A lot of things you don’t know unless you try. This is true but we forget something, when we try, we must put that skeptical us at the far end of the room. We must learn to invest ourselves fully on something and for a significant amount of time before moving on to the next big thing.  Don’t overthink it take the leap, always reorient and rebalance!

Leap of Confidence – How to Grow Your Skills
Remember the scene of The Matrix where Neo is attempting to jump from one high-rise roof top to another? He's told he can make the jump only if he believes. Neo takes the leap, doubts himself mid-flight, and falls to the concrete below. (Luckily, the concrete was really made of rubber).
I think this scene from The Matrix can teach us all something about how to grow both personally and professionally. In Neo's case, he was learning to believe he was the One, and in yours, you're learning to realize the extent of your capabilities and talents.
In many situations, you need to believe you can succeed or you will fail…and its the very act of believing that leads you to success. Public speakers frequently employ the technique by envisioning their speech being well received before the give it, runners visualize a perfect race, and students the perfect test. Visualizing success tricks the brain into beleiving success is possible, and can actually improve results.
via Leap of Confidence – How to Grow Your Skills – david wurtz.

If money were no object, what would you do with your time?
Some people would choose to be idle with their time, enjoying all of the freedom that comes with it. They’d party. They’d go on trips. They’d goof off. They’d play on their Xbox all day long.Other people would want to work for something or build something. They’d spend their time with a volunteer project – or maybe even start their own. They need to have a big productive project in their lives in order to feel fulfilled and happy.Most retirement advice is written for people in the first group. They’re the ones who, when they reach retirement age, will want to travel and spend their later years enjoying themselves with leisure as much as possible.The other group gets personal enjoyment out of working and being productive. With the many opportunities already available for people to work as late as they’d like in life, such people will probably work at something – whether it’s gainful employment or a big volunteer project or some mix of the two – until they drop dead with a tool in their hand.If you’re in the first group, you need to be saving as much for retirement as possible. While it’s fine to put money into riskier investments when you’re young, you should start moving into more conservative investments – like bonds or treasuries or cash – pretty early on, even as much as twenty years before retiring.If you’re in the second group, saving for “retirement” basically means saving for the last year or two of life when you’re unable to work and also saving for some supplemental income for the last few decades of your life. You likely don’t need to kick the savings into high gear and can afford risk a little later than the other group, sliding the money into conservative investments five or ten years before you begin to withdraw it.
via The Simple Dollar » Three Retirement Questions for People in Their Twenties.

This was a really important post for me, it said something that I connected with.  A lot, no the MAJORITY of the people I talk to dream of having a business , having some form of passive income, to have financial independence. There is nothing wrong with this.  The only thing wrong with this is that it is not right for everyone.  I believe I am a type two person, I really love working.  I love analyzing stuff , I love creating programs. I love that in a little space called the computer’s innards I rule supreme. I don’t know if I’ll forever be a type two person, the only assurance is that I’ll remain a type 2 person is that I understand Ernest Hemingway (hope you got what I mean),. Hope you read the whole article!

So did time spent in day-care affect school performance? We can't say for sure: remember, this study just measures correlations, and a correlation can't tell us if one factor causes another. But there are some interesting correlations. There is a small, but significant correlation between quality of care received in a child-care center and vocabulary scores. Interestingly, this correlation continues to be significant all the way through the fifth grade. There's also a significant correlation between number of hours spent in child care and “externalizing” behaviors such as misbehaving in school or hitting others, but this diminishes with age. Externalizing is significantly correlated with the proportion of child care provided by day-care centers, and this correlation does extend all the way through to the sixth grade.
But the factor that most strongly predicted both academic success and good social skills throughout the study period was quality of parenting. If the mother-child relationship in those short video assignments demonstrated good parenting skills, then the child was more likely to have good reading, math, and vocabulary scores and have healthier social skills. But even here, we must be careful not to assign parenting as the cause: It’s possible that parents simply get along better with kids who are naturally brighter and friendlier.
But let’s suppose the correlations are due to causation: good parenting makes good kids, and day-care makes for very slightly smarter, but also slightly less well-behaved kids. What does that tell us about whether or not to put kids in day care? On an individual basis, not much. A parent may be faced with a decision to put her child in day care or move to a cheaper house in a worse neighborhood. A small probability that the child will be slightly more aggressive in ten years probably doesn’t play into it much. But, the study authors suggest, it might make a difference on a larger, community-based scale. If ever-larger numbers of kids are placed in ever-more-inadequate day-care facilities, then schools and playgrounds could be adversely affected, which could mean a worse future for everyone.
One thing does seem clear from these results: both high-quality child-care centers and good parenting skills are associated with better results for kids. Perhaps future studies should focus more on how to make both of those things even better.
via The long-term effects of day care : Cognitive Daily.

Loved this advice. As the title suggest we sometimes need to “Go The Wrong way”. The thing is lives have a tendency to follow patterns, worst comes to worst you’re going to for an ordinary life. There is nothing wrong with an ordinary life, but some people would like a life less ordinary (I loved that movie, I’m just a sucker for a romantic comedy).

Go the Wrong Way
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By MARTHA NUSSBAUM
Published: September 5, 2009
It’s easy to think that college classes are mainly about preparing you for a job. But remember: this may be the one time in your life when you have a chance to think about the whole of your life, not just your job. Courses in the humanities, in particular, often seem impractical, but they are vital, because they stretch your imagination and challenge your mind to become more responsive, more critical, bigger. You need resources to prevent your mind from becoming narrower and more routinized in later life. This is your chance to get them.
via Op-Ed Contributor – Go the Wrong Way – NYTimes.com.

loved reading this.  read the whole thing!

Suddenly it all grinds to a halt. It’s over! The crash comes and your precious company shares, on which you have built your entire financial position, turn to dust overnight. The great big cork has popped on your champagne lifestyle – and not a moment too soon, as far as I’m concerned.
You are out of a job because the record label cannot be funded anymore, you owe the bank a fortune and your house is in negative equity. Out of the blue, you have no income, a ton of debt and nowhere to live, apart from moving back in with your parents.
In the end, you cannot get rid of the house or the stupid white Porsche quick enough. You have hit rock bottom and it is, in a strange way, a huge relief.
Yet the funny thing is, what you don’t know, Simon, is that you will never again feel so carefree in your entire life.
For a brief moment, you have no responsibilities. Literally none. No employees, no artists, no worries, nothing to fear. You have a car, a second-hand TR6, that you love much more than your Porsche.
Your parents are fantastic and you have enough decent friends – real friends – who don’t laugh at you or ditch you because you are not the big shot any more.
via SIMON COWELL: A letter to my shallow, reckless, cocky younger self | Mail Online.