Life

Can Learning A Language Make You Richer?

February 6, 2018 By Editor Leave a Comment

Can you hold a conversation in a second language? Pick The Brain’s Sean Kim reveals why learning a language is important not just for holidays but also for career progression and lifetime earnings.

As English is the most common second language in the majority of countries, native English speakers often feel that there’s no need to put in the effort required to learn a second language. However they could be missing out. Sean explains:

Just for fun or for career advancement too?

Learning a second language has traditionally always been popular with the hobbyist and travel community. But what about the business community?

According to Euro London, a recruitment agency, learning a language has shown to add between 10-15% to your income. This only goes to show that learning a foreign language is a wise investment for business professionals and CEO’s.

Let’s take the average salary of someone in New York City, ~$85,000, a 2% “language bonus” average over 40 years, and also a 1% raise annually, you’d have an extra ~$110,000 by the time you retire.
Read more at pickthebrain.com…

Perhaps you should make learning a new language part of your money magnetism strategy? But does it matter which language you learn? Evidence would suggest it does. It seems some languages will give a bigger jump in both income and job prospects as Susie Poppick of Time.com Money explains:

Can a foreign language help your earning potential?

When it comes to money, members of the U.S. military can earn up to $1,000 more per month if they are proficient in multiple languages.

A foreign language can also amp up your desirability—and therefore your pay—in business or law, particularly if you speak Chinese or Japanese, says Charles Volkert, executive director of the legal department of staffing agency Robert Half. Recently, 42% of employers at top law firms surveyed by Volkert’s team saw an increase in legal jobs requiring a second language.

“With so few qualified candidates, there’s a huge demand for professionals who can speak Asian languages, particularly at globalized auto and tech companies,” says Volkert.
Read more from Time.com…

While it’s not true that all languages are as valuable to your future wealth, you don’t have to start learning a alphabet before you attract the big bucks. German is an easier option to boost your pay as The Economist points out:

What is a foreign language worth?

Assuming just a 1% real salary increase per year and a 2% average real return over 40 years, a 2% language bonus turns into an extra $67,000 (at 2014 value) in your retirement account. Not bad for a few years of “où est la plume de ma tante?”

Albert Saiz, the MIT economist who calculated the 2% premium, found quite different premiums for different languages: just 1.5% for Spanish, 2.3% for French and 3.8% for German. This translates into big differences in the language account: your Spanish is worth $51,000, but French, $77,000, and German, $128,000. Humans are famously bad at weighting the future against the present, but if you dangled even a post-dated $128,000 cheque in front of the average 14-year-old, Goethe and Schiller would be hotter than Facebook. Read more from The Economist…

If you don’t fancy going back to school to find a class, there are a wealth of online language programs which can move you from tourist level directions and restaurant ordering through to fluent conversation and business vocabulary.

As long as you choose the right method to learn a new language quickly, that’s a pretty good return on your time.

Image from time.com

Conquor Self Doubt – You Are Stronger Than You Think

October 20, 2017 By Editor Leave a Comment

This article first appeared here.

I have never liked the phrase “hit rock bottom.” It assumes someone has plunged into the darkest fathoms of life, and like an inanimate object, now rests there forever, fixed in the mud, with no hope of rising.

And so when someone says to me, “Brendon, I’ve hit rock bottom,” my first impulse is to ask, “Have you really? What does that mean to you?”

There is no doubt that when people say they have hit bottom, they mean it. The phrase is incredibly personal. But sometimes the only way through our own truth is to look outside of ourselves for perspective. Most of what the bottom feels like is still a few dozen meters above someone else’s dilemmas or tragedies. Often the bottom is just the height of our self-doubt.

We must be cautious of defining our life’s situation as “the bottom” or “the worst,” or acting as if we’re somehow forever hopeless. Once you believe you are at your worst point in life, it gets even harder to find the enduring drive it will take to swim back up. Perhaps you’re not as deep as you think, and if you stopped looking down and instead looked up, you might see some light breaking through. Maybe there’s another angle. Maybe someone has faced the very struggle you’re dealing with and survived—even thrived. Could it be you are not alone in the dark, that others would help if you reached out? Perhaps it’s true you have been sinking, but it’s also true that you still have sight of something to be thankful for, something to still grasp at in life, something deeper than your problems that says, “I still believe.”

Maybe this is optimistic. Like I said, if we feel we’re at the bottom then that’s our truth. But I simply suggest that’s not the truth that will empower you to rise above. The real truth is rarely, “I’m incapable or unlovable or doomed for the rest of my life.”

I’ve had the privilege of working with people who have faced impossible odds and terrible tragedies, the worst life could throw at them. And they still believed. Moms who lost children to cancer. Lovers who were cheated on. Entrepreneurs who risked it all and went bankrupt. Soldiers whose friends died in front of them. Good people who wanted to give up… at first.

Were these people at the bottom? Most of them didn’t think so. They refused to bucket themselves or their situation in the it’s-doomed-for-life column. They considered if they were at the bottom, and then realized they were barely midway through life. They said, “There’s always a new day. I can do something, even if today that only means taking a shower and keeping a good attitude.” They looked around and counted their blessings. They saw how others had it even worse than they did but still managed to smile, carry on and try. That stirred belief.

Never let the weight of life’s challenges sink all hope. You are stronger than you think, and the future holds good things for you.

Article Source: https://www.success.com/blog/you-are-stronger-than-you-think.

The 5 Best Ways to Motivate Yourself

September 12, 2017 By Editor Leave a Comment

What’s your favorite motivational technique?

How comfortable are you right now?

You might be reading this on a cramped subway shuttling to your job. You might be using this article as “research” while your bigger entrepreneurial project goes untouched. You might be looking for a quick boost to spur you on to become your version of successful.

On your success journey, you’re going to be uncomfortable, and staying motivated is one of the most difficult parts of achieving something great.

These past three weeks have been emotionally tough for me—I lost a client and significant funding keeping my business afloat, among other things. But I pride myself on my stoicism and ability to stay motivated regardless of what is going on around me.

Related: 11 Powerful Mantras for Those Who’ve Lost Motivation

So I did what I always do when I’m having a tough time. I read, and read, and read some more. I compiled the five best ways to get and stay motivated from across the web. For your reading pleasure…

1. Sometimes all you need is 5 seconds.

The most bizarre trait of human beings is how willing we are to stay dissatisfied with our lives. You have an incredible life-changing idea… and then think of 100 different reasons why you shouldn’t do it. Now imagine a life where each of these amazing ideas becomes reality.

Mel Robbins has a so-simple-I-can’t-believe-I-didn’t-think-of-it technique called the 5 Second Rule: “If you have an instinct to act on a goal, you must physically move within five seconds or your brain will kill it.”

Initially, your body hates the action, but it gets results. For example, I was on a train the other day and spotted a cute girl, and 5- 4- 3- 2- 1- GO! I’m sitting next to her and we’re having a great conversation. The hardest part of that entire process was turning the instinct (She looks cute) into “Hello, my name’s Nathan.”

Next time you have an idea or an instinct, count down from five and then act. It might simply be writing down the idea, but you need to attach a physical movement to the mental impulse.

2. You need to bathe more… in motivation.

When you’re working toward a goal, it’s easy to get caught up in the drudgery of getting to that finish line. You start working harder, and harder, and harder, inching ever closer to that dream… and before you know it, you’ve lost sight of what your goal was in the first place. Cut to a loss of motivation, cut to intense stress, cut to complete personal burnout.

Enter success coach and originator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, Jack Canfield. His solution? Constantly bathing in things that motivate you. How? A vision board.

A vision board is a collection of affirmations, pictures and quotes that you keep in a prominent place. You need to look at this board every day to continually remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing.

3. Chunk it out.

I want to have a stock investment portfolio of $650,000. Even just writing it down seems insane. On top of shelter, food and water; on top of travel costs, socializing and adventures; on top of the sheer expenditure of just existing in one of the most expensive cities in the world, if I saved $50,000 per year, it’d still take me 13 years to reach that target.

Staying motivated when faced with a goal that large and that feels overwhelmingly hard is a tough thing to manage. Thankfully, Brian Tracy, one of the original greats of the personal development world, has a concept that simplifies the goal-setting process. I’ve lovingly labeled it “chunking.”

With any of your goals, “chunk” it down into a checklist of actions that need to be completed. Each time you complete one of the smaller goals, you’ll feel that winning feeling of accomplishment.

Using my dream and my business as an example:

Goal: Have a stock investment portfolio of $650,000 in 5 years

Chunks:

Need to invest $130,000 each year
Need to invest $10,833 each month
Need to sell one end-to-end book writing package each month
Need to contact 100 warm leads per month to sell my service
Need to contact 25 leads per week
Need to contact 5 leads per day

Suddenly, my dream isn’t as scary as it once was. All I need to do is make five sales calls a day. Break down your goals into simple daily tasks and focus on consistently completing them.

4. Play that funky music.

I was with one of my book-writing clients the other day and he told me that he never listens to the radio. When I asked him about this, he said “I don’t allow outside forces to control my mood.” Before we all join him in putting on our tinfoil hats, he’s got a point.

Music can control your emotions, I mean we’ve all got that “killer track” that we can’t help but move our bodies to. That’s why we include music in films, to cue the audience on what emotion they should be feeling and add to that emotional beat.

Award-winning author, record producer and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin has written much on the subject, but one of the most important points is that the right music will motivate you. Whether it’s the lyrics that speak to you, the pounding beat or that irresistibly funky bassline, it’s hard to pin down why some tracks make us feel incredible. Spend some time compiling the music that gets you fired up, and when you need a dose of motivation, press play.

5. Talk to a “you expert.”

Who knows more about you than, well… you? One of the most painful truths that I had to realize about the world and myself is it’s up to me to change myself and shape the world around me. There’s just one problem: We are terrible at knowing ourselves and our motivations.

Hal Elrod, creator of the hugely influential Miracle Morning program, lists positive self-talk as one of the pillars of his program. When you wake up and before you go to sleep, mentally repeat or say aloud your personal affirmations about changes you’re making in your life.

These affirmations aren’t things like I’m a happy person or I am wealthy. Hal’s brand of affirmations go deeper. He says you need to have a clearly measurable goal and the driving force behind why you’re committed to the goal. For example, I am committed to become fitter over the next 12 months, increasing my weekly hours exercising from one to eight, so I can be proud of my body and dedication.

You’ll also need to include the actions that will enable you to reach that goal. The next part of the affirmation might read, To ensure I increase my level of exercise, I will watch one less hour of TV per day and wake up 30 minutes earlier.

From five motivational masters, straight to your brain…. Let’s get motivated!

This article first appeared on Personal Development – Success.com