Ten Steps To A Happier Life©
Ten Steps To A Happier Life©
By Larry Winget
1. Lighten up! Don’t get your panties in a wad about every little thing that happens.
2. Forget blame. You can fix the blame or you can fix the problem. Spend your time fixing the problem.
3. Forget guilt. Guilt serves little purpose. If you messed up, apologize and move on.
4. Forget luck. Lucky people are those who are prepared, recognize opportunities and then act on those opportunities.
5. Give up the constant need to be right. Pick your battles. Sometimes it just isn’t worth the fight. Besides, sometimes you’re wrong.
6. Scope up. Pettiness is unattractive on all levels.
7. Rise above the approval of others. You are never going to to make everyone happy anyway so stop trying.
8. Forgive. You can’t be happy when you are full of anger and resentment. Get over it. Forgive them for your sake, not theirs.
9. Get healthy and stay that way. It’s hard to be happy and sick at the same time.
10. Stop looking for things outside yourself to make you happy. Happiness comes from within.
Based on an excerpt from People Are Idiots And I Can Prove It (The Idiot Factor in paperback.)
Ten Steps For Getting Ahead Financially©
Ten Steps For Getting Ahead Financially©
By Larry Winget
1. Figure out where you are financially. Know how much money you have on hand and how much money you earn after taxes.
2. Know who you owe, how much you owe and when it’s due.
3. Know what got you in the mess you are in. Figure it out.
4. Know what you are going to give up to get you out of the mess you are in.
5. Keep track of every penny you spend. Get a notebook and write it down on a daily basis. You will be amazed how silly and unnecessary some of your spending is.
6. Sell the stuff you don’t need and aren’t using.
7. Stay away from temptation; the mall, eBay, all internet shopping sites and any place else that tempts you to spend money you don’t have.
8. Cut up your credit cards. Keep ONE for emergencies.
9. Use cash. When your cash is gone, you stop spending.
10. 10 -10-10. Save 10%. Invest 10%. Be charitable with 10%. Live on the 70% that’s left.
From the book, “You’re Broke Because You Want To Be.” If you don’t have it – buy it! It’s on my website and I’ll even autograph it for you. For a FREE budget worksheet go to www.larrywinget.com and click on Free Stuff.
Twelve Ways To Be A Better Person©
People love lists. Give somebody ‘Ten Ways To Do This’ or ‘Eights Ways To Do That’ and folks will grab the list and get started. So I am going to give you folks a series of short lists on a variety of topics. Hope you enjoy. Feel free to share them as long as you give credit and realize that this is copyrighted material. And please, if you haven’t already, join the Larry Winget Fan Page on facebook and follow me on twitter!
Twelve Ways To Be A Better Person©
- Keep learning. If you aren’t staying current then you are falling behind.
- Be charitable. It will do your heart good.
- Stay busy. Become known as a person who gets things done.
- Live a life based in honesty and integrity. When you give your word, keep it. When you make a deal, do whatever it takes to make it happen. When you sign a contract, live up to it.
- Be authentic. Don’t try to be someone you aren’t. You will hate yourself for it and the effort to maintain the façade will exhaust you.
- Don’t complain and never whine. No one really wants to hear it anyway, and they have problems of their own they are dealing with.
- Be reliable, flexible, punctual, available and decisive.
- Stand for something. Draw more lines in the sand. Be uncompromising in your expectations, your standards and your values.
- Laugh more. It will do your face good and you’ll live longer.
- Be courteous. Basic courtesy has become a lost value. Do your part to bring it back: open doors, say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘you’re welcome.’
- Be nice. Simple as that: just be nice.
- Exercise and eat right. It’s stupid to be fat and die before you have to.
Based on an excerpt from the New York Times Bestseller, People Are Idiots And I Can Prove It (The Idiot Factor in paperback.)
Ten ANTI-Resolutions For the New Year©
Ten ANTI-Resolutions For The New Year
1. Last year is OVER – let it go. No good comes from dwelling on the past.
2. Don’t whine about the bad in your life. Whining prolongs the problem and irritates the rest of us.
3. Keep your problems to yourself. The tolerant are your enemy, not your friend.
4. Keep your dreams to yourself. Naysayers can destroy your dreams by shaking your confidence.
5. Never make resolutions- they don’t work. They are task focused, not end-result focused.
6. Start with the end in mind. Know EXACTLY what you want your life to look like and make a plan.
7. Write things down. Problems get smaller when written down, goals become more real.
8. Expect derailment. You will experience setbacks. Big deal. Get over it and move on.
9. Don’t stop – unless you need to stop. Sometimes you discover it was a bad goal, or you need to rest, or you need to start over completely – otherwise, stay focused and keep the momentum going.
10. Celebrate. Not just at the end, but all along the way.
Passion Has No Value©
Lost some of you already haven’t I? You want to argue with me before you even know what I’m going to say. You want to tell me that you are passionate about what you do. Good for you. I don’t care. No one else does either. Your passion is of no value to me. It has no value to your customers either. As my friend, Joe Calloway, author of Becoming A Category Of One says, “To the customer, passion is an invisible word.” I totally agree.
The dictionary defines passion as a “strong and barely controllable emotion.” Tell me the role that plays in getting the job done. None. Passion is just a word we use when we are trying to convince people that we really care about what we do. People love saying they are passionate about their job. And we love hearing that the people we do business with are passionate about what they do because we think we will get a better product or they will give us better service. Total BS. Passion has no value and is a word that ultimately means nothing.
A few years ago, I appeared on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch. He always had a handful of entrepreneurs on the show talking about their businesses and each show seemed to have a theme. At the end of the show he had an expert come out what he called The Millionaire Minute where he would talk to them about the show’s theme and get their take based on their experience and expertise. I was the guy doing the Millionaire Minute and wouldn’t you know, the theme that night was passion. Yuk. When he said to me, “Larry, what do you think of passion?” I answered with, “Donny, I think passion is a total load of crap.” He went pale under all of his orange makeup. He said, “I disagree!” I said, “It’s your show and you have every right to be wrong. But I know people who are passionate and they are passionately incompetent. “ I went on to say that people don’t hire me because I am passionate, they hire me because I am amazing at what I do. I am paid for hard work and excellence, not passion. And that’s what I believe: All of us are paid for being good at our jobs, not for being passionate about our jobs.
I gave a speech one evening to a large group. It was an after dinner speech and when I finished, on my way back to the room, I slipped over into a dark corner of the bar to have a nightcap before heading up to my room to go to bed. Big mistake. The meeting had ended and here they came. The president of the company walked over to me and said, “I want to thank you for your passion up there tonight.” I was polite and thanked him but then told him that he didn’t see any passion up there tonight, he saw a guy who was really good at his job. He laughed and said, “Oh no, you can’t fool me, you were passionate about what you had to say.” I told him that I believed what I had to say and was good at saying it and that is was years of hard work and a commitment to excellence that produced the speech he had observed and had paid me for. I went on to tell him that I was passionate about sitting on my patio with a fine cigar in my right hand, a premium scotch in my left hand, my bulldog in my lap, my wife by my side, listening to Merle Haggard playing in the background. I am good at my job and I am passionate about my family. He left confused I am sure.
Hard work and excellence: those are the keys to success. And it takes both. Some people work really hard, yet are horrible at what they do. Some people are amazing at what they do yet don’t work hard enough for it to matter. You can’t have one without the other if you want to achieve amazing results. But passion plays no part. If you care about results, you have to agree that we need a lot less passion and a whole lot more hard work and excellence.
Think about it:
I don’t want a doctor who is passionate about doing surgery; I want a doctor who is amazing at doing surgery.
I don’t want the soldier, cop, or firefighter to be passionate about their jobs; I want them to be really good at their jobs. When they are, they keep me (and themselves) safe.
I don’t want a teacher who is passionate about teaching kids; I want them to actually teach kids the subject they are paid to teach them.
I am betting that you are a lot like me. I don’t pay for passion; I pay for results. I pay for people to actually do their job and do it well. I don’t care whether they are passionate about their work or whether they hate it, that’s not my concern. I want results. Know what? That’s the way it is with your customers too. And that’s the way it should be with your employer. They all want results achieved through hard work and excellence.
I don’t want a “barely controllable emotion” any where near me or my money or my customers. I don’t trust emotions. Emotions wane. They are like the tides, they come and they go. Instead, I want someone with a total commitment to achieving results through hard work and excellence. Don’t you?
I know that even after the logical argument I have presented here, many of you will still be screaming about the need for passion and defending your own passion. That’s fine. I know that people are in love with “passion” and the feelings that the word evokes. I believe that’s because passion requires very little from us while hard work and excellence require almost everything from us.
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