Recently, I discussed the value of investing in yourself – putting time and money into improving you, not building assets. Today, we’ll look at one area of investing in yourself as part of an ongoing series on the topic, spread out once per weekday over two weeks. If you’d like to review all the entries, look at the investing in yourself subcategory.

Early on in my career, I was more or less forced into several public speaking situations. I didn’t view this as an opportunity to improve myself – instead, I viewed it as something that had to be done, something dreaded, something I did not want to do. I’d hem and haw and not practice and try to avoid even thinking about it and, unsurprisingly, my first few times on the stage were atrociously bad.

After doing it several times, though, I began to discover several things. First, I began to get better at it. I felt more natural standing up on the stage talking about projects and encouraging people to get involved. Second, as I got better at it, people responded in a variety of ways, most of which were surprising to me. I started getting a lot of individual responses from people who were intrigued, I got quite a few slaps on the back and offers to go out for drinks and connect, and I even got a few offers to speak in other venues.

In a nutshell, better public speaking improved my business opportunities, increased my personal opportunities, and helped construct a number of valuable relationships and friendships. This isn’t a lesson that came easy for me – I truly did not want to speak in public and the only benefit I could see at first is that it was a chore that I simply got through. Now, I yearn for opportunities to speak – I improve my own skills and I usually form the basis for strong relationships later on.

Here are some methods for getting started with public speaking.

Read How to Win Friends and Influence People.
As I related in the past, How to Win Friends and Influence People had a profound impact on my life. It was given to me by a very influential mentor early in my career and he regularly encouraged me to read it and practice what it said inside. It took a while, but when I finally opened the covers and absorbed the contents of the book and – even more importantly – began to apply what it said, it triggered a profound difference in how I spoke in public situations. Carnegie’s book broke things down into little mechanics that one can practice, which is where the magic lies for a goal- and task-oriented person like myself.

This is a book that’s pretty easy to pick up on PaperBackSwap or at your local library, so the idea that “it costs too much” isn’t really a good one. I’ve owned three copies over the years and all three were found in used bookstores or on PaperBackSwap.

Read the book and practice some of the specific tips. The book is mostly a collection of specific techniques to work on, all of which are very good at improving both your public speaking ability and your conversational ability. Work on the tips. When I worked through the book, I would focus on one tip at a time, trying to master just that tip for a week or two and also meshing it with the ones I’d already tried. It worked very well.

Please note that Carnegie often gets into talking mechanically about things that make some feel uncomfortable, like reminders to smile and listen when conversing with others. For someone like me, who would tend to either be more boisterous than I should be or I would mumble one word responses and stare at my feet, these things were useful to think about and make sure that I was doing. For some people, this stuff comes naturally and it seems facetious to talk about it. If you’re in the latter group and you read a piece that seems facetious, just skip over it – Carnegie’s writing to people like me who aren’t exactly adept at such human interactions.

Take a public speaking class – and take it seriously.
When I was in college, I took a public speaking class that I didn’t treat with any seriousness. I basically blew the whole thing off, doing all of my speeches completely impromptu. I got an A. I learned nothing.

That was a big mistake. Looking back on the class, most of the things I needed to know about public speaking was right there for the taking. The problem was that I was more focused on just getting the A and getting out the door than on actually learning anything.

If there was one single class from college that I could re-take, it would be this one. I wish I had the opportunity to work through public speaking in such an environment again, because it’s truly such a universal skill that you’ll use in almost any career. I’ve used it in a highly technical career and I anticipate using it again as a writer. That’s something profound.

See what your community college or local university has available. This is a great class to take in the evenings or on weekends as a standalone class. It’s definitely an opportunity to build skills, and as a standalone class, it’s often a very affordable option as well. When you do take such a course, though, take it seriously. Don’t just do it on the spur of the moment and don’t decide it’s foolish when you’re there. Absorb everything you can.

See if this is something your job will cover. Some positions encourage continued education and this is the type of class that HR departments will see value in. Check around with your organization’s HR department and see if you can take such a class and get reimbursed – or, even better, they’ll let you do it during work hours (it happens if the organization sees it as being truly valuable).

Focus on the big points and make them clear to everyone in the room.
Most of the bad talks I’ve ever seen had one thing in common: there were too many points. I couldn’t walk away from it and really say what they were talking about because there was no coherent theme to the whole thing. If your audience can’t come away and identify one or two of your basic points, then you’ve failed as a speaker.

So, how can you accomplish this, especially when you have a mountain of stuff to present?

Define the one to three points you really want to get across in your talk. An audience won’t retain the nuances of what you’re saying – if you’re presenting fifty facts, they won’t retain all of them, even in a college lecture course with people note-taking like crazy. Instead, focus on just the key ideas you want to get across first. What do you want to have them take away from this? Keep that number very small – three at most.

Now, tie all of the information you want to present to those one to three points. This will form the basic structure of what you’re going to talk about. You can definitely present fifty facts, but those facts should all be supporting a few basic take-home ideas.

As you present all of the specifics, keep actively tying them back to the main points. Show how all of this data just reinforces and clarifies those main points.

Here’s a great example: imagine this post about 100 money saving tips as a presentation. In reality, all of these tips tie back to one central point: saving money on mundane life activities frees up money to invest and pay off debts.

Volunteer for public speaking opportunities when they come up, both professionally and personally.
This is excellent advice for your career as well. Whenever there’s a chance for you to speak to others, take it. Take it in the workplace, take it in your social life, take it anywhere. Give a presentation at a work meeting. Give a toast at a wedding. Do a liturgical reading during a church service. Do anything that gets you up in front of an audience, speaking to them.

Practice makes perfect. A lot of people don’t volunteer because they’re not confident in their abilities. Guess what? Few people are confident in their public speaking abilities. Most people are nervous when they get up in front of people, and most people make mistakes and errors when they’re up there. Remember, though, that when someone stands in front of a room and gives it a shot, they’re practicing. They’re getting better. They’re getting a leg up. Don’t let others take that opportunity.

The people up front are the people who are noticed and valued. Another important thing to note is that the people who speak are often the ones that are noticed and valued by the crowd. The speakers will often represent what many are thinking and will sometimes provide valuable information to the people who are listening. Even a very bad speaker will usually create a positive response from a crowd, as long as they keep it within their timeframe.

Just stand up and take that chance. If you do it often enough, you’ll get good at it.

Join Toastmasters.
This is one opportunity I really wish I had more time to follow up on. From the time I really discovered the value of public speaking to the birth of my child, I attended these meetings off and on and found them very valuable.

In a nutshell, Toastmasters International is a club where people go to practice their public speaking skills. At the meetings I attended, most of the time was spent with various people speaking in front of the group, both prepared and impromptu and at different lengths. After each one, everyone gave some feedback to the speaker, both positive and points for improvement. In other words, if you want to build your speaking skills in a non-cutthroat environment, this is a killer place to go.

My suggestion to you is to find a meeting and invest the time to check it out. If you’re really motivated to improve your public speaking skills, it’s probably the best one hour a week investment that you could possibly make with your time.

Ask for critical feedback when you speak – and work on what they tell you.
Whenever you speak in front of a group, make sure to ask for feedback after you’ve finished speaking, particularly from members of the audience that you trust. Platitudes are nice, but ask them if they can name anything you could do to improve, because that’s where the value is.

What I usually do when I speak is I identify two to five people in the crowd that I know and reasonably trust. Very rarely will you be in a situation where you don’t know that many people in the crowd.

After the speech, ask each of those people for a bit of feedback. Ask them what one thing you could have done better during your presentation. No matter how good you were, you can always improve, and the people that you have a strong relationship with will be likely to be paying the closest attention.

Also, ask a few random people from the room the same question. Preferably, these are people that you don’t know. You’ll likely get some very different responses than from the people you trust.

There are a lot of careers and opportunities out there that come to people who put forth the effort to speak well in public situations. Learning how to speak well is one of the best investments in yourself that you can possibly make.

Just this morning, I was leafing through Jonathan Pond’s very good personal finance book Grow Your Money, which I reviewed a while back. In it, he makes the astute statement that everyone puts their money into three basic groups: necessities, luxuries, and saving for the future. The more I thought about that statement, the more profound I thought it was, as it builds a pretty strong framework for the financial problems ailing many Americans.

Obviously, the pile that will get you in the best shape over the long term is the “saving for the future” pile, but that’s only the first piece of the problem. The reason so many Americans are in poor financial shape is that they put more than they should into one of these areas to the detriment of others. Let me show you what I mean.

Some put money in the “luxuries” pile instead of the “saving for the future” pile. These are often the same people who argue that you only live once and that you’re wasting your time saving for the future when you could be enjoying the high life now. Quite often, these people realize what they’re doing – they know that they’re spending money on luxuries. The catch is that they just don’t care. I myself was in this group of people not too long ago.

Others put money in the “necessities” pile that should be in the “luxuries” pile. They identify things like HD televisions and cell phones as necessities in their life when the truth is that most of these things are luxuries. I have several friends in this group – they’re barely squeezing by and they are putting a little money away, but they continually tell me that they’re doing everything they can and are living “bare bones” as they surf the web on their G3 cell phone.

The recipe for success that I’ve found in life with these three piles is this:

First, go through everything in the necessities pile and determine if it’s really a necessity. In other words, go through every bit of your spending for a while and figure out whether you really need this item. I’m not suggesting going without the item, but merely determining whether you truly need the item for day to day life. Is that cell phone a necessity? For some people it may be, but are the unlimited text messages a necessity, or the web access features on it? Is that giant television a necessity? Is a case of beer or a $20 bottle of wine a necessity (they both are often included as “food” for some people)? When you start asking hard questions like this, it often becomes clear that many things in life are luxuries. Also, you begin to find that frugality is pretty cool – it shrinks the cost of many things in your necessities pile.

Then, try to keep a balance between luxuries and saving for the future roughly in balance. If you bring home $1,000 a week and spend $400 on the things that are truly necessities (mortgage, insurance, food), that leaves $600. Just put $300 of that away and spend the other $300 on the things that bring you pleasure – good food, good drink, technology goodies, and so forth.

Financial discipline is not about denying yourself everything enjoyable in life. It’s about finding a balance between the things you enjoy now and the things you’ll need later, and it’s also about finding value in all of the luxuries in your life rather than just treating them as things you do naturally.

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development or personal productivity book.

Every time you write anything, you’re selling something.

Throughout my life, different people have given me little nuggets of advice that have proved reliable and true over and over again. The above line was told to me by my technical writing professor in college, who consistently argued that the two death knells of anyone’s writing were being boring and being inaccurate.

What did he really mean, though? At first, my youthful attitude thought that his comment was nonsense and for quite a while, I basically shuttered it out. It didn’t reawaken until years later, when I found myself writing short pieces to try to describe a technical product to a rather uninterested group of people. I began to realize that no one would care in the least what I wrote if I didn’t present it in such a way that first got the interest of the audience and then made them care about it without being inaccurate or inauthentic.

It turns out that this idea is true in everything that you do, from an email to a blog post to a magazine article to a letter. If you don’t get them interested and also present some value for their time spent reading what you’ve done, you’re worthless to them.

My old technical writing professor had told me to pick up a copy of Ogilvy on Advertising, a book that he described as “half completely irrelevant, half the most amazing book on writing ever made.” Unless you happen to be in advertising, this assessment’s pretty spot-on – half of the book is pretty specific to the advertising industry, while the other half is invaluable for anyone who needs to communicate the written word. It’s written by David Ogilvy, one of the true giants in the advertising industry.

Intrigued? Let’s dig in.

A Closer Look at Ogilvy on Advertising

Ogilvy on Advertising is split into a huge number of rather short chapters, thus I found it much easier to extract the important points of the book by going through the whole thing, taking notes, and looking for the big themes in those notes.

The real value is in your big ideas, not your little ones.
This is something that’s often hard to remember during the day to day grind of working on something like The Simple Dollar. Each of my posts constitutes a little idea. Ideally, though, that post somehow catches a glimpse of something truly useful – something that you’ll take home and that will change your life significantly for the better forever. That’s the big idea – the one that when you first see it shakes your foundations to the core, when you begin applying it seems to alter more of your life than you ever though, and when you look back on it you scarcely can believe that you ever lived without it.

Another way to look at it is this – what’s truly the idea you’re trying to get across with this piece of writing? What’s that one big idea, not the little ones? For example, when I make a a giant list of 100 ways to save money, the big idea can be expressed in two words: spend less. All of the little ideas are mere extensions of this big one. If you’re writing something for a wide audience, can the crux of it be explained in a sentence? If it can’t, the big idea will probably fly right by.

Negativity, in the long run, gets you nowhere.
Instead of knocking something down, build something else up. Instead of demeaning someone, give them ideas for how to improve. Instead of just deriding a concept, look for the positives in it and how it can be used for success. The negative might get you “flash in the pan” attention, but the ideas that stick around over the long haul are the positive ones.

Do the research. Always do the research.
Whatever you say should be backed up with facts. The second that you make a statement without evidence, you’re treading on very thin ice, possibly misleading the people you’re writing for and damaging trust. However, if you’ve bothered to do the research, when someone questions you, you’re not alone in support of your statement.

Another advantage of doing the research is that it often points you down interesting new avenues. For example, when I read a personal finance book intending to review it on The Simple Dollar, I almost always get an interesting new idea or two.

Don’t waste people’s time when applying for a job.
There’s a section in the book focusing on applying for a job, including specific tips on how to write a resume. My favorite one is the idea that you should close a cover letter with a very clear next step of action that you’ll take to secure the job, like “I’ll call your office next Wednesday at 8:45 AM to set up an interview” instead of a mealy-mouthed “Thanks for your time and attention.” The former shows confidence and self-initiative.

I was surprised to discover that the book actually contains a lot of information on how to run a small business – in this case, an ad agency. The same ideas apply for pretty much any business – don’t tolerate office politics at all, for starters. Ogilvy suggests firing the people who play the most office politics (lots of blind carbon copies is a sure sign) and when someone comes into your office badmouthing someone else, call that third party into your office and have the accuser repeat their accusation. I wish I could have worked with this man.

Your headline/subject line should be immediately useful.
At the very least, it should clearly let the person know what’s inside the written piece. An even better headline also construes the core nugget of information. Even better, keeping it down to ten words or less. If you can do all three, you have a headline that’ll grab some eyeballs.

This exact same logic applies greatly to modern life. Think about your email. When you check it, what’s more useful to you – an email with the subject line “Updated flight info” or one that says “Updated flight info: departing San Diego at 8AM”? The second one, clearly – it contains most (if not all) the info you need without even opening the email.

The same idea applies to blog posts and so on, the art of which I’m still learning.

Be clear. Clear is always better than vague or clever.
State what you’re trying to get at clearly and directly. Don’t mince words, and don’t try to be clever with double meanings or vague statements. Quote actual concrete evidence if you can.

The best part…
The single best part of Ogilvy on Advertising is the examples. The entire book is loaded with them, in all sorts of media, from newspaper headlines to print advertisements to television commercials and subway cards and so on. Ogilvy includes both bad and good real-world examples, and even a cursory glance at them shows you very clearly what Ogilvy is talking about – the good examples pop and the bad ones are utterly forgettable.

Buy or Don’t Buy?

If your career includes even a small portion of written communication, Ogilvy on Advertising is a book very much worth reading. Ogilvy is blunt and straightforward about what it takes to write and create effectively in a way that very few sources on the topic really are.

Be aware that in many portions of the book, Ogilvy speaks directly about aspects of advertising that don’t really apply anywhere else, but the implications are often useful to understand. In other places, though, Ogilvy writes with a searing and direct tone about things that are deeply applicable to anyone who participates in the information economy – how to write effectively, how to write persuasively, and how to make sure your ideas rise to the top.

If that sounds useless to you, Ogilvy on Advertising probably won’t do much for you at all. But if any of that sounded useful, Ogilvy on Advertising (and some thought about how what he’s saying applies to your life) will be a very powerful read.

Having read a small mountain of personal finance and investing books in the last couple of years, I’ve come to realize that there’s some significant overlap in the ideas presented in the books. Spend less than you earn and avoid high-interest debt pop up again and again, but I wanted to look at perhaps the most powerful idea presented across a wide swath of investment books: invest your money in index funds.

I wrote out the case for index funds a while back: they’re easy and don’t require much time investment, they’re very cost efficient, and they outperform virtually all managed mutual funds. However, I wanted to point out that this argument isn’t mine and mine alone – it’s shared by a small army of people who write on investment topics. (In the quotes below, I’ve added my own emphasis.)

For starters, John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, writes in The Little Book of Common Sense Investing (read my review of the book) on page 200:

Deep down, I remain absolutely confident that the vast majority of American families will be well served by owning their equity holdings in an all-U.S. stock-market index portfolio and holding their bonds in an all-U.S. bond-market index portfolio… The rationale for a 100-percent index fund portfolio remains as solid as a rock. It’s all about common sense.

Burton J. Malkiel, a Princeton professor and a former member of the Council of Economic Advisors, writes in A Random Walk Down Wall Street (read my review) on page 358 of the ninth edition paperback:

For many investors, especially those who prefer an easy, low-risk solution to investing, I recommend bowing to the wisdom of the market and using index funds for the entire investment portfolio. For all investors, however, I recommend that at least a portion of the investment portfolio – especially the retirement portion – be invested in index funds.

Malkiel also writes in The Random Walk Guide to Investing (read my review), paperback edition, page 136:

[Index fund investing] has outperformed all but a tiny handful of the thousands of equity mutual funds that are sold to the public. Let’s list all the advantages of an index fund strategy:
- Index funds simplify investing. You don’t have to choose among the thousands of individual stocks and mutual funds available to the public.
- Index funds are cost-efficient. [Many] have no sales charges and have miniscule expense charges. Moreover, index funds do a minimal amount of trading. Thus, they avoid the very heavy transactions costs of actively managed funds, which tend to turn over their entire portfolio about once a year.
- Index funds regularly produce higher returns for investors than do actively managed funds.
- Index funds are predictable. You know beyond doubt that you will earn the rate of return provided by the stock market. Yes, you will lose money when the market declines, but you will never own the fund that performs several times worse than the market.
- Index funds are tax-efficient. If you do own stocks in taxable accounts (that is, outside your IRA or retirement plan), then you need to invest in index funds that don’t trade from security to security and therefor don’t tend to generate taxable gains.

What about Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, and Michael LeBoeuf, authors of the acclaimed Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing (read my review), on page 78 of the paperback edition?

Index funds outperform approximately 80 percent of all actively managed funds over long periods of time. They do so for one simple reason: rock-bottom costs. In a random market, we don’t know what future returns will be. However, we do know that an investor that keeps his or her costs low will earn a higher return than one who does not. That’s the indexer’s edge. More specifically, here are the cost and other advantages of indexing:

1. There are no sales commissions.
2. Operating expenses are low.
3. Many index funds are tax efficient.
4. You don’t have to hire a money manager.
5. Index funds are highly diversified and less risky.
6. It doesn’t much matter who manages the fund.
7. Style drift and tracking errors aren’t a problem.

William Bernstein, one of the nation’s top financial theorists, writes on page 98 of The Four Pillars of Investing (read my review):

Clearly, the best way to avoid [overpriced and underperforming mutual funds] is to simply keep your expenses to a minimum and buy the whole market with an index fund.

And then on page 102:

Failing to diversify properly is the equivalent of taking [your stock investment's] uncertain return and then going to Las Vegas with it. It’s bad enough that you have to take market risk. Only a fool takes on the additional risk of doing yet more damage by failing to diversify properly with his or her nest egg. Avoid the problem – buy a well-run index fund and own the whole market.

Paul Farrell, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker and financial reporter, writes in The Lazy Person’s Guide to Investing (read my review) on page 111 of the paperback edition:

Of all the predictors, the [Financial Research Corporation] concluded that the expense ratio is the only really reliable one in predicting future performance, because funds with low operating costs “deliver above average future performance across nearly all time periods.”

Conversely, all other predictors turned out to be unreliable – including Morningstar’s famed star ratings and the highly regarded Sharpe Ratio developed by a Nobel laureate in economics.

Bottom line: if you want predictable performance, pick cheap funds. That means no-load index funds. And since Vanguard has the lowest expenses, it should come as no surprise that its funds appear over and over in the lazy portfolios developed by so many independent sources.

The Sharpe Ratio? That refers to William Sharpe, winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economics and professor emeritus at Stanford. In Investors and Markets, he writes on page 146:

An index fund investor can then come very close to achieving the expected utility attainable with large amounts of expensive research and analysis… [the argument that] few of us are as smart as all of us, it is hard to identify them in advance, and they may charge more than they are worth is perhaps the most realistic argument for investing much (if not all) of one’s money in mutual funds.

Even Jim Cramer, who couldn’t possibly be a louder advocate of individual stock investing, says the following in Stay Mad For Life (read my review) on page 87:

Invest in index funds or the lowest-cost mutual funds offered by your 401(k) plan. This is the conventional wisdom on Wall Street, but it’s the advice that most people fail to take. People always want to know which mutual fund will give them the best return, but it turns out that’s a bad question. Even before you add up the fees, actively managed funds fail to beat the market 80 percent to 90 percent of the time. That means that at least in your 401(k), you’re better off investing in an index fund with low costs that simply tries to mimic the performance of the entire market than in a mutual fund that tries to beat the market.

Here’s the scoop in a nutshell, people. If you’re like me and you don’t have hours every week to study individual stocks, but you want to invest in stocks and enjoy some of the tremendous gains you can earn, there is no better option available to you than a low-cost index fund. As of this moment, every single dime (outside of my retirement plan) that I have invested in the stock market is in Vanguard index funds. I’ve watched tons of individual stocks and mutual funds and how they’ve done over the last few years and these guys are all spot on – index funds simply get the job done, easily and effectively.

If you have extra money and want to invest it in the stock market, index funds are the way to go. I got started with Vanguard and they’ve treated me exceptionally well both in investment quality and customer service – I’ve never seen any reason to go anywhere else.

I quit my job.

It is scary as can be to write that sentence. Unbelievably scary. I’m walking away from a good paying and very stable job. I announced my resignation this week, and my final day will happen before the end of March.

Why?

So, why did I make this decision? There were a lot of reasons, all balled together, so I thought I’d walk through them one at a time.

I want to devote more time to my family. As my writing has taken off – both on The Simple Dollar and in other forms – I’ve been more and more compressed for time. This has meant that I’ve spent weekends in the basement trying to write while my children play above me, their pitter-pattering feet on the floor making me wish I was with them. It’s meant that they spend more time in daycare instead of with me. It’s meant that when we go on vacations, I take my laptop along and write instead of enjoying special times with them. My son is a little over two years old and my daughter is almost six months old. If I keep doing this, I’m going to miss their childhood – and I don’t want to do that, not for all of the financial rewards in the world. In all honesty, this is the biggest factor that pushed me over the edge.

I want to devote more time to my writing. I love writing. There’s simply no other way to put it. The art of putting written words down on the page fills me with an elemental joy that I can’t describe. Some windows have opened for me where people are paying me to do this, and I can’t possibly turn away from it.

We’re in very good financial shape. If it wasn’t for this reason, I couldn’t possibly think of making a move like this. We have only a tiny amount of student loan debt and our mortgage and that’s it – no credit cards, no car loans, no anything. We have quite a bit of money in the bank as well and other sources of income, too.

We know how to live frugally. We’ve learned how to live way below our means over the last few years. We simply don’t spend much money at all, especially compared to our income. We spent substantially less than 40% of our income in 2007 – the difference was folded into paying off debts rapidly, with all of our car loans, our credit card debts, and much of our student loan debts just vanishing very rapidly.

Working in my home office and eating leftovers out of the fridge is far, far cheaper than commuting, buying gas, and succumbing to temptations along the way. I’ve calculated that my monthly savings just from not commuting is about twenty hours and $250 – and that’s assuming that I never stop for anything other than an occasional coffee or something. Plus, my lunches will be much cheaper – there will never be a temptation to eat out.

My wife is also considering a move to a job very close to home. Currently, my wife commutes about forty five minutes just to get to work. She’s considering a move that would reduce her commute to about three minutes.

I’m in the perfect position to leave my current job. I love my current job, so I’ve been waiting for the right time to make this move. I wanted a point where I could really walk away with minimal regrets, and now is just that time.

What Will I Do Now?

So, what’s my plan for after this switch? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and here’s what I have in mind.

At first, I’m going to get substantially ahead in my writing for The Simple Dollar. One consistent worry I always have about The Simple Dollar is that I never feel far enough ahead with the writing – it’s almost impossible to walk away from it for a vacation or an illness or an emergency because I don’t have adequate time to get ahead on the writing. So, my first project is to “bank” a lot of articles and have them ready to go so that if I need to, The Simple Dollar can keep running just fine while I step away for a bit.

This also means I’m going to have the opportunity to do some deep research and write some things that time simply hasn’t afforded to me.

Second, I’m going to shop my book hard to get it published. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a book that’s largely finished in first draft form. I’m going to polish it up and start shopping it hard, something that’s a time sink that I haven’t had time to do.

At the same time, I’m looking strongly at some freelance writing opportunities that will pay pretty well. I’m in discussions related to a newspaper column and perhaps a regular slot on a local radio show.

I’m going to start the long-discussed cooking/food blog. The focus is on preparing tasty and healthy meals at home for a family – while I won’t necessarily lean towards discussions of frugality there (I’m more concerned about tasty, then healthy), the very nature of cooking at home is a frugal behavior. When it launches, I’ll let you all know.

I’m going to dabble in local politics. This is something else that time compression hasn’t given me the freedom to do. Church council, city council, school board – these are all things I want to do.

I’m also going to spend some time on other side businesses and opportunities. Small-scale computer repair, things like that. I’m also going to look at helping my wife get her soap making side business up to speed, and I may raise a bumper crop of tomatoes, can some tomato-based foods, and sell them locally. I also have a few other strings that I may tug on, too.

I’m going to still send my children to daycare some for the socialization aspects, but we’re considering a reduced schedule that gives some stay-at-home-parent time. We’re going to ease into this over the next several months to see what works best for all of us and what matches our financial state.

Most importantly, I’m going to detach a bit from the heavily-compressed nature of the last two years of my life. In the summer, we’re going to spend some significant time visiting friends and family, people who I haven’t really been able to connect with in a while. I’m going to spend a ton of time with my kids outdoors, too – working in the garden, playing at the park, and so on. I’m going to breathe, something I haven’t done in a while.

All in all, it’s the single scariest thing I’ve done in my life, but I think it’s the right thing to do.

Recently, I discussed the value of investing in yourself – putting time and money into improving you, not building assets. Today, we’ll look at one area of investing in yourself as part of an ongoing series on the topic, spread out once per weekday over two weeks. If you’d like to review all the entries, look at the investing in yourself subcategory.

Your mood is one of the most powerful factors that determines how your day will go. With a good mood, you’ll interact with others in a generally positive way, feel positively about the things that are going on around you, and be more driven to work hard and succeed in life. With a bad mood, you create negative impressions with others, generally feel down about what you’re doing, and often are prone to creating a negative impact on what you’re doing.

Finding effective ways to lift your mood a little is valuable. I’ve already discussed exercise in detail in this series, but that’s one avenue – topics which I’ll discuss later in the series that help with mood lifting include personal appearance and self-confidence. Aside from that, though, there are several little investments you can make to consistently raise your personal mood – and thus raise your value in your own eyes and in the eyes of others. Give some of these techniques a shot.

Start your day with something intensely positive.
My average morning starts off with a shower, a small and energetic breakfast, some logic puzzles, and then, eventually, a period of time with my kids. This is an awesome way to start the day – it fills me with energy, improves my personal appearance, invigorates me, and gives me a taste of the activity I enjoy most in my life, playing with my children.

See if you can’t identify a thing or two you can do in the morning to start your day off with a positive mindset. Some suggestions:
A breakfast of fruit or oatmeal Something healthy, natural, and full of energy to start your day.
A shower Start off things by taking a long, soaking shower, cleaning you off, revitalizing you, and getting you ready to go for the day.
Meditation or prayer Early morning might be the best time to get in touch with your spiritual side, especially if it’s something that brings positive value to your life.
A brief taste of your favorite hobby Read a book chapter or play a quick game to start things off.

Include some natural mood lifters in your daily routine.
A plump, juicy grape is one of my favorite little snacks in the world. I pop one in my mouth, chew it up, and suddenly I feel just a little bit better. Thus, quite often, I’ll put a bowl full of grapes on my desk and pop several during the day. It naturally brings up my mood and makes the day flow by a little faster.

A grape is a wonderful example of a natural mood lifter. It works in the now by creating pleasure on the tongue and just a little burst of energy from the natural sugars, and it’s fine for the later, too, because it calms my appetite and the grape itself is a good food to be eating. I feel no guilt, just a little burst of pleasure and happiness.

See if you can identify some small natural mood lifters in your life. Maybe it’s a small ball that you can squeeze in your hand. Maybe it’s a photo of your children on your desk that you can look at regularly. Whatever it is, utilize it – make it a regular part of your routine. As for me, I never get tired of that regular bowl of grapes.

Accentuate the positive things you do and minimize the negative ones.
No one in life does everything absolutely right, nor do they do everything absolutely wrong, either. While it’s useful to know what your faults are, dwelling on them creates a false impression in your mind that you’re somehow less valuable than you are. Instead, spend time focusing on the positives in your life.

For example, I know I have some sort of talent for writing. Through this site, I’ve been able to reach a lot of people. Thus, I often use it as a point of pride and self-confidence for myself – I can do this, and thus I can tackle the things I don’t do so well, like handle pointed criticism.

Make a list of five or so things that you do really well and spend some time really focusing on tasks that maximize those skills. For me, for example, that sort of exercise would probably involve doing some blog writing and some freelance writing. For you, it might be doing something completely different.

Focus in on a small number of goals rather than a lot of goals.
A while back, I wrote an article entitled The Fine Art of Abandoning Goals, in which I discussed how I turned a monster list of 101 goals into a much smaller group of five goals. Why did I do this? The huge number of goals felt like a giant weight on my shoulders – I always felt like I needed to be doing something, but I never felt like I was getting close to really finishing anything.

Make a list of all of the goals you’re tackling right now in your life, from the big ones to the small ones. You’ll be surprised how many there are if you start listing them, and when you look at that giant list, you’ll be surprised how much weight that that list contains.

Now, go through that list and eliminate a lot of them. Eliminate the ones that don’t leave you yearning to achieve them. Keep them only if you absolutely must do them. Try really hard to winnow the list down as small as you can.

What remains are the goals you should pay attention to. The effort you put forth in your life should be directed towards achieving this handful of goals and not wasted by achieving secondary or small goals that your heart isn’t really into. Yes, that may mean that you abandon some things in your life. Don’t sweat it – you’re just freeing up your time and talents to chase after the things that really do have value.

Add some variety to your environments.
Most of the time, I’m stuck in an office environment with the typical pale walls and nothing much to look at – my windows all face other buildings. When I’m writing, it’s almost always early in the morning in the basement, in a windowless room. These are nice environments for focusing in deeply, but they’re not good for creativity nor are they good for my self-image.

Try changing up your most common environments. For example, when I’m writing, sometimes I get a boost of creativity by going outside – I feel better, I see new things, and I have new ideas. At work, I’ll often just walk through the building when I’m feeling blue for the opportunity to interact with people and see something different than the walls all around me.

Make some significant changes to your environments. Add a plant, a wall decoration, or change the paint. Move furniture around. Better yet, do these things regularly. It does wonders to reduce that sense of “same ol’, same ol’” that leads to a sense of complacency.

Get a bit of pampering.
On occasion, it is a very good financial investment to get some pampering – the only problem is if you’re doing things you can’t afford or doing them frequently enough that it is interfering with your financial state. Try doing something exceptional for yourself – but keep it exceptional.

For me personally, a massage is about the best thing I can get. A nice, long, deep one, where the daily pains in the muscles are ground away and when I leave, I feel like my legs are made of Jell-O.

Also, do it irregularly. I don’t get these every day or every month, for if I did such massages would lose much of their value to me. Getting them very irregularly makes such massages special and leaves me feeling amazing, rather than making such pleasure routine and thus expected as a matter of course. Don’t be afraid to invest the time and money in something like this on occasion, as it will do far more for you than you might ever believe.

Do things for others because these acts make you feel good.
If you have an opportunity to help someone, help them just because you can, not because that person might be able to benefit you. When you walk away, ask nothing in return – you’ll feel great for doing it.

There are many opportunities for this in your daily life if you look for it. Most of them just take a few seconds – holding the door for an elderly person, stopping a bouncing ball from going out in the street, or paying a kind word to someone. Most of them don’t merit anything in return, either, and you shouldn’t expect it.

However, you’ll find that little acts of kindness do in fact return something to you, something you’ll sense and feel inside. This is one of the best natural mood lifters around.

Forgive the people in your life for their mistakes.
One final aggravation and mood reducer, for me, is people. There are people in my life that I have a very hard time being around, usually because I’ve witnessed them doing something foolish or wrong that’s bothered me quite a bit. If I hang onto this, every time I’m around them my stomach is full of bile.

The best solution is to try to forgive that person by realizing that everyone is human and has failings. Maybe you don’t feel comfortable around someone because they’re a loudmouth, or maybe you witnessed a person taking a truckload of stuff from the office supply closet. These people made a mistake, and quite often that mistake is a result of their human failings.

Do some honest introspection and realize that you have failings, too. Others may see these failings in you and feel uncomfortable around you. It’s no different than how you feel about this person that’s bothering you.

Once you’ve done that, it’s often easy to forgive most people. You’ll see that the person you despise is just a person, warts and all, just like you are, and it becomes much easier to not be filled with negativity when they’re around.

If you’d like to investigate more on these topics, I strongly recommend the book Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar. It’s a very sound review of the scientific literature on positive psychology written for a general audience and broken down into some very clear and very applicable steps that people can apply to their lives. This, of course, is in stark contrast to most pop psychology books, which are mostly collections of platitudes about positive thinking and relationships with very little concrete application.

Each Friday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book.

I’ve been hesitant to review a book by Ric Edelman for two big reasons. First of all, he’s always given off a very strong “I’m a salesman first, an advisor later” vibe – he comes off as a person selling you a product, not a person helping you with advice. Second, every time I’ve dabbled into one of his books, I’ve quickly come across something that’s made my eyebrows shoot up not in a good way – I’ve seen things encouraging people to get into debt and that’s been enough to get me to close the covers.

Yet I often receive emails from readers asking me about Edelman’s advice. “Does he make sense?” “You should review one of his books.” Thus, I decided to give Edelman a fair shake. I headed off to the bookstore, browsed a handful of his books, and selected Ordinary People, Extraordinary Wealth, as it seemed on the surface to be the most interesting one.

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Wealth pledges to contain “the eight secrets of how 5,000 ordinary Americans became successful investors – and how you can too.” Intriguing subtitle. I can’t wait to dig in, so let’s get started.

Looking Into Ordinary People, Extraordinary Wealth

Secret #1
They carry a mortgage on their homes even though they can afford to pay it off.
Edelman basically argues that the concept of a mortgage being a bad thing is a relic of the 1930s, where banks would foreclose on a house on a whim, and the negativity associated with mortgages has hung around this long even though there are a lot of protections for the borrower today.

In a nutshell, Edelman says that having a mortgage with a low interest rate is a very good place to be, indeed, as you can instead use your money for better investments. He very clearly believes in the concept that you shouldn’t pay ahead on your mortgage, but that you should use the money you’d pay ahead to invest.

Secret #2
They don’t diversify the money they put into their employer retirement plans.
The subtitle struck me as quite odd at first, as it seems to fly in the face of common sense. Edelman’s advice, though, is actually pretty common – put your retirement money into a diversity of stocks. In other words, select an index fund or two of stocks in your retirement plan and just dump all of your savings into it.

The subject is actually referring to the idea that people might be way too conservative with their retirement money in fear of losing it in the stock market. However, if you’re investing in a natural diversity of stocks over the long haul, your returns will be very good. Plus, by investing in drips and drops over time (a bit each paycheck), you’re effectively implementing dollar cost averaging along the way, protecting you somewhat from a big downturn in the wide stock market.

Secret #3
Most of their wealth came from investments that were purchased for less than $1,000.
Basically, Edelman states that people who became wealthy did it not by having a ton of money right off the bat. Instead, they just invested a little bit at a time – less than $1,000 a pop. They just did it regularly.

This is something that most people can do – invest $200 or so a month into an index fund and just let it sit there until they need it. By doing this over the long haul, you can build some tremendous wealth by riding the natural growth of the value of your investments.

Secret #4
They rarely move from one investment to another.
The question then becomes what should one invest in? Edelman doesn’t offer a direct answer here, but does suggest that the only clear way to lose is by rapidly shuffling your money around from investment to investment. The route to success is to buy and hold, not to move like a jackrabbit from investment to investment, losing most of your gains to brokerage fees and taxes.

In other words, figure out what you’re going to invest in to begin with, then just steadily invest in that in small increments. This, again, is pretty sound advice – you avoid the costs of brokerage fees and just ride through with the same investments. If you pick some intelligent diversity right off the bat, all you have to do is just stick with it and keep investing over time and you’ll be fine.

Mind Over Money
There’s a section in the middle of Ordinary People, Extraordinary Wealth that focuses on psychological traps that people fall into when investing – things like relying on hindsight too much and so on. If you find this type of material interesting, Eric Tyson’s Mind Over Money (which I reviewed a while back) provides thorough and readable coverage of the connection between psychology and money management.

Secret #5
They don’t measure their success against the Dow or the S&P 500
Instead of using various metrics like the NASDAQ to judge their investment success, they look instead at whether or not their investments are actually achieving the results they need in their life. So what if the S&P 500 has an up or a down day? What’s actually important is that your investments are giving you the returns you need.

I agree with this logic. I think it makes a lot of sense to use your own goals as the only milestone for success. If you spend all of your time chasing the market, you’ll always be dissatisfied and you’ll always believe you can be doing better. Maybe you can, but is it really worth the risk if you’re already achieving your goals?

Secret #6
They devote less than three hours per month to their personal finances.
I think this concept relates very well to the “training wheel” concept I talked about a while back. Basically, Edelman is correct in stating that the people he’s talking about do spend three hours or less a month on their personal finances, but these are people who already have a firm grip on their financial state.

In other words, this isn’t an invitation for people struggling with debt to not pay some serious attention to their money – it’s merely a confirmation that when you’ve got it all figured out, it doesn’t require a tremendous amout of focus.

Secret #7
Money management is a family affair involving their kids as well as their parents.
If there’s one point that Edelman really hits out of the park in this book, it’s this one. You’re doing nothing but hindering your children’s financial education by keeping them oblivious to money. At the same time, you’re also potentially setting yourself up for a nasty surprise if you don’t involve your parents in the financial discussion as well – not only might they have insights, but you might have insights for them as well.

In both cases, conversation is the key. If you’re having difficulty talking to your parents, a great book to look at is Charles Schwab and Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz’s It Pays to Talk; similarly, an excellent book on relating to your children about money is David Owen’s The First National Bank of Dad. Both provide essential advice if you’re looking for ways to get started, but Edelman gets the basic piece completely right – starting the conversation is the key part.

Secret #8
They differ from other investors in the attention they pay to the media.
In other words, they ignore the talking heads on CNBC or the thousands of stock tips floating around out there for the most part. Why? Because it’s information overload and it’s not particularly useful to most of the people Edelman interviewed for this book.

Instead, what little financial reading they do is from reputable sources – The Wall Street Journal or The Economist or BusinessWeek – and they generally don’t even directly apply that information to their financial planning. They just keep going along with what they’ve always done, steady but sure.

Buy or Don’t Buy?

I have deeply mixed feelings about this book. I’ll use Clint Eastwood as my inspiration as I break it down.

The Good Edelman’s advice is quite good throughout the book. He tends to believe in the value of debt and leverage a bit more than I do (or many other personal finance writers do), but his ideas are sensible and are actually based on substance. His writing has a nice conversational tone, too, and if you find personal anecdotes to be powerful, this boat is loaded down with them.

The Bad More than half of this book consists of very brief half-page testimonials from people that Edelman’s financial advising firm has helped. It’s nice to see reinforcement of the principles, but when you strip away all of this, there’s only about ninety pages of content in this book.

The Ugly Edelman goes down the Robert Kiyosaki road and tries very hard to sell his other books. All. The. Time. Half of the footnotes that I checked were merely pitches to buy other Edelman books or allusions to try using his financial advising services. At times, it felt like a sales brochure for Edelman’s firm – not a good vibe to give off.

If you take the basic advice, skim the testimonials, and ignore the footnotes, this book has some very useful information inside. Unfortunately, by ignoring that stuff, you ignore about 80% of the book’s total word count. In other words, this is a great book to browse, but not necessarily a great one to buy.

Recently, I discussed the value of investing in yourself – putting time and money into improving you, not building assets. Today, we’ll look at one area of investing in yourself as part of an ongoing series on the topic, spread out once per weekday over two weeks. If you’d like to review all the entries, look at the investing in yourself subcategory.

I’m a rather introverted person. When I’m in a group of people, my gut instinct is to clam up, be quiet, and sink into the woodwork (unless, of course, I’m very comfortable with most of the group). It takes genuine effort for me to speak up in a group situation, and for much of my adult life I simply wouldn’t do it. I’d just sit there, waiting for someone else to talk and quite often not engaging at all.

This antisocial streak was hindering me, and I knew it. A large group of friends and associates are incredibly valuable to have – they can provide support to you in countless ways and you can provide support back to them as well. By sitting there like a bump on a log, not only was I not actively working towards building friendships and relationships, I was actually sending off a negative vibe to people.

There were two books that really turned things around for me: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone. These books actually have a lot in common – they both focus on how exactly to effectively interact with other people. Carnegie’s book focuses on the actual interactions themselves – how do you actually step up and converse with someone? Ferrazzi’s book continues that thought – how do you build a conversation into a relationship that has value? They’re both filled with very specific tips that you can start applying right off the bat.

With that information in hand, I had a good idea of what to do – I just needed to get started doing it. Here are some direct actions you can take to start investing in building a network of friends and acquaintances that actually have value, both to you and to the person you’re connected to.

Engage in activities that enable a lot of interactions with a lot of people.
The first step is to simply meet people whose interests overlap with your own. Sure, you may know people through work, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg – there are many, many people out there to meet, to know, and to develop friendships and relationships with. Here are some tips for getting out that front door.

Identify social activities that mesh with your interests. Like reading books? Join a book club. Like outdoor activities? Join an outdoor club. Curious about the community? Go to any sort of community activity – check at city hall for the community calendar. Obsessed with your career? Go to meetings and conventions related to your professional area. Join Meetups for any activity of interest to you. Most large cities offer a lot of opportunity to explore whatever interest you may have.

Don’t give up on it after just one meeting. The biggest mistake that people make when joining a potentially interesting group is that they give up when they go to the first meeting, the people there already seem to know each other, and there are ongoing things that they’re not familiar with. Give it a few meetings. Ask questions if you don’t know what’s going on. Don’t just assume that you’ll immediately be part of any ongoing social circle at this group – give it time to happen.

Don’t be afraid to be the first to talk – but don’t be the only one talking.
One intense challenge for me is to know how to deal with a group of people when no one is talking. Everyone’s experienced them – those periods of silence when no one has quite yet taken the initiative to start a conversation or to bring up a new topic. That’s the perfect time to get a new conversation rolling and to be noticed by others, so take advantage of it. Here are some tips.

Realize that everyone else is probably feeling as uncomfortable as you are. If there’s a silence in the room, it’s probably a good indication that many of the people there don’t know what to say next and are feeling some of your discomfort. By stepping up and getting the ball rolling, you often attract a positive response from others.

If all else fails, ask a contextual question. Most of the time, I don’t know what to say, so I’ll use what’s going on as the context for a question. I’ll ask a question about the group itself, the event we’re engaged in, the book the book club is reading, or so on. If you’re in a very small group, current events can be a good topic to break the silence.

If you notice you’re the only one talking, it’s probably time to give someone else an opportunity. In other words, trim your point to a close and try to finish by encouraging someone else to talk. One good way to do that is to finish with a “What do you all think?”

Ask questions.
The most effective way I’ve found to get a conversation going or to continue it is to get a person to talk about themselves. The easiest way to pull off that trick is to ask a question – create a situation where it makes social sense for that person to begin discussing themselves. Here’s some advice on how to do that.

Ask a question that the person would feel comfortable answering. If you’re in a book club, questions about the book you’re reading are always fair game. If they’ve brought up their children or family, cursory and positive questions about that topic are fair, too. In general, questions that are positive in tone and aren’t too personal are always worthwhile. Compliment someone, for example, and ask where they got that item or idea.

Listen to the responses. Listen to what they’re saying. Try to understand their viewpoint and experiences – they’re going to be different than your own. If you find yourself getting bored, then you’re either discussing a topic that truly doesn’t interest you or you’re not clicking with that person, which is fine, but the first step to a positive connection is to listen to what they say and try to figure out what they mean.

Use the responses for follow-up questions if you don’t have a compelling idea of your own to interject. If you don’t know how to respond to what they’ve just said, figure out the part that’s troubling you and turn it into a question again, allowing them to explain further. It not only clearly shows that you’re listening and are engaged, but it gives the person a greater chance to expound their thoughts in a positive light.

Focus on the people that interest you.
There are going to be people you are uncomfortable interacting with, either for obvious reasons or for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on. You don’t have to interact with them. Instead, focus on the people who give you a positive feeling – people who click with you and engage you. These people will be much more likely to build up an actual relationship with you, whether it be a friendship or a business relationship. Here are some tips.

At first, interact with a lot of people. Listen to who’s talking and figure out which people are actually interesting to you. When you see people standing alone and not talking, talk to them. When there’s a group talking, listen in. Spend some time interacting with as many people as you can. The reason is to figure out which ones you may click with.

Gravitate gradually towards the people you find most interesting. It might be the person talking the most at the center of the room, or it might be the person sitting quietly off to the side. Keep conversing with the people that click with you. Don’t be afraid to move on if they exhibit behaviors that make you uncomfortable.

Once you’ve narrowed it down, focus on building up ties with the people that fit best with you. Exchange contact information with one or two of them if it feels like you might really have something in common. If that doesn’t feel appropriate yet, just make sure that you have opportunities to meet those people again at other, similar events – come to the next group meeting, for example.

Follow up.
If you’ve actually traded contact information with someone in a genuine fashion, meaning that it was because of a desire to actually further exchange ideas, follow up. Don’t just let it dry there on the vine. I usually try to contact new people I’ve met once every few weeks – for example, I recently was elected to a community board, so I’m slowly putting forth an effort to get to know everyone on that board.

Wait a bit, then make a contact. I usually find that for most people, a follow up email that’s non-fluffy is worthwhile. I try to recall what we’ve talked about (I usually jot it down on the back of whatever contact info I get), do some research on the topic, and continue the conversation in some regard. I always make sure to include a reminder of who I am as well, usually starting it off that way (“This is Trent Hamm. We met recently at the Smith’s fire benefit dinner and we discussed some changes in the town’s sidewalk policy….”).

If they don’t respond back, don’t push it. Just wait for another opportunity to meet that person in a social environment and chat about it. Quite often, people intend to respond but just get busy with things – it’s often not a snub. However, you should make sure not to make yourself a nuisance.

If you can easily do a favor for someone, do it. Quite often, opportunities will come up where someone is in obvious need of a helping hand. If you have the opportunity to help out, especially if it’s easy for you, do so. Helping out the people around you is the single best thing you can do to build a solid relationship with the people you’re helping – plus, you get the opportunity to make someone else’s life better.

Dabble in hosting social events.
One great opportunity to build and cement relationships and friendships is to host small social gatherings. I’m pretty partial to the dinner party or barbecue, myself – inviting people into your home and serving them food is a great way to get people to open up and connect to each other.

Invite a diversity of people. If you have a gathering, it’s good to invite people who do know each other and people who don’t. I usually try to keep the number small and make sure that everyone there knows at least someone else besides me, but ideally not everyone knows everyone else. If you don’t know that many people, just invite who you know and keep the number relatively low.

Try very hard to accept any reciprocal invitations. If you get invited in return, make a special effort to go to that event. Social invitations are more valuable than you think and they’re often a sign of acceptance into a larger group. Make an effort to go to any invite you get, especially if it’s the first one.

Keep the communication going – don’t let it die off.
Once you’ve built a connection with someone, don’t let it fall apart because you’re too busy. It only takes a few minutes every once in a while to keep a relationship healthy, so take the time to do it.

Keep in contact regularly – a handwritten note on a special occasion is a great way to do it. Send out New Year’s/winter seasonal cards to everyone you can, with a quick handwritten note inside greeting them. One year, I made up almost three hundred of these and it was worth the effort. Similarly, if you find out someone’s made a career change, bought a house, got married, or had a child, make sure that you pop a handwritten note and perhaps a small gift their way.

Send quick emails semi-regularly. Some people do this with their cell phone, but I find that to be kind of intrusive for just touching base with someone. I often use a quick personally-written email just asking how they’re doing and maybe delivering a few sentences on what I’m up to or what’s currently interesting to me. I don’t do this too regularly – every few months or so – but it does a great job of helping a relationship to not wither and die over a long period of time.

The real key, though, is to build a solid number of meaningful relationships and friendships and make sure they don’t wither – these are the people who you support and will support you when you need it. The first step is up to you.