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Friday, May 1, 2015

Online Business Opportunity

Interior of Nagoya University of Business and ...
Interior of Nagoya University of Business and Commerce (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
02-May-2015


About 3 weeks ago, I signed up for an e-commerce business, and I am immediately seeing some results, thanks to the persistence and determination of my sponsor, who'd regularly update and meet up with our small team of about 15 proteges. And we are more or less in the same age range, late 30's and early 40's, and of course, one or two of extreme cases. But that's okay, there is no age barrier in this kind of business.

And my wife also sees the results, and methods, and at least, she is now comforted that I am using the computer to something good, not just simply browsing and wasting away time, and at the end of the day, nothing.

Well, it is an internet-based business, an e-commerce, and I am taught some new things at my middle-age years all things technology based.

If you are keen to join, just drop me a message here: pfmvidal[@]gmail[.]com. The sooner, the better.

This is serious business, and not for the faint-hearted. Don't worry, no previous experience required.

Hear from you!

Friday, February 6, 2015

Cultivating Our Impractical Sides

Pathway in East York. Toronto, Canada
Pathway in East York. Toronto, Canada (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Venus Over New York
Venus Over New York (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Times Square, New York at night
Times Square, New York at night (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
High Falls, Rochester New York, at night
High Falls, Rochester New York, at night (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


Some part of me is told in this article...
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TOM BRADY


Bill Hayes saw a girl on a Manhattan-bound subway train one day recently and noticed she was reading a book with a title along the lines of “Becoming a Practical Thinker.”

“I had an impulse to tear the book from her hands,” Mr. Hayes wrote in The Times. “Don’t do that,” I wanted to say.” Practicality will not get you where you want to go.”

His own experience serves as a guide. He recalled when he first arrived in New York City, he hopped on a train headed for Far Rockaway, which as any New Yorker will tell you is the opposite direction from Manhattan.

“But taking wrong trains, encountering unexpected delays and suffering occasional mechanical breakdowns is inevitable to any journey really worth taking,” Mr. Hayes wrote.

His career move at age 48 – coming to New York City to try to make a life as a writer – revealed his impractical side. And the more he cultivated that side, he said, the better off he was.

“Every life-altering decision I’ve ever made has seemed, at first blush, misguided, misjudged or plain foolish,” he wrote, “and ultimately turned out to be the opposite: every seemingly wrong person I’ve fallen for, every big trip I’ve splurged on, every great apartment taken that I could not realistically afford.”

The notion of what is practical, for something as simple as lunch, depends on where you sit. Or work. The media business in New York conducts its affairs over power lunches at Midtown restaurants like Michael’s or the Four Seasons. But for new media companies, influenced by the business ethos of Silicon Valley, a sit-down lunch feels too formal.

When Kanyi Maqubela, a partner at Collaborative Fund, decided to invest $500,000 in an education start-up, he met with its founder over food truck pizza in San Francisco, took a walk and sat at an outdoor plaza.

Lunch at a restaurant would be impractical, Mr. Maqubela said. “It’s harder to pull out a computer and go through an investment deck and a slide show,” he told The Times. The entire meeting lasted about 45 minutes.

For transportation in New York, you can’t get much more impractical than a Citroen, as the cars have all but disappeared from the area. But Brian Brandt, who owns a record label for contemporary classic and jazz composers, has been driving Citroens for 40 years, since he bought used 1966 DS for $300 when he was 17.

A few years ago, Mr. Brandt decided to apprentice as a mechanic under Winsley Thomas, who worked at the company’s headquarters in Englewood, New Jersey, from 1968 until it closed in 1977. Local Citroen owners bring their garage work, but it’s not a lucrative business.

“I guess I have two impractical businesses,” Mr. Brandt told The Times.” There’s such a lack of return in the record industry, but I still enjoy setting up recording sessions in concert halls.”

Like a lot of baby boomers, Kevin Monko, 58, once dreamed of playing music for a living. Life’s practicalities intervened, in the form of a job as a commercial photographer, a wife, children and a move to the suburbs. But on a recent weekend, he was playing guitar at a farmers market outside Philadelphia.

Mr. Monko has recorded a CD and along with a rotating group of mandolin players and trombonists, plays various gigs.

“When I am playing music, I can’t get much happier,” he told The Times. “I am lucky enough to get people to play with me in a variety of bands, and we go play in different places, make a little money, and just have a lot of fun.”


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, 31 January 2015

Friday, January 16, 2015

Do Good, Think Good, Feel Good

English: Broadway show billboards at the corne...
English: Broadway show billboards at the corner of 7th Avenue and West 47th Street in Times Square in New York City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I find this very New Age, and this is still the question I will pose: for you to think positive, where is that positive thought coming from? For you to feel good, so you emit good emotions, where is that good emotion coming from?
As C.S. Lewis said it, no matter how much good intention we have, if the ship we are driving is wayward, we will still bump and crash on other ships as wayward as ours. Such is our nature - unless it is changed - from within.
Read on....
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by TOM BRADY



The paths of charity, prosperity, business acumen and spiritual well-being may lead us to the intersection of happiness.

There is strong evidence that those who are generous when giving actually end up better off, Arthur C. Brooks wrote in The Times. He discovered this while working on a book on charitable donations.

“Psychologists, I learned, have long found that donating and volunteering bring a host of benefits to those who give,” Mr. Brooks wrote. “Researchers from Harvard University and the University of British Columbia confirmed that, in terms of quantifying ‘happiness,’ spending money on oneself barely moves the needle, but spending on others causes a significant increase.”

He and his wife put the research into practice, increasing financial support for their preferred causes, volunteering more and adopting a child. Psychologists say actions like these imbue us with “self-efficacy,” the belief that we can affect the outcome of any situation.

“When people give their time or money to a cause they believe in, they become problem solvers,” Mr. Brooks wrote. “Problem solvers are happier than by-standers and victims of circumstance.”

The company Alex and Ani does not claim that its products will make you a better person, but it does say its jewelry “inspires you to put good energy out into the world,” The Times reported.” And if you put good energy, good things will come back to you.”

Last year the company sold $ 230 million worth of Buddha Charm Bangles (limitless power, limitless good karma and wisdom), St. Anthony Charm Bangles (divine direction and soulful enlightenment) and other amulets.

The New Age principle of good energy, often called the law of attraction, is a central tenet of popular gurus who encourage people to do good.

John L. Modern, the author of “Secularism in Antebellum America,” told the Times that Alex and Ani’s approach is in line with a thriving, and particularly American, tradition in which the language of the occult, spiritualism and animal magnetism grew alongside the capitalist market revolution that began around 1830.

“You have crystal stuff in the New Age in the 1970s, the red-string kabbalah stuff,” Dr.Modern said, with plain red strings sold as Jewish bracelets, to ward off “the evil eye.” And in the 1950s, the famous psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich built the “orgone accumulator,” an aluminum and glass box that he said could cure disabilities, even cancer, of those who got inside.

Many cultural institutions are learning to start thinking like capitalists since they can no longer depend on donations or government support. They need to develop ways to generate revenue beyond the café and bookstore.

“How do you break this cycle of charitable poverty?” Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of the Center for the future of Museums, asked in The Times. “How do you make a program self-sustainable, where you’re drawing a connection between people who value it and those willing to pay for it?”

You may be inspired to hold a sheepshearing festival, as the historic Gore Place, a governor’s house built in 1806 in Massachusetts, decided to do recently. Or host dinners featuring prominent chefs, as the Bronx Museum of Arts is now doing, while charging $250 to $300 a person.

But sometimes these efforts at “self-efficacy” encounter obstacles, as Susan Robertson, the executive director of Gore Place, pointed out when talking about its plan to raise vegetables and open a farm stand.

“Like any new venture, there are all of the unknowns,” Ms. Robertson told the Times. “You don’t know if the geese are going to come in and strip your pea fields in half an hour or you don’t know that you’re going to have an influx of rabbits and they’re going to eat up all your squash.”


Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, April 5, 2014