Watch Out For "Saviors"

Some people will come into your life and create huge problems for you and then campaign against the very problems they created, appearing to be on your side. They come off looking like big heroes, when in actuality you would have been better off if they had never shown up. Try to see through this ruse and you will be better off for it, as it seems to be a very common way for your "friends" and even your own family to sabotage your life. Very often they will be thinly disguised sociopaths-people who think nothing of destroying other people's lives, and then sleep like a baby.

These people will be easy to spot because they usually will have the following characteristics in common:

• Control Freaks-they have to know what you're doing at all times and if you're finding happiness and success in doing it they will try to sabotage you.
• No Conscience. They don't feel bad......about anything whatsoever.
• Insecure Egomaniacs. That about sums it up.
• They themselves are never truly happy. If you know a control freak that's financially prosperous and still constantly miserable, chances are they're "saviors".
• They will go out of their way to hunt you down just to tell you how great everything is going for them, even if it actually is not going that well.
• They seem to have been put on earth for the express purpose of ruining your life.

Elephant on a Rope...

In India, where elephants are used for work animals, baby elephants are kept tied to a rope, which is attached to a stake in the ground. Due to being small and relatively weak, they can't pull the rope out, no matter how hard they try. Eventually they just stop trying to break free and take it for granted that they can't escape.

Later in life, when the elephants are full grown and much stronger, they could easily break free of the rope, but they are held in place by the same sized rope and stake, because in their mind they are still small and weak and don't even try to break free.

Sometimes, your limitations are only in your mind....

Starter Wife

Perception often affects our willingness to make important decisions, to take action instead of sitting on the sidelines and "missing the whole game". Life is about playing the game.

If you believe in being married before having children, the way it was when I was growing up, try to think of your first wife as a "starter wife". That way you can get married young, maybe in your early twenties or younger, and know with confidence that you'll still have plenty of time to recover from any mistakes you may have made in choosing a partner. Plus you won't pass up perfectly decent partners while waiting for Miss Perfect to show up and quite possibly miss out on marriage altogether when she never arrives. I've seen this happen.

The best that can happen is a young and crowded wedding where all your friends can attend and your parents too while they're still alive, one big party and then a lifetime of wedded bliss. The worst that can happen is you last maybe ten years before calling it quits in your early thirties, but you'll still be young enough to start over and maybe get a kid out of the deal who will be ten years old already.

If you hold out too long and you get too old before that first marriage, people will think you're weird anyway, so if you find yourself still dating in your thirties and never got married, tell people you're divorced.

Good luck.

Always Have a Plan

If you're not working every minute to achieve your own goals in life, expect to end up being used as a tool by someone who is.

Rich Kids

I've been getting some pictures sent to me lately, from people I went to high school or college with, of their grown children at their engagement parties or their graduations. Now most of these people I haven't heard from in years and probably aren't really friends but are more like acquaintances, acquaintances that have always been very jealous and competitive with me through the years, for whatever reason. I'm sure it's a thinly veiled complement if they're bothering to tell me about their accomplishments at this late date in life.

The thing is when I graduated, a number of my classmates had a lot of family support and received a good bit of help starting out. I know of more than a few that received huge chunks of cash to help them get off to a good start. One received $50,000 and a little house to boot. This was a lot of money back in the mid 1980's. Well of course they're going to be successful at something with that kind of start. Most still needed a couple of decades before they had any degree of "success". My parents on the other hand fought me every inch of the way, for whatever reason, but they were quite happy when I was still fairly broke ten years after graduation.

The classmates that were successful right off and got into the right occupations for their particular skills, curiously they never bothered to send me pictures of their kids or mansions or pools or any of that. They were too busy making money.

Regardless, if you haven't heard from someone in several years and suddenly out of the blue you get a picture of them accomplishing something big, most likely they're still trying to impress you after all these years, which is a complement, even if it doesn't feel like it.

Love and Money

The love of something is often different than the business of something.

For example, if you love photography you might not be able to figure out a way to make a living from it, unfortunately.

I remember I went to school for chiropractic some time ago and was struck by how genuinely good many of my instructors were at finding the exact spot in my back that needed cracked or "adjusted". They then would proceed to do an expert job at "cracking" my trouble spot in my spine.

They were really good, but most weren't very financially successful.

Often the business of that thing that you love doing will be very different from actually doing it for fun.

Sincerely,

Me

The end.

Going there is different than getting there...

I remember after I graduated with a professional degree, I did not have any work lined up after a four year stint in college and my fiancee' at the time promptly broke up with me, and I don't blame her. I mean four years of post-grad and no job? It wasn't that kind of degree, like engineering, where there's a "job" waiting for you upon graduation, or with a little effort in searching. It was a degree where I really needed to have a cheap office space lined up and grow my business from there, but I didn't even have that. It was in the very early days of the internet and I just didn't know where to go, hadn't had a chance to do the research yet.

So anyways, I'm like, "where do I go?", etc. and I first decided to go to Las Vegas, because it was a fun desert town with the bright lights and casinos and beautiful women and I thought "the dream" could start there.

Actually it turned out to be a depressing six month experience in futility, because I couldn't even find a job to support starting my little office, and even if I could, they were all minimum wage and there was a line for each one. There were so many minimum wage workers in that town anyway, drawn by the hotels and resorts. So there I was, fiancee'-less, the Southwest sun beating down on my head, renting a room in this resort town in a neighborhood filled with hotel workers surviving on minimum wage and me without enough funds to even check out the 'Vegas nightlife. It was even more depressing to watch the young guys that were successful roll into town on the weekends with money to burn. This wasn't looking anything like the dream I had when I entered school. I was there, but I hadn't got there yet.

Another pretty place where I starved was Florida. I went down there to do temp. work in my field to save enough money to eventually open my own office. Problem is, the pay was relatively low, the profession was a racket more than a profession (chiropractic) the way it was set up in Florida and I hated the work, in the auto accident racket. The lawyers and owners made the real money while I did all the work in the office, seeing patients. The owners would basically hijack my license and bill out under it. A bunch of shysters who didn't even have to set foot in the office or talk to a patient were just counting the profits and I was doing the grunt work. Months turned into years and all the sudden five years had slipped away and I had spent time in two fabulously wealthy areas while at the same time barely scraping by.

Meanwhile my friends who had worked in normal cities where the jobs are, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, where it maybe wasn't such great place to vacation, ended up buying nice properties in Florida and vacationing in 'Vegas after they were successful. I was there, but they had actually got there.

If you're going to start a business, start by building a website, one for each of the areas you are interested in, as if the business is already there and have a toll-free number and an auto-responder form, so you can gauge local customer interest and build a client list before you actually open the business. This way you can decide which area or town is your best bet for success.

If you have to work for somebody else for a living (you're not self-employed or not working), it doesn't really matter where you live, because every day is going to be the same routine drudgery anyway. You can always just vacation in your favorite place, but if you're working, it doesn't matter if it's Hawaii or North Jersey, you will soon forget about the beautiful (or not) scenery because you'll be in a blank-eyed coma most of the time from the 9 to 5 grind.