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.

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.

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)!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most of the time, I’m a reasonably happy and content person. I feel upbeat about my own life and I feel in touch with the world around me. Sure, I occasionally dive into melancholic moods, but compared to my mental state several years ago, things are going incredibly well for me.

It’s not easy, though. I spend time virtually every day keeping my mind in good shape and keeping my spiritual self – that sense of connecting with things I don’t fully understand – in shape, too. Without proper care and feeding – without a little regular time investment – it’s easy to watch these areas of your life wear down, leaving you feeling constantly exhausted, unhappy, and feeling rather empty on the inside.

Obviously, one big part of this puzzle is to eat well and to engage in exercise, two specific areas that will be addressed in other essays on investing in yourself. Another one may actually be proper care for psychological ailments – if you feel you need such help, getting that help can be a profound investment of your time and money. Beyond that, here are some things that you can do to shore up your mental and spiritual health.

Pray and/or meditate every day
Just try this, right now. Close your eyes, then breathe in deeply, hold it for about a second, breathe out completely, hold that for about a second, and repeat it ten times. While you’re doing it, concentrate on letting every muscle in your body relax. If you need to think about something else, try to mentally return the most peaceful experience you’ve ever had in your life.

Got it? That’s meditation in a nutshell, albeit a one minute taste of it. I spend twenty minutes or so each day doing this, usually in conjunction with stretching and basic yoga. I usually do it each day right after work, in a quiet part of my home. Prayer can also be a part of this if you choose. Spend some of your time being thankful for the blessings in your life, and use the relaxation of a meditative state to recharge yourself mentally and spiritually. Here are a few tips to help you get into the groove.

Put aside a bit of time each day to pray or meditate. It can be in conjunction with other activities – I do mine along with stretching, for example, and one of my closest friends does a short meditation and prayer each day in the shower. Just clear your mind of the mental clutter of the moment and allow yourself to unwind.

Try several basic meditative techniques until you find one that works for you. There are countless different techniques out there to help you meditate. Try using Google to find a few to try out. If it seems pointless and doesn’t work for you, throw it out and try another. Eventually, you’ll find something that clicks with you.

Accompany it with a spiritual reading to meditate on and/or some music. Often, I start meditating by reading a Bible verse aloud, something to give me a bit of focus as I meditate/pray. Try reading a short snippet from any work that is powerful in your life. Another useful thing to try is to select some ambient music to play softly while doing it – I find Boards of Canada to be very good for both meditation and any activity I do that requires mental concentration – their album The Campfire Headphase works very well for me.

Get adequate sleep
This is a particular challenge for me, as I tend to overstuff my days with activities. Sleep tends to be the biggest thing that I shortchange, and I sometimes suffer for it, feeling deeply worn down and mentally not engaged with the things I should be engaged with. If I’m sitting around yawning and thinking about sleep, I might as well be sleeping.

Take a power nap. Set aside a small period of time during the day to take a nap – thirty minutes should do it. This is a technique that I often have a hard time executing, but one of my coworkers closes his office every day and takes a thirty minute nap on the floor with the lights off – when he awakens, he’s like a new person.

Sleep extra on weekend nights. I tend to use my weekends to recharge from an overpacked week, and one aspect of this is sleeping extra on weekends. I’ll sleep as much as four hours more on a weekend night than a weeknight, and it makes a huge difference for me.

Fall asleep faster. I do this by organizing my evenings carefully. I’ll do things that require mental effort until I notice that I’m not as mentally sharp as I should be. Then, I’ll fill the next hour with mindless physical tasks – vacuuming, doing dishes, doing laundry, and so on. When I reach the point of genuine tiredness, where it’s challenging to actually stay awake, then I go to bed and I usually fall asleep in a minute or two. Alternately, if I went to sleep earlier, I’d just toss and turn in bed for a while, read something, toss and turn some more, and maybe get a half an hour of additional sleep out of the deal – not worth it.

Eliminate burdens that are wearing you down
As most of you know, the number of responsibilities I have on my plate are many. I often have to come up with creative ways to manage my time – writing in the early morning hours (as I type this, it’s 4:25 AM, for instance), buying groceries during my lunch break at work, mastering the art of balancing an infant while reloading the dryer, and so on. While I’ve been able to juggle everything effectively for a while, it can be a major mental load at times, and I am prepared to make some changes if I feel that I’m becoming overwhelmed. Here are some tactics for discovering things to cut out of your life.

Make a master list of all of the responsibilities in your life. Sit down and list every significant responsibility in your life. Your work commitments. Your family commitments. Your social commitments. Your community commitments. Just write them all down in one place, all of the things that are a burden in your life. You can make it highly detailed or just list the big things – I find, though, that the more items you list, the better off you are for what you can do with the list.

Rank them by importance. I usually split them into five groups ranking from absolutely essential (time with my family) to trivial (scooping the sidewalk or mowing the grass). This is mostly to gauge what’s really important to me – and what’s really not. Some honesty is vital here – I have some responsibilities that I should view as more important than I actually do, for instance.

Consider eliminating the bottom few. When you’re done, start from the bottom and look for ways to eliminate them. Can you hire someone to mow the yard or scoop the snow? Can you perhaps step down from that useless committee? Maybe you can cut out the sports booster activities in the coming year. Trimming away some of the least important things leaves you room to breathe – and perhaps room to grow in other areas.

Focus on your personal positives, not your negatives
Many people find themselves in a downward spiral of self-reinforced failure. They come to believe that they’ll never succeed at anything. This belief then influences their behavior and then, when this failure finally comes to pass, they use it as evidence that they are a failure. This self-reinforcement leads to a hugely negative self-image and a very strong likelihood that success will never happen in a person’s life. I’ve witnessed some variation on this in a lot of different people in my life and I’ve also witnessed that the best way to get out of it is through some positive reinforcement.

Consider the things that you do well. I have a friend named Tori, who sometimes comments on this blog. She’s the type of person who has a lot going for her, but she tends to dwell on the negatives. She’s a better writer than I am, for starters, and her ability to recall facts is probably the best I’ve seen. She’s also very good at lifting the spirits of others, she’s great at seeing the positive aspects in other people, and she’s one of the most patient people I’ve ever met. Yet, quite often, I’ve seen her drowning because she looks at her “bad” traits, when there are so many good ones to look at.

If you have a hard time thinking of your positive traits, talk to a friend about them. See what your friends view as your most positive traits. You might be surprised at what they say – I’ve heard friends describe traits in me that I would have never seen on my own.

Once you’ve really got a grip on what’s good about you, choose ways to spend your time that accentuate those positives. Tori, who I mentioned above, would probably be the best person I’ve ever met to write a pop culture blog of some sort – she’s got the writing skill, the knowledge base, and the right attitude and humor to really make that kind of thing work. Perhaps she should adopt something like that as a hobby, as it could naturally lift her spirits by letting her use her good traits and minimizing the traits she views as “bad.”

Set tiny goals each day
A friend of mine recently told me that she feels as though she accomplishes nothing in her life. That’s a shame, because almost everyone accomplishes far more than they ever realize. Here are some tactics to raise your awareness of the many things that you can accomplish in a day.

Set some microgoals for the day. I do this almost every day. I usually do something along the lines of the prep card idea, where I actually write down three or so things that I will do today, and two things that I won’t do. It’s simple stuff, but stuff that feels like an accomplishment at the end of the day, whether it be something that I actively do or a triumph of willpower. For example, you might write down that you’ll stop at the library today and finally get some books on a topic you’ve been wanting to follow up on, and you won’t eat any fast food today. At the end of the day, if you made that library stop and the willpower held out, you accomplished some goals today.

If you feel out of touch with your spiritual side, try to explore it in some fashion each day. Make it your goal to pray every day, or to learn more about a spiritual topic, or to read a small amount of scripture. Just touch base with it every day and you’ll eventually feel more in touch with your spiritual side.

Engage in regular mental exercise
Regular mental exercises are a great way to improve your concentration skills as well as your ability to solve problems. There are countless ways to approach this, but doing a somewhat regular series of mental exercises can really pay off. Here are some of my favorite web resources for mental elasticity.

WebSudoku is a brilliant way to solve sudoku puzzles at your convenience. Solve them online, or print off a handful to do later if you wish.

The New York Times crossword is another good challenge, particularly for word-oriented people. I enjoy solving them in pen, meaning I’m not allowed to erase and can’t make a mistake – it adds to the challenge and the focus I need.

Bridge, however, is my favorite mental game. It’s an incredibly engaging card game – don’t let a bit of terminology scare you off. Once you learn to play, it’s a brilliant way to learn to focus and make predictions. Not only does it help with mental acuity, it can also be a strong social game as well.

Take some time off
If you’re simply mentally and spiritually exhausted and the above solutions don’t help, it’s probably time for a recharge. Take some time off from your responsibilities – schedule a lengthy vacation from work and get in touch with other aspects of your life. Time off is as much an investment in yourself as time at work is – they both pay great dividends in different ways, and a healthy life contains some of both.

The biggest cost in my grandmother’s life right now is health care. She spent most of her life not getting adequate exercise – most of her jobs involved clerical work and she was always more content to be standing in the kitchen making lasagna than getting out of the house and going for a brisk walk.

Whenever I see her gasping for oxygen, I’m reminded that I could easily be in the same spot. Right now, I have the advantage of youth, but that advantage is slowly slipping away. I don’t have any trouble doing almost any activity I want to do right now, but I do get out of breath when I’m unloading heavy boxes or moving furniture or other tasks that should be relatively easy. Even now, I can see some slippage – I could play basketball for an hour without scarcely pausing for a breath, but not anymore – a ten minute pickup game leaves me wheezing.

My health and vitality are things that I don’t want to slip away from me as I age, so over the last year I’ve been working hard to invest in myself by getting better exercise – and I’ve found that it’s one of the best investments of time and money that I could possibly make. I feel better each day. I have more energy to do the things that I want to do and need to do – like keep The Simple Dollar updated, for example. Even better, I know that I’m adding years to my life – and years of enjoyable life later on when I’m free from the shackles of the day-to-day work grind.

I’m not talking about peak performance or getting into killer shape. I’m talking about maintaining a basic level of physical fitness that can extend your life, reduce your health care costs, engage in more strenuous activities now, and enjoy reasonable health during your later years. Plus, it can help you to both look better and feel better every day, improving both your outward appearance and your inward sensibilities. Here are some basic steps to take.

Talk to your doctor
Before you begin any significant increase in your regular activity level, it’s useful to schedule a routine checkup with your doctor, just in case. If you’re suffering from an ailment that might hinder significant exercise, or you have some sort of condition that needs to be noted before you start, a doctor’s visit before you start upgrading your activity level can be a real help.

Be sure to lay out your plans and any concerns you have with your doctor. If the doctor is worth their salt, your concerns will be listened to and addressed. You’ll likely also get some advice on what you can realistically expect and what your safe limits should be – it’s always useful to get your heart racing just a little, but for many people (especially those out of shape), suddenly jumping into triathlon-style training wouldn’t be good at all.

I’ll admit to being partial – my physician is a wonderful person who genuinely cares about the health of everyone who visits him. I’ve never been as pleased with a doctor in my life as I am with my current physician.

Learn how to stretch and do basic yoga
The most basic exercise that most people should do isn’t even something that people think of as exercise. Stretching is a major piece of the foundation of health for a number of reasons: it improves flexibility, it makes other exercises easier, it improves range of movement, it reduces muscle tension, it improves circulation (which directly relates to improved energy levels), and it improves muscular coordination. Better yet, all stretching costs is a bit of time – you don’t need any equipment (other than maybe a clock) to do it. Here’s how to get started.

Start off with some basic stretches. A few times a week, run through a small routine of simple stretches just to see how it works for you – you can do it in about fifteen minutes. Here’s an excellent battery of very basic stretches. What I’ve found with stretching in my own experiences is that the first time is sort of painful, the next few times after that leave you feeling incredible, and the times after that just feel good. I’ve also found that playing some quiet music while doing this helps – something in the background that’s soothing but not distracting.

Move on to some simple yoga poses. Once you’ve done several sessions of stretching, you’ll find that your flexibility has increased quite a bit and your energy level is higher, too. That’s the perfect time to move on to yoga, which is basically a mix of stretching, isometric exercises (ones where you effectively use your own body as a weight), and meditation. Try out some of the basic positions – I’ve never really done anything that isn’t listed on this page.

I often incorporate stretches and yoga into my meditation routines. I use the time I’m stretching to relax my mind as well and I usually finish not only feeling physically refreshed, but mentally refreshed, too. For many people, spending twenty minutes stretching and meditating seems like a poor use of time, but when it raises your energy level and mental level so much, it’s well worth it.

Walk
Walking is another simple exercise that can be used to build up basic health. Even better, you can get a lot of this exercise in your daily life and supplement it with dedicated time for walking each day. You can combine a short walking period (fifteen minutes) with little moves like parking on the far end of the parking lot in order to slowly improve your muscular and cardiovascular health without turning it into a major distraction. Here are some tips for getting started.

Get good running shoes and a pedometer. One major challenge when you begin to increase your levels of walking is sore feet – most shoes simply aren’t designed for a lot of walking. Try getting a pair of shoes intended for walking/running and using them when you’re going to be doing it for exercise. Even more important: get a pedometer so you can count your steps. I personally use the Omron HJ-720 because it stores my daily stepping totals and I can easily extract it to my PC for easy record keeping.

Get a baseline before you do anything else. When you get a pedometer, don’t immediately start in on the exercising. Just keep it in your pocket for a week and do things normally so that you can get a baseline of how many steps you take in an average day. This will help guide you as you define what your goals for walking will be and also make sure that you don’t set an unrealistic goal right off the bat.

Use that baseline as your first daily goal. Take all of those daily counts and use them to define a daily goal. For me, I found success in using the first “even thousand” number above my highest normal day’s walking count to start with. So, if my highest normal day involved 3,800 steps, then I defined a daily goal of 4,000 steps as a minimum. This usually meant that I would have to walk 1,000 steps extra to make sure I broke that goal every single day. Once that became routine (a week or two), I kept upping my goal, with the long-term goal of eventually reaching 10,000 or more steps in a day.

Make a one month commitment
Most people who begin exercise get frustrated when they don’t see any benefits after a week of consistent work and they abandon their plans (or at least begin slacking off). A week is far too short of a time to see any noticeable changes, and even after a month your biggest changes will be in how you feel, not in your appearance. When you start, make a minimum of a one month commitment to exercising or else you’re just wasting time.

Start at the beginning of the month. This will help you keep your timeframe in mind throughout the month – you can clearly see the beginning date and the ending date. It’s a nice, constrained time for you to get started on things.

Define an exercise schedule. Literally list the activities you’ll do each day – and follow it. Mix it up, too, so that it doesn’t get boring. I usually stretch and do yoga every day, but I try doing a variety of things throughout a given week so that it doesn’t get too repetitious.

Take measurements only at the start and the end of the month. If you’re trying to lose weight via exercise or you’re gauging things by how out of breath you are after running around the block, do this measurement once at the start of the month, then don’t do it again until the end of the month. This gives you time to build up some real progress so that you can clearly see that things are working well.

Set clear and concrete goals based on the exercise
When I first attempted to shed some pounds, I set a target weight as a goal – and I was continually frustrated as I repeatedly failed to reach the goal. It took me a while to realize that I was setting the wrong goals. I was setting goals that were only partially controlled by exercising and expecting that exercising would do the trick. A much better approach is to realize that exercise will eventually lead you towards the level of fitness or the target weight you want to reach as long as you’re consistent with it. Here are some tips.

Use specific exercise numbers as goals. Instead of saying, “I want to lose 40 pounds,” instead say, “I want to walk 10,000 steps a day for the next three months.” That way, it’s just a matter of putting forth the effort to exercise, not a question of whether your body chemistry will help you along the way.

Always look upward. Be sure to set goals that aren’t easy for you to reach. If your current exercise seems very easy, try changing your goals around to increase the challenge level. If you can easily walk 10,000 steps in a day, add to that step total or make some of the steps into running or jogging steps.

Celebrate your successes with others. When you achieve a challenging goal, don’t be afraid to be very happy about it. Tell others about your successes and you’ll find that they’ll quickly become a great support for you as you challenge yourself to get into better shape.

Try other exercises
Although walking and stretching are two easy ways to start getting in better shape, there are lots of things you can do without ponying up the expense of a gym membership or expensive equipment – just a time investment. I personally use the exercise ladder as a way to keep motivated. It gives clear directions on what kinds of exercises to do, how many of them to do, and how to tell when you’re ready to keep increasing your exercise level, plus it directly integrates goals into the program. Here are some general tips for expanding your exercise regimen.

Start off below what you think you can handle. That way, you don’t over-exert yourself or accidentally strain something by doing too much at first. Once you’ve got the hang of it, slowly ease upwards until you find a level that’s challenging for you – and then work at that level.

A lot of repetitions with light weights or exercises are better than a few repetitions with heavy weights or exercises. The point is to exercise your muscles, and repetition is the real key to victory. If you’re a beginner, you’ll get more overall benefit out of five sets of ten reps with a ten pound weight than one set of ten reps with a fifty pound weight – it might not maximize your muscle growth, but it will help with overall aerobic health and have a vastly lower chance of muscle damage.

Is a gym membership necessary? For some people, the camaraderie of others exercising or the availability of coaching can really make the difference, but don’t jump in and sign up for a long-term plan. Pay for the shortest plan you can get (even if it’s pricier) and see whether it’s of real use to you. If it is, keep going and sign up for a longer stint – if it’s not, you’ve minimized your expenses.

When I graduated from high school, I was blessed with the opportunity to be the first person in my family to attend college. I had earned a mountain of scholarships, enough to cover four years of tuition, room, and board at a state college, and the total value of this education was an amount that far exceeded my family’s annual income. I went to college without any real concept of what the experience would be. My preconception of the experience was based on popular culture – thus, my perception is that it would basically be a continuation of the high school experience but with substantially less supervision.

What I found out – much later than I should have, actually – is that education isn’t just what you pick up in a classroom. Sure, the classroom education is useful and valuable, but the real opportunity to grow and learn more takes place outside of the classroom. Even more importantly, the person that steps up and takes advantage of all of the educational opportunities to improve puts themselves in a better lifelong position to succeed.

Obviously, this takes some investment. You have to invest time, money, and your own mental energy to make education and cultural literacy work for you. Here are some ways you can invest in your own education, from the obvious to the subtle.

Get a college degree
This is the most obvious method for investing in your own education – but it’s obvious because it works. A college degree opens countless opportunities for you, whether it’s an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, or a Ph. D. The major drawback is that a college degree requires a huge investment in time, money, and mental effort. You can’t just walk down to the corner shop and pick one up – it requires years of continuous effort to acquire it.

Thus, the best way to maximize the value of a degree is to figure out the area you’re passionate about as early as you can – and perhaps you might even find that your passion can’t be followed in a college environment at all. Pay a lot of attention to what you do in your spare time – activities that you find enjoyable that you’re drawn to time and time again. Looking back at my high school years, I see a lot of patterns there that could have pointed me down the road to writing, but I chose to ignore them and go for areas where I believed the “money” was. I wish I hadn’t.

Also, don’t just assume that a degree at an expensive college is the best investment opportunity for you. No one will deny that a degree at Harvard is more valuable than a degree at East Overshoe Tech, but for most schools, the important part is that you achieved the degree at an accredited school. Do your own research and find the best educational value for you – it might be at your local state university or even at your local community college, especially if you don’t have significant resources to invest up front.

Engage in activities that can teach you new things
Most people go through the same routine, day in and day out. They do the same activities each day and rarely put forth the effort to stretch their wings and try new things. However, time and time again, trying something new teaches us quite a bit about the world around us from people (what others believe, how they act, and the realities they face in everyday life, etc.) to ideas and skills (how small businesses handle computer networking, how a soup kitchen prepares food for six hundred people, etc.). Here are a few ways to dabble in potentially educational activities in your community.

Engage in activities outside of your comfort zone. This isn’t a call to go do something illegal or unethical, it’s just a suggestion to find things that you’d never think of doing and give them a try. Go to a community dinner. Go to a speech at your local university. Attend a religious service of a faith you don’t subscribe to. Spend your vacation in a third world country helping impoverished people. You’ll learn a lot of things from all of these – and also learn things about yourself.

Join a community or student organization. There are all kinds of organizations out there that you can join and use to learn new things. Visit city hall – or your institution’s activities board – and see what kind of organizations are available in your community. Attend their meetings and see what sort of knowledge they have to offer, in an environment with others that are passionate about the topic. Try new activities with the group.

Travel to new places. Spend your vacations going to places you’ve never been before. Go to a part of the world you’re unfamiliar with and observe how people live there. Get off the interstate and visit areas you’ve never been before. I’ve stumbled across unexpected museums, festivals, and countless other opportunities for cultural learning just because I bothered to go somewhere new.

Find a mentor
I’ve had a small handful of mentors in my life and they’ve taught me more than I can ever possibly relate. They’ve offered intelligent advice when I’ve needed it, provided a sounding board for my own ideas, constantly encouraged me to push myself and grow, and provided valuable intellectual company. No matter what area you’re trying to grow in, a mentor can be a valuable thing to find. Don’t know where to start? Here are a few basic steps to get started.

Look for people who have attained a level of respect in the area of interest to you. It might be someone who works for the company you work for that others look up to. It might merely be someone in your industry, or possibly even someone in the community that’s earned the respect of others. Just look for a person that you respect who has experience and likely has ideas in their head that can help you grow.

Also, look for people who won’t have a conflict of interest when helping you. The best mentor is a person who isn’t tied down by a conflict of interest in helping you. If you’re both shooting for the same position in a company, that person is probably not going to be a good mentor. Similarly, don’t look for a politician to be your mentor if you see yourself running for office against that person in the near future.

Pick up the phone and actually make the contact. This is the hardest step for most people. The best way to get started is to simply be complimentary and polite and then ask for a lunch where you’ll pick up the tab. I got the attention of one person by telling him I would buy his lunch at a very nice place in town and that I just had some questions about how the radio industry works – I didn’t want to sell him a thing and I didn’t want any money, just conversation and learning. He loved it.

Attend a trade school
One of my closest friends in the world scored a 29 on his ACT in the late 1990s, yet he didn’t even bother to apply for college. Instead, he immediately became an electrician after high school, working as an apprentice and eventually becoming a journeyman. He’s now making almost as much money as I am and wasn’t saddled with the college debt, either. Better yet, he’s happy as a clam – he figured out early on that he really enjoyed assembling complex wirings and such.

The biggest thing to remember here is that college isn’t necessarily for everyone. If you’re passionate about a skill-oriented trade, like electrical work, carpentry, or plumbing, you’re probably better off not going to college and instead attending a trade school or getting involved in an apprenticeship program.

Also, remember that a trained person in a useful trade can earn very good money. Many people believe that you have to go to college to make a good living – it simply isn’t true. If you find that you’re passionate about carpentry or woodworking or electrical wiring, you can earn a very nice living and you don’t really need to go to college.

Trade school is a very solid investment for some people, particularly considering that the costs to get started in a trade like this is much lower than the costs of a four year degree. If your passion is in an area that overlaps with a trade, consider the investment of going to trade school instead of going to college.

Get additional certifications
Many careers revolve around continuing education and a big part of it comes in the form of professional certifications. Certifications generally indicate that a person has received and (to some degree) studied a significant body of information and has performed a certain set of tasks that usually indicate that the person has a certain skill. In other words, when you see a certification on a resume (and it can be validated), you can be sure that that person has learned and applied the skills described.

Certifications do two things: they add a nice line to your resume and they often boost the skills you can list on your resume. In combination, a number of certifications can significantly raise the level of income that you can potentially earn in your career. Here are a couple of things you can do to get the train going.

Identify certifications that you could potentially be earning. What sort of certifications can you earn in your career? These might not initially be obvious to you. The best place to start looking is within any trade groups or guilds that service your area of employment. For example, if you’re an electrical engineer, it’s useful to see what things the IEEE is offering.

See what certifications are currently in demand. Do some Google searching for any certifications that you don’t know about. If you’re not finding much about it, it’s probably not worth that much. Focus on the certifications that give you the most bang for the buck.

Find out if your employer will pay for some certifications. In a previous job, the employers were very happy to pay for almost any certification an employee wanted up to a certain dollar amount each year – you were even allowed to work on it during 20% of the work week. If you work in an environment like that, take advantage of it!

Educate yourself
Another potential avenue for acquiring new knowledge is to educate yourself. This goes beyond just reading books and absorbing material on your topic area. It’s about expanding your ability to think and understand the world around you. Putting effort into absorbing challenging materials on any topic will do nothing but improve your ability to think, your ability to communicate meaningfully and intelligently with others, and your ability to understand the world around you. The best part? The cost of self-education is mostly just time. Here are some ways to get started.

Identify areas that you’d like to learn more about. Are you trying to learn more about economics in order to gain a greater understanding of how people spend money? Perhaps you’re into history, because many of the people you associate with are big history buffs? Maybe you’ve always admired the life, actions, and ethics of someone and you’d like to build a much greater understanding of that person (much like my personal near-obsession with Theodore Roosevelt). Perhaps you’d just like to absorb some challenging modern literature in order to gain insight into the modern human condition. Figure out an area or two that you’d like to know more about.

Identify challenging and informative materials to absorb in one of those areas of interest. Again, the internet is very useful for this. Look for reading lists on specific topics. One good place to start is to look for the reading lists for courses on these topics at schools with open notes, like MIT’s OpenCourseware. Better yet, use those materials to actually work through a course on the subject in your own time.

Set aside some time each day to make progress. I usually devote about an hour each day to self-directed learning – right now, in fact, I’m reading a lot of material on economics as well as collections of great essays (and books on how to write them). I do this in two half-hour pieces, spreading out my thoughts.

Take lots of notes, expressing the ideas you’re picking up on in your own words. If you come across a great idea – or even a moderately interesting one – write it down in your own words. That’s the single most effective way I’ve found to absorb a new idea.

Stay aware of changes in your field
Many people work in fields where there are constant changes. New ideas crop up all the time and are slowly absorbed by the people in the field. Of course, the people who are most successful are the ones who learn the new ideas first and figure out how they connect with what they already know and what they’re already doing. Keeping up to date on these big changes will do nothing but help you out in your career.

Read trade publications. Find publications dedicated to the work you’re doing and keep up to date on your reading. Many employers will pay for subscriptions to such journals. If not, utilize the nearest large library to stay up to date.

Read message boards and blogs. You should also keep tabs on any message boards and blogs you can find that focus on your area (or similar areas). Some topics, like computer programming, are very well covered by these – others are not. You might be surprised, though, at what’s out there in your area. I know friends who are active participants on journalism and nursing message boards and blogs.

Attend meetings. If there are meetings and conferences available in your field, try to take the time to attend them on occasion. Not only is a meeting a great time to learn new things, it’s also an invaluable time to meet new people.

Become culturally literate
One final way to invest in yourself is to regularly take the time to remain culturally literate. By this, I mean be aware and informed about current events and have an idea about the cultural topics of the moment. Not only will you inform yourself about what’s going on in the world, cultural literacy improves your comprehension of many additional things in subtle ways. Here are some things that can help you get started.

Listen to the news on your way to work. No, “Bill and Timmy’s Funny Mornin’ Show” doesn’t count. Use your commute to stay aware of what’s going on in the world. I usually listen to NPR, but in large media markets there are a lot of good choices on the radio dial.

Pay attention to what others around you are talking about. If you hear a lot of conversation in the workplace about politics, put some effort into learning at least a bit about politics. If there’s a lot of talk about college basketball, at least raise your basic awareness of the topic. Not only will you learn something, you’ll also be able to relate to people better because you’ll share common knowledge.

If someone makes a reference you don’t understand, keep quiet, remember it, and look it up later. If someone in your circle is making reference to something, it’s likely important enough that you should be aware of it. Google the terms you remember and see what you can find out – it can educate you quite a bit on the topical culture of the people you interact with.

In my own life, I’ve found that some of the most valuable things I’ve ever done were investments in myself. My parents invested in braces for me when I was in junior high, straightening out some crooked teeth. I invested the cost and time to get a college education. I’ve even invested a lot of time – an amount that some of my friends have believed was excessive – carefully figuring out who I was, what my true talents are, and what I should be doing with my time. I did all of these things pretty early in life, before I was thirty, and they were all worth the time and financial costs associated with each of them.

Here are some specific examples of what I’m talking about.

Education This is the obvious one – there’s a reason so many people go to college straight out of high school – it’s a great investment. Post-secondary education can vastly increase your earning potential over your life, even if you choose a degree that isn’t “money.” Even if you didn’t get the needed grades to get into college, learning a trade in trade school – like learning to be a carpenter or an electrician or a plumber – also vastly increases your earning potential.

Later in life, education can still be very valuable, but in a somewhat different way. Many people don’t realize their deeper passion until later in life – if you return to school with that burning passion in your gut, you’ll be in a much better position to get through school successfully.

Steps anyone can take to get started with further education include figuring out what you’re passionate about and where your natural talents lie, then seeking education that can maximize and cultivate those passions and talents. For example, I have considered enrolling in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa, because I’m passionate about writing and believe I have a modicum of talent in that area that could be cultivated.

Specialized skills These are things that you don’t necessarily learn in school (or at least don’t major in). Skills such as the ability to speak in public, the ability to present in a dynamic fashion, the ability to communicate with others, technical certifications, and so on are valuable. Most of these skills primarily cost time rather than money – you can build them by participating in groups like Toastmasters.

Steps anyone can take to get started with further specialized skills include identifying skills in others that you’d like to acquire, figuring out what you could do to work on those skills, then setting aside the time to work on them. For example, I’d like to continue to hone my public speaking skills, so I’m getting involved again in Toastmasters.

Appearance I’ve written about the value of personal appearance before, but it’s true – the first impression most people get of you is your appearance. The investments here are a mix of time – practicing good hygiene every day, keeping your hair cut well, and so on – and cost – dental work, nice clothing, and so forth. Remember that your appearance is an investment – you’re maximizing the first impression that you give people, as well as the continuing reinforcement of that impression.

Steps anyone can take to get started with personal appearance include simply bathing every day, brushing your teeth, using deodorant, and other basic tasks of personal hygiene. If you have problems with your teeth, talk to a dentist – I know that my braces made a huge difference for me when I was in junior high, for example.

Therapy Many people have something on their mind that would feel good to relieve, if nothing else. Others might have some psychological issues that need to be worked around. The biggest key is to talk about it, whether to a therapist or to a close friend. Talk about the things that bother you, upset you, and keep you from being happy. One of my closest friends and I spent several years where we basically functioned as therapists for each other – it not only built a very close bond, but it helped us both come together as people.

Steps anyone can take to get started with therapy include just talking to a friend or loved one and laying out the things that really bother you. If you don’t have anyone, a therapist will also work. Some people may find that they do in fact need psychological help, but for most of us, relieving the burden of the things on our mind is enough to make us feel much better and more confident about our lives.

“Feeling good” By this, I mean things like massages, free time, meditation, aromatherapy, and other environmental things that can improve good feelings in ourselves. I’m not talking about spending for the rush of spending – I’m talking about investing in experiences that genuinely improve our outlook and feelings on life. If something genuinely lifts your mood consistently without negative repercussions – like getting a massage from your spouse or spending twenty minutes each day praying or meditating – then do it.

Don’t be afraid to invest time or money improving yourself, particularly early in your career. Over the long run, education, skills, strong appearance, and a grounded and positive outlook on life will pay enormous dividends for you. The key is to not become obsessive about each individual area, but to balance things – a strong appearance is great, but if you’re spending an hour each day “getting your face on,” your time can probably be better spent working on learning a skill, for example.