Visualized.Feel.Abundance

Procrastinating is thinking about
What you will be doing tomorrow
When it should have been done yesterday.

1. Your to-do list is getting too long. Clear them before you run out of paper or you would be guilty of killing trees.
2. Your health is heading south. Start exercising or you will need a wider door.
3. Your laundry basket is overflowing, soon you will run out of undies. You could wash them or buy more. Washing is the cheaper alternative.
4. If you spent the time doing the work instead of procrastinating, you would have completed the work already.
5. Taking action kills less brain cell as you concentrate on doing and not thinking!
6. You are not cool if you procrastinate! Have you seen a procrastinating celebrity? If they procrastinate, you won’t be hearing about them right?
7. Procrastination is Painful. Painfully slow.
8. You will be bored staring at the same thing day after day. Get it over with so you can stare at something new.
9. Your inertia is building up. If you don’t move now, soon you won’t be able to, even if you wanted.
10. You won’t be as successful as NIKE if you procrastinate. Stop Procrastinating, Just Do It!

Cheers
James

PS: If you notice that I am a bit quiet this couple of days, that’s because I am not feeling well. Too much work can be bad too, the long hours I drive myself couple with lack of water finally did me in. So I brought up my backup post to share it with you guys. It was meant as a humor but the content is still accurate enough

Popularity: 10% [?]

Hey Folks,

I have taken great pains (4 post) to set the stage for what I am going to share with you today. I did it not to “fill in” posts but I sincerely feel that to really appreciate what I am going to say in this post, you need to understand the real situation. So take some time to read them before you continue with this post:

Understanding The “Boss” Mentality
Understanding The Effects Of Globalization And Outsourcing
Understanding The Effects Of The New Economy On Our Salary
Misconceptions of Key Performance Indicators, Promotions and Pay Increments

Summary Of Prior Post

“We live in an era where the economy dictates that companies pay their employees what they are worth and that worth is determined by how much a company is willing to pay as cost of the products or services they produce. Anytime the an employee ceases to produce the value they were paid for, the company would be forced to reevaluate the need for that employee.”

Who’s Considered An Asset
To be an asset in a company, it doesn’t always mean that you need to climb the corporate ladder (although it is a common result of being an asset). Every company needs assets at every level of their company structure. You don’t always have to be a manager or departmental head to be an asset. For example:

A production line worker that is always on time, meets his daily production target, helps fellow colleagues in times of need and encourages and keeps the team in high morale is an asset.

A housekeeper keeping the office and toilets pristinely clean everyday creates an environment so comfortable and conducive to work that every employee feels good when reaching office is an asset.

How To Be An Asset
What I am going to show you is a series of thought provoking questions that will guide you to:

1) Discover and determine your current value in your company
2) Find your direction and balance in your company
3) Become a positive influence in your company

Discover and determine your current value in your company
First, you need to asked yourself these basic questions:

1) For what purpose where you hired for?
- You can check the job description for your position or alternatively, check with your boss. You need to know exactly what your role is before you can determined your value.

2) How do I determine the value I have created for my company?
- For some jobs such as sales, this is simple, the amount of sales they bring is their value. For some jobs such as accounting and human resource, it is not as simple to determine. In such cases, the KPI will be an invaluable tool to justify your value. If you do not have a KPI set for you, talk to your boss and get one.

3) What values have I produced for the company?
- Again for jobs such as sales, just check your figures. The rest will depend mainly on whether they have met their KPI’s set for them or their department. The minimum that every employee could do is to meet their KPI as this alone tells your boss that you are not a liability.

Find your direction and balance in your company
Once you have the answers to the above, you have to ask yourself these questions next:

1) What is your vision of yourself in the company 5 years from now?
- Would you like to remain in the same position or proceed to the next level? Understand what that vision of yours will implies. If you decide to stay at where you are, you will need to understand that there will be a cap to how much salary you can earn in the long run. And if it is higher salary that you desire, you will need to improve your skill set (management skill, communications skill, etc) to advance.

- For example, a production line worker will never earn $5000 a month but a production line manager has the capacity to do that. However, he will need knowledge of how to run a production line, quality control measures and procedure, people management, scheduling, etc in order to advance.

2) Are you happy with that vision and is that what your heart desires?
- I know some employees who are perfectly happy to stay where they are while some may decide to scale the corporate ladder. Whichever is your preference, you need to be at ease with that decision. A happy and grateful employee is productive, well liked and becomes an asset while a resentful employee spreads negativity and affects the productivity everyone else around him and becomes a liability.

- Both the happy and resentful employee is in similar situation, draws similar pay and is equally productive (quantitatively) but they are viewed in a differently in light of their actions, which is a result of their thoughts.

3) What are the values you need to create to get where you want to be?
- If you desire to escalate, find out the job description or KPI of that position and acquire the necessary skill. Talk to your boss, he should be able to facilitate. If that position is higher then where your boss currently is, helping him to get there before you could help you greatly.

- If you desire to stay put, create you own unique proposition. Be the most productive employee, most helpful employee, the most innovative employee, etc.

Become a positive influence in your company
What ever you choose, remember to deliver the basic value you were hired for (meet KPI) and be a positive influence on your team, department and company. By looking towards the positive side of things and events, you put yourself in a position to spot opportunities and capitalized on them.

Here are some positive influence tips:

a) Communicate In The Right Direction - If you have doubts or negative feedbacks, convey upwards (to your bosses). If you have positive ideas and encouragements, convey downwards (to your staffs, colleagues).

b) Volunteer First - When management asked for volunteers, be the first to volunteer for the task that you know you are proficient in. You kill 2 birds by getting brownie points for volunteering and avoid being tasked something that you aren’t able to handle.

c) Help Yourself First - Always complete your own task first, then extend whatever help to the rest of the team. If team work is part of your KPI, clarify with your boss which comes first (teamwork or own task and write it down).

d) Keep A Smile On - Maintaining a smile on your face at work can do wonders to you and all that is around you. It is like an infectious virus then everyone will catch and it make people happy

e) Share Abundantly - Share your experience, knowledge and skills with your colleagues. By sharing abundantly, you will attract others to share with you, even your boss. I assure you that you will gain more then you have given out. For example, I share 5 tips with 30 colleagues and 5 of them share with me 1 tips each. Net total is that I have 10 tips now, 25 of them have the 5 they had while the other 5 have 6 each.

f) Always Bring At Least One Solution For A Problem - Never give your boss problems. If you must, bring along some probable solutions. If you have only 1 probable solution, add a solution you know your boss won’t take so you give him a choice.

“Don’t find fault, find a remedy;
anybody can complain. - Henry Ford”

g) Don’t Leave Problems Alone - I have seen many clerks manually extracting figures from their system by printing out reports then manually collating figures into an Excel spreadsheet. They spent 2-3 days a month doing just that! An elegant solution is to get your IT department or vendor to create a automated report that will takes just minutes to get the same report. Even when a cost is involved, I believe it will be justified in the long run.

“Most people spend more time
and energy going around problems
than in trying to solve them. - Henry Ford”

h) Run It Like You Own It - Always think of how a certain decision, action, process, etc will benefit the company (not yourself). Only when you start running the company like you own it, the benefits will come a full circle to benefit you.

“If there is any one secret of success,
it lies in the ability to get the other person’s
point of view and see things from that person’s angle
as well as from your own. - Henry Ford”

i) Never Work Hard, Work Smart - Working hard without working smart is the dumb mans way of earning a living. An employee working smart can produce the same result in much less time then an employee working hard. Using the same example in (g), the smart employee with automate the report has 3 more work day per month then the other who works hard (hard manual labor). If you spot and solve a problem that saves 10 man-minute per employee per day for a company of 1000 employees, you save your company 48,000 man hour each year henceforth! That is roughly 18 years your annual value to the company, imagine that!

j) Work Hard Only When Necessary - Sometime the company finds itself in some situation where they need you to draw a little deeper into your reserves to help them out! Do it, you will be appreciated. What you don’t need to do is to work late everyday even when you don’t need too. It could be deemed as inefficient.

k) Never Say “No” Right Away - When given a task or problem to consider, ask for some time and think about it seriously. It lends credence to you that you have given it due thought, even when you know from experience that it cannot be done, and sometimes, you might just find a solution that you haven’t thought of.

“I am looking for a lot of men
who have an infinite capacity to
not know what can’t be done. - Henry Ford”

l) You Always Have A Little More Then You Think - When you thought you have given all you have, just empty your cup one more time, reset your objective view and take a look at the whole team, department, company, processes again. You are bound to find something more to improve on.

“The man who will use his skill and
constructive imagination to see how
much he can give for a dollar,
instead of how little he can give for a dollar,
is bound to succeed. - Henry Ford”

I have shared a great many tips with you folks and I do hope you have benefited from it. If you have other tips or opinions, please feel free to contribute here. And nope, I am not going to talk about liability. Talking about it will just get you focused on it and I would prefer that you focus on being an asset.

With this post, I end my series of 5 post on “Are You An Asset Or Liability To Your Company?“.

Love,
James

PS: Folks, the key points in this post is Perspective and Gratitude. To understand and be thankful, allow a soul to drop whatever resentment is holding you back and gives you room to achieve greater things in life even when your skills stays the same. Think about it.

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Hey Folks,

Last night I caught a show about the real life story of a local entrepreneur, Mr Mustaq Ahmad, who runs the hugely successful retail mall Mustafa. I have a real soft spot for any stories on successful people, especially successful entrepreneurs.

The show was very short, just 30 minutes but it focus on Mr Mustaq’s childhood days and significant lessons that he learn since young. From milking cow in India to selling teh terik (milk tea with foaming bubbles) to selling textiles in his later years!

What Mr Mustaq Learned
Here are some lessons he learn as I appreciate them:

1) If the price of your merchandise is fixed by external source, sell more to increase your income.
- He learned that from a milk man collecting milk that his mum milked from their cow in India. “One rupee per bucket. You want to earn more, get me more bucket of milk” says the milk man.

2) Be honest in your business dealings.
- His father taught him that whatever he wants to do in business, he must remember to be honest. They were so honest, they even refused to pay street gangs “protection fee” (that’s 1970’s Singapore). By the way, the mall is named after his father.

3) Fixed a price that is lowest in the market for your merchandise and sell lots of it.
- In 1970’s Singapore, price haggling is probably the default mentality of consumers. They haggle over any purchases, even a cup of tea! He noticed the trend and decided that he wants to focus on selling and not price haggling. He did that by fixing a non-negotiable price that is lowest in the market for his merchandise.

4) He never gives up!
- While operating their road side stall, they were frequently harassed by street gangs and even the police (in the later years when street hawking became illegal). It was actually at this point when he got his first shop space, just 500 sq feet but he bought it - never even considering rental!

5) Treat Your Customer Well and Listen To Their Needs
- His father taught him to treat each customer with respect and he, in his later years, taught his father to listen to their customers need. He say “If they want henna (a type of hand paint), we get henna. If it proves a mistake, we learn from it.”

It was at this point the story ended and it showed how successful Mr Mustaq Ahmad has become. Click here to take a look at his website and his retail mall. The story of what happened after the first shop can be found under history on their website.

What I Learned
So why am I telling his story here? This certainly is not a paid post (maybe I should contact him to see if he is willing to advertise here :P). What I wanted to share was what I saw on the show and how it relates to the Law of Attraction and Positivity.

Mr Mustaq is a positive man. In the show (that’s all I can tell since I don’t know him personally) he has a simple objective - to make himself rich (it’s every migrants dream). He choose to focus on things he has control of (fixing the price and sell more) and ignoring the things that waste his time (price haggling).

He set a goal where Mustafa (his company) will be known as the cheapest place you can get the best merchandise and he sets out to achieve it. His action speaks louder then anything he could have said. His father was not agreeable to price fixing and even laughed at him when he started selling silk handkerchiefs at fixed price. He was mocked by customers too for the same reason but they ultimately came back to him when they found that he was the cheapest in the market!

His goal set almost 40 years ago continues to be the pillar of his business and he continues to innovate by listening to customers feedback! It is the only retail mall in Singapore to operate 24 hours and it made the news for being the first and probably the only retail mall in Singapore to sell automobiles as part of their merchandise. Customer who feels appreciated will come back to buy from you. Another good example of like attracts like.

I love his story and I hope you love it too

Love,
James

Popularity: 7% [?]

Hey Folks,

Lets talk about something most employees who care for their livelihood would never dream about saying to their bosses. The word we are talking about here is “NO” and by that I mean “No” to assignments/requests/demands given by their boss.

My Reasons For Saying “YES”
I used to be a “YES” employee, everything that was ever assigned to me, I’d take them. Even if I don’t know a thing about it or even when I was already drowning with my current assignments. So why do I always say “YES”? Here are some of my reasons (thoughts actually):

1) I fear of being branded (or marked) as
- Insubordinate or rebellious
- Unable to Multi-task
- Inefficient or Ineffective
2) I want to be on the good side of my boss
3) I felt that I have no choice but to accept because he is my boss
4) I want my promotion
5) Or simply, sometimes I just don’t know how to say “NO”
6) Or worst, I fear I be shown the door if I say “NO”

So did the “YES” man attitude work for me?

Saying “YES” Was Good
In the beginning, all was well. I could handle all the assignments and demands and completed them quite well. But I did end up attracting more assignments precisely because I did them well and never say “NO”. But that was what I wanted, to prove my value and get a promotion.

I did get my promotion and attracted even more responsibilities and more challenging assignments. Again a good thing because I still could handle them. But good things are good if it is not carried to the extreme. Occasional overtimes are OK, especially if it is part of the nature of your job (such as finance department being extra busy during periods where they close their account books). But the moment you start taking so much assignments that you consistently do overtime, you will start to attract the “not so good” things.

Saying “YES” Was Not So Good
Fatigue starts to set in and you start losing family/personal time. You will get irritated or lose focus easily because of fatigue. And finally, your mood gets affected, negative thoughts starts to creep in and you start attracting bad things. At this point, you better learn how to say “NO” to your boss. Well, actually, you should start saying “NO” selectively well before this.

If you carry on accepting assignments at this point, you will soon find yourself juggling between so many assignments that you start to be inefficient and more critically, you start making mistakes and blunders that you could not afford! That could become fatal! Fatal to your career, that is.

So How Did Saying “YES” Attract This Mess
So why did it happen the way it happened and how did saying “YES” turned from being good to being bad? It all started with my thought! Go back and take a good look at the reasons that influenced me to say “YES”. The only positive thoughts in there were “I want my promotion” and “I want to be on the good side of my boss”. But the rest of my thoughts prevented me from saying “NO” when it was necessary to say it.

Different Thoughts, Different Results
So what if my thoughts were:

1) I need to understand what I need to do to get a promotion
2) I will complete my assignments as efficiently as possible
3) I will not accept a task, with ample reasons, if I cannot handle it
4) I will learn from my boss, ask for guidance whenever possible
5) If I had to accept more assignments than I can handle, I must have the resources to complete them

If I had these thoughts in the first place, I would have said “NO” where necessary and will not be afraid to ask for resources or extension of datelines if the assignments cannot be declined! See the difference?

Why Saying “NO” Can Attract Good Results
By saying “NO” to your boss, you indicate to him that there is a problem. Explained to him what the problem is and negotiate something out of it. No bosses wants his project to end up in flames, right? Think positive. Giving you a new assignment may mean he isn’t quite sure of your current work load or he is still testing the limits of your capabilities. So tell him that you have reach it by saying “NO”! Because the other option is to go down in flames!

Summary
So do you still think saying “NO” to your bosses is necessary a bad thing? Not necessary, you just need to know when to say it and how to say it. Nows your turn to talk! Share your experience and views even if you don’t agree with what I said. It is always good to have both views so we can compare and learn from them
Love,
James

PS: In my article, I always refer to someone as “HE”. The boss(es) need not necessarily be a “HE”, It’s just easier and less cluttered then writing he/she all the time.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Hey Folks,

Welcome to this weeks Positive Articles Day. Cheers, we made it to Volume 2!

The article that I would like to share with you folks today is called “26 Tips to Stay Calm When Situation Goes Bad“. In this article the author shares 26 tips to calm your nerves in face of a bad situation! Everyone knows that in the heat of the moment or in face of a bad situation, you may not be in the best position mentally to make a sound decision. So if you find yourself in such a situation, try one or more of the 26 methods the author mentioned and it may just do the trick for you.

Personally, I use a combination of the tips the author mentioned. I will usually take a deep breath and smile. Then I start focusing on the positive side of things and start hunting for solutions. Here’s my evaluation steps:

1) Can the situation be changed? If yes, change it! If not, go to step 2.
2) Can I do anything to change the situation? If yes, do it! If not, go to step 3.
3) Can I live with this situation? If yes, live with it. If not, ignore it and focus on the good things.

I hope this article and my little tips will benefit you smile (hey, smile more. it’s beneficial to your health) and, if ever, when you face a bad situation (I hope not)!

Now, a little about the author. This article was written by promising young Indonesian by the name of Donald Latumahina who runs a blog called “Life Optimizer” where he shares loads and loads of great tips to improve your life! I like the way he presents a huge list of tips that you could easily scan through.

Till next Tuesday. Stay Positive

Love,
James

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