Each week, I highlight ten things each week that inspired me to greater financial, personal, and professional success. Hopefully, they will inspire you as well.

1. A big sister comes into her own
Our daughter has been struggling with the role of being a big sister to her baby brother. She had been the baby of the family for years, then suddenly there was a new little one around. She didn’t know how to play with him or how to act around him. She would hug him once in a while.

Recently, that began to change. She’s started to relish her role as a big sister, showing him how to do many different things like drinking from a cup and how to pull himself up. The little one has responded to the change: he now looks at his big sister with a smile and a twinkle in his eye that wasn’t really there before.

She’s taking on a new challenge in her life and, from my eyes, she’s passing with flying colors.

2. Emerson on costs
To acquire money, we’re always spending something. Time. Energy. Ethics. Ideas. Is it worth it?

Money often costs too much. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

What are we trading away for more money?

3. Seesmic
Seesmic is how I use Twitter. Without it, it would be very difficult to follow the flood of tweets that are going on out there. Seesmic makes it easy for me to follow who I want to follow and, more importantly, what I want to follow. Plus, I can see all of the tweets directed at me (private or otherwise) plus all of the public tweets I want to see without clicking around – it’s all in one place.

4. John Wooden on leadership
Leadership is about people, not about results. If you cultivate good people, the results will follow.

John Wooden is one of the few true heroes I have. He established a basketball coaching standard that will probably never be matched while also turning out some amazing articulate and thoughtful people like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton.

5. Billy Rose on basic investing
I like little quips about what to invest in – and what not to invest in. This one gave me a chuckle.

Never invest your money in anything that eats or needs repainting. – Billy Rose

Any investment that requires a constant supply of money to work and doesn’t provide a guaranteed return is an investment you should avoid unless you really know what you’re doing or you want to work hard for it.

I think I’ll pass on buying hogs, in other words.

6. Splashup Light
I’ve been a Photoshop user for many, many years, but I have to say that Splashup Light is the best free simple image editor I’ve found yet.

I’ve found myself using it as a quick-and-dirty image editor, particularly on my relatively slow desktop computer where I can be halfway done with what I want to do using Splashup before Photoshop is finished loading.

It doesn’t do everything, but it does a lot of the tasks I need to do very quickly and efficiently. That’s just the kind of tool I love.

7. Mumford and Sons
This band was pretty much the soundtrack of March for my ears. While Little Lion Man (just a note for some readers, there’s language use in Little Lion Man that may not be suitable for some, though it’s used here to express a genuine emotion than to be purely vulgar) was their bigger hit, my favorite song by them is Winter Winds:

8. Charles Lamb on borrowers and lenders
Which would you rather be?

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend. – Charles Lamb

I think I’d rather be a lender than a borrower. Right now, I’m lending money to banks via my savings and lending money to companies via the stocks I own. Much better than borrowing – and having to pay interest.

9. Chess
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been teaching my oldest child how to play chess (hopefully to be followed by go and Arimaa).

I started with chess because it’s the game I felt I could explain the easiest to him. I usually remove several of my own pieces from the board (the queen, a knight, three pawns, and a rook, usually) and try to play him well.

There’s nothing more wonderful than watching the boy’s mind click as he begins to see patterns and put moves together in a sensible order. He’s still learning how the pieces move, but a few days ago, he used his bishop to take out two of my pieces in consecutive turns and his thrill at his own success was wonderful to watch.

Many thanks to soupboy for the wonderful chess photo.

10. Lulu
Lulu is an amazing web service that makes it incredibly easy to self-publish, taking your own book from a manuscript on your desk to an item available at Amazon.com.

Now, why on Earth would I find this kind of tool inspirational? I’ll leave that one up to your imagination.

Each week, I’ll present a low-cost meal (or a meal that demonstrates a lot of options for cutting costs) that my family eats for dinner and enjoys. Many of the recipes will be vegan or vegetarian, with options to add other ingredients for non-vegetarians.

Kevin wrote in this week asking me if I could show some meals that utilized a slow cooker, as he’d love to cook more inexpensive and healthy dishes at home but he’s often strapped for time in the evenings.

I’m happy to oblige.

One of our favorite slow cooker recipes is Jamaican red bean stew, a delicious thick stew that turns out wonderfully after cooking slowly all day in a slow cooker. You can prepare it in about fifteen minutes in the morning before you leave and your house is fragrant when you get home.

All you have to do is chop some vegetables and toss some stuff in the slow cooker in the morning!

This will make a healthy pot of soup – our family of four ate this soup for dinner, then for lunch, and there’s still about 1/3 of the soup in the freezer. If you’re single or just a couple, you may want to halve the recipe.

This recipe is based on Robin Robertson’s Jamaican stew recipe from Quick-Fix Vegetarian cookbook, though we’ve modified it quite a bit.

What You Need
The ingredient list is pretty straightforward. Most of the ingredients are either fresh vegetables or spices you should already have on hand.

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups sliced carrots
1/2 yellow onion, chopped
1 sweet potato, diced
1 can diced tomatoes (15 oz), drained
1 1/2 lbs. dark kidney beans (two 15 oz. cans drained of the juice will work)
1 cup unsweetened coconut milk
1 1/2 cups vegetable broth or water
2 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/4 tsp red pepper flakes
1/4 tsp ground allspice
Salt and pepper

The receipt totaled $9.80 for the ingredients and produced 12 servings of the stew, which means the cost per bowl was around $0.80.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
If you wish, you can slice the carrots, chop the oinion, and dice the sweet potatoes the night before. This will cause a slight alteration of the procedure in the morning, but don’t sweat it. If it’s more convenient for you to do things this way, prep the vegetables and keep them in the refrigerator overnight.

Preparing the Meal
If you’re doing the vegetables in the morning, put the olive oil and the garlic into the slow cooker and turn it on high while you’re preparing the vegetables. If the vegetables are prepared, just add the olive oil and garlic first and turn the slow cooker to low.

When the vegetables are ready, start adding ingredients, going straight down the list above. Stir the stew as you’re adding ingredients to make sure the liquid is getting everywhere and distributing the spices all around. The coconut milk may have some “curds” in there, but don’t worry about it – they’ll go away throughout the day.

Set the slow cooker to low, put the lid on, and leave it all day. When you come home that evening, serve!

That’s really all there is to it!

Optional Ingredients
If you’d like, slice up some cooked cured sausage and add to the stew, as you desire. Another ingredient that would work reasonably well would be diced ham.

In any regard, this is such a hearty stew that it’ll function just fine as a standalone meal.

Amy writes in:

I have no problem setting goals for myself. I follow the steps you suggest: make them realistic, make them numerical so I can keep track of them, write them down, and so on.

The problem is that when I come up with a plan to reach them, that plan completely falls apart within a week, every single time. I’ll have a four day run of working out at the gym, then a crisis will happen at work or my son will get sick and then I miss a day and once that chain is broken, I feel like such a failure that I don’t go back. I do the same thing with financial goals. I will do good for a while, then an emergency happens and I just give up.

What can I do? Help me achieve some goals here!

This happens to be a very common problem for motivated people who set strong goals for themselves. I usually find that when something like this happens to me, it’s a sign of one of three different basic problems, each of which has a different solution.

So let’s look at each one.

For examples throughout this post, I’m going to stick with the example Amy used of exercise goals, since it’s something many of us are familiar with. The same principles hold true for any sort of self-improvement goal, whether it’s financial or relationship-based or anything else.

Unrealistic or inflexible schedule
Your goal is to get into better shape. In order to do that, you decide that you’ll work out every day, perhaps using a system like P90X. For several days, you stick to it, but inevitably your life hands you some complexity that makes it impossible to work out for a day. Boom – you’ve fallen off your schedule and you feel like a failure.

The problem here isn’t your goal or your general idea for getting there. The problem is that your plan for getting there is so strict and tight that ordinary life will inevitably prevent you from getting there.

My suggestion is simple. Rather than saying “I will exercise every day” and feeling like a failure when you miss a day, say “I will exercise four times a week.” When you’ve set that goal, front load your week so that you have a good chance of knocking out those required four sessions right off the bat, then you can even shoot for exceeding that.

In short, give yourself a bit of room for flexibility. Assume that there are going to be times and days where things are going to keep you from executing your exact plan for that day. What kind of plan can you develop that takes that into account?

Poor measurements of success
As I’ve mentioned before, a good goal is one that offers a very clear way to describe success, often a numerical description, and completion of that goal often leads to the effect you want. “I want to lose weight” isn’t a good goal, for example, because it doesn’t describe what success is. Is it one pound? Is it a lot of pounds?

Of course, at the same time, “I want to lose 50 pounds” isn’t a good goal either, because pure weight loss is a rather poor metric for what you’re likely wanting to achieve.

What is it that you do want to achieve? Do you want to feel healthier? Do you want to look better? Do you want to live longer? Each of these has different things associated with it that you’d want to make happen, from diet to exercise.

Talk to people who understand these issues who can help you figure out what you should be aiming for with regards to success in those areas. These discussions should help you to have a much deeper understanding of what kinds of things you should actually be shooting for and provide you with some reasonable guidance for setting meaningful goals that will get you what you want.

Lack of external motivation
Another problem with many such goals is that they’re entirely internal. If you’re the only person involved with the goal, you’re the only person you let down if you fail to achieve the goal.

One way to break through this is to find a “buddy” who is working on the same (or a similar) goal as you are. This gives you someone to exchange tips and advice and motivation with as well as someone to actually participate in activities with. The key benefit, though, is that you’re no longer the only person involved with your goal. You’ve got another person who’s on the line with regards to your success. If you fail, you’re letting your buddy down, and that can be a huge motivator for people.

If you don’t have any sort of “buddy,” another method is to simply tell people about your goal and your plan to get there and ask them to keep you on your toes about it. When you know your close circle is going to be watching for your success, suddenly the motivation for your goal changes. Others are involved and the stakes are raised.

In the end, nothing can make you achieve a goal if you simply refuse to make progress towards it. However, just a few tweaks can turn something that feels insurmountable and pointless and not important to anyone else to something that feels reachable, vital, and valuable to people around you. That’s a drastic change in the nature of your goal and it can certainly make the difference between failure and success, whether you’re talking about financial goals, fitness goals, or any other type of personal goal.