► Every year, around this time, you hear the standard carol, “Joy to the World.” But for many people, the holidays aren’t that joyful.

Abdallah Harfouch 

Founder of AH Financial Consultancy /Economist / Financial Markets Analyst

Email:  abdallah@ahfinancialconsultancy.com

Facebook Page: AH Financial Consultancy
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If you seek opportunity in life, you’ll end up with all of the security you need. However, if you only seek security, you’ll end up with neither opportunity nor security.

The proof is that this is all around us, in the downsizing and reconstructing of corporations, where thousands of men and women who sought security are finding themselves unemployed for long periods of time.

A person makes his or her own luck by setting goals, following through and achieving them.

Follow these success principles to not only find more opportunities open up in your life but to find greater security as well.

Make Your Own Luck

Use these three success principles to set and achieve your goals. These are derived from three physical laws; the Law of Momentum, the Law of Inertia and the Law of Probability. You can apply these principles equally well to everything that you accomplish or fail to accomplish.

You make your own luck by getting out of your comfort zone and achieving your goals on your own. First you must learn why people succeed or fail based on these three success principles.

1) The Law Of Momentum

The first success principle is the Law of Momentum. In physics, the law of momentum states that a body in motion tends to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.

2) The Law Of Inertia

The second success principle is the Law of Inertia. The Law of Inertia states that a body at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force.

These two laws imply that it may be hard to get started toward your goal because you have to fight the pull of the comfort zone and the force of inertia. But, once you get into motion toward something that is important to you, it’s much easier to continue making progress than it is if you stop somewhere along the way and have to start again.

When you observe successful people, you find that they are very much like the plate spinners in the circus. They get things started. They get the plates spinning. Then, they continually keep them spinning, knowing that if a plate falls off, or something comes to a halt, its much harder to get it restarted then it is to keep it going in the first place.

3) The Law Of Probability

The third success principle is the Law of Probability. If you want to be more successful faster, just do or try more things. Take more action; get busier. Start a little earlier; work a little harder; stay a little later. Put the odds in your favor. According to the Law of Probability, the more things you try, the more likely it is that you will try the one thing that will make all of the difference. You make your own luck by trying more things and doing more.

How To Achieve Your Goals

Discovering how to achieve your goals starts with you! Once you have a goal and a plan get going! Once you start moving toward your goal, don’t stop. Do something every day to move yourself closer to the goal. Don’t let the size of the goal, or the amount of time required to accomplish it, discourage you or hold you back from reaching it.

Write Down Goals And Objectives

During your planning process, break down the goal into small tasks and activities that you can engage in every day. Create a checklist to follow. You don’t have to do a lot, but every day, every week, every month, you should be making progress in the direction of your clearly-defined goals and objectives by completing your predetermined tasks and activities.

Author:  Brian Tracy

Publisher: www.goalsontrack.com

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How to find the sweet spot of difficulty

Aim high. It’s not as cliché as it sounds, says leadership expert Mark Murphy, author of Hard Goals: The Secret to Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. When you’re aiming to achieve extraordinary things, hitting the farthest target—and missing—can be more valuable than hitting the closest target and succeeding.

Undersetting goals—say, your target is to reach $5 million in sales over the next 12 months when you’re already at $4.9 million—allows you to slack off and still hit your objective. Oversetting goals—for instance, you want to surpass Facebook in users by 2016—can leave you feeling so defeated that you’ll abandon your efforts.

When you set a goal, you should ask yourself two things:

• What new skills will I acquire by pursuing this goal?
• How will I grow as a person as a result of this goal?

“An appropriately difficult goal is going to require you to learn,” Murphy says. “It’s going to stretch your brain, excite some neurons, amp you up and awaken your senses.”

Murphy suggests reflecting on what you consider your greatest accomplishments (developing an innovative product, competing in a triathlon, earning your master’s degree in business administration, nursing a parent through a difficult illness) and assessing how much you needed to learn and change for those achievements. Or think about it this way: If a goal is sufficiently demanding, you’re going to have two to four significant new learning experiences along the way to reaching it.

Murphy offers another test to assess whether a goal is tough enough but not too tough. Ask yourself, To what extent is this goal within my comfort zone? Possible answers:

1. Totally within my comfort zone. (“I could do it with my eyes closed.”)

2. Pretty much within my comfort zone. (“My eyes are open, but I’m not excited.”)

3. A little outside my comfort zone. (“I’m feeling a twinge of nervousness.”)

4. Outside my comfort zone. (“I’m on pins and needles.”)

5. Way outside my comfort zone. (“I’m so anxiety-ridden that I can’t even respond.” )

You should aim for No. 4, a goal that takes you into uncharted territory but doesn’t leave you feeling hopelessly lost.

Publisher: www.success.com

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A salary with a bunch of zeros tacked on the end doesn’t necessarily equate to wealth. At the end of the day, it’s just a number — and if the cash behind that number is not managed properly, it can disintegrate in the blink of an eye.

“Most people fail to realize that in life, it’s not how much money you make. It’s how much money you keep,” writes Robert Kiyosaki in the personal finance classic, “Rich Dad Poor Dad.”

At the end of the day, money does not solve financial problems — in fact, it often exacerbates them. Consider the lottery winners who lost it all within a few years; or the professional athletes who made millions in their 20s and wound up broke.

When income increases, people have a tendency to boost their spending, which can quickly spiral into dangerous overspending habits.

“Money often makes obvious our tragic human flaws, putting a spotlight on what we don’t know,” explains Kiyosaki. “That is why, all too often, a person who comes into a sudden windfall of cash — let’s say an inheritance, a pay raise, or lottery winnings — soon returns to the same financial mess, if not worse, than the mess they were in before.”

What solves financial problems and produces money is intelligence. “Money without financial intelligence is money soon gone,” writes Kiyosaki.

Unfortunately, while most of us are taught how to make money — how to get a job and work hard — we are not taught how to intelligently manage it, the crucial part.

The good news is that you don’t need to be a certified financial planner or have an MBA to develop financial intelligence.

Start by learning the difference between an asset and a liability, the single most important distinction to recognize if you want to get rich, Kiyosaki says. Next, focus on bettering your savings, and ensure that more money is coming in than going out.

Author: Kathleen Elkins

Publisher: www.businessinsider.com