Ignorance is Never Bliss

Ignoranace-is-bliss-in-clouds

There is an old saying that “Ignorance is Bliss.” If it is ever true, and I have my doubts, it is certainly not so when it comes to money.

If you want to succeed with money you need to first know and understand money.

Knowledge is Required in All of Life

No matter what area of life we are engaged in we assume and accept that there is a prerequisite amount of knowledge and/or skill required for success. Big task, small task, complex or simple, there is consistently some element of knowledge needed.

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Financial Freedom in Half the Time

You’ve all heard the competing insurance commercials. In one you can save 15% in 15 minutes; in the other you can save more in half the time.

Remember Suzie Orman’s book titled, Nine Steps to Financial Freedom. Well guess what? Now you can achieve your financial independence goal in half the steps! How? By following the plan in my new guide, Five Steps to Financial Freedom.

With Apologies to Suzie Orman

Suzie Orman book - 9 Steps

What’s up Suzie? Why make people go through nine steps when they could achieve the same thing in just five?

Naturally I am having some fun with the titles. Suzie’s book is great and I can recommend it. It has gone through at least four editions and sold over 3 million copies which tells you something of how well received it has been.

In her book Suzie cover 9 basic principles that will affect your chances of success. For example, one is Trusting Yourself More than You Trust Others. This is a very important principle as are all the others.

When you get a chance you might want to read it. It is a classic.

The Five Steps to Financial Freedom

On the other hand, my five steps are an introduction to the five practical steps that are involved in getting the job done. It is not a book but a concise eight page description of exactly what you need to do to achieve financial independence.

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How to Increase Personal Productivity

One of the keys to success in any field is to discover and put into practice those skills that increase productivity. All else being equal, increasing your productivity has a direct correlation to increasing your income.

How I Learned About Productivity

When in graduate school I had the privilege of working with Dr. Elmer Gray in conjunction with my studies, particularly in learning more about writing. He had authored a couple of books in addition to many magazine articles and was working as the editor of a newspaper.

Project Plan Page

One of the invaluable skills he taught me was to plan carefully (even if quickly) what you were going to write. In particular, to get all the facts first, then organize your project into sections and write out a fairly detailed outline including the space to be allocated for each part.

Next, I learned to write in a disciplined fashion so that you would end up with only ten percent more material than you wanted for the end product. Finally, edit down to the intended size, deleting repetitious, superfluous material, unnecessary adjectives and the like.

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Whether the Job Be Great or Small

Often high achievers are plagued with a combination of two conflicting interests, a sense of perfectionism and a wide range of desirable activities. Perhaps most successful people experience this to some degree. What should we do when this is the case?

Perfectionism Drives Achievement

Obviously, taken to the extreme, perfectionism can be a negative. We are all familiar with what is called the “paralysis of analysis.” But a significant degree of perfectionism drives us to achieve high marks in school and success in our work.

Man thinking

When young I was indoctrinated with the old saying, “Whether the job be great or small, do it well or not at all.” It drove me to achieve reasonably high grades in school and eventually to continue my education until I earned a doctorate.

This attitude contributes to the degree of success the perfectionists have in all of life’s activities. Look at the Olympics. We watch in amazement at what some of these athletes can do, perhaps even more at their ability to focus for years on honing their skills.

No One Can Do It All

Here is the big problem with perfectionism. It inevitably leads to a great conflict that can affect life in a very negative way

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Skills and Habits that Pay

Sometimes it is the little things that count most. A small cut on your finger can be a real irritant. Of course a cut finger will heal in a short time, but there are a lot of other little problems in life that keep us from doing the work we need to do, things that won’t fix themselves.

cut-finger

If we want to achieve more success with money or anything else, we need to increase our productivity. In this post I thought I would mention one of the little things that we can do to help us get more done.

Information Overload

As a person who is committed to learning generally I have long subscribed to newsletters and similar information on a variety of topics. I have been very selective about what I choose to sign up for. Even so the number of emails arriving in my inbox every day has become overwhelming to the point that I have decided something has to be done.

I know I am not the only one to find myself in this predicament. We all know this has become an information world. We all want and need to learn. Some of the best information is on the internet and some of these newsletters are among the best educational sources available.

But even if you are careful you can easily find yourself receiving so much email you will be swamped. This is not a good thing.

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Time Is Money

You have no doubt heard the old saying that time is money.

Money with Timer

Saving Time is Popular Advice

Just today in an email from Sitepoint, one of my favorite resources for learning about web matters, I read a comment that relates directly to this point:

Trimming a few minutes out of common tasks can add up to hundreds of hours saved in the long term. That time could mean more clients, better work, new skills, or perhaps just room for those personal projects that are full of potential.

One of the best ways to increase your income and productivity in general is to learn how to save time. And the really good news is that it is altogether possible to do it on a massive scale.

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