David Mindich, author of Tuned Out: Why Americans under 40 Don’t Follow the News, interviewed 18-to-24-year-olds in 2002. He found that 60% could not name a single Supreme Court justice, 48% did not know what Roe vs Wade was, and 62% could not name any of the three countries Bush had identified as the ‘Axis of Evil’”.

This article was published in the Boston Globe, in 2007, but is still relevant and worth reading. It shows the difference of what has become important to Generation Me, then what drives the previous generations. When I read the article I started thinking of people like Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Madam Curie, Thomas Edison and other individuals who had the chutzpah and self confidence to keep moving forward………. Read the article and I’d like to see your comments.

Generation Me

The crop of talented recent graduates coming into today’s workforce is widely seen as narcissistic and entitled. And those are their best qualities.

By Jake Halpern|  September 30, 2007

Nicole Mirabile, who is just 15 years old, has a clear vision of her future, and it doesn’t involve a boss. The prospect of working at a Fortune 500 company – and landing the sort of well-paying job that Americans once regarded as the benchmark of success – holds zero allure for her. “It would be hard compromising with a lot of different people whom I might clash with,” she speculates. Mirabile, a sophomore at North Quincy High School, would be far happier running her own company. “I have the time, I have the brains, I have the patience to do it, and I am not going to give up if I fail once,” she vows.

Alan Chhabra, who is 31 years old, shares a similar sensibility even if, as it turns out, he does report to a boss. Chhabra works at Egenera, a computer-server manufacturer based in Marlborough, but he is not the sort of fellow who puts too much stock in old-school notions of corporate protocol. As he puts it, “I have no problem knocking on the door and walking into the CEO’s office or the CTO’s office on a whim – interrupting their schedule – and saying, ‘I need to talk to you.’” Chhabra says that ever since he was a kid, he has been “knocking heads with basketball teachers, track coaches, teachers, and girlfriends. If I felt that I was right, I wouldn’t back down.”

What do Alan Chhabra and Nicole Mirabile have in common – besides a great deal of chutzpah (pronounced (xʊtspə) is the quality of audacity, for good or for bad)? They are members of the so-called Entitlement Generation, the upstarts at the office who put their feet on their desks, voice their opinions frequently and loudly at meetings, and always volunteer – nay, expect – to take charge of the most interesting projects. They are smart, brash, even arrogant, and endowed with a commanding sense of entitlement. And since a new crop is graduating from Boston’s high-powered colleges and universities every year, chances are, one may be heading to your office soon.

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, says that this includes virtually everyone born after 1970. According to Twenge, these young people were raised on a daily regimen of praise and flattery from their baby boomer parents and from teachers who embraced a self-esteem-boosting curriculum that included activities like the Magic Circle game. Never heard of it? In this game, one child a day is given a badge that says “I’m great.” The other children then take turns praising the “great” child, and eventually these compliments are written up and given to the child for posterity. This constant reinforcement, argues Twenge, is largely responsible for those young co-workers who drive you nuts. At the University of South Alabama, psychology professor Joshua Foster has done a great deal of research using a standardized test called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). The NPI asks subjects to rate the accuracy of various narcissistic statements, such as “I can live my life any way I want to” and “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place.” Foster has given this personality test to a range of demographic groups around the world, and no group has scored higher than the American teenager. Narcissism also appears to be reaching new highs, even within the Entitlement Generation, among American college students. Another national study involving the NPI, conducted by Twenge, shows that 24 percent of college students in 2006 showed elevated levels of narcissism compared to just 15 percent in the early 1990s.

All of this would seem to suggest that this generation, which is flooding into the workforce, will create chaotic, unpleasant, and utterly unproductive work environments that will drive many a good business directly into the ground. But there’s another very real possibility. It may be that this much-reviled generation will revitalize the economy and ensure the prosperity of America for years to come. Painful as it sounds, in the not-too-distant future, we may owe a debt of gratitude to these narcissists.

The concept of narcissism is an ancient idea that dates to Greek mythology. According to legend, Narcissus was a beautiful Grecian youth who fell madly in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to avert his eyes from the image of his own face, Narcissus knelt too close to the water, fell in, and drowned.

Michael Maccoby is a psychoanalyst, anthropologist, and business consultant based in Washington, D.C., who works with CEOs who want to become more-effective leaders. He is also the author of Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails. Maccoby has spent the last seven years writing and arguing – quite convincingly – that what the American economy needs right now is a generation of brazen, brash, narcissistic innovators. Within the business world, Maccoby’s theory is something akin to blasphemy. For the last five or six years, the bible of corporate management has been another book, titled Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t, by Jim Collins. In his book, Collins studies the inner workings of 11 mega-companies – including Wells Fargo, Gillette, and Walgreens – and determines that truly effective CEOs are often actually “self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy.” Maccoby, for his part, argues that such CEOs may get the job done in old-fashioned companies that focus on retail, manufacturing, and cutting costs, but that businesses that rely on innovation, new technology, and globalization require far bolder leaders who can take risks, shrug off conventional wisdom, project confidence, formulate hyper-ambitious plans, and charm the pants off investors and underlings alike, so that they, too, will make a leap of faith and believe in the next cold-fusion-powered car or the iPod that pays your bills and runs your household.

“Generally, it is very rare that people accept new ideas,” Maccoby says. It takes a person with “strategic intelligence” to push a new idea successfully. Such a person must have foresight, the ability to partner with others, and the charisma to motivate an entire organization to succeed. This, Maccoby says, is “productive narcissism.” When a person with this combination of traits emerges – and arguably this will happen fairly often when you have an entire generation of young narcissists – great things can happen.

Take the example of Yael Maguire, the 32-year-old chief technology officer of Thing Magic, a Cambridge-based company he cofounded in 2000 that designs and manufactures radio-frequency identification systems, commonly known as RFID. “I think we are an entitled generation, but by feeling entitled, we also feel empowered to do great things,” Maguire says. “I grew up thinking if you were confident in yourself and you took a chance, you could do whatever you wanted. The thought of working my way up the corporate ladder had absolutely no appeal to me.”

Interestingly enough, one of the pivotal moments in Maguire’s career hinged on his not listening to superiors. One day, when Maguire was in grad school studying quantum computers at MIT, he began chatting with a protein biologist about a hypothetical device that could detect whether a given protein was binding with a receptor. Such information is vital in drug research. Maguire became fascinated by this challenge, even though, he says, “I didn’t know anything about biology other than what I knew from high school.” He designed a device using technology that is traditionally used in wifi. This device, Maguire boldly proclaimed, could determine whether the protein was present. The biologist and Maguire’s fellow students were skeptical. So he built the thing, and, sure enough, he was right.

It is precisely this style of thinking that has enabled Maguire, as CTO, to pioneer new technology. And now that he’s at the top of a 50-person company, he says he plans to keep hiring other young, passionate, “freethinking types” – the sorts of upstarts who won’t be afraid to tell him, on occasion, that he is dead wrong.

Just a few miles due south, roughly a dozen teenagers – including 15-year-old Nicole Mirabile – have gathered in a dreary classroom at North Quincy High School in the hopes of figuring out how they might launch highly successful start-up companies of their own. The students are participating in a program known as Biz Camp that is sponsored by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. At the front of the classroom is Jacky McDonough, director of business partnership for My Turn, Inc., a youth development agency. McDonough seems to embody the iconic Whole Foods customer – willowy figure, sandals, and flowing hair.

“We cannot reiterate this enough,” McDonough says to her students, who range in age from 15 to 18. “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” To demonstrate her point, McDonough smiles, puffs up her chest, and says with gusto, “CATS ARE VERY SPECIAL!” She then pauses a moment, steps backward, slouches, and says quite meekly, “Cats are very special.” The students in the classroom nod their heads comprehendingly. A few scribble down notes.

“So,” says McDonough, “can anyone tell me what role confidence plays in starting up a business?”

A shy giant of a boy at the back of the classroom raises a hand sheepishly and then begins to talk. “You get your confidence . . .” McDonough interrupts and tells him to show his confidence. The boy stands up, nods his head, and begins again. “You get your confidence by knowing what you are going to do,” he says. “You have all your ideas, and if you are confident, nothing is going to stop you. You are going to succeed, no matter what.”

“Without confidence, you can’t take risks,” adds another student, who takes the initiative to stand up on his own. “And in a business, you have to take risks.”

“Beautifully said!” exclaims McDonough. “Let’s give them a round of applause!” The students applaud politely.

During a break in class, I have a chance to speak with Mirabile. She is dressed in blue jeans and a magenta T-shirt. From the start, Mirabile appears to be the prototype of the self-assured, self-empowered teen. “I am always confident in myself because it will lower my self-esteem if I’m not,” she says. Mirabile quickly adds that she doesn’t let failure or naysayers get to her. “Even if I do badly in a class, I know I can do better next time.” When I ask her what the chances are that her dreams will come true, she answers without batting an eye: “I would say about 85 percent.”

At first glance, Biz Camp may seem like just another self-esteem program, encouraging young people to be overly confident and self-centered. But unlike the Magic Circle, where kids are praised for being inherently “special,” the Biz Camps teach skills along with self-confidence. On a nuts-and-bolts level, the hope is that students like Mirabile will learn what it takes to make it as an entrepreneur. On a deeper level, however, the hope is that this program will encourage her to hold onto that brash self-confidence well into her 20s and 30s, when – professionally, at least – she’ll need it the most.

Management professor Edward Roberts, who has been teaching at MIT’s Sloan School for decades, argues much like Maccoby that high-octane self-confidence is a prerequisite for entrepreneurs today. “Think about it,” he says. “As an entrepreneur, you need serious chutzpah to overcome the negatives that are thrown at you on a regular basis. And you need the stamina to overcome failure. If you do something risky, you will fail. So what do you do once you fail? Do you give up? Or do you come back and say, ‘Damn it all. I am going to try again!’” One might argue that this country has always needed a base population of cocky entrepreneurs. But according to Roberts, we’ve never needed these types as badly as we do at this very moment. “If you went to the huge corporations and asked, ‘Where are you opening new labs?’ the answer would uniformly be India, China, Russia – but not the US,” he says. “And if all of these companies are going overseas, what are we left with? From my perspective, we have nothing left to the US economy other than start-ups and entrepreneurship.”

The good news, says Roberts, is that America remains an idyllic incubator. “Studies show that in many societies – like France, for example – once you fail, you are damned, and society will shun you,” he says. “This isn’t true in America. American laws are very supportive of entrepreneurs. You can go bankrupt here, and you start with a clean slate. We have a much more forgiving set of attitudes.” What we need now, Roberts says, are waves of young people who are willing to push their own ideas and who aren’t afraid of failing. Like them or not, he concludes, the young, brash kids with the grandiose plans are our future.

Tom Hadfield, who is 24 and a senior at Harvard, is the very embodiment of Roberts’s young, hyper-confident entrepreneur. At the age of 12, Hadfield started an Internet company from his bedroom in Brighton, England – Soccernet.com – which ESPN purchased just a few years later for $40 million. “No one ever knew I was a kid online,” Hadfield says. “All I needed to do was spell properly, so I had Mom buy me a dictionary.”

Hadfield actually made very little money on the sale of his website – the profit went mainly to his investors – and as he puts is, “My parents still have a mortgage on their house.” But this hasn’t discouraged him in the least. Since then, he has started several new businesses, managed a global environmental education program, and started an initiative to raise awareness of the genocide in Darfur. When I finally tracked him down for an interview, I reached him on his cellphone in Zambia, where he was running a philanthropic project funded by the Goldman Sachs Global Leaders Program. “We came here with these naive, grandiose plans to set up a micro-financing program, distribute anti-malarial bed nets, teach English, organize health education – and do it all in one summer,” he says. “A lot of people would have said that it was naive when I was 12 to set up an Internet website like Soccernet.com – but luckily I didn’t listen.” Hadfield believes that such an attitude can also create problems with “people who were born before 1975,” who are “generally running the treadmill, trying to pay mortgage payments, and buy a JetBlue ticket to take their one vacation a year.”

“Our naiveté enables us to try things that previous generations haven’t tried in the history of humanity,” he says, “But it often builds resentment among the older managers, who resent these young self-important kids who arrive on the scene and want to take the fast track without putting in their time.”

Twenty-year-old Lilly Deng, a junior at Harvard, was raised in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, by a single mother who worked multiple jobs. Deng’s saving grace, she says, was a teacher who taught every student to “realize the genius in their inner self.” This teacher left her feeling so empowered that Deng, who longed to be a nationally ranked debater, wrote every single lawyer in the Collegeville phone book asking for sponsorship. Deng soon found a patron, traveled to debate tournaments, distinguished herself repeatedly, and launched a program that teaches the fundamentals of debating to hundreds of kids from 30 different schools in eight states. For her part, Deng doesn’t seem too surprised by her success. “I never thought anything was impossible,” she says.

In recent years, aspiring Harvard entrepreneurs have had quite a bit of inspiration as they’ve witnessed fellow students get rich quickly by starting companies like Facebook and Sparknotes. Last year, two undergraduates – Mike Segal, who is now 19, and Travis May, now 20 – cofounded the Harvard Entrepreneurial Forum. The club started off as an informal gathering of four or five students; by the end of the school year, it had more than 200 members.

According to Segal and May, many of their classmates are no longer interested in working their way up the corporate ladder. What’s more, says May, “people want to do something that makes them famous and rich or creates some change in society.”

“People like their own ideas,” adds Segal. “And I think that’s why so many people are unhappy at their office jobs. Because when they ask themselves, ‘Who am I doing this for?’ the answer is not for themselves, but for the greater good of the corporation. And ultimately people lose touch with their egos and themselves. Entrepreneurship is the diametric opposite. I think it is just egomania, but in the best sense possible.”

This isn’t a Harvard-only phenomenon. In the basement of a barbershop in Jamaica Plain, entrepreneurs Tony Martinez, who is 24, and his partner, Eliu Hernandez, also 25, have established what they call the international headquarters for their business, Created by Us Airbrushing. Right now, “international” is a bit of a misnomer, as is “headquarters.” The space, which is only accessible via a trapdoor behind the barbershop’s cash register, is essentially a cramped, dingy cellar furnished with a stereo, a fan, a fax machine, and a great deal of airbrushing equipment.

But never mind that. Martinez and Hernandez have grand plans, great talent, and a very interesting product. They sell customized hats, sneakers, and hoodies with made-to-order designs. That way, anyone – from a boarding-school kid at Milton Academy to a punk rocker in Berlin – can go online and order the sort of street apparel that used to be the exclusive domain of urban American hipsters.

Hernandez, who does most of the actual airbrushing, in some ways couldn’t be more different from the members of the Harvard Entrepreneurial Forum. He joined the Army instead of going to college, serving in Afghanistan. But his outlook sounds familiar: “One thing that I can be grateful about is that my confidence kept me a little ignorant, maybe even a little arrogant,” he says. “If you start looking at everything that could go wrong – and think about that all day long – you will never do anything!”

According to both Hernandez and Martinez, their unflappable self-confidence has been the only thing keeping them afloat during a rocky start-up period. It is not that they feel entitled to greatness as much as that they feel entitled to a shot at greatness, just like the other members of their generation.

But even productive narcissism is not an entirely good thing. Far from it. Michael Maccoby is the first to admit this. He says that narcissists tend to be oversensitive to any kind of criticism and are often incapable of learning from others. What’s more, they frequently bully subordinates and don’t care at all about the feelings of others.

The greatest danger, however, is that narcissists are so sure of themselves that they ignore the advice of others – and even the dictates of common sense – and arrogantly blunder their way into serious trouble. Foster, at the University of South Alabama, has seen this scenario play itself out many times. In one study, subjects were asked to play a game in which they earned points by answering trivia questions correctly. Before answering a question, subjects were allowed to wager a certain number of points. “In the study, we had many highly narcissistic people who would get all these questions wrong, and yet they were still willing to wager that they would get the next one right,” says Foster. “Narcissists have this view of themselves as being so excellent that they say, ‘To hell with the data. Things are going to work out for me!’”

In this regard, narcissism poses quite a conundrum. On the one hand, we need plenty of young entrepreneurs who are willing to believe in themselves in the face of skepticism from their peers, mentors, and society at large. But we also need these upstarts to be correct in their beliefs. It does a society no good to invest in young narcissists who, in betting on themselves, squander resources as they come up with wrong answers again and again. The key, it would seem, is to identify the upstarts with the most potential and then – despite whatever personal qualms we may have with them – allow them to run with their ideas.

This is precisely what the management at servermaker Egenera decided to do with Alan Chhabra. Chhabra was, by his own admission, neither the easiest nor the most diplomatic of employees. “I think that at another company, after some of the heated moments that I had, the bosses might have said, ‘This isn’t working out, Alan. It is time for you to go,’ ” he says. But that’s not what happened. According to Rachael Jacobson, who works in Egenera’s HR department, the company recognized Chhabra’s value, and saw that he constantly needed new challenges. In a new division, he was given wide latitude to help get operations off the ground. The division’s goal was to encourage clients to buy not just servers but also long-term customer-service programs. Perhaps the biggest challenge was that Chhabra had to persuade prospective clients to stop using the services of heavyweights like HP and IBM. He says: “Basically, I had to meet with CTOs who had 3,000 to 4,000 people working for them and had an IT budget of $10 million to $50 million and – within five minutes – I had to convince them that what they’d been doing for the last five to 10 years was wrong and that they should start buying Egenera.” And this is exactly what Chhabra did. According to the company, Chhabra and the division helped Egenera undergo an important and profitable transformation.

Of course, there are people – perhaps even within Egenera – who can’t stomach the notion of promoting someone as strident and nervy, someone as entitled, as Chhabra. It doesn’t look as if they’ll get relief any time soon. “Kids definitely feel entitled when they get out of school nowadays,” he says. “They have been groomed, they’ve been told that they are the best, and they’ve seen people from this same generation make millions of dollars just before them. They think, ‘I want to be the next Google, Amazon, or eBay. After all, these companies were founded by young people. Now it’s my turn.’”

Jake Halpern, born in 1975, is the author of Fame Junkies.

“Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keep friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment.”

~Greenville Kleisser

 

Picture by D. [SansPretentionAucune

We would do well as a nation to remember the importance of taking responsibility for our own lot in life. I think there is a danger in putting too much pressure on the individual. I don’t mean that the government should pick up the slack and neither do most Americans. Our public institutions are weakening and are in no condition to be relied upon except in a time of crisis.

Pull your life together consider whether you are happy at your JOB, or your JOB is taking away too much time from your personal life and separation from family. You should consider a career change and look for something to provide financial independence, more personal time and having fun along the way of accomplishing these goals.

“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

~ Edward R. Murrow

America, It Will Take Much More Than Our Daily Wants To Go Forward (Continued)

V. Accountability of government

Accountability vs. Responsibility image by Dean Shareski

What the American people need from government is elected officials who say what they mean and mean what they say(which is for the most part the definition of accountability today). But even as Americans lower their expectations about how much government can do in their lives, they are going to raise expectations about how well government delivers on what it promises. We will and must throw out the party, either party,  that continues to promise the world and deliver peanuts.

VI. Restoring responsibility of the creativity among American youth - Enough said about government I would like to say something about our future, the youth of America.

A poll of Americans was taken including all age groups. The question asked was, What do you think the youth of America need more?

Ages 18-29             Total

75%                          79%          A Swift Kick in the Ass

25%                          21%          A Gentle and Understanding Hand

A swift kick in the ass is not going to help this generation achieve its fullest potential. Because the youth have seen the worst of life, 9/11 and the depression we’re living in. This requires a significant effort to renew their faith in the future. This generation could be the most successful, dynamic and diversely talented cohort in American history. Our older generations should probably offer a compromise or something in the middle of the two questions above that were posed to our young Americans. What they need is a firm hand and gentle guidance to show them how to channel their creativity and raise them from this stigma of economic ruin. My opinions about what we should be doing are in my success tips.

Success Tips

• Lets stop dumbing down our school systems with bad programs such as no child left behind, for example NYS lowered their passing grades from 65 to 55 for their state wide regions exams three years ago, because too many students were failing the exams and weren’t graduating high school.
• Lets stop this attitude of a level playing field in our education system, exceptional children should be rewarded and recognized; how else will the average child be motivated to improve, if we continue this mediocrity in our school systems we’ll dumb down the talented and loose the potential talented students from the average or good student population.
• Raise salaries/benefits of our teachers that deserve it, no raises across the board, no tenure, employment at will and rid the system of non-motivated and non-dedicated professional teachers. Also, parents elevate the teaching profession as one of the highest and admired professions and make sure each school system has a way to measure the teacher’s productivity. This way the parents have no one but themselves to blame when the child comes home with failing grades. The parent needs to have accountability as well as the school system.
• Parents who are successful in the business world instill the idea of entrepreneurial ideas in their children such as an example of an independent Business like this.

I hope you get my point because this country will be non-alphas and be betas or less as Aldous Huxley defined the future world in his book ‘Brave New World’

More to come tomorrow………….

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

~Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

America, It Will Take Much More Than Our Daily Wants To Go Forward (Continued)

III. Reestablishing The Respect For Religion In America.

Imagine No Religion by Napalm filled tires in flickr

The American experiment with democracy, opportunity and freedom to practice your religion has been deep rooted in this country and has influenced its ethics, morals and laws. Religion is deep rooted in this country “In God We Trust” overall 82% of Americans believe in this phrase on our currency. But in recent years America is trending towards a new and troubling direction. We may soon find out what happens when we unlink our freedoms from our faith. If we follow this trend of taking pray out of school and public gatherings, the consequences could mean less morals, more unhappy people and less success for our country. I’m not advocating a integration of church and state like most of the Islamic Faith Countries have, that of course denies freedom of religion.

A recent poll of Americans across the country where Americans were asked Which of The Following Matters More To You?

The Bill Of Rights 52%

The Ten Commandments 48%

This is close, but we should keep in mind that our laws are based on Judeo/Christian beliefs and there laws. What does this all mean, it means that, there is a pragmatic reason to protect religious freedom in this country, but even a more pragmatic reason to protect our “Bill Of Rights” and our Constitution. Enough of this I just mentioned it not to set up an argument between atheists and religious Americans, I wrote about this to remind people that there are a lot of countries that are intolerant to religious citizens that aren’t state sanctioned and if they had their way they would want to see America do away with our core values and laws of religious freedom.

Success Tip

Here’s a further breakdown of what Religion Can do for the Family and individual in this Country:

• Religious American are much more likely to reject the instant gratification mentality.
• Religious Americans are more likely to prioritize family
• Religious voters vote religiously
• Religious employees are more dedicated to their jobs and more fiscally prudent.
• Religious Americans are more satisfied sexually – Huh you say…..
• In a poll 61 percent of religious people said they were satisfied sexually as opposed to only 42% of non-religious people said they weren’t sexually satisfied. So religious folk are outperforming non-religious folks, joke………

God is good for America as individuals and collectively as a Nation.

MORE TO COME TOMORROW ON DIFFERENT THOUGHTS

Liberty has never come from the government.  Liberty has always come from the subjects of it.  The history of liberty is a history of resistance.

~ Woodrow Wilson

America, It Will Take Much More Than Our Daily Wants To Go Forward (Continue the previous Post )

II. The American family is broken.

Not entirely shattered, but certainly broken. When more then half the marriages end in divorce we have a problem; when one in three children lives in a home with only one biological parent we have a problem.

American Family by duckstrap in Flickr

There is more assaulting the American family then divorce and absenteeism. The familial essentials of time and attention are absent. The direct relationship between drugs and alcohol abuse among our youths and the lack of time and attention should be no surprise to our adult parents. What is surprising is how the parents still continue to engage in behavior that is overly harmful to our youths. *RESET

Remember adults you’re the role models for our children and we should as adults be cognizance of that every day. *RESET

Success Tip

*Here are seven simple suggestions you can follow to try and repair your core family or my suggestions for your RESET:

• Have dinner together as family unit at least five days a week
• Take your children to church or synagogue weekly
• Check your children’s homework nightly
• Demand the truth from your children and get it. Conversely be truthful to them about situations that have direct effects on them, such as the financial situation of the family and that we’ll all have to do some belt tightening.
• Taking your children on vacation for at least one week a year. Even if you can’t afford to go away take them to museums, free public parks or beaches, have a picnic, play with them baseball or something fun like maybe a game of poker with the family, you’d be surprised how inter-personal poker is and how it teaches children a lot about life, interacting in business, bartering or negotiating, etc…..
• Encourage them to get involved in team sports in school, or Police Athletic league (PAL) or even get them to have a startup game with friends(basketball or soccer inexpensive sport). Parents, just supervise the games don’t live vicariously through your children. Most of all don’t praise them if they aren’t doing well in the sport give them constructive criticism and to help them to improve. Remember let’s stop leveling the playing field for children with everything they do there are kids who will be better than them but let them find out where their talent is.
• Try and find a career that will give you more time with the family and financial freedom.

MORE TO COME TOMORROW ON DIFFERENT THOUGHTS…….

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.

~ Thomas Paine

America, It Will Take Much More Than Our Daily Wants To Go Forward

If we are to put America back on the right track, restore confidence in our future, restore trust in our institutions and revitalize faith in ourselves it will take more than just satisfying our daily wants. We have to look into ourselves as well as muster up our inner strength and fortitude and recaptor what makes us unique as a nation and what truly needs to get done. Rather then invest in our own selfishness to gain individual wealth, we need to invest in the goodness of our nation and the American people.

I’m going to outline over the next five blogs what I think is  important enough to help Americans start using their creativeness and national pride to restore this nation to its greatness. That is:

I. We  should reset our expectations about life, opportunity, and the American dream

• Home prices are off 15 to 50 percent of what was there value. We expected to fund our children’s college education or even retire from the equity built in these homes. *RESET.
• The price of food, gas and other basic commodities are increasing at an enormous rate, while the dollars value is declining. *RESET.
• Our Federal Government is hell bent on doing things it can accomplish quickly, borrowing from countries that will are trying to bankrupt us in the global economy and the Feds are spending monies like a drunken sailor putting us in deeper and deeper debt. We should have an overseer like Ross Perot to run the government like his successful corporations were. The Congress and Executive Branch of this Government is not looking out for you my fellow Americans they are catering to their own selfish agenda. *RESET —- Sorry for the anger but you should be angry to at the inept leaders we put in power and we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Seemingly in the blink of an eye, our sense of security and all the expectations we had  where each one of us stood financially sound and where our country stood economically solvent is gone.

Success Tip

*Reset

It’s time we accepted the truth and started fresh. Our economic crisis should force you to some level of reality. You should now more then ever be questioning on a personal level a number of things such as necessary spending vs discretionary spending, trying to pay down your personal debt and trying to save for a rainy day. Belt tightening is the key words. More income is advisable utilizing and balancing your time, this could be accomplished through Business’s like this.

As for the federal government they are long on promises and short on results. The 2010 elections are coming and we should hold the individuals accountable that haven’t followed through on their promises, but when you replace them make sure you make it clear to their replacements you’ll be watching and tracking them.

Please do not mistake this straight talk as pessimism. We need to dream and dreams have a place in our lives but now is the time for reality.

MORE TO COME TOMORROW ON DIFFERENT THOUGHTS

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” ~ Dale Carnegie (Was an American writer and lecturer – November 24, 1888 – November 1, 1955)

Here’s What Americans Really Want From Health Care.

Photo Credit: Neil Parekh/SEIU Healthcare 775NW

It’s apropos that I’m presenting this information to you today, whereas the House Of Representatives in Washington are trying to force through a vote for the Health Care Bill HR3962 before they go home for this Fridays long weekend in honor of Veterans Day. Most of our elected congressmen would like to have this vote completed so they won’t have to face their constituents and answer some of the hard questions they may have for them. If the bill is voted on and passed in the House it’s now the Senates headache. Just one more thing before I get today’s blog here’s a summary of the Bill HR3962 Socialized Medicine and what it has written in it:

• Raises taxes on middle class families
• Makes significant cuts to Medicare
• Taxes small businesses that have 17 or more employees
• Taxes current insurance policies that will be passed on to patients in higher premiums
  Penalizes states like California for having medical malpractice reform laws on the books
• States may have to be left paying for unfunded mandates as more Americans go on the government plan by expanding Medicaid eligibility (a federal-state partnership)

If you want to have your opinion voiced get on the phone today and call your local Representative, go to the website and find your representative and call them…….

Let them know what you really want and let them know if they go against your wishes that they might as well start packing next year when their term is up because the majority of voters will make sure they are not re-elected. Here’s a sample of what Americans really want when it comes to health care:

• The Medical Professionals are in charge
• People are the primary concern not paperwork
• Health Care is about rights, not privileges
• Power equals portability – carry your health care plan from one job to another
• Health care quality is having access to the treatment you need, when you need it.
• Humanize your approach

Banished forever should be all the health care systems, providers and networks. Thereby, letting the Dr’s treat their patients as human beings not numbers.

Success Tip

Seniors, middle age and younger generations take control, prepare, and live a full healthy life by calling your congressmen now and also increasing your income and financial stability in this Business.

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” ~  Unknown

These are the questions that people over the age of 60 are asking politicians and other people with authority and responsibility.

1. Will I be able to afford health care when I get too old to work?
2. Am I one medical emergency away from bankruptcy and ruin?
3. Is Social Security Going to be there?
4. Will prescription drugs be so expensive that I’ll be forced to choose between medications and food?
5. Will I run out of money before I run out of years?
6. Will I be a financial burden on my spouse or my children?
7. Will I loose my independence and mobility?

There’s one attribute that defines these seven questions – Control…….. Senior citizens in America now are still in better shape than the rest of the world per se, but as a senior citizen on a fixed income their choices are more limited, the demands in life are greater, the cost of living is higher and health is more fragile. Political types shouldn’t underestimate the bond the seniors have with their social security checks, if you ask them, they’ll tell you it’s their right no I mean it’s more than their right it’s THEIR MONEY. Older American correctly believe that their country leads the way in medical expertise and are rightly pissed off by the fact that more often than not, they can’t afford it or even are denied access to it by the HMO’, Medicare and Medicaid …….

Health Care  should be personal not part of an ROI, but this is how seniors think and their thinking and reality of the situation goes like this:

• Insurance driven costs and qualifiers limit access and affordability
• Bureaucrats in Washington and in the fifty state capitals think that because they tailored perfect health care plans for themselves, they can mandate perfect coverage for the rest of us.
• Profit driven pharmaceuticals companies drive up costs and drive out competition for essential medications
• And personal-injury lawyers sue our doctors and inflate our premiums…..

Do we really want federally controlled socialized medicine with a track record like this???

Success Tip

Seniors, middle age and younger generations take control, prepare, and live a full healthy life by increasing your income and financial stability in this Business.

‘Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.’

-Arthur Miller – Author and Play Write

If you lost your job tomorrow, how long would your saving last before you ran out of Money?

Consider these stats from a recent poll of a thousand people and see where you fit in to these statistics these stats may shed some light on the fact that you’re not alone:

• 23% I have no savings
• 19% A Month or less
• 11% Two Months
• 12% Three Months
• 3% Nine Months
• 9% A Year
• 4% Two Years
• 9% More Than Two Years

You may be saying. How can I improve the situation, so if you’re still working consider this suggestion of setting aside money each paycheck. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and you’ve cut back all the discretionary spending, you can get a part time job to save or try to save more money in your 401k especially if your company matches your savings. You should consider starting a part-time business at home especially if you’re spending too much time away from home in your primary job. Use your entrepreneurial skills to earn extra monies to save. You may surprise yourself by starting your own business whereas; this approach may be successful enough to earn monies in your own business to walk away from your present JOB. If you are not aware, one out of six Americans that were in the working force and that have been downsized in corporations are starting home businesses. There are ground floor opportunities all around.

“Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them – a desire, a dream, a vision. “

“I know where I’m going and I know the truth and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.”

- Muhammad Ali

Entrepreneurship and The New American Dream

The single greatest change over the past 50 years in workplace attitudes is the slow shift of viewing your job as an opportunity to viewing it as security. Look at the stats over the past five years and see how many jobs were lost in this country. No wonder why 1 out of 6 employees are search for home businesses. We’re capitalists and entrepreneurs because we have the freedom of choice. We expect and demand a “Liaise Fair” attitude from our government when it comes to our business. The Kaufman Foundation concluded from a survey that there’s more respect for entrepreneurs then CEO’s of successful corporation. Distribution of attitudes looked like this:

The question was if you had to choose would you prefer to be?

80%   The Owner of a Successful Small Business You started That employees 100 People

14%   The CEO of a Fortune 500 Company That Employees More Than 10,000 People

6%      Don’t Know

Our educational systems aren’t focusing on individualism and fostering entrepreneurial individuals. The Kaufman Foundation surveyed older adults and the vast majority of them believed strongly that entrepreneurship should be taught or encouraged in high schools and universities.

81%  Said, universities and high schools should actively develop entrepreneurial skills in students.

77% Said, the state and federal governments should encourage entrepreneurs through tax laws and their actions.

70% Said, the success and health of our economy depends on it.

Lawmakers need to be reminded that today’s entrepreneurial ventures started out small and grew despite bureaucracy and regulations, not because of it. We want the right to:

Freedom to choose when, where and how to work or run a business; the freedom to try and fail and try again; the freedom to follow your dreams wherever they take you; and the freedom to live your own life on your own terms. Simple isn’t it?

Soon I’ll posting tips about how to start a home based business if you are interested, please subscribe.