In the first article, “Albert Einstein’s 7 lessons from the School of Hard Knocks“, author Brett Mckay talks about how Albert had fairly simple philosophies that governed his life and drove his success. He quoted Einstein saying, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

The second article, “Bruce Lee’s 6 ways to develop a kick-ass attitude”, writer Shilpan quotes Lee and affirms the value of that clarity of purpose, simplification and selfless giving. Bruce’s comment that “It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” - really brings out the natural core of success and for that matter, Zen.

Both are definitely worth a read.

One problem we face today, however is a lack of real social skills. Too many people sit behind a computer or a telephone all day, writing inflammatory posts or yelling at sales reps.

So as you go about your new social life, there is one skill you should learn before any other.

Listening

I know, it sounds dumb and simple. But guess what? If you learn to listen, people will naturally like you. You’ll meet more people, get better ideas, and basically enjoy life more as soon as you really learn to listen.

In the greatest social skills book of all time, (How to Win Friends and Influence People) Dale Carnegie tells the story that illustrates the point-

…we were at a dinner party. There must have been a dozen other guests, but I violated all the cannons of courtesy, ignored everyone else, and talked for hours to the botanist.

Midnight came. I said good night to everyone and departed. The botanist then turned to our host and paid me several flattering compliments. I was “most stimulating.” I was this and that, and he ended by saying I was a “most interesting conversationalist.”

An interesting conversationalist? Why I had said hardly anything at all. I couldn’t have said anything if I had wanted to without changing the subject, for I didn’t know anything more about botany than I knew about the anatomy of a penguin. But I had done this: I had listened intently. I had listened because I was genuinely interested. And he felt it. Naturally that pleased him. That kind of listening is one of the highest compliments we can pay anyone. “Few human beings.” wrote Jack Woodford in Strangers in Love, “few human beings are proof against the implied flattery of rapt attention.”

Go get out and do something, start a conversation, and then start listening.

Work

“Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

-Confucius

Enough cannot be said on the virtues of work, especially in regards to frugality. You cannot save that which you do not have, and for most of us, getting a job to pay for the needs of life is the norm. Labor and your contribution to society are vital to your sense of well-being.

However, there is a compulsion in society to get better paying jobs so we can get bigger houses, more cars and larger debts. Frequently, higher paying jobs do not produce higher levels of happiness and being. Small incomes can help you tightly manage your funds and gain a healthy respect for your earnings, deterring you from squandering it.

Find a job you like and make do with it. When you enjoy your work you are less likely to seek expensive, egoistic ways to fill the void of satisfaction. Lao Tsu offers some profound advice, ” The Way of the sage is to act but not compete.”

Reduce

There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.

There is no greater guilt than discontentment.

There is no greater disaster than greed.

Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires.

- Lao Tsu

Ours is a consumerist society, and as George Carlin satiricially points out, life is about the acquisition and storage of more and more stuff. Remember, all physical things have two prices - the cost of getting and the cost of keeping them. Cars need gas, houses insurance, food refrigeration. Your attitude in life distinguishes “needs” from “wants”. Reducing unnecessary expenses is just a step along the way to not spending in the first place. Eventually, finding deals and avoiding frivolous spending is just an extension of an inwardly frugal person.

Interestingly enough, with the Tao there seems to be an inverse relationship with how much stuff you own and how happy you are. Lao Tsu acknowledges, “He who is contented is rich,” and “He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.”

Give

If you must take, you must first give, this is the beginning of intelligence.

The sage does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself.

- Lao Tsu

Frugality isn’t about taking all you can and hoarding it like an unscrupulous miser, nor is it about being austere and starving yourself. The tao is about a balance of working, reducing your desires and giving back. When you manage money just for yourself, greed and selfishness cloud your judgment. When you structure your affairs with giving in mind, you’ll often find that you’ll have more than you thought.

If you approach your job or clients with the an attitude of ” how can I add value to your life?”, you’ll notice how much to gain you have by giving. Earl Nightingale states, “Our rewards will always be in exact proportion to our service.”

Frugality has a long term purpose of your choosing - greed or charity. To enrich the lives of people around you is a noble path indeed. It is the Tao.

For more information on the Tao,

Earl Nightingale said the “The most important element necessary to make an effective speech is to be interesting.” That’s great, but how are you supposed to do that?

One idea comes from Dale Carnegie’s “The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking.”

In this book, Carnegie tells story of Russell Conwell. Conwell was the founder of Temple University, which he financed by travelling and giving his famous “Acres Of Diamonds” speech. As you might suspect, it wasn’t the exact same speech each time. Conwell had a habit that helped him make every speech interesting to that location’s audience.

Here’s what it says in the book:

Russell Conwell’s famous lecture, “Acres of Diamonds,” was given nearly six thousand times. You would think that atalk repeated so often would become set in the speaker’s min, that no word or intonation would vary in delivery. That was note the case. He recognized that he had to make each successive audience feel that his talk was a personal, living thing created for it, and it alone. How did he succeed in keeping this interrelationship between speaker, speech, and audience alive from one speaking engagement to the next? “I visit a town or city,” he wrote, “and try to arrive there early enough to see the postmaster, the barber, the hotel manager, the principal of the schools, some of the ministers, and then go into the stores and talk with people, and see what has been their history, and what opportunities they had. Then I give my lecture and talk to those people about the subjects that apply to them locally.

Include a little bit of your audience in your talk, and they’ll pay attention every time.

If you are still interested in improving your public speaking, go check out this article titled “3 Steps to Better Public Speaking“

LeBouf makes the point that Americans in general are working more and more, and are not getting ahead of the financial game. We spend less and less time doing the things we want to do and we slip further and further into debt.

His solution he calls LeBouf’s Law, which is “Invest your time actively and your money passively.” While that may be a slightly egotistical name, it’s still great advice.

Investing your time actively means thinking about what you’re doing with the hours you have. Are you spending any quality time with your family? Are you able to relax? Are you taking time to learn things you want to learn?� He gives plenty of advice to help you start enjoying your life more.

Investing your money passively is very similar to the main theme of “The Automatic Millionaire.” That just means you set up a system that works for your risk tolerance and goals, and you let the system do the investing for you. He discusses several different investing philosophies that you may want to consider. Like in “The Automatic Millionaire” he suggests you automate it so that you don’t have to think about it very often.

All in all, it’s a great program. Well worth a listen.

It’s the universal challenge of modern living: If you have the money, you don’t have the time to really enjoy it. If you have plenty of time, you’re hurting for money. And most people could use a lot more of both. Michael LeBoeuf calls it the time/money trap, and in this down-to-earth and uniquely practical program, he shares a powerful, simple system that will empower you to escape it forever.

Here’s a couple of my thoughts on the subject of writing.

Good writing and good editing are really the same thing. The discussion of one automatically includes the other.

• The editing tip that has helped me the most is “read out loud what you write.” I’ve caught more errors in grammar and content doing this than any amount of reading it silently.
• As you write, don’t bother to go back and change things. Just let your mind spill out onto the page. Then go back and start cutting/revising. You’ll lose inspiration and train of thought if you stop to nitpick every sentence as you go.
• Cutting the bad or useless text is just as important as writing new text. Stephen King has written some great lines on cutting stuff out. In his book On Writing he says “first draft - 10% = second draft.”In a separate article, he also tells how he learned the importance of cutting. It was when King was in high school. He was working for a local newspaper. He had just turned in his first two stories. The editor had edited one of the pieces simply by scratching out many of the words.

  In King’s words:

  When Gould finished marking up my copy[...] he looked up and must have seen something on my face. I think he must have thought it was horror, but it was not: it was revelation.

  “I only took out the bad parts, you know,” he said. “Most of it’s pretty good.”

  “I know,” I said, meaning both things: yes, most of it was good, and yes, he had only taken out the bad parts. “I won’t do it again.”

  “If that’s true,” he said, “you’ll never have to work again. You can do this for a living.” Then he threw back his head and laughed.

  And he was right; I am doing this for a living, and as long as I can keep on, I don’t expect ever to have to work again.

I think another useful point to bring up is that you need to not just focus on one field in general (like internet business) jumping around from fad to fad and technique to technique, but settle on one specific thing and then work on that one thing until you get it.

P.T. Barnum wrote:

Engage in one kind of business only, and stick to it faithfully until you succeed, or until your experience shows that you should abandon it. A constant hammering on one nail will generally drive it home at last, so that it can be clinched. When a man’s undivided attention is centered on one object, his mind will constantly be suggesting improvements of value, which would escape him if his brain was occupied by a dozen different subjects at once. Many a fortune has slipped through a man’s fingers became he was engaged in too many occupations at a time. There is good sense in the old caution against having too many irons in the fire at once.

There are many reasons to learn new skills.

David Moldawer over at lifeclever.com suggested that everybody Learn a New Skill This Holiday. It may be too late now for the holidays, but learning a new skill can breathe energy into a life gone boring. David makes a compelling reason to spend the time learning something fun.

And face it, TV doesn’t “recharge your batteries,” it leaves you feeling more drained than ever.

-David Moldawer

David also gives 7 steps to new skill adoption, which are great tips for learning fun new things. They include: Choose what�s fun over what�s impressive, Start big, Set a goal, Join a group, Eyes off the prize, Go ahead, look silly, & Stop thinking.

Wordpress user jfree suggested that learning a new skill is a good way to keep your mind thinking better.

Learning a new skill works multiple areas of the brain. Your memory
comes into play, you learn new movements and you associate things
differently. Reading Shakespeare, learning to cook and building an
airplane out of tooth picks all will challenge your brain and give you
something to think about.

It’s odd how learning a totally unrelated skill can boost your other skills as well.

Deepak from deepakr.wordpress.com listed 5 Tips For Fast and Effective Learning on his blog. My favorite tip is #3 Think and work on paper. Scratching down notes and brainstorming on paper works much better for me than doing the same things on o computer. I remember it better, and my head puts new concepts together better. So as you’re learning a new skill, writing down notes on it is something worth trying.

Several success giants have left tips that can be helpful to us as well.

For example, Dale Carnegie wrote a book called Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business, which his wife Dorothy later updated and called The Quick & Easy Way to Effective Speaking.

The book teaches public speaking skills, but there are steps given at the beginning can be useful for learning any skill. He does a similar thing at the beginning of “How to Win Friends And Influence People,” too, where he teaches how to study. (see Studying the Masters if you are interested)

The steps he gives to learning a new skill are these:

1. Take heart from the experience of others
2. Keep your goal before you
3. Predetermine your mind to success
4. Seize every opportunity to practice

Let’s just take a quick look at those steps.

1. Take heart from the experience of others - I think this is important for two reasons. One, It is always helpful to know that people dumber, uglier, and less fun to be around than you have already mastered whatever skill it is you want to learn. Hey, if they can do it, so can you. Two, The fact that you are paying attention to other people’s experiences means you are learning from them.

2. Keep your goal before you - Remembering what you are trying to learn will keep you on track, remembering why will keep you going. Setting and reviewing your goals will remind you.

3. Predetermine your mind to success - Assume that you can learn your new skill, and be determined to do it.

4. Seize every opportunity to practice - This is probably the most important step to learning any skill. Practice is the proof of your desire to learn the new skill. It is also the only way you really get better.

Now go out there and learn a new skill.

Due to my extreme lack of any real marketing skills, I still have most of them. Anyway, I’d like to be rid of them. He normally sells them for a cool $100 (you can see it here), but I’ll let you buy one for $25. The link below will take you to Paypal if I still have copies left. If not, it’ll tell you I’m out. If you live in the U.S. I’ll pick up the shipping.

OR

If you don’t want to buy one, but you still want a copy, I’m willing to barter. Make me an offer in the comments and I’ll get back to you at the email address you use to post the comment.

Rules:

1. I won’t trade for anything illegal or immoral. (ex: no cocaine or porn)

2. You pay for shipping whatever you want to trade. I’ll pay for shipping the “Earn an Income” dvd to you.

3. I’m open to pretty much anything. Jazz CDs, Sci-fi DVDs, Doc Savage novels, spacepens…

Internet Business maven James Brausch is doing his best to be a modern Og Mandino. On his blog, he’s been releasing a series of fictionalized journal entries that describe how he went from being a drug addict and homeless to finding success and freedom. He has stated that he has compressed the time period and rearranged the events a little, but that the basics of the story are indeed true.

You can read the background on what he is doing here. http://www.jamesbrausch.com/?p=855

Here’s a list of his current fictionalized journal entries. You will need to sign up to receive updates on his blog to get the password. That’s a pretty cheap price to pay, if you ask me.

October 23

October 24

October 25

October 26

October 27

October 28

The idea of having a “mastermind” or “brain trust” is not new. Virtually all successful people have had one in some form or another. So what if you could have Ben Franklin be a part of yours?

Ben Franklin’s Mastermind

Napoleon Hill certainly wasn’t the first to discover this technique. Ben Franklin formed his own way back in 1727. It was called the “Junto.” In his Autobiography, he writes about it:

I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, [1727] I had form’d most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased.

Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory;…

Guidelines For Joining Ben’s Mastermind

One of the things Ben said about his mastermind is that they should be able to stand up and answer the following questions correctly. He also included the correct answers, just in case they weren’t obvious.

1. Have you any particular disrespect to any present members? Answer. I have not.
2. Do you sincerely declare that you love mankind in general, of what profession or religion soever? Answer. I do.
3. Do you think any person ought to be harmed in his body, name, or goods, for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship? Answer. No.
4. Do you love truth for truth’s sake, and will you endeavor impartially to find and receive it yourself, and communicate it to others? Answer. Yes.

Suggested Topics:

Here’s the list of suggested topics that Ben produced to review on the morning of each meeting, so that by meeting time, you’d have something to say.

1. Have you met with any thing in the author you last read, remarkable, or suitable to be communicated to the Junto? particularly in history, morality, poetry, physics, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge?

2. What new story have you lately heard agreeable for telling in conversation?

3. Hath any citizen in your knowledge failed in his business lately, and what have you heard of the cause?

4. Have you lately heard of any citizen’s thriving well, and by what means?

5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?

6. Do you know of any fellow citizen, who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation? or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?

7. What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately observed or heard? of imprudence? of passion? or of any other vice or folly?

8. What happy effects of temperance? of prudence? of moderation? or of any other virtue?

9. Have you or any of your acquaintance been lately sick or wounded? If so, what remedies were used, and what were their effects?

10. Who do you know that are shortly going [on] voyages or journeys, if one should have occasion to send by them?

11. Do you think of any thing at present, in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind? to their country, to their friends, or to themselves?

12. Hath any deserving stranger arrived in town since last meeting, that you heard of? and what have you heard or observed of his character or merits? and whether think you, it lies in the power of the Junto to oblige him, or encourage him as he deserves?

13. Do you know of any deserving young beginner lately set up, whom it lies in the power of the Junto any way to encourage?

14. Have you lately observed any defect in the laws, of which it would be proper to move the legislature an amendment? Or do you know of any beneficial law that is wanting?

15. Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?

16. Hath any body attacked your reputation lately? and what can the Junto do towards securing it?

17. Is there any man whose friendship you want, and which the Junto, or any of them, can procure for you?

18. Have you lately heard any member’s character attacked, and how have you defended it?

19. Hath any man injured you, from whom it is in the power of the Junto to procure redress?

20. In what manner can the Junto, or any of them, assist you in any of your honourable designs?

21. Have you any weighty affair in hand, in which you think the advice of the Junto may be of service?

22. What benefits have you lately received from any man not present?

23. Is there any difficulty in matters of opinion, of justice, and injustice, which you would gladly have discussed at this time?

24. Do you see any thing amiss in the present customs or proceedings of the Junto, which might be amended?

I find it interesting how many of the questions have to do with service to others. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.

There, now go and have Ben Franklin direct your next mastermind meeting.

More Info

If you’re interested in reading more about masterminds, there’s about a million places to look. Here are but a few of the many blogs that have spoken on the subject (including the ones I trackbackked ).

• http://www.lipsciences.com
• http://www.meetandgrowrich.net
• http://www.emomsathome.com
• http://www.businessblogconsulting.com
• http://www.ruleof5.com
• http://articles-and.info
• http://ceoconsultant.com
• http://resourcecityconnections.com/blog
• http://zaletabakman.ca
• http://www.lesliecardinal.com
• http://blogs.nassonu.edu/theanand
• http://www.taoofprosperity.com
• http://www.adversityuniversityblog.com
• http://www.steveshapiro.com
• http://www.internetnewbiediary.com/wordpress
• http://peggymurrah.com/blog
• http://www.jpmaroney.net
• http://www.ricksegel.com/blog
• http://www.seanmarler.com

It seems like most people never really try to come up with solutions for themselves, they just do whatever everyone else does, or rather whatever they’ve heard that everyone else does. And when that doesn’t work, the average person gives up.

It reminds me of a story.

Tony Robbins tells a it in one of his CD sets (this is not a direct quote mind you) where a guy is with Tony and tells him:

“I’ve tried everything.”

To which Tony replies, “Everything? There nothing else you can try?”

“Well I’ve tried a lot of things…”

“How many?”

“Well, really just one thing.”

“And you’ve done it over and over and over…”

When you force yourself to really think creatively, it’s amazing what you come up with. When you don’t, you just come up with the same old stuff, and you get nowhere.

First off, here’s some of Napoleon Hill’s tips from Think And Grow Rich

• Ally yourself with a group of as many people as you may need for the creation, and carrying out of your plan, or plans for the accumulation of money…
• Before forming your “Master Mind” alliance, decide what advantages, and benefits, you may offer the individual members of your group, in return for their cooperation. No one will work indefinitely without some form of compensation. No intelligent person will either request or expect another to work without adequate compensation, although this may not always be in the form of money.
• Arrange to meet with the members of your “Master Mind” group at least twice a week, and more often if possible, until you have jointly perfected the necessary plan, or plans for the accumulation of money.
• Maintain PERFECT HARMONY between yourself and every member of your “Master Mind” group. If you fail to carry out this instruction to the letter, you may expect to meet with failure. The “Master Mind” principle cannot obtain where PERFECT HARMONY does not prevail.

In my mind, a master mind group is less about bonding (although you do need to be able to get along) and more about holding each other’s feet to the fire. There is no success without action.

I think one of the reasons Napoleon Hill suggests that you meet so often at first is just so that you can help each other brainstorm quickly and get a plan down so that you can get to the “doing” of your plan.

So what’s the most important attribute to develop if you want to be a part of a successful master mind group? I’d say listening. I’ve blogged about listening before, and it really is a lost art. After all, most people can work out a solution to whatever problem they have if they just get a chance to tell someone who’ll sit quietly and nod.

Advice is fine, but listening is divine.

And if I used to have your link in my sidebar, remind me so I can put it back. They all got lost in the collapse.