How to Unleash Your Creativity and Find Inspiration Today!

Inspiration can be defined as a new and better way of answering a question, or solving a problem. In life, we often get bogged down by busyness and set patterns. Sometimes it’s hard to come up with insightful solutions to a difficult quandary. When you find yourself in need of inspiration and creativity, consider the following seven tips. Depending on your particular situation, utilize any one or combination of these ideas as you see fit:

 Change Your "I Don't Know" or "I Can't" Thinking to "What If...?"
 — Albert Einstein

Sometimes our own fixed patterns can be a major barrier to inspiration and creativity. Given the problem at hand, if you think close-ended statements such as “I can’t…,” “I don’t know…,” or “I’m stumped…,” you’re more likely going to create a negative self-fulfilling prophecy and remain stuck.
Instead, come up with open-ended statements and questions such as:
"I have what it takes to figure this out."
"I'm open to the possibility that solutions will come up.”
"I will find the inspiration I need to solve this."
“There’s always a way…”
“What better solutions are possible here…?”
“What if…?”
These open-ended statements and questions are your creative mantras. When you repeat them to yourself, don’t try to consciously come up with answers. Instead, empty your mind, engage in one or more activities described as described below, and enjoy the process. Allow inspirations and solutions to emerge naturally and spontaneously.

Take a Break from the Mundane

The links between music, intelligence and creativity are well established. Listening to Mozart’s sonata, for example, temporarily increases spatial intelligence. Find stimulating and enjoyable complex music to listen to, and let it refresh your mind.

Watch this short video clip of a live musical performance during a subway commute. Notice the change on the facial expressions of commuters and musicians alike as the music is played:

Get Out of Your Head with Exercise and Movement

Studies have shown that exercise stimulates the brain by creating new neurons in the hippocampus region of the brain. Physical activity helps us get out of our heads and stimulate new thought patterns. In communication there’s a saying: “motion dictates emotion.” Motion can dictate inspiration too. Engage in robust physical activity such as brisk walking, running, aerobics, yoga, bicycling, or swimming, and fresh ideas may spring forth like new seeds!

Immerse Yourself in Nature and Colors

Nature and colors are well known for their rejuvenating powers.
For example:
If you feel confused and are in search of clarity, go to a space where there are colors of green and blue, which have a calming effect.
B. If you’re looking for creative ideas, place yourself in the midst of vibrant colors (like a flower garden), which can stimulate the senses.
C. If you’re not able to visit nature right away, close your eyes and visualize it with all of your senses: See in your minds’ eye all the colors of a season; hear the sounds of birds and creeks; smell the fresh air. Take deep breaths as you let yourself mentally explore this wonderful environment. Better yet, visualize while listening to Mozart or other enjoyable complex music. It’s a nice mental vacation – perhaps just what your mind needs to rejuvenate!

Consult Your Board of Advisers
If I ask you to write down the names of six inspirational and creative people whom you admire, which may include personal acquaintances, contemporary newsmakers, historical figures, and even fictional characters (Yoda is my favorite), which individuals would you come up with? This list is your personal board of advisers.
With open-ended questions, use mental imagery and ask each member of your board how she or he would solve your problem. You may be surprised at the quality and creativity of the answers that emerge. Of course, these brainstorms are really coming from YOU – but from a fresh perspective, and often from your more inspired, Higher Self.
 “You must unlearn what you have learned.” — Yoda


Read or Watch Biographies of Inspiring, Creative People
Can inspiration be contagious? Absolutely! In your search for creative solutions, read or watch biographies of those whose creativity, innovation, and/or entrepreneurship you admire, and let their examples influence you:

  “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” ~ Steve Jobbs


“We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.” ~ T.S. Eliot

May you find your inspiration today!
Article by Preston Ni, M.S.B.A.

Get Motivated

Get up and do what you know you need to do.

Life Changing Motivational Video

 

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. ~ Bruce Lee

Don`t look back and ask why. Look ahead and say why not!!

If you pile up enough tomorrows and you will be left with nothing but a bunch of yesterdays. I don't know about you, but I'd like to make my today worth remembering.

"We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

~Aristotle

Arnold Schwarzenegger Motivational Speech

Live In The Present!

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

~ Michael Jordan

Great Motivational Speech

Your attitude is an expression of your values, beliefs, and expectations.

Everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.-- Leo Tolstoy

Randy Pausch reprising his "Last Lecture"

How To Build Massive Positive Energy That Creates Amazing Conversations

This is what it comes down to:

Emotional energy is contagious. When you're having a great day, conversations seem creative, engaging and effortless: that's a huge deal for winning over anybody. However, the ability to snap yourself into a state where you radiate a strong emotional presence can be tricky, especially if you're having a bad day!

A happy mindset, brimming with positivity, will always give you a successful edge when dealing with people.

When you're upbeat, you'll find that hitting it off with that stranger in the room becomes easy because your conversation unfolds naturally and with warmth.

However, there is a knack to developing an attitude when you feel like you are enthusiastically 'bouncing off the walls', with an overwhelming energy. If only it was easy to always feel like we do on our best days when

we have a spring in our step and everything goes our way. Then it is so easy to talk to people and things just 'click'.

Not all of us feel amazing 24/7, and we find it hard to tap into that kind of mental energy. Being gloomy and carrying that horrible sinking feeling around is a major problem when you're trying to engage with people. Not only do you expect that any interaction you have will go badly, in turn people are more likely to react negatively to you because you are projecting a feeling of unhappiness.

The problem with feeling happy is that most of the time we allow events in the outside world to influence how we feel on the inside. It's easy to rate our happiness through external factors like the size of our bank balance, state of our relationship or general healthiness.

However, no external factor can really ever equal the joy of the moment, or warmth that inner emotions can give. Although it's a (tired) cliche, 'true' happiness does come from within!

The trick to getting happy on the inside is to build an optimistic mindset that is unconquerable. Even negative events can be perceived positively when you actively choose to look for the benefits in them.

There are lots of times in our lives where we feel unhappy; however, the mistake that we all seem to make is thinking that those circumstances have to be optimal before we can experience happiness.

Modern society has unwritten rules that say:

-'if I'm not earning that much money 

-'if my relationship isn't going well 

-'if I'm not feeling too brilliant... 

..then, in turn, I have to feel unhappy.' -Who made up this dumb rule? You can choose when you feel happy!

Unhappiness comes from THINKING badly about something (choosing to perceive an event as negative).

In turn, this causes us to FEEL terrible, which in turn makes us BEHAVE in an unhappy way, and therefore attract more negativity into our lives.

Hence, we often want to BEHAVE in a way that is 'happier'... but we don't address our THOUGHTS and BELIEFS that could be preventing us from feeling that way. So, the true key to happiness (wow I feel

like a real philosopher saying that) is having a happier mindset. Nurture a carefree attitude by thinking of

enthusiastic reasons to counter the inevitable bad stuff when it crops up.

I like to use the simple phrase: "THAT'S *GREAT* BECAUSE..."

For example:

"It's raining!"

"That's great because my clothes could 

do with a wash"

Or:

       "You smell like cabbage"

"That's great because cabbage is really 

good for you!"

Or even:

"I don't like you!"

"That's great because I thought we were

growing a bit too close!"

The trick is to flip every negative occurrence that enters your life into something positive. Is this an insane way to live your life? - Probably, but I couldn't be happier!

To summarize, getting into a warm, happy state so you can engage people, no matter what, is an attitude of getting addicted to positive emotions. Bubbling with emotional energy is not about bottling your best feelings up so you can call on them at a later date... it's about living your life with a perspective that constantly creates NEW good feelings to revel in.

Now, you might be thinking this is obviously one of those 'more easily said than done' things, so I'm going to give you some fun homework!

HELPFUL HOMEWORK [BONUS!]:

 

Over the next week I want you to play a little game on a few people you know!

When you talk to them I'd like you to ask them a question so that they have to answer 'yes'. The goal is to try to coax a positive response for every question you ask.

-Let me give you some examples:

If I was trying to decide where to go for dinner and I wanted to ask my friend what they fancied, I may say:

"I can't decide where to go for dinner. 

Isn't it great that we have so much choice

available to us?"

Or, if I wanted to borrow the stapler at work

I might say:

"Can I borrow the stapler? Isn't it 

great that we have this useful, nifty 

little device so that we can keep 

everything filed nicely?"

The point of this exercise is to get YOU into the habit of being upbeat. If you can get your acquaintances to respond positively to you it means that you're already in a positive frame of mind: oozing the charismatic vibe that others dig.

Choosing to BEHAVE positively comes from taking pleasure in the little things. This can then help us to FEEL positive, and gradually we'll start to THINK positively far more often.

"If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made of"

~Bruce Lee

7 Secrets Wealthy People Know about Amassing and Maintaining a Fortune

Becoming wealthy enough to keep the wolf from your door doesn't mean an end to unwanted callers. For every newly minted billionaire, there are cautionary tales of the well-heeled undone by visits from the tax man, the loan officer and Uncle Sam himself.

A fortune requires finesse. As well as a willingness to embrace financial exotica, trips to Bermuda and the drive to start your own business--as a survey of FORBES' knowledge of the world's wealthiest people reveals. Below are seven tricks, secrets and maneuvers regularly conducted by those with more than a shekel or two to accumulate and maintain their fortunes.

Start Your Own Business

Click over to FORBES' roll of billionaires, and you'll notice something if you dig into the biographies. Nearly all of the 1,426 billionaires  made their fortunes through an entrepreneurial spirit (or their fortunes come from a family member who created the business). Ten-figure sums aren't earned by rising through corporate ranks. They're made from creating the whole shebang from scratch. It will likely occur by happenstance, in the most unsuspecting of ways. Recall that the world's fourth richest man, the aforementioned Buffett, left the working world in 1955 with plans to retire. Shortly after, cajoled by a seven-person group of family and friends, twenty something Buffett formed a partnership that laid the groundwork for his $53.5 billion fortune. He did so over a small dinner at the Omaha Club.

Put Growth Investments In A Roth IRA

The investments with the greatest potential for growth should go into a Roth IRA. They sit there tax free, and as long as you wait until the age requirement (59 and a half), withdraws won't be levied either. Employees at fast-growing private companies often go this route. Peter Thiel did it as CEO of PayPal in 2001, buying 1.7 million shares for 30 cents a share through his Roth. The 2002 eBay acquisition of PayPal make those shares produce a $31.5 million profit. The man who founded PayPal with Thiel, Max Levchin, has also done something similar. His Roth has already sold 3.1 million Yelp shares and holds another 3.9 million. Result: some $95 million that an elder Levchin can withdraw tax free. 

 Find Stocks You'll Never Sell

At the forefront of investing royalty in the last century was an intense man with round glasses from northern California named Philip Fisher. He became the first to author an investing book that cracked The New York Times bestseller list with Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits in 1958. It became an establishing text for modern growth investing, laying out a 15-point strategy that wound up catching the attention of a young man from Nebraska: Warren Buffett, who would make tens of billions of dollars through a combination of Fisher's tenets and those by value investing founding father Benjamin Graham.

Today, Fisher's son, Ken, is also a billionaire. He manages a $42 billion asset management company, and still calls northern California home. The younger Fisher is perhaps more value oriented than his father--especially favoring the price/sales ratio when assessing a company's worth--but there's a particular point in his father's work that he says is never far from his mind. Probably because it plays well in value investing, too. It's the idea that you buy a stock with the mentality to own it forever.

Papa Fisher had good reason to buy and never let go. He faced capital gains rates that topped 45%. (Today's, by contrast, cap gains are much lower at 20% or so.) He bought DuPont and Dow Chemical in the 1930s, selling them only four decades or so later. He picked up Motorola in the 1980s, and still owned shares when he died at age 96 in 2004.

Does such a mentality have a place in today's world of millisecond trading? "If done right, yes," says the younger Fisher. "People aren't perfect, though." 

 Insurance, Bermuda-Style

Ever heard of these corporations: Screaming Lord Baltic, Flip-Flop Films or On Nets Above People? Probably not, unless you're toiling in Warner Brothers' back-office.

Each of those entities were incorporated by an entertainer, specifically those advised by Scott Feinstein, who reps celebs like Aaron Paul, Hilary Duff and Taylor Lautner. Feinstein suggests the maneuver because it allows clients to better manage taxes and expenses. Celebs many times have trouble deducting some of large business expenses they face.  "These are people paying out like 20% or 40% in their income in expenses," to people like agents and managers, Feinstein says. Why can't the silver-screen crowd make the deductions? The Alternative Minimum Tax, something every American pays. "It effects something like 20 million Americans, and it limits how many expenses you take to eliminate your taxable income."

To get around this, celebs start a corporation and instruct producers to pay the corporation, not them directly. (The government made an exception for entertainers to earn wages this way, Feinstein says. You, in all likelihood, can not.) The corporation, in turn, pays the entourage, and the star emerges with a lowered taxable income.

While Feinstein favors this method, he refuses to take the blame for the oddity of the corporate names: "I tell them to come up with something that means something to them." Screaming Lord Baltic. Huh.

Think Like Zuck. Think Trusts

Doubts about Facebook the company's longevity aside, Mark Zuckerberg and his co-founder Dustin Moskovitz have already taken steps to secure their family's legacy. As FORBES reported last March, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz put pre-IPO stock into a type of financial instrument called a grantor retained annuity trust (GRAT). The pair, by FORBES estimates, wound up moving more than $200 million to the trusts. Future payouts will avoid the 45% gift tax that existed (in 2008) when these trusts were created. Perhaps not as cool as sliding $1 billion past the IRS, but a GRAT is especially useful for stashing away hard-to-value assets, like private companies shares, because it allows changes to the trust's details if you're audited.

Cash Flow Is Important. Buy MLPs, Sell The Steak House

Where does Brad Pitt put his multi-million-dollar paychecks? It's not too much to presume that he, like much of Hollywood, has money invested in master limited partnerships (MLPs). Conversations with five of Hollywood's top money managers revealed a cult following for these stocks, which generate strong yields and cash flow. Like real estate investment trusts, MLPs pay no taxes. Hence, they have more to share with investors, and payouts are more lightly taxed.

They're certainly more than one-hit wonders. The Alerian MLP Index's returns beat the S&P 500's on a 1-year, 3-year-, 5-year and 10-year basis. The index, holding some 50 MLPs, favors gas-and-oil infrastructure companies like Enterprise Products Partners, Kinder Morgan and Plains All American Pipeline.

Alan Goldman, a Los Angeles business manager with a star-studded rolodex and client roster, says he's often left talking his crew out of pitches on the next trendy restaurant, instead advising more consistent investments, like MLPs. "We find that they need to be more conservative than Joe Average." Goldman sighs. "The restaurants are very, very popular with entertainers. We look at something like a restaurant and just assume that the money is gone."

By Abram Brown | Forbes April 2013

 “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” - Aristotle

What seems like the right thing to do could also be the hardest thing you have ever done in your life!