What going to tell you us when things are going to get better.

I am going to be real honest and I am a very honest guy. No one knows what is going to happen with the economy. I could stop right now and move on to another topic but I am not. When there’s a well there’s away and that is the beginning of things getting better.

Recently Jack and Suzy Welch had an article in Business Week about the economy. As a side note they are always on the back page of Business Week and have very insightful articles. Here are two people that are at the tops of the top in business and here is what they said when asked by a young man who works on Wall Street. His question was “when are things going to get better”. Their answer was “sometime in 2010, maybe”, boy how about that for commitment.

Jack and Suzy have five phenomena and they seemed fairly certain to them. First the economy has hit some kind of bottom. They gave many reasons why. Second they thought when there is an uptick in demand it will yield a quick response to the economy, because inventory are so low that any increase in demand gets more orders in the supply chain.

Third, the American banking system is stabilizing. It is not perfect but definitely on the mend. I won’t bore you with all the details so I’ll move on to point four.
Fourth and you might find this interesting. As they said it, another “KNOWN”, people are generally feeling better and they based that on the Consumer Confidence Index. There are still a lot of those that are feeling the pain and there are going to more pain in the near term. However as things continue to improve consumer confidence will keep rising and the pain will subside.

The fifth phenomena is not one that is positive. It is about Presidents Obama’s federal budget assumptions of 4% GDP growth through 2013. They see it as totally unrealistic. Their feeling is GDP will be around 2% and if that happens and the budget stand as proposed, there will be a real need for higher taxes and we will still have increasing federal debt.

To finish their thinking, they have no idea when the economy is going to turn around. Their only “guarantee” is there will be a lot more uncertainly.

When you look at it, there has never been any guarantee’s and for sure uncertainly is nothing new. It is time for all of us to get creative, energetic, and plow ahead and make our own future
.
Happiness with Wealth to you

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Things that tell us the economy is BAD

When my mother made tuna fish casserole for dinner three nights a week and on the other nights we had macaroni and cheese, that is when we know things were different. I am sure if you think back you had indicators like that, but we didn’t know they were indicators. We just thought mom decided to change our eating habits.

There are things like that today. Recently I read that you can tell when the economy is not doing well by measuring the trash we generate. Yes, now there are those that are monitoring our waste dumps. Believe it or not they look at what is thrown away before it goes through recycling. I can just see it group of economist at our large waste dumps counting the tons of waste being put in them. By the way Pennsylvania is the leading state for landfills. That is because they have real wasteful neighbors, New York and New Jersey.

How about watching the US Post Office? They are losing money because people are not using them enough. Partly do to new technology and partly because the economy is not as robust as it was two years.

What I am saying you don’t need to be economist to know that the economy is not in good shape, just ask those that are looking for work. Do we need other indicators? Will I’ll give another one, the number of cars that go to the junk yard; normally we scrap about 14.5 million cars a year, but last year we scraped less that 9 million. Or look at housing starts. At present we are about 5.5 million starts, but we need about 14 million new houses a year to keep up with demand.

Are you starting to see something? Some day we are going to have to catch up on the cars or we’ll look like Cuba with a bunch of old cars and I don’t think that will happen. Also our population is growing and will continue to grow of the next 30 years, so we are going to have more new home.

Could these things be the engine that propels us out of this mess, could be? I am sure of one thing that well get this country going again and it is good old American ingenuity. And I am sticking to that premise.

Happiness with Wealth to you

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Did the economists screw up?

Does our economist really know what they’re doing? No and Yes. In a resent article in Business Week they put another way:”What Good is economist anyway?” I found some very interesting points on why this economic down turn happened so fast.
There will be enough blame to go around for what happened to the economy, but blame is not what we need, we need answers to why it happened, so we can correct the problems so we don’t have to go throw this again.

Here is one possibility that could have triggered the down turn, and I think it has merit. Our economist are trained to think of financial markets as efficient, most economist weren’t primed to see the dangers in lax mortgage lending, overleveraged financial institutions, and the super complex derivatives. So as the deck of card started to collapse they didn’t see the problem and to this day no one is really sure caused this mess.

One of the questions is why such lax mortgage lending? Could it have been because government wanted everyone to have a home? Could people that should not have bought a house due to lack of income gotten mortgages? The questions go on.
Others feel that the financial instructions packaged tonic mortgages as mortgage backed securities and sold them around the world. Then there are the derivatives. They are complex and are not for beginners. I did a little research on derivatives and found out I could make a whole career out of learning them. Thus I choice to not be in that market and let others play that game.

What we have learned that there is still much to learn. Boys is that’s an understatement. You know that is the way it has always been. Just the time we think we know what we are doing there is something that pops up that make what we thought was right wrong.

But all is not lost. There is some light at the end of the tunnel, but it is very faint. With all the things that are being done to improve the economic situation know one is sure that what we are doing is right. I guess that is the way it should be. I’ll will make one prediction. Things will get better. But I don’t know when and or how good they when they will get.

Why can I make this brash predication? Graphs go in two directions and at present it is going down so some day it will go up. I hope that makes you feel better.

Happiness with Wealth to you

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Trust

Trust is a two way street. It is something that we earn from others. You earn trust by what you do and not by what you say. We all know someone who can talk a great tune, but doesn’t live it. Why is trust so important? Without trust we couldn’t be sure of how people will react in any situation.

This might seem like an extreme example, but just think if you were on a battle field and you had to trust you fellow buddies, Yours and other life’s could hang in the balance if someone you trusted to do something and they decided not to. That might be an extreme setting but trusting situations happens to all of us every day.

At work your salesperson is supposed to build relationship with potential clients so the business can grow. Yes if the salesperson doesn’t do his or her job they will eventually be asked to leave, but in the mean time growing the business has slowed down.

We trust our spouses, our children, our friend and in general we trust most people until they show us their not trust worthy. Now I am a very trusting person and give most people more than enough chances to not earn my trust. Others are just the opposite. All this is part of our personal make up. However, no matter how careful you are with others you are going to get burned at some point in time. Does that mean you can’t trust anyone ever again, no it means you have take the time to build relationships with a people that you going to have trust, so you feel confident that what’s suppose to happen does.

In the big picture we have to trust our political and business leaders. I am not saying that our leaders are not trust worthy, but we have to our homework to make sure they deserve our trust.

Trust is so important to making our world a safe place to live in; I just wanted to remind myself as well as others we have to earn our trust with others daily. When we earn others trust we should treat it as if it was one the most important things we have, because it is.

Happiness with Wealth to you

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What a GREAT day

We left for Ocean Reef Club, which is a Mangrove and Coral island fifty miles south of Miami Florida. The weather was just fantastic and the golf courses were challenging but beautiful. There were about thirty people from our club of which I knew about fifteen. Guess what I got to know the other fifteen. It is amazing you can see people say Hi to them but never get to know them. This last weekend changed that for the fifteen people I didn’t know.

One guy I would always say hi to but had no idea what he did? Will I found out he was a vet that works on large animals. He also is a very good golfer. Now when I am at our club I will feel comfortable to sit down and talk with him.
Just so you know I had the best round of golf I have played in years but not so fast I also had the worst round I played in years. Golf wasn’t what made the weekend so GREAT, it was the new friends I met and my old friends that made the weekend so special.

Isn’t it funny how we can go around and think we are just so friendly and in reality we aren’t as friendly as we might think? My new vet friend said he was glad I talked to him because he thought I didn’t like him because I never spend any time to really meet him. Boy that was an eye opener, because I think of myself as Mister Personality.

I have to tell you this story when we were in college. Micki couldn’t see without her glasses and I couldn’t hear very well, but didn’t know I couldn’t. That is another story. When Micki and I would be walking across campus she would not where her glasses, so she would say hi to everyone, though she didn’t know who they were do to here bad eye sight. I couldn’t hear them. So here is what people thought of the two of us. Micki they thought was just the friendliest person and I was a snob because I never acknowledge people when they spoke to me, now I wear a hearing aid that helps a lot and Micki wears contact, so at least she knows who she saying Hi to and I can answer them when they speak to me.

The point is we all need to put our self out to meet other. They might be like me and can’t hear will or like Micki and can’t see well. So if we all make a special effort to be friendly to others well make their day and it well help us make a GREAT day.

Happiness with Wealth to you

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If it is working break it

Why would I say that, because it is true? There is a time to change and many times we wait way to long be for we change. Or putting it another way, breaks it.
Let’s look at us personally. We might feel good, but we continue with the same bad habits that might not be good for us. Maybe we smoke or are fifty pounds overweight. Or we let stress build in side us. There are so many things that can cause us to have long term major health problems, but right now we feel great. Is time we break those old habits, I think so. What do you thing?

Breaking things means changing old way of doing things. Breaking old way can be hard but they need to be done. Not only do people have these problems, but so do organizations. Just look back fifty years ago and see who where the top businesses in the USA. You would find less than half are still around and those that are still here could be in major problems. Look at General Motors. They thought they were changing, but as it turned out it wasn’t fast enough.

We all need to break from the past and move on to the world of today. By the way it’s a lot different that it was just ten years ago. Ten years ago did you carry a phone at you side? Could you watch new movies on you TV whenever you wanted? Some people might have but not many, but today almost any of us can do these things and so much more.

If it is working break it and start anew.

Happiness with Wealth to you

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It is not time yet

Into days world “It is not time yet” means you lost. You can’t wait to play it safe anymore, because there are no safe places to hide. So when you say let wait and see, you just fall further behind.

How do you overcome falling behind? You don’t rely on what you did yesterday, but do new and bold things that capture the imagination of those that you want to be part of what ever your doing. To help make this point you just have to look at the news paper business. Running a news paper was almost like printing money. The classified ads were their gold mine. If they needed to make more money they just raised the price of advertising on their classified section. Oh they might raise all you advertising.

Then something very interesting happened. The Internet started to reach more and more homes. And then someone came out with very interesting idea, free classified ads. Can you imagine FREE classified ads. At first the news papers paid no attention to these Internet ads, but the public started to pay attention to them. Instead of taking years and years for people to us the Internet for classified ads, it only took a very short time. Now the big cash cows for news papers have dried up, because of craigslist, backpage and others. So when the news paper said it is not time yet it was already too late.

You have and I have heard how fast the knowledge base is changing and if you are like me I said “ how does that affect me?”. Will we are seeing it all over. I recently renewed my driver license all on the Internet. Didn’t have to talk to anyone, didn’t have to drive anywhere. All I had do to be waiting for a stricter to be mailed to me.

We are just seeing the beginning of the great time saving things that are happening and will continue to happen even at a faster rate. I will explore many of those things that are going on that make saying “it is not time yet” means you lose. Happiness with Wealth to you

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Special Friends, Part 3

You now know my special friends Harley and Mike. So now I want to introduce the very special friend, partner and without a doubt the right person to be my life’s companion. Micki is her name, Oh that’s not her real name, it the name she gave herself and I won’t reveal her real name because she doesn’t like it. Not to offend anyone I won’t reveal her real name.

Why is she so special? Only some stories about Micki and I will reveal why she is so special. Let start right after we were married. Micki was still active in her sorority, so when they had a party for the sisters and their dates, and in our case husband, Micki took great pride in introducing me to all her sorority sisters. When we got to one of the sisters who was with an old school friend of Micki’s, she introduced me as her first husband. Now you can imagine what he thought. But instead of explaining she went on talking and to this day I am not sure if they know that I am still Micki’s first husband.

At that time I should have know that being married to Micki was going to be a great and enjoyable journey through life. I could write a book on Micki’s humor, but I’ll just give you some of the highlights.

Micki and I were married a little over a year. She was still going to college and I was deeply involved in my first job. Like all first jobs the pay scale was at the lower rung. Being a business major in college I had a budget for Micki and me to live on, in fact during the year I revised the budget several time and still I couldn’t make to work on my income. So I had the big talk with Micki about the financial short fall. She listens very intently and when I stopped talking she very calmly told me she could solve this problem. I told her I was all ears. Again very calmly she said that I should earn more. So she gave me a goal. For some reason or another I did what she suggested.

Here is the latest Mickiism. We wanted to have a quite anniversary dinner at a local steak house. Micki was to make the reservation, which she did, but not without a Mickiism. When she was asked if it was a special occasion she let them know that it was our forty fifth wedding anniversary. Then she asked if they had walkers. She said the man on the phone lost it and Micki was again helping the world have fun.

Fun and humor go hand in hand. I promised you that there was a common thread which bonded all three of these friendships. If you haven’t figured it out by know it’s OK. Having a sence of humor makess relationship work so much better and by the way he helps a lot in enjoying life.

Happiness with Wealth to you

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Special Friends, Part 2

Without good friends life wouldn’t be worth a lot. I talked about my special friend Harley, now I’ll tell you about Mike. He is a fun guy to be around. You can’t help but laugh with him. We met almost four decades ago. We both moved in the same neighborhood. He was right across the street so it was easy to talk almost every day. Mike likes to help others. When my big TV went out he said “Wait be for you buy a new one I think I can fix it”. That following Saturday he was over with all his electronic testing equipment. In a few minutes we had the TV out and he started testing things. Not long after he had the TV out he stood up and proclaimed that the picture tube was bad and he was going to get a new one for me.

Why would I let my neighbor take my TV apart? Will Mike was a graduate electronic engineer so fixing a TV was kids play for him. Yes he got a new picture tube and we had the TV working. Mike was also a fabulous fisherman.

Mike decided to teach me how to fish. Fishing we went. Out in the Everglades, you can feel really alone when you get in the back waters. Mike picked out a good spot. He looked around and then made a perfect cast and guess what, he caught a fish and it was a big one. The rest of the day seemed to go like this I kept casting and Mike kept catching fish. What I learn about fishing, Mike was very good and the best thing I could was watch ans enjoy the weather.

Mike and I don’t fish anymore, now we play golf. We just seem to laugh are way around the golf course. I bitch about his driving and he looks for bigger holes to run into. We are a real team. You might say we are like Mott and Jeff.
When we talk next about special people, I’ll l go over the common thread that makes these friendships so special?

Happiness with Wealth to you

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Special Friends, Part 1

We all have special friends in our life. Some are friends from the good old days like college or early jobs. Others we have picked up over the years. Then there are the very very special fiends. Actually they are more than friends they are our partners for life, our spouses.

Here is a story about one of my college buddies, Harley. When Harley and I first met I wasn’t too sure of him and I don’t know what he thought about me. As time went on for whatever reason our friendship grew. Looking back I think it was because he had had a real drive to be the best he could be. And that is the something I wanted. We put on some of the best fraternity parties on campus and built an award winning homecoming float. This doesn’t seem like much now but at the time it made Harley and I feel real good.

After Micki and I got married Harley would come over and help me with home project. We punched a hole in our master bedroom wall to put in a wall A/C. When we got done it looked good. He helped me lay sod with some other fraternity brothers and we managed to get the green side up. But our crowning achievement was building the wooden deck. It took a lot of beer and white paint.

Harley moved to California so we didn’t get to see him much after that, but our friendship never wavered. Last year we met Harley in Los Vegas for a day and had a wonderful time.

Just to show what kind of parties we put together here is an example of one. There was this island in the middle of Bellville Lake. No one lived on it, but in the winter duck hunter would use it. Harley and I thought it would be a perfect place for a party. All we had to do was build docks on the mainland and island, plus get a generator to power the light and music on the island. Oh, we also need a couple of boats to carry the party goers to the island. Yes we got boats and the party was an over whelming success.

That’s my very special fiend Harley. They don’t make them any better.

Happiness with Wealth to you

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Success

We all want success in one way or another. And that is good. Success is seen in the eyes of the beholder. Meaning we have different measures of success.

Some people want fame other want a fortune. Let’s take a look at that those that want fame. First fame can come in many ways. You could be rock star with millions of adoring younger folk clawing at you. That doesn’t seem to appealing to me, but everyone to their own. Maybe deep down I am jealous of rock stars. Sorry about that. Fame can come from being a great actor or actress. Just think of going to all the grand openings of your movies or if you are a broad way performer the joy of the multiple curtain call. Fame can come to authors. Just think you get to go on the talk show circuit for months at a time. On some days you might do two or three talk shows. But just think of all many books you are selling by being on these talk shows.

As you can see fame can have some draw backs. You can lose a lot of you own personal time. Time lose with your loved ones and friends. I guess that’s the price of fame.

Success can come with money. Look at Donald Trump. He seems to be everywhere and despite thee resent bad times he is like the Eveready Bunny contently moving. You can have great financial success without fame. I would talk about them but you can’t find their name anywhere, but we all know they’re there. Just drive through the well to do areas in any community and see all the beautiful large homes. You can’t live in homes like that without a lot of money.

Success can come by just knowing that you are doing the right thing. What is the right thinks. How about living by your personal values, having real friends that you would do anything for and they would do the same for you. If you did just those two things, I and most of the rest of the world would consider you a very successful person.

To you success.

Happiness with Wealth to you

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Being you

So many people want to be somebody else. I can’t figure this out because everyone us has something that so different than anyone else, maybe is because some people have not found what make them so unique.

As speaker I not only speak to others but get hear many speakers want to be. I love hearing the very natural ones. Yes they are prepared but most important they project them self. What I mean by this they are them self and it shows. I can’t tell you how many times I heard speaking coaches say “relax and be yourself”.

Being you sounds so easy and it is. If you find it hard let’s take a look at how you can find out about whom you are. Start going over things you like then look at the things you are good at. It is not hard so do it. Grab a piece of paper and start now. Don’t’ start judging your ideas, just make the list. One for what you like to do and the other what you do best. Stop reading and start the list.

OK you have list. Now start to rank the things on the list. Put the things you do best and like most at the top and continue to ranking all the items. Just look at it. Now look at what ranked the best of what you do and do the best.. You don’t need an answer right away. Sleep on it or what I do and wait till my thoughts crystallize. Than out of nowhere bam good ideas strike.

Write the ideas down as soon as possible. What you will find is that you have something that no one as has. This is the start of being you. Now you don’t have to be someone else because now you can be that very special person, you.

I’ll bet, and I am not a betting person, that if you work on what you like and do best, some good things will start to happen. One thing for sure you will have gained some will needed self-confidence. Also you will start to see in yourself the real you and like it.

Being you is the only way to go.

Happiness with Wealth to you

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Results

Results are what’s makes the world go around. We can study and plan but without result nothing happens. Thus there is a big need to get results. With that all said there is an important part of getting results that I need to tell you. Results have to be Win Win. If you win and the other person loses, I am not talking about binge pong, and then in reality everyone loses.

There is a balance in nature that somehow keeps track of things like this, so if you think you one and other person loses in the long run you will loses. It is a very simple system. If you live by it in th

Why can I say this, because it has happened to me? I won’t bore you with all the details but some very bad things happened to me that was out of my control. I could have just curled up and quit, but I didn’t.

For some reason not known to me I started a whole new career. Instead of felling sorry for myself, for some reason I felt like this was a new beginning. Now it is very important to me to make sure that whatever I do, it is a win win for all.

To advance in my career as an author, speaker, consultant and coach I use my life experiences and do a lot of research. That might seem like doing a lot of different things, but in reality it isn’t. To write I do a lot research which give me so much more knowledge than the topic I am researching. This knowledge I can use in consulting and coaching, which is real plus for my clients. In this case everyone wins.

So I live by my values and help others win and get results, which also help me. Not bad. Go for the Win Win.
Happiness with Wealth to you

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Want a happy marriage? Part Three

Having a happy marriage is not as hard as some people make it out to be. You don’t have to spend a lot of time looking for partner and we talked about that. Knowing your self is important and knowing and understanding others particularly you partner is also important. So what else can help in having a happy marriage? How about a since of humor? Yes a since of humor can certainly smooth out some of the rough spots in a relationships.

In my book “ Happiness in Eight Steps” I go over how important laughing is. So if you have a since of humor you going to have to laugh. It does so much for you and the also releases tension, both for you and your partner. Here is a story about Micki and I when we were first married.

We were in our first house all 1150 square feet of it. Oh it did have a basement to. Being this was our castle we wanted to make it look like one. The entrance way was small with at lot of corners, so when we went to wallpaper it we got a real challenge. First off we never wallpapered before. Second this wallpaper we picked out had a pattern, so you had to match it when hanging it.

It is important to know that this was very inexpensive wall paper and paper it was. You would have to laugh at how we set up to start papering. I got two folding chairs and a small sheet of plywood and the top of the back of the chairs. It worked but you had to be careful not to knock the plywood off the chairs. Then there was making of the paste. We started with a five gallon bucket and a brush we had from an earlier painting job. My job was to measure and cut the wool paper and Micki’s was to put on the paste. Micki is perfectionist so putting on the past took longer than it would have taken most people because she would not have even the smallest lump of paste on the back of the paper.

Ok we hung the first piece of wallpaper. We both had to step back and look at our master piece in the making. Now came the corner. Micki did her usual great job on the pasting and I started to hang the paper. Then it happened the pattern did not match. I could not hold myself back. I said some not so good things about my helper for cutting the paper on the wrong spot of the pattern. Then the light went on I realized I was holding about fifty cents worth of wallpaper and I was just about ruin a marriage for fifty cents.

Will here is where humor really helps. After I cooled down Micki looked at me and in a very soft a warm voice said “You can’t get good help anymore”. With those few word all my tension was gone. I think we had a beer and went back to putting up the paper. By the way to save the fifty cents of wallpaper I hung it upside down and being in the corner and with such a small pattern know one ever notice.

Have a happy marriage and have a since of humor.

Happiness with Wealth to you

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