I can’t believe that a month has flown by since my last post, I have broken one of the cardinal rules of successful blogging – infrequent posts.

What happened to break my commitment to publish 1 post every week? All sorts of urgent things, like spending a week to get my accounting programme up to date so that I could finalise my tax return. Very hot dry weather required many hours on the farm to set up irrigation. My better half going to England for 2 weeks resulting in me having to remember how to cook, do laundry, housework and look after 5 cats, a dog and 3 horses.

Thank goodness Sue does not go away very often, but when she does, I really do appreciate how much she does to keep our home running smoothly.

I could provide a great list of excuses but the point is that life just got in the way, the same reason most of us don’t always achieve what we set out to do.

We have a choice as to how we spend each of the 960 minutes available each day (allowing 8 hours sleep). I am guilty of not using some of those minutes for posting more content on this blog. Given that a blog post should take me less than 60 minutes, no matter how many other urgent things needed attention, there is no excuse.

Changing subject, many readers have asked which theme I am using for this blog. It is the “Snowblind” theme, it’s available under “Themes” on the Wordpress dashboard, is free, easy to install and works well. Other readers asked if I set up this blog myself, yes, I did.

I use www.GoDaddy.com ” to purchase my domain names and host all my websites. It is very easy to install wordpress with GoDaddy and if you are stuck, the support people will talk you through the installation.

No commercials this week, now that I am back on track, I will have something interesting to share next week.

Wishing you success with all your endeavours.

It seems most people I talk to are always trying to be more productive and get more done in the same 24 hours we all have each day.

Here’s a very useful social media tool that saves me a huge amount of time. I use it to schedule posts to twitter and Facebook, find followers, follow and unfollow people and much more.

It’s called Pluggio (formerly Tweetminer).

Watch this 3 minute video then try it out – the basic version is free.

No I don’t earn a commission from Pluggio, I use it because it is good.

Wishing you succes in all your endeavours.

Here we are in the opening days of Spring. Are you one of
the 8% of Americans who successfully achieved their New
Year’s resolutions? If not, would you like to be?

It doesn’t matter whether you want to lose weight, reduce or
eliminate stress or depression, sleep better, improve
memory, or break a bad habit like smoking or nail-biting!
You can be successful when you eliminate the need for
willpower by benefiting from hypnosis and NLP.

My friend Alan B. Densky, CH, an internationally known
hypnosis expert with 32 years of experience, offers hypnosis
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of the 8% who will be successful at reaching their goals!

As an Easter / Passover present to you, Alan wants to send
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Wishing you success in all your endeavours

For me, life is too short to spend hours watching TV, so I catch the news in the evening, and occasionally watch a movie. That’s been the pattern for years until coverage of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver started.

There is something much more fascinating and compelling about sport at the Olympic level than at other major events. Is it because the athletes are striving for not only their personal glory, but also their country’s honour?

Is it because for many athletes it is the culmination of 4 or more years of dedication to a relentless training schedule, fighting injury and pain and often putting the rest of their lives on hold?

Or is it because of the publicity and media saturation? Or the sheer number of different events in a short space of time?

Whatever the reason, watching the events provides many valuable lessons for entrepreneurs.

Firstly the dedication and commitment to hours of training over a long period, for most of that time, with no certainty that they will qualify for their national team.

Without a clear goal and a vision of winning a medal, how many people will maintain that degree of commitment for years?

Contrast this with so many would-be Network and Internet Marketers who are unable to maintain that level of commitment to their business for even a few weeks or months.

Secondly, focus. Focusing during years of training, on only what is critical to achieveing the level of fitness and skill to put in a world class performance. Ignoring distractions.

At the start and during the event, being able to focus 100% on winning that medal, ignoring pain, the weather or fear of failure. Even to the extent of competing with 4 broken ribs as was the case with an athlete in the 15km ski event.

Thirdly, not relaxing for even a blink of an eye until that goal is achieved, how many races were won by a few hundredths of a second?
The difference between Gold medal and 5th place in the womens skeleton race was inches.

Many countries award cash bonuses to their medal winners, so a five hundredths of a second gap between Gold and Silver could cost the second place finisher up to $5000 depending on their National Olympic organisation’s generosity.

That works out to $6 million dollars a minute!

Of course, we understand that Olympians are competing for the achievement and honour, not the cash.

Just for a moment, look at that in terms of our businesses, if a few minutes of extra effort, or a few ounces of extra energy every hour could generate even a small fraction of that sort of return, would we make that extra phone call, spend more time improving our sales copy or perhaps write an extra blog post each week?

Makes you think doesn’t it?

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

According to an article by David Frum in the Saturday edition of National Post, the director of the Congressional Budget office, Doug Elmendorf, warned this week that the economic recovery will be slow and that unemployment numbers in the USA will hover around 10% for the rest of 2010 and probably not get down to 5% until 2014.

What this means is that things are not going to get better quickly and if you are already struggling to survive financially, you cannot afford to wait and hope for the best.

Waiting and hoping are two of the most common but most useless activities known to mankind. The only more demoralising activity after waiting and hoping is looking back later and playing the “if only I had done something about it” game.

Any positive action, no matter how small, is the first step to improving your situation. Believe me, I have had to start again more than once in my life (see my story on the “About me” page). Improvement in any situation can only come with action.

There is a saying in self improvement that “What we focus on expands”
This is absolutely true, focusing on our curent state of misery, debt and hardship ensures that we stay in that state. Focusing on what we still have, still can do and what we want to achieve, lets us move forward.

I know how difficult it can be, but if you are still breathing on your own, you have the means to do something. If you have a roof over your head and basic food on the table, you are more fortunate than millions of people in the world.

The road to a better future can start with something as simple as a commitment to start walking for 30 minutes a day.

If you have a computer and Internet access to read this blog, you have the means to research more free resources than any previous generation. You have the means to start a business with virtually no start up capital.

For access to free training on Internet marketing have a look at this.

In my last post, I mentioned the baby boomer generation, if like me you belong to this group, even more reason to get started on building an income.

Age is no barrier to entry for a home business, in fact experience in interpersonal communication, language skills, resilence, perseverance and a solid work ethic gained over many years can often be a distinct advantage.

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

Yesterday I received an email that appeared to come from UPS.

At first it looked genuine, it had a senders name and a tracking number. The message said that a package could not be delivered to me because the address was incorrect, it instructed me to open an attachment to get the details and collect my package from the post office.

Because I was not expecting a delivery from UPS I paid a bit more attention, on closer reading, the email contained 2 grammatical and 1 spelling error. The grammar was not only wrong, the choice of words was not typically North American.

A further clue was the warning not to reply by email as “this is an unmonitored address”

Becoming suspicious, I checked the properties of the email and found that it had been sent from an entirely different email address from that which appeared in the”from” line in my email in box.

I did not open the attachment and immediately deleted the email.

After checking the tracking number on the UPS site and finding it fictitious, I emailed UPS.

Within 2 hours, I had a reply confirming that UPS were aware of these emails, they definitely were not sent out by UPS and that some attachments contained viruses. UPS also advised me not to open the attachment and to delete the email.

What impressed me about UPS’ reply was that they took the trouble to reply quickly and offer advice on a matter that had nothing to do with immediate sales, but everything to do with me forming a good impression of them.

A huge contrast to some of my experiences with other large companies who cannot take the trouble to reply to much more serious enquiries.

Well done UPS.

Here is my question to you. Do you give that much attention and consideration, and that quickly, to people who contact your business?

So pay attention to emails that purport to come from reputable large companies before opening attachments.

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

Just read a great, thought provoking article “Is Money Destroying the world?” by Mike Dillard with excerpts of Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged”, it’s worth reading.

I lost everything in Zimbabwe because the government not only acted outside the law, but used the police and other security forces to confiscate the property of thousands of productive citizens.

In the process the economy was destroyed and only the “looters” prospered.

Any wonder that I and, by the number of comments on Mike Dillards article, many others are concerned at the continuous expansion of Government control and the concerted efforts of supposedly neutral organisations to cripple the productive economies and distribute their wealth to the have nots.

If you are an entrepreneur, read the article, it will make you think. Then read the book, it will really make you think!

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

p.s If you are not on Mike Dillards list check out Magnetic Sponsoring

Disclaimer, as an affiliate, I earn a commission on items ordered from Amazon and Magnetic Sponsoring links on this blog.

I recently made contact with Alan Densky of Neuro Vision and have been reading about the benefits that hypnosis can bring to our busy and stressful lives.

Alan has done a lot of work on using hypnosis to overcome problems that many people face. Three important examples are: increasing self confidence, stopping smoking, and losing weight.

To find out more about who hypnosis will work for and how it can help you, get your copy by entering your details in our subscription form, you will then get an email with the download link.

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

Always on the lookout for ways to stimulate my brain ( the experts say that keeping our brains active helps prevent dementia) I stumbled upon this website that has some great exercises for keeping mentally active.

Try the exercise that calculates your “Brain Age” it’s about halfway down the page.

Here’s the link The Worlds First Mental Gymnasium

Wishing you success in all your endeavours and have some fun with the mental gym.

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Many people ask me what my life in Africa was like. It’s a long story and it will be published in a book, but not yet.

I have posted a short version on my About Me page.

My intention is to show that despite the worst that the recession or even just life can throw at us, only we can decide how we respond.

We can choose to stay in the victim role or we can choose to pick ourselves up and start moving again.

Sue and I chose to keep moving forward, I am so glad we did.

Wishing you success in all your endeavours