Why is it so hard to smile? Or even worse, to make other people smile? I don’t know if it’s a hard thing for you to do, but it sure is for me. It seems like that for every 30 random people in a social gathering, there is maybe one person (and that’s on a good day) that is genuinely happy. This person smiles for fun, is complementary of other people and is apparently tons happier and more fulfilled than everyone else around him.
I would love to be this person, but the fact is that I’m not. I have social pansy-itis disorder and tend to hang back in the shadows and errmm (not) smile. However, I’ve realized that smiling and making other people smile in life can have a huge impact on other people’s self esteem. Not to mention the impact on the self esteem of the person that made person b smile.
So lets all smile more, damnit. I think the more we try to focus on getting other people to smile (and I’m talking about being genuine here!) the happier we will be ourselves. It totally makes sense in my head, but so do a lot of things that I can’t execute well on… sigh.
Take a look at the video my friend posted on his blog about the impact that validating other people (or making them smile) can have on them. Pretty insightful. I like videos that make me step back for a few minutes and evaluate the role that I play in the game of life.
Alright guys, I try to only share valuable, actionable intelligence with you on this blog, and I feel inclined to give you a quick piece of financial advice that you’ll be happy to have been made privy to. A dude from Primerica (an investment & financial advice company) just stopped by our house to tell us about their company & the services they provide.
I wasn’t very happy to listen to what he had to say, because A) he’s obviously a commission-based marketer, just like me (and us marketers don’t really like being pitched to) and B) I’m not a fan of meeting with anybody outside of my computer. Primerica seems to be a pretty legit, down to earth, no pressure company that offers sound financial advice without any hype. Anyways, I’m not trying to talk about how great Primerica the company is, I’m going to tell you something that you can thank me for in 50 years:
As soon as you turn 18 (or if you’re older than 18, now!), you need to start a Roth IRA & contribute the max amount possible. Max annual contribution = $5000. Max That Shit Out! I don’t care if you do it through Primerica, Sharebuilder, TD Ameritrade, or any of a number of other companies. Just do it. Do it as soon as you can. I don’t care to go into the details of why, or provide a fancy column of numbers that show how much the investment will make you, you can Google that all on your own. All you need to know is that you need to start a Roth IRA…like 2 years ago (in my case).
The guy showed me a chart that showed person A that started maxing out a roth at like 22 years old, then stopped at 30 and didn’t invest a cent more after that until retirement. At the bottom of the page it showed that after all those years his investment amounted to like 1.5Mil. Then he showed another person, we’ll call him person B, that started at 30 and maxed their roth out every year, and then retired at the same time that person A retired. Guess what? His investment only ended up being around the same 1.5Mil amount. What does that mean? That it’s super duper duper important to start a roth IRA and max it out as young as you can possibly start one!
If you don’t believe me, do some Googling and read about Roth IRA’s. I have nothing personally to benefit from writing this post (not that I usually do or anything), but I really think you should take my advice.
I’m going to meet with an accountant in the next day or two to get my finances in order so I can start being a responsible human being and contributing to a Roth IRA myself. I’ll probably meet with the Primerica dude a time or two more so he can advise me on some more wise investments. Looking forward to it. I swear, it’s all about the people you know so that you can get the information that you need to know that is vital to your success in life. It’s all about learning…and then taking action.
Inspiring info from from Gary Vaynerchuck as usual. Worth a watch for sure. Especially if you’re trying to build a brand. I always have a hardcore reality check every time after I watch one of Gary’s videos. He’s such a real dude. It makes me want to stop being such a douche and start being more like him. I love all of you people that read my blog, for the record.
FYI: Lots of swearing in the video…don’t watch if you’re a delicate individual.
oh man guys. If you’re ever doing anything with your website, whether it be adding a new ftp user, or deleting old junk, just do yourself a favor and backup your site. Here I am sitting here stressed out, waiting for my web host to restore my site from their nightly backups. I totally just deleted my holy grail site that has made me a consistent $X,XXX a month so far this year.
With the success of my site, I’ve had a few ideas for custom development to better meet the needs of my visitors. Yesterday I posted a job on elance to finally get a custom project underway for my site. Fast forward to today…about an hour ago when I awarded someone the job. I figured I’d do everything right this time with outsourcing development work. This included scolding the developer to make a backup (or two) of my site before making any changes just in case anything went wrong because I couldn’t afford anything to go wrong with this site.
So I award the job. I make him his own login to my WordPress site, then I figure I’ll make him a custom FTP Login so that I won’t have to share mine with him (not like it even really matters!) So I make him a login, but I try it out and I didn’t give him access to the public_html folder. So I did a few other things (wasn’t really paying attention) and I ended up seeing this message:
Are you sure you wish to delete the FTP account (……)?
Yes | Yes & Remove All Files in /home/…/public_html Two options.
I wasn’t really paying attention, so guess which one I clicked? Yep. I deleted the whole damn public_html folder of my website. This sucks. Funny that I should have been more concerned with telling myself to back up the site than telling the developer.
Anyways…WiredTree (excellent, on the ball web host by the way) is in the process of restoring my site to one of their server backups from earlier today. Awesome that they have a backup, cause I sure as heck didn’t. Every time I go through this freaky process I always tell myself that it will never happen again. I always tell myself to back up the site before doing anything that may cause damage. But I’m pretty awesome so I never think that anything bad will happen. And it always does.
All of my eggs are pretty much in one basket right now, and the only good thing that has come out of this downtime is making me realize that I totally need to diversify my web portfolio. My goal is to build a website that does $500 daily…in addition to the site that is doing well for me now. (no, my site isn’t doing $500/day right now…but I’m working real hard to get it there)
Save yourself the mental anguish. Make daily backups of your databases, and at least bi monthly backups of the files on your server.
Update: I now use Digsby instead of Meebo. Same concept, it just works better and has more features (social networking + IM + Email). Just be sure to be careful when you’re going through the install process. They try to load a bunch of junk on your system.
I rarely read tech/news/affiliate blogs daily anymore so it had been a while since I checked out John Chow’s blog. I’m glad I saw Chow’s post about how he runs his business from a browser because it told me about Meebo. I think I had heard about Meebo a few months/years ago but had never given it a shot. So what is Meebo?
Remember that day when you were too lazy to do anything? The day you had LAS (Lazy arms, not ass, syndrome)? I do. It was yesterday, and the day before that, and probably the day before that! Sometimes it’s just hard to keep on ticking when you have a computer job. All that sitting just makes you tired.
Alas, I have discovered 5 tips that can save you time (in the future, when you’re not being lazy), while you’re being lazy right now. Everything I list below can be accomplished while using only half of your brain, and only your mouse hand. The other hand can be behind your head, or in whatever other lazy position you want it to be in.
I got this idea from Justin Dupre. I’ve heard it from multiple successful people, but the idea is to keep your goals in front of you as much as possible. Complete with money signs, a white Lamborghini, and me meeting Shoemoney, (and Obama), this is my goal board desktop background. I think it turned out pretty cool.
What’s the number one thing that all successful people have in common? You may argue that they all have good looks, or they were born into wealth, or they are just naturally smarter or were born into a more-likely-to-succeed-position in life. Forget all that crap, and stop fooling yourself. They all know how to communicate!
When I say communicate, I mean that they all know how to talk themselves up. You know, brag. Flex their muscles in front of everyone. Talk to the pretty cheerleaders. Answer all of the questions the teacher asks, even if they’re always wrong. They were good at something in life and they let everyone know it. They told everybody! 90% of those people never cared, but some of those bodies were important people and made a somebody out of that cocky nobody with talent. You might call B.S. but I’m convinced that I’m right.
Let me present you with two situations, with two different people. We’ll call the first person, person A, and person B the second person, person B to keep things complicated.
Person A is brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that you could never know all of the knowledge, information, and skill he possesses. Literally, you would never know it because this person, for one reason or another never got around to tooting his own horn. He passes all of his exams with flying colors, got straight-A’s, and even has great ambitions of becoming rich and famous. The only problem? He lives his life in a bubble of silence. He never opens his mouth. He simply laughs when people make foolish decisions, when he clearly – in his mind – could have succeeded in the same situation without ever batting an eye. The problem is that he never stuck his neck out, never gave himself the option to be the guinea pig, never gave himself the chance to succeed in the limelight. The result: Nobody cares because nobody knows about him. He doesn’t exist. Period. Forget about it.
Person B, on the other hand is a complete dim-whit. He sucks at Math, Science, English, he even sucks at cooking in his Homec class. What could this quarter-brained, immature, delinquent possibly be good at? Person A might think that he’s a complete idiot. A nuisance. A waste of his time, a waste of space. What Person A doesn’t realize, is that Person B has a ridiculous amount of skill at making a fool out of himself – in the limelight. In front of everybody. On the stage of life. He talks the loudest, he sings the loudest, he even burps the loudest – in front of everyone. Person B even has the ridiculous ability to play a tuba while hacky-sacking at the same time! For some reason or another, people can relate with Person B. He seems human. He does stuff. He appears to have talent. He talks! The whole school knows this person, whether it be for good or for ill. Everyone from the principal to the janitor knows this person and talks to him like he’s their kid, albeit their worst one. The Result: Everyone knows Person B. The skill that this person has is exactly the skill that Person A lacks in order to succeed in life. He’s a cocky, shameless self-promoter with a few unique abilities that people can relate to. Like burping.
Both Persons A and B have a job interview tomorrow. They don’t know each other, but they’re interviewing at the same company, for the same position. The interviewee, or boss in this case, just happens to be a big fan of people with tuba-ing while hacky-sacking skills. Who do you think is going to get the job? The intellect, who is Person A? Or the nut-job, cocky tuba player? The winner appears obvious to me.
Moral of the story: Be somebody. If you’ve got talent show it. If you don’t have talent, find out what yours is, then show it. If you know how to solve a problem someone is having, help them. Talk to people. Open up. Make contacts. Network. Brag about yourself. Don’t be shy. If you’re being shy to be peaceful, screw that. The loud jerks are taking your promotions. Don’t stress. Toot your own horn. Nobody but your Mom will toot it for you otherwise, and that just looks weak.
So I’m being a mass Twitter following noob using John Chow’s Twitter Follower tool. The tool lets you mass unfollow people with the click of one button, but to follow a ton of people, you have to click ‘follow’ about a billion times. Now granted, Twitter Follower makes it tons easier to follow people than [...]
So I’ve been having tons of hosting issues lately. Put simply: Dreamhost and Simple Helix have failed at hosting so far this year. This blog and another 30+ sites I own are hosted at Dreamhost and the last few weeks, months the sites have been terribly slow and the downtime has made me ill. Besides [...]
Sitemaps have perplexed me ever since I started blogging. I understood that they were a page that linked to all the pages in your site, and they were good food for the search engines, but besides that, I didn’t know how to submit one to Google or how to set one up for my WordPress [...]
It’s no secret, but it’s unknown among many bloggers that if you respond to posts that TechCrunch makes, or even the Google blog, they will put a link to your article on their site. Sites like TechCrunch and the Google Blog get millions of hits per day, and what happens if your link just happens [...]
I'm a 19 20 year old Web Entrepreneur from Utah. I work at home and my office full time doing affiliate marketing and SEO. I'm intimidated by girls, believe in UFO's and love making money online. I started this blog when I was 17 and write on a variety of topics from business, and entrepreneurship to music and politics.[read more...]
credit: stevendepolo
