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Grit: The Reason You're Not Getting Wealthy

29/3/2015

2 Comments

 
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Channel 4 recently showed a ravishing documentary called, The Secret Life of 4Year Olds. Basically, 10 4-year olds were left to get on with it in a nursery/reception rigged with cameras and their behavior was analysed by child psychologists.



The traits on display included:
  • Dominant
  • Less dominant
  • Aggressive
  • Team-player
  • And most interesting to me, having grit – a trait that is believed to be more important in determining life success than IQ and most other traits.

Half the 4-year olds were male, half female, mostly white – there were two mixed race kids (one black+white, Skyla, and the other white+oriental, Jayda), there was one black person, a boy called Christian – he was the one who was said by the psychologists to have grit in “ample supply”.

The children were split into two teams, dominant and less dominant, and asked to build a den; this task involved team-work, a very hard ask at that age.

The less dominant personalities were able to work together and build the den within the required amount of time; unable to reach agreement, the dominant children failed to work together, lost interest and their den wasn’t build.

The teachers awarded the less dominant team the “winners” and asked the dominant kids how they felt about that. They obviously weren’t happy but got over it and went on to play. Christian (in the dominant team) admitted that he was “sad” about the loss, however, instead of just giving up he asked Chaim another dominant kid (and a bit of a bully) to help him finish the dominant team’s den. Chaim refused so Christian went on to do it himself and finished although, by his own admission, it was very hard to do on his own. 

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He didn’t do it for any award, he knew the other team had already won but he went on to do it anyway to overcome his sadness and perhaps feel a sense of completion. I’m not going to lie, I was super impressed: he was exactly the sort of child everyone hopes to have, very methodical, he played well with others but it’s his grit that I will focus on.

What is Grit?

Grit is stamina and sticking to your goals with passion and perseverance for long periods of time, no matter what. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon not a sprint.

According to Wikipedia, “Grit in psychology is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual's passion for a particular long-term goal or endstate, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective. This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles or challenges that lie within a gritty individual’s path to accomplishment, and serves as a driving force in achievement realization.”

Grit has been studied very widely by psychologists and studies suggest that people with grit are more successful because they’re unfazed by stumbling blocks. For lack of a better phrase they just get sh*t done come hell or high water.

Watch this TED talk on Grit:

If you don’t have grit you’re much less likely to reach your end goal – you lose interest and give up or you are easily put off by small setbacks. If you work on something long enough, that is, if you really commit – you will get there. You will live the life you want and achieve the type of success you desire.

You can’t improve your IQ by much but you can work on improving grit, especially if you’re young. Importantly, if you have kids you can literally revolutionalise their future by working on their grit. You can make them grittier by allowing them to fail and letting them understand that the failure or setback is transitory – it’s neither fixed nor permanent. Also, praise them for struggling through hard tasks.

Do you have grit? Would you like to improve your grit and your ability to persevere towards a goal? That’s what I teach in the “Success” module of The Money Spot Program. 
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Want to Build a 6-Figure Beauty Business from the comfort of your sofa? Then my course is designed for YOU! 

"Beauty" includes a WIDE range of products from the not so obvious non-perishable foods and crafts to the more obvious hair, makeup, fashion, health & fitness.

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Is Your Religion Keeping You Poor?

19/3/2015

19 Comments

 
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I listened to a lot of Grant Cardone in 2014. In Sell or Be Sold he has this one little section where he talks about how he works 14 hours a day on his best days and does more in 2.5 days than most people do the whole week. Grant then goes on to say that come Sunday, having done nothing all week some people still feel entitled to rest because “The Good Book” says they should rest.


As far as Grant is concerned and I would tend to agree that logic is completely flawed. He thinks God rested on the 7th day because he’d built the whole entire world in 6 days and as such deserved a rest. You haven’t done anything solid all week and still you think you need a rest? What? Why?

Indeed, every religion has it’s own day of rest whether it be Friday, Saturday or Sunday and a lot of people use it as a justification for not working. If you’ve been as productive as you want to be the rest of the week, why not? However, the fact is most haven’t.

I personally think rest has to be well earned and if you’re going to make it in this life there will be months when you cannot take a single day fully off. Even when I was pregnant and exhausted I was working like a donkey most days until the 37th week when I cut back to about 2 to 4 hours per day.

As a student in both high school and university I used to go to chapel every Sunday but that didn’t mean I didn’t do any work. I just did my work around chapel and ensured that I didn’t laze around the rest of the week.

Chapel was actually one of my favourite times of the week because it was a very social experience. I was friends with many people at chapel and usually spent an hour afterwards hanging out.

After I was done enjoying myself I went back to hit the books.

If you feel like you’re underachieving relative to where you should be and you also take a day off every week for religious reasons I would have a critical think about that. I’m not going to tell you what you should do all I will say is that you are the mistress of your own fate and small things like allowing yourself to work on the day you have been taught to believe is “a day of rest” can make a massive difference in your output.

God doesn’t care when you work. If God was so against me working on Sundays then why did he let me go from academic success to academic success? From a struggling 11 year-old how is it that by the time I was 17 He gave me all the resources to get into Cambridge and then ultimately to graduate with a first class degree?

Ultimately, you could be saying I am not working on Sunday or Saturday or Friday for religious reasons when the truth is, you’re not working on that day because you don’t want to and feel a religious reason is a good justification for your laziness. ‘Nuff said.

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Want to Build a 6-Figure Beauty Business from the comfort of your sofa? Then my course is designed for YOU! 

"Beauty" includes a WIDE range of products from the not so obvious non-perishable foods and crafts to the more obvious hair, makeup, fashion, health & fitness.

19 Comments

Maybe You Are Not An Entrepreneur

13/3/2015

10 Comments

 
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You’ve heard it said a million times before, everyone has ideas but only a tiny percentage of people actually do something about them. 

Usually, people blame it on fear that leads to inaction or the lack of resources required to make their idea a reality. However, the truth is not everyone is cut out for the realities of taking the risk to run a business. No, they are not lazy, it has a lot more to do with the stories they have told themselves and the unshakeable habits they have formed over a lifetime.

If you are in this situation before you can even contemplate starting a business you need a huge mindset shift and that may sometimes not be possible for you because you don’t want it. Rather than talking in riddles, I am going to give three very specific traits that I have noticed in friends that would hate the realities of entrepreneurship.

1: No Guilt When Not Productive

In my personal world, when I wake up, I have to be productive as soon as possible otherwise an overwhelming guilt will sweep over me. My productivity is normally set by a to-do list rather than the number of hours that I work.

Once I have achieved the goals of the day or at least the ones I realize were realistic then I can relax without feeling guilty.

On the other hand, I have observed some people don’t see things in the same way and don’t carry this productivity guilt at all. They will wake up, watch some TV or YouTube videos, read a newspaper, play video games and before you know it, two or three hours have passed. They then have a shower and get ready and then lo-and-behold it’s lunch time and they haven’t done a thing.

Importantly, they don’t feel guilty about it at all. It’s almost enviable the way they can relax like that. They don’t see that passage of time as a lack of productivity but simply as them carrying out rituals they enjoy before they get on to doing some work.

2: A Different Attitude About The Need For Relaxation

Outside of scheduled holidays many believe you need to pace yourself and incorporate relaxation into your schedule. Nowadays many are raised with rituals like taking the weekend off or having a lie-in at the weekend but many entrepreneurs don’t see it like that.

The typical entrepreneur normally wakes up to work on a project unrelated to his day-job in his relaxation times – her business is her hobby. So, if you have an employer then you see your free time as the time to work on the business that you’d like to make a reality. You see it as fun, not as work at all.

Ultimately, if and when you do manage to transition out of a regular job this habit of using free time to work on pet projects does not go away. If anything it comes on with a vengeance, taking time to just chill is a struggle.

My grandfather who died when I was less than three summed it up beautifully, he said to my dad, holidays are not an opportunity to do nothing, they are an opportunity to work on things you don’t normally get a chance to work on. 

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I was pretty much brainwashed to fully believe the same thing because my dad lives this reality. If we went on holiday he would take me along to shops; as we perused the aisles, he said we were checking out what they sell in whatever country we were visiting to see if it was exportable to Malawi. If we went on holiday to Lake Malawi he would pull out a piece of paper and start drawing the type of house he plans to build at The Lake in future.

There were plenty of times when we just chat and he told stories but peppered along every holiday were instances of what many would call work. To him, and to many entrepreneurs drafting your plans is pure fun.

Not everyone has been nurtured with these principles, beliefs and rituals so they don’t come naturally. That’s not necessarily a problem.

3: Completely Struggle To Keep To Plans

My office is at home. When I wake up, no one tells me what to do. I have a schedule and I stick to it and for the most part I don’t even have to think about working my plan. It just happens like clockwork.

“I wouldn’t get anything done if I worked for myself,” many friends have said to me.

At first, I thought this was complete nonsense but now, at the age of 30, I realize that I was judging them by my own standards. Those that have said this to me know themselves better than I know them and if they think they wouldn’t get anything done, they probably wouldn’t.

If you have gone your whole life doing things simply because you have been told to do them, e.g. teachers say do this, parents say do that – you will not all of sudden become a self-starter. Some people cannot work and achieve goals without having a higher authority to be accountable to. If you know this about yourself that is awesome because you stick to employment and don’t set yourself up for failure by going out and trying to strike it out on your own.

IS THERE A SOLUTION?

What if you notice one or more of the above traits in yourself but still want to pursue a business because you believe your idea is a slum dunk? Is there a solution?

Yes there is: partner with someone! Find someone who has the trait of making things happen and sell your idea to them. Make it clear what your weaknesses are in making your idea a reality and create a partnership agreement where your partner makes up for your weaknesses.

Sometimes accepting that you are lacking some very necessary qualities required to start an enterprise is the best way to actually finding the path to a fruitful business. Accept the way you are then find a solution for your weaknesses.

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Want to Build a 6-Figure Beauty Business from the comfort of your sofa? Then my course is designed for YOU! 

"Beauty" includes a WIDE range of products from the not so obvious non-perishable foods and crafts to the more obvious hair, makeup, fashion, health & fitness.

10 Comments

Anything Lots of People Do Can't Be Good For You

4/3/2015

0 Comments

 
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You’d be forgiven for thinking that I believe everything Grant Cardone says but trust me, I really don’t – he just says a lot of stuff that I already believe and he has a great way of putting it.

In Sell or Be Sold, I loved his statement that, “Anything a lot of people do can’t be good for you”. In this particular instance he was talking about TV. 

He asked, “What do you do between 5am and 8pm every day?”

His belief: when you get home spend quality time with your loved ones. Switch off the TV. When you’re done hanging out with the family make a list of contacts you’re going to call the next day then hit the hay.

Grant Cardone argues that TV watching is what everyone does – they do way too much of it – and that is a dead giveaway that it can’t be good for you. I Agree.

Ration TV watching. The quantity and quality should both be controlled. News: waste of time. Documentaries: choose the good ones and watch those. They don’t all have to be about business.

Personally, I enjoy documentaries on people that have a different life to mine, e.g. in Britain, following the credit crunch, there was a period when there were lots of documentaries on people that live on state benefits, people that live on council estates, immigrants, etc. and I watched many of them. I not only learnt a few things about how others live but it made me even more grateful for what I have.

Businesswise I love Bloomberg GameChangers but I think I have watched them all. I also enjoy The Apprentice, Dragon’s Den (it’s like Shark Tank in the US) and there are numerous programs on experts helping businesses grow – e.g. The Business Class with James Caan (it wasn’t that good to be honest), shows with Alex Polizzi, etc.

Now, for relaxation I’m partial to Criminal Minds, Scandal, Undercover Boss, Storage Hunters, The Face (it’s better than America’s Next Top Model but I like that too), The X-factor but only with Simon Cowell, home improvement shows and weight loss shows (e.g. the Biggest Loser) to name a few. 

That said, I usually can’t watch my favourite shows when they are on because the commercials waste a lot of time. To solve this problem I record and watch when time allows; this way I can skip through the commercials. Frequently, I watch a series several months after it’s finished –I always watch Scandal a few months after it’s finished over a 3- or 4-day period when I think I deserve a reward.

Overall, I think I watch a lot of TV but I also realize I watch far less than most. The other time I caught my mum telling my dad, “You wouldn’t think there’s a TV in this house, it’s always off.” Not true. It was on even less when she was around probably because I was trying to spend quality time with her. I normally watch 1 to 2 hours of TV a day in the week and 2 to 4 hours on each of Saturday and Sunday. When I’m super tired and my brain can’t think anymore I can watch TV the whole day because it’s so mentally uninvolving – this is way too much

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These are my TV watching habits – what are yours? I found some interesting stats on TV watching in America. By ethnic groups, Nielsen finds that:
  • African Americans watch an average of 218 hours of television a month (that’s over 7 hours a day!)
  • Whites watch 155.3 hours (5 hours per day) 
  • Hispanics an average of 123.2 hours (4 hours per day) and 
  • Asian Americans an average of 92.3 hours (3 hours per day).

I don’t even know what to make of these numbers. Personally I think poverty and not race has more to do with these numbers. Asian Americans are on average wealthier than white Americans who in turn have higher incomes than African Americans. As TV is a very cheap form of entertainment, the lower one’s income level the more of it you do.

However, does this then lead to a culture of TV watching? It’s also generally accepted that Asian parents push their kids harder to excel in school leading to the myth that Asians are the smartest when in fact hard work has more to do with it.

Although correlation does not imply causation I personally find these TV watching stats worrying because reading is just as cheap if not cheaper than TV. I bought 22 Walt Disney Classics for Little Zeusy just before he was born for £0.29 (44 cents) each at a local charity shop. All of them were almost brand new. I could not believe it – 22 books for less than it costs for a pack of cigarettes.

I then decided to look at smoking stats by income level. Interestingly:
  • In the US, 27.9% of adults who are below the poverty level smoke, compared to 17% of adults who are at or above the poverty level (source: CDC)
  • 24.7% of adults who do not graduate from high school smoke, compared to just 9.1% of those with a college education and 5.9% of those with a graduate degree
  • The stats are similar in the UK, roughly 20% of the population smokes; smoking rates are highest among the unemployed, blue-collar workers and the less educated.

Smoking is a cripplingly expensive habit. An article on thinkprogress.org states that smokers in New York who earn less than $30,000 a year spent on average almost a quarter (23.6%) of their annual income on cigarettes, while the state’s wealthier smokers — defined as those earning over $60,000 a year — spent an average of just 2.2% of their earnings to support their smoking habit. 

So clearly, there might be a lack of knowledge regarding “good habits” at lower income levels. However, I also found evidence online that tobacco companies target more of their marketing at low-income groups because the stresses of their lives make them more likely to take up the habit. And because the habit is so common amongst lower income groups it is more accepted and much harder to give up than is the case amongst the more affluent.

Anyhow, the links here are complex. I aim only to make one point. If you choose to break away from something that most people do the impact can be dramatic. Shun TV and substitute that time with listening to audiobooks or actually reading quality books and you will gain a lot of useful knowledge. Substitute smoking for going to the gym and the health benefits can and will translate into wealth benefits too.

Anything lots of people do is probably NOT good for you. How will you be different?

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Want to Build a 6-Figure Beauty Business from the comfort of your sofa? Then my course is designed for YOU! 

"Beauty" includes a WIDE range of products from the not so obvious non-perishable foods and crafts to the more obvious hair, makeup, fashion, health & fitness.

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Heather Katsonga-Woodward, a massive personal finance fanatic.
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