In a recent forum thread about starting a new business, someone asked about the best way to handle competition. How do you ensure that your efforts will pay off instead of merely jumping into a giant pool with everyone else and being unable to stand out? My strategy for dealing with competition is the same no matter [...]

I recently decided to learn to play chess. While it may not be the sexiest undertaking and probably wouldn’t make for a very exciting 30-day trial (don’t worry — I’ll spare you!), taking up chess as a hobby appeals to me for several reasons. In November I posted an article called Discover Your Strengths, which is about an online [...]

Erin recently decided to start offering consulting services on her web site.  You can visit her consulting page for details and topics, or read her recent blog post about it. Technically she’s been doing consulting for a while.  Some people would book a reading with her and then use their reading time to ask her [...]

Your alarm goes off at 5am, and you immediately get out of bed without a second thought.  As you orient yourself to the waking world, you can barely detect any lingering grogginess, even if you look for it.  You stand up and stretch, feeling totally alert, fully conscious, and eager to start your day.  The thought [...]

Our feelings are a natural response to our thoughts and intentions.  We don’t really choose our feelings directly.  Our feelings are a feedback mechanism.  They indicate whether we’re moving into alignment with our true desires (positive feelings) or out of alignment (negative feelings). Simply put… we feel good when we’re moving towards what we want, and we feel [...]

John Assaraf is an international best-selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur. You may have seen him as one of the experts in the popular movie The Secret (as well as in The Secret book), talking about how he manifested his dream house. What’s most amazing is that he lived in that house for quite a while before discovering it was the exact same house he originally posted on his [...]

Overcoming jealousy has been one of my most requested topics for new articles, but in the past I’ve always declined such requests because I don’t have much personal experience in this area.  I’m not prone to jealousy, so I can’t explain from personal experience how to overcome it.  Nevertheless, due to the demand for such [...]

What if you hate your life?  Or maybe you don’t quite hate it, but you’re just not happy with your current situation?  Perhaps you’re depressed, bored, or apathetic.  Or maybe you just don’t see the point in living at all. If you don’t see the point in living, then you’re missing the point of life [...]

Sometimes we procrastinate on projects because we don’t know where to begin.  A goal like “write a book” might seem straightforward enough when first set, but when it’s time to act, the goal becomes this huge, amorphous blob.  Procrastination soon follows. A popular suggestion is to define the immediate next action that must be taken, and then focus on [...]

Journaling is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to accelerate your personal development.  By getting your thoughts out of your head and putting them down in writing, you gain insights you’d otherwise never see. Beyond sequential thinking While your brain is technically capable of processing a great deal of input simultaneously, your conscious thoughts [...]