Friday, February 27, 2015

Everybody Hates Procrastination

There are things in life that we, alone, can do and the first thing we notice is that we keep getting in our way. Procrastination is what usually kills our goals and is one of the worse habits to have. If left amok, it will rob us of our victories in all areas of life. Do not leave to tomorrow what you should be doing today.

Thursday, February 26, 2015

The "Healthy" Employee

As you probably know, there are a lot of corporate employee coffee lovers out there. Most of them go to the doctor to get checked and some are told that they’re blood pressure is too high. Instead of doing a lifestyle change, like reducing coffee consumption for example, they get on pills.

It doesn't make sense to me – why would someone raise their blood pressure, with something such as coffee, to then try to reduce it with a pill? Couldn't you just stop drinking coffee to see if it helps? High blood pressure is a big deal after all.

We rely on pills too much - they should be used only when there are incurable problems, not as an excuse to continue our poor lifestyle choices.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Self Confidence

A lack of self confidence makes other people doubt in your abilities to accomplish anything even when you have years of experience on the subject.
Self confidence can make an expert look like a fool or a fool look like an expert.

What this means is that confidence in your abilities is just as important as the abilities themselves.

Self confidence needs to be treated individually rather than be bound to what you do (or what you like). Doing otherwise will only create a temporary posture when your field of expertise is brought up but you will loose it as soon as the subject change.

Being comfortable with yourself will make you comfortable in any situation.

If you want more information, the below books (pictured above) are a good place to start:



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Revision Wednesday
Blog post originally created on December 19, 2013 and can be found here.

Monday, February 23, 2015

“The No Medical Required” Insurance

Ever seen the commercials regarding "no medical required" type of insurance? It’s a good way to get new customers but the question we should all be asking is “do they look at my medical history once I need the money from the insurance?”

I have no experience with these types of Insurances but lets logic this out. The goal of insurance is to make money out of you and to give as little as possible back. They need to make money which, to me, means that they will look at your medical history once you actually need to get money from them (but hey, at least they don’t look at your medical history when you pay for the insurance … how nice of them!)

I may be wrong - I would read the fine prints before getting those types!

Friday, February 20, 2015

We've Grown Apart!

"We've grown apart" is a popular reason for people to get divorce. The problem isn't that people have changed, because we all change on a daily basis, it's that we failed to communicate that change to our partner hence why we feel like we've grown apart.

The "we've grown apart", at the core, is but a communication problem rather than a "we changed in opposite direction" kind of problem.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Hone Your Craft

Self-Improvement is important in everything we do. It's what give us the winning edge over somebody else. Doesn't matter what job we're doing, we should learn all that there's to know about it in order to increase our value as an employee.

John Bolinder, a 36 year old CFO, joined a mail room of a microbiology testing company at the age of 22 and was promoted to CFO at the age of 28. How did he do it? He worked on improving himself by completing his MBA at the University of Utah and the rest of the company by finding solutions to the various problem they faced in the mail room and other departments.

The job we do today will be the same job we do in 5 years if we don't work on improving ourselves.

For more information on John Bolinder, see the article on the Forbes website available here.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

4 Rules for Saving Money



Wealth means how long someone can live forward, with his current lifestyle, without a source of income. For some people, it's not very long. It is good practice to have 3 to 6 months saved up in the bank in case of emergencies. The below rules can help achieve that.
  1. Live below your means: If you make a million dollars a year but spend a million dollar a year, you're not better off financially than the person who made 30k and saved 5k.
  2. Keep track of every penny spent: Keep track of your spendings to then make an accurate budget. Ideally, you want to save 25% of your monthly income so that you accumulate 1 month of freedom every 4 months.
  3. Open a Tax Free Savings Account(TFSA) and/or retirement account: There's nothing wrong with a government to want his share of the money you make but when you use a TFSA (in Canada, we can save up to 5500 a year tax free when using this type of saving account) or a retirement account to store money in, the government gives you a little break. This will give you more money during tax season and I would encourage you to save it.
  4. Don't finance things that depreciate: It doesn't matter if the item is at 0% interest, it's still not a good idea to buy new due to the depreciation.
We generally want to clear off our debt before starting to save for the simple reason that the interest rate on a debt is often way higher than the interest rate on money at the bank. For more information, pick up the book "The Millionaire Next Door" book by Thomas J. Stanley Ph. D. & William D. Danko, Ph. D.

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Revision Wednesday(on a Thursday)
Blog post edited/re-posted on May 21, 2015

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

A Move?

"The grass is greener where you fertilize it." -Lana Hamilton

A job is not the same thing as a relationship or a business... career decisions are difficult to make. The grass is greener where you fertilize it but what happens when you feel like you lost the drive to do so? One can always "fake it until making it" or move on. The best way is to weight in the good and the bad of staying vs moving on and go with which ever side we feel is better.

Monday, February 16, 2015

I'm Back!

2015 has been interesting to say the least. So far, I’ve learned that I’m not as disciplined as I’d like to think myself to be and that I lack some skills that would be beneficial in my career.

I’m thankful for my family, friends and the wonderful Christy for being there for me during the interesting times. :)

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