Just days after posting “The Best Investment in Your Life Is Something You Should Already Know” which talked about Mr. Malkiel’s book “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” among other things, the Wall Street Journal has printed an article discussing the very concept that the book preaches and I summarized. Thought this was interesting and click the link below for the Wall Street Journal article.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124036618955342011.html

"Your Money and You Don't Even Know It"

First off, in order to get anywhere in life you need a game plan. Since attending the University of Miami MBA program one of the first classes I had the privilege of extracting knowledge from would be Strategic Management. Your ability to build a strong strategy based on a vision of your future and then setting clear goals to attain that vision is important to your long term success in every aspect of your life. You should always take the time to set a strategy for whatever it is that you want to accomplish (the vision) and then create the goals that will lead you to your destination.

Since companies always talk about creating mission statements, it is important as an individual to create one of your own. What kind of person do you want to be? Notice that you are capable of becoming whatever it is that you want, and it is in no way being dishonest to state what you want to change about yourself and then setting out to do so. This is how progress is made.

The vision should communicate your future aspirations without succinctly describing how exactly you intend on reaching those desired ends. Your strategy comes next and the goals marry specific quantifiable objectives to achieving the strategy which moves you closer to that vision.

How does this relate to marketing yourself, well if you want to be successful you need to develop strategies, and marketing yourself needs this same kind of attention. You want to answer simple questions about the things you really want in life, what kind of person would be capable of achieving those things and then finding ways of bringing that part of you out into the real world. One way to think of this is by administering the Law of Correspondence which basically states that your outer world becomes a mirror reflection of your inner world. Every aspect of yourself merely reflects the person you really are in life. Develop connections and friendships with the kinds of people you admire, respect and may ultimately want to mirror in some way.

Change the way you live, create new habits and develop ways of letting those parts that you want to reflect from your personality shine onto others. Once you have a clear foundation you can use this to your advantage when looking for a job. The resume is a reflection or summary of who you are in your professional experiences and knowledge you have acquired over the years. By utilizing those connections you made you can then pass your resume on to the right people. With time, patience, and fortitude your opportunity will be waiting for you at the end of this tunnel.

The interview is the next step and I will be discussing that in another post.

Slow & Steady

Investing has been on my mind lately as I am reading a book by Burton G. Malkiel titled, “A Random Walk Down Wall Street.” The point of the book is summed up in this quote – “A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts.” What has made this book so interesting to read during this period in my life is twofold: 1) I am taking a second level graduate class in Finance at the University of Miami MBA program and 2) the current economic, stock market, and global market downturn.

The class I am taking is from the standpoint of an investment analyst seeking to make sound investments that beat the averages for a firm, while the book is looking at investing more from an individual standpoint, but the differences between the two are fascinating. Even though both value reducing risk by creating a portfolio of diversified investments, the book goes one step further and makes everything very simple, straightforward and easy to understand; whereas, my Finance class is talking about concepts that try to defy the laws of gravity.

The book and its updates use historical evidence to show that no expert has beaten the market averages consistently over the last 35 years, and that professionally managed portfolios sadly lag the market averages. Any outperformance in one period is soon corrected in the next. It argues that you should buy the index, and avoid selecting a portfolio of securities that are chosen through some kind of analytical technique, because the average stock market performance for the last 80 or more years has produced a 10% annual return – beating the pros. There are all of these financial advisors and analysts who have a multitude of theories, complex algorithms and computerized software to help them pursue the greatest investment opportunities, but they all too often lead to unsatisfactory results and confused looks when the investments they were sure of (that had to be “winners”) became duds.

This conjures up images of the tortoise and the hare, where, with all the smarts and vastly superior speed potential, not even the hare could outrun the simple yet true tortoise to the finish line. The investment problem for these experts is simplicity, they don’t like simplicity because it means they are no different from everyone else and they try to rise above it with their theories and high tech gadgetry. There was an amazing quote that I came across the other day that seemed to jump out at me: Leonardo Da Vinci once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Buying an index fund is just that kind of sophistication. Which brings me to the point of this post, the bottom line is that the best investment in your life is investing in yourself. If I wouldn’t have read a book like Malkiel’s I might have been floundering with the ideas that are taught in my finance classes by trying to apply them to my personal investments.

So read many kinds of books, expand your knowledge by making what you are learning everyday simple for you to understand, use your creativity to give the new information some weight, and always tap into the resources that others have and the world around you. Investing in yourself is great because you not only know everything there is to know about the investment you are considering, but the long-term benefits will far outlast any other investment you could have possibly pursued. If you are interested in investing in yourself as well as individual investing on the stock market make sure you pick up Mr. Malkiel’s book, “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” as it has helped me grow and has been the greatest example I have ever seen that delivers knowledge on investing in a fun, simple and understandable level.

Now that I have jumped into the social media frenzy, by joining Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter and most recently Wordpress, is it still too early to say we are heading towards a split between reality and virtual reality? It just shows how important information is to each and every one of us. The funny thing is we all love watching ourselves essentially marketing ourselves to other people online, and this phenomenon has formed one crazy addiction. Typing what we are doing and then sending it off for the world to see, has a sort of selfish quality to it, and yet it gratifies on such a primitive level, it’s hard to stop. It reminds me of the scene from “The Jerk” where Steve Martin’s character says: “The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here! . . . I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this book everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes people… I’m in print!… Things are going to start happening to me now.”

This is the wave of the future and we are all part of this mad experiment – but it’s so liberating to actually have a voice. Imagine what it was like for the people that came before us, when all they had were opinions and egos the size of whales and yet no way of expressing those opinions or their egos to a mass audience. Only the privileged few who were skilled enough to write editorials in newspapers or find publishers to print their opinions were capable of finding an outlet. But now we have the new online “printing press” at our disposal and we can disseminate whatever news, ideas, or opinions we feel fit to talk about.

Let the mass influx of randomly generated opinions spread throughout the blogosphere and rain down. There are no standards or rules, just us, the ideas, and the freedom to write them. Through the noise there will be blogs worth your time – that actually add value to your life. In fact whole movements are formed on this very technology and those proactive enough to take advantage of it. The recent situation surrounding the Tea Party events across the country points to the efficiency these types of movements can attain, in a short span of time, to collectively inform and coordinate groups of people.

Using this blog as my starting point, I am trying to think of ways to use such great tools to advance my ability to connect with those that have similar desires, ideas, and needs. What I want to make absolutely clear, is that talking about what I will be doing today, tomorrow or the week after is not what I am trying to achieve with this blog (that I will leave up to Facebook and the other online surrogates). I want to clearly make this blog about knowledge, learning, and ideas that revolve around the world of business. Hopefully I will achieve this through a Marketing and Management context, since it is my main area of interest and importance. But I will not hesitate to tackle anything business related, as I view business in a Holistic perspective, where everything is connected one way or another. The existence of this very blog is proof of the Holistic approach to thinking about business.

I, in no way, believe I am capable of tackling such a large project on my own and that is why achieving the ability to create a massive blog – as part of an even more massive blogosphere with similar interests/blogs – simply interests me because we may achieve a form of collective wisdom. Finding patterns in people who are completely unique and different is what I am interested in, a form of synchronicity. What are the patterns telling us, what is it that drives our addiction? I want to find out, and using this blog as my starting point, maybe we can get collectively creative and come up with some imaginative ideas that will inspire others to expand and grow.