@Randem

Yesterday, someone tried to get under my skin by throwing in my face that facts that I don’t own a car, that I don’t own my own home, and that I live in a bad neighborhood in a spare room with family. This person thought that would really hurt my feelings, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. If you think that bothers me, you don’t know me at all.

Fitting, then, that after this happened, I went home and opened Google Reader to find the latest post from Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar, talking about what it all means:

That luxury car and that sweet house in the suburbs are balms. They’re like putting calamine lotion on a very bad case of the chicken pox - you might lessen the itch, but the itch is still there and it will keep coming back no matter how much lotion you put on it.

What is the itch? That itch is your dreams, what your soul tells you that you should be doing with your time. That itch is the dream that you’re not chasing so you can drive that Lexus on your dreaded morning commute. That itch is the time you spend at meetings when you’d rather be your son’s Little League coach. That itch is the realization that you’ve just sold your dreams for a house full of consumer goods that are gathering dust while you sit in a hotel room watching sports on basic cable after a business meeting wondering what has happened to your life.

Exactamundo. Money comes and money goes, but time is in limited supply — once it’s gone you can’t get it back. I’m chasing my dreams, and they’re bigger than some mortgage or car payment. To quote Trent one more time, every time we make a purchase that doesn’t have real meaning for us, we’ve added another bar to our prison cell.

I have discovered a little-known secret that has allowed me to raise my credit score significantly. Using this revolutionary financial secret, I raised my credit score by more than 80 points in only a few months.

Sure, there are lots of gimmicks and programs available online that promise to help you magically raise your credit score, but they all require you to do debt consolidation, or apply for hardship billing status, or even to file bankruptcy. Some of them try to convince you to write fictitious letters claiming that your bad credit marks aren’t really yours.

All these gimmicks and programs are encouraging people to be dishonest and to try to cheat the system. But most people just aren’t that dishonest. Most of us don’t want to spend our lives looking over our shoulders and trying to keep our lies straight. Am I right?

My radical new program offers an honest solution. If you follow my simple advice, you will see your credit score increase rapidly, and your debt will decrease. And since there are no gimmicks and no tricks, you can feel good about yourself and have the confidence of knowing you won’t have to answer for it later.

This is truly groundbreaking advice. It’s so obvious that most people don’t even realize that it’s an option. But it is, and it works. It worked for me, and it can work for you, too.

It’s not difficult, and doesn’t require a great deal of time. You don’t have to spend hours on the phone with creditors, or writing letters to Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. Most of the work can be done in just a few minutes each month, right from your computer.

Are you ready for this groundbreaking advice? It’s simple: pay your bills. Yep, that’s really it. Just pay your freakin’ bills! If you pay the money you owe, your score will go up, and your debt will go down. It’s really that simple!

I won’t even charge for this advice. I’m giving it to you, my readers, free of charge. So go and try it. See that it actually works! Just pay the money you owe, and watch how much your financial situation improves!

Last night I had another one of those typical disagreements about my workout routine. Then today, Mehdi on StrongLifts.com writes about exactly that:

Can’t You Exercise Tomorrow? Bad. You break the exercise habit & accustom people to skip workouts for reason X. Do it once, and you’ll get plenty of more reasons to skip workouts in the future, “but you did it last time!”

Solution: men need time for their women, friends, and themselves. If you’re not “allowed” to spend 1h30/week doing StrongLifts 5×5, find somebody else. Nothing is worse than having no freedom to do what you need to be happy.

Bingo. Too true.

Mehdi writes about women sabotaging your workout routine — and gives some good explanations for why they do it — but in my experience, it’s not limited to just working out. They’ll try to change your diet, your social habits, your dreams, your goals… anything they can. You can’t let it happen.

Women don’t think like men. When you allow it once, they don’t remember that and considerately make a point of not doing it next time. No, if you do it once, they’ll establish that as a precedent for doing it again and again.

If you care about someone and choose to spend your life with them, then it’s good to change your dreams and goals and friends to include your partner. But there are some things a man needs for himself. That’s sacred ground. Don’t give in — even if it’s just a workout — or else you’ll find yourself six months later wondering why you ever quit going to the gym.

I found an article at Girls Who Network, a blog for woman entrepreneurs, which talks about how to build a lifestyle to justify your desire to spend, spend, spend.

Their solution? Figure out what you want to spend, and then create an investment which yields that amount.

Your principal is your “golden goose”, the interest is the “golden eggs”.  You keep the goose and spend the eggs, forever!  As long as your goose lays eggs, you can have a shiny, new car parked in your garage.

For instance, if your desire to be in a new car every few years ends up costing around $6000 per year, you can invest $50,000 at 12%, and then the interest pays for your car without you having to work for it.

While I have a few minor problems with the theory (eg, what about inflation?) I feel that the idea is still an excellent plan and is far better, on the whole, than what most people do with their money.

Jay White at Dumb Little Man offers five tips to improve your social networking skills.

5. Be a Hub: A hub is a connector. Find a way to connect people with what they need and you will be valued. If you meet two people (separately) at an event who you think would benefit from each other- introduce them! Don’t be shy. If they don’t click, they will just walk away. If they do click however, you will be the one they always remember as making that introduction.

This dovetails nicely with the book I’m reading this week, the Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. In fact, the five tips seems to describe all the key traits of Gladwell’s description of Roger Horchow.

All five tips are good, and I recommend reading them. The book is good to.

A theme I love to go on about is how the things you own end up owning you. Material possessions can serve a purpose, but more and more they becomes suffocating.

Naturally, I took an interest in this Penelope Trunk’s recent entry at the Brazen Careerist, in which she offers five steps to taming materialism, including:

3. Understand the concept of aspirational clutter. Get reality and throw stuff out.
So much of what we hold on to is what we wish we were using — objects that commemorate a life we aspire to but do not have. The six books we bought a year ago and haven’t read, for example. We don’t want to admit that we’re not making time to read, so we save them. The treadmill is another object that is loaded because if you throw it out you’re admitting to yourself that you’re never going to use it. Keeping it, even unused, maintains your dream of getting into shape.

This is something I try to do often in my life. I take an inventory of the things around me and ask myself “am I really using that, or am I just holding on to an idea?” When I’m honest with myself (as I try to be) the reality of the answer is sometimes surprising.

I often hear people try to encourage each other, offering the advice that you have to love yourself for who God made you. Mother’s tell this to their child who’s shorter than everyone else his age. Wives tell this to their balding husbands. Etc.

Well, to be frank, I think it’s a bunch of bullshit. We are our parents’ offspring. Our traits, our appearances, and even in large part our personalities are products of a genetic coupling process that is well documented and understood. If your mother had a dominant gene for brown eyes and recessive for blue, and your father had brown eyes with recessive for green, then you’re going to have a very high probability of having brown eyes, with a slight chance for green, and you will never have a chance at blue eyes.

That’s science. It’s not some random, magical experience. It’s not like you get pregnant, and then God sets up a workshop in your womb, playing games of chance for 9 months until a baby is born. If that were the case, white couples would be able to have black babies, and asian couples could have arabic babies. That doesn’t happen.

You are the product of genetics. And as such, there is no divine plan for who you are. Therefore, choosing to just take what life gives you is living by default. It’s refusing to take responsibility for yourself.

I say, stop living by default. Start living by design. Live where you live because you choose to live there. Look how you look because you choose to look that way.

You don’t like be overweight? or underweight? Stop whining about it. Stop blaming it on your McDonalds, or your wife’s excellent cooking, or the price of healthy food. Stop blaming God for making you a miserable fat person, or an insecure skinny person. Take responsibility. Change your diet. Start going to the gym. Design your body how you want it.

You don’t like being poor? You don’t like living week to week? You hate not having extra money to go out to dinner or spend a night at a hotel? Stop blaming your job, or your education, or your family’s expectations. Take responsibility. Look for a better job. Get more education. Change your spending habits. Be more frugal. Stop buying every cute singing fish that you see in the line at Wal-Mart. Design your finances how you want them.

Have you ever known someone who got plastic surgery done? A facelift, or a nose job, or a beast augmentation, or lyposuction? Sometimes the work looks natural, and sometimes you can tell it’s not. (Think Cher…) But I have never known someone who got cosmetic surgery and wasn’t happier for doing so. In fact, I remember seeing a piece on tv about a real life couple who had sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into cosmetic surgery to make themselves literally look like Ken and Barbie™, but even though their looks were obviously cosmetic, it didn’t stop the couple from being truly happy with themselves. Instead of being insecure, they are confident and outgoing.

You have the power to choose your life. Stop complaining about your situation. Stop accepting that you have no control. Stop being a victim and start being a cause. It’s very empowering when you choose to take responsibility for yourself. Instead of being miserable with the life you have by default, you can be truly happy with the life you have by design.

Many of us have tried weight training in hopes of reducing fat and gaining muscle. We all know that it’s the only way to put on muscle. And many of us are aware that the best way to lose weight is to increase the amount of muscle burning the fat we want to lose.

So if we all know that weight training is the best (or even the only) way to accomplish our goal, why is it that so few of us are ever able to stick to it?

People give up

If I talk about the painful experience of trying to cancel a gym membership, I’ll bet most of my readers will know what I’m referring to. And I’m willing to bet that damn near all of my readers have some exercise equipment from late night tv — the Gazelle, the Ab Lounge, the Bowflex, the Nordic Track, the Fitness Flyer, or that silly thing that Chuck Norris sells — sitting in the attic or the basement or the back porch, with a layer of dust and cobwebs on it.

So why do we all get hyped, and get serious enough about doing this that we spend money on memberships and machines, only to give up after a month or two? Most likely because we’re not getting the results we wanted. Convinced that we’re wasting our time, and that it’s never going to work or that it’s going to take too long, we give up.

If it’s hard, you’re doing it wrong

But it doesn’t have to be too much work. In fact, most bodybuilders will tell you that they made the most significant progress during their first two months. When done right, a weight training program should yield very exciting results right away — enough that you will have no problem sticking to it.

My motto in life is, “If it’s hard, you’re doing it wrong.” I don’t believe that anything has to be hard. When it is, you just need to find a better way.

It starts with common sense

You can’t get stronger if you don’t increase your weights. For some reason, people seem to think they can just use the same weight over and over, forever, and that they’ll somehow get stronger and stronger. They’re wrong.

You can’t get stronger until you know how strong you currently are. First you have to find your limit. Keep adding weight until you can’t lift it, or press it, or squat it, or whatever exercise you’re doing.

Expect exciting results

Once you’ve found your limit, you should find that you’re able to increase it by 5 lbs every week. That’s approximately 50 lbs over two months! In other words, if you start off only able to bench-press 150 lbs, you should be putting up 200 lbs (or close) by the end of your second month.

Those are exciting results, and you should be seeing them on all of your exercises. Seeing that improvement should be enough to motivate you by itself, but the development in your body over that time should be significant and exciting as well.

It all starts with common sense, though. You can’t get stronger if you don’t add more weight.