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.

We all get the same 24 hours each day, of which almost half is devoted to attending to sleeping, eating, transportation and errands. On a good day this leaves 12 hours with which you are free to do as you please to further the achievement of your goals and desires. How is it that some people manage to get so much more out of that 12 hours than others? Why is the time of some people so valuable that they can command $250/hr for their attention? How do I go about earning that, and perhaps more?

The answer to this lies in the prehistoric days, a vague and poorly documented era that I am free to take artistic liberty with. Og was a particularly smart caveman living in that particular era and like all good cavemen he spent the bulk of his days hunting animals while simultaneously avoiding being hunted by said animals. Og was rather fascinated with the world around him, often getting lost in his primitive caveman thoughts as he spied a particularly interesting leaf. It was perhaps the first case of ADD ever noted, and unfortunately for Og it meant that animals would often creep up on him and catch him off-guard. Many wounds later Og realized that he was very poorly equipped in comparison to the saber-tooth tiger that had just run him up a tree. Something had to be done lest he starved.

Og did some heavy thinking and came to the realization that a wooden stick would help him fend off attackers if wielded in the right way. It was a bold idea with much potential. Up until now everyone simple wrestled smaller prey to the ground or settled on sharing termites with the chimpanzees (history suggests it was them that first invented the stick, but accurate patent records have yet to be dug up). After much testing and determination Og had his first functional hunting stick and the first real meal in weeks. The human race had its first tool and soon Og became the most well-fed caveman around.

Other cavemen began to take note of his bulging waistline and came to Og hooting angrily. They too wanted to hunt more effectively as the cavewomen at home were beginning to notice how much better Og was fairing. Og pondered this situation carefully and gestured wildly that yes he would share the powerful secret of the Hunting Stick. In exchange each caveman using said stick would be required to provide Og with one chunk of mammoth meat per month. It was a fair bargain and so Og was able to provide food for himself and his family nearly effortlessly.

So much is written about how to manage your time effectively, but performing low-output tasks efficiently will still get you far less than performing high-output tasks inefficiently. Og’s key to success was his propensity to find ways of leveraging his resources to achieve exponentially higher gain. His first breakthrough came from the stick, which allowed him to catch bigger prey faster than the other cavemen. Rather than using just himself to perform the work, he had transferred some of it to the stick. With the spare time this provided Og was able to think harder and an even bigger breakthrough came next. Og realized that he could equip others with a marvelous Hunting Stick in exchange for food. Suddenly Og didn’t have to do any hunting at all thanks to properly leveraging his resources (the stick idea). At this point historical records are again rather faint, but we can theorize that Og continued to profit from his invention by creating product upgrades like the Sharpened Hunting Stick, Hunting Stick Classic, and the Armored Tank.

You don’t need to be an inventor or a caveman to have this model work for you. What you do need is a change of mindset from the rat race of getting as much done as you humanly can within those 12 free hours into figuring out how much you can leverage your resources and abilities to exponentially increase the return you receive on each hour you work. As a work machine a human being is actually quite terrible. We are high maintenance, error-prone, and can only do so much work in a given period of time. The most productive use of that 12 hours is thinking up ways to generate value through available resources, and then putting those resources together to generate that value. You don’t want to get stuck requiring yourself to be able to generate the value, as the opportunity for expansion becomes highly limited. Og could have sold his hunting services rather than the Hunting Stick, but then he would have to be constantly working to receive payment and would have likely been stomped on by a mammoth. Remember that as impressive as a consultant’s $250/hr rate may sound, many millionaires are making much more than that from passive income streams and doing so while they sleep.

I read an interesting article on Life Dev suggesting that you should never check your e-mail first thing in the morning or before bed. The article makes some excellent points, but I’d like to disagree with the solution.

To summarize, the author describes the perils of checking your e-mail at night or first thing in the morning. The core argument is that mail can take a while to get through, with messages like funny videos making it very easy to become derailed for 2 hours just surfing the net. Instead of being productive by checking your mail regularly you are burning up the most precious working hours or staying up too late and not get enough sleep.

All of this rings very true for me. About two years ago I fell in the above trap and combined with online forums I wasted ridiculous amounts of productive time. The result was the feeling that I never had enough time to do what I needed to, constant tiredness from a lack of sleep, and gradually increasing procrastination. Yikes.

Nevertheless the entire time I read the article, rather than nodding my head profusely I found a voice in my head shouting “what if your e-mail is important to your work?”. Being an entrepreneur I don’t have the luxury of turning off work beyond the 9 to 5 timeslots and there is always the possibility of an e-mail in my inbox that either needs to be answered urgently or will drastically reshape my schedule for the day. Knowing what’s coming at me as soon as possible makes it much easier to make good use of my time.

If the idea of not checking your mailbox sounds unrealistic for your situation I’d like to propose an alternative that I’ve successfully used for the past year. I say go ahead and check your e-mail in the morning. Check it before bed. Have your mail client running all day while you work. Give your e-mail as much visibility as you feel you need to be comfortable! The trick is to use a highly underutilized feature of virtually every mail client out there.

The Follow-up E-mail Flag

Virtually all mail clients have this feature. In Outlook it is literally a flag beside each message that you can click. In Gmail it is a star. It provides a very simple way of marking an e-mail message for follow-up along with an easy way to find these messages later.

I actually have two very different e-mail modes. Checking e-mail and responding to e-mail. The first mode can occur at anytime, and since I have my mail client always on and a BlackBerry strapped to my belt, it’s best described as “all the time”. When I check my e-mail I scan over each message very briefly (not everything needs to be fully read right away) and either flag it, leave it, or delete it. If an e-mail is flagged I am comfortable in knowing that I will get back to it at my liesure. Something that is high priority may get an immediate response, but anything else is saved for an appropriate time. I make a mental note of any e-mails with attached actions, allowing me to be aware of what is coming up without necessarily needing to act on it right away.

Not responding to everything is tricky at first as it takes a little bit of discipline to not watch that funny video right away or respond to every single question that someone may have of you. The author of the LiveDev article is perfectly right that doing so will quickly waste the most valuable productivity hours that you have. You also need to get in the habit of checking what messages you have flagged. E-mail clients generally have a separate view, but I’ve gotten in the (possibly bad) habit of simply scrolling through my inbox and watching for flagged messages. I find that needing to flip to a flagged messages only view is a little unintuitive and is a lot more likely to get forgotten.

Bonus E-mail Tip

If you look at my inbox you may become disgusted at the mess that it’s seemingly in. Virtually every undeleted message remains in there, with no real organization. The reality is that I’ve given up on attempting to artificially file messages on arbitrary criteria like the person who sent it or its topic. I was lead to do this after a combination of filing cabinet advice from David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Gmail’s unique tagging model. It turns out that the more places you have to store things, the more places they aren’t when you need them!

I’m confident that the e-mail that I am looking for is in my inbox. If it comes from a certain person I can sort my inbox by name and usually find it that way. The same applies to subject and date, both of which also greatly narrow down the location of an e-mail to a scannable size. If I’m using GMail I tend to simply search for the e-mail as the engine works really well and returns results instantly. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for Outlook’s search, which can take several minutes to find what you are looking for. I recommend searching in Outlook as a last resort, and using the sorting function as much as possible.

I should note that I do use folders for certain special messages, like order receipts and automated e-mails. These special cases only get checked in a certain way and in the case of automated e-mail can really clog up an inbox if not dealt with separately. At the time of this writing I only have six such folders.