Remember that if you want to manifest money, then you need to have an open door through which the money can arrive. First, this means that you need to keep an open mind and loosen up on your previous beliefs about how you’re capable of making money.
Your financial open doors include your job, your skills and talents, your business(es), your communication channels (mail, email, phone, instant messaging, etc), your web sites, income-generating programs you belong to such as affiliate programs, accepting donations, your assets, your investments, all the people who know you, the time you spend outside which makes new interactions possible, your skills and talents, etc.
Here are some of the ways people have reported they’ve manifested money in the Million Dollar Experiment so far:
- Finding new ways to monetize assets they already own (several people have started making money with Google Adsense or Chitika eMiniMalls)
- Unexpected checks arriving in the mail (rebates, tax refunds, etc.)
- Finding money (usually coins; one person reported finding a $20 bill on the ground)
- Joining a new affiliate program
- Interest rate changes (getting a lower interest rate on debt or a higher rate on Savings)
- Taking advantage of an opportunity for easy money that comes to them out of nowhere
- Selling “worthless junk” on ebay
- Saving money (receiving unusual discounts or freebies)
- Receiving fresh income from previously “dead” sources
- Even a small lottery win!

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Making Money Consciously

Tags: beliefs, career, growth, money, steve-pavlina, wealth on 2007-12-13 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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How important is money? How much is enough? Is money a distraction from one’s spiritual path? Is it a necessary evil? Is it unfair that some people have more money than others? Is poverty more noble than wealth? Is it possible to become an enlightened millionaire?
Is money a positive resource or a consciousness-lowering distraction?
Given the way our society currently functions, if you have a lot of money, you have a lot of solutions.
I think Earl Nightingale said it best:

Nothing can take the place of money in the area in which money works.
Conflicting beliefs about money

For most of my life, I’ve been stuck with incongruent attitudes towards money.
On the other hand, we might watch a classic holiday movie like It’s a Wonderful Life that tells us we need to keep money in perspective and that relationships are far more important.
According to United Nations World Magazine, the Church has several billion dollars in gold alone, and when you consider their massive worldwide real estate holdings, their artwork collection, and their tax exempt status, the amount of wealth controlled by the Catholic Church is staggering.
What is money?

Money is a social resource – the primary social resource. Money has no inherent value of its own, but we assign it value through social agreement.
if you still want to take advantage of social resources, you’ll need to create your own social contracts on a case-by-case basis. This could include barter or other forms of exchange, or it could involve leveraging relationships to meet your social needs.
So money is essentially social credit. It’s an IOU from society, enabling you to extract a certain amount of social value whenever you want. The more money you have, the more society owes you, and the more value you can extract.
While the monetary system is far from perfect, it’s more efficient than the alternatives. By assigning a monetary value to our social exchanges and by making it easy to transfer money from one person to another, social trades are performed with relative ease. Buying groceries, going to work, using electricity, or connecting to the Internet are all examples of social trades, and by social consensus, all of these are reducible to money.
How to earn money

Let’s consider what it means to earn money. Since money is a social resource, earning money means acquiring more of that social resource. When you spend money, you convert money to value. But when you earn money, you convert value to money.
The greater your ability to personally deliver a high social value, the greater your earnings potential. The difference between making $10/hour vs. $100/hour is that the latter work has much greater social value. This difference isn’t anyone’s “fault” — the difference is due to the social consensus about the value of certain work. Note the difference between absolute value and social value.
If you think about it, there are two basic ways to earn money:
1. Make a social contribution, and receive payment commensurate with the social value of your contribution.
2. Take advantage of market inefficiencies to extract money without contributing any value.
If you find yourself stuck at a certain level of income and unable to go any higher, an underlying moocher mindset is probably the culprit. This is the mindset that leads you to ask, “How can I get more money?” instead of, “How can I contribute more value?” It’s also the mindset that says it’s a bad idea to earn more money, since your gain is someone else’s pain.
The contributor mindset

Now let’s consider the contributor mindset. This mindset recognizes that the best way to make money is to provide fair value in exchange. Create genuine social value, and receive payment commensurate with that value.
If you want to earn income as a contributor, you must contribute social value, not personal value.
Here’s the key point: your income depends on the social value of your work, not the personal value.
The saying “Find a need and fill it” certainly rings true, assuming we’re referring to a social need or desire.
Another name for the contributor mindset is the abundance mindset. This mindset says that wealth can be created from ideas and action. Your gain is a reflection of the social gain you’ve contributed. If you want to earn a high income, you must contribute a lot of social value. The more social value you create, the more money you can earn. This is a win-win mindset because you’re putting value into the system for the benefit of others.
The only real limit on your income is how much social value you can create. If you want to earn more money, then develop your skills and talents to facilitate the creation of lots of social value. The best way to increase your income is to figure out how to deliver more social value. Focus on giving, and the getting will largely take care of itself. The systems to reward social service are already in place, so all you need to do is plug your service into the existing marketplace.
Let your inspiration come from the desire to provide even more social value.
Money makes you more of who you already are, so if you’re already a contributor, more money can allow you to expand your contribution.
Making money consciously

Contributing social value is the primary strategy for making money consciously, but by itself it’s still not enough. The problem with social value is that your personal values won’t perfectly align with the social consensus.
When you attempt to provide social value without achieving congruence with your personal values, your motivation will be very weak.
Alternatively, when you attempt to satisfy your personal values without providing any real social value, you get the starving artist syndrome. You may be inspired by work that totally fulfills you, but it won’t pay the bills.
The solution is to find an area of overlap between your personal values and social values, and work within that area of overlap. This will allow you to do what you love and create something that others value as well. Don’t force yourself to choose between your integrity and your income — choose both!
Congruent contribution

Two simple realizations can help you achieve a congruent mindset about money and push beyond limiting financial beliefs. First, you must consciously adopt the contributor mindset and abandon the moocher mindset. And secondly, you must find a way to contribute social value while achieving alignment with your personal values. Once you’ve internalized those two mindsets, you’ll be in a position to generate abundant income while serving the greater good.
If you want to generate income without lowering your consciousness, you have to get your limiting beliefs out of your way. Holding yourself back from earning more money doesn’t serve anyone. Limiting your income only limits your contribution. The conscious reason to earn more money is that you can put those social credits to good use. Use them to expand your service to others. If you’re living an honorable life, then it’s a good thing for you to receive more money. You’ll be a good custodian for it. The more money that flows through your life, the more resources you can invest into your life purpose.

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How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes

Tags: growth, personal-development, purpose, steve-pavlina on 2007-11-27 and saved by16 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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How do you discover your real purpose in life?
At some point during the process (typically after about 50-100 answers), you may want to quit and just can’t see it converging. You may feel the urge to get up and make an excuse to do something else. That’s normal. Push past this resistance, and just keep writing. The feeling of resistance will eventually pass.
If you want to discover your true purpose in life, you must first empty your mind of all the false purposes you’ve been taught (including the idea that you may have no purpose at all).
At some point during the process (typically after about 50-100 answers), you may want to quit and just can’t see it converging. You may feel the urge to get up and make an excuse to do something else. That’s normal. Push past this resistance, and just keep writing. The feeling of resistance will eventually pass.
When you find your own unique answer to the question of why you’re here, you will feel it resonate with you deeply. The words will seem to have a special energy to you, and you will feel that energy whenever you read them.
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How do you discover your real purpose in life? I’m not talking about your job, your daily responsibilities, or even your long-term goals. I mean the real reason why you’re here at all — the very reason you exist.

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Overcoming Limiting Financial Beliefs

Tags: career, steve-pavlina, success on 2007-11-24 -All Annotations (0) -About

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2 Mental Blocks to Making Money

Tags: career, growth, steve-pavlina, success on 2007-11-24 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The essence of successful income generation is value creation. If you want to earn income, you must provide something that matters enough to someone else that they’ll pay you for it.
Stop cleansing, balancing, and saging your aura, and start directing your energy into the physical reality all around you.
It’s great to be working through your inner blocks. I don’t want to suggest that kind of work isn’t important. But inner work by itself is NOT an income-generating activity. How are those actions providing value to others such that they’ll gladly pay you in exchange?
By focusing on trying to get money, you’re missing the point. The point is to provide value to others. This means serving people in a way they aren’t already being served, in a manner that aligns with your unique creative self-expression. Share what only you can share. Express what only you can express in the way that only you can express it.
Try to look past your own needs and recognize there’s a pretty interesting world around you. Through your actions you can have an impact on it, for better or worse. Think about how you can provide something that people want or need in a way they aren’t already being served, something that will make a positive difference. Then act on it.
A clean aura is certainly helpful, but unfortunately it won’t pay your bills.
Too often that shell remains hollow, containing nothing but recycled and rehashed ideas that can readily be found elsewhere. There’s no innovation or risk-taking.
Mistake #2: Focusing on getting money instead of providing value
You’re too wrapped up in your own little world of me, me, me. Where’s the value?
Mistake #1: Meditating as an attempt to generate income.

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Self-Discipline: Willpower

Tags: self-discipline, steve-pavlina on 2007-08-23 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Self-Discipline: Acceptance

Tags: growth, self-discipline, steve-pavlina on 2007-08-23 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Self-Discipline: Hard Work

Tags: growth, self-discipline, steve-pavlina on 2007-08-23 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.

- Oprah Winfrey
My definition of hard work is that which challenges you.

And why is challenge important? Why not just do what’s easiest?

Most people will do what’s easiest and avoid hard work — and that’s precisely why you should do the opposite. The superficial opportunities of life will be attacked by hordes of people seeking what’s easy. The much tougher challenges will usually see a lot less competition and a lot more opportunity.
When you discipline yourself to do what is hard, you gain access to a realm of results that are denied everyone else. The willingness to do what is difficult is like having a key to a special private treasure room.
Hard work goes hand-in-hand with acceptance. One of the things you must accept are those areas of your life that won’t succumb to anything less than hard work.
Your life will reach a whole new level when you stop avoiding and fearing hard work and simply surrender to it. Make it your ally instead of your enemy. It’s a potent tool to have on your side.

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Self-Discipline: Persistence

Tags: growth, self-discipline, steve-pavlina on 2007-08-23 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Self-Discipline

Tags: growth, personal-development, steve-pavlina on 2007-08-12 and saved by15 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Soulful Relationships by steve pavlina

Tags: growth, relationships, social, steve-pavlina on 2007-08-04 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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Are You A Failure Germaphobe?

Tags: career, steve-pavlina, success on 2007-07-31 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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It’s been said that if you want to increase your success rate, you should increase your failure rate. Success comes at least partially from your volume of attempts.
Go out and attempt something at which you know you’ll fail.

Fail on purpose.
You’ll condition yourself to take action and stop ruminating. You’ll tear yourself away from the state of analysis paralysis, and you’ll start making things happen instead of just pondering and planning them.
There are several significant benefits to attempting something even when failure is certain:
You’ll gain experience failing, how to take it, and how to recover from it, which is at least as important as learning to handle success.
You’ll develop greater humility, and this will allow you to subvert your ego more
You’ll run straight into your limits and become comfortable working butt-up against them, instead of lagging behind your untapped potential with a comfortable padding.
You’ll strengthen your resistance to fear of failure in the future.
Many tasks at which you ultimately fail will still yield partial success.
You’ll develop a thicker skin.
You’ll become more persistent.
Every once in a while, you’ll learn that you were wrong, and you’ll succeed at something even when failure seemed certain. You’ll drop limiting beliefs and gain a more accurate grasp of what’s realistically possible for you. You’ll discover new talents you never knew you had. You’ll learn that your previous concept of what you thought was realism was in fact too pessimistic, and you’ll slide it down a notch closer to optimism until you get it just right.
Fear of failure and fear of rejection hold many people back from setting and achieving big goals. So it’s critical to develop a strong immunity to both.
Another problem with failure germaphobia is that you’ll have to avoid successful people.

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Self-Acceptance vs. Personal Growth

Tags: growth, stephen-covey, steve-pavlina, true-north on 2007-07-31 and saved by6 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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How do you balance self-acceptance vs. the drive to grow and improve yourself?
Is compromise really the best solution?

I believe most people simply compromise. They don’t fully accept themselves as they are, but nor are they fully comitted to lifelong growth.
Now you have to decide how much you want to push things to improve in quality as you progress through life. You can accept your current position as adequate and opt to simply maintain it, or you can strive to achieve something greater.
The more you accept where you are, the less motivation there is to grow. And the more you push yourself to grow, the less satisfaction you derive from your current position. You might end up oscillating back and forth along this spectrum, sometimes being very complacent and other times being very driven.
Trying to apply the linear mindset to your self-image creates the conflict between self-acceptance and growth. Instead of merely measuring various aspects of your life and noting how they change over time, you identify with them.
When you identify with the positional aspects of your life, you pull your ego into the picture. Your sense of self then becomes dependent on your particular position.
Even more problematic than a real loss is worrying about the possibility of a loss in advance. You may hold yourself back because you fear becoming too dependent on a certain position. If you stay low, you don’t have far to fall when things go bad.
Perhaps by setting up camp in mediocre land and staying far away from super-achiever, you’re protecting your ego from inevitable setbacks.
The underlying problem is that by rooting your sense of self in something that will fluctuate, like the current position of any measurable part of your life, you’re going to suffer in one way or another.
Instead of rooting your sense of self in your position, which is changeable, what would happen if you rooted your sense of self in something permanent and unchangeable? Stop identifying yourself with any form of positional status, and pick something invulnerable instead… like a pure concept that nothing in this world can touch. Examples include unconditional love, service to humanity, faith in a higher power, compassion, nonviolence, and so on.
I’m certainly not the first person to suggest something like this. Stephen Covey wrote about this in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He refers to it as true north.
When you root yourself in unchangeable ”true north” principles, you may still measure the various metrics of your life and notice how they change over time, but you won’t make them part of your identity. Hence, you keep your self-esteem separate from your particular circumstances.
Separating position from identity

By rooting yourself in the permanent, your position detaches from your identity. This makes it possible to unconditionally accept yourself as you are while still courageously playing the positional growth game, regardless of the outcome. Self-acceptance and growth are no longer in conflict because now they don’t apply to the same thing. You’ve separated your identity (self-acceptance) from your position (growth).
When the pendulum swings the other way, and of course it eventually will, I’ll get frustrated with my less than stellar performance. And from there it’s a slippery slope into the realm of ego-driven attachment to outcomes.
The solution is upstream… to keep identity and position as separate as possible. I find that a couple practices help a lot with this: journaling and meditation.
I keep my sense of self rooted in permanent concepts like service, awareness, and peace. Those concepts don’t change, so my deepest sense of self remains fairly fixed. That makes it easier to fully accept who I am in every moment. But on the positional side, I’m still able to enjoy the pursuit of positional growth and play full out without settling for underachievement.
When you loosen your attachment to positions, you don’t have to defend them.
What I’m really getting at here is inner peace. When you keep your sense of self away from third-dimensional positions, your position can rollercoaster all over the place, and you can still be at peace on the inside no matter what happens. You don’t have to withdraw and be totally passive.
If you find yourself succumbing to the ego-position trap, add some practices to your life like meditation, journaling, time with kids, time in nature, and so on. This will help you reconnect with what’s most sacred to you (your own version of true north principles) and keep your identity separate from your position. Then you can experience drive without attachment, ambition without ego, and peace without passivity. :)