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;

What I've learned since moving to D.C. (some of which should be obvious): 0082

4051.  Victimhood is a choice, not an event;

4052.  Ideas are potential value, not value in themselves.  If you don’t follow through on a good idea, it won’t improve anyone’s life, not even your own;

4053.  Money does not have to control our lives.  Unfortunately, we often let it.  We do this by believing that it has power, that it holds intrinsic value (either good or bad) and that it represents solutions to problems;

4054.  What our money does is reflect who we are.  If we use our money to serve people, that’s a good thing.  If we use it to buy cocaine, that’s a bad thing.  The truth is that it’s not the money that matters; it’s the context in which it is used;

4055.  Apparently, auto body shops get a lot of business the day after (heavy) snow or rain;

4056.  The only time we are in debt, in the true accounting sense, is when our liabilities are greater than our assets, those things that provide income or potential cash flow in our lives.  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.  In fact, in many instances, the way to increase our prosperity and wealth is to increase – not decrease – our liabilities;

4057.  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;

4058.  Correctly understood, debt is bad, but liabilities are essential to building wealth;

4059.  Any time we concentrate on fear and scarcity we are, by default, limiting our potential;

4060.  If it’s right that you attract people who are like yourself, it makes sense why a relationship or a marriage ends when one person changes and the other doesn’t;

4061.  You personally don’t need money in order to launch your business; you don’t need money to make money.  The prime mover in this case is still you and your human life value.  If you need cash to start a business, you’ll need to develop the concept, research, provide evidence of a demand in the marketplace, perhaps write a business plan, do as much implementation as you can and then convince other people to give you the money you are looking for;

4062.  The “solution” to put more money into things – with little thought given to strategic use and wise management – in an effort to make them more productive is evidence of a society that believes that money is a primary cause of action and production, that money has power and that material things have intrinsic value.  Oftentimes giving an individual, a company or other institution more money for the sake of having more money develops a system of waste, misallocated resources and entitlement;

4063.  When people or institutions claim that they need more money in order to be more effective and productive, more often than not what they actually need is better management rather than more money;

4064.  Ignorance is one of the most uncomfortable feelings to deal with, yet truly scrutinizing our beliefs is key to our progression;

4065.  Without actually knowing a person intimately, understanding her/his intentions, purposes, mission, and mindset, we have no way of accurately judging her/his life;

4066.  Exploitation can only occur in an environment of deception or coercion.  But again, we cannot find evidence of either in the amount of money that individuals have, since money is a byproduct, an aftereffect.  The only way to determine if a situation is exploitative or beneficial to all parties is to know the people involved;

4067.  The belief that money comes through exploiting others is a false conception that thrives in an atmosphere of scarcity.  In abundance, every transaction, economic and otherwise, is a win for all parties involved.  In scarcity, we believe that we can only win if other people lose.  Hence, if we want to win, we’ve got to make other people lose;

4068.  Just because a person doesn’t have a nice house and car doesn’t mean that s/he doesn’t create a lot of value in the world and neither does it necessarily mean that s/he’s broke.  People are assets, not material things.  Material things are external reflections of what is going on internally in the minds of people, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that those with little or no material things are poor or that those with a lot are rich;

4069.  Pride and envy are two aspects of our tendency to judge people based on their material possessions.  They emerge in our lives when we place the emphasis on material things, not on people.  The truth of the matter is that, just like money, in a world of cause and effect, value creation is the cause and material things are the effect;

4070.  Virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private;

4071.  One of the most important lessons we can learn in our quest to prosperity is that we don’t have to wait until we have money to be able to prosper.  Prosperity is achieved by creating value, by maximizing our human life value;

4072.  Having more money doesn’t change our fundamental nature; it merely brings out more of who we already are.  If we’re charitable by nature, more money will give us more opportunities to be more charitable.  If we’re naturally greedy, more money will allow us to be greedier.  The point is that we must become our ideal selves in the present moment, regardless of the amount of money that we have.  Money can neither save us nor damn us; that choice is up to us as individuals;

4073.  A chicha morada (i.e., Peru’s classic beverage made of purple corn, pineapple & spices) reminds me of pomegranate-cherry juice;

4074.  The pepperoni sauce at Graffiato (GraffiatoDC.com) in D.C. is good, but a little overrated;

4075.  Pepperoni sauce tastes like tomato soup with a “hit” of pepperoni;

4076.  To prosper, we must relinquish our grip on selfish and shortsighted desires and serve others.  The paradox is that the less we focus on our desires and the more we help others get what they want, the more we get of what we want;

4077.  Our happiness or misery doesn’t depend on the amount of money we possess.  There are miserable people with money just as there are miserable people without money.  If we’re not happy, then we’re not prospering.  Our happiness is the single best indicator of our level of abundance.  Prosperity brings happiness and happiness brings prosperity.  You can’t have one without the other;

4078.  That which we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly;

4079.  If you want to elevate your life and become a manifester, then you have to change what you’ve believed to be true about yourself that has landed you where you are;

4080.  In order to increase our chance of healthy rewards, we must do everything in our power to decrease our risk or chance of loss;

4081.  No investments are inherently risky; it is people who make them safe or risky.  It is people who make investments productive or not.  Just as money and material things have no intrinsic value, neither do investments.  What is risky to one person could be the safest investment in the world to another;

4082.  Your primary concern with any investment – even more important than the potential returns – is the value proposition.  If you know exactly how you are creating value in the marketplace, your chances of failure are significantly reduced.  If you do good market research and know that people will value what you’re doing, then you have an excellent chance of success, depending, of course, upon your skill in implementation;

4083.  The way to mitigate risk with any venture is through increasing knowledge and applying universal principles.  Investing well is a product of knowledge, not of luck;

4084.  The investment standards that Warren Buffett adheres to are the following: 1.  Know what you own; 2.  Research before you buy; 3.  Own a business, not a stock; 4.  Make a total of only twenty lifetime investments; and 5.  Make one decision to own a stock and be a long-term owner (i.e., Buffett is speaking of something entirely different than the “long-haul” accumulation approach; he’s teaching you to hold on to a stock because you’ve done proper research and you know it will increase in value.  He’s not talking about holding on and riding out downturns in the market because of fear of loss);

4085.  What we must realize is that every decision we make in life involves opportunity costs – every decision, without exception, means sacrificing the potential benefits of the paths we don’t take.  Therefore, the goal isn’t to eliminate opportunity costs; it’s to recognize them, take them into account and by so doing maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of each of our decisions;

4086.  The most important way to overcome the myth of risk is to learn how to reduce your risk to near zero in any investment opportunity.  This is accomplished through education, understanding your abilities and how to produce value with them and aligning with principle instead of being driven by technique and strategy alone;

4087.  Karl Alzner is (now) the (Washington) Capitals leader in consecutive, regular season games played at 423 (and counting);

4088.  We are taught that insurance is a necessary evil at best and that the smartest route is to get minimum coverage with the lowest possible premium payments.  The underlying goal is to accumulate enough assets to be “self-insured” – to have enough money in the bank to cover every eventuality that insurance would protect us from.  Once we achieve this state, we can eliminate any insurance that we aren’t required to carry by law and save the expense of premiums.  The fact is that there’s no such thing as self-insurance; either you have insurance or you don’t.  You either have a way to transfer your risk of loss or you retain that risk;

4089.  Simply having a lot of money in no way protects you from the loss of that money.  In fact, the more money and assets a person has, the more important insurance becomes to protect her/him from the risk of loss.  Self-insurance is really no insurance and the unnecessary assumption of risk;

4090.  The best way to be financially free and to feel confident in utilizing our assets productively is to reduce the risk of losing those assets, including our own knowledge and abilities.  By transferring risk to those more efficiently equipped to manage it (i.e., insurance companies), we protect ourselves from unforeseen losses and release the fear that we might not have accumulated enough assets to cover the losses we might face.  Proper insurance coverage can dramatically improve our ability to think abundantly and therefore be creative and productive;

4091.  The national average percentage of uninsured motorists is 13.8 percent;

4092.  When we retain risk we’re hesitant to act and to produce because we’re not certain what the result will be.  Hesitation means decreased productivity and decreased productivity means that we’re kept from living up to our full potential;

4093.  Every moment you spend worrying about loss is a moment that you are not thinking productively and you can never recapture those lost moments;

4094.  When we utilize insurance properly, we can have true peace of mind and be actually protected from negative circumstances.  We must never confuse peace of mind with laziness and naïveté – true peace of mind comes from applied knowledge, which requires effort and stewardship.  The less worry we have in our lives, the more productive we will be and insurance is one excellent way to legitimately eliminate worry;

4095.  People should transfer as much risk as possible away from themselves.  The less risk a person is exposed to, the more wealth s/he can create;

4096.  Being self-insured requires allowing vast resources to sit stagnant;

4097.  The best way to reduce our insurance expenses is to get as much insurance as possible;

4098.  Insurance coverage must be designed to protect human life value, not just property value;

4099.  Insurance coverage increases our financial freedom and productivity, regardless of our age or financial situation;

4100.  The more assets a person has, the more insurance s/he should have;