One of the biggest underlying themes of The Simple Dollar is that personal finance is merely a tool to improve the quality of your life. Of course, it’s an unwieldy and dangerous tool, one that, if used without care and forethought, can add quite a lot of difficulty and pain to your life. Take credit cards, for example.

In connection with that theme, I often read intriguing books about personal happiness – take my reviews of Stumbling on Happiness and Happier, for example, both of which were excellent reads.

Perhaps the most enjoyable book on happiness I’ve yet read, though, is The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. A quick note: I know Gretchen professionally, have exchanged several messages with her over the years, and enjoy reading her excellent blog on happiness topics. Of course, if I didn’t like her writing already, I might never have read the book – which I suppose means I already knew I would like the book before I opened the cover. But enough with that…

The Happiness Project largely focuses on Gretchen’s own experience applying mountains of classic advice on happiness (from Thoreau to Epicurus to the Dalai Lama to Oprah) to see what actually worked – and what didn’t. It’s mostly written in a memoir form covering a single year in which she applied these ideas, which works really well for the material covered (and makes it engaging to read).

Although I’ve had this book for a while, I decided to save this review until the start of the new year because it relates so well to the resolutions that people make for themselves.

January – Boost Energy
It’s often hard to tackle all the things we want to do in life if we don’t have a high level of energy. If your energy is sapped, it becomes all that much easier to simply take the path of least resistance and simply not work on the important things in life, which of course contributes greatly to a sense of unhappiness. Thus, there’s a great deal of sense in beginning a happiness journey by lifting one’s energy.

The two techniques that really stood out in this chapter – and in my own life – were to get more sleep and to simply move around more and get a bit of exercise. I’ll speak for myself in saying that when I don’t get adequate sleep for a few nights in a row, I feel tired and lethargic and unable to do much of anything productive. Similarly, when I fall off the “exercise wagon,” my energy level drops like a rock after about a week.

February – Remember Love
Marriages aren’t easy. Add kids and they become even more difficult. At times, marriages can seem like an emotional negative on the whole. What works? First, don’t expect appreciation for the things you do – and don’t feel a need to point them out and lord them over your partner. It does nothing more than instigate fighting and resentment over something you chose to do. If you want something done, do it and don’t use it as a psychological weapon.

Second, don’t just use your partner as someone to dump your problems on. Don’t blame them for problems. Don’t nag them over things left undone – if it’s undone, it must not occupy a high level of importance for them. Instead, focus on ways to accentuate your partner’s positives. What do they do well? Encourage that in a positive way instead of browbeating over the things they don’t do well. You’ll both wind up happier.

March – Aim Higher
There are few things that feel better than success, particularly when that success occurs at something you never expected to be successful at. When you think to yourself, “I could never do that,” then after investing work you find that you can do that, you’ll find yourself at a big emotional peak.

The best way to aim higher and go beyond what you think you’re capable of is to simply give it a shot. You should expect to fail at first. The first ten times. The first fifty times. That’s fine – you’re learning what it takes to succeed each time you fail. The key is to not give up, to not beat yourself up over the failure, and to get up and try again. Eventually, you will succeed – and that success will lift you high.

April – Lighten Up
People are often happiest when they’re doing something. Gretchen refers to this as “fog happiness” – a sense of happiness, or at least contentment, that comes from working towards a goal. Often, that happiness is borne of a sense that what you’re doing will make others happy.

Another big piece of the puzzle is to simply act happy. Act lighthearted. One effective way to do that is to simply sing on a regular basis – Gretchen suggests doing it in the morning. Play some simple pranks on other people. Do things that make you laugh. It’ll lift everything else.

May – Be Serious About Play
Happiness is often found when you seek out sources of happiness – things you do that bring you joy, no matter what they are. Those things are different for each of us, but when you find those things, devote some serious time to them. Block out time for fishing or for playing the piano. Those times will become powerful personal refreshers for you.

If you don’t have a hobby or activity that brings you such joy, find one. Set aside time to explore potential new interests – and block that time off. Make time for it. When you find something that brings joy into your life, it often works like a “happiness battery,” charging your entire day.

June – Make Time for Friends
Friendship is an easy thing to neglect in our busy lives. We often think to ourselves that our friends will always be around, but when we look again, we find that the friendship has drifted away. Even more importantly, we get joy from time spent with friends, but because we define such interactions as “important but not urgent,” we often replace them with the “urgent but not important” things in our lives.

One powerful way to maintain friendships is to schedule regular events with them. Start a weekly potluck dinner at your house and invite several friends (something we’re in the process of setting up). Another effective tool is to avoid gossip – don’t talk negatively about people behind their backs.

July – Buy Some Happiness
This chapter more or less focuses on one of the major themes of The Simple Dollar – the connection between money and happiness. Without directly touching on it, Gretchen touches on the idea of the fulfillment curve – that everyone has some point that maximizes the enjoyment they get from their spending. Spend too much and you’re not happy. Spend too little and you’re not happy, either.

How do you find that balance? Focus on just buying things you know will bring value into your life, but don’t chide yourself constantly for doing so. Look at your true passions and focus on things that complement those passions and don’t spend as much on the rest.

August – Contemplate the Heavens
Spirituality is another interesting beast in the stable of happiness. For many, there is a lot of solace in contemplating the mysteries of life. If you find peace in seeking these answers, seek them. Gretchen suggests reading about the lives – and beliefs – of spiritual leaders of all stripes (like the Dalai Lama or the Pope or any of a huge number of historical figures).

I find a lot of power in keeping a gratitude notebook. Simply by writing down five things I’m grateful for each day, I keep in mind how many gifts and blessings have found their way into my life. It also often opens a window into religious exploration for me as well.

September – Pursue a Passion
In a way, pursuing a passion builds upon many of the themes already in this book. If you discover you’re passionate about something, chase it. Dig in deep.

For me (and for many others), one great way to build upon a passion is to embark on a big, ambitious project that requires us to dig deep. Write a novel. Build a new deck. Master a particular technology. Start an ambitious blog. To do these things, you have to set aside time – but the projects themselves provide a lot of spiritual happiness and personal reward.

October – Pay Attention
Quite often in life, it’s easy to feel as though we’re swept along by currents largely out of our control. Yet, just as often, if we study our lives, those currents make sense. We have a surprising amount of control over them as well. Most importantly, that awareness can be a real source of happiness.

One effective way to do this is to meditate a bit each day. Spend some time doing nothing more than emptying your mind of all of the mental junk you’ve picked up and clear out that space. Looking at the world with fresher eyes makes all the difference.

November – Keep a Contented Heart
If you’re finding more happiness in your life, how do you maintain it? To put it simply, just pass it on.

It’s very easy to do this. Laugh when others are around. Help others out. Use good manners and be polite. Be positive when you talk about things. Surround yourself with people who do the same thing. This will all add up to a lot of reflected happiness in your life.

December – Boot Camp Perfect
If all of these changes seem overwhelming or impossible, remember one thing: the perfect is the enemy of the good. Take small steps and do them when you think of them or when you can do them. Put these ideas into your calendar and mark off some boundaries for your happiness – but don’t despair if something happens to take one of them out.

The key is to put little positive steps into your life and let the aggregate of those steps help you reach a higher level of personal joy.

Is The Happiness Project Worth Reading?
Regardless of any value you might get out of the advice, I think The Happiness Project is worth reading for the pure entertainment factor. I was sucked into the narrative and wound up reading it much more like a novel than like the nonfiction books I typically read for The Simple Dollar. In fact, this book has found its way into my “to-be-read” pile for purely personal re-reading, a rarity for the books I review for The Simple Dollar.

The advice itself throughout the book overlaps well with many of the books I’ve read on happiness. I think the real key comes through here: listen to yourself carefully and act on what you hear. Your mind is often telling you what you need to be happy, but we often overrule it because of what we’ve consciously decided makes us happy. We buy stuff when we don’t need it and get ourselves into financial pinches. We hang onto relationships too long. We stick with old tired patterns. Quite often, we know these are choices that will make us unhappy, but we don’t listen.

The Happiness Project is a very enjoyable read. It takes a topic – personal happiness – and runs with it, making it personally engaging and entertaining. Drier books fail to entertain at times and fictional narratives often fail to inform – this balances the two quite well. If you’re seeking your own happiness, read this one. You’ll enjoy it.

We want to do things like…
+ visit an old relative
+ create a master information document
+ work on a big project
+ make out a will
+ get involved in a community organization
+ get our masters degree in the evenings and weekends

Instead, we fill our time…
+ catching that can’t-miss show on television
+ surfing the web for some obscure piece of trivia
+ answering the phone and chatting with whoever answers
+ dealing with email
+ doing dishes
+ stopping at the grocery store for the third time this week

The first group of tasks are things that I would call “important but not urgent.” These are things that don’t have to be addressed immediately, but still have serious importance and value in our lives.

The second group of tasks are things that I would call “urgent but not important.” These are things that try to grab our attention and focus now but have no real impact on our long-term lives.

It’s easy to let our lives be run by the things that are “urgent but not important.” Most large bureaucracies function in this way. I know that my previous job certainly did at times. We often manage our lives this way – we’ll look around, ask ourselves what needs to be addressed right now, and then focus on dealing with that task just because it’s due today, even if it’s trivial compared to a much more important thing.

We’ll answer the phone several times in an hour even though it means constantly stepping away from a big project.
We’ll watch the big game tonight and call our elderly mother in a few days.
We’ll surf the web for trivia but let our dreams of a masters degree sit idle.

I do this myself, more often than I would like. Since I have two articles “due” on a given day for The Simple Dollar, it’s often easiest to focus wholly on the task that needs to be done today (those two articles) instead of stepping back and looking at the bigger picture of writing really long-lasting useful information. It’s easier to look around the house, see a big mess, and tackle it, even though my kids are quietly clamoring for more attention.

I find that four little things help me keep the “important but not urgent” in the forefront and let the “urgent but not important” things slide.

I’m unafraid to turn off my phone and email. Closing off channels through which the “urgent but not important” tasks can interrupt the “important but not urgent” tasks goes a long way towards maintaining my focus in the right areas. If it’s not important, it can wait. If it truly is important, I’ll know about it as soon as I’m available since I’ll check my messages.

I block off time for long-term projects. I spend part of every day focused on projects with a long-term payoff. For example, for much of July, August, September, and October, I focused heavily on the manuscript of my book. This didn’t help me at all in my day-to-day work, but it did build something with much greater long-term value. (Yes, I’m working on a long-term project now related to The Simple Dollar – no, I’m not ready to announce it.)

I sometimes will utterly drop the unimportant but urgent things if they’re getting in the way. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with little requests. If I focused on nothing but those requests, I’d never get anything done. So, sometimes, I just have to drop those requests. I’ll put off responding to an email – or not even respond at all if there’s not an obvious answer needed. I’ll skip watching the “big game” and catch the highlights later. I’ll actively choose to put my communications devices away.

I’m acutely aware of what’s truly important to me – and what isn’t. One final trick is understanding what’s actually important to me – and how relatively important various things are. Quite often, it’s easy to substitute urgency for importance – but that often leaves you putting out fires and not really accomplishing anything. Sometimes, it’s best to ignore the fires and focus on the important things.

As I often say to my wife, “Don’t worry about it. I’d rather have dirty floors and well-adjusted children than a spotless house and sullen kids.”

If you’ve been reading my weekly roundups for long, you know I’m a big fan of the Unclutterer blog and its chief writer and editor, Erin Doland.

I link to Unclutterer frequently because I believe there is a strong connection between clutter and financial problems, since clutter represents having more physical possessions than you can manage and all of those possessions cost money. Plus, dealing with clutter requires a time investment and in our busy lives, time has a very high value.

Unclutter Your Life in One Week essentially offers a “detox” plan for getting clutter out of your home, office, and life, ostensibly in one week. I should say right off the bat that I found actually accomplishing all of the ideas in this book in one week to be impossible. That doesn’t mean the book has value, but you should not expect that all clutter in your life will be gone in one week if you follow this plan. Although, I will say that there is some function of how cluttered your life is when you start and how thoroughly you’re going through your life with the plan.

That being said, the advice in this book is stellar, in my opinion. Let’s dig in and look at some of the specifics.

The Foundations
Most of us have lives that are overbooked, overworked, and overstuffed. We have more things that we want than we possibly have time for. I’m certainly in this boat myself – I’d trade all the material items I have for another four hours in my day.

In our rush to jam even more into our lives, our lives become inherently complicated. We accumulate more things than we can deal with and some things begin to slip simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day. Those “things that slip” often take the form of clutter – items in our lives that we simply don’t have the time to process. These tend to build up throughout our lives, filling up our homes and our day planners with a backlog of things that need to be taken care of and things we don’t have the time to actually enjoy or use.

Dealing with clutter is an intense process, because it not only requires dealing with this backlog of stuff, but it also requires dealing with the elements in your life that are causing clutter.

Monday
Monday is the best day of the week to begin establishing new routines. It’s also a good day to tackle the “firsts” – the elements of clutter you face first throughout your day.

For example, many of us face a cluttered closet in the morning when we wake up, so a good first step is to get your clothes in order. If you have more clothes than you can adequately fit in your dresser and closet, you need to eliminate some.

At work, the first thing we often see is our desk or workspace. Figure out a place for all of the stuff that you see – and don’t be surprised if the space for many of those things is the trash can.

Tuesday
Tuesday is the most stressful day of the week, so it’s the best time to tackle the areas of your life that cause you the most stress and require the most work to keep up.

At home, Erin encourages decluttering the bathroom (with the goal of being able to easily find all of the things you need but tossing the things you don’t actually use that tend to fill up your bathroom closet) and also streamlining your household chores. I find in my own life that when I have a household chore routine, things are more likely to work well.

At work, one should take a look at filing all of their papers so that the documents one needs can easily be found and the less-important things are out of the way. At my previous job, I found that having a filing cabinet split into two pieces worked for me – a single drawer for stuff I actually used sometimes and the rest for stuff I needed to retain but would rarely look at. 99% of the time, I’d just look in that one drawer and find what I needed.

Wednesday
Wednesday is “hump day” and a perfect day to focus on communications and processes in our day.

At home, take a look at your kitchen and your bedroom. For us, at least, the kitchen alone can be a major project for de-cluttering. One big tactic that works is simply reducing your kitchen implements, replacing fifteen low-quality single use items with one high quality item that simply does the job. You don’t need a butcher’s block, you just need one really good chef’s knife, a bread knife, and a paring knife. You don’t need tons of casseroles and Pyrex, you just need a few high-quality French ovens. A more streamlined shopping plan helps, too.

At work, re-evaluate your commute and your communication processes. How do you get to work? Does your trip fill you with unnecessary distractions and angst? Look for the least stressful way to get to work. When you’re there, look at how you communicate with others. Does it happen in an orderly fashion with appropriate emotions? I find that “communication sessions” work well for me, where I spend a period of time each day just handling communiques, then I turn off those communication channels to allow myself to focus on other areas.

Thursday
On Thursday, the focus should be on organizing your living spaces at home and focusing on your workflow and processes at work.

At home, look at the places you spend your time during the day. For us, that means our family room, and the obvious place to look there is our entertainment center, which is often a mess thanks to kids pulling out DVDs and playing with various items. Another spot to look is our book collection in the laundry room, which could sorely use some time.

At work, examine how you work on projects. Do you have difficulty completing them? Do you have too many projects? Start using the “five whys” and dig into the reasons for this. Quite often, there are some simple things blocking you from a much better workflow.

Friday
Friday’s focus is solely on uncluttering your schedule. Most of us have schedules that are so full to the brim with activities that we scarcely have time for important things in our lives. How many of you read the previous activities and thought, “That sounds awesome, but I don’t have time for it!”

The best way to do this is to simply prioritize the things you’re doing. Figure out what elements are truly of low priority and either treat them as such or find ways to completely eliminate them. Then, look at the higher priority things and look for ways to compress them – perhaps, instead of watching a show live on Tuesdays, you can record it and watch it commercial-free on Wednesdays. Perhaps instead of unwinding after work, you can spend a brief bit of time truly relaxing and then get on with the things you need to do.

The Weekend
The biggest benefit of unclutterinig is that it truly frees your weekend. If you have established routines for handling everything throughout the week – and you’ve uncluttered your time enough to allow for it – your weekends go from being “catch up” time to being big blocks of free time with which you can do whatever you want.

That’s really the reward, isn’t it?

Is Unclutter Your Life in One Week Worth Reading?
Absolutely. This is the single best book I’ve ever read on organizing your life. Much like my favorite book on time management, Getting Things Done (and, incidentally, Unclutter Your Life in One Week has a foreword by the author of GTD, David Allen), Unclutter Your Life in One Week shines because of the small implementable details, like the few pages devoted to how to organize your clothes and fold your shirts (seriously – I started using that method and it works really well).

If you were to do everything in this book, it would take much longer than a week, without a doubt. However, the modularity of it allows you to pull out pieces to tackle the most egregious parts of your life and then gradually move to other details as the “de-cluttering” advantages become clear.

This book has found a semi-permanent home on my bookshelf as I move towards decluttering some of my own life (like that nightmarish junk drawer and the train wreck that is my closet and, frankly, my time schedule).

Knowing how to be a leader – and using that skill from time to time – opens doors for you no matter what you’re doing in life. It helps your career. It helps your social standing. It creates a positive reputation for you, one that often precedes you. It can even help your family life and personal friendships. In short, leadership can be truly rewarding.

The problem with leadership, though, is that the vast majority of people don’t know how to actually be a leader. For a small number of us, leadership comes easy – a natural extension of who we are. For the rest, though, it’s not obvious at all. We’re held back by our own seeming desire for simplicity (though, sometimes, it’s simpler to lead) and our own lack of self-confidence or sense that we’re not leaders at all.

A long time ago, I was forced into a leadership position on a project that I felt completely unprepared for. A very kind friend in a high place mailed me a copy of this book – Warren Bennis’s On Becoming a Leader – and encouraged me to give it a read. The ideas in this book helped me to step up and actually make the most of the situation as it was handed to me and, since then, I’ve recommended it to several others (as I did in a recent Reader Mailbag, actually).

What makes this book so compelling? Let’s dig in and take a look.

Mastering the Context
Every situation in which one is called to be a leader has some sort of context. The people involved are part of the context, as are the specifics of the situation. Quite often, leaders become too tied to the context of the situation and, as a result, come up with pretty poor leadership decisions. Bennis offers several good and bad examples of how leadership can be destroyed by context. For me, the most potent example was the presidency of George W. Bush – in the context of his political ideology and of the disaster of 9/11, he made choices that were perhaps not the best leadership choices for the United States (I don’t think anyone would argue, whether they be liberal or conservative, that mistakes were made during the Bush years). A positive example of stepping outside of context is Norman Lear – the creator of the seminal sitcom All in the Family. He took the context – sitcoms of the 1960s – and looked not at a situation full of rules, but instead a situation where many of the rules could be broken. That’s what a leader does – he finds ways to break away some of the context, opening up new areas for success. (Incidentally, I think this is why great leaders also have a big dash of creativity.)

Understanding the Basics
Here, Bennis identifies a pretty large handful of traits one will find in a leader: a guiding vision, passion, self-knowledge, candor, maturity, trust, curiosity, and daring. Bennis argues that most of these traits are not ones people are simply born with – they’re usually self-made by a person who pushes themselves and wants to excel at leading others. He goes on to distinguish that there’s a big difference between merely being a manager and being a leader – in fact, he argues that, quite often, an MBA makes a person a good manager but a pretty poor leader. A manager manages and maintains the status quo – a leader leads people somewhere great.

Knowing Yourself
In order to lead, you must know yourself intimately. You have to know what you’re truly capable of and what you must ask others to help you with. Without such intimate self-knowledge, you can never effectively lead because you’re incapable of understanding how to select people to fill the roles you most need filled. Bennis points towards four key lessons one must learn in terms of knowing oneself:

You are your own best teacher. Pay attention to the things that work for you and don’t work for you. Don’t listen to what everyone else says – try things for yourself and see if they fly.

Accept responsibility. Blame no one. If something goes wrong under your watch, it’s your fault, period. Don’t blame others for it – step up and take responsibility. Yes, you can make moves to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, but the failure is your responsibility if you’re the leader.

You can learn anything you want to learn. Knowledge can be acquired by anyone if they’re persistent. Don’t use ignorance as a crutch. Instead, accept that you are ignorant about some things and step up to educate yourself.

True understanding comes from reflecting on your experience. Look back at what you’ve accomplished and try to figure out how you accomplished it. Similarly, look back on your failures and determine what you did wrong to cause that bad result.

Knowing the World
Almost all of the worthwhile learning that people do comes outside the classroom. It comes from losing yourself in an experience, reading books because you want to read them, trying new things because you want to try them, and reflecting on all of this stuff, adding it to your tool belt. People who choose not to do this are actively choosing not to be leaders – they’re happy being managers.

Read a book. Travel. Meet new people. Build a friendship. Find a mentor. Mess something up. You learn from these things, not from rote memorization in a classroom.

Operating on Instinct
Every decision we make in life is based on incomplete information. At some point, we have to decide that it’s good enough and go ahead with whatever decision we have at hand. Our ability to still make good decisions even with incomplete information relies on instinct – a sense of what the right decision is that comes from inside. Often, that voice inside of us is built out of a lot of learning about the world, a lot of experience of both success and failure. Learning trains our instincts so that we can make better decisions with less information.

A leader, in the end, is a person others rely on to make the difficult decisions and set the direction for everyone. A well-honed instinct is key to being that kind of leader, and a good leader relies on and trusts that voice inside of himself.

Deploying Yourself: Strike Hard, Try Everything
Every single one of us fails in life. The difference between leaders and others is whether or not they pick themselves up and try again. Do you face your fears? Do you again try the things you failed at in the past, or do you avoid them like the plague? If you try something and it goes badly, do you avoid it in the future or do you relish the challenge of improving in that area?

To put it simply, a leader does not back down from a challenge. They don’t allow fear to control what they do. Instead, if something is scary or deeply challenging, it’s something they focus even harder on achieving.

One particular quote at the end of this chapter really struck me.

The means of expression are the steps to leadership:

1. Reflection leading to resolution.
2. Resolution leading to perspective.
3. Perspective leading to point of view.
4. Point of view leading to tests and measures.
5. Tests and measures leading to desire.
6. Desire leading to mastery.
7. Mastery leading to strategic thinking.
8. Strategic thinking leading to full self-expression.
9. The synthesis of full self-expression = leadership.

In other words, it all begins with reflecting on your successes and failures and building from there.

Moving Through Chaos
It’s often thought that leaders don’t have the same crises that we do. We think they don’t have to deal with office politics, layoffs, demotions, fighting for promotions, and so on. We think they view the world as a set of chess pieces to play with as they wish, that “strategic vision” means playing games with people.

In truth, most leaders had to overcome a great deal of career adversity to get where they’re at today. The only difference is that, at every opportunity, they took the opportunity to try to grow as a person and improve their instincts instead of complaining and commiserating about their hard luck. A trial by fire can either burn you or forge you – leaders are forged.

Getting People on Your Side
The key to getting people on your side is to be trustworthy and to constantly show that their trust is well-founded. Bennis identifies four key elements of such trust.

1. Constancy. You stay the course for the people that rely on you. When problems come, you handle them, but through it all, you maintain a steady direction and don’t descend into chaotic behavior.

2. Congruity. If you say something, you mean it, and it shows in your actions. If you expect something of your followers, you expect it of yourself first and you follow through with it.

3. Reliability. When it really counts, you’re there for the people who need you.

4. Integrity. When you make a promise or a commitment to someone else, you follow through with it.

Organization Can Help – or Hinder
There are times in which the group you’re intending to lead simply will not be led. If the people involved don’t care or they have a completely different direction in mind than the one you’re providing or the bureaucracy in the system is so intense that no amount of bushwhacking will clear it, no leadership can help the situation.

Instead, a leader should attempt to learn from this situation. What can be done to end the situation as painlessly as possible? What can be done to avoid such situations in the future? Every failure is a lesson.

Is On Becoming a Leader Worth Reading?
On Becoming a Leader pretty much delivers what the title promises. It’s the best discussion I’ve ever read on things a person can tangibly do to improve their leadership skills. If you’re interested in improving them, this one’s pretty much a must-read.

The question comes down to whether or not you personally find it valuable to work on your leadership skills. My perspective is that most lives have avenues that can be improved through leadership – it helps you build better relationships with others in the workplace, in the community, and in one’s family if they’re able to step up and be a leader when the situation calls for it.

The Simple Dollar has reviewed hundreds of personal finance, personal growth, and career books. Please check out the full list of Simple Dollar book reviews, alphabetized for your convenience.

You constantly write about how having a notebook in your pocket all the time helps you in life and saves you money. I get that you can write down your ideas in it all the time, but I’m not a creative type. I don’t see how having a notebook on me at all times can save me money at all.

Aside from the fact that I’m able to use the notebook to write down my ideas – my career’s bread and butter – a pocket notebook constantly comes in handy for many other financial reasons as well. (FYI, I usually just keep a simple small Mead reporter’s notebook in my pocket, along with a good pen that doesn’t run out of ink.) Here are fourteen ways I use that notebook to directly save money.

1. Write down sale prices. If you spy an item on sale but you’re not really sure how good of a sale it is, jot down the item and the sale price. Later, you can research that price and find out if it really is a great bargain. This is particularly useful when shopping for gifts or for specific expensive purchases.

2. Make ongoing grocery lists. During a given week, I’ll make efforts to prepare several meals at home. As I’m doing this, I’ll often come across items that we need to replenish in our pantry – for example, last night I discovered we were nearly out of extra virgin olive oil. Similarly, I was down in the basement over the weekend and noticed that we were out of furnace filters – something that was very easy to immediately note. If I have a notepad with me at all times, I can add that item easily no matter where I’m at. Then, since my shopping list is complete, I don’t have to do any “wandering” at the store, helping me save time and drastically reduce impulse buys.

3. Do warehouse club price comparisons. My family often shops at Sam’s Club for many household staples, like toilet paper. Whenever we’re considering making a purchase in bulk, we’ll jot down the Sam’s Club price, then compare it to the normal price we pay at our usual grocery store. Quite often, Sam’s Club is less expensive, but not always. Checking the price lets us know whether or not this item should be purchased at the warehouse club or not.

4. Record great gift ideas. When I’m interacting with a friend or a family member, they’ll often drop a hint of some kind indicating a Christmas or birthday gift they’d like to receive. If I note that idea immediately, I can often give myself plenty of time to bargain-hunt for that specific item, enabling me to get that person a gift they’d really like for the lowest possible price for me.

5. Record contact info for potential clients or new acquaintances. Whenever I’m at a community event, I almost always meet someone interesting who wants to see my website, has a website of their own to share, or wants to keep in touch for some reason. Having a handy notebook makes this easy – I can either jot down my own information and share it (if I don’t have a business card, of course) or jot down their information and keep it.

6. Write down recipes or other food ideas. My parents and in-laws subscribe to tons of magazines and also have extensive cookbook collections. Sometimes, I’ll be browsing through them and see something really intriguing that I might want to prepare in my own kitchen. With my notebook at the ready, I can jot down this recipe, often giving me a great idea for a low-cost meal to prepare at home.

7. Leave a note for someone. Ever stopped by someone’s house when they’re not home and wanted to leave a reminder for them? If you have a notebook in hand, it’s easy to just slip a note under the door, turning a useless trip into a useful one and often helping you salvage a poor situation.

8. Make a simple price book. If you’re trying out a new store, record the prices of some of the items you buy most frequently – milk, eggs, bread, vegetables, fruit, and so on. Then, use that information to compare the prices of this new store to the one you regularly shop at. Is this new store offering better value for the things you buy? Finding the store that offers the best prices on your staples can make a huge difference in your routine food spending.

9. Exchange insurance information. In a fender bender, it’s often vital to exchange insurance information with the other person in an accident. I’ve been in accidents before where the other person was attempting to get off the hook because they didn’t have paper with which to exchange such information. With a notebook right in hand, such excuses won’t matter – information can easily be exchanged and repairs can commence as quickly as possible.

10. Write down a phone number on a “for sale” item. Perhaps you see someone selling their car (or some other large item) themselves with a phone number in the window. If you’ve got a notebook, it’s really easy to jot down the necessary information so you can call the person up later when you have appropriate additional research in hand to ensure that you’re getting a good deal.

11. Keep a “master list” of preferred brands. Consumer Reports often ranks the quality of various household items – toothpaste, shampoo, trash bags, paper towels, etc. – as well as the “best buys” for each one. Having this information in hand can help you easily get the best bang for your buck when you’re standing in the store trying to decide which item to buy.

12. Write down things you want instead of buying them, as per the “thirty day rule.” The “thirty day rule” is pretty simple. Whenever you’re tempted to make a major purchase, instead of buying, just remember the item, put it back on the shelf, and walk out of the store. Give yourself full permission to buy the item in thirty days if you’re still actively wanting it or thinking about it. I actually suggest jotting down the item if you want. Later, you can research the item a bit, figure out if it’s what you really want, and if the thirty days go by and you still want it, you can carefully comparison shop and get the best bargain you can find for it.

13. Keep a detailed errand list. There are always errands that need to be run, ones that are often important to good financial health. By keeping an ongoing errand list in your notebook, you can kill two birds with one stone – for one, you don’t forget them, and for two, you have access to that list all the time, particularly when you’re actually out and about.

14. Make an omnipresent “big goal” reminder. Since I use my pocket notebook all the time, one great technique I’ve found for keeping my mind in the right place is to start off the notebook by writing my big goal on every single page of the notebook. At the bottom, I write “Are you helping yourself get the country house today?” Writing it on every page of the notebook takes a while, but that action alone pounds the message into my head. Then, whenever I look at the notebook, I see that reminder in my own handwriting and it keeps me on a better path.

To put it simply, I couldn’t live without that pocket notebook. It’s an essential part of my personal and financial life.

In the end, the decision was made to keep the one with flashes of brilliance. After all, in my mentor’s words, “followers are easily replaceable, leaders are not.”

Ever since that day, I’ve thought a lot about what makes a leader. The person with flashes of brilliance clearly wasn’t a leader in the traditional sense – he was at the bottom of the pecking order. Yet he clearly was a leader in the more important sense. Other people trusted him and often turned to him when they needed help. He also was able to step up his game when it was needed the most.

Thus, he became much more vital to the organization than the steady, quiet employee who kept to himself.

What does it mean to really be a leader? It doesn’t mean having a title – that’s often just the result of already being a leader. It means being the person people rely on in a tough situation. It means being the person that steps up when it’s needed. It means being the person that gets people going on the things they need to do. It means getting the things done that you need to get done as well.

A leader with strong skills to back it up is indispensable to any organization. Here are fifteen ways you can start to become a leader in your own organization and make yourself more valuable there – even if you’re a quiet person who’d prefer to just get his or her work done.

Speak up at meetings.
If you have a genuine concern or a good idea in a meeting, speak up and voice it. Why? Quite often, your very concern or idea is in the mind of a lot of others around the room, only they’re afraid to speak up. By speaking up, you’re essentially giving their thoughts a voice without that risk. You’re being a leader for that group of people with that idea.

I’ve found that time and time again, when I do this, people will come up to me afterwards and say, “Thanks for saying that!” Right there, our relationship is stronger and they now look to me a little more than they did before. In at least one case I can think of, it led to a surprisingly strong working relationship.

Cut out the negative talk.
Talking negatively about others behind their backs does very little to help you. You might get the quick rush of feeling good from the ability to make yourself feel superior to the other person, but over the long run, you’ll have a very negative reputation outside of your tightest associates. If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say it – it will damage the amount that people trust you. Plus, do you think people are saying similar things about you behind your back? How do you think that affects your reputation? A good tactic is a simple one – don’t run away from negative talk and don’t repeat it at all, but don’t contribute to it. Just ignore it and see it for what it is – usually jealousy on some level.

Offer up some positive talk, instead.
My tactic is to usually be quiet when people are being disparaged, but speak up quite a bit when the conversation is more positive. Making positive statements about others (and doing it consistently) does nothing but improve your reputation. Keep it to the realistic things, though – don’t just blindly compliment people.

Volunteer for the tasks everyone’s afraid to volunteer for.
Whenever a major task comes up that bears some serious responsibility and others are afraid to step up, step up. As with speaking up, by doing so, you effectively become the leader of the people who are interested but are too timid to volunteer themselves. You can take these people and channel them into being a part of the project.

Look for people who are struggling – and ask them what’s wrong.
In a workplace where people meet regularly and collaborate on projects, it’s often quickly clear if certain people are struggling or having problems. Quite often, these people are left to flounder by others who are too “busy” to deal with it, but by spending some time to find out what the real problem is, you’re often throwing this person a life raft which, if they climb aboard, can make them eternally respectful and supportive of you. When people are in trouble, that’s the time to approach them, find out what’s wrong, and find out if you can help without greatly upsetting your own boat.

Directly compliment impressive work.
If someone does good work, tell them right to their face that it’s good work, preferably in front of others. Everyone loves recognition and compliments and usually retain positive feelings towards the people who give recognition and deserved compliments. That positive feeling can often be utilized later on when you’re in charge of a team they’re on.

Tell supervisors when their subordinates are doing well.
This is a more indirect – but often more effective – method of the idea above. If someone does outstanding work, contact their supervisor and tell them. Face to face is often good, but even an email works for this purpose. Tell their supervisor exactly what the person did to go above and beyond the usual standard. This often results in an improvement in the workplace status for that person and, quite often, they end up realizing who offered up such compliments and recommendations.

Be willing and enthusiastic about team-based work.
I used to be a workplace loner and avoid team-based work. Eventually, though, I learned that team-based work is the absolute best opportunity you ever have in the workplace to build strong relationships with the people around you. The more you participate in teams – and come through with your part of the puzzle while helping in little ways with the parts of others – the more others begin to see you as reliable and trustworthy.

When you’re part of a team, take charge of it – but don’t be dictatorial.
My approach is pretty simple. If I’m a part of a newly-formed team, I’ll step up immediately and brainstorm a plan, then send it to the others for consideration. Unless someone rips it to shreds, it usually more or less becomes the plan and I’m the de facto leader of the group. It’s for the same reason as above – you’re usually speaking for people who are too timid to speak up or offer a plan and they’re happy for you doing that if you’re not pushy about it. I would usually do something like send out a rough plan and say, “Here’s my idea for how we should tackle this. What do you all think?”

Make a point to remember – and celebrate – your coworker’s life milestones and accomplishments.
One person I used to work with had a calendar he kept with everyone’s birthday in it along with their favorite two items from the vending machine. On their birthday, he’d go up to the vending machine, pop in $2, get their favorite soda and favorite snack, affix a bow (that he’d brought along with him) to the can, then stop by their desk and put them there, saying “Happy birthday!” with a big grin. It was small, but it came across as incredibly thoughtful – unsurprisingly, he was very well liked within the group and was often listened to and respected whenever he had any ideas or plans to share. Also unsurprisingly, he’s doing very well in life now.

Take two minutes to recognize the milestones and highlights in other’s lives. Keep track of them if you can. Find little ways to make everyone smile. Do these things and you’ll always win.

If there’s a problem you can easily solve, solve it.
Don’t worry about the political connotations or anything like that. If someone comes to you with a problem that you can completely solve or help solve without too much effort, just solve it. The more problems you solve, the more people look to you as a problem solver and the more they listen to your advice and what you have to say.

Ask for help when you need it.
Sometimes, you’ll need help. Some people are afraid to show weakness and avoid asking for help unless it’s absolutely vital. That’s nonsensical and inefficient. If there are particular elements that others can do much easier than you can, ask them for help (unless, of course, it’s a lot of additional work for them). This is the flip side of the coin from helping others whenever you can – if you’ve consistently helped others, they’re likely to help you.

Suggest events that involve your coworkers.
Be the person that rounds up a group to eat lunch together. Be involved in the planning of office parties – and even be the ringleader. Plan parties for people who are leaving. That doesn’t mean you have to do all the footwork, but develop the plan yourself. People will see you as a person who takes charge – and such events are simple to pull together if you just take a few minutes to do it.

Offer useful, detailed feedback.
In a busy world, it’s easy to just go “Looks good!” when someone wants feedback on something. Instead, take ten minutes and try to come up with three things that could be improved with the document. Preface it with a compliment on how good the project already is, put the three suggestions down as clearly and positively as possible, and finish up by saying something along the lines of wanting to turn something very good into something truly great. If the feedback is really worthwhile, they’ll again see you as someone to turn to when the chips are down.

When asked for your opinion, be honest but don’t be cutting.
Your honest feedback is much more valuable than being positive – but even if things are bad, you don’t have to be hurtful. I usually make an effort to compliment where I can, but if there are serious problems with what I’ve seen, I say so. Not saying so hurts them (since they present a poor product) and then, by association, hurts you (since you told them this poor product was good when it wound up dumping egg on their face).

These small things, done every day, make you simultaneously indispensable in your workplace as well as a person people look to as a leader. Who do you think will have their name come up the next time promotions are discussed?

The brightly-colored cover of this book caught my attention on the “New Releases” shelf at the library. I picked it up and read a bit of the first chapter – a story about a girl left alone in a room and watched by her mother. The radio was on and the girl couldn’t help herself – she jumped up and danced to the music. It’s just what she was drawn to do – in her words, “she needed to move to think.”

It was an idea that really stuck with me. Quite often, I need to write to think. I need to be able to take ideas in my head and put them down in word form – if I don’t do that, I tend to spin my wheels in life. Writing is an outlet – it’s my passion and it’s simply a part of me. Without it, i would feel empty.

Virtually everyone has a deep passion or two like this – an activity without which we wouldn’t feel whole. The Element by Ken Robinson digs into those passions – finding them, bringing them to the forefront, and evaluating the enormous impact that passions can bring to our lives. Once found and given room to breathe and grow, passions can transform our day-to-day activities, our careers, and our whole lives.

The Element
What do you do when you’re alone and have no responsibilities to follow up on (assuming, of course, that any supplies you need are available to you)? I tend to do one of two things: read or write. I love expressing myself in the written word and receiving the ideas of others through that same medium.

Other people might do different things. One person I know immediately starts drawing elaborate landscapes – I’ve seen his notepads after meetings. Another person heads immediately to his workshop and starts working on small pieces of furniture – miniature display cases and end tables. One woman I know heads straight to the piano and starts playing whatever song appears in their head.

Take someone with the initial passion like that and feed that passion. What do you think happens next? That passion compels them to get better at their chosen craft.

Think Differently
Self-definition can be a dangerous opponent. Many people already have a strict definition of who they are – and who they’re not. “I’m a good accountant, but I’m not a painter,” says the naturally artistic individual whose life path somehow led her into accounting. Yet she doodles magnificently during long, boring meetings. “I’m a researcher, not a writer,” I once told myself, but I couldn’t help but spend my spare time writing essays and short stories and the like.

You aren’t defined by what you’re doing right now or what you believe your limits to be. Nor are the people around you. Margie from accounting might actually be a great artist. Trent from R&D might actually be a great writer. But until they discover it, they’ll stay stuck in place.

Beyond Imagining
Perhaps you know what you’re passionate about, but actually following it seems like a daydream. The competition is too fierce. I don’t have time for it. I love doing it, but I’m not actually good at it. To put it simply, they can’t imagine themselves actually succeeding.

Sustained passion can overcome all of these obstacles, as long as you’re willing to step back and look at the big picture. The people who succeeded before you – they’re human, too. The biggest difference between where you are and where they are is perspective.

In the Zone
One sure sign that you’ve stumbled across the right mix of passion and personal skill is the so-called “zone.” The “zone” refers to an intense level of focus, to the point where a person completely loses track of time and other events going on around them. When you’re in “the zone,” you’re utilizing all of your cognitive effort and talent towards one specific endeavor, often with amazing results.

When I’m in the zone, I lose all track of time and all track of the world around me. I don’t hear my wife talking to me. I don’t hear the telephone ringing. I’m just absorbed in what I’m doing. At some point, I’ll snap out of it, glance at the clock, and pretty much believe whatever it says, whether fifteen minutes have passed or nine hours have passed. I’ll believe either one. Almost without exception, all of my best work is done when I’m in “the zone.”

What things do you do that put you into this kind of “zone”? Whatever it is, it’s probably an indication of what you’ll excel at in life.

Finding Your Tribe
When you begin to follow your passion, you need a group of people around you to support you and help you grow that passion. They can be mentors, advisors, friends, and peers.

For many, though, the trick is finding them. The internet is making this easier, of course, but meeting people face-to-face can sometimes be a real challenge. Robinson offers a great deal of advice on how to find peers that share your interests. One big key that’s worked for me – visit shops in the area that sell items related to your passion and ask around there for groups and interested folks. If there are no groups, get involved in starting one and cooperate with that store to promote the group (they’re usually happy to do this).

What Will They Think?
Many people worry about what their friends might think of them if they start following a new passion. Will my friends laugh at me if I start spending a lot of my time painting?

Here’s the scoop: your real friends will support you. If you have “friends” that laugh at you because of an interest you’re following, are they really friends?

Along those same philosophical lines, you’re likely to find new friends that share your passion if you put effort into finding your tribe. When some friends – the unsupportive ones who really aren’t there for you as you grow – exit stage left, new ones – ones who do support you and share your passions – enter stage right.

Do You Feel Lucky?
Here, Robinson riffs on the idea that fortune favors the prepared. If you put yourself in situations where luck at least has a chance to happen, you have a much higher chance for success than avoiding such situations.

The simplest way to do this is to get involved in community projects or activities related to your interest. The nexus where your passion meets a lot of people is the best way to have opportunity come knocking at your door.

Somebody Help Me
Robinson digs deep into the idea of finding and cultivating a mentor here, suggesting that anyone embarking on a new life journey can really be served by finding someone to guide them.

For some passions and experiences, simply finding someone else who is experienced and passionate can be enough – you can probably locate these folks through community groups or online forums. For others, you may need to find people who are deeply engaged in careers that involve your passions. Don’t look for people who would be in direct competition with you – that would present a big conflict of interest – but look for people who are doing similar, parallel things. Ask them questions – and if they need any help you can provide, offer it!

Is It Too Late?
Obviously, no, it’s not.

Robinson tells several anecdotes, but the one I like to think about is my great grandmother, who passed away in 1999. During the last decade of her life – when she was in her eighties – she took up painting. She painted landscapes and a few still lifes and a few of them (painted in the year or two before her age started to catch up with her) have a certain something to them that’s indescribable. I have one hanging in our dining room that depicts a late winter evening, snow heavy on the ground. In the distance there’s a cabin with lights on. Whenever I look at it, I have this strong sense of “going home after being away for a long time” – a feeling evoked by this painting that my great grandmother’s frail hands painted. That’s exactly what she was trying to communicate with her frail hands and her paintbrush and the message came through loud and clear. That’s talent – and a bit of passion, too.

If a woman can take up painting in her eighties and produce things that can take my breath away, it’s not too late for you.

For Love or Money
Many people focus on the question of making money with their passion. Can they turn it into a profit-making venture? If not, why invest the time?

Robinson’s suggestion essentially boils down to do what you’re drawn to do. If it feels right to you – if it sucks you into that “zone” – do it. That’s the kind of experience that makes life worth living. Quite often, with a lot of practice of the mechanics of what you’re doing, the “zone” can produce truly amazing things and others will notice and value those things.

But there are no guarantees with anything in life.

Instead, follow the passion because you love to do it. If your reason for not following it revolves around

Making the Grade
The best part of following your passion is that you get to define what success is on your own. Perhaps success is just simply getting started each day, or maybe it’s an enormous lofty goal. Whatever it is, you define it – you get to figure out what success is.

It’s your baby, and it’s beautiful.

Is The Element Worth Reading?
The Element really codifies some of the ideas I’ve been developing over the last few years about following your passions – it’s really worth it, but you have to overcome your fears and you can’t just expect the world to come knocking because you’re now doing something interesting. It requires interaction, networking, practice, and footwork to channel your passion into something that can put a roof over your head. But it’s worth it.

Robinson does a great job bringing these ideas together into a very readable book, packed with approachable stories and ideas. If you’ve ever had an inkling of a passion in your life but have kept yourself from chasing it for one reason or another, Ken’s book might just be the antidote.

As with many books of this type, you get out of this book what you put into it, so if the concept seems alien or uninteresting to you, you likely won’t get too much out of The Element. However, if you’re struggling to find your passions and direction in life, this can potentially be a life-changer.

In response to my recent article, Are Poor People Lazy?, where I concluded that laziness doesn’t always equate to poverty and vice versa, Pamela left this comment:

There are many factors that lead a person to the life they are living. I am quite shy. No matter how much I socialize no matter how many times I try to assert myself I remain shy. Because of this I do not take classes or do many of the things suggested for me to do to get ahead in life. So according to you I am lazy. NOT SO. If allowed I would work 12 hour days at my job.
I also agree with many of the comments that being in the right place at the right time can have a more positive outcome on you life than anything.

For most of my life, I’ve been very shy. Sometimes, I’ve been able to cover it up by essentially adopting another persona – simply pretending to be someone else who was outgoing – but that would only work for short stretches. Usually, I would just maintain that level of false outgoingness until I could get out of the situation.

I told myself that it was impossible to be any different than that. It was a convenient excuse, as are all excuses that take us away from great opportunities in life.

In truth, adopting that “outgoing” persona, escaping social situations, and believing I was just shy and nothing could be done about it was merely taking the path of least resistance in life. In other words, it was the easiest path available to me. Being more social and extroverted was far outside my comfort zone – it was a lot easier to just put on a mask, get through the situation, and remain introverted.

It has taken me a very long time to grow beyond that level of introversion and shyness. I’ve had a lot of painful social interactions along the way, and I’ve practiced in ways that would have seemed ludicrous to me years ago.

Now, though, I feel completely fine starting up conversations with people I’ve just met. I can lead conversations with others, as well as follow their lead, and I actually enjoy it because of the human interaction as well as learning a lot of things along the way.

Being more social has opened up a lot of avenues for me. I’ve met interesting people, gained some public speaking opportunities, and built a lot of friendships in the community.

If I had just continued to follow the path of least resistance, I would have never had these opportunities.

Is the path of least resistance laziness? Some might argue that it is – I don’t. People can work quite hard on the tasks that they’re most comfortable with.

However, opportunity rewards people who step outside their comfort zone. The Einstein quote that starts this article really sums it up: if you just keep doing things the same way over and over again, you’ll keep getting the same results. If you don’t like the results you’re getting in some aspect of your life – your economic situation, your personal situation, your health, and so on – it’s time to take a new path, one that’s not easy.

Find it hard to be social? Read Never Eat Alone and How to Win Friends and Influence People and start acting on what you read.

Find it hard to lose weight? Start exercising every day, even if it’s hard, and throw out most of the junk food. Try drinking water instead of soda – it’ll be hard at first, but fighting through that resistance is what will make change happen.

Find it hard to learn and grow your knowledge? Turn off the television and read books on subjects that you don’t know much about. If they’re over your head, back off and read simpler ones first.

Find it hard to execute some particular skill? Use your spare time and practice it, even if practice seems difficult and you’d rather be doing something else. Play the guitar until your fingers hurt. Cook every meal for a month from scratch.

Find it hard to get out of debt? Cut up all of your credit cards and erase those numbers from all of your online accounts and learn how to live on what you have.

Once you’ve broken through some personal barriers, you’ll find that opportunity knocks more often than before. You’ll understand the world around you better – and people will interact with you in a more positive fashion.

It’s hard to change course, but if you keep doing what you’re doing now, you’re going to keep getting the same results. Now’s the time to get off that path of least resistance and try the hard way.

Over the past several months, I’ve reviewed a lot of books about entrepreneurship, building relationships with others, and climbing the career ladder. All of these techniques have one thing in common: they require you to stand up for yourself and be assertive. This is a point that often comes up in the comments for such book reviews and other articles about moving forward in your career or dealing with workplace problems. Either people aren’t assertive enough, they’re ridiculously over-aggressive (which creates conflict), or they switch between the two extremes (passive-aggressiveness).

All three of these elements usually result from a lack of a naturally-developed sense of appropriate assertiveness. Appropriate self-confidence, the ability to express your ideas, the ability to accept criticism without it destroying you personally, the ability to say “no” without guilt, and the ability to stand up for yourself all revolve around being appropriately assertive and, frankly, many people simply don’t have it.

For most of my life, I wasn’t assertive enough at work (I’m usually assertive enough in my personal life, but even there, I’m not always assertive enough). I was scared to death to speak in public. I’d often allow others to walk all over me, often ending in disastrous work situations. I was usually willing to state my ideas, but I would usually fold immediately in the face of criticism of those ideas.

The Assertiveness Workbook by Dr. Randy Paterson takes on the spectrum of assertiveness problems and strives to point people towards an appropriate, mentally healthy level of assertiveness in their lives. Having that appropriate level allows a person to easily stand up for themselves, their ideas, and their goals, enabling them to climb the career ladder and build what they want for themselves. Let’s dig in.

1. What Is Assertiveness?
Assertiveness is largely the realization that you are in control of what you will or will not do, but not in control of what others will or will not do. Passive people tend to not recognize the control of what they themselves do, while aggressive people tend to try to control what everyone does (and passive-aggressive folks alternate between the two in often-confusing ways). Assertiveness simply means sticking up for yourself – your time, your energy, your money, your work, and your ideas. Assertiveness strikes a happy balance between passiveness and aggressiveness, enabling you to control your own destiny without treading on others.

2. Overcoming the Stress Barrier
Stress often pushes us, revealing the nature we fall back on. Do we run away (the passive response)? Do we attack the source of the stress (the aggressive response)? Do we gossip and offer indirect attacks (the passive-aggressive response)? None of these are good solutions to stress. Instead, the best solution is to simply minimize the stress so that we don’t slip into our default biological “flight or fight” response – instead, we deal with it rationally, using a cool head, and often wind up choosing the best solution for the problem (usually, the assertive one). You can minimize your stress by eating well, getting adequate sleep, minimizing your caffeine intake, getting exercise, and trying to live a balanced life that mixes work, personal, and leisure time. You can also utilize quick stress responses that are outside the “fight or flight” dichotomy, like stopping and breathing deeply a few times.

3. Overcoming the Social Barrier
If you attempt to be assertive instead of your normal response to stress (whether it be passive, aggressive, or passive-aggressive), the people around you might not react positively – not because assertiveness is bad, but because they’ve come to expect that you’re passive or aggressive. They might be confused as to how you’re acting and it might make the relationship worse in the short term. In a nutshell, bear with it. Instead of caving and resorting back to your previous behaviors, keep acting assertive. Things may get worse before they get better, but they will get better – for you and for the people around you. Relationship strain is natural and should be expected, but in the end, assertiveness will make you more valuable, not less, and will build stronger relationships. Be patient.

4. Overcoming the Belief Barrier
Many people build up a set of beliefs that reinforce their natural responses. Naturally passive people, for example, believe that assertiveness is selfishness and passivity is the way to be loved and valued – neither of which is actually true. Similarly, naturally aggressive people believe that full honesty is always the best policy and that if they’re not aggressive nothing will happen – neither of which is actually true. Paterson works through a ton of such beliefs in this chapter, evaluating why they’re not generally true and offering techniques for eliminating them from your life.

5. Reality Check
You are in charge of your own behavior, others are in charge of their behavior. That’s really the key point of this entire book. You can’t really control the choices of others, but you can control your own choices. Sure, you can use aggression to strongly influence other’s choices, but there’s a huge cost there – resentment happens whether you see it or not. Similarly, if you’re passive and let others dictate your choices, you become their doormat.

6. On the Launchpad: Preparing for Change
Assertiveness is what you do, not who you are. You may naturally be a passive person, but you can choose to act in ways that are assertive. You may naturally be aggressive, but you can choose to scale back on the aggression towards others. Instead, focus on what you’re doing when you interact with others. Stand up for how you spend your time and energy – and let others make their own choices. You’re going to make some mistakes along the way – that’s fine, just keep trying to find that sweet spot of assertiveness. One great technique is to minimize your communications – focus on making your messages as slim as possible, only communicating the bare assertive essentials.

7. Becoming Visible: Nonverbal Behavior
This chapter comes straight out of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It offers a very long checklist of nonverbal behaviors for you to work on to make your presence felt in a room without dominating others aggressively. Integrating these individual behaviors can be difficult, so Paterson encourages people to practice each behavior for a week, focusing intently on that behavior, until it starts to become at least a little natural. I find that, for me, it takes more than a week of such focus for it to become a natural behavior.

8. Being Present: Giving Your Opinion
Passive people tend to not give their opinion at all, while aggressive people tend to state their opinion in such a way to make it clear that other opinions are wrong – neither one is cool. Instead, focus on actively expressing your opinion, but frame it well. State it from your perspective: “My take is…” or “I enjoyed it…” Don’t criticize other’s views – it’s quite likely that other reasonable people will have their own take that differs from yours. This works in almost any conversation and, when prefaced that way, is almost always welcome. If anyone attacks you for stating what you think – if you make it clear that it’s just your take – they are the ones who will come off as aggressive and rude, not you.

9. Taking the Good: Receiving Positive Feedback
Many people find it hard to accept compliments. They view it as unbalancing the situation and either should be ignored, devalued, or met with a reciprocal compliment. If you feel this way, the best thing you can do is let it go. Accept a compliment with a polite “Thank you” and move on with life, accepting the complement as a positive. Of course, sometimes compliments are given with an ulterior motive, but you cannot honestly know what the motives of others are. Instead, respond positively to the comment in the now and allow other actions and statements to reveal the other person’s true character.

10. Giving Helpful Positive Feedback
The best way to give good positive feedback is to avoid all ulterior motives. Never give a false compliment, nor a backhanded one. You should also try to compliment things that have already happened, like complimenting someone on a lovely dinner after the dinner. Avoid compliments where you’re trying to use the compliment to get something, like complimenting someone on their car when you need it for a ride. The best positive feedback is honest positive feedback that only serves to tell someone else what they’re doing well from your perspective. Anything beyond that begins to spoil the soup.

11. Taking the Valuable: Receiving Negative Feedback
What about negative feedback? Again, if someone offers you negative feedback, your best bet is to always hold back. Accept what they’re saying. Your only response should be for clarification or to explain without offering excuses. Don’t try to change their mind or argue with them – it won’t work and creates more of a scene. Later, reflect on what they’ve said and draw your own conclusions. Quite often, particularly from people with aggression issues, the negative feedback has little to do with you but instead has to do with their own hangups. Careful reflection will reveal whether the feedback is something you need to work on or something to ignore.

12. Constructive, Not Critical: Giving Corrective Feedback
How do you give negative feedback? This is very hard for passive people to do, but there are a few principles that can make negative feedback really helpful. First of all, state what you observed so that they understand the specific element you’re coming from. “Joe, you walked in at 9:15 and the store opens at 9.” Then, make it clear what about that action or statement is problematic. “Being late means that there’s no one to man the register, so others have to take up your slack.” Follow that with a suggestion on how to correct it or move towards some sort of solution. “Let’s go have a talk about why you’re regularly late.” That framework will create corrective feedback that works instead of just tossing off negative feelings.

13. The Assertive “No”
If you cannot say no to someone or something, you’re not in charge of your life. Learning how to say no doesn’t mean you’ve decided to ignore the needs and wants everyone around you. Instead, it’s merely a realization that your needs come first in your life. There are several strategies for saying “no” that really work. First, decide what you’re going to say before you even speak – if you don’t know yet, then don’t answer. Second, if you’re going to say no, be strong about it. Don’t try to soften the “no” or else aggressive folks will see it as practically a “yes.” Don’t apologize and don’t make excuses for the “no” unless you’re actually changing your statement from an earlier promise. Also, many aggressive people will continually keep asking if they want something – if you’ve decided to say “no,” keep saying it and don’t reword it (which is a cue that you’re starting to waffle).

14. Making Requests Without Controlling Others
Another part of balancing assertiveness well without falling into passivity or aggressiveness is to make requests that are clear but aren’t controlling. Paterson breaks such requests into four parts: describe, express, specify, and outcome. Describe simply means to describe the situation as you perceive it to be right now. Express means explaining how you feel about this situation – stick with “I” statements. Specify means identifying clearly (but briefly) what you’d like the other person to do to change the situation. Outcome expresses the results you hope to see if they fulfill the request. Surprisingly, it’s quite easy to condense these four pieces down into a total of just a few sentences, but they’re all needed to make a clear and fair request of others.

15. Countdown to Confrontation
Sometimes, confrontations are unavoidable, particularly when someone is demanding more than is realistic or socially unacceptable. Confrontations are occasionally part of appropriate assertiveness, as long as you prepare for that confrontation in a rational fashion. First, state the issue to yourself and make sure you understand why this is an unresolved problem. Next, figure out the symbolic value – at the core, why is this a problem? Is it a realistic conclusion (”he makes sexist comments and demands ridiculous things of me, so the problem is that he’s sexist”) or unrealistic (”he leaves the toilet seat up so he doesn’t love me”)? Next, figure out what you want to come out of the confrontation – do you want a behavioral change or do you want a person to reflect and make a personal change within themselves? Ask yourself if it’s really you that needs to change, and make sure you’re picking a worthwhile battle here. Then, choose an appropriate place and time and make sure you’re safe during this confrontation (as some aggressive people tend to not react well in such situations).

16. Constructive Confrontation
The biggest key is to focus on relaxing during this. If things get intense, emotions tend to take over and no resolution to the problem can happen. Try to keep your voice even and don’t show off obvious signs of agitation – if you feel that way, take a time out. Focus on making it clear how the problem is negatively affecting you. Don’t focus on “winning” but on making your concerns heard. Don’t bring up old history, either – let sleeping dogs lie and focus on the issue at hand. Avoid absolute statements like “You always…” as they’re usually wrong and send the discussion down a bad path; instead, say that something happens “… more often than I’m comfortable with.” Try to find solutions that are based on common ground, recognizing that both sides have needs. Don’t get angry and if there are periods of silence, just wait them out. Doing these things will make confrontations much more palatable and likely to achieve a result you want and less likely to result in ongoing problems.

Is The Assertiveness Workbook Worth Reading?
To put it simply, if everyone in the workplace actually used the ideas in The Assertiveness Workbook, the workplace would be a wonderful place to be. You’d have a good idea where others stand and people wouldn’t commit to unrealistic things. Confrontations would be handled without disaster and people with good ideas would be unafraid to express them but wouldn’t use them as weapons, either.

Naturally, the first step you can always make in creating such a workplace is to do it yourself – be assertive, not aggressive or passive or (worst of all) passive-aggressive. If you find that you fall into one of the other areas, The Assertiveness Workbook can be really useful in helping you assert yourself without trampling all over others.

One final note: this is closer to a “book” than a typical “workbook.” Though there are a few blanks to fill in throughout the book, most of the suggested thought exercises are better done in another notebook, not in this workbook itself.

I know of Ming Tsai from his excellent public television cooking show Simply Ming. He tends to make a lot of fairly unusual dishes with Asian themes that are really palatable to Western taste buds. So I was excited to try out the recipe he submitted to “How Low Can You Go,” Chicken-and-Corn Fried Rice with Lemon Spinach. Even more interesting, he claimed his kids love it, which made my foodie thoughts perk up even more. Here’s the recipe:

1 pound ground chicken
2 eggs
1 large yellow onion, minced
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon ginger powder
2 ears of corn when in season, or 1 bag frozen (12 ounces)
1/2 (10 ounces) bag spinach (washed, spun dry, de-stemmed, leaves torn)
2 tablespoons naturally brewed soy sauce
Juice of 1 lemon
4 cups cold, cooked long-grain rice, brown and white combination, preferably day-old so it’s nice and dry*
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Canola oil

Heat a wok or large saute pan over medium-high heat. Lightly coat with oil. When oil shimmers add chicken, season with salt and pepper, and brown, breaking up any large chunks with wooden spoon or spatula. Remove chicken to a plate. Add about 1/2-inch oil to wok and allow to heat; add eggs, which will puff up. Cook scrambled eggs and remove to a paper towel-lined plate. If necessary, add more oil to wok to lightly coat, then add onions, garlic, and powdered ginger, and cook until nicely caramelized, about 5 minutes. Add corn, rice, chicken and egg, and toss to combine. Add naturally brewed soy sauce, toss to combine, and check for seasoning. Place mound of raw spinach in center of four dinner plates. Drizzle with lemon juice and season. Top with fried rice to cover. Enjoy!

My wife Sarah took charge of this recipe, so my notes below are largely taken from her comments as she was making it.

First of all, here are the ingredients we used.

We wound up using Dole spinach for this because the spinach we got at the farmers market (our usual source for summer produce) was utterly abysmal – the two purveyors had some of the saddest looking spinach we’d ever seen, so we passed. The rice – a mix of white and brown long grain – was pre-cooked a day in advance. We also chose to substitute some ground turkey for the ground chicken, because that’s what we had on hand.

So, anyway, on with the cooking. She cooked the turkey with quite a bit of seasoning by itself, breaking down the pieces. Here it is, frying away on our stove:

Sarah suggests spicing the meat quite a bit here by putting on plenty of pepper and I agree wholeheartedly – black pepper really complements things well.

After the turkey was finished, she cooked the eggs, essentially making scrambled eggs in a bit of oil. This part smelled really good to me:

After the eggs were finished, she cooked the other ingredients together in the remaining oil. A quick note: she decided that there was an excess of oil after the eggs finished and removed most of the oil. I agree – I think with that much oil, there would have been too much in the pan. Half an inch might be the right amount in a wok, but not in a large pan – use just barely enough to cover the pan (once the eggs are done).

Upon adding the rice, the turkey, the eggs, and the corn to the mixture, there was a huge amount of food, filling up our rather large pan.

It smelled heavenly at this point. I (personally) suggest adding a bit more soy sauce than what the recipe calls for, but it was quite good as-is.

Serve it on top of spinach leaves, as the flavor of the spinach combines well. Here’s our final plate:

Did we like it? Almost universally, yes. Even our son, who is the pickiest eater in the house, seemed to really get into it, gobbling it down like crazy. Both children had seconds, though neither one finished their second helping. I loved it, though I would have included just a bit more soy sauce. Sarah loved it, too, though she’s intrigued as to whether it would be significantly different with chicken.

What about the cost? Our cost for this recipe totaled $9.80. But here’s the kicker – there was more left over than we consumed at the table. We were able to get eight more meals out of the fried rice, for a total of twelve meals. Thus, the cost per meal was $0.81 – not bat at all.

Still, if you’re eating for a small family and don’t want to eat this four times, you should reduce the recipe significantly.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
The first thing I would do is halve the recipe. The recipe makes a mountain of food and, unless you want to eat it several times or have an enormous family, it makes too much food and the rest will go to waste. One could freeze it, I suppose, but the dish does not strike me as one that would tolerate freezing well.

The second thing I’d do is reduce the oil. This doesn’t change the time, but it slightly reduces the cost and definitely improves the health of the meal. You don’t need half an inch of oil here unless you’re using a wok – even then, it’s perhaps too much.

Third, de-stemming the spinach seemed flatly unnecessary to us. It would be a time investment that doesn’t gain too much – the small stems on most spinach is just fine. We served ours just as it came, after washing.

Those changes alter the recipe quite a bit. Here’s my alteration:

1/2 pound ground chicken
1 eggs
1 small yellow onion, minced
1/2 tablespoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon ginger powder
1 ear of corn when in season, or 1/2 bag frozen (6 ounces)
1/4 bag spinach (washed and dried)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Juice of 1/2 lemon
2 cups cold, cooked long-grain rice, brown and white combination, preferably day-old so it’s nice and dry (that’s about 3/8 cup of white and 3/8 cup brown when dry)
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Canola oil

Heat a wok or large saute pan over medium-high heat. Lightly coat with oil. When oil shimmers add chicken, season with salt and pepper, and brown, breaking up any large chunks with wooden spoon or spatula. Remove chicken to a plate. Add about 1/4-inch oil to wok (unless using pan, then just coat bottom) and allow to heat; add eggs, which will puff up. Cook scrambled eggs and remove to a paper towel-lined plate. If necessary, add more oil to wok to lightly coat, then add onions, garlic, and powdered ginger, and cook until nicely caramelized, about 5 minutes. Add corn, rice, chicken and egg, and toss to combine. Add naturally brewed soy sauce, toss to combine, and check for seasoning. Place mound of raw spinach in center of four dinner plates. Drizzle with lemon juice and season. Top with fried rice to cover. Enjoy!

For a long time, I was one of the resentful folks. I had a hard time speaking up in group situations and I hated presenting. The first time I had to give a major presentation to a group and interact with them, I went to the bathroom repeatedly and threw up until I was dry heaving because I was so nervous and so unconfident.

What I’ve learned over time is that the person that appears confident is often not as confident as they appear. They just simply do a few things well. They walk in a way that appears confident. Their eyes seem alert. They stand tall. They have a faint appeal that you can’t quite put your finger on. You feel fine talking to them, but not to most people.

They’re not wired differently than you. They just do a few clever things.

Over time, I’ve figured out how to make many of those things quite natural for me – and most of the techniques I use are somewhat unusual. Here are ten of them. Each of them will help if you have problems with appearing confident, as I sometimes do.

1. Pick a spot.
When you first walk into a room, look around with your head completely level. Find a spot in the room that’s exactly at your eye level. It can be something on the wall, an object hanging from the ceiling, or something else. Pick something you’ll find visually interesting, if you can find anything. Once you’ve found your spot, remember it. Then, whenever you’re nervous, sweep your eyes to that spot.

What this does is it allows you to keep your nervous tic of staring at the floor or looking away from someone – something that can be very hard for an introvert to break – and redirect it in a bit of an optical illusion. By keeping your eyes up at eye level – which they will be if you look at that object – you appear to be looking at another person. That is a subtle cue of confidence – you’re looking for others, thus you must be socially accepted.

Obviously, you shouldn’t stare at the object, but knowing it’s there and looking at it from time to time when you’re nervous is a vast improvement over casting your eyes down, which signals a complete lack of confidence.

2. Improve your posture with duct tape.
Yes, duct tape. Masking tape or electrical tape or even Scotch tape will work, too. You’ll need a friend or a spouse with this.

Stand up as straight as you can, with your back vertical and your arms at your sides, relaxed. Then, have a friend take a strip of duct tape and run a three inch strip down your back. The top of it should be on the center of one of your shoulder blades and end three inches below it. Then, that person should put a second strip, starting at the center of your other shoulder blade and going straight down for three inches. Take a third strip and apply it horizontally, connecting the tops of the strips, then a fourth strip connecting the bottoms of the vertical strips. You should have a rectangle on your back, nearly square in shape.

Here’s the thing. As you go through your day, every time you attempt to slouch, that tape will tug at your skin, resisting a poor change in posture. It’s not painful (unless you have excessive hair back there), but it is enough of a physical reminder to cause you to naturally keep a good posture.

This works great before a big meeting, but it also works great for training by doing it every day for a few weeks. You’ll naturally exercise some muscles in your back, making them stronger, and allow other muscles to relax and slightly weaken. What will happen is that your muscles will begin to find that a position of good posture is the natural one and that’s how you’ll begin to sit and stand.

Good posture gives the appearance of confidence, and this is a great little way to create that appearance.

3. Carry a flask – whether you drink or not.
I was at a conference chatting with a really solid presenter from Oracle whose name I can’t recall right now – let’s call him “Jim.” After a really great presentation, I started chatting with Jim and discovered that we knew a few people in common, so after the chat, we agreed to go get a drink together.

On the way, we both needed to stop to use the restroom. When I was finished, I walked out to see Jim taking a big slug out of a flask he had pulled out of his front pocket. I jokingly said, “Whoa, cowboy! Getting an early start?” He smiled, swished the liquid around in his mouth for a minute, then spit out some blue stuff. He grinned and said, “Listerine.”

It was a trick of his. Whenever he was about to meet with some people, he’d head to the bathroom, take a slug out of his flask, swish it around for a bit, then spit it out. He’d follow it with a bit of water to get any bad taste out, then look in the mirror to make sure there wasn’t any food in his teeth.

Doing that simple routine made him feel better. He could be sure his breath didn’t smell at all, his mouth felt squeaky clean, and he was also confident there was no food on his face or in his teeth. All around, it really gave his confidence a bump.

Good advice. I actually started just keeping a travel bottle of Listerine with me, but this is a great use for a flask since they’re designed to fit well in a pocket.

4. Go for a thirty minute fast walk three times a week.
Walking improves your health. We all know it – and it’s absolutely true. Thirty minutes walking instead of watching a television show will help you lose weight, feel better, and all that.

But it has an extra confidence booster in it as well.

If you make an effort to walk as fast as you can on your walks, the speed of your natural, normal walk will increase, too. It’ll feel more natural for you to go faster, so you will. You’ll strengthen all the appropriate muscles and, soon, the way you walk across a room will look much more confident than before without any conscious effort on your part.

5. Memorize a person’s eye color with one extra adjective.
I have a hard time looking people in the eye. Mostly, it’s because my eyes sometimes have problems focusing well, especially in the evening, but there’s also an aspect of low confidence there, too.

I’ve found a solution that works well in both regards. It gives me a reason to look people in the eye on a regular basis (making me appear confident) but not too much (making me appear creepy).

All I do is this. When I first meet a person, I look into their eyes until I can describe their eye color with one noun and at least one descriptive adjective. Their eyes are “cloudy blue.” Their eyes are “mocha brown.” Once I’ve figured it out, I’m free to look away.

Then, if I can’t recall immediately their eye color, I know I should look back. In practice, this means that I tend to look at their eyes directly several times early on in our conversation, but not too much at one shot. Instead, I alternate it with the first trick, swiveling my eyes to an object at eye level in the room.

What does this do? It creates an impression that I’m interested in what they’re saying and also fully engaged in the larger event – very confident – when in truth I’m not confident at all.

6. Keep a chamomile tea bag in your wallet.
Chamomile tea is an effective natural relaxant. It is the single best natural way I’ve found to calm myself down in any situation that makes me nervous. If I feel awkward, I’ll just find some hot water, put it in a cup, dunk in a bag of chamomile tea, let it steep for a couple minutes, then drink it down. Calmness washes over me.

It really helps with appearing confident, too. I tend to get quite nervous during social events – and it shows. I talk too fast, look away, and generally hide from conversation. In short, I need to calm down. When I’m calm, my speech gets a bit slower, I’m less nervous around other people, and I’m more willing to engage others – all signs of confidence.

Chamomile is a natural calming agent that’s pretty much socially acceptable in any situation, so it’s a great “secret weapon” to have in your pocket.

7. “Hi, I’m Trent Hamm.” Period.
Whenever I would introduce myself to people, I often found myself saying things like, “Hi, I’m Trent Hamm and I work on this project and I wrote this document” or something to that effect. In my nervousness, I felt the need to include what amounted to a short resume with my name.

I believed at the time that it would do a good job of laying out who I was to people, but what it actually does is shows that you’re not confident already in who you are. If the other person doesn’t know who you are, they’ll either ask for information – or they’ll hold it in and believe they should know who you are. In either case, you seem more intriguing and in control.

So, next time you introduce yourself, stop with your name. At the very least, it opens the door to more conversation.

8. Hit Google News.
Whenever I enter a group, I usually stop and check the news to see if any major events have occurred really recently. This gives me something to break the ice with almost every time – I can simply use a major news event or a popular culture event to open with.

I usually read the top stories and see if there’s anything of strong general interest there. If it’s a slow news day, I’ll check the entertainment and sports news. In some groups, I’ll check other news sections, too – technology works well in some groups, and business and money news works well in other groups. If I see something interesting but I don’t understand a big piece of it, I take another few seconds and hit Wikipedia to give myself enough context that I’m not clueless.

Having a current event or two in my head gives me something to say when I’m standing there wondering what on earth I should be talking about. Quite often, the person who comes up with conversation topics is often the person who comes off as confident, as many other people are often standing around just as nervously.

9. Take five deep breaths.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with a situation or you’re about to step out into a room where you have to start speaking very quickly, just pause for a moment and take five deep breaths.

The intake of a lot of oxygen does several little things to your biochemistry, all of which are helpful. It lowers blood pressure. It increases alertness. It reduces anxiety. In short, it’s a very simple thing that helps in almost any situation that makes you nervous.

I find that any time I know I’m going to be speaking soon, I do this. It always helps, without fail – I feel better right after doing it.

10. When in doubt, ask a question.
So, your breath smells good. Your posture is good. You naturally walk with confidence and introduce yourself with confidence. You do a bit of small talk with current events. Then….

The best thing you can possibly do is lead the conversation. The best way to do that is to simply ask a question and then listen to the response. Ask them what they do. Ask them about their biggest project. Ask them what they think of the meeting, or of the last speaker. Ask them what hotel they’re staying at and if they like it.

Then, listen to what they say. Almost always, you can follow up on something there. You can relate your own experience or thoughts. You can ask another question. You can dig into information that you actually want to know more about.

Line this up with the other techniques (the eye technique and good posture) and you’ll look confident no matter how you feel inside.

Good luck.

Dal is a delicious simple Indian dish, often served with rice or wheat flatbread (called “roti”). It’s often a mainstay of vegetarian diets because it provides quite a bit of protein, and the rich flavorings make it palatable to us omnivores as well. Valerie Gaino, of Pichilemu, Chile, submitted a delicious Chilean variant on the dish to the How Low Can You Go contest:

3 cups of lentils
2 cups of chopped potatoes
2 chopped carrots
3 chopped tomatoes
1 hot pepper, chopped
1 small onion chopped
2 gloves garlic chopped
16 ounces tomato sauce
1 tsp cumin
a little beer or sherry
a little red vinegar
olive oil
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
salt and pepper

1. Soak and cook lentils till soft. Drain and rinse, set aside.
2. Sautee onions, garlic, hot pepper, and cumin in olive oil. Add beer or sherry.
3. Add potatoes and carrots, cover with water, bring to boil.
4. Add tomatoes and cook till potatoes are soft.
5. Add lentils and tomato sauce.
6. Salt and pepper to taste. (I sometimes add more water or beer if it’s too thick, or vinegar if it’s too sweet.) Add more cumin or hot sauce if you like it really spicy.
7. Throw in the cilantro, take if off the heat. Serve after a few minutes.

One immediate problem I observed is that the “three cups of lentils” likely refers to three cups of lentils after boiling, which means that 1 1/2 to 2 cups of dry lentils should be more than adequate for this recipe. Three cups of dry lentils would make this recipe mostly flavored lentils with a few other pieces thrown in.

Sarah (my wife, for those of you new to The Simple Dollar) handled most of the food preparation for this dish, so most of the notes that follow come from her. Here are the ingredients we used:

First, you simply boil some dry lentils, easily found in the bean section of any grocery store. We only used two cups of dry lentils to start with. Just boil them in a large pot with plenty of water for about thirty minutes or so and they’re fine, then drain the water off of them. This can be done a day or two in advance – store the cooked, drained lentils in the refrigerator. Here are the lentils we had after boiling:

While the lentils are boiling, you’re going to be spending that time chopping vegetables – again, something you can do a day or two in advance. The potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, onion, and garlic all need to be chopped.

We use a special knife called an ulu to make this process easier. An ulu is an all-purpose knife used by the Inuit for many different purposes, but it works really well for quickly chopping small amounts of vegetables. You simply grasp it by the handle and rock it back and forth on a cutting board with the vegetables underneath.

Of course, you can use pretty much any knife to chop vegetables – this is just a recipe where the ulu really comes in handy.

Next, I sauteed the onions, garlic, pepper, and cumin together, with about two tablespoons of white sherry. The same amount of a mild beer would be fine.

Next, add the potatoes and carrots, then add enough water to cover everything, then raise it to a boil. Once the water is boiling, add the tomatoes and then let it boil for ten minutes or so. Check a piece of potato and see whether it’s soft enough for your tastes – if it isn’t, let it boil for another five minutes and check again.

Once the potatoes are finished, it’s basically done. Just add the tomato sauce and the lentils, stir it a bit, season with some salt and pepper, and serve it!

Of course, you’ll want to serve it on something. If you have access to a flatbread, that’ll do just fine. Alternately, you can simply use rice. Here’s our rice steamer in action, steaming while the dal was cooking:

You might also want to have something else on the side. We had a very simple chickpea curry – basically just chickpeas (garbanzo beans) loaded up with curry paste. Yes, we love our chickpeas at the Hamm household!

Here’s our final plate:

This made a huge amount of dal. We had enough for our dinner that night, lunch the following day, and lunch two days after that for all four of us, and we still wound up freezing some of it.

Did we like it? All of us liked it quite a bit. Sarah perhaps liked it the least, particularly on reheating, and strongly suggested trimming the amount of cilantro, which I agreed with. It was delicious, though, and I was happy eating it even the third time.

Our total cost (ignoring fractional items we had on hand): $8.29, almost entirely on fresh vegetables. Given the amount we made, though, the cost per meal was $0.69 – pretty nice!

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
First of all, I’d trim the entire recipe by half. This made far too much food for us as is. Without some significant changes, you’ll either be freezing it – not a great option, since the texture will be ruined – or eating it all the time for days.

Second, I’d cut the remaining cilantro by half – and use dried cilantro. Fresh cilantro has a stronger flavor, but dried will work fine.

Third, I’d chop the vegetables and boil the lentils the night before. Turn on a radio in the kitchen and take care of these tasks in the evening so you can toss the meal together very easily when you arrive home from work the next day.

These changes modify the recipe a fair amount, making it cheaper and perhaps slightly faster. Here’s what the new recipe would be, as modified by me:

Trent’s Chilean Dal

1 cup of lentils
1 large red potato, chopped but unskinned
1 chopped carrot
2 chopped tomatoes
1/2 hot pepper, chopped
1/2 small onion chopped
1 clove garlic chopped
8 ounces tomato sauce (small can)
1/2 tsp cumin
1 tbsp beer or sherry
olive oil
1/8 cup chopped cilantro
salt and pepper

Night before:
1. Chop potato, carrot, tomatoes, pepper, onion, garlic, and cilantro.
2. Soak and cook lentils till soft. Drain and rinse, set aside.

Next day:
1. Sautee onions, garlic, hot pepper, and cumin in olive oil. Add beer or sherry.
2. Add vinegar, potatoes, and carrots, cover with water, bring to boil.
3. Add tomatoes and cook till potatoes are soft.
4. Add lentils and tomato sauce.
5. Salt and pepper to taste. Add more water or beer if it’s too dry, or add hot sauce if you like it spicier.
6. Throw in the cilantro, take if off the heat. Serve after a few minutes.

Before the trip, I collected suggestions for free things to do in the area from both readers of the site and on Twitter. The response was pretty surprising, with lots of great suggestions thrown our way. I collected all of the ones suggested by multiple people, selected the handful that I was sure would be a hit with my family, and we tried out several of them.

So, here are the great free things to do in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

Free Things We Enjoyed
Here are the four free things we really enjoyed on our trip. We tried several things, but these stood out from the pack.

Pioneer Plaza

Pioneer Plaza is a beautiful park in the middle of Dallas that features a life-size bronzed cattle drive – three cowboys herding a lot of cattle across a stream. The setting is beautiful and the sculptures are fantastic.

We wound up spending almost two hours here, even on a hot summer day. We admired all of the bronze statues, walked across the stream a few times, and my children petted a horse ridden by a Dallas police officer. It would have been a perfect place to have a picnic had we been more prepared.

You can find out more about Pioneer Plaza from the Texas Trees Foundation.

Dallas Farmer’s Market

What can I say? I love farmer’s markets. There are tons of fresh food samples, opportunities to buy delicious produce at a very low price, and almost always a surprise or two. The Dallas Farmers Market, on the quiet Wednesday morning that we were there, was sparsely crowded but had a lot of vendors happy to talk and offer samples of all kinds.

In the picture above, my daughter was discovering that she loves watermelon – she was trying a (free) piece of yellow watermelon. We wound up buying quite a few fruits at the market, which provided afternoon snacks for the family and some breakfast food as well.

You can find out more about the Dallas Farmers Market at their website.

Dealey Plaza
This is the area where President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. You can stand outside the School Book Depository and observe the route that Kennedy took. There’s also a lot of public works projects in the area, built in the 1930s.

Although there is actually a very nice museum nearby in the School Book Depository, I found that the actual setting outside the Depository had much more of an impact. I walked along the route that Kennedy took, absorbed the area, and thought about that tragic moment.

Wikipedia has an excellent entry on Dealey Plaza.

Fort Worth Stockyards

Over in Fort Worth, we visited the Stockyards. While there are a lot of shops in that area, there’s also a ton of free things to see and do – walking around the stockyards themselves, for starters. There are several free special events each day as well.

The highlight, though, was seeing the longhorn steers being leisurely driven down the street by three or four cowboys (pictured above). My son loved this part and kept talking about it for days afterward.

This is a great way to spend most of a day in Fort Worth. You can find out more at the Stockyards website.

Things Recommended By Two or More Readers
Here are five free activities recommended by multiple readers that we simply didn’t have time to make it to on our trip. All of these sounded like quite a bit of fun – and we would have likely done all of them had our trip been a few days longer.

Jazz Under the Stars
Each summer, the Dallas Museum of Art has a free concert series – in 2009, this series is called “Jazz Under the Stars.” Each Thursday at 8 PM, people gather at Ross Avenue Plaza, spread out blankets and picnic baskets, and enjoy a free outdoor concert by some very good jazz ensembles. More information is available at the Dallas Museum of Art website.

Crow Collection of Asian Art
The Crow Collection of Asian Art is a beautiful art museum located in the Dallas Art District that several readers raved about. It’s right in the heart of the city and features a stunning collection of Asian art, both historical and modern. Outside, there’s an extensive sculpture garden, which includes 20 statues from the French masters. Find out more at CrowCollection.org.

Farmer’s Branch Historical Park
This is a large collection of historical buildings from the 19th and early 20th century, maintained in a state as close to the original as possible. For people into folk history, this is apparently an exquisite place to visit. You can find out more about the Farmer’s Branch Historical Park here.

Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
The Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center is a spectacular concert hall with extremely impressive architecture and acoustics. Built by I. M. Pei, the Center also features one of the best pipe organs in the United States. Check it out at MeyersonSymphonyCenter.com.

Thanks-Giving Square
This is an open area in the center of downtown Dallas dedicated to the idea of giving thanks as a universal human value. The location features an interfaith chapel, a stunning courtyard, and an impressive array of nature and art. Find out more about it at ThanksGiving.org.

Believe it or not, our summer vacations for the next five summers are penciled in right now. For each of those trips, I intend to do the same thing: ask around for free things to do, try out as many as I can, and report on the ones we didn’t make it to.

Let me make it as clear as possible: without the insights from Getting Things Done, I would have never found the time to launch The Simple Dollar, nor would I have been as involved in my children’s life as I am today.

Since reading it the first time, I sit down about once a year and re-read Getting Things Done, hoping to add some new insights to my repertoire. On my first few readings, I mostly found value in reiterating the big points. Lately, though, I’ve found that the book contains a lot of hidden lessons that aren’t directly placed front and center.

Here are seven more subtle aspects of the book I’ve found useful in my life recently.

1. The best way to get things done is to “pre-work.”
The single biggest thing that constantly derails one’s effort to get to an empty inbox (i.e., to whack everything off of one’s to-do list) are deadlines. You have to get this item done by 4 PM today, so you toss aside all of the other stuff you might be working on – some of which is likely more useful than the task you’re doing – and get to work. At the end of the day, you have a full inbox/to-do list and you realize that this isn’t working too well.

Thus, one of the hidden goals of GTD is to pre-work – put in effort so that there are fewer and fewer of those urgent tasks that interrupt your work. The best way to do that is to “pre-work.” I do this by writing articles in advance. At my previous job, I used to fill out forms as early as I could, often filling them the rest of the way out with estimates, so that I wouldn’t be tied to the clock later on filling out that form. I’d write lots of “library” code that will likely have use in the future so that when the time came, I could quickly prototype things that were pretty nifty instead of burning the midnight oil.

“Pre-work” helps keep your schedule free of at least some interruptions and makes it much easier to bear down and focus on the more important tasks at hand, like the large projects that you’ve always wanted to accomplish.

2. Keep an active “someday” list – because “someday” arrives sooner than you think.
I take special effort to write down every project idea that crosses my head. Once a week or so, I’ll go through them and toss out a few of the truly frivolous ones, but for the most part, I keep that list. It’s usually between 50 and 100 projects long at any given time – and I may or may not ever do any of them.

So what’s the point? The reason is that “someday” arrives more often than you think. If I’ve managed to work through my inbox and have an empty afternoon ahead of me, the first place I turn is my “someday” list – and there’s always something worthwhile to do on there. My “someday” list produced this and this and this, among many other things.

3. The more you delete, the better.
I used to use services like Tumblr and Delicious to store piles upon piles of bookmarks for future reference. What I found, though, is that I rarely looked at them – and when I did think of trying to find something, it was like finding a needle in a haystack. It was far faster to just Google for it.

The same thing is true for paper documents. When I read a magazine, I toss it. I’ve stopped actively updating a recipe box since virtually any recipe I want is out there in the cloud. I don’t keep many books – I can just use PaperBackSwap to get any book I want again pretty quickly. Why store mountains of music when I can just use Pandora from pretty much anywhere? Sure, I keep a few of each type of thing – but why keep so much stuff when it’s easy to retrieve it again from the cloud when you want it.

Thus, I keep only the minimum amount of stuff – and it’s made my life far, far easier. Very little time is spent filing or organizing the stuff – and is instead spent getting stuff done. Erin’s right – clutter is the enemy of success.

4. Post-It notes as task reminders are useless.
Whenever I see a person with Post-It notes all over the place with task reminders written on it, I usually expect to find that person is good-hearted but surprisingly disorganized. Why? Because Post-It notes wind up all over the place. There’s no consistent place to go to find the next task that needs to be done.

The fewer places you have to look for the next thing to be done, the more successful you’re going to be. Spreading your to-do list across a bunch of websites, notebooks, sticky notes, and other things does nothing more than ensure things will slip through the cracks and also that you’ll spend a lot of time just figuring out what to do next – both are enemies of getting things done.

A single system, even if it’s nowhere near the best system, is better than three or four great systems.

5. Hands-free collection of ideas and to-dos is a winner.
I go back and forth between using a voice recorder and using a small microphone attached to my iPod Touch, but in either case, I find that having the ability to record thoughts while my hands are otherwise engaged (or at least one hand is) is absolutely amazing for productivity.

The key, though, is to make sure these thoughts are actually saved and processed somewhere. I listen to my voice recordings every day and jot them down in their appropriate place so that they don’t get lost in the shuffle.

What’s the benefit? Many of my best ideas come up out here:

I’m pushing one of my kids on the swing and an idea pops into my head. If I try to hold it there, I tend to forget it. If I stop pushing my kid to write it down, the moment is often broken and the child runs away to do something else. Instead, I just pull out that voice recorder with one hand, speak my thought, and keep going in the moment.

6. If you feel negative about something, address it immediately.
Sometimes, I get the sense I’m forgetting something important. When that feeling comes up, I pay attention to it, because it’s usually right. I almost always stop, check my calendar and my inbox, and almost always, I find that there was something that needs to be taken care of.

Trust your instincts, particularly when you’re going through daily routines that are familiar to you. If something sets off your radar and gives you a feeling that something’s not right, listen to it. Address it now rather than later.

This is actually a great principle for life in general. If you feel like something’s wrong in a relationship, address it sooner rather than later. If you feel like something’s wrong with a larger project, spend some time evaluating the project as a whole now before a bunch of work goes to waste.

7. The mechanics of the system itself are not all-powerful.
Every time I’ve run into problems with keeping track of the things I need to do, it’s because I’ve made things too complicated. For me, it’s simple. I jot down things I need to do wherever I’m at. When I’m at a computer, I record them all in one central place (I use Evernote). I keep an “inbox,” a calendar, a project list, and a “someday” list. And that’s it.

For some people, this is overkill. For others, this is not nearly enough. Everyone has a different level of organization that works. The point is if you find yourself fighting your system, then your system isn’t working. It’s either too simple or too complex – and I usually bet on too complex.

No system is all-powerful. No system is perfect for everyone. Instead, mix and match elements until you find what works for you.

Good luck!

A better solution is bartering – exchange something you have for something of roughly equal value that someone else has. This works quite well in some environments, but it’s often difficult to find like-minded people to barter with.

That’s where the internet comes in handy. Here are fourteen great services for bartering, most of them operating by mail and from the convenience of home. I use most of the services listed below and I’ve mentioned quite a few of them before – some of them, particularly PaperBackSwap, are part of the fabric of my life at this point.

Let’s dive right in and get bartering! (One quick note: the sites that trade “everything” aren’t necessarily the best places to go – often, it’s difficult to find things you want on those sites. I find the niche sites have a much higher level of success for that specific area.) For a few links, I’ve included my email address in the link if you click on it so I can quickly touch base with any readers who sign up for the service.

BabysitterExchange
http://www.babysitterexchange.com/
What you can trade: babysitting, carpooling, pet-sitting, tutoring, etc.

This website essentially helps you set up a babysitting, tutoring, pet-sitting, or similar neighborhood sharing cooperative online. Here’s how it works: you get a small group of families who all know each other, then you all sign up for BabysitterExchange. The site helps you schedule exchanges of common tasks like babysitting and so forth, enabling all members of the cooperative to essentially have those services for free (and with easy access) in exchange for providing the service every once in a while.

BizXchange
http://www.bizx.com/
What you can trade: business services and goods

Quite often, businesses are heavily involved in fairly similar marketplaces but aren’t in direct competition with one another. In those situations, it makes a lot of sense for those businesses to cooperate strongly with one another with regards to many specific business elements – sales, marketing, and so forth. BizXchange helps businesses interested in such exchanges to find each other and help set up healthy relationships.

Craigslist
http://www.craigslist.org/
What you can trade: everything

Craigslist is a three ring circus – newspaper classifieds gone wild. There are countless items and services for sale and trade. Digging through it is kind of like walking through a carnival – there are all sorts of interesting sideshows and you may or may not find what you want, but you’ll enjoy the trip!

Freecycle
http://www.freecycle.org/
What you can trade: everything

Freecycle is kind of like Craigslist’s DIY libertarian cousin. It revolves around people wanting to give things away – items they have that they just want to find a good home for. It has its own culture – it’s generally considered good form to both give and take, not just take, making it more of a laid-back bartering site.

Game Trading Zone
http://gametz.com/
What you can trade: video games

Game Trading Zone is a service that lets you set up trades for video games and video game accessories. Instead of listing what you have and receiving credit for those listings, Game Trading Zone allows individual users to trade with each other. They browse each others’ libraries, set up trades, possibly throw in other items, then ship things to one another.

Goozex
http://www.goozex.com/
What you can trade: video games, computer games

On the other hand, Goozex also allows trading of video games and computer games, but instead of requiring users to set up trades, it assigns a point value to each game or peripheral you list. Trades are made basically by moving those points around – if someone with enough points to request an item you have requests it, you send the item away and receive those points, which you can then use to request any other items that are listed. More efficient – but sometimes less fun – than the Game Trading Zone system.

PaperBackSwap
http://www.paperbackswap.com/
What you can trade: books

What can I say? I love PaperBackSwap. I’m an avid reader, and that often means that my shelves get overstuffed with books. I used to take piles of them to the used book store, but I’d get at best a 2-for-1 exchange and the selection at local used book stores was limited. PaperBackSwap works much more efficiently. You just list ten books you want to trade and the site gives you two credits. A credit essentially represents a single book that you can request, so you can immediately request two books out of the more than a million books listed on the site. Want more credits? When someone requests a book you’ve listed, send it to them and receive a credit when they receive it. Shipping is easy, too – you can print off complete shipping labels directly from the site. For me, it beats used book stores in selection, convenience, time, and cost.

SwapACD
http://www.swapacd.com/
What you can trade: CDs

This service works much like PaperBackSwap, except with CDs. You receive a credit for each CD sent out; requesting a CD costs a credit and $0.49. You can swap credits between SwapACD and PaperBackSwap and SwapADVD, so you can effectively make trades in each type of media (send out DVDs and get books in return, or send out CDs and get DVDs in return, for example).

SwapADVD
http://www.swapadvd.com/
What you can trade: DVDs

Again, this works much like PaperBackSwap, except for DVDs. When you sign up, you list ten DVDs for trade and receive two credits. You receive a credit for each DVD sent out and requesting a DVD costs a credit. It’s also “credit compatible” with SwapACD and PaperBackSwap, meaning you can move credits back and forth between the sites.

SwapStyle
http://www.swapstyle.com/
What you can trade: clothing, fashion accessories

This is a perfect place to go if you’re a clothes or fashion junkie. You can swap clothes, cosmetics, shoes, handbags and so on. Although the items are all women’s fashions, several readers have told me that the items available here are quite great.

SwapThing
http://www.swapthing.com/
What you can trade: everything

SwapThing is basically a giant swapping free-for-all, where swaps are individually negotiated between two people. You simply list items you’re willing to swap, then negotiate with the lister of an item that you want. Once you come to an arrangement that makes you both happy, you send out the items.

SwapTree
http://www.swaptree.com/
What you can trade: books, CDs, DVDs, video games

SwapTree facilitates one-for-one trades of the CDs, DVDs, books, and video games you no longer want. Make a list of the items that you have and are willing to trade as well as a list of the ones you want and the site will look for people who have the item you want and want some of the items you have. The wait is sometimes long, but when you actually do make a swap, it usually feels like a great swap.

U-Exchange
http://www.u-exchange.com/
What you can trade: services such as carpentry, cleaning, electricity, etc.

U-Exchange facilitates face-to-face bartering in specific locations. Visit the site, browse through the proposed swaps in your area, and see if there’s anything that you want or can trade. It’s fun to browse, if nothing else, and you might just find a great bartering situation for you.

Zwaggle
http://www.zwaggle.com/
What you can trade: kid’s stuff: clothes, toys, accessories

Lately, I’ve become a huge fan of Zwaggle. Zwaggle is a swap site for stuff for children – in other words, a treasure trove for parents. You can swap kids’ clothes, toys, furniture, and so forth. For every item you shop, you receive a number of points (roughly equal to the dollar value of the item) which you can then spend on other items. Virtually everyone involved with the site is a parent who just wants to find bargains on high-quality items – something I can certainly identify with.

What Is Angel Food Ministries?
Angel Food Ministries is a non-profit group that distributes low-cost food options in many communities (a typical basic box from Angel Food Ministries costs $30 and has approximately $55 worth of groceries in the box).

Most of the funding and organizational structure of Angel Food Ministries is handled through evangelical Christian churches in the United States. Many churches serve as distribution centers in local communities, and each box contains a leaflet that outlines some of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

What’s in the Box?
The May 2009 menu provides a clear example of what a box from Angel Food Ministries will provide:

.5 lb. Lean Chopped Beef Steaks (5 x 8 oz.)
5 lb. Leg Quarters
2 lb. Chicken and Corn Bread Stuffing Casserole (Ready to Cook)
28 oz. Salisbury Steak Dinner Entrée
1 lb. Boneless Pork Chops (4 x 4 oz.)
1 lb. Corn Dogs (6 ct.)
12 oz. Deli Sliced Ham
5 oz. Chunk Light Tuna in Water
32 oz. French Fries
1 lb. Sweet Corn
15 oz. Musselman’s Apple Sauce
15 oz. Pears (Product of U.S.A.)
8 oz. Dinner Roll Mix (Makes 8 Nice Rolls)
7.5 oz. Mac ’n Cheese
32 oz. 2% Shelf Stable Milk
Dozen Eggs
Dessert

This box is available for $30.

At first glance, this is a pretty good deal, and if your primary concern is getting food on the table at a very low price, this is likely a great option for you.

However, if you dig a little deeper, some of these options may not be the best value for your dollar. For example, I would be hesitant to feed several of the options on that list to my children on any sort of consistent basis, at least not without some careful inspection of the actual nutrition facts and ingredients of those items (the corn dogs, the “dessert” item which is often something like Twinkies or Moon Pies, etc.) Under that perspective, though, if I were to get the box, then throw out a third of the items, I might as well simply go to the grocery store at my own convenience and choose the exact items I want for my $30. Other writers have come to largely the same conclusion – it’s a value on the surface, but the quality of items may not be up to many personal standards.

Some would argue that I am somewhat looking a gift horse in the mouth here, and I agree that I am. From my perspective, this box is one option for spending $30 in food for my family. Depending on your financial situation and your food priorities, this can be a great bargain. It mostly depends on the type of value you’re seeking.

What Angel Food Ministries Does Right
One area where Angel Food Ministries hits a home run, in my opinion, is with some of their optional packages. You can choose an optional package as an addition to the basic package, as listed above. For example, one of their optional packages for May 2009 is the “Fresh Fruit and Veggie Package”:

1 head Premium Fresh California Iceberg Lettuce
1 head Premium Fresh California Romaine Lettuce
1 5 oz. Package Fresh Gourmet Classic Caesar Croutons
1 Package Wiley’s Citrus Garlic Salad Seasoning
1 lb. California Cello-Pack Carrots
2 each Premium Jumbo Vidalia Sweet Onions
1 each Premium Jumbo Red Onion
1 6 oz. Bag Premium Fresh Florida Red Radishes
1 head Premium Fresh Green Cabbage
3 lb. Premium Idaho Baking Potatoes
3 lb. Premium Tree-Ripened Valencia Oranges
3 lb. Premium Washington State Red Delicious Apples
1 each Premium Large Vine Ripened Honeydew Melon
AFM May 2009 Fruit and Veggie Recipe Sheet

For $22, that’s a very strong deal, especially if you want to get fresh produce on the table and you’re struggling to make ends meet.

Another strong advantage of Angel Food Ministries is that they often distribute in central community locations (like churches) that are quite accessible for many families that may not have access to transportation to get to the grocery store. Using a church as a distribution center means that the distribution often occurs in the middle of a residential area, making it easier for many people to access the food – particularly those who need it the most.

Is It Right To Use This Service?
In terms of using this service, my biggest question is whether it’s a justifiable option. Quite obviously, this service is trying to target lower-income families who can really use the savings provided by the options made available through the ministry.

The question is whether or not it’s ethical – or socially appropriate – for a person with a higher income level who is simply trying to maximize every cent to take advantage of this service.

On the one hand, the service makes it clear that it’s intended for everyone. There are no requirements at all for people to take part in receiving food from Angel Food Ministries, and they claim that there is plenty of food to go around.

On the other hand, if you’re in a situation where you have a reasonably large monthly food budget, why would you choose to use this service? If you are making it your goal to feed yourself and your family a well-rounded, high quality diet, many of the options in the basic box from Angel Food Ministries probably do not fit the bill, making it much less of a savings for you.

Thus, I think the question really comes down to your own personal food choices. If you are in a tight financial place and the goal is to get sanitary and diverse food options on the table at the lowest cost possible for your family, Angel Food Ministries is where you should go – and you’re exactly the type of person the service was designed for. On the other hand, if you have enough of a food budget that you can make detailed conscious choices about what goes on your table and what does not, you’re likely better off going to the grocery store and the farmer’s market – which, again, is appropriate.

In other words, Angel Food Ministries somewhat self-regulates – if this is a good deal for your life situation, they’re ready and willing to help. For me, though, I’ll stick with my own meal planning, which gives me much more control over what goes on my table (albeit at a higher price – a price I’m willing to pay).

Angel Food Ministries as a Charity
As you can see, in large part, I support the work that Angel Food Ministries does on the ground in getting low cost foods to people who really need them. In fact, I had considered donating to Angel Food Ministries in the past – and, as I’ve mentioned before, that means I sat down to research how the charity itself worked.

What I found sent up a few pretty big red flags for me.

First of all, the charity is not listed with Charity Navigator, an impartial service that evaluates charities in terms of how they manage themselves internally and how much of their revenue actually goes towards charitable work. This is a basic step that many charities of any size take on – it’s the honest way to conduct a charity.

Second, the charity is being investigated by the FBI for reasons that are not being made clear by either the charity or the FBI. Here’s some details on the investigation.

Perhaps the biggest red flag, however, comes from MinistryWatch, a watchdog group for Christian-affiliated charities. It issued a “donor watch” for Angel Food Ministries, stating the following:

Angel Food Ministries is marketing to help individuals that are on the low economic side of the scale and in “need”; however, the leadership for the organization has higher salaries than the norm. In addition, the higher salaries consist of the leadership of individuals that are related. This is just for the known year of 2006, it is unknown of the more current years.

1. Wesley J. Wingo: $588,529
2. Linda Wingo: $544,043
3. Andrew Wingo: $529,014
4. Wesley Wingo: $454,673
5. L.M. Wingo: $384,694

Let alone the fact that these five people are related, the individual salaries are above and beyond what charities typically pay their employees, even large charities at the highest management levels.

Obviously, these discoveries are much more of interest to people who are considering donating to Angel Food Ministries. This should in no way prevent you from using Angel Food Ministries in your community.

My Final Take
On the ground, Angel Food Ministries provides a good service that many people really need – a lot of food at a very reasonable price at the expense of flexibility. For someone in a poor financial situation, Angel Food Ministries can really be a godsend.

However, as a broader charity, I would not donate to Angel Food Ministries when there are many highly ethical charities out there to contribute time and effort to. In many larger cities, there are local versions of Angel Food Ministries that you can donate to or be involved with – just ask around in your own community.

Rich Like Them by Ryan D’Agostino follows in the tradition of The Millionaire Next Door and The Difference: it interviews a large group of millionaires in order to figure out what traits they have in common.

Rich Like Them takes this tactic and runs in a slightly different direction with it. The author, Ryan D’Agostino, identified the fifty richest zip codes in the United States and went to forty nine of them. He quite literally went door to door, knocking on the doors of people in these communities, and asking them if they’d be willing to discuss how they “made it.” Surprisingly, he got a roughly 10% success rate, even including the droves of people that weren’t home or avoided the interview.

The result of these interviews is Rich Like Them – a collection of the advice that D’Agostino collected on this journey. In fact, he codifies all of this advice into five general areas.

One: Open Your Eyes
We’re all almost drowning in opportunities. The problem is that many of us simply don’t see them. We’re either too focused on the specific little thing at hand or simply aren’t keeping our mind open when we’re “off the clock.” Every person you meet and every situation you’re in is an opportunity not only to improve yourself, but to connect to others and open the door to money-making possibilities.

What steps can you take? Build relationships with people – and, even better, try to connect those relationships to each other, because bringing people together in a useful way is one of the best things you can do. Listen to what people are actually saying and doing – and try as hard as you can to keep your own conclusions out of the mix.

Two: Luck Doesn’t Exist
Luck is mostly about preparation. If you have the ability to record great ideas and to take immediate advantage of opportunities that come your way, you’ll seem much more lucky than the guy who never writes anything down and doesn’t have a hefty savings account.

What steps can you take? Write down ideas as soon as they come to you. Have an “opportunity fund” in the bank in cash form that you can use when something great comes along. Surround yourself with people who are doing useful and interesting things.

Three: The Economics of Obsession
Find something you’re passionate about and throw yourself in head first. Become obsessed with what you’re doing. Read everything you can get your hands on. Meet everyone even remotely related to your passion. Try it all. Practice, practice, practice.

What steps can you take? Figure out what you’re truly passionate about, then when you find it, make it central to your life. Surround yourself with people and activities that reinforce that passion. Become so obsessed, in fact, that others sometimes find it almost scary.

Four: The Myth of Risk
Risk is real, but most people use risk as an excuse not to try things. Instead, you should build a safety net for yourself and take that leap sometimes. A risk that others aren’t willing to take is often the source of an incredible opportunity for someone who is passionate and is prepared.

What steps can you take? Make your own life as financially secure as you can. Dig into opportunities and figure out their real risks. Realize that if something is truly in your wheelhouse, you’re likely to face less risk than someone less impassioned.

Five: Humility
Above all, no matter what happens, be humble. Humility takes you far in life – you can mess up and you will. The way you treat others often winds up matching the way they treat you, especially at that key moment when you really need their help.

What steps can you take? Treat everyone well. Don’t complain about the behavior of others – instead, set your own example. Be humble about your accomplishments instead of bragging about them.

The Best Part: Little Points of Wisdom
The part of this book that really stuck with me was the short principles and quotes inserted throughout the book every few pages. I collected these pieces together, simply because I thought they were so incredibly worthwhile:

Don’t forget your goal – even when you’re on vacation
Where others see death, imagine life
When you hear someone say “If only I could…,” you’re hearing an opportunity
Connect the people you meet
Even when you find the sure thing, save some money for a rainy day
Once you connect the dots, follow through
Choose your purpose, and don’t let anyone tell you you’re wrong
Remember: with time comes free money
Watch your pennies, no matter how many you have
Keep your cool – it’s a big part of persevering
Don’t deviate from your planned path to get a quick gain
Perseverance doesn’t take forever
Once you find your calling, persevering is easy
Remember that you can’t do a business transaction with yourself
Prepare to get lucky
Find a driver other than money – it’s usually more lucrative than money alone
Do one thing and do it well
Obsess over whatever job you have
Take your mind off the money – you’ll earn more
Don’t plan a career – plan a life
Obsession makes you work harder
If you look forward to going to work, that’s a good sign
Discover love through immersion
Turn fear into passion
Never stop being a student
Calculate every risk – even the one you live in
Look for your window to go solo
You want autonomy? Let it motivate you
Be cocky when it counts
Don’t worry about what other people think
Reduce risk by believing in yourself
When you fail miserably, rejoice
If you hate your career, um, change it
Sometimes the biggest risk is doing nothing
Never let pride get in the way of profit
Be humble even if you’re as rich as Brooke Astor
Understand your limitations
Don’t be a slave to Plan A – it’ll prevent you from seeing plan B
Don’t be afraid to make less than your spouse
Never feel as if you’re too successful to sweat
Remember that you are not, nor will you ever be, a god or goddess

Good stuff, all around. Somewhere in there is a piece of advice that is probably a life changer for you.

Is Rich Like Them Worth Reading?
Rich Like Them is a spectacular handbook for someone who is a self-starter with an entrepreneurial bent. If you’ve got a strong desire to build your own success, the advice in this book can provide a great foundation.

If that doesn’t sound like you, Rich Like Them doesn’t have as much to offer. Unlike The Millionaire Next Door and The Difference, the focus here is strongly on entrepreneurial behaviors – taking advantage of the opportunities around you.

So, here’s the deal: if you have an entrepreneurial nature, Rich Like Them is an excellent read; if not, I highly recommend giving The Millionaire Next Door and The Difference a read.

“You know, we have a perfect example of this at work out in our yard right now.”

And she’s right. Here’s a picture of it.

The play equipment above sits exactly on the property line with our neighbors to the south – the property line actually runs just to the right of the slide. The entire piece is used extensively by both families – we have a three year old and a one year old, whereas the neighbors to the south have a six year old and a four year old.

This item was already in place on the property when we moved in – it came with the house. The previous owners of our home and the home to the south each wanted a large, wooden play area for their respective children, but instead they got together and made the frugal decision to split the cost of the play equipment.

When we moved in, one of the first things we did was discuss the arrangement with our neighbors to the south. It turned out to be a great way to introduce ourselves to them and a great way to have our children begin to play with each other. According to them, they actually bought the very play set that they intended to buy for their children – they just paid half the price for it and got all of the use out of it.

Later, when that family moved out, a new family moved in to the south of us. This provided them an opportunity to meet new neighbors (us) and have our children bond – and they certainly have. The younger child next door and our older son play together regularly and the older child next door loves “mothering” our toddler-aged daughter.

What about liability? Whenever I discuss this arrangement, this is often the first question we’re asked. In this situation, house insurance would cover any claims that resulted from the equipment, just as if another child without health insurance was hurt while playing in our yard. In most practical situations, though, common sense and an ongoing, healthy relationship with our neighbor takes precedence – we’re all aware of a lack of any sort of ill intent with the equipment and the social costs of any sort of legal action in this situation would be tremendous.

What are the potential benefits? As enumerated above, the play equipment itself saved each family 50% on the initial purchase (or it could allow for the families to combine resources to purchase an even better set of play equipment). It also reduced the work load on each family by half when the equipment was actually installed.

After the purchase, it facilitated a better relationship between each pairing of neighbors that lived there – and also helped build a friendship between the children.

What are the potential drawbacks? The drawbacks come if the situation changes. If one family moves out, the new family that moves in has to be agreeable to the situation or else you may have a legal problem (though most situations like this are resolved by common sense). Thankfully, two such moves have occurred since the equipment was installed without any problems.

Another problem that may occur is if one family wants to do something different with the property line, such as installing a fence. Again, we’re fairly lucky in this regard – we have a large shared lawn area where the children of many families play together and most of the families are loathe to interrupt this with a fence or other obstruction.

Yet, even in the face of these drawbacks, the shared play equipment has been an enormous win for us. Half the price, half the labor, all the enjoyment, and a built-in opportunity to bond with your neighbors. Sounds like a great deal for me!

At almost every job I’ve ever worked at, from a minimum wage service job where I helped people print documents to a full time job in a research lab, creativity and initiative have been rewarded. A person who is a source of good ideas becomes valuable to their coworkers and to their supervisors – and that value often translates directly into financial and other rewards.

That’s the reason I enjoy reading books on encouraging one’s creative thinking, and Stimulated! (by Andrew Pek and Jeannine McGlade) is a prime example of this genre (along with some of my favorites, The Creative Habit and The Path of Least Resistance). Subtitled “Habits to Spark your Creative Genius at Work,” Stimulated! focuses directly on creativity in the modern workplace – spawning ideas that will solve problems that directly help the bottom line of your organization (and, indirectly, help your own bottom line).

Does Stimulated! offer any useful insights that go beyond other readings, or are we better off just sticking with The Creative Habit and The Path of Least Resistance? Let’s dig in and see what Pek and McGlade have to offer.

Introduction: Awaken Your Creative Genius
If you want to be creative, you need to have a good platform for creativity. That means you need to be healthy and have a lot of sources for ideas. Some tactics for getting there include changing your daily routine, exposing yourself to new ideas constantly, visualizing your future in a positive way, eating well, getting plenty of sleep and some exercise, and laughing often. Your first step towards building a more creative life should be along those lines. Get a full night of sleep. Eat healthy. Start an exercise routine. Make a major change to your daily routine. Spend some time each day absorbing new ideas (reading is a good way to do that). Find opportunities to laugh regularly.

Stimulus: The Catalyst for Creative Genius
The “spark moment” is what we’re looking for – that exact moment when a fresh new idea pops into your head. That idea is usually borne by some sort of stimulus, either directly or remembered. The key, then, is to have lots of different kinds of stimuli in your life. Surround yourself with as many ideas and experiences as possible, focusing on your area of interest but often branching out into any number of related areas. Beyond that, simply enjoy a wide variety of experiences in your own life. Eat a wide variety of meals. Go to a wide variety of places. The more interesting stimuli you have in your life, the more likely you are to have a “spark moment.”

Eyes Wide Open: Scouting for Spark Moments
How can you actively seek to create these spark moments, though? Stimulated! points towards conscious observation – in other words, carefully observing the things you see, taste, hear, smell, and touch in the world around you. The book goes a step further than that, discussing the difference between describing and interpreting the things that you observe – and pointing out that describing what you observe is a far more powerful source of spark moments. Other keys include taking regular breaks (to let your mind subtly work through all of the inputs) and keeping a notepad with you at all times (so you can jot down spark moments as they occur).

Spaces and Places: Cultivating Spark Moments
Obviously, each of us has certain environments where we tend to think well. I tend to think best in small groups, actually – I come up with a lot of ideas at the dinner table with my family. I also find that listening to very rhythmic music helps as well – many of my best ideas actually pop out to the music of The Beach Boys – and changing environments sometimes helps, so I often go to the library or simply go out in the yard with a notebook in hand. Stimulated! recommends trying a wide variety of settings, music, visual elements, and so forth in your primary work area with the goal of finding the elements that seem to make ideas pop out of your head. If you find something that works, stick with it – but riff around it (don’t just play the same album over and over, for example).

Amuse Yourself: Playing with Possibilities
Play. That’s the advice of this chapter. Play a game (both physical and otherwise). Make a sand castle. Do a crossword puzzle. Play a musical instrument. Play with children (and/or watch them play). Play allows you to knock down many of the walls that surround your normal activities and almost forces you to think in a different way about the world around you in a very relaxed manner. I think this is part of the reason I find myself often writing about my children – I’m constantly inspired and filled with ideas when I play with them.

Make the Leap: Venturing into the Unknown
Many people avoid creativity because they view it as “risky.” Creative ideas rock the boat. They often force the person that creates them out of their comfort zone – and for many, that’s not a comfortable place to be. So why do it? The people and events that rock the boat are the people and events that really make things work. Instead of hiding, now is the time to be confident and courageous. Visualize the potential outcomes of making a suggestion that really rocks the boat but really helps the business – you’re seen as visionary, or at least as creative and focused on making the business better.

Real Results: Harvesting Creative Action
You have a spark – a very simple but very creative idea – but it needs work. How do you translate that little spark into a roaring great idea? For starters, ask questions about that spark. Throw every question at it that you can. A good question takes an idea and forces it to grow. Another tactic: keep track of your sparks as they grow in something of an “idea journal” that you can turn to when you need to get your juices flowing. Another great tactic is to share your burgeoning idea with others and ask them to throw questions at it and criticize it, then absorb those questions and criticisms.

Keeping in Swing: Sustaining Your Creative Genius
So how do you sustain this forward progress? The key to getting better at anything – and generating creative sparks is just one example – is to practice it every day. Set aside some time for creativity on a daily basis. Engage in activities that get your juices flowing, keep a notepad or a journal with you, and jot down ideas as they come to you. The more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Is Stimulated! Worth Reading?
Stimulated! takes many of the great ideas found in books like The Creative Habit and The Path of Least Resistance and condenses them down into something of a “recipe” format. While the other books tend to ramble on occasion, Stimulated! does a great job of providing a clear description of how to make the creative process work in your life.

Having said that, The Creative Habit and The Path of Least Resistance provide a lot of stimulation in their “sidebar” moments. It’s often the unrelated things that really got my juices going, and Stimulated! more or less lacks those sidebars.

I think I know what the difference is. Stimulated! is a better book for creativity for those that need structure for that creativity. Some people simply crave a straightforward process, and Stimulated! provides it. On the other hand, if your creativity seems much less process-oriented (and I’ll say that mine usually does), The Creative Habit and The Path of Least Resistance are probably better reads.

I quite enjoyed Stimulated! – there are a lot of great ideas inside the covers, and it’s perfect for people in a large organization.

Whenever I see clutter, I see money lost. For one, the clutter itself is usually made up of unused items that have value. Books, decorations, games, DVDs, and so on – they all cost money to purchase and many have at least some degree of resale value. For another, clutter takes up time, and time is money. It takes longer to find things. It takes longer to clean. It takes longer to rearrange and to organize.

Thus, over time, I’ve begun to look at clutter as an enemy of sorts. Stuff that just takes up space, particularly stuff with very limited aesthetic appeal, is stuff that can easily be eliminated.

That’s not to say that I’m entirely successful in my war on clutter. There are many places in our home that are quite cluttered (starting with my office, for example), but I often have difficulty sifting through that clutter and determining what exactly I should keep – and what I should get rid of.

Throw Out Fifty Things by Gail Blanke offers an interesting solution in the title itself. Blanke’s premise is that by going through your cluttered spaces and choosing fifty things to get rid of, you push yourself through the psychological barriers that cause you to create clutter in the first place.

Blanke identifies four key rules of disengagement (how to decide what to get rid of):

One. If it – the thing, the belief or conviction, the memory, the job, even the person – weighs you down, clogs you up, or just plain makes you feel bad about yourself, throw it out, give it away, sell it, let it go, move on.

Two. If it (see above!) just sits there, taking up room and contributing nothing positive to your life, throw it out, give it away, sell it, let it go, move on. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. Throwing out what’s negative helps you rediscover what’s positive.

Three. Don’t make the decision – whether to toss it or keep it – a hard one. If you have to weigh the pros and cons for too long or agonize about the right thing to do, throw it out.

Four. Don’t be afraid. This is your life we’re talking about. The only one you’ve got for sure. You don’t have the time, energy, or room for physical or psychic waste.

An interesting start, but is there more meat on the bone than that? Let’s dig in and find out.

Getting Rid of the Physical Stuff
Throw Out Fifty Things starts with a room-by-room walkthrough of one’s house (bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room, dining room, attic, and garage), highlighting lots of specific areas and specific tactics for getting rid of clutter.

A few particular themes seem to come up throughout this section.

First, memories are in your head and in your heart, not in items. Many people have closets crammed full of things that are kept for sentimental reasons, but they’re things that will almost never be looked at again – and when they think about the prospect of digging through all that stuff, it’s not a happy thought. So suck it up and go through it. Find the stuff that you’d actually like to have out and about for decoration because it really gives you a positive feeling – then chuck the rest. Seriously.

Second, just because you used an item a lot in the past doesn’t mean you have a use for it now. You read that book a year ago, spending an hour with it each night for weeks – and now it’s finished. Will you ever read it again? If not, toss it. Apply that same litmus test to everything you remember using frequently in the past – will you use it frequently again?

Another regular theme: digitize it. Got old documents in boxes taking up space? Scan them in and burn the originals. Got lots of old pictures in photo albums? Scan them in and share the digital images with your friends.

Your Office: Paring Down the Professional Clutter
Here, the “digital” theme really comes to the forefront. In a professional environment, there’s really not an extensive need to maintain a huge amount of printed documents – they take up space and are very cumbersome.

Blanke encourages anyone in an office environment to digitize everything they can. Scan documents, make sure they’re searchable (most modern scanners do this, enabling you to save a scanned document as a searchable PDF), and save them in a place that’s backed up regularly. You can turn boxes and boxes and boxes of documents into digital files stored on a hard drive – and it’s now searchable and much easier to use.

Yes, this takes a lot of time. It’s a tremendous project, in fact, but if you feel like you’re simply overrun with documents in your office, this is the way to go.

Another interesting tactic: get rid of old digital files that are simply outdated. Stick them in an archive folder somewhere and simply forget about them. I’ve found that most presentations and documents that are more than a year old or so tend to age quite seriously, so it’s usually best just to archive them (in case you ever need them again for some reason) and get them out of the way. Out of sight, out of mind – and you’re ready to create new ideas.

Attacking the Mental Mess
Here, Throw Out Fifty Things dips heavily into the “power of positive thinking” realm. Blanke argues that mental clutter is just as limiting as physical clutter and encourages people to get rid of it. A few examples:

“Throw out” negative terms you use to mentally describe yourself. Instead, focus on the positives about yourself. Visualize situations where you come through and succeed instead of imagining scenarios where you fail.

Let the past be the past. Particularly failures. Once you’ve failed, reliving it does nothing but bring you down. Absorb the lessons you can, then move on – don’t think about the mistakes you once made.

You’re not perfect. No one is. Stop focusing on your little mis-steps – they’re going to happen. Instead, work on preparing yourself for success in the future. Picture yourself doing everything right in the future.

You’ve grown. You’re not the same person you were ten years ago. Look at the things you define as your true interests and passions. Quite often, many of these things simply don’t match up with our self-definition. That means it’s time to toss out those old impressions.

Stepping into the Clearing
Once you’ve eliminated the clutter, what’s left? It’s likely much more minimal than before with just the essentials left behind. Those essentials are a fertile breeding ground for some essential redefinitions of your life.

Things that reflect who you are. If you strip things down to a minimal home decor, you’re left with only items that make you feel positive. From this state, you can be very careful about adding new things – again, add only stuff that contributes to your overall positive sense.

Culture that reflects who you are. Perhaps you’ve realized you’re no longer passionate about alternative rock and now you’re interested in personal development. That means you ca stop using mindspace for those old things and devote your time and mental energy to the areas that reflect where you are right now.

Ideas that reflect who you are. Getting rid of the many things cluttering your mind and your life frees you up to explore new ideas that previously intrigued you. Your kitchen is clear of clutter, your time is free of unfulfilling activities, and your mind has let go of old concepts – time to learn how to cook.

Is Throw Out Fifty Things Worth Reading?
Take a look around you. Do you feel happy about what you see? Are you surrounded by things that provide real value to you and are easy to find, or are you surrounded by mountains of stuff (and simply looking at that stuff makes you feel bad)?

Throw Out Fifty Things is a very thought-provoking book if you find yourself in the latter camp. If you can actually get out of the chair and do the things that Blanke suggests (and in this review, I’ve mostly just focused on general themes – there are a lot of great specific tips in the book), you’ll go a long way toward improving the environment around you and the environment in your head, too.

If you’re already organized, Throw Out Fifty Things won’t do much for you. If you’re not organized – and you’re willing to try – Throw Out Fifty Things can be a godsend.