eCOMMON
Thursday, July 22, 2004
A Chance To Do It Right
Recently in a favorite programming forum a 21-year old participant posted a question in the “Café” section asking:
What are things you know now that you wish you'd not only known but ACTED ON when you were my age? What are your general investment or savings strategies? Should I avoid dating and romance until I have a set amount of money set a side, or is it irrelevant?
I found this to be a good question to ask at his stage in life, so I proceeded to pound out the following from the various conversations I had with my children and others over the years.
Advice Disclaimer:
Advice is often only worth what it cost, but more often it is never worth the price you pay. Be very discriminating about what advice you adopt. Instead consider what you hear in terms of how it fits for what you want to achieve, and how you want to live.
Another aspect that makes the giving advice suspect is that it is often given from the perspective of what another person thinks you should do. This is potential flaw that is almost impossible to detect and it can render most, if not all of the advice meaningless.
Instead, look for advice in terms of what people do and find successful, or in most cases what they have found doesn’t work. Only when you are allowed to look at applied results can you decide if the advice might be appropriate.
To keep advice from being an application, what follows are general snippets that capture the ideas of what I would keep in mind had I the chance to do it all again.
Considering Advice:
In life there really aren’t any rules that will assure success, but there are some behaviors that can help increase our chances of being successful. To know which behaviors will work for yourself, you must have some sense of the goals you hope to achieve. Primary in understanding goals is to know how you want to live. Not in terms of monetary wealth, but in terms that will meet your personal beliefs so you never violate the trust endowed.
A general way to get a sense of personal goals is to ask yourself, how would you want your children, or the most important person in your life to remember you. Their memories will be imprinted by what you do and how they compared to what you said. Another aspect that will help you understand a goal is to understand what makes you glow inside. For some, it is beating the crap out of a competitor. For others it is offering a helping hand to the disadvantaged. For most it is someplace in between. Finding your personal answers to these questions will help you understand what kind of advice fits for who you are, and with whom you share your time and home.
In addition, everyone’s beliefs evolve over time. How we see things today will most often change as our experience and understanding grows. There is an old adage that goes something like this, “Life is short, and we are too soon old and too late smart.” In looking back, that really says a lot. It also says be open to new ideas and don’t be too quick to judge as you probably don’t understand.
Achieving Success:
If there is a formula I haven’t found all of it, but I do know that better than 90 percent of what is needed is attained by just showing up and going to work. Simple persistence and honest effort will take you a major part of the way.
Showing up when you don’t want to, or would like to be elsewhere takes discipline. Without a key grip on discipline you haven’t a chance of being successful. As for what else is needed, I’ve depended upon luck because I’m not as smart as I’m lucky giving what I’ve been able to accomplish. This is also true for many of the very successful people I know, although not all of them agree on the smart luck ratio. However, if you have a choice between being lucky and smart, go for lucky.
Acts - Commission and Omission:
What matters in life isn’t just derived from what we do, but is also influenced by what we don’t do. Telling a lie, or not telling a truth, is each a good example of what not to do. I know this complicates things, but life wasn’t designed to be simple or easy.
Mating:
Dating doesn’t sound as committed, but most often the process of dating is the first step toward the ultimate act. Because getting some can often bring more than you bargained for, be sure you want what you get. Some gifts keep on giving and taking, and that step in life puts you in a position where you are in less control than you are now. No matter how much control you think you have, you are probably over estimating it.
Picking a Mate:
Again no rules work here, but some observations and key characteristic to look for can help you understand if the attraction will work past the next Sunrise.
Most healthy relationships have three characteristics that are easy to see. First there should be some chemistry between the pair. Second, there should be a set of common goals that can be agreed upon, and lastly both must be willing to communicate their personal feelings without attacking the other person. Dialog, not division helps connections can grow stronger. If any one of these is missing, resentment, blame and court order payments often follow.
Be willing to negotiate. Each of us has our own personal needs and beliefs. If only one side gets the lion’s share, the other party will starve in some personal way, and living with a hungry lion isn't the safest way to exist. Not everyone sees things the same for a lot of reason, but if you and your mate can talk about the issues without tearing each other apart, you’ll have more than most people ever achieve. A critical aspect to negotiating is to focus on the issues and don’t draw a line in sand. Lines to never cross one day may be the shortest paths out of misery tomorrow.
Pay attention to how you feel when you are with the other person for a while. If after two-days of hugging you find your inside feelings want you to be elsewhere, it might be time to leave the ride for someone else. In addition, pay attention to how your partner feels when they run that same test. For example, if they are always trying to escape when it is over, open the gate as soon as you can so others have a chance to get in while it still matters.
Keeping Promises:
If you make a promise, talk to the other person from your heart in a clear and honest manner before you break a promise, or you’ll loose their respect and that is hard to regained. More importanly, accumulating breaks in trust will eventually break a bond that can’t be repaired. If this is too hard, than just do what you say you will do. No exceptions no matter what the other person's age may be.
Finances:
Money is the grease that can make life easier, or it can be the distraction that triggers greed and makes everyone suspect. Having enough to meet your needs and those of your family helps you work on being who you want to be, but all too often money blinds us into working way too much at feeding its bank accounts.
A plan to have enough money around when you are old will keep you from being an unnecessary load on others, so begin to save when you are young, make it a habit and be sure you have some available when you reach retirement. Don't wait for age to bring into focus how critically important nest eggs are to living the 10 to 12 years left past retirement. May you be so lucky.
At a minimum, try to put at least 10% of your weekly pay into an interest bearing account. As that account grows, consider putting about a third into safe and regulated investments, and put another third into more risky, but proven investments (Don’t ignore the word proven). Keeping it in various places will keep it from disappearing over night like so many experienced during the recent market collapse.
Don’t ignore real estate as a safe invesment vehicle. Owning the home you live in and pay for is great, but also having a few that other people pay for is even better.
If I could do this over, I would do all of the above, plus I would also take another 10% of the income so I could buy more houses. If the new Social Security age of 67 seems like a late time in life to get onto having fun, starting with more savings and real estate earlier is a very good way to bring that age number down.
Credit Cards:
This area is so important and so often violated that it is one of the primary causes why so many people don’t have anything other than debt for most of their lives.
In simple terms, don’t put anything on a credit card that isn’t going to be there at the end of the month. Don’t buy any thing you can’t afford to pay for. In other words, if you don’t have the cash for it, and your life doesn’t depend upon it, don’t put the plastic down.
With that said, plastic is a better way to buy things you pay off at the end of the month, or to cover an income timing problem, as long as the timing period is short. They are also great for traveling because they keep the amount of money you need to carry to a minimum and in many places are accepted easier than cash.
Getting out of Debt:
Plastic extracts anywhere from 12 to 25 percent of the average balance from its holders. This cost of money is greater than what most people can cover over the long term because individual income rates don’t grow enough to service rates that high. This means that most people can never retire a credit card debt without a strong focus on not spending, cutting current living cost and hoping for a windfall gain to get away from minimum payments. For far too many people see the term “minimum payment” like a friendly amount to keep spending easy, while in fact it is the minimum amount you can pay before the card tilts and collectors call. A minimum payment plan is a plan for self-induced servitude in the land of the free.
If you have debt, do whatever you can legally to get it retired and resist it with as much energy as you can, and never forget how much our want-glands can be amazingly seductive.
Selecting friends:
A famous person named Morris Massey once said something like, “People are mostly the products of their environments and the people they knew in those conditions.” That isn’t exact, but it covers the issue that apprentice programs work because people do best when they can emulate someone. Because of this, the people we spend time with will influence what we do, and we will have an influence on how they behave. This fact makes it critical for us to be careful about selecting environments and friends. It also means that our children will be influenced more by what we do and where they are than what we say, so being honorable and consistent is critical in helping those around us not get confused about what we think is important. It also says, don’t just live anywhere.
Esteem:
Learning to trust your self is easy for some, and almost impossible for others. Wherever you are on that scale, one way to gain trust in yourself is to be brutally honest with your internal appraisals when something doesn’t work as expected, and do the same even when it does. This is critical because only by learning what does and doesn’t work for you can you gain the confidence you’ll need to trust your decisions, and then improve them.
Finally:
Learn to live well, laugh hard and love with all your being while you can, because the while you can’t is always getting nearer.
Monday, October 20, 2003
While making other plans...
Time goes by unnoticed all too often, and so has my attention to this Blog space. In simple terms, life at eCOMMON has been asleep since last July.
Plans were to find new space for this Blog, but the time to make it happen hasn't surfaced. Also not surfacing are technical changes at BLOGGER to provide ACTIVE-FTP access to available space at my ISP. And then there is the matter of being on hold, while my hope for a technical questions left in the BLOGGER Support queue fails as weeks click by waiting for them to read the question. Maybe more importantly, are the distractions from paying projects that provide reasons to spend time on them instead of eCOMMON.
In time, hope has it that time, labeled as spare, will arrive so eCOMMON will get moved out of the linen closet of the larger web site storing these post.
Life use to be what was happening while I made other plans; Now it is happening while I'm on-hold.
Saturday, July 05, 2003
Testing Exposes Problems
It never ceases to amaze me how the simple things seem to get in the way of getting stuff done. When I wrote the first post for eCOMMON, it seemed like all I had to do was click on the POST button and the first message would leave and make the web space active.
Well, that didn't happen and the first message didn't leave until today. In fact, after spending more time trying to find a work around solution to get the new BLOGGER software to post into the web space, I put my hat under my chin and asked the BLOGGER people for help. That request for help was almost three-weeks ago and BLOGGER Support hasn't even read the message yet. It will be interesting to see how long it takes them to read it, and if they ever respond, I'll add the cycle time. Of course this exercise of asking and waiting could be like the proverbial question of whether a tree makes any sound if nobody hears it when it falls. In this case, is the question ever asked, if nobody reads it?
If you are wondering how this is getting out, well after trying all different sorts of approaches to getting eCOMMON published, I’ve come to the conclusion that the new BLOGGER software won’t work with a hosting service that requires ACTIVE-FTP, instead of the PASSIVE-FTP mode some space providers will support.
As for this space, it is temporarily renting a room not being used by another web site. Before long, I'll need to make a decision if I should move the eCOMMON web site domain to a more flexible hosting service than MegaPath.Net, where I have this Happy/Sad relationship, that I may talk about later.
Sunday, June 22, 2003
Testing the Waters
It was more than a year ago that interest in a Blog surfaced, but work and other distraction always seemed to find a way of pushing a startup off into the future. In many respects, knowing how to work with the Blogger became a stumbling block in itself. Not that any of this was hard, it really wasn't. It was just that I just didn't want to take on one more thing to learn until the paying projects found their way to completion.
Where to host a Blog became the next stumbling block. For sure living in a sea of ads popping up all around didn't sound appealing, so putting it in my allotted web space provided by my ISP seemed like the best choice. That decision came with its own set of problems when months of terrible ADSL service followed a transition from a rock solid IDSL connection. It for certain seemed like finding a new ISP was going to be the only solution to getting back to a reliable connection. Fortunately, a good deal for a T1 line was offered and my affair with ADSL technology was banished.
With four months of a solid connection to the Internet now accumulated, what to say and when, were the only issues left on the table. While those issues aren't resolved as of this posting, I'm sure some words will surface when I'm ready. If this post makes it the web space, I'll know the creation side of Blogger is solved, and the more interesting words can begin to flow.
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