I find that creating goals for the next year helps me stay focused, and gives me something to drive toward for the new year.  Of course everyone has a few goals each new year that seem to never get accomplished.   Goals like losing weight for the new year, learning a language, earning a full time income with your blog?

How many of these New Years goals do we attempt and fail quickly? Do we have a plan or just a dream?

Creating a New Years Plan and Not Just Goals
One of the main reasons we fail at the goals we create for the New Years is the fact that there is nothing behind them.  Saying that we will lose weight means nothing if there isn’t a plan behind it.  Instead of just making goals, make plans to achieve those goals. How are you going to lose the weight?

It’s time to plan out your dreams, your goals and figure out how you are going to achieve them and not just dream about them.

How I Gave My Life More Purpose
1) Goal Setting – I wrote down goals in my life that I wanted to achieve. Goal setting is a great way to get yourself on track and figure out what it is you want to do. Your purpose in life? Complete your goals
2) What Were Your Most Fulfilling Moments? – Ask yourself which moments in your life were the most fulfilling and this might help you discover just what your purpose it.
3) What Are You Afraid Of? – Sometimes our fears simply stand in front of your life’s purpose. If you want to do something

Having a purpose in life simply gives us a sense of self purpose and a reason for living. I believe that everyone should have a life purpose.

I started this blog as well with a purpose. I wanted to be able to survive solely off the income of this blog. Now as of last month I had nearly $5000 in earnings, which is more than enough to survive.

Just do a comparison for the words I should have kissed her vs I shouldn’t have kissed her.  Which action wins, inaction or action?

• “I shouldn’t have” returns 2,130,000 results
• “I should have” returns 33,800,000 results

You can always fix a bad mistake through time, but you can never get back inaction.

Another Example: A woman saved up her entire life, penny pinching at every moment to afford a summer home.  She had that home taken away after buying it by the Government.  So what happened to all those moments she could have enjoyed?

The moments I remember the most where everything didn’t go to plan, than trips where everything went according to plan.  When it comes down to it, money shouldn’t always be the issue why we aren’t doing the things we want.

The more you buy, the more you tie yourself down.  That expensive car?  You create your own money trap, where if you stop working you can’t afford the car.  Therefore you have to work or those possessions you bought will be taken away.

Conclusion? When given the chance to do something or not do something, and it is something you wanted to do, just do it, and if things should go astray at least you won’t be regretting inaction and you can always fix whatever mistake you made through time.

Image via caribb

Factors for being an extrovert

1. Being comfortable with groups of people.
2. Meeting people easily.
3. Having conversations without wondering what to say.

Don’t blame yourself

You might think it’s just a factor of your personality, why you aren’t an extrovert, but it’s more of social conditioning.  If you’ve never practiced being a social person, then you won’t find it easy to get out and socialize.

Practice Makes Perfect

The first step is to spend more time with people.  The less you are in social situations the more likely you feel uncomfortable in them.  Try just talking to random people anywhere.  Comment on something they are doing.  It might feel hard to do. But the more times you do it, the easier it will be to do.

Find Activities You Enjoy

If you aren’t a party type person you might find it even harder to socialize at party, but if you enjoy activities such as tennis, you might find it easy to play with a group of people who enjoy tennis.

Go Running…

Exercise helps your self confidence and if you aren’t confident you certainly are going to shy away from social situations.  By exercising you are more likely to feel better about yourself.

image via tamelyn

Back in 2006, David Miles Jr. and Kato Leonard, two 20-year-olds in Louisville were collecting $100,000 a month on their online website template site.  Freeweblayouts.net, still does serious traffic even today.

Another Website, SeatGuru.com makes $10,000 to $20,000 a month by telling people where to sit on plans.  The sites creator says that about half of his revenue comes from Google Adsense.

Internet dreams do come true and you don’t have to be the best site out there to make a fortune.  Most people find it helps to document your passion, rather than trying to work on something you don’t care about.  Whenever I need to feel inspired I think about these websites and try to work even harder to achieve their very same success.

>>information adapted from WashingtonTimes

Who wants to be a Turkish Millionaire?

BustaBlog: Create a Free Wordpress Blog Online
With BustaBlog, users can register, choose from over 100 templates (or even add their own), monetize their blog using services like Chitika and Adsense, and connect to other users on the network.

My Idea
Be better than the rest.  Sure we’ve got blog networks, but I plan to be the most customizable.  Most networks limit just what you can do with your blog.  Of course, I have had to invest money for my own virtual server, getting the server up and running, and lots of ad money to bring users on to the BurstaBlog.

Never Give Up on Your Dreams
I’ve created many blogs, and tried many possibilities, all with 80% of them failing.   But it was worth it to find that 20% that now provides a full time income.  BurstaBlog may or may not work out, but I continue to try idea after idea looking for that next money maker.  We wouldn’t have billiondollar websites like Facebook if the users hadn’t tried, made the small invest and worked hard on their website.

Practice makes perfect, and you can actually practice and become more confident with yourself. Many times, being confident has is often the fear that you might humiliate yourself.  You’d rather blend into the crowd.

Become More Confident with Dancing
Did you ever go to a club and want to disappear into the crowd rather than be the star of the dance floor?   One way to get more confident on the dance floor is to simply enroll in some dancing classes.  Your fear of dancing might just come from the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing.  But, learning some dancing you’ll ultimately feel more confident on the dance floor.

Become More Confident With Language 
Did you ever feel too embarrassed to speak in a foreign language simply because you didn’t know the language that well?  When I first started learning German, I was embarassed to try speaking with someone.  But, after learning the language for a few years and practicing over and over I was no longer to speak with anyone in Germany, often I would even start up the conversations.  I was much more confident just through practice and once I didn’t worry about how I was going to appear speaking was no problem.

Become More Confident in Social Situations
Some of us learn to be confident in social situations earlier than others.  Or, we might have had a few bad experience that shys us away from social situations.  The best I advice I could say here is simply say hello to a complete stranger.  Try imaging how you’d feel if someone strange just said hey to you.  Would you take it offensively?  They probably won’t either.  Your probability of finding new friends is 0% if you don’t try and your probability greatly rises the more people you talk to.  It might seem hard and embarrassing, but the more people you start up the conversation with, the easier it’s going to get. It’s ultiately like dancing and learning a language, the more practice you have, the more confident you’ll be social situations.

Ultimately the best way to become more confident with yourself is just to practice those areas that you don’t feel confident in.  Like they say, practice makes perfect, and as I’d add, practice makes confident.

With this in mind, to many you are already a rich person.  Consider that person who comes from a poor nation to your country and is happy living lower middle class.  To them they are already a much richer person.  You to many people in the world probably are already rich, even with $20,000 a year income.

The Average Per Capita of the World is only $8,200!
While at the same time, only about those living in the top 29 nations are averaging wages about $20,000 per year.  Keep in mind this is all adjusted for purchasing power parity.

The Message…
The message I’m trying to deliver is, you are probably already much better off than most of the world.  Though you want to keep up with the latest fashion and trends, sometimes, it’s better to appreciate what you have because as Ben Franklin put it, lower your wants and you’ll be a richer person already.

(*figures via success-and-culture.net)

A New York Times article went over exactly what old habits mean what they mean and some tips for taking control of them. The article found here explains a few ways you can get into new habits.

Why habits are a good thing
Up to 90 percent of our day can be spent in old habits and routine.  We brush our teeth without thinking, we create our habitual breakfast and even drive without thinking.  We practice the same activity so many times that we can repeat the habit over and over without much thought.

Habits Can Be Bad Too!
We might have habit of thinking poorly.  We might have the habit of completing activities without using our entire effort.  Maybe we have bad eating habits and tend to eat the wrong things.  We might have habits of laziness and often leave our apartments dirty rather than developing habits of cleaning up messes as they happen.

I often find myself repeating the same mistakes over and over.  I’ll promise myself to start running everyday, but that promise becomes quickly broken.  I’ll promise to start cleaning my messes as they happen, but before I know it, my room is trashed.

The Science Behind Old Habits
Researchers at MIT found that “Important neural activity patterns in a specific region of the brain change when habits are formed, change again when habits are broken, but quickly re-emerge when something rekindles an extinguished habit — routines that originally took great effort to learn.”

The performed a study on mice, trying to teach them habits in a maze.  By the end of the study they discovered that “If a learned pattern remains in the brain after the behavior is extinguished, maybe that’s why it’s so difficult to change a habit.”

Basically, we learn habits, and even if we stop them, they often still remain in our brain.

Changing Old Habits, the Struggle
After you’ve discovered just what those bad habits are, write them down.   When you notice that you are about to repeat that bad habit, I often tell myself “This is habit I want to change and I will not do it again.”  Strive to break that habit, even though it will be hard, just keeping telling yourself no.

It’s easy to blame other people, but with hard work, you can do it!

Accepting Yourself as a Success
You might often see yourself as a failure, nothing you ever do is good enough. Instead of focusing on this negative image, focus on the times when you have been successful. Imagine that time when you succeeded.

Accepting Yourself: Self Confidence
It’s easy to let other people tear us down. Maybe you’ve been rejected in dating, maybe someone called you a bad name. Don’t worry about these people. You wouldn’t want to be around these people anyway. It’s often not the way we look that’s important, but the

radiance of success we carry with us. People will often want to be around a successful person, rather than someone who’s always depressed.

Accepting Yourself by Being Happy
Though they say it’s money=happiness, it’s not money that makes people happy, it’s what

you can buy with money. But, put money aside, a great way to make yourself happy is

simply by helping other people. Simply helping people has so many positive aspects. You’ll find a reason for living, you’ll feel good inside for helping someone else, and you’ll meet a lot of friends. If you ever feel truly depressed, simply volunteer! You’ll realize there are people that have it a lot worse than you.