Issue #2484

• WEALTHY: A key to a company’s financial stability (Charles Delvalle)
• HEALTHY: An underappreciated fat burner (Craig Ballantyne)
• WISE: Ben Franklin on making progress

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

• The “elephant eating” success technique (Matthew White)
• How varying the words you use can strengthen your writing (Don Hauptman)
• It’s Good to Know… how teen video gamers try to justify their addiction
• Add “misprize” to your vocabulary

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Financial Word of the Week: Dividends

By Charles Delvalle

It’s nice to own stocks, sure. But do those companies pay you dividends for owning them?

A dividend is like a corporate profit split. As the company earns profits, they can choose to pay out a percentage of those profits to their shareholders.

Shareholders love dividends, because it gives them an interest in the continuing profits the company is making. Oftentimes, shareholders will even reinvest their dividend payments and buy new shares.

Had you been doing that with cigarette maker Altria (NYSE:MO) since 1970, you would have seen a return of nearly 98,000 percent to date. In other words, every $1,000 you invested would have turned into nearly a million dollars.

Another great thing about dividends is that they give you a clue as to how a company is doing financially. If a company is lowering its dividends, that’s an indication it is suffering financially - and you almost certainly wouldn’t want to own it. If a company is raising its dividends, it is growing quickly and would be one to keep in your portfolio.

Dividends are extremely helpful in creating lasting, true wealth. So whenever you’re searching for a stock, check to see if it’s been paying increasingly large dividends. If it has, you should be able to count on its “profit splits” for years to come.

[Ed. Note: Breaking down incomprehensible financial lingo is only one way ETR's investment team - including investment analyst Charles Delvalle - can help improve your investing IQ. With ETR's Red Flag Insider financial advisory service, you can discover a surprising way that dividends can make you prosper. Learn more here.

And be sure to send your financial questions to Charles and the rest of the ETR team at AskETR@ETRFeedback.com. Include your full name and hometown, and they may respond to your question in Early to Rise.]

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“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.“

Benjamin Franklin

Why Small Bites Trump Multi-Tasking

 By Matthew White

At a press conference early in his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower was asked for the name of his favorite author. “Harry Sinclair Drago,” said Eisenhower.

The reporters looked puzzled. They obviously hadn’t heard of Drago, even though he’d written several classics of western fiction, including Suzanna: A Romance of Early California and Whispering Sage. 

So they asked Eisenhower for his second favorite. “Bliss Lomax,” replied Eisenhower. If nothing else, this proved that Eisenhower was consistent, because that was a pen name used by, you guessed it, Harry Sinclair Drago. 

Drago used at least eight additional pen names. He needed all those names because he wrote a lot. Over the course of his career, he wrote short stories, screenplays, articles, and more than a hundred novels. More than three full-length novels a year for 30 years. 

When Syracuse University announced that it would be the custodian of Drago’s papers, the thing that seemed to fascinate reporters the most was the amount he wrote. One of them asked him: “How did you write over a hundred books?”

“Four pages a day,” replied Drago

One Bite at a Time

Harry Sinclair Drago knew that, often, the secret of accomplishing big things is to break the big task into lots of small tasks. There’s an old joke that illustrates the point.

Question: “How do you eat an elephant?”

Answer: “One bite at a time.” 

You can make it a big bite or a small one. I bet Drago didn’t start out writing four pages a day. It might have been as little as one hundred words.

By breaking your big projects into little action steps and doing at least one step a day, you can accomplish great things. Just don’t keep all your action steps in your head.

Get Out of Your Head

I’ve met people who get the “baby steps” concept, but they still don’t get anywhere because they never get to the action part. They come up with action steps like “Think about the plot for the novel” or “Analyze marketing options.” 

Those sound like action steps, but they’re not. They don’t result in real action. Real action is something out in the physical world that others can witness.

Instead of “Think about the plot for the novel,” try “Draft plot outline.” Instead of “Analyze marketing options,” try creating several specific action steps. They might include: “List three sources of information,” “Contact source A,” and “Prepare report on costs and benefits.”

Make a call. Make a list. Send an e-mail. Write a report. Do something. If you make it visible, you won’t fool yourself about whether you’re making progress. And to keep things moving, define action steps that are small enough that you’re sure to succeed.

Make It Small Enough to Get You Going

You’re more likely to succeed at small, easy action steps. So when you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the things, or the big thing, you have to do, make your action steps smaller and easier. One clue that you need to break your goal into smaller chunks is when you find yourself procrastinating.

Say that you know you need to get the house painted, but you’re not doing anything about it. So make it smaller.

What’s the first thing you need to do?

It could be: “Get some estimates.” 

If getting estimates is still blocking you, make your next action step even smaller. Try: “Call three painting companies.”

If you’re still procrastinating, choose a smaller step. How about: “Make a list of five painting companies to call?” 

At some point, you’ll be down to an action step that moves you forward but isn’t so big it stops you in your tracks. That gets you moving and gives you momentum.

Savor the Small Wins

The principle of using small wins to build psychological momentum was presented in a Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford University in 1977. The theory: It works because it’s a truly brain-friendly concept. 

When someone praises you, you feel good because your brain produces a chemical called dopamine. When you praise yourself by checking off a completed action step, you get the same physiological result. As you achieve one small win after another, you find it easier and easier to take the action steps that generate the wins.

One way to keep things moving is to keep score. 

At the end of every day, Ben Franklin would ask himself: “What good have I done this day?” You can ask the question: “What have I done today to move my life and career forward?” 

Think about the action steps you took today. Think about how they helped you achieve your goals. Savor your victories.

Remember that success usually isn’t a result of achieving great big things all at once. Eat the elephant of a big achievement one bite at a time.

Identify the next small step. Make it visible. Reward yourself for achievement. Then identify the next small action step.

[Ed. Note: Master the "elephant eating" technique, and you can make any goal easier to achieve. For 189 success strategies that are just as easy to implement, check out ETR's "Flip the Success Switch" collection.

Matthew White is the author of The Confidence Bible: the Little Blue Book of Fearless Confidence. He believes being confident is a skill that can be learned, just like playing golf or learning to drive. Find out his simple method for building rock-solid confidence here.]

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High-Protein Diets for More Fat Loss

By Craig Ballantyne

While the media focus on low-carb vs. low-fat diets, they tend to miss the point about high-protein diets. It’s well known in the fitness industry that higher protein intakes help with fat loss. For one thing, protein helps control appetite.

Most bodybuilding nutritionists recommend that 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight is effective for building muscle and burning fat in normal-weight men and women. But overweight individuals should have more.

A study published in The Nutrition Journal tested the effect of supplemental protein intake on weight loss in 100 obese men and women. All of the subjects received two protein-enriched meal replacement shakes per day. But half received a total of 1 extra gram of protein per pound of lean body mass per day. And the other half received a total of 0.5 extra grams of protein per pound of lean body mass per day.

At the end of 12 weeks, both groups had lost approximately 8 to 9 pounds of weight, but the higher-protein group had lost more fat (3.6 pounds vs. 1.32 pounds).

If you want to lose fat, a little extra protein can go a long way.

A cup of milk or yogurt provides 10 grams of protein. A chicken breast provides 20 to 40 grams, depending on the serving size. You can even get protein from nuts (a few grams per ounce).

[Ed. Note: Extending your life and living out your years in tip-top health is really a matter of making simple lifestyle choices - like adding more protein to your diet. For more easy-to-implement ideas about how to live longer and feel better, click here.

In addition to getting more protein, you can burn fat by following Craig's Turbulence Training exercise program.]

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The Language Perfectionist: Is “Elegant Variation” Bad?

By Don Hauptman

Consider the following, all of which I found in a major newspaper. What’s the common problem?

• “In a story that could be straight out of a Flannery O’Connor short story…”

• “Microsoft… is able to use its money to put on a great show at the Consumer Electronics Show…”

• “One thing Mr. Rosenbluth won’t relinquish is his annual black-tie cattle drive (so named for the black-tie-and-cowboy-boots dinner at the end of the event).”

• “The 10-day program visits Cambridge, England, and Russia, retracing the steps of the Cambridge Spies, a group of Soviet spies who attended Cambridge University.”

You’re right. Each one repeats a word in a manner that’s awkward and clunky.

How could these passages have been written instead? Some possibilities: “In a tale”; “put on a great event”; “formal-dress-and-cowboy-boots dinner”; “a group of Soviet agents.”

H.W. Fowler (1858-1933), a legendary language expert, cautioned against what he called - not approvingly - “elegant variation.” He scolded writers who strain for a different word just to avoid repetition. A classic example: following “He said” with “He stated,” “He averred,” and so on.

Fowler had a point, but he seems to have overlooked the fact that variation can be a good thing. The repetitions in the above examples are obvious, heavy-handed, and… inelegant. When we substitute appropriate synonyms, the passages are stylistically superior.

To find the right synonym, keep a thesaurus handy. But remember that synonyms are not interchangeable. A writer must understand the nuances of each word.

Some thesauri are available free online. But for decades, I’ve relied on The New American Roget’s College Thesaurus in Dictionary Form. I give this volume so much use that every few years I have to replace my worn-out copy.

[Ed Note: For more than three decades, Don Hauptman was an award-winning independent direct-response copywriter and creative consultant. He is author of The Versatile Freelancer, an e-book recently published by AWAI that shows writers and other creative professionals how to diversify their careers into speaking, consulting, training, and critiquing.]

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It’s Good to Know: How Teen Video Gamers Try to Justify Their Addiction

“Playing video games causes teens to withdraw from their communities.” This basic assumption was the hypothesis of a recent survey of teen gamers by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Not surprisingly, the teens who responded to the survey insisted that the opposite is true.

For one thing, these game addicts claim, rather than making them withdraw from interacting with others, many popular games, such as World of Warcraft, involve large groups of players. And, they say, although the players may not be face to face, these games do require teamwork and communication.

They also tried to make the case that gaming actually encourages them to think about deeper issues. 52 percent reported playing games that make them think about moral and ethical issues. 43 percent reported playing games where they have to help decide how a nation, community, or city should be run. And 40 percent reported playing games that teach them something about a social issue.

Well, here at ETR, we don’t buy it. Keep your kids away from video games. Far better to get them involved in activities that directly help them develop the interpersonal skills they need to succeed in life.

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== Highly Recommended ==

Hey, Rat Race Runners… Need a Change? 

If your soul has been screaming at you to get out of the never-ending rat race, here’s your chance. After all these years, don’t you deserve to live the good life?  Get started making money for yourself instead of your boss. 

Word to the Wise: Misprize

To “misprize” (mis-PRIZE) - from the French for “wrong” + “appraise” - is to undervalue or hold in contempt.

Example (as used by Alistair Horne in Seven Ages of Paris): “I hesitate to appear to misprize my native city, but how can the history of dear, sedate old London town possibly compare to Paris for sheer excitement?”

[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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