thoughtsformykids

[thoughtsformykids]

Fear

We all have things that we are afraid of, maybe you are deathly afraid of spiders, or your knee starts to buckle when you look over a balcony, or maybe the sight of blood causes you to faint.

I certainly have tons of fears, for example I am not a fan of the water, I am still trying to get comfortable and learn how to swim after all these years. I don’t like roller coasters, the sinking feeling you feel in your stomach with each drop is just not any fun for me. Then there is the fear of public speaking, now this one really bugs me.

There are different type of fear, some fears are trivial and doesn’t hinder or affect your life in a negative way, but then there are fears that prevents you from experiencing life, that limits you, and that cripple you from expanding your potential and horizons.

These are the fears that one needs to work on and try to overcome. Its not easy.

One way to put your fear in perspective is to ask yourself, “Whats the worst that can happen”, or break down the task into small steps and focus on getting over the one little thing at a time.

A great example of this is when we tried to teach you guys how to swim. 

You guys were deathly afraid of the water. So what we did on the first day was to just have you guys put your foot in the water and splash around, and that was it. The next time we did a little more, and so on. Eventually you guys are swimming like fishes.

I am not saying there weren’t set backs and hardships etc. But at the end of the day need to think about your fears and figure out if the fear is holding you back. If it is, then its time to overcome it one little step at a time.

Remember everyone is afraid of something, there is nothing wrong with being fearful. It doesn’t mean you are less of a person because you are afraid of something while someone else is not. The important thing is understand your fears, be aware of them and figure out which ones you need to overcome and which ones you can live with.

[thoughtsformykids]

Warren Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Berkshire Hathaway, equates IQ to the horsepower of an engine and RQ to the output. We all know people who are high on IQ but average or low on RQ. Their efficiency is poor. There are others without dazzling IQs but who consistently make sound decisions. They are highly efficient.

[thoughtsformykids]

Do your best ...

I know, "Do your best" we have heard this before from many many different folks. Its not very exciting when you hear someone telling you to "Do your best", this inevitably implies you are not doing your best.

I think this phrase is important not because it can help you achieve great things, but because how it can affect your happiness and reduce your stress in life.

Like many people in the world. I am the type of person that usually look at things as "half full". I always see the issues and problems and complain. I always worry about what the outcome of what I am doing will be and complain about how others are not doing it right.

That is very stressful.

If you concentrate on "Doing your best" everything else will just take care of itself, good or bad. Because you know what at the end of the day, the only person that you can really control is "yourself". Why worry about what so and so is doing or not doing? You can't change that! Or worry about what event is happening or not happening. Or worry about all the external things that you cannot and have no control over.

Worrying about others is not only stressful but counter productive.

You concentrate on yourself and "doing your best". You have the peace of mind in knowing, you have done all you can as a person. Everything else is beyond your control, so why worry, think, complain about it? 

Do your best ... forget the rest.

[thoughtsformykids]

The cubicle may be cozier, and more creativity inducing, than we think.

Great article on the benefits of being a "worker bee". Remember not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur.  Working for yourselves sometime is not all its crack up to be. Working for someone else is not as bad as everyone (media, etc.) makes it out to be.

[thoughtsformykids]

Government by the People, ... but not for the People

I am mad and sad, I have always thought the US is a beacon of law and order. The country founded under the Constitution (where the 4th and 5th Amendments of the United States Constitution protect us against illegal search and seizure and against the taking of private property) have decided to do exactly what the 4th and 5th Amendments of the Constitution protect us from, the government have decide to seize private property from Fannie and Freddie shareholders without due compensation. 

Here is an analogy to what the government have done (if you are interested in all the technical legal details check out Tim Howards blog at http://timhoward717.com/)

Lets say you own a small grocery store in your local neighborhood, you fell under hard time and decide to go to the bank for some help. The bank look over your situation decide to help you out.

The bank provide you with $183K (so you can keep the company afloat pay your cost and works) and charge you an interest rate of 10% (man that is high, but what can you do you are desperate) per year for the money. At the same time as part of the deal, the bank will take control of the store and help the store to become profitable and eventually return the store to you.

As a few years goes by your store started to do better and in turn starting to make lots of money.

All of sudden the bank came knocking on the door and decide to change the agreement, from now on ALL your profits from the store will be going directly to the bank. You get nothing, zero. Even though you are still the owner of the store, you will see none of the profit from the store in perpetuity.

Above is pretty much what The Treasury have done to Fannie and Freddie shareholders.

[thoughtsformykids]

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - George Orwell This appeal is addressed to the mainstream media in the hopes that we can get some more objective ...

[thoughtsformykids]

Dare to be Great!

Do you want to be great! What does one need to do to be great? Well once again Howard Marks has a great memo on this topic. A great read.

Dare to be Great II

To be great you have to do things differently.

[thoughtsformykids]

Great post, play more and laugh

[thoughtsformykids]

Can You Retire?

I think many people at some point in their lives have thought, "When can I retire?" or "Can I retire with what i have saved up along with my expenses?".

I recently came across this great retirement calculator FIRECalc, which is not your typical retirement calculator.

The typical retirement calculator takes your portfolio amount and use the historical average return for the portfolio and calculate what you will earn base on the historical returns. However we all know that is not realistic, using "average returns" have many short comings.

For example your return and your portfolio size would be considerably different if you decide to retire at the beginning of 2008  vs 2010. If you started in 2008 your return would be horrendous (2008 market crashed), however if you started in 2010 things would be very different.

For example, lets say your portfolio is $3 million, you would like to spend approx $100K a year and you would like this to last for 50 years. If you plug those numbers into FIRECalc here is what you will get along with some nice chart which we won't show here.

Here is how your portfolio would have fared in each of the 93 cycles. The lowest and highest portfolio balance throughout your retirement was $1,017,682 to $59,770,745, with an average of $16,567,850. (Note: values are in terms of the dollars as of the beginning of the retirement period for each cycle.)

For our purposes, failure means the portfolio was depleted before the end of the 50 years. FIRECalc found that 0 cycles failed, for a success rate of 100.0%.

What FIRECalc is saying is, base on 93 different retirement starting points you have 100% chance that you can retire with $3million and able to spend $100k every year for 50 years.

[thoughtsformykids]

Once in a while when you look at your little gal twirling in her frilly skirt, remember she'll be grown one day. What do you want her to know about men, life, herself, love?...

What can i say, this list is just simply amazing. It is something that i am striving for with my little girls. Here is the complete list from the above article:

How you love me is how I will love myself.

Ask how I am feeling and listen to my answer, I need to know you value me before I can understand my true value.

I learn how I should be treated by how you treat my mom, whether you are married to her or not.

If you are angry with me, I feel it even if I don't understand it, so talk to me.

Every time you show grace to me or someone else, I learn to trust God a little more.

I need to experience your nurturing physical strength, so I learn to trust the physicality of men.

Please don't talk about sex like a teenage boy, or I think it's something dirty.

When your tone is gentle, I understand what you are saying much better.

How you talk about female bodies when you're "just joking" is what I believe about my own.

How you handle my heart, is how I will allow it to be handled by others.

If you encourage me to find what brings joy, I will always seek it.

If you teach me what safe feels like when I'm with you, I will know better how to guard myself from men who are not.

Teach me a love of art, science, and nature, and I will learn that intellect matters more than dress size.

Let me say exactly what I want even if it's wrong or silly, because I need to know having a strong voice is acceptable to you.

When I get older, if you seem afraid of my changing body, I will believe something is wrong with it.

If you understand contentment for yourself, so will I.

When I ask you to let go, please remain available; I will always come back and need you if you do.

If you demonstrate tenderness, I learn to embrace my own vulnerability rather than fear it.

When you let me help fix the car and paint the house, I will believe I can do anything a boy can do.

When you protect my femininity, I learn everything about me is worthy of protecting.

How you treat our dog when you think I'm not watching tells me more about you than does just about anything else.

Don't let money be everything, or I learn not to respect it or you.

Hug, hold, and kiss me in all the ways a daddy does that are right and good and pure. I need it so much to understand healthy touch.

Please don't lie, because I believe what you say.

Don't avoid hard conversations, because it makes me believe I'm not worth fighting for.

[thoughtsformykids]

One of best simple explanation of how the "Economy" works, all in an easy to understand animation.

[thoughtsformykids]

If you can DREAM IT, you can DO IT - Walt Disney

[thoughtsformykids]

Posting secrets anonymously is an old idea on the internet, but Secret is special for one reason: so far it's completely taken over by gossiping techies, early adopters with lots of bile to unload. It's part therapy, part confession, part defamation, and it's a lot of fun to eavesdrop.

Love it!

[thoughtsformykids]

Traits for Success

What make a person successful in life? What does a successful person poses in terms of personal quality/trait that a regular person doesn't have?

With my little girls being born, i have been trying to figure out what to teach them as a parent. 

I am currently reading a few books on this. Base on what i've read so far there are 6 traits that matter. I am trying to instill these 6 traits into my little ones and they are:

Persistence

Self-Control

Curiosity

Conscientiousness

Grit

Self-Confidence

I think its more important to instill these traits/quality into a person than having them able to recite all the facts in any encyclopedia (who needs that when pretty much all the information are just a few key stroke away).

What do you think?

[thoughtsformykids]

50 Unfortunate Truth about Investing

Great list of truth about investing:

http://www.businessinsider.com/50-unfortunate-truths-about-investing-2013-11

Number 32 is very interesting:

The best investors in the world have more of an edge in psychology than in finance.

[thoughtsformykids]

Luck

I know, i have written a few post about luck already, I find the topic fascinating. Here is a blog post i just read recently "Survivorship Bias" which has a section on Luck, here it is:

the latest psychological research indicates that luck is a long mislabeled phenomenon. It isn’t a force, or grace from the gods, or an enchantment from fairy folk, but the measurable output of a group of predictable behaviors. 

... Before you emulate the history of a famous company, Kahneman says, you should imagine going back in time when that company was just getting by and ask yourself if the outcome of its decisions were in any way predictable. If not, you are probably seeing patterns in hindsight where there was only chaos in the moment. He sums it up like so, “If you group successes together and look for what makes them similar, the only real answer will be luck.”

If you see your struggle this way, as partly a game of chance, then as Google Engineer Barnaby James writes on his blog, “skill will allow you to place more bets on the table, but it’s not a guarantee of success.” Thus, he warns, “beware advice from the successful.” Entrepreneur Jason Cohen, in writing about survivorship bias, points out that since we can’t go back in time and start 20 identical Starbucks across the planet, we can never know if that business model is the source of the chain’s immense popularity or if something completely random and out of the control of the decision makers led to a Starbucks on just about every street corner in North America. That means you should be skeptical of any book promising you the secrets of winning at the game of life through following any particular example.

It might seem disheartening, the fact that successful people probably owe more to luck than anything else, but only if you see luck as some sort of magic. Take off those superstitious goggles for a moment, and consider this: the latest psychological research indicates that luck is a long mislabeled phenomenon. It isn’t a force, or grace from the gods, or an enchantment from fairy folk, but the measurable output of a group of predictable behaviors. Randomness, chance, and the noisy chaos of reality may be mostly impossible to predict or tame, but luck is something else. According to psychologist Richard Wiseman, luck – bad or good – is just what you call the results of a human being consciously interacting with chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others.

Over the course of 10 years, Wiseman followed the lives of 400 subjects of all ages and professions. He found them after he placed ads in newspapers asking for people who thought of themselves as very lucky or very unlucky. He had them keep diaries and perform tests in addition to checking in on their lives with interviews and observations. In one study, he asked subjects to look through a newspaper and count the number of photographs inside. The people who labeled themselves as generally unlucky took about two minutes to complete the task. The people who considered themselves as generally lucky took an average of a few seconds. Wiseman had placed a block of text printed in giant, bold letters on the second page of the newspaper that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” Deeper inside, he placed a second block of text just as big that read, “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” The people who believed they were unlucky usually missed both.

 Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. 

Wiseman speculated that what we call luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life. Unlucky people are narrowly focused, he observed. They crave security and tend to be more anxious, and instead of wading into the sea of random chance open to what may come, they remain fixated on controlling the situation, on seeking a specific goal. As a result, they miss out on the thousands of opportunities that may float by. Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. Wiseman saw that the people who considered themselves lucky, and who then did actually demonstrate luck was on their side over the course of a decade, tended to place themselves into situations where anything could happen more often and thus exposed themselves to more random chance than did unlucky people. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else. Occasionally, things work out.

Wiseman told Skeptical Inquirer magazine that he likened it to setting loose two people inside an apple orchard, each tasked with filling up their baskets as many times as possible. The unlucky person tends to go to the same few spots over and over again, the basket holding fewer apples each visit. The lucky person never visits the same spot twice, and that person’s basket is always full. Change those apples to experiences, and imagine a small portion of those experiences lead to fame, fortune, riches, or some other form of happiness material or otherwise, and you can see that chance is not as terrifying as it first appears, you just need to learn how to approach it.

“The harder they looked, the less they saw. And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain type of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.” – Richard Wiseman in an article written for Skeptical Inquirer

[thoughtsformykids]

Pounding Away at a Rock ... revealing something else

One of the things I want to share with my angels is the idea and image of "Pounding Away at a Rock" has taught me.

If you have ever sculpted a rock/stone (I have in my younger days) you will notice as you chip away at the rock using your chisel and hammer, very little happens. However, as you keep hammering it, sometimes for quite awhile, all along thinking nothing  is happening, but suddenly the rock gives way, and a chunk of it falls away.

As you hammer away at the rock, things are happening to the rock, you just can't see it, and just because you can't see the result, doesn't mean you haven't done something. Not seeing immediate result doesn't mean you haven't made a difference or haven't achieve something.

With the same amount of force as all your previous hammering, a BIG piece of the rock falls away from the last hit.

Remember, all things are not as it appears. Whatever it is that you are trying to achieve or accomplish remember you have to keep at it. As long as you try, eventually the rock will give way.