Category: random

False Four: Habits

False 4ourHabits you should have

  • The glass is half full – Look for the positive in yourself, others, and your situation
  • Be mindful – Ever feel like the days, months, and years pass by and you don’t know where the went? Perhaps you need to focus on experiencing the moments as they happen? Being mindful of yourself (feelings, place, context) and the world around you will tether and anchor you to the time you’ve been missing.
  • Smile – It costs you nothing and will make you and everyone else you encounter feel better. Seriously, it is that easy!
  • Exercise – Time to look yourself in the eye and admit you could use 30 minutes to an hour more a day doing some sort of strenuous activity. Preferably outside, and even better with others.

Habits you should kick

  • Skipping breakfast – Skipping the first meal of the day robs you of energy during the hours you’re most productive and messes with your metabolism. 
  • Negative thoughts – the antithesis of the first habit above. Negative thoughts are the cages we build to incarcerate ourselves. There’s only ever going to be one person who will always be there for you and that is you. In your life there are going to be innumerable people who are going to bet against you and pull you down, why add to that crowd?
  • “Body Farming” – You touch your face two to four times every minutes, 91% of people pick their noses, 39% bite their nails, and people are constantly picking, scratching and irritating their skin. These activities are unsightly and unhealthy. Stop it!
  • Eating “fast” food – Companies know that Americans are a hurried and overworked population and they’ve gone out of their way to provide easy, cheap, and calorie rich food for them. While this might seem a blessing for Americans this food is largely heavily processed and consists mostly of corn, soy and oil. Calorie rich and nutrient poor. Stop it!

Habits you should cultivate

  • Learning something new – Are you expanding your horizons? What are you doing to expand your personal, professional, and creative toolbox? 
  • Get up early – Think of a great person? Got one? I don’t know who the person you picked was but I knew they got up early. Before everyone else was up their were up practicing, studying, honing and working on becoming great
  • Practice empathy – Empathy is the ability to put oneself in some one else’s shoes, and the willingness to respond to that person’s needs. Empathy will help you see the glass half full, it will help you smile, and it help bring you closer to everyone around you.
  • Read more – My own biases are showing with this last one. But, reading will help you grow as a person in every aspect of your life. It will help you go to places you can never go, understand things you never could,  and know people you could never know!

If you had bought Apple stock instead of a PS3…

ps4logo

You’d have made a hell of a lot of money.

Sony announced their next console, the Playstation 4 today. They didn’t unveil the actual machine or give its cost. But, it got the internet buzzing with hype, argument, and discussion.

But, unlike every other time a next generation console has been announced the news left me unphased. On twitter I attributed this to growing up. Some people took offense to that. I didn’t mean it in the sense that video games are for kids but more that I’m growing out of them perhaps.

After being told about the announcement and reading some articles I still couldn’t care much about it. Instead I found myself thinking about what I could have done with the money I earned instead of buying a new console. Or what I could have done with the money I have used to buy consoles in the past.

And so a thought experiment was born! The Playstation 3 came out on November 11, 2006 in two version. A 20 gig rig that retailed for $499 and a 60 gig version that sold for $599. On that same date a single share of Apple’s stock was selling for $83.12.

With the money you would have spent on the 20 gig version you could have bought six shares of Apple stock (we’ll round down and say 7 stocks if you sprang for the 60 gig version.) Seven years go by. Today, I can go on ebay and buy a 20 gig original PS3 for between $40-$70. Sixty gig versions go for around $100. A deprecation in value of  84 to 92 percent?!

As of the writing of this posts Apple’s stock was selling for $448.85 per share. So, your six apple stocks would be worth $2693.10 for an increase in value of 540 percent! Quite the deal!

Of course in 2006 I wasn’t married or working full time or contemplating buying a house. Still, if I had bought the stocks then I could have made money and bought a PS3 now and still come out ahead. Just think about that this fall when you rush out to buy the new one…

*this is all of the cuff maths so if I made a mistake I apologize. Regardless, the stock purchase would have done you a lot better than the PS3 one.

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