Issue #2532
- WEALTHY: 16 stocks going for $10 or less (Christian Hill)
- HEALTHY: An exercise machine that’s next to worthless (Craig Ballantyne)
- WISE: Paul Valery on judging others
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- Snap judgments – good or bad? (Alex Green)
- More lookalike words that are often confused (Don Hauptman)
- It’s Fun to Know… about the great Santa shortage of aught eight
- Add “protean” to your vocabulary
== Highly Recommended ==
Could This Be Your Perfect Remedy for the Recession?
A ‘robot’ made one man $80k in the last few months from other people’s greed.
All done without leaving his home, with virtually no risk, and best of all… virtually NO WORK…!
A Little Speculative Play Could Pay Off Big
The market has been getting absolutely clobbered for the last year or so. Some very big names are trading at extremely low prices. Will some of them end up going out of business? Perhaps.
But that shouldn’t deter you. Taking a few chances with some of your speculative portfolio money could lead you to windfall profits.
I’m not talking about buying penny stocks that rarely return anything more than a headache. I’m talking about household names that have just been beaten down for a multitude of reasons. The list I ran through a stock screener of companies with a market capitalization of over $1 billion and share prices less than $10/share returned 221 results.
I don’t want you to go crazy and buy up thousands of shares of companies like these. You should still be prudent and diversify. As an example, you could invest $100 in 10 of the following 16 companies. You would have $1,000 invested, and would need only a few to pay off to get a great return.
Under $10/share (as of 11/21/08):
Time-Warner (TWX)
UBS
Dell Computers (DELL)
Yahoo (YHOO)
Alcoa (AA)
Starbucks (SBUX)
Macy’s (M)
Applied Materials (AMAT)
Under $5/share (as of 11/21/08):
Citigroup (C)
Motorola (MOT)
Sprint (S)
AIG
Ford (F)
Sun MicroSystems (JAVA)
General Motors (GM)
[Ed. Note: The market may not look so hot right now. But you should be ready to take action when the moment strikes. Some incredible opportunities are headed your way. For an educational program that lays out the simple steps you need to take advantage of them, click here.]
“Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.”
Paul Valery
Think Before You “Blink”
By Alex Green
In last year’s best-seller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, author Malcolm Gladwell points out that our “adaptive unconscious” is constantly making assessments about people and situations in just a matter of seconds.
He argues that these snap judgments are not just good, but extraordinary. For example, he cites a study showing that college students can watch short film clips of professors lecturing and rate them as accurately as students who spend an entire term with them, even when the clips are only two seconds long. (Two seconds!)
This is quirky and interesting, but I’m skeptical. Much of my own experience has rebutted this line of thinking.
How many times have you made a new acquaintance, thought you knew him, and then one day discovered he was not the person you thought he was? (Sometimes better, sometimes worse.) How many times have you been badgered, cajoled, or (okay) dragged to an event that turned out to be a lot of fun?
In making snap judgments, we often shortchange our friends, our family, our co-workers, even ourselves. We miss opportunities for new experiences and relationships. And, more often than not, we are almost completely unaware of it.
Investment legend John Templeton once wrote, “A successful life depends less on how long you live than on how much you can pack into the time you have. If you can find a way to make every day an adventure – even if it’s only a matter of walking down an unfamiliar street or ordering an untried cut of meat – you will find that your life becomes more productive, richer, and more interesting. You also become more interesting to others.”
Gladwell says that we’re much more apt to “think without thinking.” But the results of such thinking are biases that are not always on target…
When I first met my pal Rob Fix at work more than two decades ago, I had two overwhelming impressions. One, he talked too much, and, two, he was a bit of a kook. For several weeks, I avoided him like the IRS.
Then, at a party at a friend’s house, I noticed a crowd of people in the backyard. They were gathered around Rob, who had brought over his telescope and was busy showing everyone the moon, the planets, the Orion Nebula, and the Andromeda Galaxy.
“How far is it to the moon, anyway?” asked a young woman who was peering into the telescope.
“Now let me see,” said Rob, thinking out loud. “I just drove it the other day…”
“Hey,” I remember thinking to myself, “this guy isn’t so bad. He’s actually pretty funny.”
Of course, now that I’ve known Rob for 26 years I realize that my first impression of him was totally off base. He’s not a guy who talks too much and is a bit of a kook. He’s a guy who talks way too much and is the biggest kook I’ve ever met. He is, in fact, the world’s most lovable kook. Perhaps that’s why he was the best man at my wedding.
Our prejudgments can mislead us…
A friend declines tickets to a jazz concert because he knows he wouldn’t like it. My daughter Hannah turns up her nose at every food she doesn’t recognize. We pass on taking a weekend trip because we imagine “It won’t be worth it.”
Each day, we face making dozens of small decisions. For expediency, if nothing else, we lapse into the safe, the familiar, the unthinking – denying ourselves the pleasure of a new discovery.
Just ask Walker Percy. In his Foreword to John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, he describes how the book came to his attention:
“While I was a teacher at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown to me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it was a great novel, she said.
“Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don’t want to do. And if ever there was something I didn’t want to do, this was surely it: To deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.
“But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained – that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.
“In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was this good…”
Oh, it’s good all right. Walker Percy’s discovery went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981, and has since sold more than two million copies. The novel – which features the hilarious misadventures of slob extraordinaire Ignatius Reilly – is now regarded as a comic masterpiece.
Let’s be grateful that Percy didn’t follow his intuition, his instant assessment, his inner “blink.” And just maybe we should keep a close eye on our own, too.
Life really is full of surprises. But “thinking without thinking” may not be the best way to discover them.
[Ed. Note: Relying solely on your snap judgments could be keeping you from taking advantage of powerful opportunities. One of the most common snap judgments we see at ETR is people who think, "No way. An Internet business isn't right for me." The truth is, practically anyone can start his or her own Internet business - and make it profitable. For a step-by-step guide to doing just that, click here.
And be sure to join Alex Green, Chairman of Investment U and Investment Director of The Oxford Club, as he tackles some of life's more difficult challenges in his free, twice-weekly e-letter Spiritual Wealth. Get your roadmap to a rich life here.]
Anatomy of YOUR Future!
How can you conquer old beliefs about yourself so that…
- the promotion you’ve been wanting could actually fall into your lap?
- you could drop the 20 pounds you’ve been stuck with for the last 2 years?
- your bank account could finally be larger than your credit card bill?
- your partner in life could actually show up as your partner in life?
Sometimes, all it takes is looking at yourself from a different perspective – one without past mistakes, losses and disagreements. Sometimes it takes living in this moment and a coach who can help you stand in the present and create the future from now… instead of looking at it through the eyes of the past.
It really IS possible to can clear out those old barriers to success and start creating the future of your dreams.
EVERY moment is a new possibility – start living that way NOW!
Why You Should Avoid the Elliptical Machine
Elliptical machines are often the only option for people with bad knees. But if your knees are healthy, think twice before using them – for two reasons.
Reason #1. Men’s Health magazine warns, “Never trust elliptical machines.” And they quote a study which found that elliptical machines overestimated the number of calories burned in a workout by 31 percent.
Ouch.
So if your “elliptical cardio workout” burned 400 calories, the truth is you really burned closer to 300.
Reason #2. Men’s Health magazine interviewed “Biggest Loser” contestant Ed Brantley, who lost 73 pounds while on the show. Ed had this to say: “I hated the elliptical. It was too easy. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. But that’s EXACTLY why elliptical machines are so popular. They are inferior for fat loss because they fail my “human nature” test.
Put it this way…
Take 100 people and put them in a gym with 100 treadmills and 100 elliptical machines. Tell them they have to exercise for 30 minutes at a hard pace, and they can use either the treadmill or the elliptical. Guess where 90 percent of those folks will be headed?
To the elliptical!
Why? Because it is human nature to take the easy way out. That is why elliptical machines are so busy at the gym. You rarely see anyone doing intervals on a treadmill or bodyweight circuits in the corner.
So if you are stuck at a fat-loss plateau and you’ve been counting on the elliptical machine to help you, forget it. You can’t say you “worked out” if you don’t get any real work done. Stick to the bike, the treadmill, or bodyweight exercises.
[Ed. Note: If you think long, slow cardio - on an elliptical machine, no less! - is the best way to get fit, you've fallen victim to one of the most common myths around. Discover 5 more myths about exercise - and how to combat them - right here.
For simple ideas that can help you find more energy, better health, less pain, and a dramatic boost in overall vitality, sign up for ETR's free natural health newsletter.]
The Language Perfectionist: A Cacophony of Confusables
By Don Hauptman
An ETR reader writes: “Could your language columnist look into the correct usage of ‘complimentary’ and ‘complementary’?”
The word “complimentary,” with an “i,” means free. It’s also the adjectival form of “compliment,” an expression of praise. On the other hand, “complementary,” with an “e,” means completing or making up a whole. Here’s an example of the correct use of the latter word: “Rather than contradicting each other, the two historians’ seemingly different views on the Renaissance are in fact complementary.”
Here are a few more “confusables” that I frequently encounter:
• The verb “augur” means predict; an “auger” is a tool for boring or drilling.
• The word “baited” means used as a lure; “bated” means abated or suspended, most commonly in such expressions as, “He anticipated being fired with bated breath.”
• An introduction to a book is a “foreword” (fore + word), not a “forward.” Incidentally, a foreword is traditionally written by someone other than the book’s author. If the author writes it, it’s a preface.
• The word “peek” means look; a “peak” is the top of a mountain; “pique” is irritation or resentment.
• If you mean courtesy or diplomacy, say “tact,” not “tack.”
The list of similar-sounding words that are commonly mixed up is almost infinite. So we’ll revisit the subject in future columns.
[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.]
It’s Fun to Know: The Great Santa Shortage of Aught Eight
In Germany, the tradition of entertaining children at malls and private parties with a bearded, red-robed Santa Claus is more popular than ever before. “People are turning to traditions to protect their children from the ‘evils of the real world,’ especially in the wake of this financial turmoil,” Jens Wittenberger, head of Santa Claus recruitment at the Jobcafe Munich, told Reuters. As a result, qualified Santas are in short supply. But, Wittenberger added, “not many people have what it takes to be a good Father Christmas.”
What does it take to fill Santa’s boots? You must be child-friendly. A good organizer. Reliable. A decent actor. And you’ve got to have a clean police record.
== Highly Recommended ==
Who Can Guarantee You a Stress-Free Retirement?
Congress can throw money into our economy until the end of time…
The Fed can lower interest rates to practically nothing…
But here are the cold hard facts: At the end of the day, Uncle Sam ain’t gonna help you… the only one who can get you out of this economic mess and guarantee you a stress-free retirement is you!
And one sure-fire way to do that is to acquire the wealth attraction skills of a billionaire.
Billionaires see money making opportunities where others see only despair!
Imagine having billionaire “money magnet” skills so ingrained into your consciousness that magically deals fall into your lap.
Imagine for the first time in your life NOT having to chase wealth! When in fact, MONEY opportunities just knock on your door— and you simply open it.
Word to the Wise: Protean
Something that’s “protean” (PROH-tee-un) exhibits great diversity or variety in its manifestations. The word is derived from the name of the Greek god Proteus, who had the ability to take on many forms.
Example (as used by Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic): “Anti-Semitism is an elusive and protean phenomenon, but it certainly involves the paradox whereby great power is attributed to the powerless.”
[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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