Life Improvement Tips For The Wise Few

I want to leave you with a quote from Robert Holden’s book: Shift Happens…

Today, be what you want.

If you want love, be loving.

If you want peace, be peaceful.

If you want fun, be funny.

If you want “NEW”, be different.

If you want adventure, be open.

If you want success, be alive.

If you want joy, be kind.

I can’t say enough great things about this book, Shift Happens, it is just inspiring, amazing and fun to read over and over again…

At some point in your life you will have to realize how important it is to stay organized, and if your not, then you should pay keen attention to what I write here today. Many times people mistake clutter for how busy they are, and then they call that; “Management”. I see that as plain old fashioned mess, no organizational skills what so ever.

To manage effectively means to be on top of everything, and to be on the top, you have to organized. You have to know the end point, before you can implement the plan. I have seen many workers and managers running their departments like it was a one day job. No structure and no plans. How will you be able to manage your money, if you don’t have a clue how much you have to spend and how much you have to start with.

Life isn’t always going to go the way you have planned, but one thing you can be assured of, and that is that life will return what plans you have for yourself.

To fully understand how to plan and organize yourself, you will have to start planning your steps, as you go along you adjust, but you have to keep your mind focused on the end goal. It’s the end goal that drives what you have planned, and without that your destined to fail.

A famous quote: “Failure to plan is a plan for failure”

So whatever you wish to accomplish, you first have to start with a plan, and I can’t stress that enough. I will hit on my St. Maarteners now, because we (I said we, that means me too) are famous for taking everything in a slow paced fashion. We actually never have a rush to get anything done. Time isn’t important, and we are always in a relaxed mode. Maybe it’s due to the size of the Island, or who knows what.

The biggest benefit we as St. Maarteners gets is when we go away to study, it is then that we see how differently other people live and that is when we honestly see how organized other societies function. And that alone should say why so many of our attitudes remain the same, because we didn’t learn anything while abroad, or we have never been over seas to learn from other cultures.

The true meaning stems from adjusting and learning as you go, your biggest problems occurs when you come back home. You have to re-adjust, otherwise many people will dislike your attitude, but I don’t believe you should adjust to anyone style.

The work around here is to always be at your best, and to start organizing your life from a very young age, and actually adapting new ways to get things done faster. For me, there is only one way to get things done faster and that is to not put off what you can do today for tomorrow.

Keeping track of your life is so important and a part of life I wished that I had known when I was much younger, because it creates a much better organized you, and one with a more functional mind.

The way I go about my day, is to use the web for all my planning and ideas, as an idea hit me and I can’t write it down, I send myself an email reminding me of that idea.

My kids always ask me; Daddy why do you send yourself so many emails?

The idea behind that is to not forget my little brain-farts I get while working. It really makes things simple, for me that is. Even on the job I am very much organized, I never have a cluttered desk, and I always keep track of everything I do on paper. These skills are so important. I write everything down, and that makes it easy for me to retrieve what I am looking for.

Please don’t write on a loose pieces of paper, get a hard cover copy book. I have sections in this book, I write in it, like a Chinese person… I write in the back, then in the front, because I create divisions in the book based on the different subjects or problems that I deal with daily.

To most, that may seem confusing, but like I said, that is my system, you have to find one for yourself, and use it to keep yourself more organized. Once you start organizing yourself, you will see a big change, you won’t be searching through piles of stuff looking for nothing. To be organized is so important, it is the beginning of a new way to getting anything you want in your life.

An organized person is superb at time management, so it doesn’t matter where your at, you should be organized at work and if your going to school, you should be getting organized for school. Learn to organize yourself while your still in school, it will show in your character once you get your own little office space and keep it organized. Skills learned in school will only get better and be more developed once you get older.

I hate walking into a unorganized office, and most of all hate seeing cluttered desk, with loads of papers, some dating back a couple of years. But, those are the managers we see daily. My guess is if your reading this post, then tomorrow your desk will be cleaned… I have seen one office, where they have dust built up on the papers… I know you will be looking at your desk and clearing off your work space tomorrow…

Can you ever be too organized?

I leave you with that one, because many issues will arise once I start on that topic… I leave that for another time.

Learning how to keep your money in your pocket and only buy what you really need is the best way to manage your money. Many of us have the tendency to buy something the first time around, but that is a very bad habit, that you will need to break. You can read my article on how to break bad habits that will help you loose that type of behavior.

Most of the time we buy items we seldom need or use, I think it’s a human behavior that acts like magnet that pulls us to buy without even knowing why. Most of the time we buy an item we are highly excited about at that moment, then a couple weeks goes by and we hardly notice what we bought, a couple months down the road and we can’t even recall what we bought.

A well know method for controlling your urge for buying is called delayed gratification. It is a method that you should also use before you jump and purchase something. The method is very simple and works as follow: When you see something that you want, don’t jump and buy it right away, just tell yourself that I will come back and buy it later. Stay away for a week or two and return to review what you wanted to buy. You will notice that your excitement has faded and your not interested in buying that item anymore.

By doing this, you will teach yourself how to not buy on impulse. You will learn how to spend your money wisely and only buy items that you really need. You will learn how to manage your money much better and control your bad spending habits. Wise spending is as simple as not jumping the gun and buying each and everything you see.
A good example of bad spending can be seen every end of the month when we get our pay or during the Holidays when we get a little bonus. People tend to buy stuff they seldom need. Many of you go out and buy gym equipment (yes, guys it isn’t easy to train at home) only to realize that after the first month or two, your newly bought equipment only catches dust and never gets used again.

It is much cheaper to just go to the gym for a couple of months and then quit when you feel like you had enough, the cost is much lower, and you won’t have to keep looking at that new piece of gym equipment that you just can’t fit into your lazy routine.

Another good example is the purchase of clothing and shoes. Count the amount of pieces clothing that you have lying around that you no longer wear and picture the shoes you have bought that also never get worn (sorry ladies that one fits up your alley). I do believe that these bad practices can be controlled, if we would really use the delayed gratification principle.

As the season approaches, I do hope many of you would actually plan your purchases and control your spending. It is much better to have some money after the season passes, than to go through the season flat broke.

Put aside a little money and save it away for after the Holiday season, or save a little this month and next month. That will be your way of making sure that when the season hype blows off, you will still have a little cash.

I know many people who blows every cent during the Holiday season and end up taking a loan or begging a friend to lend them some money to survive the worse month of the year. January is the hardest and toughest time of the year, because many spend more than they earn during the month of December.

Wise spending consist of learning to manage your money and stop begging people to help you out. If you keep lending money from people all your life will bring you is people lending back money from you. It is the poor people syndrome. All they do is lend from each other, it is a vicious circle where lending just goes around and around. It gets so bad at one moment that they lend from one person to repay another. Don’t join that never ending lending tree. If your part of that consider yourself poor, and if you wish to break free repay what you have loaned from others, and break that bad habit. Be on the giving side, that way your life will be rewarded for helping others. But only give what you can afford.

Learn to live within your means, save ten percent of what you earn each month before you pay your bills and, spend what you can afford and only buy what you need.