Self Improvement For Smart People
Corey from A Simple Marriage just posted up a guest article from your truly about gift giving. Go over there and read it and enjoy the rest of Corey’s blog. It’s a great resource for married people on how to keep a marriage strong.
And if you just got here from A Simple Marriage, welcome and please make yourself at home. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me.
Too many of these are from people who didn't run the numbers
I wrote last week about calculating the value of your time when it comes to whether or not you should haggle. The point wasn’t that haggling is good or bad, only that you should make an informed decision as opposed to a guess. I want to expand on that a bit and apply it to other parts of life.
Not all decisions in life require a lot of thinking. For example, I chose the Mexican place I went to lunch at without doing a giant pro and con list. The big things though, especially when it comes to money, those should definitely be informed decisions. Which brings me to the question I mentioned in the heading, is it better to rent or buy? [Read more...]
Last week I spoke about the monetary value of my time. Since then I’ve received a couple of questions from readers along the lines of:
“But what if I really like haggling?”
Well, in that case we’re no longer talking about your time purely in terms of dollars. Now we have some kind of other value, which is the enjoyment you get out of haggling. For me, I don’t really enjoy bargaining so there’s no value other than money. However, I could say the same about walking my dog. I could pay the neighbor’s kid $20 to take Daisy for an hour’s walk which would save me $75 of my time. However, I like walking Daisy and I want the exercise so I do it myself.
So yes, if the activity is one that you enjoy, you might actually be willing to pay for doing it, either in actual money or in terms of your time.
Do you ever feel like you’re pretending to be someone you’re not? Like you’re wearing a mask that doesn’t really reflect who you are? I feel that way sometimes. I feel that I put on masks depending on the role I’m playing. Sometimes I’m the high tech professional, leading my team through complicated projects. That’s when I’m decisive, thoughtful but respectful of everyone’s opinion. Sometimes I put on the mask of entrepreneur. That’s when I’m quick to act, enthusiastic, energetic and aggressive in my drive to succeed. Some nights I put on the mask of friend and then I’m funny, outgoing, a bit rude and somewhat abrasive. Other evenings I put on the mask of host and then I’m polite, intelligent, a great conversationalist and a talented cook. Sometimes I even put on the mask of a blogger and then I’m authoritative, provocative, a bit arrogant and a good story teller.
Masks are fine to a degree, but when I spend too much time wearing them I get tired. It’s exhausting to pretend to be someone I’m not and it’s unnecessary. The real me is just fine in any of those situations. In fact, the real me would be great in all of them, just as good as the mask. [Read more...]
There was an interesting post on Lifehacker recently about when is it worth to haggle. They had all kinds of ideas on what was worth bargaining for and what was not, to which I say, nonsense! How can you make this kind of decision without knowing the value of your time?
My time is worth about $75 per hour. How do I know this? Because that’s about how much money I can make in an hour if I focus just on making money.
So if X time devoted to bargaining is going to net me Y money, I should see if X over Y is greater than $75/hour. [Read more...]
Talking is like breaking through the walls imprisoning you.
I used to be the kind of guy who was scared to say what he wanted. The more I liked someone, the more I hid away what I really wanted in an effort to keep them happy. It’s a stupid habit and it’s one of the things that caused my first marriage to implode. Well, I’m not that person anymore and I recently had proof of that when it came to my healthy lifestyle. You can read about it on my fitness blog but I’ll give you a quick recap here.
Basically, my wife and I were spending too much time in restaurants which caused me to eat too much. One quick conversation later and we came up with a much better lifestyle which is working out great so far. It wasn’t hard, it wasn’t scary, it was just a conversation and it led to a great solution.
Bottom line, if you can’t tell your partner (or best friend or parent or…) what you want, you’re in trouble. Either you need to overcome your fear of communication or the person you’re trying to communicate with doesn’t belong in your life, either way, you have a problem. You should never be afraid to talk with someone in your life, ever!
I'm hiring!
As you all know, I’m currently trying to launch Diamonds or Dogs. As you’ll see in Wednesday’s post, my next stage involves generating traffic for the site before I try to raise some venture money. In order to that, I need your help. How can you help you ask? Well, I’m glad you asked!
First, I would really appreciate feedback on the site itself.
I’m aware of the current issue with recommendations (you may also like…) sometimes recommending things they shouldn’t. Anything else?
Second, what do you think of the site’s content?
Third, would you like to be a reviewer? That means you’d need to send me a profile and then 1 review every two or three weeks, and yes, you get a cut of the profits if your items sell well. Does that sound like fun? If so, contact me and let me know.
Fourth, assuming you like the site or a specific gift review, I’d really appreciate some free publicity. That means:
Essentially, spread the word about the site and any specific item you may like. Who knows, maybe someone in your life will get the hint and buy you the item you “liked” 
Thank you all very much for the help and I look forward to helping you with your own endeavors in the future!
Perfection sucks. It’s the enemy of invention, it’s the thing that holds you back. Trying to reach it might be an ok goal but never finishing a project until it’s perfect is the work equivalent of dry humping, it feels good but you never really get to the point. Sorry, but perfection can go to hell, I’ll take good enough any day of the week.
I say all this because I’m struggling with finishing up Diamonds or Dogs, my gift site. There are so many things I want to do. I need more reviewers, more reviews, a better landing page, a better “about us” and more information on why the site is the way it is. That’s just the beginning of my to do list. However, the more I try to get the site perfect, the more I push off the important task of starting to drive traffic to the site. Yes, I want the site to look good but I also want to start doing marketing for it. I want to start linking to it, telling people about it, running an AdWords campaign and the dozens of other things I will need to do in order to get people to my site. I’m not doing any of those things because I’m working on the landing page… [Read more...]
It’s 4:47pm here on the west coast and I just sent Julie a text telling her how adorable she is. Actually, my text read “I’m calling your boss and telling him he should give you the title of VP of Being Extremely Adorable”. I love sending her texts like these. I imagine her reading them and smiling and it just makes me happy just to picture that smile.
Think about that for a second. I brought happiness to someone I love and it cost me absolutely nothing. I didn’t have to buy flowers, order chocolates or book a trip to the carribean. All I had to do was take a few seconds out of my day and text her some words that express how much I really loved her. How easy is that? [Read more...]
Earlier I wrote about my plan for 2011 and how that went, this post will be devoted to 2012.
Each of the items below is something I want to do or accomplish this year. I’ve gone ahead and created a project for each one of these (nothing fancy, I just use tasks in Microsoft Outlook to track these). Each project has various items under it that represent to do’s or tasks. Accomplishing these tasks may lead to more tasks. For example, when I figure out what I want to build from scratch I’ll have more to do’s around buying materials and making blue prints.
Each of these projects has measurements attached where possible. These measurements are used to indicate success or failure. for example, the blogging goal has a measurement of 1000 users per day to indicate success. I then take this measurement and figure out what I need to do in order to achieve it. Some goals, like children, have no measurements attached but in such a case I usually make a note to myself about why is it that I’m tracking this goal. For example “I want to be a good parent”. This will help me figure out what I need to do.
So, without further ado, let me introduce you to my grand plan for 2012! [Read more...]
