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.

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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

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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

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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.

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1. How to reinvent yourself 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...

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?

–
Photo courtesy of omsel.

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Do you check your email every 10 minutes?

Do you read everything in your RSS feeds and Twitter streams until your brain hurts?

Is your Facebook account always open?

Do you have hundreds of unread emails?

Is your browser’s bookmarks a mess?

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One late night, while I was working on a web page, my wife asked why am I using a text editor and coding HTML when I can use Microsoft FrontPage. I tried to explain to her the benefits of my approach but she was not convinced. Honestly, I was not also convinced of my reasons but somehow, deep inside of me, I knew that I should not be using FrontPage or other tools that let you do it visually.

Some people see creating web pages as an activity reserved for graphic designers. For many, it makes sense for a fine arts major to become a web designer. These same people also think that website is about creating and placing pictures, assigning colors, and fonts.

Structure and Presentation

People venturing into web designs, I guess, have a choice between two roads – a presentation-oriented approach or structure-oriented approach. Not that one approach is superior to the other (I have no right to judge that) but from experience, a structure-oriented approach provides more flexibility that you will be thankful for when you started worrying about presentation.

For example, in almost all documents, whether in print or digital, there are items that appear more important than others, such as chapter title to a section heading. Any good designer would distinguish the important elements with the less important ones – make the element bold, increase its size, and change the font, for example.

My first goal is to structure the web page using HTML tags taking into account the semantics. For example, the heading tag <h1>, ideally, should be used to markup the most important heading in a web page while <h2> tag for the next important. So if I want to show importance, I decide which heading is more important then use the <h1> tag. Of course, nothing stops you from using an <h5> or a <p> tag for the page title.

A presentation-oriented approach does not make a distinction between an <h1> or <p> as long the elements appear as the designer intends to. Is there something wrong with that? A visitor would not care if your web page is constructed structurally or not. This is one major reason why there are web page designers that do not care about structure.

Structure as an element of presentation

Some may think that the two approaches do not converge, but as I have experienced, a good structure helps significantly in creating a good presentation.

First, the principle of contrast. If we are conscious in our choice of what tag to use, we are making contrast explicit in the content of our web page. In the absence of any formatting, a web browser can provide more emphasis on the important text against the less important. This is possible because the contrast is present and the browser can understand it. It may not be visually appealing at first but when you start formatting and use CSS, you will thank yourself for making structure a priority.

Another design principle is proximity, which states that related items should be close to each other. A good structure groups related elements. When you structure your content as a hierarchy of <h1>, <h2>, and so on, you are already grouping elements together. You can also use the <div> tag to group elements. In fact, using <div> is the most common and effective way of creating layouts (with some little help from CSS).

So what if it is not structured

We could create two web pages that looks exactly the same but constructed using different approaches. So where is the advantage? The well structured web page makes presentations manageable.

When you structure your web page, you separate the content from the presentation. You compose the content using only HTML tags and you prepare the layout, fonts, colors, margins, etc. using CSS. I do not deny that I lack artistic talent and that is why it is very important for me to able to try different designs and see the results as soon as possible. In programming, you should isolate things that may change from things that most likely, will not.

So how do these things answer why I do not use FrontPage?

If we are given a problem to solve, the perspective from which we view the problem affects our analysis and eventually our solution. Some have the ability to see things from various perspectives while others find it difficult to change perspective. (I guess this is why the world still have racism and religious prejudices.)

I see web page construction from a structured-oriented view. I see no need for FrontPage because a text editor and browser supports very well the approach I am taking.

Frontpage is not evil but…

I am not saying using FrontPage is evil. The purpose of a tool is to help us accomplish tasks easily, or with less effort than doing it without the tool. In the software domain, the use of WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) and the GUI (Graphical-User-Interface) has been one of the most effective technique of making tasks simpler. There is no doubt that software like Microsoft Word has helped a lot people especially those writing documents. If you work on a computer, there is a big chance you have used Microsoft Word. Because of the experience, you would have come to expect that every software application provides a similar ability.

Of course, not all tasks is better done visually but for designing web page it makes sense if you can do it the way you would design a teaser. I will not be surprised if you find FrontPage a very useful tool because it supports very well a presentation-oriented approach.

One common mantra, especially in management domain, is “I do not care how is it done, just get it done”. FrontPage allows you to get it done and the fact that you can focus on getting it done, allows you to ignore how it is done.

Fine, FrontPage still allows you to see the HTML – to see everything that is going on behind the scenes. But that is an optional thing to do. I bet you do not have time to do it and it does not interest you. In case it interests you, there is a bigger problem. FrontPage shows you how he does it, not how it should be done properly. You, as the person, is at the mercy of FrontPage, the tool. I cannot live with that.

If you have been relying solely on FrontPage and not really learning HTML, you may come to accept that FrontPage does the correct thing. It is like the case of Dr. Evil (in Austin Powers) who have been raised by a Belgian couple to be evil and knows no good deeds.

You may say, “I do not need to know the inner workings of car, I just need to drive”. First, as I have said before, a good structure lends to a flexible design. Second, if you understand what is happening in your web pages, you have control. Control allows you to improve things, to innovate, and to fix things when they are broken. Lastly, HTML is very darn simple so the only reason I could see to skip learning proper use of HTML tags is pure laziness.

I am really a keyboard guy

Another reason why I tend not use FrontPage or similar tools is influenced by my preference to use the keyboard in almost every computing tasks that I do. As a programmer and aspiring writer, I live and breath via the keyboard.

The most popular task in computer is saving documents. While most people would use the mouse, I prefer to use the keyboard. I am not comfortable leaving the keyboard, touching the mouse and positioning the pointer over the ‘save’ button. Sometimes, I would miss it and the ‘File Open’ dialog box would pop out instead.

Every time I use a new software, the first thing, I check is the ‘save’ shortcut, which is often, ‘Ctrl-S’. In Windows 98, the version of Notepad has no save shortcut but the Windows 2000 and XP version have it.

I guess non-programmers would find it odd that programmers would rather use the keyboard in everything we do. The keyboard is our primary tool and we want to be masters of it.

So if you want to use FrontPage, go ahead but I encourage you to take time to learn proper HTML and consider creating a structure first for your web pages before presentation details. I also invite you to learn CSS.

If you are looking for more information, A List Apart is an excellent starting point. Dan Cenderhom’s book, Web Standards Solutions is a great book on using HTML and CSS.

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The staff has developed guidelines for dealing with you and quietly passes them to new employees. “Never suggest that there might be another way of doing something,” they might say. Or “Act self-deprecating so he doesn’t feel threatened.”

#6 Employees start sucking up

You have one or two fanatical acolytes. Yes, such devotion may be a testament to your fabulousness. But often when a boss is perceived as universally loathed, the staff opportunist offers herself up as sole confidante and friend, seeking power and favor at the expense of more honest, critical employees.

#5 Your staff hides from you

You never see people walk by. Employees would rather circumnavigate the entire office to get to the coffee machine or bathroom than take the shortcut past your door and risk being invited in.

#4 Bogus reviews

Your 360-degree evaluations come back short and full of generically positive comments, with one very mild criticism (“Sometimes she works too damn hard for her own good”) thrown in for credibility’s sake.

#3 Apprehension

People don’t volunteer for your pet projects. The idea sucks, and they’re afraid to tell you, or it’s brilliant, but the consequences for letting you down are too terrible to imagine. And, of course, if it’s your pet project, you’ll probably work on it as well. Which means more time spent…gulp…with you.

#2 Former employees disappear forever

You have legions of former employees, but they rarely give your name as a reference for new jobs. Either they don’t trust you to give them their due, or they worry that because they were so miserable working for you, your recollections will also be dismal.

#1 The revolving door

You have legions of former employees, period. If your staff falls away like linty Post-it notes, ask yourself: Is high turnover the problem? Or am I?

[via Inc.]

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[via Mike Dillard's Newsletter]

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The reason I did that was because I had no money. I could never build one. Chips back then were… like I said, to buy a computer built, it was like a downpayment on a good house. So, because I could never build one, all I could do was design them on paper and try to get better and better and better.
— Steve Wozniak

I was in a similar situation during my freshman days in college. It was my 1st programming course and back then I didn’t own a computer, my relatives and friends don’t have one, and nobody in our block has heard of it.

Our department has a computer lab that offers cheaper rates but you have to compete for slots with upper class students. Somehow, these juniors, seniors (and beyond) have already occupied all the computers seats every time I had a free time to work on our programming assignments. There were 2 or 3 computers within the university premises but the rates are too expensive for me. But of course, I had no choice because I need to finish the programming assignments.

Well, I actually had a choice. Similar to what Woz did, I started writing computer programs on paper. I really can’t explain it but I think writing code on paper can make you a better programmer.

In high school, my cousins and I would go to my aunt’s office after school. Each one of us would have a free typewriter to play with. Sometimes, my aunt would ask us to type very long documents and she would buy ice cream when we’re done. When our school offered computer typing courses using WordStar, my experience with typewriters proved to be very useful.

Whenever we have programming assignments, I would write the whole program on paper first. I would sit down near our window with a bunch of papers, a pencil, and an eraser. I used the back of old letter-size papers from my aunt’s office. I would spend the whole day debugging and re-writing my program. I have no text editor, no compiler, no debugger to use. I would test my program by writing variables in columns, then in each row, the values of these variables while my program is running in my head. When I’m done, or at least, confident that my program is “working”, I would head up to the nearest computer shop and type my program. Since I’m a fast typist, it took me less than 30 minutes to write my program. Of course, it doesn’t run perfectly on the 1st try but I only needed a few more minutes to get it working. For the next two semesters, I employed this strategy.

On my 2nd year, my aunt bought a computer and by that time, many of my friends own Intel 486-based computers. I can now program 25 hours a day for free.

My motivation back then was to save money. I never really expected that running programs in my mind would help me become a better programmer. I still advice people to try it once in a while. Well, I never known someone who actually tried it. I guess if someone hears me telling this, he would wonder what the f*** I am talking about. “Of course, you need a computer to write a program.”

I never write actual programs on paper anymore. But I still have a lot of scratch papers in my study table drawer.

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