Long overdue.

“What?” you might ask.

Well … euhm … this post.

Unpublished progress reports

I’ve started to write a status update on my goal three times before. Once in October 2011, once in November and then once again by the end of December.

They never got published.

Not because there was no progress. There was.
Not because there was no time to write them. They were almost finished.

They never got published, because I wanted to finish the last details. I wrote the reports on my iPad, and although the WordPress app is cool, I did want to have the last finishing touches on the site itself. And that’s where it went wrong.

As soon as I log in to my blog, the big backlog in maintenance work is staring me in the face, and it distracts me. I do quite a lot of work setting up sites for other people, and maintaining them. And there I am … neglecting my own place on the web. And it holds me back.

Every time I went in, I did some maintenance work on the site, and left it at an unfinished state. Not to return again to finish it, but also not to publish the post.

No longer! I’m first going to finish this post, and after that I’m going to make one of the hard decisions I have been procrastinating for way too long.

Progress?

Yes! Progress. There’s progress on my financial freedom goal. I’ve been working on some of the aspects of my goal, in between all the other things I’m doing.

First of all I’ve been working on “plugging the leaks”. The leaks of course are the expenses I’m trying to cover. The expenses are there, and partly unavoidable. But I want to make sure that they are as small as they can be.

Renegotiating the mortgage

I made an appoint with the bank to talk about our mortgage (this was back in September 2011). I knew that there was a small surcharge on our interest-rate for increased risk, related to the debt/equity ratio of our mortgage. I wanted to negotiate that surcharge out of the mortgage.

In the end I did not get the 0.1% surcharge out, but due to changes in legislation I was offered a replacement for the life insurance product that’s part of our mortgage. The new offer offers more transparency, more flexibility and a lower monthly charge. The monthly charge for this drops from €152 to about €138. Savings: €14/month (€168/year and a whopping €3,800 over the remaining lifetime of this mortgage).

And the getting rid of the surcharge was within reach as well. It mainly depends on how the housing prices will develop … but the coverage is closing in on the limit to get the surcharge out. And that would bring this cost down another €20/month.

Energy costs

Another big chunk of the expenses are caused by the energy bill. I had already worked on lowering our electricity bill by investing in LED lighting to replace our incandescent bulbs. It helped to bring down our electricity consumption, but the energy company wanted to RAISE our monthly charge. But even though energy prices were rising, I knew that this was not correct.

I track our energy consumption pretty meticulously, and after a couple of weeks I was convinced that our monthly charge should be at or about our previous monthly charge. So currently we’re at €230 a month.

But this week we had some more insulation done in our house, with an expected reduction of between 20-30% in use of natural gas. It’s too early to see the effect of this measure … especially since temperatures have dropped significantly in the week following the insulation job. We had a night of -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit), which is extremely cold for our country. So I’m cashing in on the investment already, but it may not lower my monthly charge just yet

Status

So the current status of my goals is this (measurement date = 31 January 2012):

Expenses

Income

So that’s 4.6% coverage for my expenses, which in fact is less than when I started. But at the same time the gap between income and expenses decreased as well.

Next steps

I’m pretty much done with plugging leaks here. It’s now time to focus on getting more low maintenance income. Sure there’s still the possibility to lower my mortgage expenses by another €20/month, but for that I need to wait for the new official valuation for my house, before I can even begin to calculate how much I need to down pay to get that reduction. And waiting is hardly an activity, now is it?

In the meantime, I need to work on increasing low maintenance income. There’s still not a lot of that coming in just yet. And my time fills up quite quickly with other activities, so it needs conscious effort to get that part done.

Oh … and the hard decision I’m making after I hit publish on this post? Well I made it already, but I have to execute it yet. I’m cancelling the email subscription service at Feedblitz for this blog. This will cost me 100+ email subscribers. But it will clear one of the hurdles for getting this blog back on track, and it will save me about $10 a month as well. So if you’ve subscribed to my blog through FeedBlitz, and you want to keep on receiving updates, please resubscribe to the blog by following this link: Subscribe by email.

This post Progress update was brought to you by be an original

Last week I announced my new goal focused on reaching financial freedom on a basic level by the end of 2013. In that post I did give some definitions and clarification of what I mean with that goal. However, I did not quantify it enough just yet … at this point I have no clue yet, what the exact amount of passive or portfolio income I need to reach that basic financial freedom. And that’s essential information to create a strategy to accomplish that goal.

So let’s get to work, let’s first take a look at …

Expenses

Expenses are the red side of the balance, the side where your money is leaking away. These expenses aren’t necessarily bad, and a lot of them can’t be eliminated. Remember that I defined my goal on a basic level, referring to all expenses related to our home. There are three types of expenses:

• Expenses that can be eliminated
• Expenses that cannot be eliminated, but can be influenced
• Expenses that cannot be eliminated or influenced

In my case expenses that can be eliminated are for instance the mortgage payments … but I’d need quite a large sum of money to do so. So eliminating them is not really realistic. Other expenses are simply essential, like the charges for drinking water, or the energy bill. They cannot be eliminated, but I can influence them … a little anyway. And then there are some other expenses that cannot be influenced or eliminated, like house-related taxes. These are simply a fact of life for home-owners.

In numbers per month:

Yikes! That’s a lot of money! Now let’s see what my status is with respect to …

Passive and Portfolio Income

Let’s first take a look again at what we mean by Passive and Portfolio income:

The Passive Income stream is income that’s derived from work that you did once, but that continues to create an income stream. It may need some maintenance to keep on generating that income, but it’s mostly a big investment once and some small maintenance jobs down the line.

Portfolio Income is income that comes from property that generates money. Examples are interest payments on savings accounts or bonds, dividends on stocks, rental income from real estate and so on. The grit of this one is that you own something, and that generates money.

So there are two categories that have a different dynamic, but a similar result.

In my situation I have some sources of passive and portfolio income totalling about € 80 per month. It comes from the following sources:

Passive sources

• Advertising revenue from blogs (about €35 / month)
  At the moment this is only from Adsense ads on this site.
• E-book sales (about $19 / month)
  Sales of my ebook Personal Core Values are highly irregular and have a low frequency, but on average they bring in about $19 per month (that is … one book per month )
• Affiliate income (recurring: $3 / month)
  This is also quite irregular, and I don’t have a good overview of affiliate income to be honest. I know that I have a recurring affiliate income from Dreamhost and E-junkie, that comes down to about $3 per month now.
• Income from TheorieTV
  Well, actually this is non-existent yet. TheorieTV is an e-learning site for people learning for their theoretical test for their drivers license in the Netherlands. The site brings in revenue, but at the moment we are reinvesting everything to improve the product and sales. Further down the line however, I expect that we will be able to create an income source from this activity. I say we, because it’s an activity that we developed as a family, my brothers, sister and parents were and are all (heavily) involved in this product.

Portfolio sources

• Interest and dividends
  There’s only one source of portfolio income right now, and it’s not that much. Currently at about €1 per day, but that’s going to disappear. This income was mainly interest we receive on a savings account. But that account will soon be empty, because we have our bathroom, toilet and plumbing renovated next month.

So that comes down to a total of about €80 per month. As you can see I have income sources in Euro and US Dollar. Since I live in the Netherlands, and all my expenses are in Euro, I will make my calculations in Euro. I will define the exchange rate at the end of every month. For now I use an exchange rate for EUR/USD of 1.45. There’s a lot of turmoil on the currency markets, so it’s hard to say where the rates will be from month to month. It’s a fact I have to live with.

There’s a basic overview of Expenses and Income now, but then there’s also the influence of …

Income tax

This is a tricky one, and I’ve decided to ignore it for now. I’ll explain why.

In the Netherlands we can deduct interest payments for the mortgage on your first home from our income tax. This means that somewhere between 42% and 52% of the interest payments will flow back as income. As you can see in the table 52% is the top percentage of tax we pay in the Netherlands.

But besides being able to deduct the mortgage interest, I also have to add the Passive and Portfolio income to my taxable income. They fall into different “boxes”. And as such have different percentages of tax that needs to be deducted. Portfolio income in itself is not taxed for instance, but the average value of assets is taxed at 1.2% per year (if your assets rise above a certain level … which they don’t in my case).

Anyway, I decided to ignore the tax effect for now. On one side I ignore the tax deduction (which would lower my expenses), and on the other side I ignore the tax effect on my income (which would lower my income). I haven’t calculated it, but I think it pretty much evens out.

The Strategy

Okay, so now the expenses and income is clear, and the effect of income tax is ignored. This sums up to:

That means that I start with an awesome 5.6% of basic financial freedom. There’s quite a long way to go, but like I stated in my goal I want to reach that 100% by the end of 2013. That’s 28 months from now.

Plug the leaks

The first step I’m going to take is to see if I can reduce the level of expenses first. Cutting expenses is only going to bring me a little probably, because the vast majority of expenses are of the type that cannot be realistically eliminated. But there may be room to improve a little.

Passive or Portfolio?

After that, the inevitable main phase of this project is to get more passive and/or portfolio income. For me the main thing is to get passive income sources, because of two reasons:

1. Cashflow
   Most of my expenses are on a monthly basis, so I need the cashflow to follow a similar pattern. Portfolio income has a tendency to create cashflow only once or twice a year, because it relies on interest and dividends. Rental income from properties does provide a cashflow … but you need quite some capital to get a property first. Not a viable option right now.
2. Capital requirements
   I already mentioned this briefly under cashflow. Portfolio income requires a lot of capital. If you take my gap of € 1,346 per month for instance. If my portfolio would provide a steady 9% income (an optimistic figure), the total capital invested needs to be about  € 180,000! Where on earth am I going to find money like that in 28 months?! (I’m open to suggestions )

So Portfolio Income is nice, and I will look into it for the expenses that have a yearly cashflow requirement (like insurance), but it’s not the main element of my strategy.

Generating more passive income

It’s about creating recurring low maintenance income – it’s not entirely passive of course. As you saw in the list earlier, I already have some passive income sources, but not nearly enough for my goal. The main thing now is to dedicate time to activities that have a potential for generating passive income.

I have taken that step already, not only mentally, but also in my schedule. I cut back on the dayjob for one day per week, I now work as a teacher in higher education 3 days a week. One day a week is to take care of the kids (I have two), and the other day is dedicated to creating passive income. Besides that one day a week, I also had an average of 10 hours per week dedicated to freelance work (evenings and weekends). Still a lot of things on the schedule and a full week of work, but the time to work on passive income is there.

The next thing to do is to really dig into the different options I have. That’s something I’m going to do in another post (or else I’d probably make this post twice as long, and it already is a long one!).

I’m excited about this! The next post will be about plugging the leak in the expenses. I already took some steps (talk to the bank, invest in some energy saving measures), the results aren’t in yet, but it looks like I can gain something there.

(Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links. If you use them, I might be 0.1% closer to my goal )

This post Financial Freedom Goal – My Expenses, Income and Strategy was brought to you by be an original

It’s time to set a new goal for me. I haven’t set goals for a long time, because I did not have the time, confidence and energy to commit myself to them. And I also did not really believe in goals anymore. So why would I set goals? It would be utter pointless, since I would only fail in achieving them.

I’ll write another time about how and why I lost the time, energy and confidence to work on goals, that’s too long a story for this post. For now I can simply state that I found them back again. As far as regaining faith in goals … well I’m still not totally convinced yet. But again, that’s also too long a story for this blog post.

Ironically, I intially started to use both angles as an introduction for this post, but both of them became too long and distracted attention away from my main point:

I have a new goal!

So for the purpose of this post, I can simply say that I found the time, energy and confidence back to work on a goal I believe in, without elaborating on those. I’ll do that in other posts

Goal. Singular.

In the past I had a tendency to work on several goals at the same time, and by doing so I discovered that it was difficult to work with more than one goal simultaneously for several reasons. I’m not going to do that again. Just one single goal.

Value = Energy

The goal should also give me energy. I’ve found that the best way to accomplish that is by making sure it complies with the following two things:

1. Align it with my personal core values
2. Getting positive results

If you’ve been following me on this blog for a while, you’ll know that I like to use my personal core values as a guideline to set goals. I have five core values, and the more values I can serve with a goal, the greater the probability that it’s going to be successful, and that it’s going to give me energy.

Seeing progress is also giving me energy, but in a way that one aligns with my value Growth too. The progress is something I need to visualize though, and that’s why I’m choosing a very measurable goal.

So what’s the goal you may be wondering by now?

My new goal

To reach financial freedom on a basic level by the end of 2013.

Values and definitions

What values do I serve with this goal? How do I keep track of progress? And … what do I mean exactly with this goal? Those are all valid questions. let’s answer them.

Values served

This goal serves several of my personal core values, directly or indirectly. First and foremost it servers my value of Freedom. Financial freedom is something I really want to achieve, as it gives freedom by removing limitations of options in life caused by expense levels (who in turn are a result of choices in the past).

But it also serves Growth.  I need to grow on several levels to achieve this goal, and as such there’s a growth factor involved, which in turn aligns with my values.

The other three values – Fun, Love and Authenticity – are not served directly by this goal. I need to make sure to guard those, and not go into negative territory on any one of them. Lack of growth is acceptable, but moving into negative territory is not.

Specifying the goal in more detail

Since it’s not really a measurable goal in its current form yet, I have to do some more detailing. Let’s start with defining some of the terms that are related to this goal.

Financial Freedom

First, my definition of financial freedom is when you don’t HAVE to work to pay your expenses. Or – more along the lines of what Robert Kiyosaki uses in his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad – it’s when the sum of passive and portfolio income is equal or greater than your expenses.

That leads us to two new terms to define on the income side, passive income and portfolio income. Investopedia defines passive income as earnings an individual derives from a rental property, limited partnership or other enterprise in which he or she is not actively involved. Wikipedia has a defintion that’s a bit broader: income received on a regular basis, with little effort required to maintain it. Portfolio income as defined by Investopedia is income from investments, including dividends, interest, royalties and capital gains.

That leads us to the expenses side of financial freedom. Expenses in my book is all the money flowing away from you in a way that does not translate into property. Expenses range from simple expenses for groceries to big expenses as mortgage payments.

Buying a car however is not an expense, because a car keeps at least a part of its value, and that value may be released again by selling it. Cars usually aren’t a good investment, because they lose value really fast, and in turn they cause all kinds of expenses, ranging from taxes and insurance to several (high priced) tanks of gas.

… on a basic level …

A final term to define is one of my own: the basic level. I stated that I want to achieve financial freedom on a basic level. So what is that basic level? For me that basic level is defined as all the expenses that are related to my home and living there. So this basic level is made up of mortgage payments, insurance, energy, and home related taxes.

As a result this goal translates into acquiring an income stream that is not a “paid-per-hour” type of income, but a low maintenance income stream that covers the expenses for being a home owner.

So that’s it. A new goal serving my values, focused on financial freedom with respect to being a home owner. I’m excited to work on it, and I’ll be sharing progress reports and more on this goal. I have some headway on this goal, as I do have some passive  income sources already, but not nearly enough to cover for my housing expenses.

I’m excited! And I sure hope this new goal and the progress reports on be an original will also be of value to you.

This post New goal was brought to you by be an original

After revisiting my personal core values, it’s now time to revisit my personal mission statement. Even though I feel this term “personal mission statement” is rather overused and overhyped, the concept of defining a single sentence for your main purpose in life is still a powerful exercise.

So to start this exercise, let’s first check my current definition:

I, Lodewijk van den Broek, love life and have a lot of love to give. I enjoy authentic growth and I help others to grow. I’m here to have lots of fun and enjoy my freedom in comfort and vitality.

I recognize all my five values in them, even after revisiting them like I did (that’s a good thing!). But I do feel that it needs to be fine-tuned.

New insights

What I learned about myself is that I want to make people learn and make them laugh. This is rooted in my values of Growth and Fun. These values are very much focused not only on myself, but also on what I want to do in this world.

The values of Love, Authenticity and Freedom, are mostly values that are focused on myself; they are at this moment in time anyway. The lesson I learned at the Bløf concert is a clear example of this.

Growth and Fun are outward focused, and the other three are inward focused. This needs to be reflected in my mission statement better than it is now.

New personal mission statement

I, Lodewijk van den Broek, love life and have a lot of love to give. I radiate positive energy and inspire others to learn and laugh. I thrive on growing my freedom and authenticity.

Or as a mantra:

Learning Life Laughing

Parts of it haven’t changed, love is still in the first place in pretty much the same way it has been for a long time. The outward focus of Fun and Growth is better represented.

I dropped the comfort and vitality bits, because they don’t need to be mentioned specificallyand their meaning and importance have changed over time. They represent only different aspects of freedom (vitality) and fun (comfort).

High impact and design

There are two aspects that are important to me, but are not reflected in my mission statement. These aspects are impact and design. They’re not reflected in my mission statement, because I feel they’re more nuances than core elements.

Impact and design are important, because they describe the “how” I want to work with my mission statement, and specifically with the outward focused values of Fun and Growth.

I want to make a high impact in the work I do. High impact in the meaning that I want to reach a lot of people, but time synchronous as time asynchronous. Working one on one, although valuable at times, is therefore not my focus.

Design is another aspect of how I want to do my work. I like visually pleasing things, and aim to create visually pleasing things. This blog is an example of that design at work. But the design mentality permeates in different aspects of life too. I’m not a “design for the design” kind of guy, because in my opinion design needs to be functional.

So whenever I create something I want it to create impact, I want it to be visually pleasing, and I want to inspire people to learn and laugh.

Next step: Guidelines and goals

I’ve already taken a sneak peek towards guidelines and goals in this article. I’m going to elaborate on those in the next post, pretty much along similar lines as last time.

Not exactly the same of course, because I learned some lessons about setting goals in the meantime:

• Not too many goals at the same time
• Watch out for colliding deadlines
• Make sure to quantify enough
• And watch out for moving targets

It’ll be interesting to see how these lessons relate to the three different goals I’m going to set myself. One based on effort, one focused on result and one pure for fun.

PS: I realize that this is turning out a series of posts that’s focused on me, and how I’m working my way through this proces. There’s a lot of “me” in there, and I leave the translation to you … entirely up to you. I can assure you that’s not going to stay that way. But this is the process I’m going through right now, and it’s certainly a good way to get back into the writing rhythm again.

This post rewriting my personal mission statement was brought to you by be an original

In retrospect I can say that one of my better habits in the past, was my habit of reviewing my goals on a weekly basis. I’m picking up that habit again, and will be posting the reviews on this blog.

Achievements by public commitment

When I started that habit, I was really into productivity habits and systems and into goal setting theory. Reviewing my goals on a weekly basis seemed like a good habit to get a score on my progress. And it was, especially for the lack of progress … because there were periods with hardly any progress at all. And I put it out there, right in the open, stating that there was – again – no progress.

There were times that I felt bad about posting the progress report, without having something to report besides the lack of progress. But I learned a lot from doing it. And I made a lot of progress. Partly because there was a desire to make that progress, and partly because I made a public commitment to it.

So in retrospect I can say the habit worked for me. So that’s reason enough to pick it up again.

Setting new goals

But before you can review anything, you have to set some goals. Or put your ambitions into words, because you probably already have some goals, but you just haven’t put them in words yet.

Long-time readers know that I start most of my activities from my personal core values. The inner foundation of things I know to be important to me. My five personal core values are Love – Fun – Freedom – Growth – Authenticity. And although I’d love to give every value it’s own audacious goal, I know it’s better to not do that.

In order to set new goals, I’m going to use the same path as I did almost three years ago. But I add the wisdom I have gathered since that time to the process of defining them.

The process of setting new goals

So one of my next posts will be to go back to the roots and investigate my personal core values in detail once more. From that foundation I will look at my personal mission statement again and see if that needs some tweaking. After that I will translate that mission statement into guiding principles for how I want to live my life. And as soon as I have those, I will define new goals.

That may seem like a long route towards setting goals. And it is in a way, but the most powerful goals are the ones that are truly aligned with who we are and what we want. Investing that time into defining my goals will render higher quality goals, and increase the likelihood of motivating me to deeply want to achieve them.

Taking the short-cut to defining goals would probably render goals that are either too easy, unattainable, or unaligned. And that would be a short-cut to failure (and who needs that?).

You know … I’m really looking forward to writing those reviews again. You can expect them on Sundays (after I defined the goals of course). And should I miss one of the weekly reviews, please DO let me know!

This post Starting my weekly reviews again was brought to you by be an original

Six Weeks.

That’ll be the time between my last weekly review and the next one. That didn’t just happen by incident. Almost six weeks ago, I decided to focus on two things, and two things alone:

• The renovation project
• Writing an e-book

The renovation project

The renovation project is an ongoing activity for such a long time now. It’s hardly a project anymore, it’s a part-time job (or that’s how it feels at times). So I decided to focus a lot of time and attention to it to get it to the point of being done. And while I’m still not completely there, I made tremendous progress over the past few weeks.

The confidence that I’m going to finish it soon is back, and I ordered the carpeting last weekend. They’ll be laying the carpet August 22nd and I know I’ll be done by then. After that the renovation project is DONE! Sure there’s a ton of other chores to do in and around the house, but the major project is done.

Writing an e-book

I never expected it to take six weeks, but that’s the time I needed to write an e-book, make the graphics, have a cover designed, and get it proofread by native speakers. And to redesign the graphics, rewrite parts of the book, and redesign the graphics some more. It was an interesting process, I can tell you that.

But the good news is that I finished it. From start to finish, it took me six weeks, give or take a couple of days. The book will launch tomorrow (Tuesday July 29).

Confidence booster

Some of you may have read it between the lines, but as things progressed in the past few months I wasn’t quite satisfied with myself and with the progress I was making. That’s when I decided to focus my attention on a very limited set of things: my regular things (family and my day-job) and two projects. Nothing else. And that meant no blogging, no twittering, no running, no nothing.

It felt like an extreme measure, but it paid off. It was a real confidence booster for me, experiencing the progress when you focus on a very limited number of things. And to experience the fun coming back to them. Instead of grinding my thoughts over the lack of progress, I got empowered by focusing on making progress on the projects AND working on them at the same time. It was great.

I think I might even do better when I just focus on one project, beside the regular things. There have been times where the projects where biting each other, in time and mind-space.

Naming my own company

For a while now I have been walking around with the idea of starting my own company and transferring my online activities to it. It’s easier to make the income fiscally comprehensible, and it’s a platform on which I can launch other activities. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet though. And one of the things that was holding me back, was that I wanted to have a good name for it.

Almost at the end of the six weeks, in a spare moment when I was the only one awake in the house (I’m back to my night owl rhythm currently) I watched the movie Fight Club. To relax a bit, but also inspired by Brett Legree of 6weeks.ca. There is a particular scene, where six weeks is a crucial period for someone. He (a random dude called Raymond K. Hessel, who looks nothing like his Germanic sounding name) gets six weeks to change his life in such a way that he’s in pursuit of his dreams again. Or else…

Six Weeks again. 42 days. 42.

Wasn’t that THE answer? The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? Yep, it is.

That was enough for me to decide that it should be the name of my company. Now the company name will not be very visible as I want to launch activities on their own names and brands, but nevertheless I want it to have a meaning. You never know what it might grow into (ambitious as I can be).

So Six Weeks is the name of my company. I did run it by Brett to make sure he was okay with it. After all it’s the name of his blog, but he quickly replied that I should go for it. Thanks Brett (you know I’ll be crediting you for a long time to come…).

So you may find Six Weeks as a name associated with How to be an Original, in the footer of the blog, but also in my Paypal account for instance. Don’t worry about that, it’s still me!

I loved the power of focus in the past six weeks. I will revisit that feeling often. But it’s also damn good to be blogging again!

This post Six Weeks and the fruits of focus was brought to you by be an original

‘Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars
And live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
~ Lyrics from “Rockstar” by Nickelback

Fifteen cars? Is that what you want too? Chances are that the thought of something similar has crossed your mind at some time in your life. How couldn’t it have, we’re pummeled with the marketed picture of those “perfect” lives almost on a daily basis.

And that’s a problem. There are so many influences and media these days that we are consistently battered with messages about stuff to do, be or want. Sure, we zap away, develop ad blindness, take it with a grain of salt or even ridicule the commercials. But they work anyway. Trust me on this one, they work. On you, on me, on everyone.

Now featured in the self help literature

It’s not that concerning when it comes to what brand of soda we buy, or what brand of beer. But the effect extends to the level of the way we want to live our lives. Our goals and our visions of how a successful life are lived are influenced by them in a major way.

This trend has even crossed over to the self help section of your book store. Stories of abundance and grand riches have always been a part of the success literature, partly because it’s one of the most common ways of measuring success and partly because that’s what people are looking for. But if you look carefully at how they are presented, there’s been a a change.

It changed from examples to a theory or a message, to the example of how it’s done and what you should want too. The book and the accompanying movie “The Secret” are a big example for this phenomenon. I’ve written about them before, and if you read that you know that I’m divided about the message.

Overly focused on materialistic objects

One of the effects that I totally hate is the overfocus on the materialistic translation of being successful. Somehow that’s the effect that gets across the most and in the most ridiculous way too. If you haven’t seen the movie, watch this video that’s available at the website of The Secret:

It’s something isn’t it? Videos like these inspire other people to make videos like these (search youtube for mind movies and find many more):

(why are Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, John Lennon and Mother Theresa in there?!)

It’s amazing, it’s so MTV Cribs. Hilltop houses and fifteen cars. I mean I can understand Jay Leno, he has a passion for cars. He’s a collector, and collectors are passionately crazy about the objects they collect. But a random set of expensive high performance cars, what’s it gonna bring you? That’s the question not a lot of people ask themselves.

Goals are often solutions, result oriented. And especially in western society we have a tendency to translate that into a materialistic result. Something tangible, something we can measure. The Secret has given people examples of goals (houses, dollars, cars, shoes, diamonds) that represent a big monetary value.

But what does the money bring you? What does owning a hilltop house bring you? What does owning three performance cars bring you? What does [insert materialistic object] bring you?

What does owning … bring you?

Money can bring you a sense of certainty, peace of mind. That’s a result! It can be “Fuck you money” by bringing you the ability to say no to stuff that you don’t want to do. That’s a result! The money by itself is nothing, it represents something for you. And that something is what makes it valuable. The same goes for the cars, the private jet, the multiple houses. What do they bring you? What makes them valuable for you.

And when you know what they bring you, you know that you have defined a solution to getting that. How many alternatives can you come up with that bring the same effect? I can bet with you that there are alternatives that are more viable, more authentic, than the marketed goals that we are likely to adopt.

I know I’ve fallen victim to it. On several occasions even. But I usually recognize them later on, and cross them off my list ruthlessly and think about what result I’m really after and what alternative ways there are to accomplish them. I’ve found that there always are. And usually simpler too.

This post Are your goals really YOUR goals? was brought to you by be an original

A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full? They agreed that it was.

So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with an unanimous “yes.”

The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

“Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things–your family, your health, your children, your friends, your favorite passions–things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. “The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car.

The sand is everything else–the small stuff. If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.

The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house, and fix the disposal. “Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the beer represented. The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of beers.

The moral of this parable is a clear one. First fill your life with the important stuff, the golf balls. Then add stuff that supports the golf balls, the pebbles. You’re allowed to add more filling, and finish it off with a beer. The problem is that in life we don’t start with an empty jar.

Identifying your balls

In the search for a purposeful and passionate life you start to look for the important things. You take a good look at your life (the jar) and identify a couple of them. Some are real clear, some are only barely visible. There are all kinds of pebbles blocking your view. And then there’s that strange mud that smells of beer…

Then with some introspection you (re)discover some things that are definitely not in the jar. Forgotten passions, denied passions and such. You get yourself some golf balls and write those things on there. Proud of the new finds you look at the jar, only to find that there’s no room for those new balls.

There you are, looking at a jar filled to the rim and three golf balls in your hand that you want to put in there too. Energized by the find, discouraged by the result.

Clearing away the mud

To get more space for those balls, we need to clear some mud first. Now that sounds pretty easy from a jar perspective, but how do you go about that in real life?

Actually there’s a lot that’s been written about it already. Leo Babauta of Zen Habits wrote about it a lot, browse his articles on simplicity and you’ll find many tips on clearing away the sand and maybe some pebbles. Clay Collins of The Growing Life wrote a great post about clearing away pebbles and clearing away the sand. You’ll find many tips on these excellent blogs, there’s no need for me to repeat them here.

The only thing I’ll repeat here is the concept of baselining Clay Collins talks about:

The process of baselining involves writing down everything you don’t have to have, be, or do, to live a happy and fulfilled life.

This is the quintessence of simplifying. Eliminating everything that does not serve you to be happy or fulfilled. Away with the clutter, away with bullshit, away with the wants and needs instigated in you by marketers. This is similar to taking out the pebbles in our parable.

Take some time to sit down and write a list of things that are in your life, but are not necessary for a happy and fulfilling life. You might get a handful straight away, and then go blank. Just contemplate on ti for some more time, and things will come up. Put the list up on the wall of the toilet, the mirror in the bathroom, or any place you get to see it often. Over the course of days, you will encounter situations that can go on the list too. This exercise alone is already changing your mindset, and you will get inspired to actually start eliminating stuff from your life.

This is the approach I have taken (and I’m far from done). There’s so much stuff left, so much things to eliminate. And the beautiful result is that there’s so much more time to spend on the important things. And as a bonus you might just discover one of the hidden golf balls in the middle of the jar.

Fear of the empty jar

Don’t worry about this one. There will never be an empty jar, there will always be a nice set of golf balls in there. Being conscious on this one will lead to a clear jar with the golf balls you choose, supported by the pebbles you need to support those golf balls.

In the parable the professor said: “The golf balls are the important things–your family, your health, your children, your friends, your favorite passions–things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.”

If you add a handful of pebbles, that’s full enough for me. Scratch the rest (I’ll have the beer though). How about you?

Photos by memekode, Sroown and frumbert

This post Golf balls, pebbles and mud that smells of beer was brought to you by be an original

I’ll admit it, I’m a stats junkie. I like to track progress, see numbers, have charts on whatever it is I’m trying to accomplish. I share my blog stats with you on a weekly basis in the weekly reviews.

I track my goals and habits on a daily basis too. For this I use Joe’s Goals, a simple web app designed to do just that. In this post I’m going to share with you how I use Joe’s Goals.

Setting up an account

This is a breeze! No annoying questions, just an email address, a nickname and a password and you’re all setup.

Configuring your goals and habits

Once you setup your account, you can start configuring your goals and habits. There are two types of entries that you can make, Goal or Logbook. Goals have scores, Logbooks are meant for comments.

I use both types. Goals are meant for checking off on habits I have completed successfully for the day or for checking of on activities that lead me closer to accomplishing my goals. The Logbook-type I use for planning purposes and for making notes on things I have done. And I use them in combination too, more on that later.

As you can see in the images, the setup screens for an entries are pretty straightforward. They have a nice set of options, but nothing too fancy.

• Goal name
  Like it says, this is where the name goes. Choose any name you like, you don’t have to worry about sorting, because you can change the sort order later.
• Tags
  You can put tags in here. I don’t use this feature.
• Weight - goal only
  You can give a score to the checks you put in this goal. Values range from 1 to 10. This is something I use to give relative weight to my goals and habits.
• Type - goal only
  You can choose whether you want the goal to be positive and earning you points, or negative making you lose points. All my goals are positive, because I want to reward myself for doing something I like, not punish myself.
• Target Days
  Use this feature to mark on what days you want the goal to be active. My weekly review habit for instance is only active on Sundays.
• Display Stats - goal only
  Here you can select what stats you want to see in the overview screen.
• Notes
  And finally, this is where you put whatever it is you feel you need to write down. This does not show in the overview screen.

Sorting your goals

Goals and habits are initially ordered in the order you create them. But fear not as it’s easy to sort them later on, when you discover one you forgot. Just click in the upper right hand corner on the link to “sort goals”. There you can sort them by Alphabetically, by Goal Type or Weight.

If you’re like me, you want neither of those orders. For people like us, you can create a custom sorting order by simply rearranging the goals in the list. Scroll down and click on the “Save Custom Sort Order” button in the bottom.

The overview screen

When you trusted all your goals, habits and other thoughts to the program, you get a nice overview of all your entries in a table. The entries are listed on the left, and you get a week’s worth of spaces to mark your progress.

The default view places the current date as the last date in the table. But using the arrow in the top right hand corner, you scroll forward into the near future. By clicking the calender icon, you can choose a date further away.

Some of my tricks

• Injecting Planning: This feature, combined with the Logbook item, is a great way to inject some planning into the table. I use this for my renovation project as you can see. There’s not an awful lot of room for text, so you can’t be too verbose. By putting the Logbook for actuals (a) right below the planning (p) I can see instantly how much of my plan got executed (and consequently whether I need to adjust my planning).
• Divide into sections: Another trick I use is to divide my table into sections, by inserting a Logbook item with no active days. This results in a blue bar across the table. Make sure to give it a clickable title though (like the dashes I used). I have one goal dangling on the bottom of the table, where I brilliantly used the spacebar to give it an unclickable name. I still need to send a mail to ‘Joe’ to get that one removed from the database.
• Declining points for ‘old’ habit changes: As you can see I used the weight function a lot. For the habits section, I more or less have a system for that. The habits that I have been doing for quite a while now get a lower score than the ones that I just started. But some of them are multi-clickable, like the “Drink water” habit. Every glass of water results in a checkmark.
• Extra credit for perfect days: When I have a perfect day with all my habits, I allow myself to check the main habits goal as well, scoring me an additional 10 points. This is one I came up with fairly recently, so I have yet to get the pleasure of putting in a checkmark there!

Now get started!

There are more features to be discovered in Joe’s Goals, and I could write a lot more about it. The truth is that I don’t use the rest of the features, so I’m not going to elaborate on them.

The biggest benefit of using Joe’s Goals is the fact that you’re inclined to check in daily, to score your progress. Doing this on a daily basis will help you build your goals and habit changes into your daily routine, increasing the likelihood of success.

The important thing is to get started. So surf on over to Joe’s Goals and start tracking your progress. Use my tips if they suit you, or come up with your own hacks. But ultimately it’s not about the hacks or the tracking software, it’s about getting serious about change and progress. But this sure is a nifty tool to enable you to succeed.

Oh…and in case you’re worried about forgetting to check-in on a regular basis: you will get an e-mail reminder (after a configurable number of days) to get your butt back to the site and hold yourself accountable!

This post Track your goals and habits with Joe's Goals was brought to you by be an original

Last weekend I have accomplished one of my big goals. Since last Sunday I am a certified Practitioner in Neuro Linguistic Programming. Or to quote the certificate:

Lodewijk van den Broek has successfully completed the course of training in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and has demonstrated competence in the presuppositions, skills and techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming at the level of NLP Practitioner.

Cool huh? I think so! However this article is not about me becoming certified, but about celebrating when you achieve a goal. And taking this as an example is a way to celebrate for me

Goal accomplished?

Accomplishing goals is one of the most gratifying experiences in the goal setting process. It is what all activities and all energy are focused upon: getting the desired result. After all this time working on this goal, alone or in a team, and after overcoming all kinds of unexpected obstacles it has at last produced result. Success!

But…what to do now?

All of a sudden there’s this gaping void of a missing purpose, a loss of direction. This is a natural response, and a lot of people start by setting new goals again. For them the void is so dominant and is perceived as a loss, rather than a gain. So they react by filling the void with new goals.

This is a reaction by adrenaline junkies who have become addicted to the path. It’s like climbing a mountain only to run down again after touching the summit, because the next mountain needs to be climbed.

They have lost their appreciation of a goal accomplished, of the victory of achieving the end-result. It’s great to enjoy the path, but goal setting is about the path and the end-result.

So celebrate the result!

So what do you do when you reached your desired end-result? You celebrate! You won! Go dance your victory dance, sing your song of victory, send out a press release, scream from the top of your lungs, tell everybody around you, buy yourself a gift, have a piece of chocolate cake, take a glass of 18-year old whiskey, get a massage, throw a party…get it?

Achieving success is something to celebrate! The gaping void is not a void; it’s a space to celebrate and to contemplate. But first of all to celebrate!

You just climbed a mountain, now sit down on the summit and enjoy the view. Be proud of being there; look back on the path towards the summit; laugh with the people that climbed with you about the mistakes you made and how you overcame them; thank them for their support along the way.

Be proud!

Celebration is to release the energy that built up along the way, commonly known as stress or strain. Celebrating provides an outlet for that energy and it clears the mind. You will find that the void isn’t a void anymore after the celebration. It’s an open space that you can fill creatively again.

And while enjoying the success and the celebration, small fragments of new goals start to appear. New ideas start to pop up in your mind, not because you need the rush of the path, but because there’s room to create new goals.

Now take the time to realign to your life goals or company goals if you’re in a corporate environment. Make a conscious decision on what you want to achieve next.

I’m not there yet…still celebrating a goal accomplished

This post Goal accomplished? Celebrate your success! was brought to you by be an original