F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1963)
If you are doing the first two of these, you are in luck. What you have to do next is develop your skills to such a point that your employer will think of you as invaluable. I've explained how this is done many times in past ETR messages so I won't rehash it here. The point is that once you are seen as invaluable, it will be relatively easy for you to get your boss/company to agree to a relocation.
He/they would be crazy to refuse you. Most of what you do -- when you do these things -- can be done on your own and from anywhere. And if you do them really well, they won't risk losing you simply because you want to spend part of your time doing them from a remote location.
The wonderful thing about taking this track -- becoming a superstar marketer/seller or product/idea developer -- is that you will make more money and gain more power as you develop your skills. The better you get, the more you'll make, the greater your say-so and the more likely you'll be able to work from Rome.
So if you are working toward becoming a topnotch marketer/salesperson or product/idea developer, get to work on that and your relocation dreams will be a cakewalk when you are ready.
Tomorrow, I'll tell you what to do if you are a pusher or a profit-center manager. I'll even suggest a course of action if you are in the peripheral fields (i.e., customer service, accounting, operations, etc.).
Learn how to secure wealth like only the super rich can.
With International Wealth and Power you’ll learn how to
think outside of the box. Gain the upper hand over your
lawyer, your banker, insurance agents, credit card
representatives, travel agents, financial advisors, and
any government official. What is it? They’ll hide it
from you at any cost... Knowledge.
Build a fortune and live far better for the rest of your
life with the knowledge you’ll receive in International
Wealth and Power. For more details, follow this link:
http://www.agora-inc.com/reports/WLAD/etr1
You have in your head dusty rooms full of information you rarely if ever use. Most of it was filed away years ago when, in some period of infatuation with a subject of interest, you greedily absorbed everything about it that you could.
Bruce Pandolfini, the celebrated international chess master about whom the 1993 movie "Searching for Bobbie Fischer" was based, has talked about the way he fell in love with chess. He said he took up the game after stumbling upon chess books in the stacks of the Brooklyn Public Library. He loved the diagrams in the books, the cryptic notations by which the games were recorded, and even the names of the players: Botvinnik, Bogolyubov, Bapablanca. There were about 30 books in the library but Pandolfini could not decide which to take and which to leave. So he took them all home and skipped school for a month to read them.
Pandolfini knows about 100,000 combinations, including hundreds of established sequences with exotic names like the Fried Liver Attack, the Sicilian Dragon, and the Nimzo-Indian. And he has used this esoteric knowledge to create a financially remunerative and psychologically rewarding life for himself.
Most of the time, this nice progression -- from infatuation to blissful marriage -- doesn't work out. Most of the time, the precious nuggets of our brief passions become picayune and even irrelevant souvenirs of past loves.
I can, for example, explain the difference between dactylic hexameter and iambic pentameter. I can even tell you which is better for what kind of verse. I know the history of Olympic lifting -- when the three great lifts became two and why a snatch is so much harder than a clean-and-jerk. I know how to disassemble a 1963 Volkswagen engine (though I never learned how to put one back together properly). All these onetime critical bits of knowledge are now crowding up my upstairs bookshelves, making little room (or so it sometimes seems) for more currently useful facts.
Like how to hail a taxi in Rome -- as compared to New York, Paris, or London. Or how to peel a banana the sensible way -- like the apes do. (Our banana-sophisticated primate cousins peel from the end of the banana so they can use the stem side to grip it.)
So, in an effort to help us all fill in what room remains in our intellectual warehouses, I'm introducing a new category of brief today which I'm going to call, "It's Good to Know."
In future ETR messages, you'll be able to scan "It's Good to Know" for bits of information that you should be able to actively and profitably use in your current, actual, and (hopefully) profitable life. All of the "It's Good to Know" briefs will focus on relatively minor facts and figures, but they will have the potential (at least) of being useful to you in the near if not immediate future.
Today, I'm going to give you two of them. One that you will be able to use the next time you travel anywhere and another that will be relatively uninteresting to you until you get to Rome. (But then it will greatly enhance your enjoyment of this great city. So clip it and save it.)
IT'S GOOD TO KNOW: WHEN YOU'RE TRAVELING
What To Do When You Arrive At The Gate Late And They Tell You All The Aisle Seats Have Been Given Away
What they're telling you isn't true. There is always one seat reserved for the flight attendant who stands in the cabin to help people settle themselves. Usually, this seat is in the emergency aisle -- which makes it doubly good since it not only has extra elbow room but extra legroom too. You have no right to this seat -- and so you shouldn't demand it. But if you ask very politely, and smile and make obsequious noises, you just might land it.
The Air
Rome has just about always been my favorite city. As I told you yesterday, I am now living here for six weeks to test the 21st-century hypothesis that a man with a modem can work from anywhere. So far, so good. I'll keep you posted.
One thing that it's good to know when you're in Rome is that because the city is built on hills, it enjoys a great deal of fresh air. No matter where you go - no matter how narrow the street - you will usually be comforted by a cool breeze blowing in from the countryside.
You use this phrase correctly when you say something like "He anxiously awaited her answer with bated breath," but you may be spelling it wrong. It's "bated," meaning "shortened" (abated), not "baited" (unless, of course, you're talking about someone with a chunk of cheese in his mouth).
MMF
Copyright Early to Rise, 2001
If you enjoy Early to Rise and would like to read more, please visit our website: http://www.earlytorise.com
SPEAK OUT! Visit our Discussion Board at: http://www.earlytorise.com and submit your views or read what others are saying.
MMF also welcomes your questions or comments. Simply send an e-mail to support@earlytorise.com and type "Question" or "Comment" in the Subject field.
If you'd like to suggest Early To Rise to a friend, please point them to: http://www.earlytorise.com