Image courtesy of gotetrunks

Last weekend, I was at the Singapore PC Show with my girlfriend as she wanted to buy a iPod speaker for herself. She had her 2nd generation iPod Touch during one of the IT Show last year and now Epic Centre (Apple Company) is already selling their 3rd generation iPod Touch. All of you should know that if any device or equipment can continue selling for a few generations means that there are definitely demand from the crowd that keep it going. However, whenever there are new generation of goods coming out to replace the old ones, the older generation models will definitely be selling at a much lower price compared to the new ones. Normal product owners will just sell their older goods at a discounted price at some warehouse or conference shows. However, what I saw at this current PC Show was something different and amazing marketing techniques by Apple Company. They were having an auction for their 1st generation iPod Touch at the PC Show and the starting price is $50 dollars. Every time a person raises their hand to increase the bid price, the host will increase $5 dollars and anyone can called a higher price to win their competitor bidder.

A normal 8GB iPod Touch is selling at $308 and this price has remained the same for quite some time already. However, something interesting about this auction was that people are willing to bid for this 1st generation iPod Touch without any warranty up to the price of $265 and more. However, the host stop the bidders from continuing the bid as he mentioned that if the bid price is more than that, it was not considered as an auction anymore. Therefore, he will come out with a solutions of checking with his boss to let all the 3 final bidders get their iPod Touch at $265. This is actually a great marketing plan to entice the customers as everyone is involved in the process of the auction. You can hear people saying why will someone get a 1st generation iPod Touch without any warranty at all at such a high price when they can get the latest model at just $50 more. This shows that there are definitely buyers out there that will perform funny actions to buy what they want but what’s really interesting is how Apple Company sell off their old goods as they did not really do it the normal way like what other company do and that’s why this company is so successful with some many raving fans buying their products.

Cheers
Javier

P.S. Hope I have shared something interesting for you to think through whether you can do things differently like how Apple Company did

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You did not read wrongly about the title of this post as I have just managed to clear my desk after about 20 years of my life. Please don’t get me wrong as I did not wait for 20 years then start getting rid of clutter but instead this is the first time I actually manage to clear my desk to leave space for me to put my laptop on.

I have been staying in a 4-room flat with a family of 5 including me and for the past 20 over years, I have been sharing a room with my brother. A  normal 4-room flat is about 90 square metres with 3 bedrooms, 1 kitchen, 1 living room and 2 bathrooms so you can imagine how big a room is with all those places in the flats. Although I have a table, I did not really make use of the table to study or work because normally I have a lot of things on my table that cause me to be unable to actually do any other stuff on it. Usually, I will read or write anything by sitting at the side of my bed and use the bed as the table top.

I have been cleaning my table once in a while throughout the past 20 plus years of my life and I did not really make full use of the table to perform any tasks. Recently, I have been listening to some management audio books talking about getting rid of clutter in our life especially those things that may not be exactly important to us. The process of clearing is very fun as I have managed to clear almost 80% of my cupboard clothes and 50% of my unwanted table stuff. The reasons why I took this action of getting rid of all these clutter is actually because I want to be more productive in my life as I realize whenever I reach home after work, I will feel like sleeping more than getting to work on my personal project. I have been pondering about the reasons why and realize that since my working area is on my bed, the bed will definitely relate me to resting or sleeping. I realize I am more productive at work when my desk is not full of clutter so therefore I decided to actually clear my room to get myself clear of clutter.

If you have a cupboard full of clothes, it is actually time to start clearing it like what I did as usually we do not actually wear all the clothes we have in our cupboard. Usually, we will wear only 20% of the clothes in our cupboard and there will be clothes which we will not wear at all so it will be great for you to donate those to salvation army (charity). It is actually a very fun process to clear your clutter as you will feel more energy in your room especially if it is your work station. Therefore, take the action to start getting rid of the clutter in your life right now as I believe you will feel much better after doing this exercise.

Cheers
Javier

P.S. This blog post is written on the table beside my bed after the 3 hours of getting rid of the clutter. However, I have only managed to clear 20% but I believe this will definitely be one of the great steps towards my journey to success.

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Recently, I have been trying to accomplish some tasks required during my work and I discovered some interesting factors while performing the tasks. There are a few tasks needed to be done on every single computers in a lab and while repeating the steps needed for every single computers, I realized there are some programs that need to be deleted from the computers which is not in used anymore. After uninstalling the unused programs, I realized by doing that extra step, there will be not enough time left to complete all the required tasks planned in the first place. In the end, I stopped the uninstalling programs step and continue what is planned in the first place.

While performing the tasks needed for every single computers, I am able to relate what we are doing with what I have learnt through reading personal development books and audio tapes while they talked about batching similar tasks together in order to accomplish the tasks at a faster pace. When you are able to batch similar things together, you will tend to build a momentum to finish all the tasks required at a faster pace as you can focus on the one task first without having to remember every single steps of all the tasks for every single repeat. It may be quite hard for you to visualize what I mean through words so I will try to illustrate it with a diagram and hope you can grab the useful idea so that you can apply in your daily life too.

It will be better if you batch similar tasks together as you will be able to complete all task 1 earlier. Although theoretically it show that you will be able to finish all the tasks at a same time no matter if you are batching your to-do or not, when you actually do it with your own emotions and day momentum, you will definitely be able to complete all your tasks faster with batching as you do not have to remember every single steps and do them all at one time but just focus your energy on one task only.

The most important thing is to plan out the outcome you want to achieve with steps of what to do and after that give batching a try to see what you can achieve from it. Currently, I am trying to find a better way to plan my life as previously I do not have the habit of planning in advance the things I want to achieve in detail. However, I have read so many personal development books recently and most of the successful people all achieve great things through planning so this shows that planning is a really important step if I want to achieve my dreams on my journey to success. Therefore, if you come across any great programs that teaches you how to plan your life, do recommend me through this blog.

Cheers

Javier

P.S. If you have experience any sort of batching in your life, share with us by writing a comment in this post.

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Image courtesy of Wavy1

Recently, I came across a blog post on ZenHabits in regards on the above topics “How To Be a Positive Person” and I have actually save it down on my email regarding the words written about it. I have decided to place it on my blog too so that everyone can view it and see whether it will help improve your life in some ways.

Here’s what is shared on “How To Be a Positive Person”:

Realize it’s possible, instead of telling yourself why you can’t.
Become aware of your self-talk.
Squash negative thoughts like a bug.
Replace them with positive thoughts.
Love what you have already.
Be grateful for your life, your gifts, and other people.
Every day.
Focus on what you have, not on what you haven’t.
Don’t compare yourself to others.
But be inspired by them.
Accept criticism with grace.
But ignore the naysayers.
See bad things as a blessing in disguise.
See failure as a stepping stone to success.
Surround yourself by those who are positive.
Complain less, smile more.
Image that you’re already positive.
Then become that person in your next act.

Cheers

Javier

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Image courtesy of gingerpig2000

Do you have tasks on hand that you are reluctant to do or it took a lot of your time before it is completed? Recently, I have been listening to an audio book called The Power of Less by Leo Babauta which teaches how to use the method of focusing on one goal to be more effective in achieving our goals.

One of the techniques called breaking down your task into simplest form which I have tried personally is quite useful for me. I have been trying to complete a task that I have been dragging for quite some time to finish in order to achieve my 1 year goal of creating a 4 figure online monthly income this year. Sometimes, although you know the importance of the tasks, you will still feel intimidated or relunctant to complete the tasks due to a cut in motivation when the task process takes a long time and lots of things to do in order to complete. However, after listening to the audio book, I have realized the real problem is the motivation and momentum of completing the task in order to achieve the goal. What is suggested by the author of The Power of Less is to try to figure out what is needed in order for us to achieve our goal or complete our task by listing them down one by one. After that, we have to start choosing the simplest thing on the list to do to get ourselves more motivated to do more as we have the tendency to continue our task once we start to build the momentum from the first step we took.

I have realized personally that once we start something small, we start to slowly build a habit once we consistently repeat the process. From my personal experience, few months ago, I have started the habit of buying fruits from my workplace to eat during lunch time and slowly I start to bring my own fruits to work which then formed my habit of eating fruits during my lunch time hours. Personally, I feel that this method of starting small and consistent do help me to build a healthy diet and I can feel my body is in a better condition compared to a few years ago.

I do recommend you to check out The Power of Less by Leo Babauta if you want to build a good habit to avoid procrastination. Personally, I think I have to spend some time replanning my whole mastermind of health habits, exercise schedule and wealth creation to see how I can relate and implement the steps provided in the program of The Power of Less to cut down on the clutter and use the power of focus to achieve my goals and dreams.

Cheers
Javier

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Do you know that you can unleash your true potential? Do you know that we are only using less than 10 percent of our true potential? All human beings can achieve great things in life but all have to base on whether we believe and have faith in ourselves or not.

Recently, I have listened to an audio book called Psycho Cybernetics and at the same time went to read the Psycho Cybernetics book to reinforce the information that I have listened. There’s a chapter that mentioned about “Dehypnotize Yourself” and the following is an small abstract from that chapter.

Is Everyone Hypnotized?

It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent, either by eithers he has uncritically accepted from others, or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.

The main idea is for us to learn how to dehypnotize ourselves so that we can prevent our limiting beliefs from stopping us to achieve what we can with our true potential. In the book, it talks about using mental picturing in our threatre of the mind to get everything nicely in position. This is considered a technique of visualization which helps to build our self image.

What I have shared is just a small portion of the book and I do recommend you to pick up the book from your local bookstore or the library in order to find out in details about the concept shared by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Just to let you know that Dr. Maxwell Maltz was a very famous plastic surgeon who made a discovery about the human self-image.

Cheers
Javier

P.S. The video shared above is extracted from my favourite childhood anime, Dragonball Z. Hope you like it too.

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Image courtesy of Sicilian Italiano

Today’ s post is considered a very special one as I’m going to write about a real life case study of what you can achieve when you go for your dreams. Recently, I met up with one of my ex colleagues who opened a snack stall in one of the primary school. When I first saw her in her newly open stall, I nearly cannot recognise her as she has put on her contact lens instead of her usual spectacles. Personally, I felt that she has seemed to look much younger and liver compared to the last time that I met her.

To cut long story short, my ex colleague had ventured out to become her own boss after quitting her job. She went ahead to become a snack stall owner in the primary school. While eating the food that she had prepared for us and sitting down to chat, I went ahead and asked her a few questions about whether she liked her current position as her own boss. She gave a immediate answer back that she loved what she is doing now as she enjoyed lesser stress and higher income compared to her previous job. The most important part is she is able to knock off earlier at 3pm as the school she’s in is a single session one and she is even able to go shopping or catch a movie without having to go at the time where there’s a lot of crowd. Can you believe it as she even told us that there’s a lot of weekdays promotional sale or meal offer that she can enjoy now compared to last time where she was tied to a 8-5pm job.

Through the chat I had with her, I realized that she was really enjoying herself now as she get to make more money compared to the fixed income she can earn from a job. I could still remember the time when she was preparing to leave her job, she had told me before that becoming an entrepreneur was her dream and she did not dare to venture out as she had a family. However, the reason why she made the move this time round was because she had finally managed to find a low rental fees’ stall in a primary school through her friend’s recommendation and this was the first move towards her dream as an entrepreneur.

I was very happy to see the bright smile on the face of my ex colleague and was glad that she had made the right move towards her dreams. It is very important that we should all go for our dreams and live life with no regrets. Hope this real case study has inspired you to go for your dreams and make sure you live your life with no regrets like what my friend did. No matter how small the step can be, make sure you take the faith and courage to move towards your dreams.

Cheers

Javier

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For the past week, I have been busy celebrating Chinese New Year with my family and friends. The special day that occurred this year was on 14 of Feb as there were two special occasions falling on the same day and they were first day of chinese new year (nian chu yi in chinese) and valentine day. I have been eating a lot of new year goodies without maintaining my diet as it was a special period and I can say those food have made me put on some weight and caused me to feel tired easily when I was back at work compared to the time when I was regularly eating fruits with normal portion of food. Luckily, chinese new year is not all year round or else I think I may have put on a pretty huge amount of weight on myself if I keep on going to different places (relatives and friends houses) to eat good food.

During this chinese new year period, I have seen a few of my nieces and cousins growing up faster than I have expected. This shows that I may have to work on myself to grow or else they may be growing faster than me and my progress in life will not be in time for my schedule. I have bought a motivational board and placed it in my office to motivate myself each and every day whenever I am feeling down. Take a look and see whether the words give any motivation to you too.

If You Think You Are Beaten, You Are.

If You Think You Dare Not, You Don’t.

If You Like To Win, But You Think You Can’t,

It Is Almost Certain You Won’t.

If You Think You’ll Lose, You’re Lost.

For Out Of The World We Find,

Success Begins With A Fellow’s Will.

It’s All In The State Of Mind.

If You Think You Are Outclassed, You Are.

You’ve Got To Think High To Rise.

You’ve Got To Be Sure Of Yourself

Before You Can Ever Win A Prize

Life’s Battles Don’t Always Go

To The Stronger Or Faster Man,

But Sooner Or Later The Man

Who Wins Is The Man Who Thinks He Can!

Hope I have shared something great to you too and hope you have a great holidays during this occasion. Wishing you a Happy Belated Valentine Day and Chinese New Year.

Cheers

Javier

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#Quote: Successful people don’t have reasons, they have results. ~ Greg Secker

Are you successful in your life right now? If you are successful right now, this means that you focuses your mind on the results more than the reasons. Recently, I have realized that one of the reasons why I’m not successful is because I keep on coming out with plenty of reasons why I can’t achieve what I want in life. Example of not having enough money to perform certain things, not having the right opportunities, not motivated to complete my task on time and so on. I realized I really focus most of my energy on the reasons why instead of my end results of what I want to achieve in my life.

Actually, the concept of reason versus result was from T.Harv Eker’s Millionaire Mind Seminar that I had attended about 1 year plus ago. Recently, through one of the audio books I listen, I found the concept once again and therefore I decided to write a post on this. Did you feel procrastination whenever you gave yourself a reason as you start to worry about what will happen if something happen? Whenever we start giving ourselves reasons to our mind, we focus our mind on the problems and thus more problems tend to be attracted to us (Law of Attraction). Once we realize there are too many problems for us to handle, we tend to become immobile in our actions and instead of taking massive actions to reach our goals, we tend to take easy steps or make no big improvement to improve our situations.

I realized that our mind plays a very important role to help us succeed in our life and we have to choose our thoughts wisely so that it will not sabotage our performance to reach our goals. Successful and well known sportsman (like Michael Jordon or Tiger Woods) usually will focus their mind on the end results of seeing themselves winning the title and visualizing the end results in their mind while they are in or outside their game. Therefore, I believe it is very important that we should all start training our mind to focus on the solutions (results) instead of problems (reasons) whenever we meet any difficulties or challenges in life.

Right now, imagine you are a soccer player playing in the world cup final and your team is losing 1 goal. What is your immediate thought in your mind right now? Always ask yourselves what will those well known sportsman be thinking in their mind right now if they are facing the situation as you are right now. This will probably reminds us that we need to focus our mind on the end results instead of pondering on the reasons “WHY”.

Cheers

Javier

P.S. Write down your end results and visualize it to remind yourselves the importance of focusing on it.

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This post is scheduled on 31 Dec 2009 as it is coming to an end of the year and currently I am still in Macau on my way back to Singapore. Therefore, I decided to schedule this post to ensure that I list down my personal success journal of year 2009 before a new year starts so that in future I can come back to review on it.

The following are the personal successes that I am grateful and proud of myself in the year of 2009:

- Grow my relationship with my girlfriend with more understanding

- Made my first dollar online

- Received my first ClickBank cheque

- Start making money on CPA network

- Attend my first concert (JJ Lim)

- First time travel overseas

- First time visit Malaysia (JB & KL)

- First time board an aeroplane (Macau & Hong Kong)

- Have my own mastermind group to discuss weekly

- Pass my driving final theory & start learning my driving lessons

- Setup my own personal blog to keep track of success & learning

- Got complimentary ticket to attend Tony Robbins Unleash Your Power Within Seminar in Singapore

- Learn more about Internet Marketing from mentors and coaches

- Learn about speed reading

- Started reading more books & listening to audio books

- Found Holosync that helps to increase my mental threshold

- Get to know more Singaporeans who are successful with internet marketing

Lastly, I would like to say that I am very grateful about my current life as I have found more meaningful through this journey to success and I do believe that what your mind can conceive, it can be achieved so make sure you do not live life with regrets and move forward one step at a time. We will definitely grow along the way when we persist in the journey to success.

Cheers
Javier

P.S. Just to let you know that those success above may seems insignificant for you but its a big step for me in my journey to success as I feel more happy for myself as I dare to make the first step to give things a try instead of saying no like before (with limiting beliefs in myself).

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