Life Optimizer is about how to live life to the fullest through personal growth. You can read the newest posts below and some featured posts on the sidebar. If you find them useful, make sure to get free content updates via e-mail or RSS feed.
How to Live Life to the Fullest Through Personal Growth
I’m currently reading Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0 by Thomas Friedman. The book mainly discusses the ecological crisis we are facing, but the first three chapters also discusses the 2008 financial crisis. Ecological crisis and financial crisis may seem unrelated to each other, but Friedman argues that they actually have the same cause:
The way we were creating wealth had built up so many toxic assets in both the financial world and the natural world that by 2008/9 it shook the very foundation of our markets and ecosystems. That’s right, while they might not appear on the surface to have been related, the destabilization of both the Market and Mother Nature had the same root causes… The same recklessness undermined all of them.
Friedman explains the causes in more details, but they actually come down to just one thing: greed – the desire to get as much as possible for oneself without thinking about how things would be for other people or future generations.
Note: This is a guest post by Bob Hartzell of Get Degrees
When I went to college, I was right out of high school, overwhelmed by the freedom and very quickly baffled by the academic expectations. Today’s college students are often much more mature, more experienced – and in many cases, returning to school to improve a life. More often than not, college students are working as well.
Whether you’re eighteen and new to it all or you’re back in the classroom to try and make academics work for you again, college can be rough water if you’re intimidated and/or pushing yourself with family/job/education. Here are some suggestions to maximize the value of your time spent in the academic fold:
Note: This is a guest post by Armen Shirvanian of Timeless Information
If you want to see if and how you waste time, compare your current productivity to that which you have had at a winning time in your days. There is much benefit to gain from looking at a time when you felt like you were doing all the right things for a short time. You can see and reflect upon why that period of time came out feeling so good, and get new sense of how the time period you are now in is going.
You Can Stay At Your High Production State
The first thing to accept here is that you can maintain the high level of production that you have put out at some point. There is no reason you are weaker or less able now. You might have some distractions or pressures that you didn’t have when you were at your peak, but those can be pushed aside by your bigger vision. Let’s say you are a student who had a period where you were really focused on your schoolwork, and had a time where you were doing all the assigned reading given to you for a couple of months, and then slowed down since then. After a sizable amount of time passes from this period of success, you might start to feel like you can’t reach that state again. This isn’t the case, as you can reach that state, and even add to it, with new abilities you have strengthened since then.
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Do you want to make extra money? I believe knowing a few ways to supplement your income won’t hurt. You might not need them now, but when you needed them it’s nice to know the available options.
There are many ways to earn extra income, but here I make a few restrictions to prevent this post from being too broad:
- I only cover how to make extra money online. This way you can work wherever you are in your spare time.
- I only cover ways to make money in relatively short time. I don’t include anything that takes weeks or months to get results. That’s why I don’t cover things like blogging or revenue sharing with article sites (because building the necessary traffic could take a long time). On the flip side, most of the ways I discuss here won’t give you passive income. They require you to actively work to earn.
For each of the ways I’m about to share, I list some relevant web sites you can use. I don’t test all of them, so please read their terms before you decide to use them.
Without further ado, here are 9 ways to make extra money online:
Note: This is a guest post by Josh Lipovetsky of Film Insight
Ralph Waldo Emerson. A literary pioneer. Not only did he find the basis of Transcendentalism, or Bright Romanticism writing; he made great contributions to the field of personal development, and gave us some great practical ideas about living, that we will ponder upon for centuries to come. He valued the individual over society, and had many works of literature to enforce his views. In his works, there were many inspirational quotes that reflected what an individual is. Emerson’s highest values were: courage, peace, and the power of the individual.
I have selected 6 quotes, which represent Ralph Waldo Emerson’s views on life. Each quote has its own meaning, and its own method of practical application.
“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
I recently read an interesting article titled Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem. It tells the story of how 3D Realms, a video game company in Texas, developed Duke Nukem Forever, a 3D first-person-shooter game that they hoped would set new standards for the industry.
The development was started in 1997, just a year after the company released the wildly successful Duke Nukem 3D. Sadly, the company eventually shut down the project in… 2009. That’s 12 years of failed development! It sounds like a nightmare project to be in. Devoting so much time to a single project (as compared to the typical two to four years for game development) and yet ended up in failure. This is not to mention the estimated 20 million dollars wasted on the project.
But why did it happen? What turned the project into such a nightmare? The story contains a lot of lessons on what not to do to get results. These are expensive lessons for those involved, so hopefully we don’t need to go through such experiences to learn them.
