What I've learned since moving to D.C. (some of which should be obvious): 0083

4101.  Apparently, antiperspirant with aluminum chloride causes those (unsightly,) yellow, underarm stains on white t-shirts;

4102.  It’s nice to be important, but more important to be nice;

4103.  48% of mortgage foreclosures are caused by disability;

4104.  3% of mortgage foreclosures are caused by death;

4105.  Men have a 43% chance of becoming seriously disabled during their working years;

4106.  Women have a 54% chance of becoming seriously disabled during their working years;

4107.  At age 42, it is 4 times more likely that you will become seriously disabled than that you will die during your working years;

4108.  Many people focus on low deductibles when purchasing insurance, but then only file claims that are well above their deductible and don’t file claims that are smaller because they are trying to keep their premiums low.  If you aren’t going to file claims below or at the lower deductible, save yourself some money and get a higher deductible;

4109.  If your investment in an insurance policy keeps you thinking productively, indemnifies you against loss and provides a return on your investment, you have increased the productivity of your assets;

4110.  Many at-risk products or investments, such as Variable Universal Life, mutual funds, IRAs or 401(k)s, may work out great in hindsight, but people will not feel safe making significant, bold choices in other areas of their lives based on the expected performance of these assets because there is little certainty ahead of time.  They will be in a cautious, wait-and-see mode through most of their lives;

4111.  The real economic value of permanent life insurance is not in the rate of return on the cash value, nor in the ability to borrow at low rates, nor in the estate created for charity or heirs upon death, nor in the tax treatment of the policy.  Rather it lies within the world of economic possibility that opens up to the insured during her/his own lifetime because of the certainty s/he now has because of the contract guarantees and the resulting choices s/he can now make in other areas of life without fear, worry or doubt.  The insured quite literally becomes the beneficiary of her/his own life insurance policy during her/his own lifetime;

4112.  Transferring risk opens up possibilities that are unavailable to us when we retain them.  When we create certainty in our lives, we act much differently than we do when we’re operating in a risky environment;

4113.  Certainty dramatically increases our productivity;

4114.  The more certainty we can create in our lives, the more likely we will be to produce and to take on projects that we otherwise wouldn’t even consider.  Conversely, the less certainty in our lives, the more fear; and the more fear, the less productivity;

4115.  One critical way to remove fear and to increase certainty in our life is to transfer our risks through the proper use of insurance;

4116.  Many people focus on which doctors are available under their medical insurance while ignoring the lifetime maximum benefit of the insurance.  This should be a primary consideration because if your lifetime max is low, it can be eliminated by a single catastrophic event and then you would be unprotected;

4117.  The more assets you have, the more insurance you should have because the more risk you have of lost production;

4118.  Understand the difference between debt and liabilities and wisely incur and leverage the right liabilities to increase your prosperity;

4119.  Companies need to have rules – that’s a given – but they don’t have to be shortsighted and lazy attempts at creating order.  Whether it’s an overzealous attendance policy or taking employees’ frequent flier miles, even a couple of unnecessary rules can drive people crazy.  When good employees feel like big brother is watching, they’ll find someplace else to work;

4120.  Treating everyone equally shows your top performers that no matter how high they perform (and, typically, top performers are work horses), they will be treated the same as the bozo who does nothing more than punch the clock;

4121.  It’s said that in jazz bands, the band is only as good as the worst player; no matter how great some members may be, everyone hears the worst player.  The same goes for a company.  When you permit weak links to exist without consequence, they drag everyone else down, especially your top performers;

4122.  It’s easy to underestimate the power of a pat on the back, especially with top performers who are intrinsically motivated.  Everyone likes kudos, none more so than those who work hard and give their all.  Rewarding individual accomplishments shows that you’re paying attention.  Managers need to communicate with their people to find out what makes them feel good (for some, it’s a raise; for others, it’s public recognition) and then to reward them for a job well done.  With top performers, this will happen often if you’re doing it right;

4123.  More than half the people who leave their jobs do so because of their relationship with their boss.  Smart companies make certain that their managers know how to balance being professional with being human.  These are the bosses who celebrate their employees’ successes, empathize with those going through hard times and challenge them, even when it hurts.  Bosses who fail to really care will always have high turnover rates.  It’s impossible to work for someone for eight-plus hours a day when they aren’t personally involved and don’t care about anything other than your output;

4124.  It may seem efficient to simply send employees assignments and move on, but leaving out the big picture is a deal breaker for star performers.  Star performers shoulder heavier loads because they genuinely care about their work, so their work must have a purpose.  When they don’t know what that is, they feel alienated and aimless.  When they aren’t given a purpose, they find one elsewhere;

4125.  Talented employees are passionate.  Providing opportunities for them to pursue their passions improves their productivity and job satisfaction, but many managers want people to work within a little box.  These managers fear that productivity will decline if they let people expand their focus and pursue their passions.  This fear is unfounded.  Studies have shown that people who are able to pursue their passions at work experience flow, a euphoric state of mind that is five times more productive than the norm;

4126.  If people aren’t having fun at work then you’re doing it wrong.  People don’t give their all if they aren’t having fun.  The idea is simple: if work is fun, you’ll not only perform better, but you’ll stick around for longer hours and an even longer career;

4127.  Managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don’t leave jobs; they leave managers;

4128.  We do want to avoid true debt (i.e., having more liabilities than assets), but we don’t want to avoid incurring liabilities (i.e., owing something to someone else) that can be beneficial to our productivity, value creation and prosperity;

4129.  In many instances, the way to increase our prosperity and wealth is to increase – not decrease – our liabilities;

4130.  The name of the game of wealth is not to focus on ridding our lives of as many liabilities as possible.  Rather, it’s to identify which liabilities are consumptive (i.e., take more value from our lives than they put into it) and which are productive (i.e., provide more value to our lives than they take from it) and then focus on increasing our productive liabilities;

4131.  A productive liability always creates a corresponding asset – an asset that we never would have had access to had we not incurred the liability;

4132.  Every asset comes with a corresponding liability, at least in some form;

4133.  To me, (Aunt Rosie’s) loganberry drink tastes like a melted, cherry slushy;

4134.  Alexander Ovechkin is (only) the 3^rd player in NHL history to score (at least) 30 goals in each of his first 11 seasons in the league (joining Wayne Gretzky and Mike Gartner);

4135.  Say what you mean and do what you say;

4136.  The Rolling Stones are (huge) blues fans;

4137.  Keith Richards (from “The Rolling Stones”) seems like a pretty interesting (and cool) dude;

4138.  The Rolling Stones are named after Muddy Waters’s song of the same name;

4139.  Keith Richards thinks he’s a better bass player than he is a guitarist;

4140.  The average American spends more on coffee and soda than they do on post formal education;

4141.  If you’re not receiving the love you desire, it seems like a pretty good idea to explore what’s creating this.  Most of us want to place the blame for lovelessness on something external to ourselves.  That’s a waste of time and energy, but it often feels good because blame seems to alleviate the pain, even if only briefly.  However, blame energy only helps you remain out of balance, whether you’re blaming yourself or someone else.  Being in balance is centered on the premise that you receive in life what you’re aligned with.  You get what you think about!

4142.  While you may justify your loveless state with thoughts of being unappreciated or choose to see the whole world as an unloving place, the fact remains that you’re experiencing the imbalance of not feeling good because you don’t have enough love in your life.  Waiting for others to change or for some kind of shift to take place in the world to restore you to balance won’t work without your commitment to take responsibility for changing your way of thinking.  If that’s left to others, you’ll turn the controls of your life over to someone or something outside of you.  And that’s a prescription for disaster;

4143.  If feelings of being shortchanged in the love dimension are a part of your life then it’s because you’ve aligned your thoughts and behaviors with lovelessness.  By failing to match your desire for love with thoughts that harmonize with this powerful desire – for example: I’ve never been able to sustain a loving relationship.  I’m not really attractive enough to have someone love me in the way I want to be loved.  People are cruel and take advantage of me.  I see hostility and anger everywhere.  This is an uncaring world with a shortage of love.  All of these thoughts (and others like them) create a point of attraction that’s way out of balance with a desire to receive abundant love.  You attract into your life precisely what you’re thinking about and you’ve inadvertently joined “Club Loveless” with a membership that includes a majority of the entire population – that is, people who feel shortchanged about the amount of love that’s failing to pour into their empty hearts.  All of this is reversible by shifting your alignment and removing the resistance to the fulfillment of your desire for love.  You begin by ending your search for love;

4144.  To balance your life with more lovingness, you need to match your thoughts and behaviors with love.  This means noticing when you’re inclined to judge yourself or others as though you or they are unworthy of love.  This means suspending your need to be right in favor of being kind toward yourself and others and deliberately extending kindness everywhere.  This means giving love to yourself and others rather than demanding love.  This means your loving gesture of kindness is heartfelt because you feel love flowing from within – not because you want something in return.  A tall order?  Not really, unless you believe that it’s going to be difficult;

4145.  Embrace the love from within.  Don’t doubt or judge your love or the love you receive.  You can be in a loving state just by looking from within.  Once you remove judgment and love yourself, you’ll find that you receive love from many places;

4146.  The first step in true happiness in life or any situation is letting go.  Don’t hold on to anger, grief, sadness or hate.  Once you forgive and let go, you can live a rich, fulfilling life;

4147.  Living by letting go means releasing worry, stress and fear.  When you promote your sense of well-being in the face of what appears as danger to others, your alignment frees you from pushing yourself to act in a forceful manner;

4148.  Rather than telling yourself: With my luck things aren’t going to work out for me, affirm: I am open to allowing what needs to happen.  I trust luck to guide me.  This change in your thinking will serve you by guiding you to live in the flow.  Peace will replace stress, harmony will replace effort, acceptance will replace interference and force and good luck will replace fear.  You’ll become what you think about, so even things that you previously believed were evidence of bad luck will now be viewed as what helps you move toward greater harmony;

4149.  A person, who becomes conscious of the responsibility s/he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for her/him or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away her/his life. S/he knows the “why” for his/his existence and will be able to bear almost any “how;”

4150.  We create power in our lives when we create a context to live into and up to;