MetaGreg

Be yourself. Do not pretend to be someone or something you are not. Your uniqueness will appeal to a certain segment of the market. These folks become your best fans and customers.

Following your passion – doing what you love – does not guarantee financial success. But not doing what you love guarantees a life of boredom and unhappiness. The trick is to find a niche where your passions and interests intersect with the needs of the market.

Learn a financially valuable skill so you can command a decent salary or (if you are self employed) a respectable fee.

Those workers and service providers who command top dollar either (a) perform a service that makes or saves their employer or client money or time, (b) have a skill for which the demand exceeds the supply, or (c) specialize in a narrow niche with little competition.

If you can earn a salary or generate a net income as a self-employed service professional or independent contractor of $200,000 a year or more, you won’t get rich. However, your life will be easier and you will be financially more secure than 95% of Americans.

Given the choice, have your children when you are young and possess the energy it takes to parent active youngsters.

Spend as much time as you can with your children when they are young and still want you, even if you must make sacrifices in your professional achievements to do so. This time passes quickly and once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.

Strive to achieve a liquid net worth of at least $2 million by age 50. You won’t be rich, but again, you’ll have more financial security than about 95% of Americans.

The best piece of financial advice I ever got was from Florida freelance writer David Kohn, who told me: “Live below your means.” Doing so further enhances your financial security.

With your wealth, avoid buying material possessions that are unnecessary – especially luxuries that depreciate in value over time. Use your money to buy income-producing assets, assets that appreciate in value, or services that free up your time for other activities.

Avoid debt of any kind to the extent you are able. I have zero consumer debt except the mortgages on investment properties. Cars I buy for cash. If you have to get a loan or lease to drive a particular model car, you can’t afford it.

If you lend money to friends or family, do it with the expectation that the money is really a gift rather than a loan,
and do not expect to ever get the money back. If you are repaid, even in part, consider it found money.

Every day you wake up and everyone in your family is in good health, and you have food to eat and a decent place to live, you are ahead of the game.

When writers, Internet marketers, and entrepreneurs brag to you about how much money they make, divide the figure they give by three. As my colleague Fred Gleeck is fond of pointing out, the only numbers you can trust are your own.

In your business, always under-promise and over-deliver. Give your customers not their money’s worth, but more than they have a right to expect. Err on the side of being too generous rather than being too rigid or strict.

Before criticizing a supplier or vendor, say something positive – what you like about the work — first. The more
insulted a vendor feels, the less motivated they become to serve you.

Do not allow yourself to be belittled, insulted, or demeaned verbally or in writing by others. When someone makes a snide or degrading comment, your reply should be: “What was your purpose in making that comment to me?” It will stop them in their tracks, and embarrass them so they never do it to you again.

Do not give people unsolicited advice.

To paraphrase Dan Kennedy, guard your time like the gold in Fort Knox. You can always make more money, but time lost or wasted is gone forever.

As long as a business or life decision does not involve risking the mortgage money, make it quickly. Successful people are able to make swift decisions and carry them out with speed.

The #1 difference between successful people and those less successful is that successful people act on their ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Without action, ideas are worthless.

Do not think you must reinvent the wheel on every new product or business project. Most things have already been done before. All you need to do is add a twist or put your own spin on a product or service to create demand and make it profitable.

If you are successful, you can be arrogant and boastful, but why do it? Your bragging makes others who are less successful feel badly about themselves. What’s the point of doing that? Also, don’t refer to yourself as a genius or superstar in your marketing copy. If you were a genius, you wouldn’t have to say it – instead others would be saying it and you could quote them.

Focus on your work – on creating valuable products, giving great service, going the extra mile for your customers – rather than how much money you want to make.

Start investing right away, when you are young. Do this early enough, and compounding can make you rich. Wait until you’re 50 or 60, and you could find yourself in desperate straits. And diversify. Put 10% of your wealth in an investment that moves in opposition to the stock market, such as precious metals.

From Bob Bly.

Awful idea = -1
Weak idea = 1
So-so idea = 5
Good idea = 10
Great idea = 15
Brilliant idea = 20

No execution = $1
Weak execution = $1000
So-so execution = $10,000
Good execution = $100,000
Great execution = $1,000,000
Brilliant execution = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

—Derek Sivers, president and programmer, CD Baby and HostBaby

Read more practical software and business advice at Getting Real

A friend back in college once told me that he doesn’t measure his time in terms of minutes or hours but with pesos. I thought he was just drunk as we often were in college. Years later, when I started accepting freelance projects, I realized how important it is to put a dollar amount on every hour you work. The idea of dollarizing your time not only helps you in setting your hourly freelance rates. More importantly, it helps you make key decisions that affect your work, business, yourself, or your family.

You can focus on what you do best

When you dollarize your time, you can focus on your strengths and outsourcing your weakness will make sense. Working on SchoolPad (my first personal Ruby on Rails project) introduced me to the realities of working alone. I have to learn things like design and copywriting that I knew from the beginning would be hard for a coder like me. But, I had two things that will me help solve my problem – pride and money. I bought all the books I think would be useful and read them every day and night like I was preparing for a do-or-die college exam. In the end, I produced crap and had to beg a friend to salvage my work. After my SchoolPad experience, whenever I work on a freelance project, I make sure I identify the tasks that I can work on and find partners that can help me.

You will not be wasting time

I once complained to a friend that going to the movies is expensive. Then one time, he told me he got a discount (about $3 less) to the movie theater he was working for. He invited me to join him. The problem was it would be a 30-minute (at least) commute. Even if I brought my my wife and 2 kids, it still makes no sense to me. I would rather bring my family to the more expensive theater which is just 5 minutes away, and spend the hour playing in the park with my kids.

How to dollarize your time

The easy way is decide how much you want to earn every hour you work. If you set it at $40/hour, always remind yourself that your hour is worth $40. If you are unsure how many dollars to set, try this formula by Rob Walling (from the book Web Startup Success Guide):

Your $/hour = (current salary x 1.3) / 2000, rounded to the nearest $5 increment.
where 2,000 is approximate number of hours worked in a year

This is a follow-up to my previous post, How to reinvent yourself.

Don’t rush it. Energy and enthusiasm are important if you want to make radical changes to your life.  However, don’t do it hastily. I know you are eager to become your own boss but it doesn’t mean you have to submit your resignation tomorrow.  Significant personal changes require time and deep understanding of yourself.

Don’t do it alone. It always helps to have someone to watch over you while you are transitioning.  Find someone who can be brutally honest with you and at the same time you are willing to listen to. Feedback are always helpful in keeping things in proper perspectives and staying on track.

Don’t follow someone else’s dream. It’s one thing to follow your dream – it’s another to follow someone else’s. Sometimes you get envy because your high school friend who always copied your homework is richer and more successful than you, or we get pressured by our partner’s or parent’s expectations.  Acting out of envy or pressure usually leads to disaster as Hollywood movies have shown so many times.  Remember your ultimate goal is to be happy but it will not happen if you are acting based on someone else’s definition of happiness.

Freelancing is appealing because it presents a change of scene. It offers a fresh start especially if your career has been a disappointment.  Freelancing is also a chance to take on a new talent or pursue a different opportunity. I have a friend who left a nice paying job in a technology company to become a freelance photographer. It didn’t happen overtime for him and he had to go through a lot of preparation – time, money, and self-assessment.

My friend chose to reinvent himself, prepared for it, and succeeded. Some reinvent themselves because of layoffs or unplanned family situations.  Ideally, you don’t want to be forced to make changes in your life. It’s no fun thinking about freelancing after a layoff. If you want a new job (because your current company sucks), you better start finding a new one before you can’t take it any more. As they say, the best time to find a new job is when you don’t need one.

If you don’t want to be in a situation where you are pushed against the wall, you should take a regular review of your current situation and find out the imbalances in your life, upside/downside of your current job, and more importantly, the gulf between who you are right now and who you want to be.

Review yourself. On a piece of paper, list your disappointments and things that stress you on the left side, and things that make you happy or will make you happy on the right. From this alone, you can clearly see what things need to be addressed to swing your life towards the happy side.

Question your fears.  Everyone is afraid of something. If you think you can’t afford to start over with your career, that’s normal. However, fear and truth are not the same. List the things that are preventing you from pursuing your dream and start questioning them whether they really matter. Sometimes, you are looking at the problem from a wrong point of view. If you quit your job and become a freelancer, you are not necessarily starting from scratch because you still have the personal network you have built over the years with you.  You may have to start at the bottom with regards to accounting, but you can jumpstart your marketing through your network.

Don’t kill your dream. If you want to travel around the world but you don’t have the resources to do it, would you stop dreaming about it? Just because it is impossible today, doesn’t mean it won’t happen tomorrow. Dreams not only liberate; they also puts us in touch with who we are and who we want to be. If you stopped dreaming today, you will never get around the perceived limitations of money and security.  The only way your dream can ever come true is you hold onto it with unwavering belief.

Fill the gaps. If you feel you lack a particular skill or the knowledge in subject you’re interested in, ask yourself how you can fill it. It can be as simple as spending a day in the library, a lunch with a former colleague, or regular chat with a mentor to guide you. There are millions of successful people  who are more than willing to help you.

Do it. What’s the point of thinking and planning if you are not going to do it? Every change you do in your life will feel unusual at the start but that’s OK. Just keep doing it and eventually it will feel natural. Being shy,  whenever I attend gatherings where I don’t know anyone I always tell myself to say “Hello” and smile. It’s weird at first because I’m consciously trying it yet. Eventually, I got over it.

There will always be moments of doubt and that’s normal. Just remember that if you fail, the worst thing that would happen is you end up to where you are right now. So what are you waiting for?

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Photo courtesy of omsel.