Life is a balance. A balance between performing at your best and enjoying the journey. Yes, presenting your best self to the world is critical to a life well lived. Yet, joy matters too. There is no point in getting to the top of your mountain and realizing that you missed out on the journey.
Taking time off and rejuvenating keeps you fresh. A long lunch with a friend inspires you. Going to the zoo with a kid changes your perspective. Sitting quietly on the porch sipping a coffee lets you pull back from the noise. And they become moments that you’ll look back on.
Without breaks your well quickly runs dry. Your energy dwindles. Your dreams are no longer as inspiring. Cycling back and forth between regeneration and work keeps you energized and fresh. (Of course, you know that you can spend too much time in rejuvenation. It’s a balance.)
Do you know what charges your batteries? Is it being in nature? Is it travel? Is it time with friends and family? Whatever it is, make time for it this summer.
Rejuvenation Tips:
Stop Doing Something
One way to open up to rejuvenation is to stop doing things that aren’t working. Finish a project, clean out your files, hire a kid to mow your lawn. Once you remove the things you are tolerating you have more time for simple joy.
Time with Friends
It doesn’t have to be structured and you don’t have to talk about anything important (or anything at all). Just do something you enjoy doing together.
Go For a Walk
Walk through your neighborhood with no goal. Notice the sights and smells. Walk slowly.
Give Yourself a Day Off
Allow yourself to totally let go of work. Forget about errands or to-dos for a day.
Explore
Go on a road trip. Check out a new city. Try a different restaurant. Anything new and different will invigorate you.
I have been doing business in the internet for the past 2 years and now I have learned something which experience has tought me. Think of yourself as a ship and the goal as a light house. Focus on one light house and keep traveling towards that. You can vary your speed, even take rest from traveling for sometime but keep going in that direction. Lack of focus wastes lot of energy and time. Think of traveling towards a light house for a while and changing your directions towards another light house you think may be better, wastes a lot of time right?
Have a time for personal reflection, spend time in natural surrounding and start to focus your thoughts on the end result. This would help you to avoid dissipating your energies.
Start focusing on one project and keep working on it until it gets streamlined. Once you have worked enough, a time will come when it can take care of itself. Or if it generates enough profits, you can employ some one to take care of it. Then you can start the next project. As you keep doing it, starting new projects and making it streamlined will be a cake walk for you! Thats how big business men do it. And thats the way I do it.
‘Customer is the king’, is it just a saying which makes no sense in today’s business world? Looks like its true. Today’s big business which have grown due to their customers no longer care about them (actually us!).
The manager is shouting at the customer, “Pay Rs.18000 to get your account closed, or else we can’t close it.” Seems weird doesn’t it. When I dug a little deeper into the story I found out that the customer had an account with the bank several years ago. The account had to have a minimum balance of Rs.2500 per month on the average. At some point of time, looks like he had requested through phone to get his account closed but the bank told him to submit an account closure form, but he forgot. He withdrew all his balance and the account had zero balance.
Five years has passed off by and each month the bank debited the penalty amount from his account (for not maintaining the minimum balance) through the years accumulating his negative balance. Now he gets a legal notice that he owes the bank Rs.18000. He has to pay that amount for not using the services of the bank for 5 years!
Isn’t this day light robbery? Banks no longer care about their customers. They could have called up the customer after 3 months of negative balance and intimated him that his account has still not been closed. What can consumers do? Lament about this story to their friends. What else? Any ideas?
This is a conversation between two babies—Ego and Spirit—while in the womb. It is just an analogy of our outlook at life. We should believe that there are better days in our future and keep going on through tough times. Here’s the story…
Spirit says to Ego, ‘I know you are going to find this hard to accept, but I believe there is life after birth.’ Ego responds, ‘Don’t be foolish. Look around you. This is all there is. Why must you always be thinking about something beyond this reality? Accept your lot in life.’ Spirit quietens down for a while, but not for long. ‘Ego, now don’t get angry, but I also believe that there is a Mother.’ ‘A Mother!’ Ego laughs. ‘How can you say that? You’ve never seen a Mother, you don’t know what Mother is. Why can’t you accept that this is all there is? You are here alone with me. This is your reality.’ ‘Ego,’ Spirit begs, ‘please listen. What about those constant pressures we both feel, those movements that make us so uncomfortable sometimes, the feeling that we are being squeezed in as we grow? I think we shall soon have a new life, that we shall see light.’ Ego replies, ‘You have never seen light. How do you know what it is? These pressures and darkness is what life is about.’ Spirit tries not to bother Ego again but cannot resist one last try. ‘Ego,’ she says, ‘I will not bother you again. But I d believe that after all this discomfort not only shall we see light but also experience the bliss of meeting Mother.’ Ego’s reply is, of course, that Spirit is truly mad.
So are you going to be the spirit, or the ego? I choose spirit, who is with me?
I have been doing internet marketing for the past 2 years, but when I look back at the beginning, it was all an accident. I was a great fan of computer games, and hence I was an avid reader of the Indian PC magazine called digit. One day I was very bored and took up an old issue of that magazine and was browsing over it, suddenly I saw an article which talked about how to make money through internet by placing AdSense ads on blogger sites. I immediately created one and put up the ads (I had little HTML knowledge from school syllabus!). I had no patience to read their TOS. All I knew was, they pay when the ads are clicked. I clicked the ads myself (LOL) and reached $100 in a period of 2 months. (Clicking ads every day for several minutes). I was too confident that Google will send me the check. One morning when I woke up to check my stats, I saw that they have closed my account. I sent them several mails and no response!
That was the first ever attempt to make my own money (I was 19 years by then). I got too frustrated and got determined to make money off the internet, no matter what the odds. I started searching Google, ran across a few people in this field and slowly started to learn about CJ.com and other online money making methods. After a month, I got my first real check of $35 from CJ.com. The image of the check is still in my eyes!
Today I have made several thousand dollars from the internet, and will make millions of dollars (if not billions) in the years to come. I love internet marketing, and its my passion!
Thank you for taking time to read my history. I will make lot of posts in the coming days about internet marketing which would be of great help to you people.
As of today I have completed 21 orbits around the sun. Had a good time with my friends. I wish I could give you a piece of my birthday cake…
If you clearly define what you want you will surely get it. When you focus your energy upon some worthwhile goal, things which relate to it will start showing up in your surroundings. It had always been there, but you were not able to notice it because of your lack of focus.
A great method to know what you want is making a dream book. Write down your goals and dreams in that book and also paste relavent pictures of your dreams in each section. This will be one of the most paradigm shift of your whole life. See this book everyday before sleeping and after waking up.
“Dream, Dream, Dream,
Dreams give rise to thoughts,
Thoughts convert into actions.” - Abdul Kalam, President of India
I am giving you the following suggestion not just from any book I read. These are time tested concepts that has worked for me. And it will work for you too!
1. List out your positives. No matter what your situation is, there is someone else who has it worse that you. So definitely you ARE blessed to be what you are right now. List out 10 good things about your life right now in your diary or just a sheet of paper, and by the end of it you will be happier than you were a few minutes ago.
2. Write down your dreams and how you want to be in your future. Live in a great home, drive a Mercedes Benz, have a trim physique and having lots of good friends. Writing down your dreams is more powerful than day dreaming.
3. Achieve small things every day. Achievement does not mean making a million dollars or climbing a mountain. You can make a plan to jog for 20 minutes tomorrow morning, and if you do it as you had imagined, its an achievement for sure. Real happiness in life does not come by sleeping or watching movies late night. It comes from achievement of goals! For me small achievements include: having a neat and clean work table, reading a self development book, and working my plan out.
Posted on April 14th, 2008 in Life | 1 Comment »
I just came across a very nice story. There was a generous old man in a light house. His responsibility was to lighten up the oil lamp so that the ships could arrive safely. In the mean time, two to three persons came to him and requested to have some oil for their use. Being generous he gave some of the oil away. Later when the ships arrived, the lamp went off due to the lack of oil. And many ships collided and lives were lost. So his very purpose was lost because he did not focus on his priorities.
Similarly many of the activities which may not lead to our ultimate goal in our life, suck out time and energy. So it is important to set goals and as you keep reading your goals, you won’t dissipate your energies. Remember that a magnifying lens when kept upon a paper and under the sun burns it by the power of focus. Today I typed out my life’s goals and printed it. I pasted the paper on the back of my room’s door.
My Life’s Goals:
1. To evolve as the Marketing Genius of 21st Century
2. To continue to have a balanced and exciting personal, social and work life.
3. To keep building business systems to retire young and retire rich, to create jobs and to serve people.
