We are already accustomed to financial media regularly releasing statistical reports and rankings of the people that lead and have accumulated an important allotment of the world’s money. For instance, Forbes magazine published its annual Japanese ranking a few months ago. For most of us, it’d be wonderful, impressive, and even magical, to someday read our names in such lists. A lot of people only dream of being there. But reality often reveals otherwise. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of luck, or inherited fortunes. But we’ll disregard such cases, as uninteresting for analysis. The norm is that becoming rich requires plenty of sacrifices, and above all, extraordinary efforts. It’s not easy. However, it’s not impossible to reach such goal. Powerful souls set exceptional goals.
The Art of Saving
Saving refers to the preservation of money for future use. Such future use might include capital and goods purchase (house, transport, vacations, etc.), emergencies, and miscellaneous expenses. Strictly speaking, saving is the difference between our income and our consumption expenditure. Besides, saving is our main tool to cope with mortgages, credit card debt, extraordinary bills, and other loans. Without savings, such debt and expenditures may sharply erode our personal finances. Saving also allows for harnessing sudden investment opportunities and to gain access to quality services. All in all, saving is a fundamental aspect of personal finance.
Money has to be tightly controlled. We must know where money comes from, and where it goes to. We must strive to know the way our money flows, the paths it travels, and the drains taking most of our income. By closely watching our money’s nature, we’ll learn to control it. Control is a keyword of personal finance. Control refers to checking the errors we are incurring with our money’s management, and to take the corrective action to rectify any deviation from our desired goals. Setting goals is other important requirement for saving, and it answers the question what are we saving for ?
The Samurai Approach to Blogging
The Samurai approach to blogging is a way for the blogging master, a path to highlight your blog. Nowadays, the net is inhabited by myriad blogs. Therefore, to stand out has become more and more challenging. Some people write about excessively specialized or personal topics, which have a narrower audience. On the other hand, topics discussed in plenty of other blogs may appeal to a broader public. Moreover, themes in different blogs touch on similar concepts or ideas, or at least are loosely related. So, blogs have to compete for traffic. Positioning in search engines such as Google and Bing is a good example of what I’m speaking about. Thus, the question arises: how to highlight your blog in order to distinguish it from others?
It’s simple. Follow a “samurai” approach.
Samurai
Read moreThe 7 Attributes of Leadership
When I have to hire someone for any position in my company, I always pay close attention to the below discussed 7 attributes of leadership, because I always strive to hire people with leadership traits (even when the job is not a key managerial position.) I always want the best people, no matter the size, complexity or responsibility of the job. I know that, as time goes by, groups of workers with leadership traits perform and coordinate a lot better than simple people. And the today new assistant may hopefully become a very important director in a few years.
Furthermore, I prefer the democratic (also referred to as participative) leadership style: in this case, the leader offers guidance to the group, but also participates in the group, and promotes feedback from other members. Note that this style is not inconsistent with the view of everyone in a group acting as a leader! The democratic style is also suitable for the modern dynamic environments because it allows dealing with fast-changing circumstances. Other styles, such as authoritarian or delegative leaderships, are very harmful and obsolete.
15 Tips to Reduce Eye Strain in the Digital Age
In the digital age it is essential to know and apply some tips to reduce eye strain or visual fatigue, and take care of our eyes as much as possible. The ubiquitous presence of screens of all sizes causes fatigue in our eyes, which results in dry eyes, painful sensation when moving our eyes, difficulty to focus, headaches, and evident decrease in productivity. Read on and find out some tips to reduce eyestrain.
Working in Groups: 10 Keys for Success
In the following, I’ll briefly expand on the key points for achieving success when working in groups. As a result of the complex and dynamic nature of human interactions, you may find working in groups a challenging issue. In fact, the coordination and agreement required by groups is a research topic by itself (see, for instance, this research about the effectiveness of work groups in mathematics.) But the powerful rationale behind groups is the divide-and-conquer approach: a bigger workforce may lead to bigger results (but not always, and in some fields, such as software engineering, it may easily be the opposite.) In this respect, I’ll propose 10 aspects we should strive for when working with other people. You may find this discussion useful for the college, the office or life in general.