How to Find Your True Calling
Issue #2387
- WEALTHY 7 ways to fix the economy - which one might actually work? (Andrew Gordon)
- HEALTHY: How television is ruining your health (Craig Ballantyne)
- WISE: Christopher Morley on success
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- 5 questions that will help you ensure success in life (Brian Tracy)
- The CEO may do it, but it’s a no-no for you (Peter Fogel)
- It’s Good to Know… about the ultra-portable water purifier
- Add "deus ex machina" to your vocabulary
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What’s the Cure for a Sick Economy?
Take my word for it. We’re in a recession. It affects you as an investor and as a consumer. Is there anything that can bring us out of this economic tailspin? It’s time to ask a few questions about the leading candidates:
1. Inflation. If we can stop inflation and make the consumer feel better about spending, the U.S. could spend its way out of the doldrums, yes?
2. Fed cuts. Can the Fed stimulate the economy by cutting rates even more?
3. Employment. Will we have to wait for jobs to start increasing again?
4. Housing. Will nothing good happen until the housing market bottoms and real estate prices start to go up?
5. Credit crunch. The banks are in crisis. They’re also not lending as much as they used to. Can the economy rebound while banks are floundering?
6. Iraq. Getting out would save the U.S. boatloads of money. But is that a difference-maker?
7. Stimulus checks. They sent ‘em. We’re spending ‘em. Could it really be that simple?
One of the above solutions makes sense to me. But I want to know what you think. Let me know in the comments section of ETR, right here. And then… I’ll tell you what I think.
[Ed. Note: Can't wait to find out how to recession-proof your portfolio? Learn how to grab your share of a $300 billion cash pile looking for a home...]
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"There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way."
Christopher Morley
How to Find Your True Calling
By Brian Tracy
Your success in life will be largely determined by your ability to find your true calling, the right work for you to do, and then putting your whole heart into doing it very well.
The happiest people are those who have carefully thought through who they are, what they want, where they are going, and then decided exactly what they need to do to get to their goal. Asking yourself five targeted questions can help you home in on whatever path is right for you.
#1: What do I do easily and well?
When you are seeking your true calling, you must look at the activities that have always been easy for you but which have been difficult for others. Often, you will get comments and compliments on how well you do a particular task. You will be surprised when you hear those remarks, because you never even thought about it that much. It just seemed natural for you from the very beginning.
My daughter is a natural and spontaneous little actress. From the time she was three or four years old, she has memorized lines and acted in every school play and function that has ever come up. In fact, by the time she was six, she was memorizing every line in the school play, not only her own but the lines of every other child. When the other children forgot their lines, Christina would whisper them and keep the play on track.
When Christina was 11 years old, she appeared at a city council meeting and gave a speech in favor of a permit allowing her school to expand. She stood up at the meeting, on a chair, in front of 150 adults, and gave an impassioned little talk. As a result, the permit was granted - and Christina was on the front page of two newspapers the following day.
#2: What are the things that I have done in life that have been most responsible for my success?
In looking back over your work and your activities, what are the things you have done that have given you the greatest rewards and satisfaction? If you work for a company, what are the activities you have engaged in that have achieved the very best results for yourself and your company? Your previous success experiences are signposts pointing to the sort of things that you should be doing more and more of if you want to deploy yourself more fully for greater happiness and satisfaction in life.
#3: What would I do differently, knowing what I know now?
Is there anything that you are currently doing that you wouldn’t start up again if you had to do it over? Is there any relationship that you are in that you wouldn’t get into if you could make the choice today? Is there any job or part of any job that you are doing that you would not embark upon, knowing what you now know, if you had to do it over?
As many as 95 percent of people working today are under-employed, not working to their full capacity for themselves and their companies. Only 5 percent, when interviewed, will say that they are working fully extended at their current job. Only 5 percent feel that their entire potential is being consumed and that they are working on the outer edge of their abilities. These people also tend to be the happiest, the highest paid, and the most fulfilled in any organization or enterprise.
#4: What work would I choose to do if I won a million dollars, cash, in the lottery tomorrow?
This is a question I sometimes ask my seminar audiences. When you hear this question, your gut reaction is a good indicator of where you are today and possibly where you should be going in the future. Most people, when they think of winning a million dollars, think of quitting their current job and doing something else. There is nothing wrong with that. Since most people have backed into their current jobs, taking them because they just happened to be there at the time a job was needed, most people probably should be doing something else.
Napoleon Hill once said the key to success in America is to find out what you really enjoy doing, and then find a way to make a good living at it. What do you most love to do?
Successful people don’t feel like they work at all. They are doing what they love to do, and they are so busy doing it that their work becomes their play. Their work life and their personal life blends together like a hand fitting neatly into a glove. There is no separation. They are totally committed individuals who are accomplishing far more in a shorter period of time than the average person who is merely going through the motions.
#5: If I were absolutely guaranteed tremendous success in any job I chose, what field would I go into?
One of the major reasons people hold themselves back from doing what they are truly meant to do is that they are afraid they will fail in some way. And being afraid that you will fail is the surest guarantor that you will fail.
But what if you are absolutely guaranteed success in any field you choose? What would it be? What would you want to do if you had unlimited time, unlimited resources, and guaranteed success?
The answer to that question should cause you to tingle a little bit. It should make your stomach flutter. It should send a thrill of excitement and anticipation through you that tells you this is the job you should be doing.
Asking and answering the above five questions can change your life.
You have within you talents and abilities so vast that you could never use them all if you lived to be a thousand. You have natural skills and talents that can enable you to overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal you could ever set for yourself. There are no limits on what you can be, have, or do if you find your true calling.
When you become one of the few people who are doing what they love to do, who are totally absorbed in doing something they really care about, you will make more progress in a couple of years than the average wage slave makes in five or 10 years. You will come to the attention of people who can help you and open doors for you. You will be happy and fulfilled in both your work and your personal relationships. You will have more energy, enthusiasm, and creativity. You will unlock your true potential, and your future will become unlimited.
[Ed. Note: Finding your true calling can help you find happiness, success, and even wealth. Put Brian's strategies to work, and you could have it all. And if you want to find your focal point and learn to maximize your income and minimize your effort, check out Brian's 6-CD Power of Clarity program.]
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It Should Be A Crime To Be So LAZY And Still Make This Much MONEY!
I’ve never in my life heard of a lazier way you could make a ton of dough online this quickly. But, turns out it is entirely possible. You can be up and running in under a week. Then the fun begins… Before long, you could be looking at 24/7 cash flow… no income limit on what you might make.
This opportunity is fully guaranteed and risk-free. Please check out all the details on how to get started making money this month by simply clicking here.
Reader Feedback: "I may not become a millionaire this year…"
"I am a corporate executive, a full-time wife and mom with two young children, president of the board of a local chapter of HR executives, and I sit on the board of another non-profit in my spare (!) time. I just thought I’d send you my two cents about how the Total Success Achievement program has helped me this year.
"When I started the program at the beginning of the year and wrote out my goals and set my priorities, I realized that this was NOT the year to start a new business. At least if I wanted to keep my sanity intact. I had already accepted a full ration of responsibility. To be fair to the other people in my life (colleagues, spouse, children, friends), I realized that I had to concentrate only on the goals and obligations I had already taken on during 2008, and look to 2009 to add anything new.
"This was the hardest decision I’ve ever come to (and stuck with). I am one of those people who get fired up by new ideas, new challenges, more stuff to choose from. Normally, I’d just add another target to my list and run full tilt forward until I collapsed from exhaustion. However, since my husband already carries 50 percent of the house/childcare duties, and I can’t get up any earlier at this point or I’d only be getting 2-3 hours of sleep a night - it was high time to do a serious reality check.
"So although I may not become a millionaire this year, I credit the Total Success Achievement program with giving me the ability to realistically assess what I can and can’t accomplish, align my goals, and set up my days to maximize my time and efforts. I believe it will end up making me far more successful at what I have chosen to accomplish this year than I otherwise would have been. So where I might have been discouraged and felt that I’ve suffered a revenue-generating setback, instead I look forward to honing my goal-setting abilities this year and then accomplishing far more in 2009!"
Elizabeth G.
[Ed. Note: Ready to turn your dreams into reality? You can do it starting with just 15 minutes a day. Learn more here.]
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Why You Should Never Lean on Your Lectern
By Peter "The Reinvention Guy" Fogel
Why do so many speakers lean on the lectern while giving a speech or PowerPoint presentation?
After giving the same talk for the umpteenth time, some of them get complacent. They start ascribing to "The Lazy Way of Giving Speeches." But if you are slumping over a lectern, you are diffusing the energy in your body - and in your presentation.
The only person who has any excuse for doing that is the CEO of her own company. Her company, her rules. In essence, she doesn’t have to impress anyone. She signs the checks… so the rank and file will be hanging on every word.
But that’s NOT the case for any speaker who is trying to make a good impression on colleagues, an employer, or prospective clients.
Remember: You are being judged on your entire presentation. Your body language, the way you speak, and how you articulate your message. Leaning against the lectern leads your audience to believe that you might be tired… that you don’t care about what you’re saying… or that you’re not being truthful. And all these impressions could make your audience discount your words - or just plain stop listening.
So leave the lectern in a corner. Don’t be afraid to move around while you speak. You’ll increase your energy and add enthusiasm to your words. And your audience is sure to listen with more interest.
[Ed. Note: Like it or not, if you've ever had to speak to a group of colleagues, employees, or clients, you are a public speaker. With the help of public speaking expert Peter Fogel, you can learn how to get the best response from your audience. Get the details here.]
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This Thing’ll Kill Ya
It should come as no surprise that ETR, a newsletter on how to get "healthy, wealthy, and wise," doesn’t recommend watching TV. We all know that TV is detrimental to productivity. Even worse, it sets us up to eat junk food and increase our waistlines.
According to a study done by Australian researchers, the more TV people watched, the worse off they were for such health parameters as waist circumference, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels. The negative effects were even more pronounced in women, who also had higher triglycerides if they watched a lot of TV.
In fact, watching TV can even wipe out the health benefits of 2.5 hours of moderate exercise per week. So even if you exercise, you are not immune to the powerful, negative effects of TV on your health.
Instead, find a hobby that keeps you active. I have a chocolate Lab who fills my free time. You might take up dancing or a sport that you stopped playing years ago. Even use your reclaimed TV-watching time to re-connect with old friends and old activities. Pretty much anything is better than sitting on the couch and staring at the TV screen.
[Ed. Note: Getting fit doesn't have to be hard. Fitness expert Craig Ballantyne can show you how to lose weight without spending hours in the gym or giving up good food. Start your path to a stronger, leaner body right here.
Getting healthy is much easier if you have expert advice and motivation. Get both right here.]
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It’s Good to Know: The Ultra-Portable Water Purifier
A Danish company has produced a water filter that removes 99 percent of water-borne pathogens. The LifeStraw Personal - which is basically an oversized straw - is small enough to be worn around the neck on a string, requires no power or maintenance, and has no moving parts. As the user dips the straw into water and starts sipping, multiple filters take out disease-causing agents. It is intended for use in Third World countries, as well as places that have been struck by hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, etc.
(Source: Mental Floss)
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“The Broke, Lazy Man’s Way to Quick and Easy Internet Riches…”
Today, it seems there’s no shortage of ways to make money online. Problem is, some of these programs can be pretty complicated.
I hate complicated… I like quick and easy.
Well, right now… this very minute… there are 3 people in the world using an almost secret method that is just raking in the dough, day in and day out.
They’ve allowed us to take a peek, and we’re gonna spill the beans on what we saw.
For example, how one fellow took $10 and turned into a $500,000 empire.
This method is so simple and so effective, it’s almost scary.
-Charlie Byrne
Word to the Wise: Deus ex Machina
In ancient Greek drama, the "deus ex machina" - from the Greek for "god from the machine" - was a god introduced into the action, by means of a crane, in order to resolve the plot. Today, we use the term to refer to someone or something that unexpectedly appears to solve an apparently insoluble problem.
Example (as used by Stephanie Gutmann in The Kinder, Gentler Military): "In times of affluence and peace, with technology that always seems to arrive like a deus ex machina to solve any problem, it becomes easy to believe that life is perfectible."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2008
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What’s the Cure for a Sick Economy?
When people have more money (not borrowed money) in their pockets, they are less worried. They feel better and tend to more happily spend money. I know I do. So banks having less money to lend, I believe is a good thing. After all, wasn’t this “recession” at least initially caused by the “credit crunch”?
Lending to only credit worthy individuals ensures both a return of your money plus a good rate of interest. It also ensure people are spending what they can afford and not becoming glutens with borrowed money.
Andrew,
The causes of a growing & improving economy are known.
1. Use MORE energy or use it more effectively & efficiently.
2. Have most people in it know real world achievement skills both entrepreneurial & in working up to a worthwhile standard of quality combined with a focus on contribution to real value & refusal to knowingly do harm.
3. Have most people be socially skilled, particularly in asking well for what they want, persuasion, ethical negotiating skills, & knowing how to work well in teams AND have as close to everyone as possible be willing to resolve differences & work together by persuasion, contract, & negotiation rather than by violence.
4. Have the educational system do an excellent AMD time-efficient job of teaching people reading, writing, & calculating AND knowledge of science & technology, geography, current events of importance, and history, civics, & political science.
Prescription:
1. Switch with a huge national commitment on all levels to nuclear perhaps & definitely renewable energy and energy-efficiency and totally AWAY from petroleum and coal. (Our economy is sick because we haven’t already & will collapse if we do not.)
2. Early to Rise teaches # 2 & # 3 to interested adults — much to my delight & personal benefit.
It would help if all our elementary schools made this training a priority & were good at it.
3. Education, financially, ONLY is paid for by the units of time the students spend there, for the baby sitting in plain language.
This IS important. The parents of school kids are enabled to be at work.
But until our schools can make MORE money from effectively EDUCATING kids & their payments for this are made by progress payment funding, they will never be very good or time-effective at it.
4. It would also help release a drag on the economy to have most people live a health protecting lifestyle. Healthcare costs to treat avoidable illnesses run into the billions of dollars a year.
ETR is helping with that one also.
Of the things you listed, loosening credit to about right from too tight & discontinuing pouring huge sums of money into Iraq have the most promise.
The trick is to do them in whole or in part without causing more problems than you solve.
And, I have no clue how to do either one safely.
4. Housing. Will nothing good happen until the housing market bottoms and real estate prices start to go up?
This is my choice. When people start buying houses they create jobs for others. When in turn stimulates the economy. A ripple effects which affects a lot of people.
Great question Andrew. Does Keynesian economics work today? Who really knows. But the Americans should get the hell out of Iraq though — for economic and moral reasons — regardless of the solution.
Abolish the Fed,
Get out of Iraq,
Eliminate Medicare and all forms of Welfare,
Reduce the size of Government by 80%,
Institute a Flat 10% Tax,
Get back to the gold standard.
and since none of that is going to happen: make sure you read ETR and a couple of othr great newsletters to take real good care of yourself and your business because nobody else will…and surely not the government.
Bring down interest rates
get out of Iraq and spend money wisely
less outsourcing and lower the cost of college
My comments are: America needs to be America, and when i say that- it’s not where we are going, but where we left the track- by being an American people unfettered by special interest, and controled by people without vision who would control not only the economy, but it’s people who have faught for Freedom/ not slavery or the rationing of it’s basic tenan’ts- Danny
Answer- None of the above. The big problem is that the world has too many people, many of which are nonproductive, existing at subsistence level, consuming resources, cutting down our forests and leading to even more CO2 in the air, and with no hope of ever rising to the level where they have enough extra capital to enter the entrepreneurial realm. I’ve heard it said that if the First World contributed 1% of its wealth for 1 year to the Third World, and it were utilized properly, all the poor could be brought out of a subsistence economy and would have a chance of entering the middle class. I don’t see this happening and, even if it did, the corrupt leadership of the poorer countries wouldn’t allow it to function properly. I also don’t see anyone limiting their sexual activity or increasing contraception in the Third World, so we’ll continually see a percentage rise in the poor as opposed to the reasonably well-to-do and the truly affluent. I fear there’s no workable solution, people being people. I’m afraid it’s either going to take mass starvation, a global pandemic, a major world war, or some other natural or man-made calamity to reduce the population and produce a truly long-term solution- not just a temporary rise out of our own nation’s current economic slump.
I’d be thrilled to hear from someone less cyncial who had a truly workable solution.
Brian Tracy is the smartest life coach I’ve ever known. His books and articles (incl the CD set The Power of Clarity) are succinctly and powerfully delivered. He’s brilliant yet easy to understand, and offers action steps to walk you to your goal. He has helped me more than I can say. It doesn’t get any easier than asking 5 questions to answer the question most of us spend a lifetime struggling with. Answer the questions and make some decisions. Thanks Brian!
Brian, you are the most inspiring person i’ve ever known. Your purpose driven articles have a way of shaping me everytime i read them. thanx a lot.
Chris G is on the right track.
How about a stimulative spending cut?
Conventional wisdom, which is usually wrong, is that the Feds spend more (printed or borrowed) money that stimulates the economy. Thank you JMK, and a pox on your tombstone! Besides becoming a habit that politicians use to gather more power for themselves, excess printed money is simply a tax. If the Fed simply borrows the money by selling bonds to spend on economic stimulation, they preclude the capital being used more wisely by private businesses who will create real jobs.
So, if the Fed dismisses worthless and unproductive departments and does not fritter away the money, it will be available in the capital markets for stimulating real job growth.
Hahahahahahaha!
In the short term - leave Iraq for every conceivable reason from fiscal responsibility to moral integrity and then, punish the greedy deal makers of bad loans and let the worst of them fail both the loans and the deal makers).
In the long term - teach and practice fiscal responsibility from the high school level through Congress. Most Americans don’t even understand such things as monetary supply, recession, inflation, or the Fed’s role in all of the above.
I don’t thnk I am really even qualified to say anything about the war in Iraq so I won’t even take that into considerstion. Howevere, my experience in credit lending with mortgages has given me a pretty good idea that nothing good will happen while the housing market is down. It seems like everything is connected to housing. I don’t know what measures need to be taken, but nothing good will hapen untill this area of the economy has recovered. So that’s my pick!
John
In reading about Elizabeth G and her decision to not start a business this year got me thinking.
My daughter who just turned eighteen years old, is frustrated with her lack of job experience. And I realize now that she doesn’t have the proper experience in locating a job. But it’s more than that; she still may need alittle more attention from her mother as well.
With me working 40 hours a week outside the home, helping my husband of almost two years with his small lawncare business, as well as me a. trying to find other avenues of income–we need it; and b. returning to my love of writing, I just didn’t see the time to help her. But then I thought shoot, I could kill two birds with one stone if I could 1. get her to do some small clerical tasks with the tiny lawncare services that I created for my husband for some small change, 2. To motivate her by us both looking for a source of income for her and the household as well, which would 3. to give the attention that she needs in gaining work experience and giving the needed extra attention that she requires in occupational and financial futures.
Sounds like a plan,…
To see the economy improve would need the help of congress unfortunately for us. If congress would tell the oil companies, in order to continue getting our subsidies, you are required to place one E-85 pump in all your gas stations across the country. This would give the auto makers reason to begin production of their flex cars thus gradually creating the jobs their now eliminating.
Congress would also have to reduce or temporarily eliminate the tariff on sugar for the ethanol companies to have a more powerful form of ethanol.
But unfortunately I don’t see this happening in my lifetime.
Chris