge effect on your mood. You are essentially basking in their energy field when you are around them. Basking in negative energy is the equivalent of self harm.

2. It’s bad for your health

If you’re like most people, you probably have to sit behind a desk all day staring at a screen. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this isn’t what human beings were designed for.

Staring into the screen will damage your eyesight. If you do this for around 8 hours per day, you are causing a lot damage

You’re totally inactive which isn’t good for your heart. You lose muscle tone and become unfit.

Exercise is one of the remedies for getting yourself out of depression, which suggests that lack of exercise could actually cause depression.

Sure you can go to the gym after work, but that eats into the little time you have left. You shouldn’t need to go to the gym anyway. There is no reason why you cannot live an active lifestyle just by moving around a bit more as part of your daily routine.

The ultimate result is that if you don’t excise enough you’ll probably won’t live as long.

3. Stress

Your work wants to get as much out of you as possible. You are their resource that they pay a fixed amount of money to use in any way they see fit. So it is not uncommon for your employer to pile on the pressure with a ton of work, imaginary deadlines and ludicrous targets for you to get completely stressed over.

Stress is one of the main reasons why people die younger than they should. When you get stressed you cause adrenaline to pump around your body. This is designed to get your heart beating faster. The fight or flight response where you either run away from danger or physically attack it. When you’re chained to your desk, you can do neither.

The more you experience you have, the more people will expect from you. It gets worse rather than better as the years pass.

4. Not being paid for what you’re worth

Do you think you are paid what you are worth? The vast majority of people get paid by the hour. Money isn’t created in real life just by sitting behind a desk. Money is formed from value, which is created through actual work. But whether or not you have been productive or done nothing in a particular day, you will still get paid the same amount. If you were being paid by your results, the money you bring in for the business, you would receive a heck of a lot more money. You are a part of a business, so why not get paid according to how well the business is actually doing?

Even if you are on commission, you would only be receiving a tiny portion of the money your create. And I mean really tiny.

5. Trading in time for money

Time is the most important thing we have. Nothing can buy time. Its priceless. So why do you even consider trading it in for a small sum of money. That just doesn’t make any sense. You’re getting a really crappy deal for something that is literally taking your life from you. You better be having a bloody good time at work or you’re getting majorly screwed over.

If this isn’t bad enough, you soon discover after starting a job that your employer wants you to spend even more of your precious life at work. Its called overtime and in most cases its not even paid.

When my employer said he thought it was reasonable to expect us to work 5 hours a week unpaid overtime I thought he was just insane. But apparently it’s me who is the delusional one. Its a policy that is completely normal, and something you are expected to deal with. Am I the only person who thinks this is crazy?

6. You’ll never be truly wealthy

I’m from the UK, and the salary ceiling is around £60,000 per year. That is nothing. Striving your whole life for that sum of money over an entire year is just insane. Do you really think you’re worth that amount? Your worth a hell of a lot more than that. Just look at the value you create for your business at that level if you don’t believe me. You make your employer a heck of a lot more than £60,000 in an entire year.

Consider the amount of hours you put in, all the life shortening stress, being chained to the desk, not choosing what you do with your life and the person you ultimately become. Do you really think it’s worth it?

It’s one heck of a price to pay for a messily £60,000 yearly budget. After tax and the essentials, you don’t have a lot of disposable income left. You have very little to show for your efforts.

7. You don’t get to choose your career

If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to choose your job title. After that, you don’t have any say. What you do on a daily basis isn’t your decision. The boss can assign his slaves any task he or she wishes and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.

So while you might have a fancy title such as a Software Developer, all you might really do all day is test software and verify the results. This could be your task every day, and there would be nothing you could do about it.

Since your career path is essentially based upon your work experience, you don’t actually get to choose your career. You just have to hope the wind is in the right direction and your boss gets you to do things you actually want to do. The power is in your employers hands, not your own.

8. It’s risky

Doing the whole job thing as a way of being financially stable isn’t clever, its actually incredibly risky. What’s your notice period right now? One month maybe? That’s the amount of time until your employer can choose to turn off your income. Thats a lot of power to give someone. But times are tough and slaves need to be shed to save money. Your employer doesn’t care about you, they care about their bottom line. You are just a disposable resource. I’m not saying that for dramatic effect, it’s the honest truth.

It’s not like you can just shift jobs either. There aren’t many around, which might come as a shock to someone who enjoys sniping at the unemployed from their ivory tower, unaware that they are potentially one month away from the same fate.

So you can’t plan your financial future if you have a job because so it is just too unstable to make anything more than a good guess.

You can’t plan your retirement either. Pensions are being cut all over the place and their is nothing any employee can do about it. Its all part of the experience they signed up for.

So what’s the solution?

The only thing that bounds you to a job is money, so this is what you need to take control of for yourself using your own means. You need some type of a job, but to have control over your destiny you also need to become your own boss.

You need to find a way to create value by yourself. Create something that people will be willing to pay for like a product or a service. This way you get paid for the value you provide to other people. There is no pay scale so you don’t have a salary limit and you can put in as many hours as you want.

Figuring out how you can get people to pay your for something you actually want to provide is the key. Once you’ve done that, you’ll probably be able to figure out the practical steps you need to take to create this for yourself. You idea probably won’t be totally original so discovering how other people have achieved it would be a good start.

Most people don’t have the tenacity to do this but it offers a way out of the rat race. I know this is a gross simplification of the whole process, but I’m hoping it has given you enough information and motivation to get started.

If you want to live a life of great meaning and purpose, it’s easy to think it’s only the big things that count. But since the big things are few and far between, I would argue that it’s the little things people do every day without realising which actually has the greatest effect on the world .

“That made my day.” Have you ever used that phrase or heard someone else use it? Note that it isn’t usually the big things that makes people use that phrase, it’s the little things. Things like:

• Someone opening the door for you
• Someone willing to listen to you
• Someone who gave you a hug
• Someone who held open a door for you
• Someone who smiled at you
• A stranger who gave you a friendly ‘hello’

Sure, you may have got a new car, just been promoted or moved into your dream house. But it’s usually the small things that form the highlight of our day.

So if you’re here to make a difference, start with the little things:

• Be friendly,
• Kind,
• Caring,
• Understanding

You may just well make someone’s day, or at the very least make them feel better than they did before meeting you.

But it’s not just them you’re affecting. If you affect one person, they will act slightly differently towards everyone they interact with and affect them, who will affect whoever they interact with and so on. One act of kindness creates a ripple effect which has no logical end. But the same also goes for an act of unkindness.

A major part of how we feel relates to our environment. If we are placed into a loving environment, we would be kind and loving back, which would have a positive effect on the people around us. But if we are placed in a hateful environment, we will become hateful ourselves, affecting other people who become hateful also.

Consider all of humanity as one being, which you are part of. The way you act and feel does count. It does have a meaningful effect on those around you, and it does have an impact on the whole of humanity.

Just because someone is angry towards you, doesn’t mean you have to be angry back. It’s the ripple effect in action. You’ve been affected by it, and the impact on your mood will affect the people around you. You’ve spread the negativity produced from that anger.

Instead, when faced with someone being negative towards you, be aware of the ripple effect and make the decision to be positive instead. Be understanding and forgive easily. Everyone has bad days. Try and make their day a little better.

If you want to remove hatred from the world, stop being hateful. If you want more love and kindness, be loving and kind. Or actions ripple out and affect the whole body of humanity.

So the little things aren’t really that little at all. Imagine all the acts of kindness you can do in your lifetime. All those little things put together creates something very big.

Never underestimate the power you have to affect the world by your thoughts and actions. It’s the seemingly little things that make a huge difference.

Screw it, lets do it.  That’s the title of a book authored by Richard Branson, one of Britain’s most famous entrepreneurs and chairman of the highly successful Virgin group.

Every great man and woman has had to face overwhelm at certain points of their life.  Times when you feel completely unprepared.  When you’re not sure you can succeed.  When you doubt yourself.

Faced with a stack of death defying challenges in between you and your goal, it’s completely natural to feel completely overwhelmed.  So what can you do in situations like this.  How can you deal with overwhelm?  How can you succeed against such overwhelming odds?

Accept the enormity of the challenge.  Marvel at it’s dizzying heights.  Appreciate how high the odds are stacked against you.  But instead of backing down, like almost every other person would.  F**k it.  Just go for it anyway.  Life’s short.  What’s the very worst that can happen.  You’re not in mortal danger are you?

Don’t spend your life planning a strategy, too many people never leave the planning stage, take what you have and just bloody go for it!

Imagine medieval soldiers on the battlefield.  They didn’t take a look at the enemy, spend days formulating some overly complex strategy, and then proceed with caution, gently poking the enemy with their swords to gauge their reaction.  No.  They charged!  They knew what they were facing.  And they knew many of them would not make it out alive.  But they said screw it, and they dived in headfirst to do their job.

When you charge the enemy, there’s no turning back.  You’ve committed.  It’s that brief decision which creates the spark that turns into a burning inferno inside you.

Will you make it out alive?  If you’ve committed, it doesn’t really matter.  You’ve resolved to do your personal best.  There’s nothing else neither yourself nor anyone else can ask of you.

If these soldiers can put their lives on the line to achieve their goals, you can put your ego on the line to achieve yours.  If you fail, it doesn’t really matter.  If you’ve fought the enemy and come out alive, you live to fight another day.

Don’t allow your mind to create more challenges than there actually are.  Stay in the present moment.  Put your attention only on what you are currently facing.  Stay flexible and adaptable, allowing yourself to flow wherever the challenge takes you.

Most people don’t understand that by taking action, you never really fail.  Because no matter what happens, you would have gained valuable experience, putting you in a better position to deal with your challenge the next time you face it.

The only way you can really fail is if you do nothing.  If you just sit there, ignoring the challenge knocking at your door, instead choosing to distract yourself with meaningless entertainment.  That’s when you have truly failed.  If you want to achieve more, fail more.  Allow yourself to fail.  Understand the value you gain from it.  Commit yourself to failure when the odds overwhelm you.  You might just surprise yourself with overwhelming success.

Put some fire in your heart, screw it, commit anyway, and just do it.

A few years back, I proudly labelled myself as a perfectionist. I now not only avoid that label, I avoid that whole mindset.

The Problem With Perfectionism

There are two fundamental problems with perfectionism.

First, it creates the habit of procrastination.

Imagine you worked for a boss who demanded only the best. Every time you would produce a piece of work, it would somehow always fail to meet his insanely high standards. Even though you did you best and produced great work, it was never good enough for your boss.

If you had a boss like this, would you be productive? Probably not. You would try to avoid as much work you could. You would take on as little work as possible.

If you are a perfectionist, you’re this boss. You’re holding yourself hostage to your own high expectations. Faced with almost certain failure, you would make any excuse under the sun to procrastinate and avoid work.

The second problem with perfectionism is that even if you can fend off procrastination, the perfectionist mindset is highly ineffective.

The 80/20 principle states that 20% of your effort to a task creates 80% of the value.  This shows that it’s more effective to focus on the most important elements of the task and pay less attention on what is less important. Is getting 20% more value worth 80% more of you time? Probably not.

If you’ve got a chunk of time, you could spend that entire chunk on completing one of your tasks to perfection. But by focusing your best efforts on the critical 80% of the task, you would be able to complete more tasks in less time with much greater efficiency.

Take this website as an example. I discovered that 80% of the value comes from the content, while the remaining 20% comes from the design and layout. So my focus is creating great content, rather than creating a great looking website. So for the design, I just look the layout from my sleep and insomnia website and just changed the logo and colors. I could have created a brand new original design but if it only contributes to 20% of the value, what’s the point? It can be easily changed in the future, unlike the quality of the content which would have to be completely rewritten.

If I approached creating this website from my old perfectionist mindset, you wouldn’t be reading this article. In fact this website wouldn’t exist. I’d still be playing with the design, choosing the perfect shades for my color scheme.

Another example is this very article. I gave myself an hour and 15 minutes to complete the draft. It’s something I’m working on just before I have breakfast and go to work. All I have to work on is an idea and a few bullet points. It’s very unlikely that I could work this effectively if I was still a perfectionist.  I would still be in the planning stages.

How To Eliminate Perfectionism

So how can we get past perfection so we can take fast, effective action towards our tasks?

Instead of ready, aim, fire where you prepare for task, align your focus and then take action, instead choose ready, fire, aim. The idea of this is to just take action, with any action being better than no action at all.

People far to often get great ideas which they never act on them until they can great a perfect plan, which usually never gets done. Instead of requiring a grand plan, start working as soon as possible even if you don’t yet know how it will turn out. Let the pieces fall into place. Taking the initial action is the hardest part of any task, so take care of that first.

One good way to do this is to schedule yourself some time dedicated only to your task. Sit down at your desk at 12 and do nothing but your task until 3. Even if you produce nothing but crap, it’s better than nothing at all.

One of the best ways to get past perfection is to let yourself fail. There is nothing wrong with failure. Failure just means you have successfully found a way that will not work for you. Knowing this, you are closer to your goal. By eliminating what doesn’t work, you can now try a different approach that may work.

Some tasks are harder than others, but the more you fail, the greater chance you have of succeeding next time.

Thomas Edison tried and failed 10,000 times before he created the light bulb. When asked by a reporter how it felt to fail 10,000 times, Edison responded:

“I have not failed 10,00 times. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

If Edison was a perfectionist, he probably would have beaten himself up for failing and then given up after the first few attempts.

Imagine how many great people had great ideas that had never been completed because of their perfectionist mindset. Make sure you are not one of them. Don’t die with your music still inside you. Take action.

I went out yesterday for a long walk along the coast. The tide was out on the first leg of the walk giving me lots of beach to walk across. On the way back though, it was coming back in pretty fast.

I scaled my way past some rocks and came to a big piece of open beach. Unfortunately though, there was a long stream between me and where I needed to go.

The stream was too deep to wade across and to make things a little trickier, it was increasing in size and depth as the sea was coming in.

I figured the stream would soon thin out the further I got away from the sea so eventually I’d be able to cross it. Problem was I had a long way to walk. Even bigger problem was that my journey consisted almost entirely of quicksand with small rocks and piles of seaweed sprinkled over the beach. Did I mention the stream was getting bigger?

First I tried the brute force approach. Just run across the sand. A few strides in and it was obvious that wasn’t going to work. The sand came almost to my ankles and I was lucky I didn’t lose a shoe!

Then I tried a similar but less brutal approach. Slowly walk across it. If I kept a slow even pace, I should be fine I thought. That might have worked, but this mud and sand was pretty deep. Plus I didn’t really have the time to take it too slow.

Faced with the prospect of having to trek all the way back over the cliffs and find my way to the road, I had one more idea. Why not use the rocks and seaweed? The rocks were pretty small, barely enough to cover my foot. And seaweed was, well just as you would expect really! Not the most stable of substances.

My idea was that I could use these as stepping stones. I would still primarily be stepping on the sand, but the stones and seaweed should be able to give me just enough lift.

It worked a treat. I hopped along the sand and in no time found a place where the stream had thinned out just enough so I could make a leap to the other side.

Metaphorically, we all encounter quicksand in our lives.

When we want to make a journey from one place in live to another, you’re bound to face obstacles you didn’t even think would be there. Some of these you may be used to. I’m an experienced rock climber so any rocks that get in the way often pose no real problems. Quicksand is something I hadn’t dealt with before, so at first I didn’t know what the heck to do.

Often in life we try one or two things and then give up. I would have tried running across the sand and then walking across it, failing both times, then doing more of the same, getting more stressed and chaotic in the process. This would have probably ended up in me getting completely stuck in the sand, to the point where I might not be able to get out. At the very least I would have lost a shoe. Then I would probably give up and wait to be engulfed by the sea.

Sounds silly, but that’s exactly how many of us approach problems in our lives.

Instead we should accept these obstacles as a part of life, take a breath, and take time to logically work our way through them. The solution may have been there all along staring at you in the face. Other times it may not be that simple. Either way, if someone has previously taken your route and got to the other side, it’s pretty certain that there’s a solution just waiting to be found.