Aleksandra Galert's Blog: I'm thinking about... - Posts Tagged "money-management"

Over a year ago, in November 2013, I’ve attended NAC – the National Achievers Congress in Warsaw. This event has totally changed my view point and it certainly has changed my life. Since then I’ve read many books and articles, watched hours of videos of the best speakers in the world. I want to share with you the most important things I’ve learned, as I believe they can appear so useful to you as they did to me.

1. The best motivational speaker in the world – Les Brown – always repeats that what he found out is that ‘most people don’t achieve success in lilfe not because they aim top high, but because they aim too law’. I think this quote speaks for itself. We don’t believe in ourselves, we set for ourselves goals smaller than we could and, as a result, it is us who stop us the most from making our dreams come true. Realizing only this one thing can be a life changing point.

2. Have you ever heard the saying: ‘It’s much better to be a giver than a receiver’? Well, T Harv Eker claims that who said that must have had problems with maths. If there is an excellent giver, there must be an eqally excellent receiver. Eker also says that it is one of the laws of the universe that we should be able to give, but also to receive. Because, if the univers “finds out” we don’t want to receive, it will give our part to somebody next in line! Balance in life is crucial.

3. Lately I’ve read an excellent book of Susan Jeffers: ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’. In this book there are many interesting and helpful tips, but I especially remember one that become crucial for my life: Susan says that there are no wrong decisions. There are only different chances. If you choose A – you’ll get some opportunities, if B – you’ll get others. How awesome is this?! How much easier does the life seem if you know there are no bad decisions? It’s not the decision, it’s what you do with the chances you get from it.

4. Robert Kiyosaki has totally changed the way I think about money. I especially recommend the Cashflow game. The producer warranties that if, after playng the game six times, you don’t learn anything, they’ll give you back the money. Well, in my opinion, if you don’t learn anything from this game you are eiher already a millionaire or you are an ignorant not willing to learn. Kiyosaki made me understand the difference between the rich and the poor and it is: the way of thinking and managing the money. If the poor win a million of dollars on a lottery, what do they do? They buy a new, big house, they buy an exclusive car, they go on fancy vacation and soon they are broke again, just with higher bills to pay. What do the rich do in such a situation? They invest, for example in real estate, to create the passive income that will be paying for their monthly expenses for a new car. So, just by the matter of thinking, in the same conditions, the poor will get poorer and the rich – richer.

5. I don’t remember, where I read or heard it, but it was again a theory about balance. According to it, the can’t be always good things happening in one’s life, because if you continuesly put water to a glass and the glass is full, what happens? The glass is too full and no more water will be able to enter. With life it is the same: if only good things were happening to you, you wouldn’t be able to take and appreciate them all.

6. Another thing I read is that big achievemtns come from the fact that you change just one thing you do everyday. For example: instead of fried eggs for breakfast you start eating cereals. Instead of taking the car, you go to work by bike. Instead of waching tv for 3 hours daily, you watch it for half of that time and for the rest of it you read about something that can help you develop your skills or business. It is that simple. Of course, the results won’t come immediately, but if you keep on doing this new thing, for sure they’ll come. The good news is that creating a new habit lasts 21 days. So if you manage to keep doing your new, changed activity for just 21 days, later it becomes your habit and it will be no longer so difficult to force yourself to do it. Quite the opposite: you’ll miss it if you don’t do it.

7. Many of the best personal coaches in the world say that you should know where you’re going to be able to achieve it. Sounds obvious, but turns out in life it’s not that easy to know what we want. But it is important. It is like with going to the mountains: you have to know which peak you want to gain: is it Kilimajaro, Anapurna or Mount Everest? If you don’t know where you’re going, how can you get there? Of course, sometimes you won’t know it right away, but do try to find it out as soon as you only can. As T Harv Eker says: ‘Where the mind goes, energy flows and the results come’.

8. Many of us fear the change, fear to take the new opportunity, fear to make a step in life. What motivates me in the moments of doubt is a question: ‘What do I fear more: the change or living the way I’m living for the rest of my life?’. This questions usually clears all the doubts.

9. On NAC Warsaw I’ve learned something fascinating about dealing with refusal and failure. A good example to explain it is calling clients to offer them some product. Before you start you should set yourself quite an unexpected goal: I’ll get 3 no answers in a raw. Yes, exactly like this. Obviously, when you call you behave professionally to hear ‘yes’. First call: no. Good. Second call: yes. Eh, one more time. First call: no. Ok. Second call: no. it’s good. Just one more… Third call: yes. Oh, no. Actually, you’ll find out how hard it is to get free ‘no’ in a raw. But the most important of this weird game is that either way you win. Isn’t it cool? Every no answer is a winning, every yes answer is a winning. Of course, calling is just an example. You can apply it this method to anything you want.

10. From one of the CD courses I’ve listened to I’ve learned another useful thing about failure. Let’s say you set a goal for an upcoming year that you are going to earn x dollars. But at the end of the year it turns out you earned only half. And what? You’re disappointed. But wait! Look back at that year, look how much you’ve achieved, how much you’ve learned! This failure is in fact a success! Maybe you’ve learned how to invest your money – something about which you had absolutely no idea a year earlier. Maybe you earned 1\2x, but it is still the most you have ever done. Do you understand? Trying to achieve your goal was a great lesson and the knowledge you got out of it is priceless.

11. How to stop or start doing anything? I believe what is crucial is to know the rule of 20 seconds. I read about it in an article of Shawn Achor - a Harvard scientist studying happiness. What is it? The rule says that you can start one activity immediately or to start another, you need 20 seconds, you are more likely to start the first one, even if you don’t really like it. It may sound complicated, but in fact it is very easy. Let’s say, you want to stop watching so much tv. Simply put out the batteries from your remote control and put them in another room. Next time, when you sit on the sofa and authomatically push ‘on’ on the remote control you’ll say: ‘Oh, no. I was so stupid’. But you will probably start doing something that is closer to you, like reading a book lying on the table in from of you or calling a friend. Why? Because it would take you 20 seconds to fetch the batteries and this is something that the human brain interprets as: ‘Too much effort. Let’s do something else’. Achor, doing his experiments, wanted to force himself to do some morning exercises. But everyday, when he was waking up, his brain was saying: ‘No, I would have to get dressed, put on the sports shoes… Too much effort. I’ll do it tomorrow’. Well, this tomorrow would probably never come unless he did what follows: he went to sleep wearing the sports clothes. The only thing he had to do in the morning was to put on the shoes that were waiting for him right next to his bed. With sich solutions he went jogging the very first morning of the experiment. Why? Because his brain interpreted it as the easiest thing to do. You see? I told you it’s easy.

12. Simon Sinek is a very good speaker talking about leadership. Lately, I’ve watched his TED speech, where he was talking about why some companies and people become successful while the others don’t. he explains it this way: most of the companies think according to a scheme 1. What we produce? 2. How? 3. Why? While the truly successful ones do it in an exactly opposite way, because they know something very important: people don’t buy what you d, they buy why you do it. Sinek gives a few examples from real life. One of them is a story of the Wright brothers who invented the plane. Hardly anybody knows that in the same time there was another man working on the same thing. I don’t even remember his name, but he was paid a lot of money from the USA government and had a team of the best specialists in the world while the Wright brothers had no money and only a group of passionate friends to help them. So why did they succeed and the other man didn’t? because of their ‘why’. They wanted to create a flying machine that could take people on far distances in a short time. What was the ‘why’ of the other man? To become famous and get a paycheck. This story shows that the ‘why’ is very important in life.

These are the subjects I’ve found the most useful among hundreds of pages I read last year. I hope you’ll find at least some of them useful and that this article will inspire you to look for more.