Steve the Owl's Blog

Hi, everyone. I hope you are having a good day today. Over the past few days, I have been thinking about the legacy of co-founder and former CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, who died of complications from cancer at the age of 56. There are a lot of people who have talked about his brilliant work with the products that begin with the letter “i” (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad) since his return to the company in the mid-1990′s. However, I thought about the nature of foresight and how it made Apple’s success possible to build his legacy.

Finding Smarter People

Steve Jobs was so admired at one point that plenty of people have referred to Apple fanatics as the “cult of Jobs.” However, those who may have fallen victim to this thought process seem not to realize that Apple would’ve never existed without the other co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak. The man affectionately known as The Woz was part of a computer club that started based on learning signals that made it possible to make free long distance phone calls in the early 1970′s (the Phone Phreaks). Eventually, the two (with Wozniak taking the lead) built the Apple I for their friends at the club, and they worked on a product that could be marketed to the masses, the Apple II, which is considered by many to be the world’s first personal computer.

Finding Opportunity

Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985. He sold his stock (ironically, if he had simply kept all of the stock he owned in 1985, he would’ve been the fifth-richest man in the world, rather than 110) and started Next Computers. However, his true resurrection in the world of business came when he bought the computer arm of LucasFilms, which he renamed Pixar, in 1986. Eventually, Pixar began to work on the first full-length computer animated movie, Toy Story. This was an idea that many thought was impossible, but we have now reached a point where hand-drawn animation is so rare that one of the working titles for The Simpsons Movie was The Simpsons in 2-D, to demonstrate its insistence on staying true to the show’s roots.

However, before Toy Story, the rap on computer animation was that it could not match the feeling of the world of hand-drawn animation. A scene from my favorite Pixar movie, WALL-E, puts that to rest in my opinion, as evidenced by this scene where WALL-E and EVE dance in space with the help of a fire extinguisher:

Steve Jobs ultimately had his biggest financial success through Pixar, and its subsequent sale to Disney. However, his legacy is mainly based on his journey from a 20-year-old working out of his parents’ basement with a friend that changed the way we communicate. So, as I write this on an Apple, I salute Steve Jobs for everything his work has meant to the world over the last 40 years.

How do you work to build your legacy?

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It’s not that I disagree with affirmations, but I believe that whatever you affirm must be the truth. If you’re broke, affirm “I’m broke!” If you want more, say, “I’m 40 and broke!” Jim Rohn

Hi, everyone. I hope that you are getting ready to enjoy a great weekend and you look back on this September as one of accomplishment. Lately, I’ve noticed that The Money Class by Suze Orman has been re-airing a lot on the local PBS stations here, and I’ve watched a few episodes of her eponymous weekend show on CNBC. There are a lot of financial experts out there who want to tell you a lot of different things, but I would say that she and David Bach are definitely my favorites.

Both present their information in a way that is easy to understand, and it helps you to become more savvy about the investing world, to the point where I’ve even tried a couple of stock-picking contests. (I used the same principles and picked similar stocks for each. I’m doing very well in one [gaining nearly 2% in the month since I started while the market has been largely flat], and not as well in another, but I am excited about learning about discipline and patience necessary to be a great investor.) It is with this in mind that I come over and over to Suze Orman’s famous catchphrase, “Stand in your truth.”

What It Means

Stand in your truth basically means that you must be completely honest about your financial situation if you want to see success. If you are broke, that is your truth; if you are in debt, that is your truth; if you are spending too much, that is your truth; if everything is going wonderfully for you, that is your truth.

What I think is so powerful about this phrase is that it opens up everything else for you. If you are spending $4000 a month, but you’re only bringing home paychecks that say $3000 a month, the key is to stop digging wherever possible. If you can’t quite get your financial situation in order with cutting spending, this means earning more money, whether by increasing your abilities as an employee to set yourself up for a promotion and a raise because you are indispensable to the company, or through increasing the profits in your business.

“Standing in your truth” leads to another simple fact. Living above your means is bad, but living within your means doesn’t help, either. Why is that? As Suze Orman, David Bach, Jim Rohn, George Clason, and a host of others have noted, living within your means leads to insecurity. Once we learn to live below our means, we can start to build for our future. I’ve seen formulas that recommend living off of anywhere from 50-70% of income, and using the rest of that money to build your future, donate to charity, and pay off debt, or any combination thereof.

What It Does

One of the things that standing in your truth does is give you peace of mind. While I am currently in a situation where long-term employment meant a pretty big hole to climb out of, knowing that I am able to climb out, even if it isn’t necessarily as fast as I would like, tells me that I am doing something right. Back before the long-term unemployment set in, I was saving 10% of every paycheck and 50% of my tax refund check. I didn’t know about investment at the time, so I used it as a rainy day fund. There were a couple of times I had to withdraw from it over the course of just under twenty months, namely to pay for things when I knew a lump-sum payment was coming but I didn’t have the money yet. Rather than treating it as money gone from my account, I treated it as a loan to myself, and immediately used the lump sum payment to repay myself. As Brian Tracy points out, when you start saving, you start to feed the creative energy, and you will find more saving than you thought possible once you stick to your plan.

The results of this effort? In just under twenty months, I’d saved up enough money to not only have a two-month emergency fund, but enough money to pay for a wedding and a honeymoon. (Admittedly, it wasn’t the most expensive of either in the world, but for someone fresh out of seminary, it wasn’t bad.) And think: this was without even knowing anything about investing or setting up a retirement account. If the discipline was there with the knowledge I had then, who knows what will happen now that I have more investment knowledge to go with it.

What do you do to stand in your truth?

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Hi, everyone! I hope this has been a very enjoyable day for you. I write today thinking about one of the major events for my generation: the release of Nevermind, Nirvana’s major-label debut and second overall studio album (they released Bleach on indie label Sub Pop in 1989), 20 years ago this past Saturday. For those of you who were born from 1965-1980, this statement might make you feel a little bit older, but there is a lot to learn about one of the greatest albums of all time and how it came to be.

Practice Like a Job

Nevermind was a record that was treated by many as an overnight success story, with a band coming out of the Northwest and having next-to-no commercial success whatsoever (in limited release, Bleach sold 35,000 copies in its first two years) and making a record (and perhaps just as importantly, a video) that completely shook the foundation of Eighties Hair Metal (still the dominant hard rock in 1991) to its core, and changing the face of music forever.

However, this “overnight success story” was the result of almost fanatical work ethic by the band, especially its lead vocalist/guitarist/main songwriter Kurt Cobain. While Kurt Cobain and bandmate Krist Novoselic, who played bass, seemed to have nothing but trouble landing and keeping a regular job, they practiced for several hours a day. Krist Novoselic compared it to a job, and said that they “worked as hard on it as you would any job. We were just obsessed with rehearsal.” This obsession meant practices that could easily last for ten or twelve hours at a time, as the band worked and worked and worked to refine its sound and its songs. (You can hear a lot of the songwriting process at work on With the Lights Out, the band’s four-disc CD/DVD box set, where some songs are almost unrecognizable compared to the final form.)

A Message for Its Time

The early 1990′s were not a good time for American youth. The economy was in a recession, the current political order only seemed to disappoint, and small towns were dying all over America as companies outsourced work overseas. The hair metal that ruled the airwaves was an escapist form of music that had very little musical style.

It was in this atmosphere that Nirvana, drawing from hard rock, punk, and even pop influences, crafted their masterpiece. This was not a music for happy talk, but it was definitely the music for you if you wanted someone to express the frustration that you felt when looking at some of the things going on in the world around you. For a generation that was overshadowed by its predecessor, the baby boomers, Generation X was still looking for its voice. In its search, it found them in the wail and distorted guitars of 24-year-old Kurt Cobain. He was not making a political statement per se, but he was expressing the feelings of his generation, as he got such powerful sounds from his frail 5’7, 110 lb. frame that seemed to belie his physical size.

Appreciate It for What It Is

In the twenty years since its release, this record, and its first single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” have taken on a life of its own. It was seen as the voice of a generation, even when it didn’t know what to say (as evidenced by the fact that some of the lyrics are very difficult understand on first listen). Sadly, the pressure became too much for its leader, and he died less than three years after its release. However, I encourage you to listen to this song with fresh ears, as you may have in 1991 or sometime after that (I first heard it in its entirety in 1993) and feel the raw power as you know what it is like to truly experience greatness, something that happens far too little in this world.

How do you work to build your defining moment?

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Hi, everyone! It has been quite a while (three weeks) since my last blog post. This is because of something that I have been learning lately that I am seeing in action as we speak, and that is the need to find your balance.

Changes

As some of my faithful readers may remember, I started my new job teaching Religion in the World at Temple University about a month ago. This is a job that I have wanted for this phase in my professional life as I work toward my Ph.D. (I am still working my business, but my goal has never been to quit working a job, but to make enough money from my business to be able to have the freedom to teach wherever I want without worrying too much about my paycheck. In other words, like most good Protestants, I want to be able to work because I want to rather than because I have to ) for a very long time.

Needless to say, it is very different from my previous pace of life, where my biggest work has been trying to find time to post for my blog or look for work (or, when I was doing campaign work, to find a few hours a day to work on the campaign). Now, considering that I am still working the campaign job until early November (although with fewer hours to accommodate my teaching) and taking classes, all while brushing up on my foreign languages (I’m still waiting to find out if I passed the German test. If I did, it’s on to French.) which, needless to say, makes it a little bit more difficult to figure out when to fit time to do the things that I normally did based on my previous activity load. Sadly, my blog seemed to take the hit. (I’ve got plenty of ideas on backlog, but I just don’t have them written down yet, so expect to see a lot of posts soon.)

What Can You Give Up?

This was a question that I weighed last week as I looked at my copy of the Challenge to Succeed Workbook based on four-CD audio set by Jim Rohn. In this section of the workbook, it had me write down everything that I did not counting work, sleep, or the time it takes me to get to work. I was surprised at how much time I was leaving on the table. Looking through my schedule, I found 16 hours a week that I could easily give up in order to build value in my life and still enjoy plenty of leisure time. So, with that in mind, I decided that it was time to renew my efforts to continue my conversation with you, the reader, and I made a commitment to write at least three new blog posts a week, with a gap of no more than three days between posts (I am counting a day as when I wake up, rather than midnight-to-midnight, so it is possible that a gap could appear if I write late at night, but three days is the limit).

This is possible only because I looked at my life and realized that there were things that I wanted to do, and I wanted to make sure that I was using my time more effectively in the process. It isn’t about doing more or doing less, but finding a balance.

How do you find a balance between your priorities in life?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you have enjoyed your Labor Day today. Earlier, I posted about my job as a graduate student teacher at Temple University. Last year, while examining the movie The Wrestler, I looked at the ways that this shows the need for unions for a group of people who are often derided as greedy for making a lot of money, even though their work makes even more money for owners. I think of this as I hear one of the common complaints about unions being that they “were once necessary, but we don’t need them any more.” Do these people have a point?

My Union

As I mentioned in my post earlier today, the student teachers at Temple University, who formed the TUGSA (a member union of the American Federation of Teachers, which is itself a member of the AFL-CIO), fought a four-year battle with the administration who pulled delay after delay to postpone a vote for certification. When the adjuncts (both graduate students who aren’t in the union and those who already have their Ph.D.) tried to unionize, Temple did everything in its power to fight this, including prohibiting any efforts to organize on campus. (In one particularly insulting move, the administration argued that the union gave everyone the same pay, whereas non-union teachers could negotiate for even more than the union gets, even though they aren’t even close.)

Well, what were the results of this union for the student teachers? Before the unionization, health care costs were prohibitive, and student teachers received less than $2750 per course with very little fringe benefits other than tuition payment. The union won its right to exist in 2001, and the next year, the first contract was finalized, and the pay increased to $3500 per course with annual cost of living adjustments, full tuition and health care for those who teach two courses per semester, and a limit to the number of hours required per course, thus ensuring that student teachers will be able to prepare for their courses and research for dissertations.

A Matter of Life or Death

One of the worst tragedies in the workplace in recent memory was the Upper Big Branch Coal Mine, run by Massey Energy, with its then-CEO, the almost cartoonishly villainous Don Blankenship, who made a huge effort to bust unions when he took over the company, and he ordered his miners to stop inspecting for safety and start digging for coal. This came to a head at Upper Big Branch in 2010, with 29 workers dead, and Massey insisting that it really did run a safe shop.

However, everyone who I know who worked in coal mines both union and non-union told me that something like this would never happen at a union coal mine, because the union will fight for workers’ safety, and if conditions are that unsafe, they will make sure that the mine gets shut down until the gas level makes conditions safe.

We have come a long way thanks to unions, but before unions were legal (and even after), non-union shops were little more than slaveowners, forcing miners to pay for their own equipment, and refusing to pay miners in cash, paying them instead with company scrip (a process that continued in many non-union mines well into the 1950′s, which Homer Hickham describes in his memoir, October Sky) and owning all of the houses. When miners tried to fight for their rights, they were kicked out of their homes and their property was seized.

I do not write this to say that unions are perfect, but to point out that they have done a lot of good. Thanks to unions fighting for working people, we have 40-hour workweeks, minimum wage laws, overtime, and worker safety laws. Unfortunately, many of these laws that were literally won by blood are now under fire. As a member of a teachers’ union, I know that I couldn’t be a part of a union if not for those who fought and died for the right to organize, so I stand with all unions that are trying to make things better for their workers.

Probably the movie that best explains this is Matewan, a story based on one of the key events in the Coal Wars in West Virginia in the 1920′s, where workers who wanted to unionize were met with violence. Here is a scene from the movie that shows Chris Cooper as union organizer demonstrating a union at its best (his speech begins at the 2:08 mark; NOTE: this scene has some language that may be NSFW, including racial slurs):

How do you remember the people who have paved the way for you?

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Hi, everyone. Recently, I wrote about the importance of understanding Social Security’s role in determining one’s retirement picture. As I thought about this trend, another issue with it is that leads to despair in some that they may have waited too long to have a decent retirement. (After all, if someone is ten years from retirement,Social Security won’t be there as the doomsayers say, and one needs 75% of income to survive, this is going to be difficult, if not impossible.) With that being said, I don’t want you to think that I am against investing in your retirement. I have an IRA, and I think that these are vital programs to add to, but not replace, Social Security in order to build a stable retirement income.

Now or Later

Dave Ramsey argues that the most important thing that someone should do is pay off all debt except for home ownership (mortgage is something that can wait in his formulation and payments should simply be made until other things are taken care of). Once this happens, one should take all of that debt money and then start to build for retirement. He says that this is so vital that one should use every spare penny for this purposes even going so far as refusing a matching funds from a 401(k) because he feels that the key to financial freedom is a total focus on each part of the plan. However, most investment advisors argue that the most important thing to do is to pay yourself first. I’ve seen some say 15 or 20% is what is required, and others that say that 10% will do the trick. (I personally think that the answer to this question depends on the age of the person building the account.)

The ultimate problem with this way of thinking is the way compound interest works. Ultimately, when one is truly financially independent, the best way to make money is to get out of the way, and just keep breathing. In his book The Slight Edge, Jeff Olson gives an example of compound interest working for someone vs. against someone. He gives as an example a story of two friends at the age of 24 who decide that they want to invest $2000 a year into an IRA that has a yield of 12%. They decide to invest until they have enough money that they will have $1 million by their 66th birthday. The first friend starts right away, and he makes the annual $2000 investment every year for six years. He stops because he already has enough in savings to get to his goal. The second friend finds out about this at the age of 30 and decides that he’d better get started after putting it off. He finds out, much to his shock, that he will have to invest for thirty-three years in order to get to $1 million by his 66th birthday.

But what happens if someone decides to keep investing? My wife and I each have money in an IRA. I have a little bit more because I started six months earlier. We have decided to, as long as our health permits, hold off until the age of 67 (our full retirement age) to start cashing in our IRA. However, I turn 67 in October 2046, and she turns 67 in February 2054. Based on the kind of money that we should be able to earn right out of college, I did some math and decided to see what happen if I invested at $350/month and she invested at $200/month out of college, if we both invested $50/month until then. Well, by the time I turn 67, I would have over $1.9 million in my IRA. This isn’t a bad amount. However, by the time my wife turns 67, even investing 30% less than I would, she would have a total of a little more than $2.7 million in her account. This is basically the difference between investing for 36 1/4 years vs. investing for 43 years.

So, what does that mean about debt reduction? I think that debt reduction is a good thing, but it has to be a part of the total picture of financial health. Flipping through the TV over the weekend, I saw Suze Orman talking to someone who was amortizing her house to the tune of an extra $1500/month in order to pay it off a lot sooner. Suze said that her goal was noble, but she noted that she wasn’t putting nearly enough money in her IRA because of this strategy. Granted, the “get rid of all your debt first” strategy I mentioned above excludes home ownership, but this means that it is operating at the expense of time. I know, using myself as an example, that I will have a lot of student loan debt, as will my wife, once we get out of school. If it takes us five years of laser focus to get rid of our debts, and we hold off on building our IRA’s, how would that look? If we simply held onto them for five years and invested the same amount, my IRA would be less than $1.1 million, and my wife’s would be less than $1.7 million. So, combined, those five years of staying on the sidelines would cost us a total of $1.8 million. How much would our monthly payment to our IRA have to be in order to make up for those five years on the sidelines? My $350 monthly contribution would have to go to $646, and her $200 contribution would have to go to $341.

I think that this as an example of a good idea that goes too far. Debt reduction is good, but there is a reason why people like David Bach, George Clason (in The Richest Man in Babylon) and Suze Orman advise you to pay yourself first. The other advantage to starting young is that the farther out you are, the more you can afford to take risks that lead to higher yields (example: my IRA is 89% stocks, and my wife’s is 91%) which adds even more importance to the value of time.

How do you make time work for you?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you had a good weekend. In some ways, I must admit that I was saddened by two e-mails that I saw Friday, but a lot of people in the business world said that it was a matter of when I would get it rather than if. The reason why I say this is because I receive e-mails from the second-largest book retailer in the United States, Borders Books & Music.

This spring, Borders filed for Chapter 11, and started to look for someone to buy the 40-year old book chain. They also closed some of their stores in an effort to become more lean and mean. However, I knew that things were pretty bad when I noticed that one of the stores that was on the chopping block this spring was the location in Center City Philadelphia. (This is the part of town a lot of places would call their “downtown” area, but it is to the north of South Philadelphia, whose big business is the Sports Complex; hence, the name.) This was usually where you’d see the big book signings, and considering that they had just released a new version of their eReader, I thought that they were in good shape to restructure and that they just decided to focus on the suburbs and shopping centers to cut down on rent.

Changing with the Times

It was with this background that I was saddened as I saw an e-mail from the CEO of Borders thanking people for their 40 years of loyalty and the chance to serve us. The second advertised a going out of business sale at all locations. (I saw a news story that they were closing the stores, so I thought that it might have simply meant that they were switching to an online format, but this was not the case.)

As I read the e-mail, it explained what a lot of people saw as the demise of Borders was complete: they simply couldn’t compete with online bookstores. In some ways, this was true, but I think that part of it was because they couldn’t see what happened with online books until it was too late. A lot of people thought that the fact that Amazon didn’t turn a profit for several years meant that they would ultimately have to raise their prices, and they would ultimately lose their biggest advantage. This did not happen. By the time Borders realized this, they struck a deal with Amazon that would direct people to their online store, but Amazon was not really interested in helping Borders out, and they didn’t really do a good job with this.

What They Had

In this way, Borders ultimately ended up behind the curve, and they paid dearly for this mistake. However, I come not to bury Borders, but to praise it. While it is true that the business world changed and they couldn’t keep up, the simple fact is that their efforts made things like Amazon possible, because Borders was the first high-volume bookseller. Some in the world of independent books probably see this as poetic justice (After all, a lot of independent bookstores couldn’t keep up with the economy of scale of Borders.) but there were a lot of good things that Borders did that other booksellers both large and small copied. After Borders, it became far more common to see bookstores that had places to sit as people browsed through the books or waited for friends and family at the store. Even a lot of independent bookstores serve coffee, which would’ve been unthinkable before Borders did it.

This leads to the ultimate question of whether Amazon and eReaders have killed the bookstore. In some ways, there will always be bookstores, but they are far different than what they once were. As long as people love actual books and reading for its own sake, there will still be brick-and-mortar bookstores.

People say that independent bookstores are dead, but there are at least two within a two-mile radius of my house. I think that there will always be a place for bookstores because they still provide a service people like. Sometimes, I’ve gone into a bookstore not having any idea what I wanted, but just started looking around, and I found some great books this way. Paperback publishers have admitted that this is where they get a lot of their sales, because people search engines for online bookstores tend to reward newer books (and thus hardback books) when people are just looking in general. So, for this reason, while Borders may be gone, their legacy will survive, even by the companies that beat them in business.

How have you enjoyed things that many have declared dead or learned to adapt with the times?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you have had a good week. Lately, I’ve read a few books that talk about investment and retirement. A lot of the advice I read was some pretty good advice, but I’ve noticed one trend that is disturbing as I read these books: a lot of these books tend to overestimate how much you need for a secure retirement by completely ignoring Social Security, or outright trying to scare people about the 76-year-old program that may be the most popular government program in history.

The Truth About Social Security

Social Security was passed in 1935 in response to the fact that two-thirds of Americans over the age of 65 lived in poverty. The first checks went out on January 1, 1937, as a transition program of a one-time check for the amount of withholding tax the retiree paid into the system. Five years later, Social Security took its now familiar pay-as-you-go system. However, there has always been a section of the population that think Social Security is a bad thing, either because they don’t think it is sustainable, or they don’t think it is something the government should be doing. Unfortunately, these people have lied about the system in order to make it seem to be worse than it is, and (based on different reasons) a lot of financial planners have gone along with this.

The truth is that Social Security has never missed a check. There have been concerns about its long-term viability, but minor changes to the payroll tax or the payout have made sure that the program pays out. At the point where the doomsday people say that Social Security “goes broke” or “goes bankrupt,” even if nothing is done, the absolute worst-case scenario is a 25% reduction in benefits. However, small changes to the system (such as raising or eliminating the cap on the payroll tax, as has happened many times before) will make sure that this doesn’t happen. So, when you get those letters three months before your birthday (mine comes in a few days), you can count on the number that they are giving you for your projected benefits.

Why Does This Fear Campaign Continue?

With the exception of Suze Orman, I’ve never seen a major book on investment that is not written from a point of view that is critical of the retirement-investment industry that tells people to factor in their Social Security in the amount of money they need for retirement. (She argues that the retirement age may go up, but the program will still be there. I am inclined to believe her because of the popularity of the program.) So, why do these financial planners (some, who are otherwise very good, are even willing to nickname the program “Social Insecurity”) continue to scare people on this issue and tell them not to count Social Security?

The book Retire on Less Than You Think by Fred Brock gives what I think is a good explanation for why this happens: a lot of retirement planners receive a commission, which makes it financially advantageous for them to convince you to keep the absolute largest amount they can talk you into putting in your account. Another assumption that is somewhat suspect is the “75% rule,” where one needs 75% of pre-retirement income to live. However, if you plan right, this is not the case. The most expensive thing for people in their working years is their mortgage, which most senior citizens already have paid off. Another major one is student loans which are, again, usually gone by this time. Finally, unless your Social Security check is at least $25,000 for the year as an individual or $32,000 (with the median monthly check of $1840, the majority are below this level), instead of paying into the system, you are now receiving from the system without paying taxes on that money. For this reason, it is better to instead look for a more individualized plan that is based on current cost of living rather than income, which for many people is actually closer to 60-70% of their income, and Social Security tends to pay out about 20-30% of pre-retirement income, which means that someone may only need closer to 40-50% of his/her pre-retirement income.

A More Rational Path Forward

Am I suggesting that someone tries to build a smaller nest egg? Absolutely not! Instead, I am asking you to think of a more balanced asset approach. An intriguing idea from Dave Ramsey (who does make the Social Security mistake, but has a lot of good ideas) is to, rather than simply focusing on retirement as the end-all, be-all of asset management, to use money that used to go to things like the mortgage and debt to truly build a fortune on top of retirement in order to be truly financially independent. Also, adding Social Security to the mix will mean that there is a much lower yield needed in those later years, which will provide peace of mind for those who always think they are not saving enough.

Then again, you may decide that you want to save and invest enough so your Social Security check doesn’t matter, and that’s fine, too. As Suze Orman reminds us, we need to stand in our truth. If we can do this, we will have a fuller picture of our investment goals, which will give us true financial peace of mind and help us plan in a way that helps us provide for our future and our legacy.

How does learning all of the details help you make better decisions for your life?

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Hi, everyone. One of the things that I have been thinking about lately is the nature of setting priorities. This was reinforced to me as I watched the movie Click on the Fourth of July. For those of you who haven’t seen this movie, it came out six years ago and stars Adam Sandler as a workaholic who can’t seem to find his way to have enough time for everything in life. When going to a Bed, Bath, and Beyond, he meets a mysterious man named Morty who offers him “a universal remote control to control your universe.” There are a few requisite jokes once he figures out what he has, such as pausing his boss to slap him around after he orders him to work over the Fourth of July weekend, and hitting the slow-motion button when a woman is running. However, if you think of this movie only in terms of the joke, you will miss the larger point.

What Are Your Priorities?

The lead character has a family that wasn’t rich, but one that was full of love growing up. Seeing other kids enjoy the material things in life, he decides to try to work to make for a better life for his kids. This takes the form of hitting the “skip” button to avoid dinner with his parents so he can focus on designing his next project. Later, he has a fight with his wife, and he fast-forwards through the whole thing.

*SPOILER ALERT* Ultimately, when he gets passed over for a promotion, and gets frustrated after having to take his kids’ bicycles back, he decides to skip to his promotion. He finds out that it takes him forward one year. *END SPOILER ALERT*

One of the key elements of the story is that, eventually, the remote starts to program itself based on the preferences of the user. Thinking that he was getting the life he wanted, he realizes how much he misses along the way, but he learns this lesson at a huge cost.

Hollow Success

This reminds me of the concept of hollow success. No matter how much people think that financial success is the end-all, be-all of existence, it is something that must take its place in a well-rounded life. After all, what good is having all of the money in the world if there is no one to share your life with? As Jim Rohn reminds us, when we neglect one area of our life, it tends to show itself in other areas of our life. So, rather than focus on only one thing in life, it is important to become a well-rounded individual. Rather than focusing on only one thing, be sure to spend time with the people who love you, and improving as a person.

What things do you do to make sure that you aren’t fast-forwarding your way through life?

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Hi, everyone. I hope you are having a good day today. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the question of traders and investors in the world of business. This thought came to mind while reading The Way of the Turtle by Curtis Faith. Based on the title, I thought that this was going to be a book about a slow and steady approach to investing. However, it was a book explaining how someone can ride the waves by becoming a trader. With this in mind, I decided to compare and contrast these two mindsets and show why one is far more important than the other in the world of business and, more specifically, network marketing.

The Trader

The trader is someone who tries to ride the trends and the fads out there. In the world of the stock market, this is someone who will see when he/she thinks that a price is going up or going down, and make all actions based on this principle. The biggest example of this person in pop culture is the day trader. Because of the short-term nature of his/her enterprise, the eyes are usually focused on CNBC or some other business channel to see whether things are going up or going down.

The Investor

The most famous investor in the world today (maybe ever) is Warren Buffett. The Oracle of Omaha’s most famous quote when it comes to the world of investing is, “If you aren’t willing to invest in a company for ten years, you shouldn’t invest in it for ten minutes.” He looks for companies that have some sort of short-term hiccup that the rest of the market overreacts to in a company with long term value, buys into it with the attitude of actually owning the business, and holds onto it for years. (One example is holding onto stock in the Washington Post for over 35 years, buying $11 million worth of stock that has turned into $2 billion over that time.) His way involves persistence and deciding whether or not something will work for decades, selling only when the company has become overheated or when the fundamentals change.

Application in Network Marketing

How many people do you know who seem to jump from company to company over the course of months? I’m talking about people who put in an initial investment (especially in a company in “pre-launch” phase) and have a lot of enthusiasm, but the instant that they feel that the trends have changed, they will go to another company. Unfortunately, as we all know, there is a learning curve with any business.

I’m not saying that there is never a time to leave. After all, even Buffett sells stocks once in a while. However, there are times when the fundamentals change. For example, I left a company when the compensation plan changed. Sometimes, the leadership changes in a company, and it is also possible that the industry goes out from under people’s feet. (For example, I hear that long-distance phone cards used to be a popular network marketing business, but with the popularity of cell phones and even land lines with unlimited long distance, this has obviously fallen by the wayside.)

How do you tell whether you are being an investor or a trader with your business?

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