Skate to Where the Puck is Going

"I always skate to where the puck is going, not where it's been." -Wayne Gretsky

I always try to follow my own advice. If you see something that is working, do more of that. In your money making endeavors, you will find a lot of things that just don't work. You will find a few things that sort of work and even fewer things that work really well. You would be smart to continue to do the things that make money and if you are capable, you will do more of those things.

Of the things that are sort of working, you will want to adjust what you are doing and try to make them work better. You want to make those ideas make money for you. If you can't figure out why they are only making a little bit or just breaking even, maybe it is time to set that idea aside and skate towards something else that might have a higher return.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. I heard somewhere that the average person has at least three new ideas per day. The problem is that we don't act on them. We need to find a way to determine the profitability on those ideas and act on the ones that look like they will make money.

Do you have a pocket notebook? You should have one in your pocket at all times. Whenever you have an idea, you should write it down. I find if I don't write the ideas I have down, I forget them within an hour. For some reason, our ideas create themselves in our short term memory and most of them never make it to our long term memory.

A couple of times per week, during your slow time, take the time to look through your ideas and figure out which ideas you can act upon. This will lead you to more creative ideas.

Contribute to the Success of Others

"Our own success, to be real, must contribute to the success of others." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Have you ever noticed when you are trying to do things for yourself, you feel either the stress of failure or the desire to procrastinate, but when you are doing something for someone else, something without expecting anything in return, you have a greater desire to finish what You have started.

I like the idea of helping others. Many of the most successful people made their riches by helping other people get what they want. You can read about people like Henry Ford who wanted to help people get around faster without relying on a living creature. Horses get tired, but the automobile does not.

You can read about Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison who both were inventors who made things for people who needed glasses or light bulbs or pot belly stoves or a way to listen to the recorded voice. When you make a product or provide a service for a large group of people who need or want it, there will be a fortune waiting for you.

Zig Ziglar Always says "If you help enough people get what they want, You will get what you want." You could treat this statement almost like a law of life. It happens every time I see it put into use. The goal is not to think about the money. Spend your time thinking about how you can implement the idea. If the idea is valuable to people, the money will find it's way to you.

Time or Money

"Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time." -Jim Rohn

This is something that we often forget. Then we wonder where the time went when we have wasted it watching TV or surfing the internet or whatever other pointless activities we do in life. Time is something that is finite. We only have so much of it. The problem is, we have no idea how much of it we will have.

I am a strong believer in making your time count. Make sure you know what you want to do in your life. Make sure you know who you want to spend that time with. Then when you get to the end of your life, you won't be sad to find that you have wasted the time you have been give.

Do you know what you want to do with your life? Even if you do or you don't, take a few moments to sit down and make a list of all the things you want to accomplish in your life.I like the website called 43things.com. The site allows you to make goals. Then it helps you accomplish those goals.

After you know what you want to do, take a few minutes to plan out the upcoming month, to figure out how you can get certain steps accomplished to get closer to those large goals. Then the only thing you will have to do to make those goals happen is to get out there and do them.

Making a Life

We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give. ~Winston Churchill

I see people who live in one of these two ways. It is rare that I find someone who can do both effectively. They either live for the hard to earn dollar, or they live to help others around them. It is hard to focus on both of these at the same time. They tend to fight against each other.

Most people are worried about what they have to do to make money to keep a roof over their head and food in the mouths of their family. They don't usually have the time to think about other people. They don't take the time to stop to see what other people around them might need. They are only worried about themselves, which they have the perfectly reasonable right to do. They should think about their family first. That is their priority.

I have seen other people give away their lives to help those in need. I have seen people give away food and go hungry because some stranger looked like they needed it more than they felt they needed it. I have seen people use the majority of their paycheck to pay others people's light bill and never have any savings of their own. They have a heart of a giver, the heart to help those they feel are less fortunate than themselves. The problem is they never get anywhere in life because they give away everything.

I think there should be a happy median. In fact I think there should be a priority to how you deal with life. I think you should make as much money as you can, use that money to pay for your life, make yourself debt free and set yourself up so you don't have to worry about bills, then use whatever is left to help as many people as you can.

I am not saying you can't help other people along the way. You should have a giving heart, but I think you should think of yourself and your family before you go out and give away what you have earned to make your life easier.

Whose to say that we could not give other things other than money while we were getting our lives straightened out. We can always give of our time. We have 24 hours in every day. We should give some of those hours to helping other people freely and without expecting anything in return. Sure time is money, but time is all we have. Se can always make unlimited amounts of money. We can only give up to 24 hours each day. We might as well make that time count for something.