Haters Gonna Hate

The title of this little article is “Haters Gonna Hate”. It is a street term that simply means that some people are just going to be jealous and resentful assholes no matter what you do so just keep on doing what you want to do.

This should not just be a lesson from the streets and the “Game” but a lesson for all of humanity to ignore the overwhelming negativity that some people naturally emit.

There are always going to be those among us that want to bring you down in order to make them selves feel better. These people are insignificant and no attention should be paid to them at all.

Keep on doing what you do to the best of your abilities and life is going to unfold before you and reveal that it is not as bad as you think it is.

You should not just ignore the criticisms that are in front of you, your should also ignore the people that ruin your day with out even thinking about it. I constantly refer to traffic problem and road rage because that was a problem of mine for several years.

I spent many years driving for a few different rental car companies and also delivering parts before I realized that the main part of my day that I hated the most was driving.

The actual driving part was fun but eventually I learned that what I hated about it was the fact that there were so many other people on the roads and it seemed like most of them were just trying to cut me off.

Those people who are terribly selfish in traffic and have no regards for others are another form of hater. They needed to be ignored, so the plan that I came up with was to change my driving habits.

Before I changed my habits I would see someone coming up behind me quickly and I would try to not let them past me. This created hostility on both fronts of this situation and led to me being hateful every time that I got into a car.

I changed the situation completely. What I did was to just let them pass. The tailgaters got ignored and I would also leave a very large gap in front of me so that when I got cut off in traffic it would be as close as it was before and provided a much longer reaction time in case of an emergency stop.

There are still a lot of times out there that I wish I had lasers to point in their eyes, but those feelings are lesser and lesser everyday.

My example is just one way that anyone can ignore the haters. I sincerely would love to hear some more.

So remember to just be nice to each other and the world will be a much nicer place for everyone to live in.

Self Improvement – Beyond the Comfort Zone

The one true reason that all of humanity is being held back is the comfort zone. By this I mean that people are doing exactly what they want to be doing because it is the path of least resistance. Lets face it, people are designed to consume as much energy as possible and spend as little energy as possible. That is simple survival right there. But with the advances in modern times, that kind of lifestyle has lead to terrible things like morbid obesity, heart disease and even early death.

You comfort zone is what you are probably doing right now, just cruising around the internet looking at random websites and generally taking it easy. You might have a niggling thought in the back of your head that you really should be taking the dog for a walk of getting some kind of exercise but you are just planning on taking it easy.

This leads to a sedentary lifestyle that eventually leads nowhere. My previous example only talks about exercise as something that sticking to your comfort zone can prevent, but there are so many different opportunities that you are missing out on if you don’t take some time to experience discomfort and live life to the fullest.

Discomfort comes in all shapes and sizes. One common one is the fear of rejection. This irrational fear leads to you no asking your boss for a raise or promotion, not asking that girl or boy that you like out on a date and it can also prevent you from doing as well as you should in school because the fear of failing a test prevent you from even attempting it.

The comfort zone is not a modern idea. It has been around forever and it would seem that all of the great leaders of the world are completely at ease doing astounding things that would seem like too much for the normal everyday individual.

The more time that you spend doing things tat make you uncomfortable, the more comfortable you will be with them. This is true of almost any activity. It is said that practice makes perfect and that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, if you put both of those together, you are just starting to get outside of your comfort zone and try something new. Eventually you are going to be awesome at this new activity and there will still be people everywhere that are being saddled with the fears that you have overcame to achieve success.

So with all of that in mind, why don’t you just go out and do something that makes you uncomfortable. (Something healthy, drugs make me uncomfortable but I would never so them to achieve success.)

P.S. My personal fear was of having the entire neighborhood notice my jiggly man boobs while jogging. I got over it and I am on the path to an extremely healthy lifestyle.

Irresponsibility and Easy Credit are a Dangerous Team.

For a long time there has been a problem. This particular problem is worse than a gambling addiction, worse than a shopping cart hitting your brand new car in a shopping mall and much worse than my fantasy football picks could ever be. I am talking about irresponsibility. This is a problem that affects everyone. Irresponsibility takes many forms and faces but in this case, I am talking about financial responsibly.

There are hundreds of different ways to get loans and credit and this means that there are hundreds of ways to get yourself into a lot of trouble with all of this easily attained credit.

Where I live, a law was recently passed that forced credit card companies to show how long it would take to pay off a credit card if you were only making the minimum payments. I actually have one beside me right now, lets take a look shall we?

$723.56 + $14.00 min payment = 18 years and three months to pay for the principal. At 19.5% interest per year, that would mean that I would be paying the bank $855.98 in interest charges. All of this information leads me to conclude that, if I was not able to make a $500.00 payment right away, I would be being robbed. This is the worst kind of robbery as well, the legal kind.

I keep on talking about my own situation, but what about yours? How can you avoid getting swindled by banks slinging easy credit like it was free candy at christmas?

It all comes down to you. You have to make the decisions to not buy things that you can not afford. Do you really need that faster processor? That is what I put on my credit card. I knew I could pay it off over two months, so paying a bit of interest on it wan’t a big deal to me, but what about your own situation? You are going to have to get creative with your accounting and frugal with your cash if you want to pay off the credit cards and gain financial freedom.

Remember that even though credit cards are easy to get, it is up to you to be responsible with them and not pay the banks money that they don’t deserve.

Only You Can Be The Person That You Want To Be.

Stop making excuses, start taking action.

If you have found your way to this site, then you are probably looking for a way to turn your life around. Spending hour after hour in front of the television and the fridge and wondering why your life sucks. Thinking: “If only I had the kind of life that they show on TV, I would be happier”. Well guess what? That is all attainable. All that you need to do is what you already know needs to be done.

Want to be a doctor? Just go back to school part time and it will be reality, sooner than you think. Want six pack abs? Well guess what? You already know what to do. Eat less, exercise more. It is just that simple. Want more money? Hand out more resumes. Maybe you could find out what kind of positions are opening up at your company and just go for them? It is simple as that.

I hope that what I am doing here at ZapSmass.com is going to motivate at least one person to become the success that they have always dreamed of being. (and cut me in for 10% *wink*). What I really want to do with this site is get down to the roots of the motivational problems and crush them. I will be always researching, studying, and applying the principles that I learn, in order to create an environment that is going to nourish your desire to be awesome.

So, with that all said, I hope that I provide you this environment and remember, you already know what to do, now do it.

Everyone Around You Is An Idiot!

Let me just start by saying that the title isn’t completely accurate. I know that there is a huge percentage of the people around you that are sane, normal, non idiotic people. The only reason that I wrote that particular title is because the normal people don’t stand out in your daily routine. It is only the morons that interrupt your peaceful patterns that stand out. That is just too bad because those normal people deserve all the love in the world while the idiots should be ignored.

The idiots are everywhere though. You can help but encounter them. Whether you are in line and one of them cuts in front or perhaps you are just minding your own business cruising along the highway when someone in an $80 000 luxury car flies past you doing twice the speed limit, with a mobile phone in one hand and an $8 coffee in the other. Maybe the bosses just keep piling on the work load while making dumb choices and not contributing anything useful. They are unavoidable.

But how can you keep you cool when there are so many idiots?

If you look for road rage videos online, you are going to find a lot of them. Just the other day, I watched a video where a bus driver took it upon himself to teach a Porsche driver how to park properly, by using his bus to knock it away from the bus stop that it was parked in front of.

I must admit that I am a road rager, but I keep it in the confines of my automobile. I call the offending drivers on the road all sorts of clever names, but I have never carried out my dreams of installing a high powered lazer with face recognition technology to target their eyes and permanently blind them in order to keep them off of the roads for ever. I can still dream about it though.

To get to the point, what I am trying to convey to you is that it passes. Eventually the idiots will be gone out of your life. Time heals a lot of things but it can make a lot of things a lot worse.

One day, your imbecile of a boss will be gone. It might take more time than the idiot in traffic, but eventually, your boss will be gone. Either through promotion, retirement, firing or quitting, you or the dolt that you work for will be separated and never have to see each other ever again.

There are many other long term idiots in your life that time is not going to just get rid of for you though. Some times, you are just going to have to do some thing to remove them from your life. These nasty cretins include, spouses, neighbors, friends and even family. If you can not remove them from your life, you are going to have to remove yourself from their lives.

So keep calm and carry on. There is no need to worry about the short term idiots, they are usually gone within minutes and the long term jokers, you are just going to have to stay away from their contagious idiocy.

Effectively Wasting Time on Trivial Pursuits

It seems to me that so many of the current lifestyle choices that many people choose to make are spent on wasting time. When we think about how much time is spent, wasted on pursuits such as Facebook, television and all of the other things that are just purely entertainment, we realize that if we spent this time on something more productive, it would lead not only a better life, but a better existence in general.

Let’s talk for a second about television. According to Nielsen.com, 2 1/2 hours every day are spent staring at a glowing box. What could you do with 2 1/2 hours per day?

I know that I’ve used the learning guitar reference before, but in this instance, it is extremely relevant. When I was in high school, I knew a few guys that would never come out and party. All I knew about them was that they would go home after school and not come out as everyone else and have a good time. As it turns out, they were going home to practice guitar. I knew this because the only thing that they would talk about during school hours would be the guitar or music in general.

And as a proper online creep, I looked them up recently, only to find out that they are in popular bands surrounded by gorgeous women, based only on the talent that playing guitar has got them.

So, that being said let me also tell you about a fellow named Malcolm Gladwell. This fellow is a best-selling author and has discovered that the key to being great at anything is spending at least 10,000 hours doing this. If you are spending the average amount of time watching television, then in approximately 10 years you will be an expert in watching television. If however, you can translate that into a bankable skill then you are going to be well off, and probably set for life. If you do not translate your 10,000 hours of television watching into a bankable skill,then you will have wasted nearly 10 years of your free time watching television.

Television is extremely enjoyable. I can admit that I watch it on a daily basis. The only difference is that I keep the television in the corner of my eye while doing something else. This means that I do not devote my full attention to this waste of time. If like me, you can multitask, then keeping television as a second thought to the projects that you were working on, is going to reward you with not only successful projects, but also the feeling that you have not wasted your existence watching content that has only been created to fill the time between commercials.

The Financial Reason To Quit Smoking

So I know that you’ve heard, about ten million times over, that you should quit smoking. All of those advertisements and statements that you’ve been bombarded with, all are concerned with with your health, but did you know that if you quit smoking you have the potential to save hundreds of thousands of dollars. Oh, and you can also live longer and live a healthier life.

Now let’s think about this for a second, how much do you really smoke? If, like I used to you smoke about half a pack a day your health is not going to be as seriously impacted as it would if you smoked two packs a day, like my stepfather used to. Currently, where I live a package of cigarettes costs about $10. That means that I’m spending five dollars a day on cigarettes. If you multiply that five dollars per day times 365 you get a grand total of $1825 per year. Now the average smoker, will smoke for about 40 years and that only half a pack a day they can be expected to spend roughly $73,000 over their lifetime.

Now lets think of what you could gain by using this money as an investment, over forty years you could possibly quadruple it or maybe even octuple it. I’m not a financier at all, but I know that smoking is basically taking your hard earned cash and burning it. You may think that smoking is relaxing and it is worthwhile because it calms your nerves, but the truth is, billions of people around the world do not smoke. Somehow, all of these people are calm and relaxed without the aid of cigarettes.

So, $73,000. Let’s actually think about what you can acquire with $73,000 worth of cigarettes. Firstly, you take $73,000 and just give it to a tobacco company. Or, you could take that $73,000 and give it your government. Did you know, that tobacco is one of the most heavily taxed items. I know that the government where I live continually increases taxes on this luxury item at a rate of approximately three dollars per pack. Which is, as you know, 33.3%.

I don’t know about you, but if I was paying 33% income tax, I would probably lose my mind, unless of course I was making some astronomical seven figure income. Then, I don’t think I would mind is much.

$73,000 is only the cost of smoking half a pack a day. There are many people out there who smoked two packs or more per day. Two pack a day habit is extremely disgusting. As a former smoker I still don’t mind the occasional whiff of tobacco, unlike some people who lose their mind and think that they will immediately get cancer as soon as they smell someone’s cigarette. A two pack a day habit will cost you $292,000 over your lifetime. That is currently the cost of a new home. Not just a regular home, but a nice home, or a regular home and a car. They could also buy you a nice house and a college education. The things that you could buy with $292,000 are infinite.

So with that in mind, you should realize that not only are you going to live longer if you remove cigarettes from your life but you are also going to have more money to spend during that longer lifetime.

Money – Everything In Moderation

Money is something that is a constant worry on the minds of most people. It is a grating long term stress that can lead some people to do pretty drastic things. The worst thing that money makes people do, is spend 40+ years at a job they hate, in rush hour traffic for two hours each way, only to have their bosses embarrass you with their sheer stupidity. I can not think of anything worse than that scenario. Unless you consider theft, murder and other crimes for money worse.

Everyone knows that the love of money is the root of all evil, but did you know that you can live on very little cash per day. When you think about spending $300 a month to finance a $15 000 car divided over 30 days, it only equals $10 per day. That is not all that much in the grand scheme of things. A mortgage however, is a whole different story. A mortgage might cost $1000 a month and divided over thirty days it would be $33 per day. Food, as long as you are not eating at restaurants very often could be another $300 a month, or $10 a day. Other expenses, like internet, cable television and hydro can be another $10 a day as well. All of this adds up to $63 dollars a day. It equals pretty much a full time employees earnings at minimum wage.

The point that I am trying to make here, is that you don’t need to stress yourself with a long commute and a decent job, when all of the basic essentials can be had with the simplest of laid back slacker jobs. It is time to start enjoying the easy life.

You Don’t Need To Work Anymore

Thanks to the internet, if you have the right knowledge, you can make a residual income and never need to work again. Thanks to modern algorithmic changes to everyone’s favorite search engine, this task has gotten a whole lot more difficult. I am planning on making a guide about exactly how it is done, so sit tight and I will be releasing it soon.

The basic plan to making an online income is as follows:

Get yourself a website
Learning a little bit of HTML is useful
Make awesome content about a very specific topic
Make content on a regular basis, at least once a week
Promote the crap out of your site but don’t spam.

It all seems easy, but if it was, everyone would be doing it. The thing about making money online is that you need to invest a lot of either time or money into your endeavors. You can spend all of your time promoting your content, building it and creating attractive social media campaigns, or you can just pay some one else to do it for you. If you choose the right subjects to write about, and invest a lot of your time into it, you will eventually start making a few cents a day. Not enough to make a difference, just enough to encourage you to do a lot more.

So if this is something that interests you, keep watching the MONEY tab, because I will be releasing all of the “secrets” that the “experts” want you to waste your hard earned cash on.

Ten Great Ways To Waste Your Money

Money is wasted by the billions everyday. You probably already do some thing that are a massive waste of cash, I know I do. Some excellent ways to waste your hard earned dough include:

Smoking – Heavily taxed and $5 a day for a year equals $1825 per year. Just light your money on fire but don’t forget to breathe the smoke in while you do it.
Gasoline – I know it is necessary to get yourself to work, but if you are driving a large SUV by yourself everyday, you know that you are wasting a ton of fuel.
Eating Out – Fast food and restaurants are a great way to socialize with friends but the cost of that lifestyle is astronomical compared to eating at home or bringing prepared meals with you.
Credit Cards – Carrying a credit card balance and only paying the minimum is similar to just going to the bank with a wad of cash and handing it to them. I just found an old bill of mine with $788 owing. The interest was $16 and the minimum payment was $15. Do the math.
Pay Day Loans – This is just legal loan sharking. They charge massive amounts of interest and will just take your pay cheque as soon as you get it. If you are in a situation that requires money right away, like rent, i’m sure that instead of taking your bank information and proof of employment to a pay day loan shop, you can just take it to your land lord and prove that although the rent is going to be late, they are definitely going to get it. Remember to remind them that waiting an extra week for rent is a lot less hassle than kicking you out and finding a new tenant.
Gambling – The house will always win at this game. For every story that I have heard about people winning at the casinos, I have heard dozens of stories about people loosing. I actually have a story about winning at the casino. The bar was near the big spinning wheel game and for about three hours I would get up between drinks put some cash down and buy the next round. It was great! But that is my only winning story. I have probably spent thousands on lotteries and scratch tickets and never won a thing.
Designer Anything – If two hundred dollar jeans make you happy, then you have some serious self esteem issues. It is said that then more possession you own, the more your possessions own you. If luxury items are something that you feel that you can not live without, I would suggest that you buy knockoffs and tell your snobby circle that they are real.
Replace When You Can Repair – This means that instead of spending thousands of replacing your toaster, dishwasher, or any thing else, you should just take it apart and see if you can fix it. I saved my neighbor from having to purchase a new mower by flipping it over and tightening a couple of bolts.
Fines – Parking illegally, speeding, building without a permit, and other misconduct are all completely avoidable. You know you shouldn’t be doing them and the tickets are so damn expensive. An easily avoidable expense.
Time – I know that time is not really something that you can waste money on. But it is still something that you can waste. I thought it was important to add it to the list because [Time = Money]. It is true that the more time you spend, the better the returns. Just think about investing time into playing the guitar or any other instrument. If you put enough time into some thing, you are going to have a bankable skill that is going to be in demand by someone. Unless it is something like watching television, which can still be banked as long as you are writing reviews about shows or some other idea like that.