Is the office trying to kill you by boredom?  Do you have nothing to do on a beautiful summer morning?  You want to do something that could augment your income part time?  The management suddenly wants you to operate new software, a new product or implement a new process?  You could learn new skills to increase your productivity or maximize the use of your spare time.

Of course, learning something is not easy for many people like me who tend to settle on things that I could do better.  You need to exert effort and spend time to learn things as it happen.  While learning something can be quite fun, you should not waste part of your time, money, and effort in vain.  You should learn something new the ‘right’ way, i.e., forging what you know to attain what you want to learn.

Learn by using what you know

Learning can be a lot more fun and easier if you will try to learn by using what you already know.  If you’re fond of cooking, why not go up another level and learn to bake some cakes and pastries?  It would be lot more fun if you’re not messing up the entire kitchen.  If you know some techniques with some thread, why not try to learn some pattern making technique, like burlap and crochet?  With some basic knowledge on the things you do, you can forget about the hassles of learning it first and concentrate and doing it best.

Familiarity with gadgets and intricacies that comes with a certain skill would come handy if you want to learn another skill.  This is especially true for technical and scientific skills like carpentry and computer programming.  Save yourself from waste of time and save yourself from unwanted accidents by working on something that you can do without injuring yourself.

Do Not Be Afraid

Ultimately, learning something should give you the results you intended.  If you want to learn some bit of carpentry, you should learn how to make simple carpentry projects and not how sharp the saw would cut your fingers.  When you want to learn how to make cakes, you should learn how to mix a good batter, not how to spoil a good one.  By using a skill you have learned before, you can eliminate these and go straight on what is important.  Its important to make sure that learning process, while maybe difficult, is productive.

So finally you realized that the money you earn is simply slipping through your fingers like water.  Now, you want to cut all those unnecessary expenses and put a curb on withdrawals.  It may sound scary but, in fact, it is not.  Saving money can be a lot of fun, and the rewards are just as great.  Let me show you how you can save some money.

Set Your Goals

Saving some money requires a reason why you have to.  It could be a short-term goal like: buying a nice dress, upgrading your furniture, or having that necklace you’ve always wanted.  It could also be a long- term one like having your new car, a new house, or paying all your debts.  By setting your goals, you have something to look forward to, something you could use to stop yourself from having another bar of chocolate.

It All Adds Up

A movie could cost you $30, a beer could cost you $2, a cup of latte could go around $4, a haircut bills you $20, and a lunch out averages at $15.  Watch a movie every week, buy a beer and a cup of latte every day, go to a barber every month, and buy your lunch for a year and see the receipts flowing in and your money flowing out faster than you expected.  Eliminate all of these expenses and save at least $9,000 a year.

Don’t Put Yourself in a Situation Where Spending is Inevitable

Many of the things we buy are bought out of impulse, not need.  A study, for example, puts impulse factor for buying confectioneries at more than 30%.  And there are more statistics.  Many of the products today hope that you would run into them, be attracted by the way it looks, and hand your cash or your card to the clerks.  Malls and casinos are constructed as a place for consumption.  If you want to save money, avoid luring yourself into places and purchases when you don’t need it.

Don’t Lose Your Job/Income Source

Don’t quit your job if you don’t have any alternative.  Losing money can be felt the greatest when no funds are coming in.
Live a Simple Life

Who says living frugally is not fun? Most of us who want live the life they can’t afford end up with a lot of debt or a lot of years’ worth of jail sentence.  Live within the folds of what you earn.  Living frugally doesn’t mean you take the happiness and entertainment out of life.  Rather, you just have to look deeper.  For example, you don’t need to go to expensive restaurants for a dinner date if you can cook good food and eat at home.  You don’t have to go to specialty shops to buy your veggies and fruits.  There are Farmer’s Marts nearby where you can buy your fruits cheaper and fresher.  Find creative ways to spend less money, and you’ll see the phrase “it all adds up” in a different perspective.

The clincher in any job application, promotion, and other business deals is the all-too-important interview. Some people breeze through it as if it were the easiest thing to do in the world, while others struggle and dread it. To some degree, being able to talk your way in and out of almost anything is an innate talent. However, no case is lost because anyone can develop the gift of gab.

If you come prepared for the interview, there’s no reason to fear it, much less fail it. The key is to come as well-prepared as you possibly can, and this means putting in a little effort to do your research and perhaps even rehearse what you, more or less, are going to say.

Say It with Ease

What you say during an interview can prove to be a deal breaker if you don’t know what you’re talking about and you just rattle on and on senselessly; or you over-compensate your lack of knowledge on the topic by veering away from the subject and passionately talking about something else. Either way, you could lose face and a potential career.

It is best to study all the possible questions that your interviewer could pose during your actual dialogue. If this is for a job interview, your potential answers should cover your previous work history. Remember every detail as possible as you don’t know which area the interviewer will focus on and research on the position you’re applying for. This way, all bases are covered.

Generally, whatever interview you’re going to, your first rule of thumb is to find out as much as you can about the subject of the interview or, if that is quite vague for you, learn a little info about the company and the person/s who will be talking to you.

Avoiding Difficult Qs

Since you don’t have control of the flow of questions, you could find yourself being asked about things that you will not be comfortable talking about. Should this happen, simply give a general answer without being too vague.

You can avoid going into specifics if it will implicate your previous company or anyone else, or if you’d rather keep that part private. Politely decline to answer it directly and say why you’d rather talk about it under different circumstances – without bashing anybody or being negative about it.

During an interview, your attitude will also say it all so make sure that you gracefully answer everything without being a pushover.

Life can be described as follows:

Choose between this… this… and this.
Live consequences
Repeat Until you die

You work hard… you get the promotion or you earn a lot of money but you have to sacrifice time off or time with your family. You study hard at university you get your A+ but as a consequence you might put aside your relationship resulting in its degradation.

Life is like that. You are faced with a decision with a limited amount of options. With every option you choose, you will get benefits but you also get consequences. This makes decision making very important since our life takes shape depending on what decision we make. This leads us to the million dollar question.

How do you make the right choices in life?

Please allow me to suggest my brain dead simple method that I use when I am faced with a decision which is bigger than me. All it takes is a white blank sheet of paper, a pen and a clean desk. I split the paper into a series of columns depending on how many options I have available. After I list all the options at the top, one per column, I split the paper into two rows: in the top most row I list the pro and in the bottom row I write down the cons.

While doing this exercise you have to take care that you list everything down. Make sure that you think hard enough to see all the effects of the corresponding option. Don’t be biased and take some effects for granted. Be open minded and list every effect down. If you are biased in your decisions this will have severe effects on your future, since you might take the wrong decision.

I know that the decision making system that I use is very simple. But after all you need something simple, something that does not make you think since you are already overloaded with the decision that you are about to take. However, I would like to hear how you go about making decisions.

Last week, I went to a leading consumer appliance store to buy a home appliance. I asked for help because I could not make up my mind on which appliance to choose out of two in particular. A young salesman approached me and started what seemed to me like a pre-learned keynote speech saying things like…

“Sir we are not like our competitors. We here value our customers.” - It was in the first place why I went to the store because I thought that they value me. But he made me ask myself, “Why is he emphasizing it? Maybe it’s not true and he wants me to believe it is?”

“Unlike our competitors we will replace your broken appliance if it is still in the warranty period.” - That is the definition of warranty no? I mean if something breaks down within the period of warranty it should be either fixed or replaced. But yet again he made me ask myself why is he emphasising it?

To cut a long story short, I thanked the salesman for his help and left the store. With the new questions that the salesman made me ask I felt that I’d better get some trusted advice from a couple of close friends.

This experience made me think and from it we can all learn that, when we speak we are instilling feelings in our listeners, be they a family member, friend, or colleague. The feelings that we instil in the people we are addressing are associated with us and what we say. In the case of the salesman, he instilled in me negative feelings which I automatically associated with the store he was representing.

On the other hand if you speak positively, people will associate positive feelings with you and what you do. Hence, next time when you speak, keep in mind what feelings you want to instil in your listeners and speak accordingly.

Supermarkets are a good choice to get the best value for money. Due to their large volumes of sales, they tend to offer the best prices around. The way how supermarkets are designed makes boring shopping chores enjoyable. The aim of the supermarket designers is to present you with a wide selection of products (both competing and also complementary products) with the aim of making you spend more. Even though supermarkets tend to offer the best prices around, you still have to stick to your own budget or else end up overspending. Here are some tips on how to control yourself whilst you are between one shelf rack and another:

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A couple of days ago I met an old friend of mine, an old classmate. He is now married and has a child. I could tell from the way he talked that he was very happy with his new born child. He really made my day, since I was happy for him.

While I was walking back home, I kept on thinking about what he said. My friend told me that unfortunately due to a lot of expenses he is doing 3 jobs. In fact when he met me he was on his way to his second job. He was working over 60 hours a week, leaving him with almost no time to enjoy with his wife and his son. Quoting him, he told me, “… I am doing a sacrifice not seeing my son for days …” But is that a real sacrifice? At face value you will agree with him, that’s what happened to me.

But after thinking about this, I concluded that my friend was using the word sacrifice wrongly. In his case, he is denying his son from his parental care in order to work. While I don’t want to go into the nitty gritty of the story, I personally believe that there could be other ways how to reduce expenses like: not taking a holiday, maybe own one car, rent instead of buy a house or buy a small house. In my opinion it is his wife and his son who are doing the sacrifice since they are missing the love of a husband and father respectively.

This is just one example of wrongly using the word sacrifice which struck me. Sometimes the real sacrifice is to stick to our duties and not concentrate on doing more, since more most probably will mean less.

If you work as a front desk person or in a support department, you have to know how to handle complaints and unfortunately angry customers. An angry customer is very sensitive and with the right words you can avoid further irritating the customer and resolve the problem s/he has.

The rule of thumb of how one should handle an angry customer is to be patient. Speaking in a patient tone will calm down the angry customer. Being angry back at angry clients will not resolve the problem but make it further worse.

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