Archive for March, 2010

Are you having a problem getting your project on the rails?

March 19th, 2010

Here are some easy steps to moving a project forward.
This is my project that won’t move for various reasons: I want to start to exercise at a gym. The steps below can work for any project, even if yours is building a home.

Define your vision and visualize a successful outcome.
Take yourself out of your regular environment, go to the beach, be alone and visualize your project as a success. What do you see? Define your goals. If you started something and have stopped, it’s important to go back and think about what the successful outcome would look like and also ask yourself what benefits you will get from the project. Create a storyboard and map out your vision of what you want. Put this collage where you can see it.

Plan the next step
Ask yourself what the next step is that you need to do to move the project forward. This step is repeated throughout your project. Each time you finish your current step go back and ask yourself what is the next step?

Check what tools are needed
Check to see whether you require something for your projects that you need to buy or acquire. It may even be knowledge of how to do something. Ask yourself what you don’t know, so that when you define the next step you see what you may need. Do you need to get advice? Can you get information from the Web or by reading a book?

Build and maintain a support system
You may need help in order to move your project forward. This may be related directly to your project and it also may relate indirectly, like organizing help with your family so that you are have time to move your project forward. Think about the people in your life that can support you on different levels. If you are generally independent and do most things alone then now is the time to ask yourself, what you will gain by letting others help me?

Be willing to pay
Usually where there is gain this comes at a price. Are you willing to pay that price? Identify what the price is.

Reward yourself
Rewarding yourself throughout your project in a way that is good for you may also assist you. A client of mine who decided she was no longer buying cakes when shopping now saves this money and will spend it on a massage.

Check in
Rome was not built in a day. During your journey reflect on where you started from and where you are now. Many businesses do this in their weekly review. They review the past week and identify their accomplishments and then plan the coming week, making changes where necessary. Look at what is working and what is not for you. Be proud of what you have achieved and check the above points to see if there is something that is missing.

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Do you spend money on your hobby?

March 18th, 2010

This man devoted his life to designing and building racing cars
Owen Ashley designed 170 types of race and road vehicles in his motorsport career which ended last week at age 63 when he died of an illness. Most men are car crazy to some degree or another, but Owen devoted his life to cars and to car racing. He was responsible for designing and building 170 types of racing and road vehicles for, among others, BMW, General Motors and Toyota. It was his full-on passion. He completed the construction of his first competition vehicle when he was only 19.

What starts out as a hobby…
In the good old days before computers and TV, most children had hobbies. These could be anything from collecting stamps or dolls, building models airplanes, running miniature scale electric trains, collecting baseball cards or anything that took one’s fancy and kept one occupied. Many of these childhood hobbies later turned into occupations or careers; a stamp collector became stamp dealer, a baseball card collector became a pro baseball player and so on.

Owen Ashley
Own graduated from boy car lover to adult car designer and builder. His hobby never went cold on him and remained his first love. He lived in South Africa, a country with no car building industry so he was isolated.

Owen Ashley Auto Developments
Owen formed his own company, Owen Ashley Auto Developments, in Cape Town during the late 1980’s to design and manufacture specialized one-off and low volume vehicles, as well as consulting for various other motor sport related companies including Cape Advanced Vehicles (CAV), of which he became MD of shortly after. Under his management, CAV exported 100 road-certified CAV GT40’s to the US over the following years and has built in excess of 150 vehicles to date. Owen also joined Optimal Energy as consultant in 2006 to assist with their research and development of an electric car.

Hobbies
A hobby horse is a wooden or wickerwork toy made to be ridden just like a real horse. From this came the expression “to ride one’s hobby-horse”, meaning “to follow a favorite pastime”, and in turn, hobby in the modern sense of recreation. Hobbies are practiced for interest and enjoyment, rather than for financial reward. Examples include collecting, creative and artistic pursuits, making, tinkering, sports and adult education. Engaging in a hobby can lead to acquiring substantial skill, knowledge and experience. However, personal fulfillment is the aim.

Hobbyists
Whilst some hobbies strike many people as trivial or boring, hobbyists have found something compelling and entertaining about them. Much early scientific research was, in effect, a hobby of the wealthy; more recently, Linux began as a student’s hobby. A hobby may not be as trivial as it appears at a time when it has relatively few followers. Thus a British bird-watcher recalls that when seen wearing field glasses at a London station in the 1930s he was asked if he was going to the horse races.

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Divorce can be chaotic, messy and cost you money

March 17th, 2010

If you are rich and famous try and stay away from divorce
All eyes in England are fixed on the battle about to take place in the courtroom as the British singer Cheryl Cole prepares to do battle against husband Ashley. This event is expected to lead to a settlement worth $30-million. Whatever happens, the proceedings will make the headlines and keep the public occupied.

Divorce of the wealthy
Top US divorce lawyer Gerald Nissenbaum has written a book entitled “Sex, Love, and Money – Revenge and Ruin in the World of High-Stakes Divorce”. He suggests that whenever the wealthy separate, things can get very messy. “I would say half our cases end quickly and amicably,” he suggests, citing one in which a husband and wife with $70m happily walked away with $35m each. And the other half? He smiles. “Well, the other half don’t.” Whenever broken hearts are involved, the fallout rarely brings out the best in people. And if it is not money they are fighting over, it’s the children.

Gerald Nissenbaum
Gerald Nissenbaum a lawyer for more than 40 years, switched from criminal law to divorce after he grew tired of working for the mob. He gravitated towards his specialty because divorce was, back then, a growth area, and an increasingly profitable one at that. Now 70, he commands upwards of $700 an hour for his time, his client list almost exclusively rich beyond reason. In his well-appointed office in Boston, he is far more amiable in person than he appears in print. In the book he is thoroughly hard-boiled – a tirelessly wise-cracking character straight out of 1950s pulp fiction who spends his life dealing with duplicitous women who find imaginative ways of impregnating themselves in pursuit of alimony, and a great many violent men.

Fun
“The divorce court is not just where I make my living, it’s my playground!” he booms. “It’s exciting, it’s fun.” Fun?” “Absolutely! It has to be. Listen, if I didn’t laugh at some of the silliness these people do to one another, or the outrage, I’d have ridden my high horse straight into an institution by now.” He gives an example. It’s the tale of a woman whose husband was in the process of trans-gendering. “When he first met her, he would get dressed up (in women’s clothes) for things like Halloween. She thought this was fine at first but over the next decade he dressed up more and more, he started going to certain clubs, and then came out and said he wanted a sex change.”
At this point that the woman wanted a divorce. “I asked her, why now? And she said to me, Well, if I am going to be married to a woman, it won’t be him.”

Humor
Such mordant humor, he insists, is as necessary in his line of work as a permanently fired-up legal mind. Nissenbaum has both. I look forward to reading his book.

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