I had a very interesting conversation the other night which I’d like to share some ideas from. In a nutshell I was speaking with someone who has been making a lot of positive changes in her life lately. She was shocked at how much she had done in one year, but she also felt really behind for not having done things such as setup a savings account (even though she’s really just out of school). There was so much life “setup work” she had never done, or ever been aware of and now she feels like she’s just been jolted by all this stuff coming out of nowhere. What’s really happened is that over the past year she’s “woken” up a little bit and consequently came to realize things about life that had completely flown over her head.

I had a very similiar similiar experience several years ago which completely derailed me from my current path, which at that point was simply going in the direction life took me in. Sure I was making “choices”, such as planning on going ahead with a degree that I deep down knew wouldn’t be right for me, and planning to somehow be happy working in a cubicle the rest of my life (despite having had a chance to briefly try it and strongly hating the idea of being in front of a computer all day doing someone else’s work). After all programming was my talent, so why on earth would I want to be anything other than a programmer graduating with a computer science degree? I had goals too, or so I thought. Surely a Ferrari was a goal? I mean it wasn’t humanly affordable on the salary of a corporate computer drone, and I had no plan to attain it otherwise, but yes that was my “goal”. I completely didn’t understand that where I was letting myself drift in life had nothing to do with what I actually wanted. To make things worst this direction was highly encouraged through high grades in “smart people” courses and congratulations from others on making such a great and rewarding choice.

Luckily the entrepreneurial bone in me activated and gave me some business experience before I ever filled out the university application form that would have doomed me to writing boring code for stuffy monolithic corporations and unwittingly providing material for Office Space 2. I was exposed there to a strange freedom that was offered nowhere else. I read some extremely positive literature from people that seemed… happy. This was a world that my programming books had never exposed me to. Never before had I seriously read about ideas like goals, personal development, financial planning, and the idea that becoming truly successfully was something other than luck or born talent. It was enough to make me consciously realize what my subconscious had known all along - I wasn’t ready to spend another 4 years in school to prepare myself to be someone’s slave doing something that I already knew I would dislike. It’s not that I disliked programming - I’m having an absolute blast putting my skills to use with my website development company - it’s that I enjoyed working on projects of my own devising and not some insigificant clog in an obese software application. I took a year and a half off instead of going straight into university during which I awakened consciously further and further.

In the end I chose to enter a business program and because I had the opportunity I chose to go the double degree route and end up with a computer science one as well. My end choice in degrees is not important however, what is important is that for the first time in my life I had honestly been able to step off the beaten path, consciously examine my surroundings, figure out where I actually wanted to go, and then go in the direction that would actually take me there.

It’s possible and relatively easy to get to where you want to be in life if you stop long enough to start moving in the right direction.

I mentioned that I had simultaneously thought that I would own a Ferrari and planned to be a cubicle drone all my life writing software because I loved to write software. Clearly this was a logical flaw as I had no way of actually aquiring the funds for a Ferrari on the salary I would have been paid working for someone else. Yet having spent the last 17 years being a complete drone and not doing any true thinking for myself with regards to my own life, my brain was very happy to simply accept this gigantic fallacy. I was getting high marks and planning to enter a respectable profession, surely success would just come to me.

If this is how you plan to approach life, and most of us at least start off with this ridiculous mindset, then truthfully you will find success to indeed be hard. Feeling powerless and reliant on good fortune to succeed is highly depressing, which consequently pushes people into an even lower level of consciousness. It’s not surprising that very few people actually ever wake-up and realize it’s in their hands to mold shape their lives! If you’re waking up everyday wondering why life is so miserable and why bills suck so much then you need a really loud gong to jolt you out of it. My gong was realizing how much freedom and possibility actually existed for those were in charge of their lives, and how I was on the exact opposite track to that.

My dreams have changed somewhat from simply wanting a nice car. Truthfully they’ve become a lot more ambitious than that, but thankfully also not nearly as materially obsessed. Many of them are now real actual goals that I plan to achieve. I can place this label on them because I have taken the time to look at where they are, and then alter my course in life so at reach them. By altering course I mean that I have identified and am now systematically taking the actions that I need to acheive the goal. It’s as easy as baking a cake, but it’s far more long term. It requires staying focused on baking that cake for 5, 10, 20 years. It’s a pleasure to do now though, since I am seeing results and I am now confident that it is in fact me that controls where I go with my life. With that a lot of fear and uncertainty about my future has disappeared.

Waking up and taking charge has a lot do with building awareness of the world around you. Let’s take personal finance as an example. At this point you may already be cringing as visions of old people balancing cheque books come into your mind along with lectures about not taking on all that debt that is currently already sitting on your Visa (or another vendor of plastic 18% interest loans). It’s natural to not want to learn something when it doesn’t fall in your field of interest and when it seems like some complicated and tremendously boring thing meant to be understood by people that wear a lot of plaid.

However all that’s really at the heart of personal finance is goals and planning (again I can already see shivers as complicated financial planning forms and balanced cheque books come to mind). What people miss is that the complexity of the plan isn’t what’s important, it’s actually having a plan and following it towards some defined end goal. Believe it or not, once you supply your brain these things it’s actually very good at automatically taking care of the pesky complicated details. What if I told you that the difference between becoming a millionaire or a deadbeat with a terrible credit rating isn’t your level of income? What if the secret to achieving wealth is so dead simple that the only way you could have possibly missed it is that you’ve been asleep all your life and lazily following a crowd of equally sleeping debt-ridden lemmings? What if I simply tell you this secret and not ask for your credit card number or even your e-mail address in return? Very well.

The secret to accumulating wealth is to pay yourself first at a rate of no less than 10% of your income. With the money that you pay yourself you should invest it and aim for a return of 10% or so yearly. Immediately reinvest these returns and reinvest the returns of the returns and so on. Compound interest will do the rest for you.

This is the first and most important principle that financial planning books teach. I learned it first from The Wealthy Barber and recently again in The Richest Man in Babylon. Both of these books teach you the things you absolutely must understand about money and do so in a very easy to read way. The difference in following their advice and not following it however is profound. I wish I had woken up to these simple rules earlier and decided to start saving when I first started making money in high school. I would have had an extra $5000 or so saved up right now, and I would definitely not have noticed that 10% lower income.

So that’s how you get your finances in order, and hence start off on a path of success in that area of your life. But taking charge of your life isn’t just about learning how to manage your money. I said before it’s about becoming aware of the world around you, learning how it works, how to work within it, and what you wish to accomplish. Of utmost importance is waking up and consciously choosing to take actions towards the life that you actually want to live. To have a purpose and be actively fullfilling it. There are many areas in life to wake up to once you have done this. There’s your health to consider, your spiritual views, your social network, specific skills that you would like to aquire, and so on. It all starts to come together as you work towards understanding what you wish to achieve in life and actually going out there to achieve it.

Consciously following a path towards your goals instead of blindly drifting through life really is the secret to success, not being born into the right family or with the right genes.

I came across this Times Online article today that I could not resist linking to. It’s actually a book excerpt from How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis, the founder of Dennis Publishing of Maxim magazine fame (among other publications).

Aside from being well-written and entertainingly snobby, the excerpt hits home on some important points. Some key excerpts:

Nobody believed that exercise could prove addictive until science stepped in and discovered endorphins. And making money, I assure you, is a hell of a lot more of a rush than jogging.

Up to just seven years ago I was still working 12 to 16 hours a day making money. With hundreds of millions of dollars in assets I just could not let go. It was pathetic. Because whoever dies with the most toys doesn’t win. Real winners are people who know their limits and respect them.

I firmly believe this is true as otherwise we wouldn’t have nearly as many billionaires. At some point you simply don’t need more money. However it’s only pathetic if you’re making money for money’s sake, rather than enjoying the ride.

If you wish to be rich, however, you must grow a carapace. A mental armour. Not so thick as to blind you to well-constructed criticism and advice, especially from those you trust. Nor so thick as to cut you off from friends and family. But thick enough to shrug off the inevitable sniggering and malicious mockery that will follow your inevitable failures. Not to mention the poorly hidden envy that will accompany your eventual success.

After a lifetime of making money and observing better men and women than me fall by the wayside, I am convinced that fear of failing in the eyes of the world is the single biggest impediment to amassing wealth. Trust me on this. If you shy away for any reason whatever, then the way is blocked. You will never get started. You will never get rich.

Fear of failure is almost certainly the reason that you have not already begun to make yourself rich. It haunts all of us.

This is a constantly reiterated concept by successful business owners everywhere. It’s the fundamental barrier that causes people to come up with all sorts of wonderful excuses for not starting that business they’ve been dreaming of. Dennis goes into this in-depth and strikes important point after point.

It’s not very easy to find a book that is both well-written and full of great advice. Based on the excerpt it’s got potential to be entertaining and insightful in the same was as Branson’s Losing My Virginity. I’ll post my full review once I have my hands on it in a month.

Reading is key to having new ideas to fuel the expansion of your business. I currently have 30+ unread business books that I’m slogging through, many of which have provided me terrific ideas to utilize in my business. Sometimes I come across a book that I feel is worth mentioning on this blog, and having read Bag the Elephant by Steve Kaplan I can happily say that this is one of those books.

The book is all about the dream of many small business owners - bagging that large corporate customer that will provide steady revenue and skyrocket the growth of the company. Through 200 well-written pages Kaplan presents a practical plan for doing just that. He demystifies the process involved from start to finish in a blueprint that any small business owner can follow, spelling out the big and small points of interacting with a giant company and its bureaucracy.

What really sold me on this book and the techniques inside is the practical approach it takes. Kaplan has bagged his own elephants, with the first ever being Proctor & Gamble. He draws on this experience heavily within the book, with the Proctor and Gamble account being the focal example as Kaplan lays out his plan. In addition to the usual high level business recipes that business books love to provide, he shares indispensible tricks that he picked up along the way such as the time he got his status upgraded from supplier to contractor to get his own security badge (allowing him to setup and attend meetings far more easily than the competition).

It goes without saying that a truly large contract is a breakthrough for a company and properly managed it is the start of a truly booming business. This plan provides an amazing playbook to draw from to accomplish this and to do so without collapsing the company along the way. Kaplan makes sure to cover how to manage the relationship and the critical mistakes people make that could cause the deal to destroy them. Everything within the book is highly readable too, making it one of the scarce non-fiction books that are hard to put down.

I highly recommend picking this title up as I can’t imagine any business owner not being able to learn a significant amount from it, whether you are eyeing your first elephant or are looking to expand your impressive client list.