Anyone can make money. You can post an offer in your supermarket for services you are willing to provide. You can post offers on Craigslist to sell your services. You can sell old merchandise on eBay and other online sellers. You can get a part time job. There are many other ways people can make money. The question is, why do you even need a money mindset if making money is easy?
While the dynamics of making money may be easy, if you are not taking the right steps, you won’t be making enough for it to be worthwhile. You not only want to optimize your money-making abilities, but you also want to keep the money that you do make. Further, you want to make it grow in the fastest possible manner and by the most amount. For this, you certainly want to consider taking on a money mindset.
You need to focus your efforts on opportunities that will give you the highest return. Most people aren’t taught how to do this. They learn it by trial-and-error. Which means, they will likely do the wrong things that will cost them a lot of money. That money took a long time to make.
Learning about the right approaches to money management can counter all of these problems. You can still use the methods discussed in the first paragraph to earn money for yourself, but you want to take that money and get them earning more for you.
Some people will strike it lucky. They will win the lottery, or they create an app that sells for millions of dollars. Can you depend on either of these? Are you going to come into money from a long-lost relative who passed away? Again, this is not something you should count on (unless you know for sure).
Even those “lucky” people who come into money somehow, wind up losing it all because they don’t have a money mindset. Time after time, you read about lottery winners who are broke. The biggest problem for them is all the relatives and friends that suddenly come into the picture. Also, spouses have differences of opinion on how this money should be spent.
People want to make money. You see the lavish lifestyles of celebrities and other famous people and wish you could have the same lifestyle yourself. But, is your drive for money blinding you to what is truly important in your life?
It is often said that if you do something you love, the money will follow. There seems to be something to this because you will approach whatever you love with passion. You’ll get better at it to the point where you are better than everyone else, or at least that is what you strive.
On the other hand, if making money is your driving force, how will you accomplish that? You will simply chase the dollar from one job to the next or from one opportunity to the next. You will get seduced by false offers of riches. Over time, you will look back and see that not much has been accomplished.
In other words, you didn’t give your previous level enough time to develop a foundation. You jumped ahead, and now you are unclear what to do. It’s a concept known as the Peter Principle, named after the person who came up with the idea, Peter Drucker.
Money isn’t as important as many try to make it out to be. For instance, what good is having a high-paying job when you have to work 80-90 hours a week? What kind of life is that? Many people who do this, look back at their lives and wonder why they did it.
While they may have a lot of money when they get older, they likely don’t have anyone to share it with. Another possibility is the heavy workload to obtain that wealth gets them to an early grave. The money they earned is useless to them if that happens.
If you are happy with what you are doing, money becomes a secondary priority. People do need money to live, and you shouldn’t settle to work for less than you are worth. But, when you can balance a decent amount of money with doing something that you enjoy, it will bring a whole bunch of satisfaction into your life.
Choosing someone to manage your finances for you is a big step. Who do you trust and how good are they? If you are lucky to find the right financial advisor, will it help develop your money mindset?
The advantage of having an advisor is they are not emotionally attached to your money. The disadvantage is they are not emotionally attached to your money. It is a double-edged sword and one that you have to monitor very carefully. Too many people make the mistake of keeping an advisor employed even when they are not doing as well as expected.
Ask potential advisors a lot of questions before deciding. If they are not transparent about how they are going to manage your money, it’s probably best to move on to someone else. They should have no problem making their plans for your money known. It’s important to remember it is your money.
This brings up an important point. You are ultimately responsible for the decisions made by any advisor you choose. While they may not be good and end up losing money on your account, you chose them, to begin with. This is why it’s crucial to pick a good advisor. Try to find people you trust who are happy with advisors they have used. Referrals from people you know are the best type of referrals.
On the other hand, you don’t want to micromanage your financial advisor. Good advisors are well trained and know the ins and outs of managing money. If you are constantly calling them to find out why a particular stock or bond is not doing as expected, you are not being fair to your advisor.
Of course, if they set up the plan with one expectation for your entire portfolio and it is not doing what you agreed upon, you need to be critical with the advisor.
You need to be comfortable with the risk the advisor is going to take with your money. Hopefully, they interviewed you about your risk profile and set up a plan with this in mind. It cannot be overstated that it is your money, and you are responsible.
Having the correct money mindset requires great self-discipline and many people struggle with this so if you want to harness the power of self-discipline, check out the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 🙂
A catalyst can be something that you experience – such as an event, or it can be words spoken by another person, or a book or a movie that causes you to alter your life in some way.
Some catalysts are simple – such as a man who gets fired because he’s always late. Losing the job can be a catalyst for that man to make sure he gets to his next job on time or find a job that gives him so much personal satisfaction, he never wants to let his company down.
The event of getting fired, often at an inopportune time, caused him to make a change in how he acts in life. Change is hard. It’s easier to do what you’ve always done because there’s comfort in familiarity.
If you were to take a survey of random strangers and ask them, “Are you happy with your life?” you would get more no answers than you would yes ones. There are a lot of people who aren’t happy with their lives.
They don’t like their personal life or their professional life – and they don’t like how they act sometimes. Yet day in and day out, they don’t do anything to change any of that.
Some people don’t know how to change it. They don’t understand how they can find a catalyst to motivate and inspire themselves toward the kind of life they want.
Sometimes a catalyst enters your life, and you’re too focused on the ordinary, that you miss it completely. You may have to train yourself to watch for opportunities if you want to raise yourself to a higher level of success and happiness.
If you take the time to look over your life at this moment, what would you think about it? Think about the people in your life – those who you’re in an intimate relationship with.
Is it everything you wanted it to be and hoped it could be? What about where you are financially in life? Does where you stand right now with your finances make you wish things were different?
Does it create a hunger within you to have more? To be wiser about your finances? What about your job? This is an area where a lot of people are absolutely miserable.
Yet, they stay in that job year after year getting older and even more miserable. If you dislike any area of your life because it simply isn’t satisfying, you but you stick with it anyway, it means that you’ve settled.
You will have lost time and you will have missed the opportunity to make changes during that timeframe. If you want more out of life – if you feel that you should have more – and the unhappiness with your life sits like a rock in the pit of your stomach, then you need to take steps to make changes.
Physical signs like that are always indicators that something isn’t the way you want it to be – that it needs to be addressed. And ignoring these physical signs can lead to emotional complications as the stress of the matter weighs heavily on you.
Remaining where you are in a life you’re not happy with will lead to feelings of depression, sadness, and resignation. That hole inside of you that aches for something more, for something better will never be filled.
That’s not what you deserve. It’s not what anyone deserves. Life is not meant to be something that’s just endured. It’s meant to be lived with excitement because it’s an adventure if you decide that it is.
Though people are all different, we all have one thing in common – roadblocks that get in the way of what we really want from life. Roadblocks stop some people from ever making a change, but they motivate others to keep on going to find a way to what they want, regardless of the roadblock.
You might have one of these roadblocks or you might experience more than one of them. A major roadblock to change is fear. When things change, it ushers in differences that can make us afraid.
We’re afraid to leave behind the bad job for fear we won’t like the new one – fear that we might not fit in as well. Remember though, that one of the acronyms for fear is False Evidence Appearing Real.
Your fears are usually based on what if myths – and they almost always never come to pass. Don’t let fear cause you to sit on the sidelines of change. Another roadblock that gets in the way is a lack of knowledge.
It’s hard to make changes when you’re not sure exactly how to go about those changes. You might be branching out into an area that’s completely beyond your scope of knowledge at the present time.
Remember that what you don’t know can be learned. Use educational resources as your catalyst for change and success. Strive for new levels of insight that you previously didn’t have.
Thinking that you simply can’t add another thing to your already full life keeps many people stuck where they are. Making changes requires work. So many people see the effort as not worth the payoff – and that’s a mistake.
This belief is what keeps you rooted to that job that you hate, to those messy finances, or to that relationship that’s sucking the life right out of you. Learning better time management skills can be a catalyst for a better life as you clear out things that are a waste of time and make room for what offers the most benefits.
Being just comfortable enough where you are can be a roadblock to motivate you to change. You’re not 100% happy, but you’re “happy enough.” All this means is that you settled for a life that keeps you locked in your comfort zone.
You’re trading a full life for one that’s half empty – because if you’re not 100% satisfied, then something is missing. That something may be the very thing that you always wanted, but because you were “happy enough,” you’ll never reach it.
Focus on how it could be improved and then make a game plan to get you there. If you block out those thoughts in an effort to stay content, you’ll never know what you could have made of your life if you’d give it a chance.
Wanting everything to be perfect is a huge roadblock to motivation. It’s here where people stall out. They want the new situation to be perfect before they attempt any changes.
They want the new job to have everything in place. They don’t want to take the chance that they’ll make a switch and find it’s not what they wanted. These are people who wait for the “perfect” relationship before getting into one.
Perfectionism is the killer of change because what you see in your mind as perfection doesn’t translate that way in life. That’s because there are no perfect scenarios in a life that’s lived to the fullest.
There are experiences to encounter – and not one of them will be perfect. That’s okay. Perfectionism kills progress. You don’t want to be sitting on the sidelines waiting to get into the game of life.
The number one roadblock that keeps too many people from letting a catalyst be their motivation is the fear of failure. They falsely believe that they haven’t failed yet because they haven’t even tried – so they’re safe.
But whether they realize it or not, they have failed. They’re choosing to stay stagnant in a lesser life than what they dreamed of. That, in itself, is a form of failure.
Another roadblock happens when people wait for change rather than seeking change. They wait for the perfect joint venture partner to come to them instead of seeking one out, because that requires putting themselves on the line.
They wait to see if the person they’re in a relationship with is going to treat them better, rather than speaking up about what they want and deserve. They avoid tough situations and tough conversations because they’re waiting for everything to work out on its own.
Change isn’t something that happens on a whim. It’s something that you make happen. You must find the motivation within yourself to make that change. And it’s uncomfortable at first.
That’s okay. Take that sign of discomfort as a compliment. It’s proving to you that you’re taking action and bettering your life, even in the face of fear or uneasiness.
You get the life that you think you deserve. Your mind or your thought patterns lead you to make changes – to take action that alters the life you currently have.
What usually happens when someone’s mind leads them to take action is they become so upset with their current situation, they think leaving it where it’s at is no longer an option.
Their emotions will often reach a point that they must make a change. This drive can often start out backed by an emotion. For example, if someone is in a relationship with a person who didn’t treat them that well, they’ll often stick with the relationship until a catalyst fueled by emotion causes a change.
One emotion could be anger. If the person you’re in a relationship with is unfaithful, it’s often anger over the cheating that drives the catalyst – even when the prior bad behavior didn’t induce a change.
You can tell if you’re living a life full of passion by asking yourself this question. Do I love getting out of bed in the morning? If you’re not excited about what you get to do when you get out of bed, that’s a warning sign that you need to find your catalyst.
Whatever it is that motivates you is what will drive you to wake up, ready to start and excel throughout your day. It will drive you to keep going in the face of obstacles.
You’ll continue on – even if you’re the only one who believes in you, or your idea or your change. That’s why it’s vital to your success – to your ability to thrive – that you get in a business that you have a strong emotional attachment to – something you are proud of and believe in strongly.
Did you ever hear of someone who had a terrible health scare because they made bad choices in life that led to the issue? It shook them up – and for awhile, they strictly followed the doctor’s orders.
They ate right. They exercised. They got the amount of sleep that they needed. They quit smoking. They quit drinking. Yet before several months were out, they slipped right back into their old habits.
The catalyst, which was the health scare, came face to face with personal responsibility – and lost. The hard truth is that for your catalyst to motivate you, you’re going to have to accept personal responsibility.
You must accept personal responsibility for what you want to see changed in your life before it can change. People who place the blame on others for their lot in life don’t ever reach a place where they’re truly happy – regardless of the changes.
That’s because they see life as happening to them rather than them making life happen. Accept the responsibility for your mistakes, for your poor choices, for that awful job you shouldn’t have taken, or for that relationship that was a mess from the start that you wasted too much time on.
Once you accept it, you can move on. You can free yourself to finally accept the catalyst for change. Don’t let where you were be a stone around your neck that anchors you to the place where you currently are.
Let the mistakes you made in the past become part of your motivation – part of your growing experience. While growth is hard, all good things happen with the evolution to a different place in life.
Knowing that you want your life to change requires that you take stock of your life. It means that you must examine every area and look at what’s not been working to make you feel the inner satisfaction that you’d like to have.
The first way that you can find your catalyst is to understand the things in your life that matter to you. Your catalyst for motivation won’t be the same as someone else’s.
While what matters to one person may be an expensive house, that might not matter to you. Your priority might be financial security for your retirement, or more time to spend with your loved ones.
If having time to do what you want to do with creative work is what matters to you, then your catalyst will be whatever action gives you the chance to free your inner artist.
This may be something as simple as cutting back on hours with work or finding a different job. It might be the catalyst of taking an art or a writing class. Whatever it is should be something that you truly desire – something that you feel your life would be lacking if you didn’t have it.
The second way is to accept that you’re going to have to change things to get what matters to you. Many people are willing to acknowledge what matters to them, but then they balk at the change.
You won’t get what matters to you without change. It’s like losing weight. You can’t shed pounds if you stay sedentary, eating copious amounts of calories. You must be mindful of your movement and intake.
The third way to find your catalyst is to give it the opportunity to happen. For example, if you want to start your own business, but your personal and professional life doesn’t leave you with room to learn about business development or to increase your talents, then something has to give.
The fourth way to find your catalyst is to make it concrete. Write it down. Share it with others. Find a mentor. Don’t allow this change you want to remain nothing more than a desire.
By naming it, you’re taking a step toward making it your future reality. Claim what it is that you want for your life. Then make a formidable plan to go after it, step-by-step.
The fifth way is to not let the size of the change throw you off your goal. Some changes that people want to make really are pretty big. Changes like moving from your home to live in another country because it’s what you’ve always wanted is a huge change.
You wouldn’t want to pack up overnight and head out the next morning. You can’t throw away personal responsibility when a catalyst happens. What you must do is focus on the things you need to do to reach that change sensibly.
If your goal is moving to another country, you would want to find a place to live and secure a way to support yourself financially before taking the leap. Those are action steps that you can take that lead to the big change.
Small change is what equals big change, and it gets you closer to where you want to be in life. Think about how often you’ve just accepted your fate – your lot in life.
Have you ever made an action plan to get to a better place? To have more peaceful relationships by setting boundaries. To feel the thrill of waking up each morning, ready to lead a niche that excites you?
If you’ve been watching time pass by, waiting for a bolt of lightening, consider this day your wake up call. It’s time to embrace every catalyst you encounter so that years down the road, you’re not still stuck in the mud wondering why life passed you by.
As you probably already know, having a strong mindset is critical to any attempt to make a change in your life, so click on the featured resource below to get a free report on how to develop a strong mindset. Download, it read and take action 😊
You always want to strive to do the best work that you can. No matter what it is that you’re doing, do it to the best of your ability. These are good concepts to live by, but often times they can be misinterpreted.
Phrases like “to the best of your ability” and “the best work that you can” don’t mean that what you’re doing has to be perfect, but rather as good as you can get it. If you’re allowing perfectionism to pull you off track, it can seriously halt your progress and have some rather adverse effects on you.
The greatest masterpieces in the world have their flaws, and there is not one thing that is perfect. By striving for something unattainable, you could work for years to try to get something exactly right, and still be unsatisfied with it.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t put any effort into it, but give it your best shot without going overboard. If it takes a few days, that’s fine, but once it starts to get into a few months of work with no progress, you’re going overboard.
While there is the danger of you wasting too much time chasing after perfection, there’s also the negative mental aspects. If you’re consistently dissatisfied with your work, you’re going to end up feeling pretty bad about yourself.
You might think you’re bad at your job or that you’re not putting in enough work, and it’ll only be detrimental to you. Instead of second guessing yourself and wasting time, produce something that’s satisfactory to your standards and be proud of that alone.
There’s no reason that you should overexert yourself just because you think something’s good, but it could be a tiny bit better. At some point, even if you were to reach a point very close to perfection, it would come with what’s known as diminishing returns.
If it takes you five hours to produce something that your client is happy with, but it takes you years to produce something that’s slightly better, but close to perfect, then the difference is negligible. You will have spent far more time doing it, making that work not worth doing in the first place.
It’s true that some distractions can be beneficial to your creativity. Getting immersed in something that’s related to your creative work or doing something that lets your mind wander can help you be more creative and can often result in some better ideas.
This isn’t always the case, though, and you need to be able to distinguish the difference between distractions that are actually benefiting you and distractions that are holding you back from working as you need to.
For example, if you’re writing a science fiction novel, and you’re running out of ideas, it could be beneficial to watch some science fiction shows with the pretence that you’re trying to come up with new ideas.
It can help inspire you and show you things that you hadn’t thought of before. In this case, the distraction is beneficial. It helps you gather new ideas and gives you a bit of inspiration that you can channel into your work.
Distractions that have nothing to do with what you’re doing are often not that helpful, but that’s not always the case. If you were trying to come up with a new logo for a company and you were sitting outside letting your mind wander, that might not have anything to do with the logo directly, but it can still be a good way to open up your mind to new possibilities.
In this case, even though it’s not related to your work, it can still be pretty useful. One method of determining whether or not a distraction is beneficial to you is to keep a sort of distraction journal.
Log the amount of time you spent with each distraction and make note of how many quality ideas actually came out of that time you spent. If you spent 3 hours watching a show and only came up with one decent idea, it’s probably not that worth it and is just eating up your time.
If one hour spent outside produced three or four decent ideas, however, that’s a different story. At that point, that could be a worthwhile distraction that’s actually helping benefit you relative to the amount of time you spent on it.
Creativity is something to be admired and cherished, because it can be so incredibly helpful for you. It can give you new ways to do things, new ideas for projects, and bring a lot of light into your life.
However, there is such a thing as being too creative. You need to find a balance between creativity and actual implementation in order for those dreams and ideas to come to life.
You can spend your time 24/7 daydreaming, and during that time you will no doubt come up with some great fascinating ideas. The problem is, it’s almost irrelevant how good an idea is if it’s not put into action.
If you have an idea that would work well, but you don’t implement it, then you’re just wasting your creativity. You should use focus and hard work in conjunction with creativity so that you can actually benefit from your creative work.
Implementing your creativity is tedious work, and it often requires a lot of focus and dedicated effort. If you’re more creatively inclined, this will be more of a hassle for you, but it will be well worth it if you’re coming up with quality ideas.
You might be concerned that stopping your creativity to work for extended periods of time will hinder your creativity, but that’s not exactly true.
First, it means that your creative dreams won’t just go on to die out, but rather they’ll actually come to fruition and mean something rather than just staying an idea forever.
Additionally, you may be surprised to find that you can actually become more creative after a break. If you’re constantly using creativity, you may become burned out after a little while.
Taking a bit of a break to work normally can reinvigorate you when you get back to it, making you even more creative than you were before. It’s important to balance hard, boring work and creativity as much as possible.
Strictly doing either one will lead to some negative consequences. All work makes you less creative and you’ll start to get repetitive, while all creativity doesn’t really give you much to work with if you’re not putting things into action.
As you can appreciate, a lot of this is dependent on the way you think and if you want to know more about developing a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊
At some point in everyone’s life, they will come across obstacles. Many people are not prepared for these obstacles, and it causes them to stumble. But when you discover that obstacles can be opportunities, then you will be better prepared to handle them.
Many people are plagued with alcohol addiction. Some will come to terms with it and seek out help for their situation. It is not easy for them, but when they are on the road to recovery they can use their experience to help others.
Sometimes it can be as simple as being there for those who are still struggling. Other times, these people will hold seminars about their experiences in the hope that others will see they are not alone.
When we come across obstacles, we are often tempted to wish they would just go away. This seldom works as we usually need to take action to overcome obstacles.
Simply ignoring your problems thinking they will somehow manage to solve themselves will only make your situation worse. The good news is, in many cases, when you come up with a plan for your obstacles you will find they can be overcome.
You will be amazed at how many people settle for these obstacles and do nothing about them; perhaps they use them as an excuse for the way their lives are headed.
But realise that you don’t have to tackle them alone; in fact, you are always better off doing this as part of a team.
Join groups where people have dealt with the same obstacles you are dealing with. They can offer suggestions or point you to the right programs or solutions.
What you don’t want to do is to join these groups in the hope they will solve your problems for you. These groups can also help you make new friends and even establish future connections or professional endeavors.
Another opportunity in obstacles is the strength that you obtain during the process of solving them. You will learn a lot about yourself during this trying time. It may be worth you documenting what you are going through and this could form the basis for a book that could be used to help others.
You can bet that there are others in a similar situation to yours, s if you have found a way to overcome a particular obstacle, don’t you think that others would want that information too?
When you find other people who are looking for a solution, you have the opportunity for a business or venture.
People are willing to pay to solve a problem or at least reduce its impact.
When you solve that problem for them, they often tell others who are experiencing the same problem, so the venture feeds on itself. This makes your solution an easy sell.
Talking of obstacles, do you think that age is an obstacle nowadays? It may have been in the past but what about now? Well, let’s take a look at that…
Kids spend a good part of their childhood wanting to be older. They are proud of reaching certain milestones like age 10 and then age 16, etc. Parents try to encourage them not to rush their lives as they know life goes much quicker and seemingly so the older you get.
And there is an obstacle for people who are under 25. It’s harder to get a loan without someone cosigning, and insurance on automobiles is quite expensive for this age group. Rental car companies usually don’t even rent to them until they reach 25 years of age.
But, eventually, they reach the age where they don’t have restrictions anymore. That is until they start approaching their 50’s. It seems companies don’t want to hang onto these aging employees. This is because they can find someone younger for much cheaper.
While companies are not supposed to discriminate based on age, it’s quite easy to find other reasons not to hire these people.
This is narrow-minded on the part of companies. Many of these aging employees hold years of experience and knowledge. While generally, their younger counterparts are cheaper, it will take them years to gain the experience and knowledge of the older employees.
Another problem is people are living longer and many are not willing to retire at age 65, or whatever limit is set by governments. They have a lot to offer and they like the challenge of working. It is supposedly healthier for their minds to keep active as well.
Some companies will offer early retirement packages to people of a certain age. While these packages are not as lucrative as they used to be, it is still generally a wise idea to take them when offered. If you don’t it is likely you will be cut eventually anyway, with no package to rely on.
In many instances, this early retirement policy causes gaps in the business, and they end up hiring the same employees back as consultants. This may seem like a waste but it’s important to remember that consultants don’t add to the headcount and can be let go at a moment’s notice.
One solution is to keep on a group of aging employees as trainers and mentors. They have much to offer in the way of knowledge transfer and they can be a great benefit to the company when new hires are added to the payroll. They can help new employees get up to speed quickly by showing them the ropes as they have already been there and done it!
Whatever you want in life will require discipline to achieve and overcoming obstacles is a small part of this. But if you want to know more about harnessing the power of self-discipline, then check out the featured resource below for a free detailed report; download, read it and take action 🙂
If you’re creatively inclined, then you probably enjoy most of your time coming up with ideas, but you’re likely less intrigued by the serious business side that requires a lot of focus and monotonous work.
Any creative projects require these aspects to become full-fledged products or ideas, as annoying as it may seem. Don’t panic when it comes time to set aside your creativity, because you will get back to it.
Instead, just focus on your intentions with the creative idea and work to bring it to reality. While ideas certainly have merit, they’re not particularly useful if they’re never put into action.
Often times, putting them into action can be a tedious process, but it becomes worth it to see your creative endeavor brought to life, able to accomplish the goals that you had in mind when you thought of it in the first place.
For example, if you came up with a great infographic to inform people about a topic that you’re passionate about, it wouldn’t get very far as a simple idea or rough draft. A completed product that was shared and spread online would be able to actually inform others and spread your knowledge, but it’s going to take work.
You’re going to have to do research and cite sources, make it look nice, and go through the work of getting it to be spread and shared around. These are tedious things, but since your intent was to spread knowledge to begin with, it makes it worth your effort.
You might also want to create something with the intent of generating some income for yourself. It might be something like designing logos for up and coming companies or making physical products that people can buy on websites like Etsy.
The thought process is fun when you get to utilize your creativity, but then comes the actual process of bringing it to reality. Gathering materials, stocking your inventory, shipping purchases – all of these things can be a hassle.
Regardless of whether or not it’s a pain for you to do, your intention was to make money. The only way for you to do that is to give them an actual product. Very seldom will people pay good money for the concept of something that they’ll have to actually create themselves.
Instead, they’re more interested in purchasing a completed product, something that they don’t have to put any more work into. That’s where your effort to backburner your creativity comes in handy.
While technology and all of the gadgets we have today are certainly useful and can help you work more efficiently, they may also be dragging down your creativity and focus.
Whether it be a ton of distractions on all your devices or the fact that you might be using them as a crutch, they can sometimes do more harm than good for your creative flow and ability to focus.
In these situations, it’s best to put all of the tech down and just focus with the bare essentials. It’s almost like a palate cleanser. While you spend hours and hours writing on Word documents or drawing pictures in Photoshop, you can just as well get it done with a good old fashioned pen and paper.
It might not be as efficient, but it helps in ways that you might not anticipate. The best thing to do when attempting this is to separate yourself from as much technology as possible.
Otherwise, you shouldn’t be listening to music or watching anything, and preferably it’s somewhere outside where you can really absorb the sights and sounds of nature. When you don’t have the distractions of technology, from constant alerts to easily accessible entertainment, you might find that you’re able to be much more focused.
You’re there with only your own work to do, and otherwise you have nothing to really focus on. If you’re having trouble focusing, this might be a great way to get you back on track.
In terms of creativity, technology is very helpful, but it can start to become more of a crutch than a tool. If you know that you can always reference random guides online and draw inspiration from all kinds of other designs, then you may start to lose your creative edge.
By isolating yourself from all of that, you’ll be able to use your own pure creativity to create something entirely unique, without the reliance on all kinds of other sources. You should always look at technology as a tool – a means to an end.
It’s an amazing tool that you can and should take advantage of, but sooner or later, you’re going to reach a point where you’re becoming overly dependent on it, at which point you need to take a break and reassess.
Productivity is often stressed above all else in businesses today. It’s the best way to put out product after product, which typically results in the highest profit yield. However, productivity isn’t everything.
You need to be able to put out something that you’re proud of, something original and creative, and too much focus on productivity may stifle that, leading to some rather negative consequences.
There are many companies that would rather put out as many products as possible instead of making high quality products a priority. There’s a balance to be found between the two.
You obviously can’t release just one small product every year, but you also can’t be rushing so quickly that you’re not putting enough effort into things. Once you start to rush through your projects without care, you’ll start to slip.
If they’re used to receiving quality products from you, ones that are made with much love and care, they’ll be pretty sour once they start receiving a ton of mediocre work.
At that point, word may start to spread, and you can actually end up losing business. Creativity takes time. That is a fundamental part of business – it doesn’t just come out of thin air.
It takes time and care for you to develop an idea fully and to polish it to near perfection. You can’t take all the time in the world to get it done, since you naturally have certain deadlines to meet, but you can put a bit of extra time and effort into it to get it just as you’d like, to make something you’re proud of.
Extended periods of time spent pumping out as much as you can without any true creative input can actually hurt you in the long run as well. It might get you some short term sales, but it’ll start to fall off.
Creativity is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised frequently in order to grow and develop as well as stay healthy. If you’re not spending some time honing your creativity over a certain amount of time, it will start to degrade.
Eventually, you’ll be left without the same degree of creativity that you had before, and it can be difficult to get back into your flow when you need it. Instead of focusing on pure quantity, make sure you’re actually putting some heart and effort into the things you produce.
Well, as I’m sure you can appreciate, there is a lot more to be learnt about increasing focus and productivity; far more than can be covered in this short post, but if you’d like to know more about this, then click on the featured resource below where you can pick up a free report, Stay Focused For Success, that covers this topic in more detail. Download, read it and take action 😊
