The Quality of Life Blog

Yes, it is true. Someone has had either the brilliant insight or experienced a complete collapse in reason such that they have given me my own radio show. Now admittedly, this is Internet radio at this point but it is a good bunch of folks (particularly the manager Lillian) and the airtime is affordable.

I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. Ultimately, it is about publicity. Getting my name, voice and ideas out there to increase my audience and hopefully to hear from them. I’m looking for feedback on my material (”Gosh, Mark what you said about our Wealth Potential was really cool”) but also for what kinds of things people are thinking right now about their overall wellbeing. Whenever the economy starts getting shaky, people start shaking too, sometimes forgetting what it is that life is supposed to be about. Yes, yes, yes … I know money is important … you wont ever hear me discount it entirely. But remember too (or if you have not heard me say it before): you dont want money, you want what money gets you. And as Lennon and McCartney remind us “Money can’t buy you love”

I’m getting off the track here. The other reason to do the show is to get even more practice talking off the top of my head. I have so much material built up inside me as a result of writing my book that it will be a very long time before it all makes it into print. The benefit of doing a radio show is that they are all going to be taped and I will be able to post them on my website as podcasts. Most of the speaking I am doing right now is not taped (some, but not much of it yet). I know that I am losing a lot of spontaneous insights and other random mental connections that are only going to happen in real time when I can get (at least part of) my conscious mind out of the picture.

The last of the reasons to be doing a radio show is to get used to that particular format just a little better as I will be doing LOTS of radio interviews when the book “officially” comes out on May 1st. This should help me get my live radio chops up before the real debut.

I will be talking about all manner of things on the show, from personal growth and wellbeing to all different entrepreneurial topics as well as how to make money.  If you are interested in listening to my show, go to Private Internet Voices Talk Radio and click on the Listen Live link in the upper part of the left hand side toolbar. There are 2 streaming options for regular and broadband connections. The Low-speed Internet Connection Audio Stream works just fine for me (even though I have broadband) and does not require that you download a specific streaming audio plugin (you may have to start up WMP or whatever client you use for streaming audio before you click on the link.

The show runs every Thursday from 4:30-5PM PST (7:30-8PM Eastern). The website has a chat room so if you have a question (lower right of the page). If you actually want to call in and chat or ask questions, send me an email at mark.rafter@gmail.com so I know who you are and I can give you the number and access code.

Cheers to your wealth!

When you work for someone, the theory is that you are doing something of value that the employer/boss/owner compensates you for based on some prior agreement (you do ___. you get paid $____). Pretty straightforward exchange of value. When you are accessible and empathic to someone’s situation, they will find you more likable, and subsequently will be more interested in being your friend. When you contribute of your time and/or your financial wealth to charitable causes or needy individuals, you find that not only does this make you feel good (helping with the wellbeing of others) but that you are recognized for it by your peers, maybe even the Universe that continues to send opportunities and other forms of abundance to you with no real connection to any specific acts of generosity that you have performed but, gosh, it just seems like are one lucky person.

Baloney.

What you are doing is exercising your Wealth Potential and the rest of your reality is responding according to the universal principles and laws that govern the creation of wealth (specifically in these examples, the principle of ‘what goes around comes around’).

OK, so what’s “Wealth Potential”? Wealth potential is pretty much just what it says: it represents the potential you (and everyone else) has to create wealth.  Since you now know (from reading the previous blogs … if you haven’t done that yet, get going and catch up) that wealth is multidimensional, you can see how it was created in all of the instances about: financial wealth (pay check), better quality relationships, increased self-esteem and coincidences. These are all forms of wellbeing that were created on your behalf because you were exercising your Wealth Potential.

Wealth Potential is the subject of the 3rd Article of The Wealth Manifesto: Your Wealth Potential represents the value you have to yourself and to others.

Your WP consists of any and all of the resources that are at the core of your needs for personal fulfillment and/or what can be a part of the unique value proposition you have to offer anyone else. It consists of your knowledge, skills, talents, passion, relationships, beliefs, attitudes and anything else that contributes to your ability to offer value.  In short, we get what we want by exercising using our wealth potential.

Forget about money for a moment.  If we are using our skills, doing things we are passionate about, things that make us feel good (gardening, reading, playing golf with friends, creating something, starting a business, etc), we are satisfying different levels of needs (and different dimensions of wealth) by both the act and the result.  Everything from the Bible to the work of Abraham Maslow has said that to become a full human being we must live the fullest of our capacities.  Interestingly enough, my approach in helping people to develop their Wealth Potential is that the things that many people find most rewarding personally, can also be applied in the marketplace as something unique and valuable that others are willing to pay for.  This is where the second half of the article comes into play.  When you are able to figure out how your internal motivations are best satisfied, this can be turned into a marketable asset that can get you whatever type of wealth you want, including money.  This is where your Unique Value Proposition comes in.  Ill talk about this in the next blog in a few days.

Cheers to your wealth!

I want to talk about goals … look at it as a belated conversation about New Year’s resolutions if you will. A resolution is typically nothing more than a commitment to a goal. In my coaching practice, I often talk to people about how to get balance in their lives. They feel overwhelmed with work, don’t make enough time for family or themselves, etc. One of the first things I try to find out is what they do to identify goals. A high percentage of the people I work with actually do pay attention to their goals and have some kind of system they use to identify and track them. This is actually not that surprising. A good number of my clients are self-employed and as such have a higher than average level of motivation and have been working on self-improvement, increased productivity and such more so than the general population. However, it doesn’t matter how aware you are of what should be done, it’s whether you do it. The challenge is, that like many other things in our lives, its the tools you use that are the ones that count.

I have the same issues myself - I get into hyper busy mode and forget about the goals and routines I have committed to and just keep pushing through whatever is on my plate. I’m supposed to be setting an example for others and helping them in their lives and sometimes don’t have my own act together either. Hey, I’m human. And besides, ‘being perfect’ is not on my goals list…

In any event, we need to make the effort to use some kind of system for identifying goals. I have found that one of the best things is to make sure you have goals in all dimensions of your life. Since my philosophy is that everything we are can be categorized into one of the various dimensions of our overall wellbeing (or more specifically, wealth), this is how I suggest people set up their goals.

When you list out the various things in your life that you attach value to, you have identified the dimensions of your wealth that are the most important to you. These then become the categories of your goals. I create a table in MS Word (you can of course use anything) that looks like this:

————————Year ———|———Month ———|———Week———–

Physical:

Spiritual:

Intellectual:

Relationships:

Family:

Service:

Fun:

Business:

Investments:

Etc.

When you fill this out, keep these guidelines in mind:

1. Create higher level goals for the year.
2. Derive more detailed goals from the yearly goals for a given month (may require that you break it down on a separate page to identify “month-size-tasks” for particularly challenging goals).
3. Update Sunday night each week. Save a unique file for each week for future reference. Break down tasks to be listed here that can be accomplished in no more than one day.
4. For each day, write down the things that you will commit to accomplishing in that day. WRITE it down on a note pad or something that can easily fit into your pocket or purse. Don’t enter it in a computer or your PDA (a planner is OK if it is handwritten). Writing it down makes it more real. Once you have written it down, make sure it is something achievable in this day and that you mentally are committed to getting it done. Prioritize the items. Make sure there are not too many. It’s real easy to make a list that you never complete (done that a few times haven’t you?). If you can, avoid doing anything else in your day until the short list is finished off

The nice thing about this is that anything you come up with that is important to you can evolve to something you want to track as a goal you are committing to achieving. This method keeps all the dimensions of your wealth in “top of mind” prominence asking for your attention.

These categories are what make up your quality of life: don’t ignore the list.

Mark T. Rafter, Author
The Wealth Manifesto: Transforming Your Life from Survive to Thrive
(Pre-publication release now available at The Wealth Manifesto

There sure is lots of talk these days about energy: the cost of energy, the need for renewable energy, saving and conserving energy, investing in energy - not exactly new subjects but they sure are getting a lot of attention. What’s the big deal anyway, why is energy so important?

Well, for starters, all living organisms rely on energy to grow and reproduce. Whether it’s radiation from the Sun causing photosynthesis in green plants or chemical energy from food firing the metabolism of animals, we all depend on energy to survive. From the astronomically huge world of galaxies to the infinitesimally tiny world of subatomic quanta, energy relationships are perfectly balanced to provide us with the world we live in. Everything is energy. Energy is everything. Energy is the currency of wealth, literally and figuratively a factor in all aspects of our lives.

Energy is the subject of the 2nd Article of The Wealth Manifesto: Wealth is created by the transformation of energy.

If you look back at some of the previous blogs, I have been talking about wealth, how it works to define all the dimensions of your wellbeing, the stuff that you do that makes your life worth living. The nice thing about having all aspects of your life operate under one concept such as wealth is that it means all aspects of your life, whether you are trying to generate more income, have more friends or get in better physical shape are governed by the same fundamental laws. And a lot of those laws have to do with energy. Consider a few examples.

The 1st Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed (meaning into other forms of energy). If you want to be paid more at your job, you have to demonstrate additional value to your employer so they will compensate you with additional cash. Money itself is potential energy because it can be used to get whatever you want (at least among the things that money can buy). Your additional hard work, brainpower, creativity … whatever it is that you do to add value is converted into the potential energy of money.

Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion states (simply) that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you want to have more friends …guess what? You think that is going to happen without being a better friend yourself? Nope … not going to happen. You need take action - expend energy and effort to be a friend - to have that energy come back at you (the opposite reaction because it is in the opposite direction, towards you) in the form of more friends.

This works at the quantum level too, where intentionality aligns our thought energies with our feelings to help minimize entropy (taking into consideration the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics) and create the reality we want.

These universal laws are found the realm of common “rules of thumb” and spiritual teachings as well. “What goes around, comes around” - is more than just a saying, it is an everyday version of the 1st and the 3rd Laws I just discussed … you dont need to have a degree in engineering to know that you only get out of something what you put into it. Finally, there is the one Rule that everyone knows from their religious upbringing. It doesnt matter if you are a Christian or a Jew, Muslim or Buddhist, or hardly ever went to church, everyone knows some variation on:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

This is the way the world goes ’round and it all ultimately comes back to energy management (way more important than time management, by the way). Learn how to manage your energy and you can have all the abundance, in whatever form, that you desire.

Cheers to your (energy transformed and delivered) wealth!

That should get someone’s attention.  This is not one of those “MAN BITES DOG!” headlines … these things are actually very definitely connected….

Anyone that read books by Vonnegut and JD Salinger in High School back in the ’70s probably came across Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig.  It is a semi-autobiographic, road trip, father-son bonding book about Pirsig and his son Chris.  It’s is about Zen, some about motorcycle maintenance. And a good bit about Pirsig’s emotional and mental breakdowns that led him to spend part of the early ’60s in and out of mental institutions (with Electro Shock Therapy thrown in as well).  But the book is really about is Quality.

Which is why I was assigned the book as a text for a Ceramics class.  Yep … a ceramics class.  The instructor was let’s just say, unconventional.  Who needs glazes anyway when you understand Quality!

I dont want to spend a lot of time talking about the book (read it if you get the chance … not what I would call light reading but worth the effort … I re-read it every 5 years or so).

Why I am talking about this is that ZAMM (as the book is sometimes abbreviated) is where I first was ‘turned on’ to the idea of quality.  We usually hear this word in one of two contexts: quality standards used in a manufacturing environment and the experience of Quality, as in Quality of Life or when we speak of quality time with our spouse or family.  The former is very specifically defined, the latter somewhat more elusive. 

Ford Motor Company used the advertising slogan “Quality is Job 1” to create the image of a dependable car and truck manufacturer at a time when imports were being favored over domestic brands. Ford did not say, “High Quality is Job 1.” It didn’t need to. Without any additional adjectives, Quality is understood to be a good thing.  In a manufacturing context, Quality is measurable and testable. For instance, there are very precise physical tolerances and performance guidelines for the components that go into a new Ford Mustang.  The ultimate goal for Ford, however, is to produce a car that creates an experience of Quality in the mind and emotions of buyers. This perception of value is a major reason we buy certain cars and other products and experiences.

This is the meaning of Quality I am associating with wealth - it is the ‘feeling’ of wellbeing that is associated with the most satisfying aspects of our existence.  Wealth is the Quality of your life. Quality is how we experience value. It is the “archetype” for wealth, an idealized model or state we seek in all dimensions of our wellbeing. Quality, like happiness or being in love, is hard to define but we know it when we experience it.  Quality is contentment, it is bliss, it is losing yourself in the moment, it is self-evident. It just is; it’s a one or none proposition, like the binary language of computers.

Something either has Quality or it does not. Like Yoda said: “There is only Do or Do Not. There is no Try.”

My challenge to you is this: how much Quality do you have in your life right now? What areas of your wellbeing - health and fitness, finances, intellectual growth, relationships, etc. are you perfectly content with, see no room for improvement, wouldn’t change for the world? I want you to know that this is indeed possible … in some cases it is not that you have to change WHAT is going on in all those areas so much as how you perceive what is going on in your life. But that’s a topic for another day.

Back to the ceramics class and ZAMM.  The instructor (Charlene Felos from Cypress College in So Cal) wanted us to understand (more appropriately, to “grok”) the concept of Quality with respect to making art. To get to the point where we knew the piece was complete, that the bowl was centered “enough,” that we could - in all of our Orange County raised, 19 year-old wisdom, be present and complete with results of the craft we were learning.

Needless to say, this was a pretty cool class ….

Cheers to your wealth!

If wealth is multidimensional, how do we find out what those dimensions are? Are they the same for everyone? How do we prioritize?

To create a more holistic concept of wealth, each of us must look at our system of values. We must identify and prioritize the things in our lives to which we attach meaning. After all, how can you create a Wealth Manifesto and declare your intention to become wealthy if you don’t know what being wealthy means?

Our system of values is fundamental to who we are. Values guide us in deciding what kind of food we eat, how we discipline our kids, how we behave in business negotiations, the amount of time we spend learning, the role of spirituality in our life and just about everything else we do. Even the most basic day-to-day decisions are reflections of our values, whether we acknowledge this or not. Values determine how we prioritize what is important, where we put our energies, and how we focus our intentions. Values lay the foundation for how we define our wellbeing and provides us with the “why” when we set goals for ourselves.

In short, our values provide us with the “categories” of our wellbeing and are the guidelines we use to measure the breadth of our interests, passions, and in short, the Quality of our lives. The more dimensions of wealth/wellbeing we are involved in, the more rich our lives are, the more the possibilities for growth and the more we will learn to truly live to the fullest extent possible with our time here on Earth.

There is one final thing we have to discuss: How do you assess your wealth? Well, financial wealth is pretty easy. Everyone who has some amount of money knows how to count. Money is easy to value. Someone with $1.6M is clearly more financially wealthy than another person is with $1M. What about peace of mind? The “value” of your relationships? How do you assess time with the family vs. more time at the office?

You prioritize based on your system of values. How you determine that a particular activity is giving you what you want, what you need and what you are typically hoping to experience is through Quality (that’s why it called Quality of Life!).

The way that we experience value is through Quality. I’ll talk more about that next time.

Cheers to your wealth!

In the last post, I talked about wealth having many dimensions and not being confined to the financial domain. Somehow the idea of wellbeing was hijacked a few centuries ago and the ‘wealth=money’ idea entered into popular thinking. I see this changing. I started in on the idea of wealth beyond money going on 3 years ago. I just saw an interview in Inc. magazine with Bill Zanker, one of the guys that founded the Learning Annex. They were talking about real estate and how with the market downturn the attendance at the Learning Annex seminars for real estate investing was waning. The interviewer asked him what was next (or something to that effect) and Zanker said they were putting together something “…called ‘How to Attract Wealth’ - It’s different from getting rich. It’s a different mindset.”

There a bit of jumping on the bandwagon here with the popularity of things like the Law of Attraction and other new thinking beliefs such as was seen in The Secret. That’s fine … anything that gets more people thinking outside the religion-specific Dogma Box is OK by me.

Back to wealth. OK, so there are many dimension…what the hell does that mean. The different dimensions of wealth are identified by our system of values. This is how we identify and include what is important in our lives as well as how we prioritize and make decisions (often in the form of some kind of tradeoff). What specifically are those dimensions? They can be very high level: financial (yes, it’s still very much in there), physical (fitness and health), relationships, spiritual etc are all aspects of our wellbeing. If you want to go down another level, you can start talking about things you want to do or learn about but dont take the time (e.g., musical or artistic wellbeing). It can be specific relationships: with your kids, spouse, or parents. Your relationship with God is apart of your spiritual wealth.

Wealth covers everything about our lives. This is the first thing we have to understand before we can keep the dialog going. And I could talk about it all day long ….
Let Bill Zanker know I’m ready.

That title sounds like a quote or something, doesn’t it? It’s supposed to: it is the 1st Article of The Wealth Manifesto: Transforming Your Life from Survive to Thrive, my upcoming book on creating Quality of Life based income. Let me start with a simple question:

Are you wealthy? Well, are you?

Before reading any further, think for a minute about what “being wealthy” means to you. Close your eyes and imagine that fabulous wealth is yours. Where are you standing? What are you doing? What’s going on around you? Who you are with? What is your state of mind?

Done? When imagining wealth, you may picture yourself on a yacht in the South Pacific, throwing a big party in your Park Avenue penthouse at Christmas time or golfing at St. Andrews in Scotland. Others imagine thrilling lives filled with momentous events such as climbing Mt. Everest, ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange or traveling into space. The vision is frequently accompanied by a substantial sum of money in the bank.

Whatever you might imagine, one thing is clear: while wealth includes money, it also involves great people and places, peak experiences and the time, freedom and health to enjoy them.

With that in mind, please take another moment to really imagine what wealth is to you. Finished? Good.

I want you to know that just by doing this simple exercise - by visualizing what you really want in life - you have already initiated the chain of events necessary to achieve wealth. Visualization is a part of intention, the first step in manifesting wealth and the beginning of your Wealth Manifesto.