Persistence Unlimited Personal Productivity Tips

7 Simple Ways To Develop A Profit Mindset

Profit is a bad word to many, but to others if they can’t make a profit, life isn’t worth living.

Regardless of your feelings about profiting, your ability to make a profit will decide many factors in your life. It will determine what you eat, your quality of health care, where you’ll live, and what you’ll be able to do with your free time.

“The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try
again in a different way.” - Dale Carnegie

The power of profit makes it an important concept to understand and ultimately harness if we want to take control of our lives. If we don’t profit, we are leaving too much up to chance. We can’t get the knowledge we need. We can’t help others to the best of our abilities. And we can’t live our dreams.

You may be new to the idea of developing a profit mindset. So I’ve put together seven simple ways to develop the mindset so you can start profiting immediately:

1. Remember Interest is money earned - When you put money into the bank, it earns interest. Some argue that it’s not a lot, but the bank is the first place to start. You eventually want to move into Mutual funds and bigger investments. But when you are just starting out, the bank is the safest investment. Interest leads to more money. Each deposit becomes a little earner who brings back money to you as the interest accumulates.

2. Spend Interest, not principal - My father had a great saying for holding on to your money. ‘Spend interest, not principal’ What this means is your nest-egg should never be touched, instead, use interest. That way, your investments will continue to earn more interest.

3. Treat found money as savings - If you’ve ever gone through the attic or garage and found a 100 dollar bill. Woo Hoo! That’s found money. Inherit some money or get a paid bonus would be considered found money too.

The thing to do with found money is to immediately put the lions share into the bank or investments. Spend a little if you like, that’s fine. But be sure to get your investments handled first. Saving and then spending is the best of both worlds.

4. Buy a house - When you have a decent amount invested it is time to think about owning a house. A fixer-upper is a good place to start. A house will gain value over time. Don’t let the housing market scare you from never buying a house. The houses that are depressed right now will be worth a lot in the next 10 to 20 years.

5. Buy a modest dream house - Once, someone advised me to “buy as much house as the bank will loan you.” I think that is bad advice.

Sure you want to buy a house of quality, but be very conservative. When you stretch yourself out with high house payments, you aren’t compensating for when life comes along and whacks you on the head. People lose jobs, people get sick, sometimes a leaky roof needs a $10,000 repair. If you are stretched to the point of breaking on a house payment, you can’t afford much of anything else.

Therefore, it’s better to buy a house with a lot of wiggle room in the piggy bank.

6. Invest for long term, not short - Don’t buy into the latest trends. I’ve learned this one the hard way when I bought a bunch of Cisco stock in 2001. They don’t call it playing the stock market for nothing. If you are going to put your money on the line for an investment, think “how much will this be worth in 20 years?” If the answer is “not a lot” or “I don’t know”, then don’t invest. That means it’s not a good investment for you.

7. Find something to sell - Do you have a specialized skill at repairing something? You can purchase stuff that’s defective, fix it and sell it at a profit. I know a guy who collects old LCD monitors, repairs or tunes them up and resells them for $100 a piece. Often, he gets them for free, but then makes $100 a pop. Not bad money considering he makes less than $20 an hour when his day job is janitorial. This is pure profit that he socks away into the bank.

You too likely have specialized skills or knowledge you can sell at a profit. When you own your own product or service, your ability to profit skyrockets. It’s no longer dependent on the will or whim of employers.

For more info: If you are looking for some good books and resources on making personal profit, you might also want to check out JD’s Get Rich Slowly Post.

If you like this post, please vote for it on del.icious, StumbleUpon & Digg - I really appreciate it !

Master Time & Money By Accounting for It

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” ~ Edmund Burke
An article by Melissa Raffoni asks if you are spending your time the right way. Well are you?
It’s a good question.
Her concept here is mainly geared toward managers, but I think some of the points are good for anyone who wants to [...]

12 Memory Tricks for Better Recall

It’s funny how reliant I’ve become on technology to remember stuff. I have alerts to remind me of upcoming birthdays - at least 5 days in advance so I can arrange for gifts. I also have phone numbers, recipes, DIYs and other items that would be good to just remember stored in my [...]

Facing an Uncomfortable Past and Rolling Hard…

“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.” ~Golda Meir

I don’t like to revisit the past. If I move — I move. If I quit a job, I’m gone — that’s it. A prior home just doesn’t feel right — almost gloomy if I have to spend too much time there.

My friend says I “roll hard”. Meaning that when I roll, I roll on and do not return. If I quit a job, there’s no sense in me going back and hanging out. Back when I was in the dating scene, when I would stop dating someone, she would probably never see me again. I would fail miserably as stalker.

Part of me wonders if this is not true of all “forward thinkers”. I think about tomorrow, the next week, and the next year. Today is okay, but I’m always anticipating.

I like that quality about myself from the perspective of optimism. It tomorrow is going to be better than today, it is tough to get depressed. I am always optimistic about life working out well - even if it appears bleak at times.

But there is a weakness in forward thinking. Since today is better than all days in the past, my past feels bittersweet at best and miserable at worst. Not always… But sometimes.

I’ll sometimes look back to a time when I was having a great day and it feels, how should I say? Creepy. I think to myself “you call that happy? It’s not near as great as it is now.” It is sad to put it into writing because suddenly it feels like I’ll never have one of those “rocking chair moments” when I’m 85 years old. A rocking chair moment is where I am sitting on the porch with my wife as an old man reminiscing about the “good old days.” There is no way to reminisce about “the good old days” if there aren’t any.

I can see why some people run away and never go back. As if someone walks into your past life with an ax to chop up and defile the memories. You just don’t want to go back there.

Sometimes however, going back is required. A funeral of a loved one, a 100-year birthday, or a business trip… The first day of going back is hard, but he gets easier in the coming days.

Why? Because you aren’t really going back. Things are different. People have aged. The endless tick of the clock forges forward. Not even a bad memory can stop it. Today in Kansas is much different than it was 30 years ago. Progress has been made; they even have HDTV and computers! It’s just the filters through which I look are flawed.

The beauty of studying self-development is I have the tools where I can change those filters. Sometimes I do change them. But more often I just leave them be. I leave them alone because of the experience. After all, you can’t go around all day with a goofy grin on your face. There needs to be a balance — the yin and the yang. Awkwardness, sadness, and longing is part of the human experience. Accepting the feelings (as uncomfortable as they may be) is the strong thing to do.

Are you a forward thinker, past thinker or present thinker? How does that frame of mind affect your day to day life? Does it make it easier, more difficult or does it affect you in other ways?

Finding Your Most Important Task of the Day

If you have ever struggled with what you should do here’s a simple tip that can help.

We know we are supposed to first focus on our top priority.  But sometimes determining which is the top priority, that’s the $1,000,000 question.  

I know when I’m stuck between two or more top priorities, I get stressed and often it takes much longer to start.  So here’s a trick I use to sometimes find out what I should be doing so I can get to work.

It’s pretty simple really.

1.  Take the tasks that are on your immediate mind, write them all down.   You don’t have to spend an hour doing this, spend five minutes if you’ve got it.

2.  Rank each task for DIFFICULTY:   You might say that taking out the garbage is a 2, while sitting and writing 3 pages of your book is a 9.

3.  Then, simply pick the most difficult task on your list and get to work.

Odds are, the task you feel is most difficult is also your most important. We have a tendency to put off tasks that we feel are most difficult. But tough work is also what brings the highest value. We get more rewards for completing the tasks other We get a lot of benefits from doing the most important tasks on on our list. We might be paid higher, we might receive more love or more commitment or more energy.

Do you have any unique ways of divining your most important action of the day?  If so, feel free to let us know about it in the comments below. :)

Build Your Very Own Meditator — Or Not…

Ha ha ha… An funny retro piece over at Modern Mechanix shows a 1970 excerpt from the magazine Popular Mechanics. In it, they show how to build a meditator ‘tank’ for relaxation and reflection.
‘Bye for now, says the man of the house as he retreats into think tank….’
Aside from the contraption being huge, [...]

Links of Late…

Here are some pages that caught my interest in the past few days:

My favorite Text to speech app Text2Go is on sale at BitsduJour today.
RulesofThumb is a Cool site discussing little DIYs, How To’s for just about everything. Information from building you McDonalds to never get into a fistfight, this is a great place to [...]