Answer Yourself! A blog by Sukhpreet Singh

Your thoughts define the course of your life. To change the course, just change your thoughts. So, its not that rich and successful people think differently; its these people think differently and thats why they are rich and successful. Here is a wonderful quote from James Allen’s book “As A Man Thinketh” that states it perfectly:

A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.

Just as a gardener cultivates his plot, keeping it free from weeds, and growing the flowers and fruits which he requires, so may a man tend the garden of his mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts, and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts. By pursuing this process, a man sooner or later discovers that he is the master gardener of his soul, the director of his life.

Dictionary.com defines ‘cultivate’ as “to promote or improve the growth of (a plant, crop, etc.) by labor and attention.” You must make a conscience and intelligent effort towards conditioning your mind to set a definite goal and then nurture it with useful thoughts to achieve that goal. Change of thought process won’t happen on its own.

My Story
In beginning of 2006, I was struggling to keep our family’s finance under control – I had no rainy-day saving, I had no investments for my retirement, no idea about what’s 401k, never heard about Roth-IRA, never heard of bank CDs, was broke (its easy: earn million, spend million + one) and had no knowledge of high interest saving accounts. But I was sick and tired of going nowhere. So every day, I started dedicating at least 1 hour to find what’s going wrong and how can I improve my situation. I SET the goal of educating myself about personal finance. Even tho’ I didn’t like reading books on finance, I labored through three - four of them (list-1 below), started reading blogs on personal finance (list-2 below) and started listening to tapes while driving (list-3 below) paying attention to all the details that would help me achieve my goal which was to reduce the fear of uncertain financial future and put myself on a path towards financial stability. Result of this careful tending of my mind’s garden is that today :

a) We have a house
b) All our debts are paid off – credit cards and student loans
c) All our cars are paid off
d) We are saving about 15% of our income for retirement - 401K and IRAs
e) We have enough in my bank to last us through rough times or unplanned expenses and to help our family
f) We are able to financially help someone close to our heart
g) Donate to charity and organizations we believe in.

Things YOU can do
Here are a few things you can do to cultivate your mind to gear towards success and happiness.

1) Read books geared towards 2 aspects: a) ones that educate you on a particular subject related to your goal and b) ones that inspire/motivate you to keep working towards your goal (like “Magic of thinking big”, “Become who you were born to be“)

2) To have maximum impact on your thought process, invest particularly during these 2 times of the day – in the morning when you get up and at night before going to bed. Whatever thoughts you generate by reading or by introspection, will have maximum impact during these times.

3) Have a few audio books in your car. You can turn your car into a class room for just a few bucks.

4) Choose your association carefully. Get out of the comfort-zone of your friends and join some new clubs and meet some new people. (Here is one excellent club and i highly recommend it: Toastmasters)

5) Read various blogs that will help you attain your goals. People share their experiences on their blogs and you never know who you might be able to relate to most and have an “Aha!” moment. I had mine too from a blog that i mentioned in my first post.

Lists
List-1: Books on personal finance
a) The Automatic Millionaire by David Bach
b) Smart Couples Finish Rich: 9 Steps to Creating a Rich Future for You and Your Partner by David Bach
c) Financial Self Defense by Charles Givens
d) More Wealth Without Risk by Charles Givens

List-2: Blogs on personal finance
a) www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com
b) www.mymoneyblog.com
c) www.allfinancialmatters.com
d) www.pfblog.com

List-3: Audio Books
a) Magic of thinking big - David J. Schwartz
b) Napolean Hill - Think and grow rich
c) Road To Wealth - Suze Orman
d) John Maxwell - Ordinary to Extraordinary
e) John Maxwell - 5 Thoughts That Will Take You To The Top

These are few books, CDs, blogs that may help you get started. As its important to realize the significance of cultivating your thoughts, its also important to realize the significance of how not to let your mind run wild or neglect your thoughts. Thats for my next post. If you have other ways that you use to cultivate your thoughts, please share it with us.

I spent some time searching for the right tools to setup my blog. Since its fresh in my mind, i thought of sharing it on the web hoping it might help someone in future.

Two Options

There are 2 options to begin with:
1) The hosted service: Examples for this would be - typepad.com, wordpress.com, blogger.com, and livejournal.com.

Pros:
a) Someone else manages the technicalities for you. All you do is express yourself.
b) Easy to get started. Just sign-up and within minutes you are up and running.
c) Most of these services are free and so won’t cost you anything to start your blog.
d) Community features on each of these site help you network better.

Cons:
a) Customization of design and layout is limited (but good enough for most users).
b) Cannot install new software or plug-ins that suits your need.

2) Self-hosted packages: Examples for this would be - Wordpress, Expression Engine, MovableType, Textpattern.

Pros:
a) You are the boss. You have absolute control over the software.
b) Can customize it to any extent. Can install any third party software or plug-in.
c) Future expandability. You can turn your blog onto a full blow website with blog.
d) You have absolute control over design and layout of your site.

Cons:
a) You have to deal with the set up, maintenance and troubleshooting.
b) You will need to buy the domain name and hosting space for your blog.
c) Need to have some technical knowledge.
d) Lack of community features. But there are open source communities that anybody can join and network.
To find more about what best fits your need - the hosted service Vs self-hosted package and to compare different features of various self-hosted packages, visit this and this link.

My choice

I went the self-hosted-packages route mainly because i wanted some more control over configurability and flexibility. I chose wordpress as my blogging software.
Why wordpress: It’s the most popular self-hosted blogging software package (when i was evaluating). For me that meant:
a) It will be mature and stable as more people will be working on its development and maintenance.
b) Must be easy to install and maintain by the user or else it won’t be very popular.
c) Must be feature rich.
d) Must have good online support as the solution to most of the problems or bugs must have been posted by someone, somewhere.
After some more research, i found that wordpress had over 1700 themes (design and layout) to choose form and about 2600 plugins (tools to extend the functionality) to choose from.

Factors determining the choice of theme: You can design your own theme. But, you need to have some experience with CSS, design and layout, color theory and php. Time investment would be significant if you don’t have enough experience with any of the above language / technique. I started with my own design but soon realized the time commitment. So I looked for a theme that had following features:
a) three columns so that I can have content in the center and user widgets on the sidebars (left and right).
b) theme should be widget ready. Wordprss.org describes widget as

WordPress Widgets (WPW) is a plugin designed to provide a simple way to arrange the various elements of your sidebar content (known as “widgets”) without having to change any code.

c) descent color combination.
d) good design and layout of header, footer and the three columns mentioned earlier.

If you would like add any other pros and cons, or factors for choosing 3-column layout relevant to above post, please let me know and i will update the post with credits.

Finally, I did it. One of my goals for this year was to start my own blog. It took me almost two months to get this blog going (more on that in my next post.)
I started reading blogs last year and some of my favorite have been: techcrunch.com and iwillteachyoutoberich.com, mymoneyblog.com. One of my main inspirations has been Ramit Sethi of iwillteachyoutoberich.com. I like the way he manages his blog, involves and inspires his readers, and of-course his style of writing. An aspiring entrepreneur myself, I have been toying around with different ideas and have a couple of domain names registered but the desire/need to be online was not big enough that I could devote my resources and time to it, until I read this article on Ramit’s site. It’s a book review on Ben Casnocha’s new book “MY STARTUP LIFE”.

I was intrigued by what could NINETEEN YEAR young individual write on a “start-up life” that the book made it to #1 Movers and Shakers list on Amazon. At 19, I didn’t even know how to manage my daily activities let alone manage a company. So while going through excerpts from his book, I had an ‘Aha!’ moment when I read the following lines here :

“Like companies, you are projecting a brand right now. Each of us is CEO of Me, Inc. The question is whether you are going to cultivate your brand to be as truthful and powerful as it can be….

Your online identity. What will someone find when they Google your name? You should own the first result—it should be a personal website or blog that you run. You should also own an email address that is your name (for example, ben@casnocha.com).”

That was it for me. The desire, sense of urgency, need – everything kicked in. I taught myself some new stuff and went to work on my blog. And there … you have it.

If you are here for the first time, please leave your comments on what you like and don’t like about this blog and how can I improve it.