Monday, October 30, 2006

2 lessons I learnt in creating wealth

A man without any knowledge and without any money wanted to change his way of living. He found his life too boring and unexciting. For years he did not know what to do and how to do it. He has a good paying job and a great family, but he lived his life day-in-day out dreaming of wanted to do something, feeling unfulfill but did not do anything. Then one day, he decided to make changes. He started talking to people he thought are better knowledge and have better experience than him. He started searching for a meaning and a direction in his life. He started meeting new friends of the same mind set and people who have found their direction in life. He also started reading books which helped him to stay focus on his search for that direction.

Then one day he met this group of people in a financial seminar, and his life had never been the same again. He started attending seminars and talks with these group of friends who have the same focus and direction in life. They met up frequently and started doing things togather. Soon, he started to plan for his future togather with his new found friends and also worked on his plan, by learning new knowledge and skill required in his plan. After a few months, he started to see results from his work he has put in. In his group, and also with more people he met, he started sharing his experience and knowledge with more and more people of liked minded. As he shared with more people, his knowledge and skill continue to grow. As he shared with more people, he discovered new opportunity for him to grow and new challenges for him to explore. His circle of knowledge, skill and wealth expended as he consistanly sharing with people what he know, he would soon found himself a very wealthy person.

This is true story of a man I know who follow his dream and willingly taking his first step. In the process you may find yourself lost in the middle of darkness and unknown. But stay persistant and stay focus on the slimest light at the end of the tunnel even at time you may not think is real at all. If you are willing to pay for the price to find out the source of the light, the rewards will be there waiting for you at the end of the tunnel.

Two lessons I learnt from this friend:
1) Start dreaming of your reality what you think is real is your reality. Whatever you think and say is real becomes your reality. It was this ability to expend your reality that ultimately made you wealthy. Quote from Robert Kiyosaki, in his book Retire Young Retire Rich.

2) There is no such thing as perfect timing to start working on your dream. You will need to just take the first step, sometimes regardless if you are ready. Timing and condition are things that out of our control. Too many people have waited too long for the perfect timing and condition, at the end, your dream will remain a dream, nothing but a dream, reality never arrive. So taking a qoute from Peter Spann, aurthor of How You Could Build a $10 Million Property Portfolio in Just 10 Years.

Just Take The First Step. Don't let your destiny reside in things outside yourself. Stop waiting for something to happen; just do it.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

Discovering wealth is also about having the right attitude

Few days ago, I recieved an Email from my friend which I wanted to share with you. This is the detail of the Email:

If A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, E=5, F=6, G=7, H=8, I=9, J=10, K=11, L=12, M=13, N=14, O=15, P=16, Q=17, R=18, S=19, T=20, U=21, V=22, W=23, X=24, Y=25, Z=26

Then HARDWORK, H+A+R+D+W+O+R+K = 8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

KNOWLEDGE, K+N+O+W+L+E+D+G+E = 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

LOVE, L+O+V+E=12+15+22+5=54%

Luck, L+U+C+K =12+21+3+11 = 47%

None of them makes 100%................................ Then what makes 100%

Is it Money? ..... No!!!!! M+O+N+E+Y = 13+15+14+5+25 = 72%

Leadership? ...... NO!!!! L+E+A+D+E+R+S+H+I+P = 12+5+1+4+5+18+19+8+9+16 = 92%


Every problem has a solution, only if we perhaps change our "ATTITUDE".

It is our ATTITUDE towards Life and Work that makes OUR Life 100%Successful..

A+T+T+I+T+U+D+E =1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5=100%

Therefore discovering wealth is also about having the right ATTITUDE.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Billionaire takes control when creating wealth

I just recieved AdvantEdge Newsletter from Nightingle and I like to share part of what I have read with you:

History's billionaires didn't build a better mousetrap and wait for the world to beat a path to their door. They improved someone else's mousetrap and then took it to the world.

According to folklore, the way to create a spectacular fortune is to build a better mousetrap, then let the world beat a path to your door. However, if you study the individuals who took this advice to originate many of the great ideas in business and technology, you'll be surprised to learn how few struck it rich.

Billionaires have another strategy — and if you look into how history's billionaires created their fortunes, you'll be surprised to discover how few of them invented anything.

For instance, Bill Gates, the wealthiest person in the world, didn't invent the products that made him rich. Microsoft's first successful product, DOS, was derived from a product created by Gary Kildall, a pioneer in the software industry who died at 52 in a barroom brawl and who was well short of the billion-dollar mark in net worth. Microsoft Windows®, in the popular view, was copied from Apple Computer®, but the technology didn't even begin at Apple. Its uniqueness, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) was originated at Xerox®, which never effectively exploited it.

Gates did, however, have one exceptional insight. He understood how to make money from a product. It must have been tempting for Gates to simply sell DOS to IBM for use in its personal computers. At the time, that would have been a big sale for Microsoft. Instead, Gates allowed IBM to use the operating system for a modest sum, recognizing that the real money would be in licensing it to producers of application software.

A similar story can be told about the late Sam Walton, a previous occupant of the top spot on the Forbes 400 list. He actively boasted that his best ideas came from competitors. Wal- Mart wasn't the first discount retailer, yet it became the biggest retailer of any kind. One big reason was that Walton tirelessly shopped the other chains, with an eye toward copying whatever was working for them.

Others had the idea of the discount retailing format before Walton did. But he was the one who developed the most successful formula for exploiting it. His approach had several components, including concentrating initially in small towns, giving store managers a big ownership stake in their businesses, and betting boldly on new computer technology.........

.............Clearly, the super-wealthy have followed many different paths to achieve their billionaire status, but there are common themes. Determination and hard work characterize all of their successful quests. But many determined, hard-working people never achieve their clearly defined goal of amassing great wealth. And most will continue to fall short because they don't pursue the key strategy that has worked repeatedly over the years.

There is a theme that consistently runs through the billionaires' stories. I call this theme "the billionaires' strategy" which is to:


Gain control of an asset and increase its value.

Coincidently this is exactly what I read about in chapter ten, Winners Take Control of Why We Want You To Be Rich, a new book by Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki. All billionaires have many things in common, taking control is one of them. Coincident........I doubt, do you?

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Another winning mentality of discovering wealth

According to Donald Trump from his book, Why We Want You To Be Rich, the other component of winning is to have a winning attitude. Some people may interpret as Thinking Positive.

My personal experience tells me that positive thinking works and it is a very powerful tool if you were to use it correctly. It has a lot of power to give you a push when you are in difficult situation to continue, lift you up when you are down or faced a road block, and gave you extra encouragement when you hit a mile stone in the process. Winning requires power of this kind. Power gives you strength, and being positively charge with positive thinking is one of the most powerful tool you will get. It helps you to pull through the most difficult situation you will face.

To arrive with such power of positive thinking, we have to go back to the cause of your mission. If the cause is strong enough, you will have strength at all time to have positive thought sending to your sub-concious mind or super-sub-concious mind as Brian tracy discribed as. To create that level of belief in your sub-concious mind, you need to have a very strong cause for your mission. We need to understand that our sub-concious mind will not be able to differentiate what is a positive thought and what is a negative thought. They will take in any thought you give it, therefore it is important that in order to win or to win big, we need to feed positive thinking to our sub-concious mind. It is like creating a picture of what your reality you want in your sub-concious mind.

Enough of positive thinking allow you to continue to break new grounds, continue to climb over obstacle after obstacle, and continue to pick yourself up after every fall. That is how powerful positive thinking is, and if you have gone through enough of these experience. Your positive thinking will evolved into a self-belief. Taking a leaf out of what Keith Cunninghem said:

Belief is the mother of optimism
Optimism is the mother of persistence
Belief = Faith

Taking another example of sub-concious mind creation. Many of us believe in Faith. The defination of Faith according to Bob Proctor in his book, You Were Born Rich:

"Ability to see the Invisible which we believed we can do the Incredible, will allow us to achieve what the mass think is Impossible"

Work on the power of positive thinking, which is another winning mentality of wealth discovery.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

A winning mentality in discovering wealth

"If your reality begins with your dream, your dream will become your reality" -- Donald Trump wrote in his new book together with Robert Keyosaki.

In one of the chapter in their new book, Why We Want You To Be Rich, Danald told the following story from his dad:

A guy who love soda so much that he went into the soda business with a product called 3UP. It failed. So he started again with a soda called 4UP. It failed, too. So he decided to name his product 5UP and worked just as hard if not harder to make it work. But sure enough, it failed again. He realized that he still loved soda, so he tried again with a product named 6UP, and work even harder than before. It failed, and he gave up completely. Then, a few years later. Someone else came up with a soda product and named it 7UP, which became a huge success.

If you believe in your dream and truly wanted to make your dream your reality, never give up. Donald trump called the behavior as Being Stubborn. Napoleon Hill called it persistent. What ever you want to call it, it is a behavior that are common to all winners. Believing in yourself and believing in your ability to fulfill your dream. Aim high with much enthusiasm and create your plan to achieve what you are aiming for. Work on the process to covert your dream into your reality.

That is what a great winner make of, "Never give up on what you believe is your reality"

Friday, October 13, 2006

Lesson learnt on discovering and accumulating wealth

LC Development, a counter I have been watching in Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX) has been having a great run this week. I would like to share my experience as another key element on wealth accumulation and discovery when purchasing this counter.

I have spent some time, for the last six months, coming up with a list of undervalue companies in SGX. LC Development, a small property company was also in the list with the share price at less than 50% of its Net Asset Value (NAV). It is a share with great discount but the only sore point is that they have been in the red for years. It has been going down trend since the May peak of the Singapore Stock Market, which means it is getting cheaper and cheaper compared to its Net Asset Value, but still in red. But things started to change late August as the price of the share started to pickup. Last weekend, my broker sent me his newsletter and talked about the counter again. The newsletter ignited me to go in and take a closer look at this company profile again, as they have just closed their book in June for Year 2005 and reported turning black after few years in red.

After doing my checking of the fundamental, I decided that it is a good time to purchase the share. On Tuesday, I started queuing at 15 cents per share, but the trading was so thin that even the last done price was at 15 cents, the target that I wanted, I never had a chance to complete the sales. Next day, I went in and started my queue before the market opened at 15cents. This time I was quite confident that I would get it. But the price went up to 15.5 cents and never came down. I evened up my queue to 0.155 cents in the later part of the day but never got it because the trading was still too thin. On Thursday, I started my queue at 15.5 cents and expected this time to get it. However, by the time I finished my lunch the counter had moved up to 16/16.5 cents. The trading was heavy as I learnt later because of some property they have sold that triggered the interest to this counter. Eventually, the counter closed at 17 cents. Once again ,I was left in the cold. So to make sure I would get the counter the following day, I actually started to queue at 5.16pm yesterday. This was to ensure that I would get what I wanted when the market opened the following day. This time, I had 2 queues, one at 15.5cents and another at 16cents.

I then went back home but felt bad, because personally I felt like being played out by the market for not getting the stock at a cheaper price 3 days ago at 15 cents, where now the counter have moved up to 17 cents. In my mind, I was battling with my emotion:

Firstly, I felt bad for losing the opportunity to make 2 cents per share from 15 cents to 17 cents( which is 13%) within the short time span of 3 days. Secondly, I was mad at myself for not making the decision to purchase at the selling price instead of insisiting on my lower purchase price. I blamed my persistancy of holding on to my purchase price for missing the 13% gain. To make the matter worst, on the last 2 days, this counter closed right at my queue price, and based on my calculation, the market closed right where I almost got my queue of purchase. The thought of "just missing the boat" feeling, make me feel unjustise and incredible unfairness.

What happened is that I started calling my friends and telling my wife to just blow my fustration of the last 3 days of trading. Screaming that I will get it next morning. I could'nt even have a good rest last night and could not wait for the market to open and see my trade was finally being made.

What happened on the next morning was something I never expected.

I woke up this morning and a sudden flash of thoughts came into my mind.

I remembered that LC Development had just announced a dividend which was issued at 50 cents, and I remembered that I have read this on Monady's Business Times Dividend summary table. To confirm, I searched for the Business Times and found the table, which confirmed the dividend pay out was 50 cents. Now, knowing this part of information, I had a very different view now on this company. The company net asset value was 28 cents per share, last year earning per share was 0.81 cents. Therefore, with all these numbers, how can this company pay a dividend of 50 cents, which is higher than its net asset value and his full year earning. If the dividend is true, then the comapny left only an emty shell without any value by the time they pay up all the dividend.

With this piece of thought I have in mind, the very first thing I did when I went to work this morning was to check on SGX website to reconfirm the dividend payment. To my surprise, the dividend shown on SGX website is 0.5 cents, instead of 50 cents. I told myself that there must be a mistake in either the Business Times or the SGX report. To validate the numbers, I logged into the Philip Security Website and checked out the data, and confirmed that it was 0.5 cents. With 2 vs 1 of my information telling me that the dividend issued was 0.5 cents, I SMS to my broker just to triple confirm the dividend payment. By then, the market has opened and the trading is holding at 17 cents. My broker later finally returned back and confirmed that the dividend was actually 0.5 cents and not 50 cents.

Lesson learnt:
1) Due diligent is one key element when we are in the process of discoveing wealth. the process of discovering and accumulating wealth will involve many times, your emotion and pyscology of making right decisions. In the process of accumulating wealth, when we discover a piece of opportunity, it is important to reasearch on the fundamental piece of opportunity. Gather the information and data, analyse them to ensure we are making the right choice. Every piece of information is critical, and do not miss out any. The piece that you missed may be a critical part as it might make the diffrerence between a gold mine and a trash bin. Like the case I have, if the actual dividend is 50 cents and I never realised it and bought into the counter, it would be a disaster.

2) In the world of wealth discovery and accumulation, it is all about physcology. Every time you do an investment, you will be having the ups and downs feeling inside you. The emotion control of the whole process is what differentiate between a good investor from a great one. Naturally, I still have a long way to go and a lot to learn in emotion control. The missed opportunities I felt when I keep missing my trade and the impatient caught up with me on the 3rd and 4th day of missing trade. Revenge creeped into me on the 3rd day where I placed my trade on the closing of the day for the next day purchase.

I only realised it when my mind suddenly flashed back some thoughts of the piece of news on dividend payment and the concept of Asset value of the company this morning. Subconciously, my knowledge of self-control and checking fundamental of the company, brought my emotion in check and in control. After the whole incident this morning, I realised how critical it is for us to have our emotion on check if we want to be a successful investor. In fact, I believe emotion control is important to every investment decision, not just in this incident. Also similarily important is to perform our due diligent in all situation to check up the fundamental of all even we faced, in the above situation I referred to the fundamental of the investment I am getting into. So in life nothing can be taken lightly, we must always follow the process of doing things. The porcess which you have believed in and the process which you have proven. The difference the next time may not just be money, it can be your life that are at stake.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Money is not wealth

I was just surfing the internet today to search for some internet marketing ideas, and I came across this article which find it quite interesting. I want to share with you, a section of the article talking about money and wealth which I think is worth reading:

If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is. Wealth is not the same thing as money. Wealth is as old as human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. Money is a comparatively recent invention.

Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.

Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can't make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.

How do you get the person who grows the potatoes to give you some? By giving him something he wants in return. But you can't get very far by trading things directly with the people who need them. If you make violins, and none of the local farmers wants one, how will you eat?

The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff-- the medium of exchange-- can be anything that's rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we've been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn't physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government.

The advantage of a medium of exchange is that it makes trade work. The disadvantage is that it tends to obscure what trade really means. People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage-- just a shorthand-- for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

For those of you who wanted to read the whole article, you can go to this site:
www.paulgraham.com

Monday, October 02, 2006

How to discover wealth by adding more value?

Many of us have the concept that everyone will get paid for how hard we work and how much time we put into the work. We always relate our monthly take home pay to 2 things, how much time we put in and how hard we work for our current job. Many people in my work place spend enormous time of their life in working hard and spend many hours in office discussing on issues, and moving from one meeting to another. To the extent that they take late dinner by staying beyond the office hour, sacrificing family time for work time because they only actually start their day when they finished discussion and meeting.

This is a very old school of thoughts, but a common sight.

In the fast changing world of today, the time you spend in the office has nothing to do with your performance on your job. It definitely does nothing to improve the money you will bring back home. We are living in a age of information technology, many people work from outside of the office, and getting higher pay than those who spend more time in the office. The old economy of working hard with blood and muscle is over due. That is the old economy of our grand fathers.

Recently I listened to an audio CD, The Art of Exceptional Living, by Jim Rohn and this is what he mentioned:

We get pay for bringing value to the market place.
It takes time to bring value to the market place,
but we don't get pay for time.
We get pay for the value you put into the time.

Isn't what he said make so much sense! A man said that he is paid $30 per hour! The statement is not really true by Jim's account that the man is paid for the value but not the time he put in. Is it possible to become twice as valuable and make twice as much money? Of course, the solution is to add more value to your work you are doing. So you can see how important for us to add more value to our work. So the question become: How can we improve the value we put into the market place?

The way to add more value to your work is to continue the learning process which everyone of us started when we arrived in this world. Sad to say that many of us have stopped this process when we have completed our traditional education system. I was once in the very same position as many of them. So it is important that we continue to learn and improve our skills and knowledge so that we can continue to add more value to the market place.

We need to understand that knowledge can be learnt at all stages of our life. What we have learnt from school were only the very fundamental skills. In fact, once we completed school, that is when the real education starts. School only provides us the fundamental skills to learn more. The actual education, is the education of life, which will never stop until we are 6 inches under the ground. We must train ourselves like a sponge, never stop absorbing knowledge as we move along. The greatest mistake anyone can make is to become complacent of what we have gained and known.

It is good that we work hard, but we need to work hard on the right thing by working smart. Prioritizing our work is one way of working smart. We must always focus on the 20% of the work which can bring us 80% of the results. Do not spend too much time on the other 80%. In fact, I spend very little time on the other 80% of the work as it does not give me any value. Spend your time wisely, as everyone of us have equaled number of hours in a day, which 1s 24 hours. How you spend your time to optimize your value added to the market place is one of the key to your success.

The other way of working smart is delegation. Deligate your work to more capable people who can be more effectively complete the tasks with better results in the shorter time than if you will to do it yourself. Each of us has our own strength, recognizing the strength of the people around you and utilizing their expertise to help you to complete the tasks. The truth is that each of us is genius of our own right. No one person can claim that he is a genius in everything. Therefore, we need to leverage on the the geniuses of others to create a successful life of our own. By doing so, you are also helping others to add more value to the market place. Hence, completing each task in a much shorter time than you doing it all by yourself.

What I have mentioned here are only 2 ways of adding value to our work. There are more ways and methods of adding more values to the market place. We can just start to work on the 2 ways I have mentioned, and get better on applying them as we work. In the process, we will experinced the increase of effeciency in our work and thus will find more values have been added. I personally experienced it, so I believed you will to.