SELF IMPROVEMENT AND MOTIVATION

"Thank you." These two simple, monosyllabic words mindlessly slip off our tongues every day, almost reflexively. We utter them so much they've all but become meaningless, out and about, at home and especially at the office. If you merely grunt a quick, curt "thank you" to a colleague who just did you a solid, and then say nothing more, you might as well say "thanks for nothing." "This one especially applies to bosses, who often feel, 'I don't have to thank my employees because I'm paying them,'"as I mentioned to somemagazines tells  during a phone interview. "It goes a long way, starting at the top, where leaders can model gratitude, and not with employee-of-the-month programs that can cause animosity. It could be as simple as taking a few seconds to pop your head into someone's office and properly saying 'thank you' to them for expending their life-energy to make your business successful." Notice the ope...

Jim Rohn, the renowned management guru from the US once said, “Invest more in yourself than in your career because the most skilled and competent people are NEVER unemployed”. I certainly think that this is very, very good advice indeed and is something that everyone in the workforce should take heed of. To ‘invest in yourself’ first and foremost means treating yourself as an asset!! You must accept the fact that you are an asset either to your company, to your family, spouse etc. You must therefore do everything you can in order to increase the value of this asset. Improving your skills, academic qualifications and health for example will most certainly mean that the value of this asset goes up. You will then reap high returns as the effort you put into consistently improving yourself will certainly play a role in determining your destiny and quality of life in the future. Some simple ways to invest in yourself are as follows: a.  Invest in your health.  This is paramount as ...

Who’s your hero? In 2008, 13 year old Joseph Schooling got to meet his hero, Michael Phelps, when the Olympian visited Singapore prior to the Beijing Olympics. Today, 8 years later, Joseph just made history by beating Michael to Gold in the 100m Butterfly finals - the first Singaporean to ever make (let alone win) an Olympic swimming final. After meeting his hero as a young teenager, Joseph said “Michael Phelps may be my idol, but I just want to make my own career.” He then became fully committed to his swimming and, 3 years later in 2011 Joseph beat Michael’s age-group (15-16 years) time over the 100 yards butterfly. At the time, Joseph said, "It's been a target of mine and I'm really happy to do that. It is a huge boost… Hopefully, I can get more of his records." In 2012, at 17, he finally got his dream of swimming in the same race as Michael, saying it was "a tick off on my bucket list.” That was the year Joseph first qualified for the Olympics in London, but ...

Hello once again fellow entrepreneur friend colleague and all out there. Today we have a very interesting article based on an interview I had last week.  When I think about this accomplishment, i told myself it has taken about ten years to get to that level of expertise in my presenting skills. This led us to discuss something I reiterate numerous times, that success is   never an overnight phenomenon , and it’s always the long distance runners who win in the end. Endurance Beats Speed In many areas of business, you hear people talking about overnight success, but  business and wealth creation  needs to be committed to for the long term.  I have has studied wealth creation for decades. The penny dropped after one of his mentors asked him to read the  BRW Rich 200  and start  studying billionaires , rather than listening to people who talk about making money. He noticed all these guys were 50+, and only started to really crack money game in the mid...

There is a common misconception that a business presentation must be crammed with information, serious and dry. It seems the higher you go in the corporate world; the more you are expected to “confuse to impress”. This results in presentations that are long, verbose, poorly structured and capable of inducing prolonged somnolence! I believe every presentation is a ‘sales pitch’ of some kind. You may not be selling a product or service, but you want to persuade your audience to take on board your message, take action or change their attitude/views/ minds on a subject. Because of this, every presentation is a balance between entertainment and information. Entertainment is simply the way you get your message across, information is the message itself. Too much information and you confuse your audience or worse still, they switch off. Too much entertainment without the information and your audience feels cheated that they have wasted their valuable time. Good speech structure helps...

*Who is poor ?* *A wealthy woman goes to a saree store and tells the boy at the counter* *Bhaiya, show some cheap sarees. It is my son's marriage and I have to give to my maid."* *After sometime, the maid comes to the saree shop and tells the boy at the counter* *Bhaiya, show some expensive sarees. I want to gift my Mistress on her son's marriage"* *Poverty is in the mind or in the purse?* *Who is rich ?* *Once, a lady with her family was staying in a 3-star hotel for a picnic.* *She was the mother of a 6 month old baby.* *"Can I get 1 cup of milk?" asked the lady to the 3-star hotel manager.* "•*"Yes madam", he replied, "But it will cost you money."* *"No problem", said the lady.* *While driving back from hotel, the child was hungry again.* *They stopped at a road side tea stall and took milk from the tea vendor.* *"How much?”* *she asked the tea vendor*. *"Madam, we don't charge money for kid's milk...

Choosing a career path (or changing one) is, for most of us, a confusing and anxiety-riddled experience. Many will tell you to “follow your passion” or “do what you love,” but as Cal Newport argues in  So Good They Can’t Ignore You , this is not very useful advice. When I graduated from college, I liked lots of things. But love? Passion? That would have been seriously overstating it. We all want to choose a career that will make us happy, but how can we know what that will be? Research suggests that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how they will feel when doing something in the future. It’s not hard to find someone who started out thinking that they would love their chosen profession, only to wind up hating it. In fairness, how are you supposed to know if you will be happy as an investment banker, or an artist, or a professor, if you haven’t actually done any of these things yet? Who has ever, in the history of mankind, taken a job and had it turn out exa...