The power of thinking big

One of the hallmarks of a successful money making mindset is 'thinking big.' But so few people have this trait. We've been conditioned to think small, not to be greedy, to expect less from life - in short, we've been swamped with a puritanical way of thinking since the day we were born.

I read somewhere that, as an experiment, someone put two adverts in a newspaper. They were for the same job, doing the same work with the same hours, but one of them offered to pay a salary many times the other. Guess what? About ten times more people applied for the lower paid job! People think small. And that's one of the reasons they fail.

Many (most?) people are afraid of thinking big, they're scared to be successful, scared to be rich. For most people, being rich is a nice dream, but they're comfortable with the dream - it's nice and it makes them feel good. But truly successful and wealthy people take it to the next level - they are committed to being rich, to being successful, and they're prepared to keep on keeping on until the dream becomes reality.

You can have anything you want - ask for it, choose it, be committed to it. Start thinking big. Ask for MORE. Life is like that - by its very nature it grows, it evolves, it seeks to be more than it is, it acquires: that's not a bas thing. The bad thing is that we've been taught to be small and to accept less. The tragedy of most people's lives is that they think there's not enough to go round and they mustn't take more than their fair share. But there is enough - enough money and enough success and enough of everything - the universe never runs out, it just keeps on making more and more. What a pity we don't ask for it! The more you get, the more you can inspire others, you more you can share, the more you can contribute to everyone around you, the more you can enrich the world.

There is a quote I love, often misattributed to Nelson Mandela but actually from A Course in Miracles, which summarizes all of this:

Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God; your playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone, and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people premission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Dividend stocks - the best passive income stream?

There are two kinds of income: active and passive. Active income streams are what you get in exchange for effort - your day job is the best example: you put in the hours, you get paid. Passive income streams are like getting interest from a bank account - you do absolutely nothing and the money rolls in. In between are things like maintaining a Website: it (potentially) generates money for you all the time, even as you sleep, but it does need to be monitored, updated and maintained, and so there is work involved.

You might love your job and love the work of running a business, maintaining a Website or whatever, and this is desirable because for most people their active income makes up the lion's share of all their disposable cash. But what we are thinking about here is the ideal passive income stream. Its characteristics are:

(1) It is completely passive - you don't need to do anything at all to maintain it.
(2) It is a safe and stable source - it should not change unpredictably
(3) It is rising - at least at the rate of inflation, preferably alot more.

Although some people (including no less illustrious a man than Peter Lynch) don't seem to bother much about dividends, as passive income streams go, you don't get much better than owning stock in good, solid businesses with good yields and rising dividends. Acording to The Motley Fool, If you had invested $10,000 in Ibbotson's large-cap companies back in 1980, you could sell them today for about $130,000. Say what you like about Walmart, but it's been increasing dividends since 1974 and is up 100,000% since its initial IPO. Money invested in solid dividend stocks like this, or Pepsi, Phillip Morris or Johnson & Johnsons would have go you similar results, all on the back of dividends.

Just buying the highest yielding stocks won't do, however - there's more to it than that. You need to be sure that the dividend is secure and that it will go on rising. You don't want to be monitoring the stock and the company constantly. One of the best dividend advisor services I have come accross is MorningStar's dividend Investor newsletter. For a very reasonable price you get a comprehensive monthly newsletter and a stack of e-mail updates.

We tend to get caught up by the excitement and the 'game' of buying and selling our stock in the daily circus of the market. But Warren Buffet said something like 'I never made any money in the stock market,' meaning (I guess) that it's owning the right companies at the right price (and perhaps the right dividend) that is what actually makes the money. If you do this, you can sit back and watch the money roll in, and watch the lemmings fall off the cliff along with all their hard (actively) earned cash.

Think rich to get rich

This blog is about making money. But I believe that you cannot make money, whatever you do, unless you have the right mind set. You need to think in a certain way, you need to have the right 'financial blueprint' to use a phrase coined by T Harv Eker in his book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. Most people seem to think that when you are wealthy, you will feel wealthy - make sense, right? But Eker and many other proponents of the 'law of attraction' (myself included) believe that it's the other way round - you need to feel wealthy first, and the feelings lead to the wealth.

Feeling wealthy involves lots of different things which I'll explore in later posts as time goes on. I've been trying a few different things lately myself and I have to say that they are working. Part of feeling wealthy is being open to wealth coming to you in all sorts of ways. There are many, many channels through which wealth an flow to you - money is flowing constantly, the world is full of it, and you need to start believing that you can tap into these pipelines. If others can do it, why can't you? The answer is that there is no reason. So start believing - stop dreaming about being rich and start choosing to be rich.

On the topic of making yourself feel wealthy, you might want to check out this blog article.