Wow. So much has changed since the last time I took the time to write a post for this blog.

No major changes on the important aspects of life thankfully! My wife and kids are still happy and healthy, and so am I. My parents and siblings are all in fairly good health, and there’s only happy news. So on that part of life, everything’s good! I feel blessed to have such a loving family around me, and to have all the people I care about in good health and in good fortune.

The changes I’m talking about are work related. Since last month I’m fully self-employed, and loving it all the way! I took the plunge, and even though preparation could’ve been better (like having a bigger emergency fund … errr … like having an emergency fund in the first place), I’m totally confident that this was the right move to make.

Deciding on quitting

Quitting my day job was not something I took light-hearted, especially since I loved the job (most of it anyway) and there’s something very comforting to have that sense of security of knowing a paycheck will come in at the end of the month. But at the same time, circumstances changed in a way that made me realize that quitting was the best way forward. There were three reasons for taking the plunge:

1. Business is good
   We (my brothers and I) are fortunate enough to have more work than we can handle. We love that, especially in these times with economic headwinds.
2. Sudden new tax plans would hurt me big time
   The political climate in the Netherlands is not very stable, and early this year a new tax plan was announced, which would hit me unreasonably hard. I would take an 7-9% hit in net income, just because I had to travel about 170 km roundtrip to work, three days a week.
3. Fit between me and my job
   There were forces (partly due to political changes, partly due to internal organizational changes) in the higher educational organization I worked for, that made me realize that the fit between me and my job was moving in the wrong direction. Not very fast, but there was a trend.

In a way, I already knew that 1 and 3 were happening, business was picking up, and the day job wasn’t going anywhere. I expected that I had to take a decision about what to do in 12 months or so. But #2 came very unexpectedly, and pushed me over the edge early. Just before the summer holidays, I actually quit my job and took the plunge to go to self-employment in the business venture I have with my two brothers.

Ironically, in the September, the first month of being self employed, we had elections in the Netherlands, and the parties that came out as the biggest have pretty much eliminated the tax plan that was the basis for reason #2. So the reason that pushed me over the edge has disappeared. In a way I’m thankful for it, because it made me take the plunge, and I’m happy I did.

The way forward …

Looking at the way forward as far as work is concerned, I see two things ahead of me. First and foremost is making our company a success. Our company, Maneros, is focused on two activities: e-learning and business intelligence. My speciality is mainly on the e-learning side, but I know my way around data and databases as well. We’re very lucky to work with great companies like ASML, Office Depot, and NS (Dutch Railways). They challenge us, and we love to help them forward.

Second, I will still be involved in the online blogging world. I have been fortunate to be able to work with and work for awesome people like Mary Jaksch, Leo Babauta, and Courtney Carver. I will continue to do work for them as I have been over the last couple of years, and I’m very happy to have them as business partners (in a way). They know that my involvement in blogging is not my main focus, yet they trust me to help them make sense of the technical aspects of their blogging businesses. I’m grateful for that too! Thanks guys!

How about the blog?

And this blog and my goals? Well, they will probably be more lively than they’ve been in a long time. Quitting my job has freed up a lot of time and mindspace. Since a week or two, the idea of writing a new post started to take hold of me again. And now, late at night (it’s past 2am), I’m putting the first words on paper again.

This blog will probably continue to be a chronicle of my journey through life, and since I’ve got that teaching bug in me, I will have thing or two to teach. Yet at the same time I’m as curious as a three-year old and I plan to listen more to what that three-year old is telling me. So a fair warning is in place: Topics may vary! Here’s a list of things that are inspiring me today:

• e-learning
• videography
• typography
• personal finance
• solar energy
• running

And my family of course. I’ve written about one of my strongest personal values before, it’s Freedom. And you know … I’ve learned that experiencing freedom for me is strongly tied to having the liberty to spend time with my family, and being there when it matters. And I’ve learned that small things matter …

This post I loved my day job, but I quit anyway was brought to you by be an original

Long overdue.

“What?” you might ask.

Well … euhm … this post.

Unpublished progress reports

I’ve started to write a status update on my goal three times before. Once in October 2011, once in November and then once again by the end of December.

They never got published.

Not because there was no progress. There was.
Not because there was no time to write them. They were almost finished.

They never got published, because I wanted to finish the last details. I wrote the reports on my iPad, and although the WordPress app is cool, I did want to have the last finishing touches on the site itself. And that’s where it went wrong.

As soon as I log in to my blog, the big backlog in maintenance work is staring me in the face, and it distracts me. I do quite a lot of work setting up sites for other people, and maintaining them. And there I am … neglecting my own place on the web. And it holds me back.

Every time I went in, I did some maintenance work on the site, and left it at an unfinished state. Not to return again to finish it, but also not to publish the post.

No longer! I’m first going to finish this post, and after that I’m going to make one of the hard decisions I have been procrastinating for way too long.

Progress?

Yes! Progress. There’s progress on my financial freedom goal. I’ve been working on some of the aspects of my goal, in between all the other things I’m doing.

First of all I’ve been working on “plugging the leaks”. The leaks of course are the expenses I’m trying to cover. The expenses are there, and partly unavoidable. But I want to make sure that they are as small as they can be.

Renegotiating the mortgage

I made an appoint with the bank to talk about our mortgage (this was back in September 2011). I knew that there was a small surcharge on our interest-rate for increased risk, related to the debt/equity ratio of our mortgage. I wanted to negotiate that surcharge out of the mortgage.

In the end I did not get the 0.1% surcharge out, but due to changes in legislation I was offered a replacement for the life insurance product that’s part of our mortgage. The new offer offers more transparency, more flexibility and a lower monthly charge. The monthly charge for this drops from €152 to about €138. Savings: €14/month (€168/year and a whopping €3,800 over the remaining lifetime of this mortgage).

And the getting rid of the surcharge was within reach as well. It mainly depends on how the housing prices will develop … but the coverage is closing in on the limit to get the surcharge out. And that would bring this cost down another €20/month.

Energy costs

Another big chunk of the expenses are caused by the energy bill. I had already worked on lowering our electricity bill by investing in LED lighting to replace our incandescent bulbs. It helped to bring down our electricity consumption, but the energy company wanted to RAISE our monthly charge. But even though energy prices were rising, I knew that this was not correct.

I track our energy consumption pretty meticulously, and after a couple of weeks I was convinced that our monthly charge should be at or about our previous monthly charge. So currently we’re at €230 a month.

But this week we had some more insulation done in our house, with an expected reduction of between 20-30% in use of natural gas. It’s too early to see the effect of this measure … especially since temperatures have dropped significantly in the week following the insulation job. We had a night of -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit), which is extremely cold for our country. So I’m cashing in on the investment already, but it may not lower my monthly charge just yet

Status

So the current status of my goals is this (measurement date = 31 January 2012):

Expenses

Income

So that’s 4.6% coverage for my expenses, which in fact is less than when I started. But at the same time the gap between income and expenses decreased as well.

Next steps

I’m pretty much done with plugging leaks here. It’s now time to focus on getting more low maintenance income. Sure there’s still the possibility to lower my mortgage expenses by another €20/month, but for that I need to wait for the new official valuation for my house, before I can even begin to calculate how much I need to down pay to get that reduction. And waiting is hardly an activity, now is it?

In the meantime, I need to work on increasing low maintenance income. There’s still not a lot of that coming in just yet. And my time fills up quite quickly with other activities, so it needs conscious effort to get that part done.

Oh … and the hard decision I’m making after I hit publish on this post? Well I made it already, but I have to execute it yet. I’m cancelling the email subscription service at Feedblitz for this blog. This will cost me 100+ email subscribers. But it will clear one of the hurdles for getting this blog back on track, and it will save me about $10 a month as well. So if you’ve subscribed to my blog through FeedBlitz, and you want to keep on receiving updates, please resubscribe to the blog by following this link: Subscribe by email.

This post Progress update was brought to you by be an original

Last week I announced my new goal focused on reaching financial freedom on a basic level by the end of 2013. In that post I did give some definitions and clarification of what I mean with that goal. However, I did not quantify it enough just yet … at this point I have no clue yet, what the exact amount of passive or portfolio income I need to reach that basic financial freedom. And that’s essential information to create a strategy to accomplish that goal.

So let’s get to work, let’s first take a look at …

Expenses

Expenses are the red side of the balance, the side where your money is leaking away. These expenses aren’t necessarily bad, and a lot of them can’t be eliminated. Remember that I defined my goal on a basic level, referring to all expenses related to our home. There are three types of expenses:

• Expenses that can be eliminated
• Expenses that cannot be eliminated, but can be influenced
• Expenses that cannot be eliminated or influenced

In my case expenses that can be eliminated are for instance the mortgage payments … but I’d need quite a large sum of money to do so. So eliminating them is not really realistic. Other expenses are simply essential, like the charges for drinking water, or the energy bill. They cannot be eliminated, but I can influence them … a little anyway. And then there are some other expenses that cannot be influenced or eliminated, like house-related taxes. These are simply a fact of life for home-owners.

In numbers per month:

Yikes! That’s a lot of money! Now let’s see what my status is with respect to …

Passive and Portfolio Income

Let’s first take a look again at what we mean by Passive and Portfolio income:

The Passive Income stream is income that’s derived from work that you did once, but that continues to create an income stream. It may need some maintenance to keep on generating that income, but it’s mostly a big investment once and some small maintenance jobs down the line.

Portfolio Income is income that comes from property that generates money. Examples are interest payments on savings accounts or bonds, dividends on stocks, rental income from real estate and so on. The grit of this one is that you own something, and that generates money.

So there are two categories that have a different dynamic, but a similar result.

In my situation I have some sources of passive and portfolio income totalling about € 80 per month. It comes from the following sources:

Passive sources

• Advertising revenue from blogs (about €35 / month)
  At the moment this is only from Adsense ads on this site.
• E-book sales (about $19 / month)
  Sales of my ebook Personal Core Values are highly irregular and have a low frequency, but on average they bring in about $19 per month (that is … one book per month )
• Affiliate income (recurring: $3 / month)
  This is also quite irregular, and I don’t have a good overview of affiliate income to be honest. I know that I have a recurring affiliate income from Dreamhost and E-junkie, that comes down to about $3 per month now.
• Income from TheorieTV
  Well, actually this is non-existent yet. TheorieTV is an e-learning site for people learning for their theoretical test for their drivers license in the Netherlands. The site brings in revenue, but at the moment we are reinvesting everything to improve the product and sales. Further down the line however, I expect that we will be able to create an income source from this activity. I say we, because it’s an activity that we developed as a family, my brothers, sister and parents were and are all (heavily) involved in this product.

Portfolio sources

• Interest and dividends
  There’s only one source of portfolio income right now, and it’s not that much. Currently at about €1 per day, but that’s going to disappear. This income was mainly interest we receive on a savings account. But that account will soon be empty, because we have our bathroom, toilet and plumbing renovated next month.

So that comes down to a total of about €80 per month. As you can see I have income sources in Euro and US Dollar. Since I live in the Netherlands, and all my expenses are in Euro, I will make my calculations in Euro. I will define the exchange rate at the end of every month. For now I use an exchange rate for EUR/USD of 1.45. There’s a lot of turmoil on the currency markets, so it’s hard to say where the rates will be from month to month. It’s a fact I have to live with.

There’s a basic overview of Expenses and Income now, but then there’s also the influence of …

Income tax

This is a tricky one, and I’ve decided to ignore it for now. I’ll explain why.

In the Netherlands we can deduct interest payments for the mortgage on your first home from our income tax. This means that somewhere between 42% and 52% of the interest payments will flow back as income. As you can see in the table 52% is the top percentage of tax we pay in the Netherlands.

But besides being able to deduct the mortgage interest, I also have to add the Passive and Portfolio income to my taxable income. They fall into different “boxes”. And as such have different percentages of tax that needs to be deducted. Portfolio income in itself is not taxed for instance, but the average value of assets is taxed at 1.2% per year (if your assets rise above a certain level … which they don’t in my case).

Anyway, I decided to ignore the tax effect for now. On one side I ignore the tax deduction (which would lower my expenses), and on the other side I ignore the tax effect on my income (which would lower my income). I haven’t calculated it, but I think it pretty much evens out.

The Strategy

Okay, so now the expenses and income is clear, and the effect of income tax is ignored. This sums up to:

That means that I start with an awesome 5.6% of basic financial freedom. There’s quite a long way to go, but like I stated in my goal I want to reach that 100% by the end of 2013. That’s 28 months from now.

Plug the leaks

The first step I’m going to take is to see if I can reduce the level of expenses first. Cutting expenses is only going to bring me a little probably, because the vast majority of expenses are of the type that cannot be realistically eliminated. But there may be room to improve a little.

Passive or Portfolio?

After that, the inevitable main phase of this project is to get more passive and/or portfolio income. For me the main thing is to get passive income sources, because of two reasons:

1. Cashflow
   Most of my expenses are on a monthly basis, so I need the cashflow to follow a similar pattern. Portfolio income has a tendency to create cashflow only once or twice a year, because it relies on interest and dividends. Rental income from properties does provide a cashflow … but you need quite some capital to get a property first. Not a viable option right now.
2. Capital requirements
   I already mentioned this briefly under cashflow. Portfolio income requires a lot of capital. If you take my gap of € 1,346 per month for instance. If my portfolio would provide a steady 9% income (an optimistic figure), the total capital invested needs to be about  € 180,000! Where on earth am I going to find money like that in 28 months?! (I’m open to suggestions )

So Portfolio Income is nice, and I will look into it for the expenses that have a yearly cashflow requirement (like insurance), but it’s not the main element of my strategy.

Generating more passive income

It’s about creating recurring low maintenance income – it’s not entirely passive of course. As you saw in the list earlier, I already have some passive income sources, but not nearly enough for my goal. The main thing now is to dedicate time to activities that have a potential for generating passive income.

I have taken that step already, not only mentally, but also in my schedule. I cut back on the dayjob for one day per week, I now work as a teacher in higher education 3 days a week. One day a week is to take care of the kids (I have two), and the other day is dedicated to creating passive income. Besides that one day a week, I also had an average of 10 hours per week dedicated to freelance work (evenings and weekends). Still a lot of things on the schedule and a full week of work, but the time to work on passive income is there.

The next thing to do is to really dig into the different options I have. That’s something I’m going to do in another post (or else I’d probably make this post twice as long, and it already is a long one!).

I’m excited about this! The next post will be about plugging the leak in the expenses. I already took some steps (talk to the bank, invest in some energy saving measures), the results aren’t in yet, but it looks like I can gain something there.

(Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links. If you use them, I might be 0.1% closer to my goal )

This post Financial Freedom Goal – My Expenses, Income and Strategy was brought to you by be an original

It’s time to set a new goal for me. I haven’t set goals for a long time, because I did not have the time, confidence and energy to commit myself to them. And I also did not really believe in goals anymore. So why would I set goals? It would be utter pointless, since I would only fail in achieving them.

I’ll write another time about how and why I lost the time, energy and confidence to work on goals, that’s too long a story for this post. For now I can simply state that I found them back again. As far as regaining faith in goals … well I’m still not totally convinced yet. But again, that’s also too long a story for this blog post.

Ironically, I intially started to use both angles as an introduction for this post, but both of them became too long and distracted attention away from my main point:

I have a new goal!

So for the purpose of this post, I can simply say that I found the time, energy and confidence back to work on a goal I believe in, without elaborating on those. I’ll do that in other posts

Goal. Singular.

In the past I had a tendency to work on several goals at the same time, and by doing so I discovered that it was difficult to work with more than one goal simultaneously for several reasons. I’m not going to do that again. Just one single goal.

Value = Energy

The goal should also give me energy. I’ve found that the best way to accomplish that is by making sure it complies with the following two things:

1. Align it with my personal core values
2. Getting positive results

If you’ve been following me on this blog for a while, you’ll know that I like to use my personal core values as a guideline to set goals. I have five core values, and the more values I can serve with a goal, the greater the probability that it’s going to be successful, and that it’s going to give me energy.

Seeing progress is also giving me energy, but in a way that one aligns with my value Growth too. The progress is something I need to visualize though, and that’s why I’m choosing a very measurable goal.

So what’s the goal you may be wondering by now?

My new goal

To reach financial freedom on a basic level by the end of 2013.

Values and definitions

What values do I serve with this goal? How do I keep track of progress? And … what do I mean exactly with this goal? Those are all valid questions. let’s answer them.

Values served

This goal serves several of my personal core values, directly or indirectly. First and foremost it servers my value of Freedom. Financial freedom is something I really want to achieve, as it gives freedom by removing limitations of options in life caused by expense levels (who in turn are a result of choices in the past).

But it also serves Growth.  I need to grow on several levels to achieve this goal, and as such there’s a growth factor involved, which in turn aligns with my values.

The other three values – Fun, Love and Authenticity – are not served directly by this goal. I need to make sure to guard those, and not go into negative territory on any one of them. Lack of growth is acceptable, but moving into negative territory is not.

Specifying the goal in more detail

Since it’s not really a measurable goal in its current form yet, I have to do some more detailing. Let’s start with defining some of the terms that are related to this goal.

Financial Freedom

First, my definition of financial freedom is when you don’t HAVE to work to pay your expenses. Or – more along the lines of what Robert Kiyosaki uses in his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad – it’s when the sum of passive and portfolio income is equal or greater than your expenses.

That leads us to two new terms to define on the income side, passive income and portfolio income. Investopedia defines passive income as earnings an individual derives from a rental property, limited partnership or other enterprise in which he or she is not actively involved. Wikipedia has a defintion that’s a bit broader: income received on a regular basis, with little effort required to maintain it. Portfolio income as defined by Investopedia is income from investments, including dividends, interest, royalties and capital gains.

That leads us to the expenses side of financial freedom. Expenses in my book is all the money flowing away from you in a way that does not translate into property. Expenses range from simple expenses for groceries to big expenses as mortgage payments.

Buying a car however is not an expense, because a car keeps at least a part of its value, and that value may be released again by selling it. Cars usually aren’t a good investment, because they lose value really fast, and in turn they cause all kinds of expenses, ranging from taxes and insurance to several (high priced) tanks of gas.

… on a basic level …

A final term to define is one of my own: the basic level. I stated that I want to achieve financial freedom on a basic level. So what is that basic level? For me that basic level is defined as all the expenses that are related to my home and living there. So this basic level is made up of mortgage payments, insurance, energy, and home related taxes.

As a result this goal translates into acquiring an income stream that is not a “paid-per-hour” type of income, but a low maintenance income stream that covers the expenses for being a home owner.

So that’s it. A new goal serving my values, focused on financial freedom with respect to being a home owner. I’m excited to work on it, and I’ll be sharing progress reports and more on this goal. I have some headway on this goal, as I do have some passive  income sources already, but not nearly enough to cover for my housing expenses.

I’m excited! And I sure hope this new goal and the progress reports on be an original will also be of value to you.

This post New goal was brought to you by be an original

It’s been almost a year since my last post on be an original. You could say I took a sabbatical year away from the blog, albeit an unplanned one. It has been a beneficial time in many respects though.

As you know I blogged about personal development and personal productivity. And I liked it – in the early years anyway. I was growing and learning, and I shared my progress and my insights. It was fun.

I learned to blog

But in time I learned some more about blogging … and then I learned some things about how to write posts that attract readers … I learned about what it takes to build a voice … and to build a (personal) brand. I liked some of it, and disagreed on other things. But in general I grew and adjusted to what I had learned.

In the meantime I also got quite proficient with the technical aspects of blogging. I have a tech background, and I really enjoyed learning how this stuff works. Sometimes out of necessity, most of the times out of interest.

Personal development

I also read other personal development blogs … I read personal development books … I even watched some movies about it. And the more I learned about it … the more I started hating it!

I saw a lot of parallels between different authors, the same stuff over and over again … I saw a lot of regurgitation … writers claiming new insights as their own … while they were essentially repackaged insights, most of the time without attributing it to a source. Where is the originality in that?

But it wasn’t only the repackaged content, I also grew to hate the “let’s only tell the good stuff” writers, showing perspectives of fame and fortune, but omitting the effort and perseverance one needs to even get in the vicinity of that fame and fortune. They’re deceiving their audience and that bothers me (a lot actually!). The fact that the audience is also buying it (literally and figuratively) bothers me too. I didn’t want to be a part in that.

I also hated the “Listen to me – I’ll tell you how to live your life” writers, a pretty common trait among personal development writers. I’m guilty of this attitude in a couple (and then some) posts on be an original. I don’t regret it, it’s been a part of my path and it has helped me to get to new insights about myself (and the industry). But it’s not the attitude I’m going to have towards writing anymore, especially in something as personal as your development. Who am I to tell you how to live?

Life is not a set of easy step-by-step tricks. Life is complex, it’s emotional, and we all have a different starting point, different paths to follow and different lessons to learn. There is no such thing as “the best way” to live your life.

My path

By following a path that was not my own, it dawned upon me more and more that it did not feel authentic … even though that’s something I can only say in hindsight. I just felt a growing dislike of the blog and a serious lack of inspiration. There was no productivity solution to get me motivated again. There was no inspiration I could find to get me back on track. It bothered me at first, but after a while I accepted it as part of my path.

And now – almost a year later – that I can say that it was life (or my heart) telling me that it did not want to get back on that track … because it wasn’t my own. The further I moved away from my path, the more I lost my voice and motivation. Whether I moved away from my path, because I changed my voice, or vice versa … I don’t know. It’s not important.

It’s all about taking action

My last post before the sabbatical was a self-made photograph of a hot air balloon seemingly flying to the moon. I added a quote in it, that appealed to me, but that I did not understand very well. It’s been on my mind a lot in the past year.

It took a while for me to really understand that the emphasis in this quote has to be on TRYING (even though I did put an emphasis on it in the image). It doesn’t say:

“Every fool knows you can’t touch the stars, but that doesn’t stop the wise from knowing you should try anyway.”

It’s not about the knowledge, it’s about the action. And I have been taking action, while following my heart. And in hindsight I can relate them all back to my personal core values. I’ve focused on working as a teacher (Growth), I spent time with my family (Love), I’ve started working more as an entrepreneur (Freedom) in areas I really enjoy (Fun). Keeping in touch with my Authenticity is my challenge though, but it shouldn’t stop me from taking action. Through action comes insight.

So is this the end of be an original?

The answer is Yes, if you’re here to get quick recipes for how to live your life, or parts of it. I’m not going to do that (anymore). The answer is No, if you’re here to have a piece of my mind.

This blog has been most valuable for me when I was actively working on improving my life. At the times I was working on my goals. And when I was writing about how my values influence my life and my decisions. I’m going back to using be an original for that purpose. Goal setting, progress reports, core values and my opinions about stuff I encounter along the way on the path. My path.

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Guest post written by Barrie Davenport of Live Bold and Bloom.

“Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism.” ~George Henry Lewes

Most of us are just regular people.

We live our lives in our little corner of the world. We go to work and do our jobs. We spend time with our families, enjoy our hobbies, and put our pants on one leg at a time. We do pretty much the same thing day in and day out, with a few bursts of excitement and drama.

Perhaps in our personal sphere of influence, we are viewed as someone special. We are loved and important to those around us. But we tend to view others who live bigger, bolder lives as the real stand-outs, the true originals.

You might look at these people and wonder how they do it. How did he come up with that great idea? How does she have so much style? How can he be so funny? We all want a dose of whatever these people are drinking, but we can’t seem to find the bar.

These unique people must belong to some special club with privileges and talents unavailable to the rest of us mere mortals.

When we meet these shiny, exceptional people, we tend to view ourselves as boring and prosaic in comparison. No spotlight here please. I have nothing special or interesting to offer the world. There is no way I could ever be that ingenious or brilliant or avante garde. It must be some kind of fortuitous genetic anomaly that accounts for these abilities.

Yes, there are gifted people born with superior intelligence or incredible talent and abilities. There are those with the predisposition for magnetic personalities, a positive outlook on life, and creative expression. But is it their genetic gifts that make these people original and unique?

One of the dictionary definitions for the word original is this: “arising or proceeding independently of anything else.”

According to this idea, a true original means it’s the first and only. For example, the very first blade of grass that ever grew was an original. Or was it? That blade of grass was composed of molecules, cells and chemicals that already existed. The intelligence that created that blade envisioned a new way to combine those elements to create something different, something unique.

Originality isn’t creating something from nothing. Originality is taking what exists and seeing it in a different way.

You’ve heard the expression, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Nothing is truly original. The tools for every new, fresh, bold idea are available to us right here and now. All we really need is vision, passion, and action. You can be gifted and talented, but you may never harness that vision. You can be quite average and make unbelievable contributions to the world.

Arthur Fry is the guy who came up with the idea for Post-It Notes, the yellow slips of paper with adhesive on one end. They are ubiquitous now — cultural icons. Fry received his early education in a one-room rural schoolhouse and had no special advantages growing up. As an adult, he worked for 3M as a researcher in new product development.

Fry was in church when he came up with the idea for sticky notes. He sang in his church choir, and he used slips of paper to mark the pages of his hymnal. When the book was opened, the makeshift bookmarks often moved around or fell out altogether.

On a Sunday in 1974, it occurred to him to use a new adhesive he learned about at work to create a better bookmark. The Post It Note was born. The amazing commercial success of this humble product is undeniable. (Here’s a great article about Arthur Fry and the Post It Note.)

You don’t have to have special talents to be unique. You just need to harness what you have at hand.

If you want some ideas to uncover your own uniqueness, give these a shot:

1. What can you do?

What are the things you are good at doing? It doesn’t have to be something dramatic or earth shattering. Can you cook? Are you a good listener? Can you repair things? What seems simple to you may be complicated or overwhelming for someone else.

2. What do you enjoy?

Having passion and enthusiasm about something provides energy. When you have that energy, you can accomplish much, much more because you aren’t struggling against yourself.

3. Pick something and focus.

Being unique requires some time and effort. Don’t try to be astounding at everything. You’ll be exhausted. Pick one thing right now and focus like a laser on it.

4. See things with new eyes.

We get into ruts and routines, even with the activities we love doing. Ask yourself frequently, “How can I do this differently?” How can I make it more interesting, fun, special, appealing, beautiful, useful, pertinent? Challenge and stretch yourself.

5. Pounce on inspiration.

Just like Arthur Fry, you need to take advantage of inspired ideas. How many times have you said, “I could have done that?” Don’t let these ideas float in and out of your mind. Keep a notebook with you all the time. Write them down. Think them through. Put them into action.

6. Copy ideas.

And then expound on them. Look at what other people have done that seems original and unique to you. How can you change it to make it better or bigger? Remember, nothing is really new. Build on existing material and create something different.

7. Keep learning.

The more knowledge and information you have, the more raw material you accumulate for creativity and inspiration. Become an expert in your field of interest. Read, take classes, ask questions, observe other experts.

8. Be sincere.

Uniqueness just for the sake of being unique is an exercise for the ego. Nothing more. Uniqueness and originality arise from a sincere desire and passion to challenge the status quo, find a better way, express creativity, and satisfy curiosity. Feed the soul, not the ego.

9. Embrace failure.

Before Arthur Fry’s Post It Notes ever made the big time, his idea was rejected several times by 3M and received initial lackluster response from consumers. He believed in the value of these little sticky papers and was persistent. It paid off. Experimentation and failure are part of stepping out of the box. Some things work, some don’t.

10. Become a salesman.

Learn what people want and need. Find the people who share your interests, passions and ideas. Then present your unique ideas and solutions to them. I doubt Sara Blakely, the woman who created Spanx body shapers, sent out an e-blast to a bunch of men. She thought about a real problem (visible panty lines) that is bothersome to a real group of people (all women with butts), and she worked to promote it in front of the largest possible audience of these people (The Oprah Winfrey Show). From panty line problems to a multi-million dollar business.

What’s so unique about that?

If you want to get started on your on unique path, check out these free downloads that will help you get inspired, learn more about your passions and interests, and help you start setting goals to take action.

Barrie Davenport is a life and career coach and the founder of Live Bold and Bloom, a blog about bold and fearless living.

This post Originality for Beginners: 10 Strategies for Uncovering Your Uniqueness was brought to you by be an original

Writing obituaries is hard work, and most people do not enjoy the process. Writing an obituary is like facing death and facing the finiteness of life, also of your own life. In the process of writing you experience a wide range of emotions, ranging from grief over a loss to the warm smiles of fond memories. It also helps us put life back in perspective, let’s us focus on what’s truly important and what might not be.

This is why writing an obituary for yourself is a very powerful exercise to help you focus on those important things. Stephen Covey asks you to do this exercise in his record-selling book “The 7 habits of highly effective people“, and I’ve added a much more detailed version in my ebook “Personal Core Values“. We want you to focus on the important aspects of your life, and facing the end and looking back on your life is a powerful visualization to help you do that.

The results of this exercise may be that you change some aspects of your life, sometimes just a little and sometimes dramatically. Roz Savage is a woman that shows how this exercise can cause dramatic changes for the better. In the TED video below she tells about how she did this exercise and what the results are.

She used a variation to the obituary exercise that I really like. Instead of only writing the obituary of your life as you envision it, she also wrote the obituary of the life she was currently leading. By doing both of them you’ll get a very clear vision of the difference between them. Roz discovered that she was on the wrong path, and she turned her life around and rowed solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

This post How writing obituaries can change your life dramatically was brought to you by be an original

Over the coming weeks I’ll be writing a lot about various aspects of the Eisenhower Matrix, this post is part of that string of posts

The Eisenhower Matrix has two main dimensions, the urgency axis and the importance axis. To understand how to decide whether something is urgent or not, I’m going to dive into the dimension of Urgency in this post. Urgency is a dimension that’s time-related. Something can get urgent for a couple of reasons, but the main characteristic is that you need to give it attention NOW or at least on a short notice. If you don’t things go wrong or you’ll get in trouble.

Basically there are four types of urgent:

• Procratinated urgency
• Unexpected urgency
• Stealthy urgency
• Implied urgency

Procrastined urgency

These are the deadlines that are around the corner. They create urgency, because the deadline is coming closer, whether you like it or not, and you still need to do work to meet the requirements for the deadline. There’s urgency right there.

Most of the times however, this urgency is mostly caused by procrastination. People have a tendency to procrastinate work, especially if they don’t particularly like the work. That procrastination invokes a sense of urgency as soon as the time gap between the present and the deadline gets close to the amount of work that still needs to be done.

Time to deadline >>> estimated work left -> very high risk of procrastination
Time to deadline >> estimated work left -> deadline comfortably in the distance
Time to deadline > estimated work left -> first sense of urgency
Time to deadline = estimated work left -> high urgency
Time to deadline < estimated work left -> stress + poor quality
Time to deadline << estimated work left -> forget it, you’re busted

Common examples are your taxwork, handing in reports, sending in articles to magazines and so on. They’re hardly ever urgent when the deadline is set, because usually there’s ample time to get the job done. But if you wait long enough, the urgency kicks in.

Unexpected urgency

This is a type of urgency that doesn’t give an early warning. Suddenly it’s there as an interruption of what you were doing, or what you were planning to do. Something happens, and that something requires your immediate attention.

Some examples of events with this type of urgency are when you’re involved in traffic accident for instance, or when one of your kids just puked all over his bed. It’s the type of event that forces you to drop everything else, and give immediate attention to.

Stealthy urgency

The third category is a type of urgency that sneaks up on you if you ignore it. It’s not related to deadlines, and it’s not an interruption. This is the kind of urgency that evolves from neglect or from spending too little attention to certain things.

This one happens both in the material world as in the emotional world. In the material world for instance, neglecting to do maintenance work to your roof will lead to an urgency when the roof starts leaking (usually during a massive rain storm).

In the emotional world this kind of urgency can occur when you’ve spent too little time with people that matter for instance. It’s what the song “Cats in the cradle” is all about.

This stealthy urgency is a tough category, because you could’ve known it was coming, yet you didn’t recognize it or even ignored the early warning signs (hence stealthy).

Implied urgency

Implied urgency is something we all recognize, but somehow we never really see it as something with an urgency factor. Implied urgency is associated with the activities that would create (close to) immediate urgency if we decide NOT to do them.

For most people this is true for their jobs. If you decide to quit your job today, you create an immediate urgency on the financial aspect of your life. Your mortgage or rent, the utility-bills, taxes, the groceries, and many many more will not cease to exist instantly. So quitting your job creates an urgent gap between your cash coming in, and your cash flowing out.

It’s this implied urgency that we all feel when faced with these kinds of decisions. If quitting an activity creates more urgent activities than the amount of activities your quitting, you’re dealing with an activity with implied urgency.

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