Archive for the 'Personal Development' Category

Being Weird Is a Good Thing

Since I began my journey of obtaining the perfect life, I’ve noticed a strong trend that keeps getting more noticeable as time goes on.

What I’ve noticed is this: The more successful I become in terms of wealth, health, and happiness, the more strange people think I’m becoming.

For example, instead of “living to eat” like most people do, I “eat to live”. The difference between these is that I eat what is going to make me the leanest out of all the choices I have at that time. If this means eating a piece of chicken and some green beans at 10 a.m., then that’s what I’m going to eat.

I don’t get caught up in the illusion of “social norms”. Why follow what the majority of the people are doing when the majority of people are fat, unhappy, and poor?!

Some people think I’m weird because I invest my extra money instead of buying more clothes or going on more vacations. The funny thing is, I think THEY are weird because I can’t quite comprehend why someone would spend money they didn’t need to spend instead of investing it and securing their financial future.

By adhering to social norms, you are subjecting yourself to living the life that everyone else is living. Remember that it’s the little decisions made frequently that determine the outcome of our lives.

If you decide to eat a cheeseburger instead of a piece of chicken, that’s probably an extra 400 calories. If you do something similar for each meal each day (assuming you still only eat 3 meals a day) that’s an extra pound of fat on your body every 3 days.

Over the course of a few decades, that adds up to you being 40-50-60 pounds overweight. Being overweight causes you to feel lousy, die a lot sooner than you should, and enjoy your life much less.

Unfortunately, doing what I’ve just mentioned is now the social norm. If you opt not to go out to eat because you’re eating healthy, people will literally laugh at you (trust me).

Sometimes you must learn to develop a think skin if you’re going to do something outside the norm. People feed off those who are different, even if the people who are different are the ones living the lives everyone should be living.

The scary part of these social norms is that they’re getting much worse. I served a lady the other night who was an easy 15-20 pounds overweight, and I overheard her saying that all her friends tell her she’s too skinny.

What!?!?!

It’s amazing that telling somebody they’re too skinny is socially acceptable, but how often do you hear people telling others they’re too fat? Making fun of a fat person is considered mean, even though you may have the intention of making them aware of the fact that they have dozens of health risks by virtue of being overweight.

As a side note, being 10 or 15 pounds underweight is MUCH more healthy for you than being 10-15 pounds overweight.

Make it a point to start doing everything a little backwards. Start being more unorthodox in everything you do. Why do only about 5% of stock traders make most of the money? They don’t follow the crowd – they follow the charts.

If you can teach yourself to spot out social norms and resolve to do the exact opposite, you will move ahead much quicker in life. The difference between an amateur and a master is that amateurs copy other amateurs, while the master copies from other masters.

Be the master of your own life.



Managing Mental Energy

Stress is one of the biggest contributors to the dozens and dozens of health problems the world sees today. Unfortunately, most people think they should work, work, work in order to get ahead. They take pride in the fact that they have no time for themselves, and very often no time for their families.

However, being constantly busy shouldn’t be one of your goals. It’s not going to help you achieve your perfect life any quicker because your health and happiness will be shot by the time you reach financial independence. You’ll then have to spend all of your time learning how to unwind and relax your mind and body, which is harder than it sounds.

I know I talk about making sure you stay focused on your work and not getting lazy, but there is a fine line between being lazy and learning to relax. My advice is to simply work until you can notice your skills are slowly wearing thin. Then you can take a break and do whatever you’d like that you love to do until you’re refreshed enough to start working again.

I’m a big offender of working a little too hard. For instance I’m writing this a half-hour before I’m leaving to work a 12 hour shift. I’m only writing it now because I had a goal to get a post written today and I hate not sticking to my goals.

However, I still manage to find time to go out and have fun. My girlfriend and I go out every single Friday but we also spend a little more “us” time throughout the week once or twice. We might be going to the Philadelphia Zoo a week today, so that will be my break for the week (I love animals!).

The key to unlocking the fast track to your perfect life is that you create a balance in your life. Most people think of “burnout” as physical stress. In all reality its your mind that is getting too tired of running full speed all the time. Your body only plays a minimal role in burnout.

Over at genius types, Brian Lee has written a review about the book ” The Power of Full Engagement “.

He bought the book hoping to help him learn more about self-determinism, but was astounded when he realized how much it helped him balance out his life and manage his energy like professional athletes can somehow learn how to do.

I suggest at the very least you check out his review, and spend a little time at his website. His is one of the few websites I have a subscription and I’d recommend subscribing to his website as well as mine. If you haven’t subscribed to mine yet – shame on you! :-P

Tomorrow I’m going to try and add a “contact me” page so you can give me some feedback on my posts (positive or negative – everything helps) or ask me any questions you might have.

Today’s Sunday, it’s meant to be a day of relaxation. Make it your day that you get to relax your mind and body and just have a little fun!

Your perfect life awaits,

Jeremy

PS – I’d love to know what you do to unwind after a stressful day, or simply what you do to balance your life. Write a comment and let me know, it will benefit everyone!



The Simplest Rule Of Success

Rules govern our lives in almost every situation. There are church rules, social rules, and business rules that are supposed to be followed in order for you to achieve whatever it is you’re looking for.

Whether you follow the rules or not is completely up to you, and it’s obvious that a lot of people don’t follow the rules. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if you’re doing it for the right reasons, but in the case of sticking to the following rule – you should make it a point to ingrain it in the back of your head and live by it every single day.

The Rule of Progression For Success

If you really want to become successful in whatever area of life you’re trying to improve, you must learn that without constantly tweaking your approach to make it a better one, you are going to have a very hard time progressing.

There’s a phenomenon that occurs in the beginning of any type of new venture in which you see major changes at first, followed by a lull in action. For example, when you first start a strength-building program it’s very common to see increases of 20% or more in the first month. However, once your body re-adapts itself to the stimulus it then slows down progress – which leads to frustration. This is the point where most people quit.

The reason most people lift for years and never seem to get very much stronger is because they don’t follow the rule of progression.

Progression is the key to succeeding in anything you want to achieve in life. Whether it’s perfect health, financial independence, amazing relationships, or happiness that can only be described as pure bliss. You must start at the beginning and progress to the final goal.

The key to progression is making sure you have an ultimate goal in mind, and tracking your progress along the way to make sure you keep pushing yourself to hit higher limits.

For example, my first “major” goal in getting my own financial independence was getting to $300/month of passive income. Once I hit that, I assessed the situation and looked at opportunities that I could utilize in order to hit my next major goal, which is $500/month.

I realized that I could continue to build www.crazyfortea.com which is bringing me the most money, start something else on the internet, perform technical analysis on stocks to gain capital to fund another investment, or do real estate.

From there I realized that I was the most comfortable with doing things online. Although I’m by no means a “techie” I can usually figure things out without too much difficulty. I think I’m a decent writer (hopefully you agree ;) ), and I enjoy writing – so that was my choice.

After I realized I could most likely do the best with another online venture, I decided to start this blog. I was going to strictly work on my other website but I realized that if I was more strict about my time I could manage to own both. Although it’s not making me income yet, in the future I’m going to slowly be adding monetization models to the website so it creates yet another revenue stream for me.

My girlfriend mentioned to me recently that she’s noticed a big improvement in our relationship since I started this blog, so to me that’s worth much more than money can bring. In essence I’m progressing my happiness, relationships, and finances with one venture!

As long as you can track your progress, you can progress in anything you do. If you are trying to lift a certain amount of weight make sure that at each workout you add another pound, another rep, less time between sets, or any other factor that increases what you’ve done compared to your last workout.

If you’re trying to improve happiness, seek to find more and more things that make you happy and be around those things more often. Go for more walks, do more hobbies, tell your girlfriend/wife she is beautiful, learn to meditate, or whatever else would make you more happy.

Each day of your life, you either progress or decline. You only have a certain number of days on earth so in my eyes, stagnant days are declining days because nothing was accomplished or improved.

Make it a point in your life to progress in something every single day, even if it’s just by a fraction of a percentage. The only way to obtain your perfect life is by constant progression – until you finally reach your ultimate goal and live the life of your dreams.

So how do YOU track your own progression in life?

Your perfect life awaits,

Jeremy




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