Tim Ferriss’ Productivity Video

Tim Ferriss is the author of the book “Four Hour Work Week”. Based on the reviews I’ve read on the internet about it, he redefines what it means to be productive. As a life-long procrastinator, when I first heard about the book, I planned on getting it…someday. It’s not that I don’t think I need a book on productivity. It’s just that I didn’t think it would teach me anything more than that the other gazillion books on productivity out there.

But a link to this video starring Tim Ferris was forwarded to me via email and I have to say that it convinced me to get off my tush and buy the book. The video is worth watching but if you are short on time, I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting the main points.
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How to Set Goals and Achieve Them

The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score. -Bill Copeland

Goal setting and achievement is a necessary part of living a fabulous life. Goals give us purpose and meaning. At the simplest level, goal setting gives us something to do. Without goals, we would wander, aimlessly, through life going wherever fate decided to take us. For some people, this is good enough. For the majority of us, though, this leads to an unsatisfactory life filled with work we hate and people who aggravate us.

But goal setting does more than lead us towards more fulfilling lives. Goal setting helps us filter out distractions and make better decisions. For example, you want to buy a house within two years. The desire to achieve this goal would inspire you to spend your money more wisely. Instead of splurging at a fast food joint, you would make the frugal choice of taking lunch to work and investing the money you saved into a high interest savings account.

Here are a few things that I’ve learned about goal setting that I think will help you in your quest to shine your light and live a fabulous life.
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Off Grid Living?

I’ve decided that I will learn how to live off grid. I have actually had this thought for a few years now (actually since Bush came into office) but the seriousness of this was pressed upon me when I read an article that talked about the future.

In the article, the author wrote about how wonderful it is to have such great technology like the cell phone and the wonderful things you could do with it but speculated that there really was no guarantee that the infrastructure for these things will exist in the future and thus rendering them useless.

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The Act of Creation

I believe that anything in life, if placed in the proper context, can become a life lesson. After about four and a half hours of organizing my computer, I decided to take a break and look for desktop wallpapers to go with my, now, sparkling clean and organized computer space. As I’m making my way through the Google Image Search, I come upon a YouTube video of an artist creating a picture of Arwen and Aragorn.

It was an enlightening experience watching this video. Most people, including myself, take for granted the things that exist. Things are just automagically there when we want/need them. We fail to appreciate the time and effort it takes to “materialize” these things.

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How to Break Bad Habits

Previously, I wrote about a bad habit of mine where I was literally sleeping my life away. I was always late to work because I would sleep past the threshold of time when I needed to get up and ready. Most times I would wear a colorful scarf on my head and skip putting on makeup just so I could make it to work at a reasonable “lateness”. After work, I would vegetate in front of the television or aimlessly surf the internet before going to bed. On my days off I would take long naps. I estimate that I slept between ten to sixteen hours a day and would still be tired.

By December of 2007, I began to wage war against my apathetic self and the first place I attacked was my poor sleeping habits. I imposed a maximum sleeping time restriction of eight hours. Afternoon naps were forbidden. I set a bed time and an awake time that had to be kept without exception.

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Ways to Rekindle Your Self-Motivation

Last week, a co-worker of mine confided in me that she wanted to quit. The main problem was that this was a second job for her; one she had gotten to help pay off the stack of bills piled up on her kitchen table. Her goal was to pay off her debt so she could get a better interest rate when she refinanced her home but the struggle of working two jobs had pretty much destroyed her self-motivation. She didn’t like working two jobs but she wanted to preserve her credit score.

I didn’t know what to say to her. Unfortunately, I’m one of those people who only think of something good to say after the fact. This time, though, I was in luck. Our shifts overlapped and after about a half an hour of thinking about her situation, I presented her with my brilliant solution that would rekindle her self-motivation.
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How to Make a Billion Dollars in One Easy Step

People like to try and make you think that making money is this hard and complicated thing. It really isn’t and anyone who says differently is probably trying to sell you something.

In all actuality, making, say a billion dollars is quite possibly the easiest thing you could do in life. It is so easy that you can do it one step and I won’t even charge you to share with you what that step is.

How to Make a Billion Dollars

Step One

Convince one billion people to give you one dollar each. Since there are approximately 6.5 billion people in the world, finding enough people shouldn’t be that hard.

Alternatively you can convince one person to give you one billion dollars and to make life even easier for you, here is a link to a list of the world’s billionaires.

Now I know you are probably thinking that I’m having a great laugh at your expense. You would be partly right. The fact is that there is a very basic and simple business lesson to be learned from this which is that when it comes right down to it all of the financial goals you have in life depend on the willingness of others to share their money with you.

It does not matter if you are providing a product or service or if you are looking for charity, the ideology is the same. Why do you think businesses spend so much money in advertising and so much time building their reputation? In a world where people have a multitude of options literally at their fingertips, they, the businesses, are trying to convince as many people as they can to give them a dollar.

If your financial goals seem overwhelming just break it down. I’ve even provided a cool chart that I made myself to give you a starting point. Now what you do to convince people to give you money is entirely up to you but know that making money really is that simple.