Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you might be aware that two well-known fifty year old men passed away this past week.

Michael Jackson got most of the media coverage – and for good reason. He recorded the best-selling pop music album of all time and virtually everyone can recognize the beat of many of his songs. He was simply an amazing performer – here’s my favorite example, actually:

However, I was more shocked and psychically bothered by the passing of Billy Mays. If you don’t know him, he was the ubiquitous television pitch man for a huge diversity of products – most notably OxyClean. His beard, friendly demeanor, pure skill at promoting products, and often nearly over-the-top enthusiasm made him memorable:

Both of these men were fifty years old when they passed away.

Both of these men died of sudden cardiac arrest, a common outcome of heart disease.

Those facts together shook me quite a bit. Fifty years old? I’m thirty – twenty years away from that magic number. Both of my kids would merely be college age when I’m fifty. I have many things that I want to do in life, and the thought that my life could easily end – or my quality of life could rapidly fall – at such an early age made me think quite a bit about the future – and other things I can do now to protect it.

I’ve invested quite a bit of time and energy in my own life – and I’m sure you have in your own – building the foundation for a great later life. My retirement accounts are solid. I have a book in print that pays me royalties and another one on the way. I want to be able to enjoy the benefits of these things in my golden years as I play with my grandchildren. I want to protect my investment.

So I’ve decided to do something about it. For my family, for my health, for my finances, and for my long term future, I’m going to make a number of changes that directly reduce the chances of heart disease – and also help with preventing other diseases, such as type 2 diabetes.

I should note that I’ve already been doing these things in 2009. I made a resolution to improve my health and I’ve lost about forty pounds this year through a mix of more exercise and better eating and I hope to keep up the progress.

I simply started by asking my doctor what I could do to reduce my chances of heart disease as I grow older. He suggested eight things, all of them pretty simple.

First, don’t smoke. Nicotine raises your blood pressure (not good) and the tar reduces your lung capacity and makes exercise more difficult (not good). It also increases your risk of many other diseases, like emphysema.

Second. exercise. If you don’t exercise at all, start really slow. Make a commitment to just walk for thirty minutes each evening around your neighborhood. The goal is to raise your heart rate to a reasonably elevated level for a sustained period, and continuous movement (like walking) is an easy way to get there. If you want to go beyond that, that’s great, but take it slow – don’t dive in and try to run a 5K right off the bat. Just go for a walk.

Third, eat more green things. Eat broccoli, spinach, brussels sprouts, and leafy vegetables. You can start by having a side salad with dinner. I’ve found that spinach is a great ingredient in many, many dishes, for example – just add a bunch of spinach to lasagna, for example.

Fourth, eat fewer meats. Going vegetarian isn’t necessarily the best option, but reducing your meat intake is a good idea. For example, try eating no meats until your last meal of the day – for breakfast and lunch, eat vegetables and fruits and whole grains.

Fifth, eat some nuts. Seriously. Nuts contain fiber and also contain vitamin E, one vitamin that tends to be deficient in modern diets. One great way to do three, four, and five all at once is to make your own granola bars – something I’ll talk about in the future.

Sixth, cut down on your sodium intake. In other words, don’t dump table salt on your foods. Sodium directly raises blood pressure and we already get enough sodium in our normal foods without extra salting.

Seventh, try meditation or relaxation techniques. Stress elevates your blood pressure and causes all kinds of health issues. Take some time to calm down and psychologically deal with the stresses in your life. Here are some great beginning meditation and stress management techniques.

Finally, cut down on your caffeine. Caffeine also raises blood pressure. Many people say they can’t “live” without the caffeine, but coupling caffeine reduction with other diet improvements and a bit of exercise will make the transition easier.

Most of these changes are not very hard to do in your life. As with any behavior change, take it slow. Don’t go whole hog at first. Just start walking in the evening (I do it while listening to podcasts) and maybe substitute a food or two that you eat for something better for you, particularly at dinner. Put the salt shaker in the cupboard and put out granola bars and fruits for snacks instead of cookies.

It’s simple to protect your life’s investment with a few little changes. Today’s the day to get started.

I came across an article recently at Free Money Finance that argued strongly on behalf of the idea that one’s career is their most valuable asset. To quote:

But I wanted to have one post where I listed the main reasons I think it’s so important to your financial health, so here goes. It pays all your living expenses. Without it, you couldn’t survive. It is the source of all of your investments — retirement, college for your kids, and so on. It helps you acquire other big assets like your home and cars. In short, it’s the source of everything you have financially — unless you inherited a ton of money — the source of your net worth. Even though spending less than you earn is the way to getting wealthy, you must have some income (and the higher the better) to spend less than. In other words, even a miser can’t get rich spending less than he earns if his income is zero.

I found this article about three months after walking away from a very stable and healthy career in order to chase my dreams. And thus, not surprisingly, I don’t agree with the premise.

Your career is not your most valuable asset. Your career is just a series of employments that hopefully build into something that can produce useful income to you, but the career itself is not the valuable asset.

The valuable asset is you.

If you work on building yourself as an asset – constantly adding new skills, new friendships and acquaintances, and new approaches – you’re not building your career at all. You’re building inherent value in yourself, value that you can carry from job to job within your current career or that you can take with you if a great opportunity presents itself.

Investing time in your career is great if it maximizes your value, but if you’re merely toiling away in obscure drudgery, you’re not investing in anything other than the same old paycheck you could get by doing any number of things.

Instead, invest in yourself: personal growth, education and cultural literacy, personal appearance, self-confidence, public speaking, diet and exercise, mental and spiritual health, networking, and perhaps most importantly, feeling good and relaxing. These steps may add value to your career, but they unquestionably add value to you.

Why is investing in yourself more important than investing in your career? There are several strong reasons.

First, you retain that personal value regardless of what happens in your career. Let’s say you work for ten years at a company and it goes under. If you spent all of your time investing solely in your career, you’re likely up the creek. If you spent your time investing in yourself, you’ve got the personal assets and contacts needed to quickly move on from there.

Second, investing in yourself often overlaps with career investment. For example, look at making contacts. Having a huge network of people can help you in your current career, but can help you greatly in making the leap to something completely different. My own personal network of people was key in enabling me to leap from my old career to my new writing-oriented career.

Third, it greatly expands your potential horizons and hands you countless little opportunities. If you’ve built value in yourself, you don’t have to spend your time merely looking straight ahead at the next move within your career path. Many, many other avenues open up to you – sideways leaps within your career to something different, perhaps a giant leap in your current career, or a jump to something entirely different. If you’ve made yourself valuable, those alternative choices open up.

Fourth, it allows you to center around the true values in your life. Investing in your career means you stay late at the office every night so that you have the best chances of advancing in your career, Investing in yourself means you do what’s most valuable to you – spending time with your family, building a larger network of people, improving yourself, and learning new things.

If you want to truly succeed, you need to be more than just a warm body filling a slot in a company and cranking out work product. To become more than that, you need to invest in yourself first, not in whatever might give you another inch in whatever happens to be your current career path.

Remember, it’s you that provides value to your spouse and your children, not your career. If your company shuts down and your career path blows away, ask yourself what’s really left over and use that as your guide.

Recently, I received an email from a reader – let’s call her Denise. Here’s her story (edited slightly to remove a few personal details):

Here’s something I’ve been stressing about for a month or so now… I recently lost about 80ish pounds & have a ton of excess skin on my tummy. To “fix” it all is a cool $17,000. I’ve been debt free for several years now but remember clearly when I wasn’t & what it took to get out of it. Your Money or Your Life was a huge catalyst for making that recovery process possible and helping me get my head right about money’s role in my life. I haven’t owned a credit card for over 10 years, bought my first home 3 years ago, paid off my car, and only have about $8.7K left on my student loans. I have a wee little emergency cushion, but no retirement savings.

I know most people consider this a vanity issue, but it seriously effects my self image and my relationships… which is the only reason I am even considering hurling myself right back into debt. It’s really that important to me. But then, so is being able to pay all my bills.

What’s also interesting, of the people I solicit advice about this, most people say “Do it!” However, they all tend to be people who have never had to dig themselves out of serious debt, and/or are people who see how I tend live pretty frugally anyway and just want me to be happy. My “rich relatives” even compared this to the social stigma attached to people with significant overbites, clef palates, “and other disabilities.” As offensive as it might be, their point was that even if I overcome the body
image and self-esteem challenge, the society we live in will continue to make decisions about me based on my appearance which could affect everything from my job prospects to my marriage prospects (I’m 41 and single). They see this as a $17K investment in my future.

I’m interested in hearing a fresh perspective from someone who knows how devestating debt can be, that it can be overcome, and that happiness isn’t about money.

I know this is a highly personal decision, but then, isn’t that the whole point of processing all this? What would you do? What you advise your wife or sister or, in a few decades, your daughter to do?

There are actually a number of simultaneous issues going on here that need to be looked at individually.

First, the surgery itself would have some personal emotional value. No matter who you are, removing a large packet of loose skin from your body will have a positive impact on your self-image. You’ll feel better and more confident about your personal appearance and that can manifest itself in a lot of ways.

I’ve witnessed how a change in weight has completely altered the personality of an individual. I can think of one friend of mine who lost 120 pounds and became incredibly arrogant – she wound up alienating pretty much everyone around her. Another friend of mine lost about 90 pounds and basically went from being a wallflower to being an incredibly outgoing and kind person – it brought her out of her shell. Another person I know gained about 50 pounds but in the process became a happier person because he was no longer “possessed” by the need to maintain a great body, a pressure that he felt he constantly needed to live up to.

Why is this worth discussing? In modern society, body image is intrinsically tied to our sense of self and thus when we change our body (and thus our body image), our sense of self changes as well – and that changes how we behave. If you’ve lost a ton of weight, sit down with a close friend that you trust and ask some honest questions: how has it changed me? A dramatic change in your body and personal appearance can be a great thing, but it’s not worth alienating the people around you or building up a negative personality.

Second, an improvement in personal appearance does affect how others perceive you. Regardless of how you feel about yourself, others do use your personal appearance as a factor in their impression of you. Removing a large amount of excess skin is likely to be an improvement in this area.

In our society, again, such a decrease in weight is a net positive, as would be the loss of the excess skin.

Third, there’s that pesky debt. Obviously, it’s never a good idea to go into debt, but it’s quite reasonable to think that an appropriate cosmetic procedure such as this one does have some significant return on investment.

The question is whether this return on investment is enough to make the surgery worthwhile. It’s only a positive return if the surgery itself is a net positive, and part of that relies on the changes in your personality. Have you personally changed in a positive way because of the surgery, or at least in a neutral way? A two hundred pound person with a positive attitude is much more valuable than a one hundred and twenty pound person with a negative attitude.

Given that you’ve already lost the weight, you have a good indicator as to whether your body changes have affected you positively. Talk to your friends about it. If it’s been a net positive, then the surgery is probably a good idea, as you’re quite likely to continue that positive mindset and have the benefit of a better body. Added together, it will certainly add enough value to your life to make it worthwhile, even through the debt.

On the other hand, if your friends report that you’ve changed in a negative way, listen to them. Don’t blow it off as “jealousy” or something like that, because it’s not – it’s genuine concern from people who care about you. Your best approach is not to gain the weight back, but not to immediately have the surgery, either – instead, seek counseling and work through the reasons why this weight change has altered your personality in a negative way. If you can work through the issues, then consider the surgery.

What about the finances? If you have cosmetic surgery that brings about genuine and dramatic change (removing significant excess skin would fall into this category) and it’s accompanied by a genuine positive change in personality (or at least not a negative change), then, in my opinion, it’s worth it to find a way to finance the surgery.

However, Denise really needs to get on the retirement savings ASAP. Go to your employer and start a 401(k) or 403(b) now, not later. Get it done today – don’t wait another second. If you don’t know what you’re doing, just use the recommendations of the plan’s manager at your workplace – you can change most of this later on.

What about people who need cosmetic surgery and don’t know how it will affect them? Cosmetic surgery should always be accompanied by (at the very least) significant self-analysis – spend time reflecting on the changes it has brought to you and also ask friends and family about the changes they observe. If there are any bumps in the road, a psychologist should be sought out – you’re dealing with a major change in body image and that can affect your personality significantly.

Good luck, Denise! I’m sure the readers will have many more comments than I (and probably a few disagreements, too)!

When I first sat down to write the Investing in Yourself series, I was mostly thinking about financial investments – how can you invest money in yourself in order to increase your earning potential? What the series actually pointed out to me, however, is that investments really take on a lot of forms and you can often transform one type of investment into another.

For example, take The Simple Dollar. For me, it’s a money investment (hosting fees), a time investment, an intellectual investment, and a bit of an emotional investment, too. What do I get out of it? I reap some financial rewards, increased knowledge and understanding (as a result of the research), improved writing skills, a network of acquaintances, and the wonderful feeling one gets from helping someone. Is it enough reward for the time investment? I believe that it is, but it’s probably not an exchange everyone would see value in.

There are lots of ways to invest in something.

Money is the most obvious investment. It’s very easy to see how financial investments increase in value over time just by itself, let alone how you can use money in effective purchases to improve your situation. Most tangible goods in some way fall under money, as they have some sort of direct monetary value.

Time is also rather obvious, and for me it’s the more valuable investment. An hour of your time should reap some sort of reward, and that’s why I think that many people were frustrated with my recent article about personal appearance and hygiene – for some, the benefits of the investment of time in cleaning yourself is so obvious as to be idiotic (and thus some seemed to be insulted by the article), but yet for others it’s not something worth investing their time in because they don’t really see the benefit. The comments on that post make that dichotomy clear (and convinced me that I made the right call in posting it).

There are other investments as well. Emotional involvement is one – whenever you become emotionally involved with something or someone, you’re hoping for a positive outcome. I immediately think of my sister-in-law here, who works at a job that she’s deeply emotionally involved in without much pay. For her, it’s much more than just a time investment. It’s passion.

Intellectual investment is another important one. For example, I often come home from my regular job with my brain completely drained of mental energy. It’s almost all I can do to raise up the mental energy to engage with my family in the evenings at times.

Along these same lines, not all investments pay dividends in the form of money, either. There are rewards in the form of time, in the form of emotion, and in the form of self-improvement as well. Again, looking at investment rewards from this perspective brings my sister’s job into clear view. She works at an emotionally involving job, investing her time and emotions greatly into her work. What does she receive as a reward? Money’s just one part of it – it leaves her with a great deal of emotional reward, too, from the upfront happiness of bringing a positive change to people’s lives to the overall satisfaction of doing something that fills a true social need. Overall, the equation balances out for her, even if looking at it from a time-for-money perspective makes it look as though she’s getting a raw deal.

When you start looking at investments from a wider perspective, lots of interesting aspects of life come into view.

Time-wasting activities seem more wasteful than ever. I’ll be the first to confess that the hour a week I spend watching Lost is probably not the best time investment. I spend an hour of my time, a bit of my mental energy, and a tiny bit of money on a show solely for the entertainment factor. Do I get enough out of that time to make it worthwhile? It’s rather hard for me to make that case, even for a show that my wife and I both get a lot of enjoyment out of, thus it’s almost impossible for me to make the case for just flipping on the television and staring.

Things that previously didn’t seem like investments seem more like investments. The personal appearance and hygiene article comes to mind again. Most people don’t think about this as an investment, but that’s exactly what it is. You’re investing time and a bit of money in exchange for a better appearance and slightly better health. For most people, this investment seems like such a no-brainer that it’s not even something to think about, but for others, the costs of this investment (mostly the time lost) isn’t worth the reward.

Maximizing the value of your investments takes on a whole new light. It goes beyond maximizing the cash value of an hour of your time. If you can spend an hour doing work that’s incredibly grueling and draining for $20, or you can do something very easy for that hour for $18, the $18 is a far better investment opportunity because it leaves you with energy for other tasks. I think back to a time two years ago where a penny-pinching travel companion of mine insisted that we sit in an airport for eight hours to save $30 on an airline ticket – for him, that was a good investment because he could cozy up in a chair and read, but for me, it was a terrible investment because I wanted to see my infant son quite badly.

Think about things in your own life that drain your emotions, your mental acuity, and your time. What rewards do you get from those activities? Are there other opportunities where you could get more value out of your investment?

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.

The final entry in this series (yes, this is the end of it – I know some have really liked it and others have not liked it so much, so this may either be good or bad news for you) focuses in on the idea of personal growth – becoming a better person with a greater understanding of yourself as well as the world and people around you. Doing so not only increases the comfort you feel with yourself, but it also helps with relating to others in all aspects of your life, personal and professional.

Personal growth is not about taking tests or attending seminars – in fact, most of that stuff is a waste of your time and money. Personal growth really comes from challenging yourself and your beliefs, and doing that well takes time and patience and a willingness to change.

Personal growth is one area of investing in myself that I take very seriously, and I always have. I spend a lot of time on introspection and understanding why people are the way they are. I’ve worked very hard to understand my core values and to also understand the values that others use to operate. Doing this consistently has transformed me as a person, making me much more able to comprehend new situations and also to understand and to control how I respond to them. Here are eight little things you can do to personally grow.

Figure out what your core values are.
Most people have a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong that’s guided by a surprisingly small handful of core values. Whenever you feel inside yourself that something is wrong, ask yourself why you feel that way. Keep trying to break each answer down into more and more fundamental pieces, things that you are sure are right and things that you are sure are wrong. If you invest some time into this, you’ll find that slowly your beliefs and reactions of right and wrong begin to make a lot more sense to you and you can explain them much better as well. More importantly, it becomes much easier to figure out the best ethical and moral decision when something new comes up.

Travel.
By this, I don’t just mean go to a tourist hotspot and see the sights for a few days. I mean genuinely travel. Get off the beaten path, and stay for an extended period – at least more than a few days. If you live in a small town, spend a few weeks in a city. If you live in a city, go live in the country for a while. Visit other parts of the country you live in and, if you can afford to, visit other countries as well. Hitting the sights is fine, but the real value comes from exposing yourself to the life of people that you don’t know.

Read challenging books.
A Stephen King novel is fun, but it doesn’t really stretch your understanding of how human life works. Read challenging stuff. I recommend picking up any novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction or any of the Modern Library’s 100 best novels or best nonfiction works (stick with the editor’s picks, primarily). Almost all of those works will force you to reach a little bit, to understand lives and existences different than your own. When you walk away, you’ll have a deeper understanding of what it means to be different than you, and the more you read, the deeper your appreciation for the varieties of human experience will become.

Explore the varieties of religious experience.
The vast majority of people on earth incorporate some form of religious experience into their lives, whether it’s a Westerner attending an Easter Sunday service at a Protestant church or a trip to a Buddhist temple. I’ve attended a huge variety of religious services and I’ve found that they have a lot more in common than most people tend to think – they all involve people trying to connect with something greater than themselves. It is this commonality, paired with the huge diversity of the specifics of practice and belief, that really make clear that most people on earth are trying to take different, parallel paths to the same goal. Not too many years ago, I used to be afraid of people of different faiths, tending to think that they were either foolish or frightening – now I see them as using the tools they’ve learned to try to experience much the same thing. Try visiting a few religious services of faiths you don’t follow and just watch and listen carefully.

Figure out what you actually want from life.
Almost everyone I know (myself included, at times) spends their time and money chasing the things they think they want from life, while ignoring signs that those might not be the things that they actually want from life. For example, I have a friend who is incredibly passionate about painting. Spend five minutes with her and she’ll almost always move the conversation towards a gorgeous painting she’s seen recently or one she’s working on. Yet she took a job at Home Depot instead of at an art store because the Home Depot job paid $3 an hour more. Why? She needed that $3 an hour. For what? Car payments on an almost-new automobile sitting in her driveway, a car that she only drives on weekends because she takes the metro to work.

It’s really clear from everyone around her that her passion is in the painting. With her passion and skill, she could likely parlay the job at the art store into some opportunities for individual instruction or countless other things that would let her indulge deeply in the things that truly matter to her. Instead, she works at Home Depot in complete drudgery so that she can have an almost-new car sit in her driveway five days a week.

For most of us, it’s not as clear cut, but we often are beholden to things we somewhat want (like a shiny new car) over the things that fuel the passionate fires in our belly (like painting). Figure out what those real fires are and direct as much as you possibly can towards fueling them. It’s a lot easier to drive a 1987 Honda every day to a place you’re passionate about than a 2005 Prius to a job that you hate.

Commit to a large activity that solely benefits someone or something else.
By this, I basically mean volunteer work. Spend some time with any sort of volunteer project, preferably for the benefit of some group that fuels your passion. Perhaps you can spend some time helping out at a soup kitchen or building a Habitat for Humanity house if you sympathize with the poor, or maybe you can start a small volunteer project at a retirement home if you sympathize with the elderly. I know one person who goes to a VA hospital and reads a chapter out of a novel aloud every day.

Spending time helping disadvantaged people shows you quite often how many blessings you actually have in your everyday life. It might seem devastating to you to not get a promotion, but if you spend a day working to help out sick children at a hospital or building a home for an extremely impoverished family, you’ll quickly see how many things you have going for you in your life.

Set one big goal for a year from now, then break it down into bits you can do each day.
One of the most transformative things a person can do with their own life is to set a really big, audacious goal, break it down into small actionable pieces, and then start knocking off those pieces. For example, let’s say that my goal one year from now is to lose fifty pounds. After talking to my doctor, I might realize that the way to do this is to get twenty minutes of exercise a day and to improve my diet. Thus, I set three tiny goals for every single day: do a twenty minute exercise session, eat more vegetables than anything else, and keep my daily fat intake below 50 grams on any given day. These are my goals, every single day, and I literally write them down everywhere I go.

Over time, each of these little steps contributes to that big goal. The pounds slowly slip away and before I know it, those fifty pounds are gone. That’s a huge milestone, a huge goal set that I’ve reached. Sure, it’s a vast improvement for my health, but the real power of it is that I’ve reached a big, monstrously audacious goal – and I did it myself.

Set a big old goal for yourself for the next year, one that you can achieve through your own actions, then set daily goals to push you slowly each day. Along the way, you’ll not only achieve something big but learn patience – and other things about yourself as well.

Never stop.
You might try everything else in this entire article and find that none of them really work for you. Or, you might find that only one or two work and the rest are rubbish. Never use that as an excuse to not bother to grow as a person. No matter what, seek out things that challenge the fundamentals of what you believe, both about yourself and others. You’ll either reinforce your deeply-held ideas or you’ll discover that perhaps they weren’t as perfect as you believed they were – and both things are incredibly valuable.

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.

If this article seems to be too much about “basic life skills” for your tastes, stop for a moment and think about people you’ve met who put little or no effort into their personal appearance. Think of people with bad breath or greasy hair and how your opinion of them subtly changed when you noticed these things. This advice is primarily for those people, but also as a reminder to everyone that the small efforts of personal appearance are tiny investments that do pay off.

Personal appearance is one of those subtle things that’s difficult to quantify. Mostly, it’s a collection of a lot of small investments of time and effort that add up to a slight but noticeable tweak in how people think of you. The difference is real, and over time these small differences in a lot of interactions and events can really add up. Keeping clean and keeping up a good appearance are also great ways to simply feel good – I know for me personally, few things make me feel better than a hot, soaking shower. Even better, personal appearance is something that you can maximize – or at least significantly improve – with just a bit of effort. Here are a bevy of little steps you should be taking to maximize the value of your personal appearance, from the obvious to the subtle.

Maintain a daily hygiene schedule.
For some people, setting aside time each and every day for basic personal hygiene is a challenge. They’re wrapped up in work, super-involved with their families, and have too many things going on, so they’ll just skip an evening shower and make things look all right in the morning, or they’ll simply fall into bed without thinking about it and then get up so late in the morning that they have to bolt out the door to start taking charge of their responsibilities.

Hygiene is important. Schedule some time each day to take care of things. I usually do my hygiene tasks the moment I wake up, and I have a litany of things that I go through as part of the routine. If you don’t have an established routine that is simply a fundamental part of your day, start one. Literally make a list of things to do and do them every day. That time you invest will pay off in the long run because you’ll be constantly providing a subtle positive cue to others about yourself – and you’ll feel better, too.

Take a bath or shower and clean thoroughly.
When I was in school, I bathed in a shared shower situation with a lot of other people and I witnessed people standing under the shower for a few minutes, flopping a bit of soap lather on themselves, rinsing it off, and getting out. If that sounds like your average shower, you need to start scrubbing a bit more. Lather up a washcloth with a lot of soap and use it to scrub down all of your body. Rub vigorously everywhere, then rinse. If the place produces significant odor, do it two or three times. Trust me – at the end of the day, this will leave you feeling much fresher than if you just take an ultra-quickie shower.

Don’t use antibacterial soap.
Antibacterial soap might kill off some of the bacteria on your skin, but that’s bad for two reasons. First of all, it lowers your own resistance to a variety of bacteria, making you more susceptible to bacteria-borne illness. Second, if a soap kills off 99.9% of bacteria, the 0.1% that’s left is going to be resistant to that soap and will thrive. In the words of Dr. Stuart Levy, a microbiologist at Tufts University: “Dousing everything we touch with antibacterial soaps and taking antibiotic medications at the first sign of a cold can upset the natural balance of microorganisms in and around us, leaving behind only the superbugs.” Use some quality soap, but don’t use antibacterial soap – it has no real benefit and may in fact make you sick over the long haul.

Brush your teeth, floss, and get dental checkups.
One of the first things I notice about a person is whether their breath smells badly. For some people, this is a medical condition; for others, it’s a side effect of too much garlic. Either way, you can go a long way towards preventing it by practicing good oral hygiene. Brush your teeth every day and floss them, too. Also, visit the dentist sometimes to make sure your teeth are still in good shape.

A clean mouth and clean teeth give you a nice smile and fresh breath, both of which are major positives for one’s personal appearance. It just takes a good scrubbing in the morning to cause it, so don’t skip over brushing your teeth.

Get dental or orthodontic work, if necessary.
When my “adult” teeth first came in, several of the front ones came in highly crooked and it left me feeling very self-conscious. I avoided smiling and looked rather surly much of the time, and when I would occasionally flash my teeth, the inside of my mouth looked like a mangled train wreck. Not pretty, and not good for my social interactions. Thankfully, my father’s health insurance was able to cover braces for these and, after the correction, my teeth appear perfectly straight.

Having your teeth fixed is a wonderful investment. Many health care plans will cover dental corrections, so if you have any issues with your teeth, mention them to your dentist or seek out an orthodontist. Most dental corrections are simple and very cost effective investments for improving your personal appearance, so seek them out.

Use deodorant.
A scentless odor-blocking deodorant, preferably one that does an effective job of absorbing moisture, can do wonders for both minimizing any potential body odor and for keeping any moisture from appearing on your clothing. Most deodorants work pretty well for the average person – don’t overthink it, just apply it.

Keep your hair clean and trimmed evenly, at the very least.
Again, a fairly obvious tip: keep your hair clean, combed, and trimmed. I like to keep my hair very short – it’s easy to make it look professional and very easy to keep clean. In fact, for quite a while, I kept it at stubble length – it looked good and was almost no maintenance at all.

The important thing is to keep it clean. Clean hair, even if it’s a bit disheveled or not cut perfectly, does wonders for a person’s appearance. When you take a shower or bath, give your hair a thorough scrubbing.

Shave, or keep your beard trimmed.
Almost every guy in America goes through a beard phase – some for longer than others. I was no exception. For a few years, I had a strong lumberjack look going. My beard grows in very thick, so it was hard to even keep trimmed well and now I have to shave twice a day to keep a clean-shaven appearance.

Why bother? Again, it’s a subtle symbol of your attention to detail. An unshaven face on most males looks pretty unkempt and unprofessional and gives off subtle signs of “I don’t care.”

Minimize body artwork unless it clearly doesn’t matter or is beneficial to your career.
Personally, I’m all in favor of people expressing themselves through body art. While I’ve personally never utilized any, both of my brothers have a wide assortment of body art and some of it is simply stunning. However, I’ve personally witnessed this body art causing a social stigma for my middle brother, who has several pieces visibly evident beyond his clothing. He’s been avoided on the street, passed over for work promotions, and faced various subtle social stigmas because of the art.

If you choose to have body art, be aware that for many people, such art is in fact a social stigma and that you will suffer for it in various ways, both subtle and non-subtle. In some careers and some social strata, body art is inconsequential or even encouraged, but this is far from true for all careers and all social strata. In a nutshell, be very careful of the long-term consequences if you are considering some form of permanent body art.

Dress well, usually a touch above what is considered the norm.
Observe what the standard dress code is in your workplace, then strive to dress just a slight notch better than that. Not enough so that you stick out, but enough so that you look very crisp and fresh compared to the rest of the crowd. If everyone wears t-shirts and blue jeans in a work environment, wear ones that are crisp and clean. If you’re in a highly casual office environment, stick to business casual. If everyone wears dress shirts and Dockers, keep your clothes clean and pressed and bust out a tie on occasion.

Of course, this doesn’t work in all work cultures. At a minimum, make sure what you’re wearing is clean and presentable, though, as people will visit and draw a number of conclusions based on your appearance – a bunch of grungy guys in cubicle-land doesn’t instill heavy confidence in the higher-ups.

Greet everyone you meet, shake hands, smile, and willingly engage in conversation.
Once a day or so, I make the rounds to all of the offices and cubicles near where I work, greeting everyone and saying hello. As a result, I have a fairly solid relationship with everyone nearby. Whenever someone new comes into the office, I greet them and shake their hands firmly.

All of this only takes a few moments, but it creates a very positive impression of you in a social sense, particularly when combined with good hygiene and good appearance. It only takes a few greetings from a well-scrubbed person to develop some level of positive feelings towards that person, and that’s something that’s always good to have in your corner.

Here’s the bottom line: keep yourself clean and presentable, dress well, and interact positively with others. It takes time, effort, and a bit of money to pull that off, but if you do, you’ll create an overall positive impression of yourself with everyone you interact with, and that positive impression is something very, very valuable to have.

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.

As I sit down to write about the value of investing in your own self-confidence, I keep picturing one of my closest friends. She’s got a lot going for her, but she often finds reasons to think that she’s a bad and/or unworthy person and she often doesn’t have the self-confidence to step up and grab the ring, even though her talents have entitled her to it.

I’m introverted, but I’m very lucky to have never really doubted myself. I’m pretty confident in my own abilities and thoughts and I rarely hesitate to express them. Yet, at times, I fall prey to a lack of self-confidence myself – things move towards a topic that I don’t know anything about, for example.

Here are some tactics to improve your self-confidence no matter what’s happening around you.

Recognize the things that make you feel less confident and work on them.
For most people, there are specific occasions where one’s self-confidence drains to an absolute minimum. You feel completely unworthy of being in a particular situation and you quite often shrink away – or, at the very least, fail to step up when the opportunity is there for you.

Ask yourself why you don’t step up to the plate, and keep asking “why” until you get a concrete answer. What is the root cause of your lack of self-confidence? For a lot of people, it’s something that can usually be dug out with some introspection. For others, it may require some professional help – a therapist, perhaps. The first step, though, is sitting down and thinking about the situation where your self-confidence failed you, then asking “why” over and over again until you hit something concrete.

Take action on that concrete thing that you discovered. Once you’ve found a specific, concrete thing that diminishes your self-confidence, work on improving it. If you’re self-conscious because of your weight, work on improving your diet and exercise. If you’re self-conscious because of your appearance, practice better hygiene and dress better. If you’re self-conscious because you lack knowledge or technical skill, use your spare time to hit the books. Be proactive and know you’re doing what needs to be done to solve the problem.

Identify your successes – and keep them in mind.
At the other end of the spectrum is the success that you’ve experienced in life. These successes are usually the result of an application of your natural abilities – abilities which you have that are quite strong and quite valuable.

Think about the greatest successes you’ve achieved. Make a list of them. What are the five things that you’ve worked for and accomplished that were the greatest successes? Maybe you completed your college education – or maybe you finally passed organic chemistry. Maybe you were given an award at work for persistence and diligence – or maybe you nailed a long-desired promotion. Make this list and keep it with you.

Recognize that these successes were the result of a lot of positive attributes that you possess. The items on that list were the result of talents and skills that you possess. Persistence. Intelligence. Studiousness. See if you can identify a few traits for each one that helped push you over the edge. These are strong attributes that you already have.

Maximize the focus on the things you know you’re good at.
Once you’ve figured out what your traits are that you’re strong in, the next step is to find activities that maximize those strengths. If you’re a patient person, long-term projects are great. If you’re very good at graphic design, gravitate towards those projects. At the same time, try to minimize projects that don’t match well with your strengths – for example, if you’re terrible at organizing papers, look hard for ways to minimize paperwork.

Working on the things you’re good at will not only hone your skills, but it will improve your confidence. You’ll begin to feel that, yes, you can contribute things of value to society and to your workplace. If you continually fuel that feeling, your confidence will begin to slowly build up and even start to spread to areas where you’re not as blessed with natural gifts.

Minimizing the things you’re bad at reduces the impact that negative confidence can have on you. Reducing the negatives can also be a boost to you. For most of us, there are job tasks that we do that make us feel much less confident. Find ways to minimize your exposure to these tasks at the same time that you’re maximizing your exposure to other tasks.

So, take action! Go talk to your supervisor and suggest that you focus more on the tasks that your skills point you towards and less on the ones that your skills don’t support. It won’t take long for you to feel a big new surge of confidence about your place in the workplace. At that point, start tackling some of the tasks that you don’t feel as confident about. You’ll find that you address them with a whole new light.

Surround yourself with people that build you up, not tear you down.
For a period of time in my life, I had a group of friends that were extremely negative about everything. They were critical of everything outside of the group and were often quite negative towards other members of the group as well. I would often enjoy the sarcasm in the moment, but later on, I would generally feel pretty awful about myself. The best thing I’ve probably ever done in my life is to move on from that circle of friends.

If people in your life only seem to bring you down or always seem to express a lot of negativity and bile, create some separation. Reduce your exposure to the negative people in your life. If your current social circle is leaving you feeling negative, withdraw a bit and see if you can find other sources for socialization. I’ve done this multiple times in my own life, actually.

At the same time, if someone in your life is often very positive and fills you with a positive feeling as well, spend more time with that person. My current circle of close friends and family all support me in a positive fashion. They’d do about anything for me and I for them. While my trusted circle isn’t very big, it is very valuable and positive and I attribute a lot of the success I have in life to their constant support.

Stick to your core principles and values.
Many people, at some point in their lives, face a personal dilemma. Do I do what others are suggesting that I do, which involves abandoning some of my principles, or do I make the choice that’s in line with my own values? Almost every time, the choice that involves abandoning your values is the choice that will leave you feeling far worse about yourself and your confidence in the choices you make.

If you’re about to do something that is setting off warning bells and flashing lights for you, strongly reconsider that choice. Just step back for a bit and think about why you’re making that decision. If those reasons are deeply disconcerting to you, don’t go forward with it.

Trust your heart over your mind. I’ve found over and over again in my life that when it comes to the root of a decision, my heart is usually guiding me the right way. My mind serves to clear the path for my heart. For example, when I stood at the precipice of the decision to quit my job, my heart was telling me to leap while my mind said, “No!” I decided to trust my heart, and then I let my mind do as much securing and preparation for that leap as it possibly could. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made, and it filled me with a lot of confidence that it was the right decision once I made it.

If you don’t know, say so.
This is a common self-confidence destroyer: someone will ask a question, you give an answer you’re completely unsure about, and you’re left afterwards feeling as though you did something wrong. At one of my previous jobs, I was in a position where I had to do this regularly, and by the time I finally left, I felt completely worthless.

Think about it from the audience perspective. Saying “I don’t know” is much more clear and confident than delivering a factually incorrect answer. Even if it’s an answer that reveals the limits of your knowledge, it also reveals that you’re committed to accuracy, that you’re honest, and that you’re not going to load someone up with a nonsense answer.

Offer to figure out the correct facts and deliver them later. If someone asks a question and you don’t know, it’s always better to offer to look up the answer and deliver that answer to the person. Not only will it educate you, but it will give you an opportunity to show that you follow through in what you say.

Act confident, even if you’re not.
If all else fails, putting on an appearance of confidence helps you feel more confident. Try the following tips.

Sit up straight in meetings. Don’t look bored – look attentive. Take notes on what’s being said.

Shake hands firmly. Look people in the eye when they talk, but don’t stare at them. Do the same when delivering an answer. Make eye contact with as many people as you can without being obvious about it.

Be assertive in your answers. If you know the answer, just deliver it firmly. If you don’t know, state that you’re unsure but do it firmly.

Most of all, notice when you do things that don’t exude confidence and try to correct them. If you’re slouching, don’t slouch. If you’re getting bored, start writing something down that will engage your mind. If you’re offered a handshake, take it and shake it firmly – if you’re not offered one, offer your hand. These are signs that you are confident – and when people start reacting to you as though you have confidence, your own true confidence will grow.

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.

Just a week ago, I touted the benefits of investing in yourself via exercise, and it met with a lot of interesting discussion, including the astute point that exercise and diet are two halves of the same coin when it comes to managing your short-term and long-term health.

It’s true: the food you eat every day has a profound effect on your long term health. High-calorie and high-fat foods might be convenient now, but that time you save right now is taken away from you at the end of your life as a result of unhealthy eating. Even more so, bad eating reduces the quality of your daily life even now in your healthy years. It’s easy to witness this effect – try eating very healthy for a few days and you’ll notice a significant change in how you feel. I often notice it after just one meal – a very healthy breakfast (oatmeal and/or fresh fruits) makes a huge difference for me.

I’m not talking about dieting for weight loss here – I’m talking about eating well for a lifetime of good health. Such eating usually results in weight loss, especially as you transition to it from less healthy eating, but the best way to invest in yourself with your diet is to eat naturally nutritious foods in a balanced fashion.

But what is a nutritious diet? This concept has been heavily marketed over the last decade or so, often to the point that it’s hard for the average consumer to separate fact from perception. I’ve read a lot of books related to food over the last several years (and I’ve discussed a few on here, including In Defense of Food and Volumetrics) and I’ve found that time and time again, a few basic principles are all you really need to cover your bases for a healthy diet.

Prepare more food at home.
At a restaurant of any kind, you’re relying on the food preparers to make selections for you and their primary interest is providing a tasty meal at a fair cost (with different levels of taste and cost depending on the establishment). Most restaurants aren’t really concerned in the least about the long-term health implications of the food you eat – they’re mostly just concerned that it’s tasty and that it pleases you in the short term.

When you prepare food at home, you have more control over the stuff you put into your body. You can make choices that lead towards a healthier lifestyle. When you make pasta, you can substitute in whole wheat – or even make some of your own. You can choose from a wide variety of spaghetti sauces, or else boil up some tomatoes yourself. You can buy a cheap loaf of bread, an artisan loaf, or make one yourself from just a handful of ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, and yeast).

Here are some tips if you’re afraid to make that leap.

Get a cookbook that focuses on teaching technique with a gentle hand. My favorite cookbook along these lines is Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. If there’s something basic that I’m unfamiliar with, this is the book I turn to for tips on getting started. Better yet, Bittman’s recipes tend to lean toward the healthy side (for the most part) and are quite simple to follow.

At first, focus on simple stuff that you’ll find tasty. Don’t try to make something intriguing but nearly impossible right off the bat. Also, don’t decide that the day you’re going to start cooking at home is the day you’re going vegan. Start off making comfort foods, even if they’re not the most healthy dishes you can make, and choose ones that aren’t overly complex. For me, spaghetti with a tomato sauce is the perfect meal for people just starting to cook at home – it’s very simple to prepare in its basic form, most of the stuff you’ll need is easy to acquire, and when you want to start kicking it up in complexity and healthiness (making sauce or pasta or breadsticks from scratch), the basic form is very adaptable.

Eat more vegetables, especially leafy ones.
Our bodies are designed to eat more fruits and vegetables than meat. This harkens back to our hunter-gatherer days, where our diets would consist of mostly gathered fruits, nuts, and vegetables and an occasional large helping of meat when a hunt would be successful. Millions of years of adaptation attuned our biochemistry to this – only in the last few hundred years has our diet changed significantly from that basic structure.

Eat a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, especially fresh ones. Try everything. You’ll find some you like and some you don’t – that’s okay. Just make sure you’re not eating the same vegetable over and over or it will get boring (and it’s not particularly the most healthy choice, either). You’ll also find some stuff that surprises you – my parents both hated okra and so I never tried it until I was in my mid-twenties, when I discovered that I quite liked it.

Eat at least one salad a day. I really, really enjoy a basic salad (lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots, etc.) with a bit of ranch or blue cheese dressing on it. It’s a very healthy thing to eat, very easy to prepare, and not very expensive, either. We eat one as part of our evening meal almost every night and I occasionally eat one as my lunch, too.

Eat a larger portion of vegetables than meat at any given meal. It’s not very fair to give an exact amount for each one because there are so many variables, but you can rarely go wrong with simply making sure there are more vegetables on your plate than there is meat. Keep that as a constant rule of thumb and you’ll be doing fine.

Avoid heavily processed foods.
Again, the logic for this harkens back to the foods that our bodies are biochemically adapted to eat. We’re made to eat the nutrients found in fresh foods, not the ones found in heavily processed foods. Here are a few things to keep your eye out for.

High-fructose corn syrup appears in a lot of foods. It’s a sugar substitute in many industrial foods because it’s cheaper, easy to blend, and leads to a long shelf life. Because of these properties, HFCS appears in abundance in expected foods and even pops up in significant quantities in food you wouldn’t expect. The consequence of this is that it raises your sweetener intake significantly – and increased sugar intake is not a good thing. You’re far better off just sticking with naturally-occurring sugars – if you need a sugar fix, eat an orange or a banana and avoid foods with HFCS.

Startling health claims are usually a sure sign that a food has been significantly altered in an industrial process, quite often with additives of some sort that are very hard to figure out from the label. Don’t buy a processed food because it has plant sterols added to it – just go eat a vegetable instead.

A large number of ingredients that you can’t easily identify is another sign of serious processing. Again, staple foods have all of the nutritional value that a person needs, so why would you consume this stuff, especially if you don’t know what it is? When you buy a food, check the ingredients label and if you start seeing a lot of stuff you don’t know, reconsider putting it into your body unless you’ve done the research on this stuff.

Buy foods from people who care about food quality.
The best way to buy food is to buy it from other people: people you can talk to and can tell you how it was made or grown or produced. Around here, I’m a big fan of the local Picket Fences Creamery. They’re local, give public tours pretty much whenever you want, maintain a blog, have “Sample Sundays” where you can stop by and try lots of the things they make, and generally wear their passion for what they do on their sleeve. They make a quality product out in the open that I can witness and know what goes into the food.

Buy local. Whenever you have a chance, buy your food from a local source, particularly one where you can literally visit the place where the food came from and follow it every step along the way. This way, you know exactly what’s in that food. You can carry that even further and have a garden yourself.

Attend a farmer’s market. I love our local farmers market – I get a lot of produce there during the right season and I’ve even considered selling something there a few times. Here are some tips for newcomers – the best advice I can give is to just go, see what’s there, and talk to people. You might even consider getting involved in a co-op, where you pay for a share of a farm and in exchange they deliver vegetables to you on a regular basis.

Set time aside for meals if at all possible, and avoid eating on the run.
One of the true highlights of my day is dinner with my family. We all sit around the dinner table – even my six month old daughter in her high chair – and we eat together with conversation. My wife and I talk about politics and current events, my son tells us about his day’s adventures at daycare (usually involving a blue truck), and my daughter usually passes around a lot of smiles and gurgles at everyone.

Taking the time to devote to food is not only spiritually fulfilling, but it can be beneficial to your diet as well.

Never eat alone. Dinner conversation is the single best way to keep you from bolting down your food. Get engaged in the conversation and eat the meal slowly – you’ll find yourself enjoying the food more and not eating as much of it.

If you must eat on the road, avoid places where they bring the food directly to your car. It’s a pretty safe rule of thumb that food preparation that is put directly into your car is probably not the healthiest choice to make. If you do have to eat on the run, bring something from home or stop at a grocery store to get something remotely healthy. A drive-thru is a dangerous place for your health, no matter how yummy it is.

In a nutshell, I think Michael Pollan nails it when he says “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Live by that and you’ll be all right.