I’ve talked about getting Bro Bo Sanchez as my personal mentor and I’m having a great time learning from him. I guess that’s make me his apprentice. And more ways than that, I believe that its very important to know on how to be a good apprentice. Just because you now have a mentor, it doesn’t mean you will just wait for your mentor to spoon feed all of the info to you. Somtimes, many times we have to roll up our sleeves and just get to it. I’ve become an apprentice and a mentor in various aspects of my life and because of this, I was able to put together some points on how to be a good apprentice.

1. Know your mentor’s teaching style – not all people will teach you like how Bo Sanchez teaches his students. Not everyone will tell you the lesson first then let you experience. Some teachers will allow you to experience the lesson first before explaining to you. So to save yourself from all of the disappointment, find out what youre getting into
2. Research before asking – almost always, you will need to ask your mentor questions. But before you do, always try to understand your question. A mentor would appreciate you asking him what you did wrong when you did this and that. rather than asking him what do about this situation. Mentors appreciate the hunger for learning not only from themselves but from others.
3. Do your homework! – when your mentor tells you to do something, do it. Its very disappointing to learn that an apprentice did not do a particular tasks just because he “forgot” or “didn’t feel like doing it”. And usually these tasks are meant for you to do so you can learn something
4. Do extra credit work – when your on idle moments, try to back to your previous tasks and if possible do them repeatedly. You can get to practice your skills and at the same time repeatedly doing these task will build a habit in you.

Having a mentor is great, but you won’t succeed if you don’t duplicate what you’re mentor is doing. So just get into that good apprentice hat and into the motion and pick your mentors mind and follow his footsteps. Most like he found a pot of gold which you will eventually find too.

… but you should finish it anyway.

That is what I almost always use to say to my younger sisters. Don’t get me wrong I do believe that having a college degree will help you get started in life when you finally start looking for financial freedom. But what I actually mean is that a college degree is NOT required to be successful in life. Or in some cases for you to get a good source of income.

Allow me to raise some points regarding this:

1. A considerable chunk of the successful entrepreneurs of the Philippines (of the world for that matter) did NOT finish college. Famous tycoons like Bill Gates and Henry Sy are part of this popular line up.
2. Good grades does NOT guarantee good salaries or good living. I’ve seen of apparently smart ones from my college days, who happened to rake in the high scores in all of the exams, who are currently struggling in their careers. It’s not about being smart. It’s about being street smart!
3. If you are part of the IT industry, you will notice that almost, if not all, of the topics you studied in college are obsolete by the time you graduate. Like if you learn using HTML in class but the professor teaches about HTML4 by the time you graduated its not longer considered best practice to use HTML4.

Well enough of those, the real point of this post is Why you should finish college even I tell you that I don’t believe in it.

1. College teaches you discipline – Studying for some people (like me) does not come naturally to everyone. And the somewhat rigid structure of our education system will allow students to have the discipline to do their school work.
2. College teaches you public speaking – or atleast how to communicate your ideas to a group of people. This is important for almost anyone who wants to go into business. Speaking in public and relating to people is important for entrepreneurs.
3. College help you build your networks early – going to classes, participating in organizations with your college is actually the early stage of networking. You’re building your contacts for future endeavors. So while studying, start building those connections.
4. College teaches you how to handle difficult people – one the problems in the corporate world is that people within organizations even within departments do not always agree. And different personalities will always clash with other personalities. Bullies, Toxic people, user-friendly people all these are part of college life.

To sum it up, I believe that while college is being branded by some people as not necessary, I still believe in finishing it. Just dont take too long. Living and learning in the real world is better than staying in the classroom. But finishing college will allow you to be ready for it.

Sometimes we find ourselves in different levels difficulty, whether it is in our work or in our personal life. There will be times that we hit the ground and many times we fill that getting up is no longer an option. It seems that some situations would really require us tossing the towel in and just giving up.

Personally, for several points in my life, i really felt that I already hit rock bottom. One thing I really appreciate about life is that God is with you in painting your life. And he knows that, when you’re trying to paint a picture of light, one should never be afraid to use some dark colors. These colors will actually highlight the lighter ones making it easier to focus. Just like in life, the dark points are there so you can focus on the brighter spots.

So whatever or however darks the paints you have in your canvas, there is always a good place where you can place your bright colors. And for the most part, the bright colors are what matters most. Just to let everyone know, I got this lesson by watching the movie Bruce Almighty starring Jim Carey (who happens to be one of my favorite actors).

If you consider yourself a techie person, chances our a lot of people come to you for advise about almost anything high tech. What brand of laptop should I buy? Is this a good model? Is it better than that brand? These questions always seem to go our way even if we are not familiar with all brands and models. And just like most techie people I get these questions a lot. Especially on what brand of laptop should people buy.

For me, I already have a preferred brand and its Lenovo’s Thinkpad series. For me, Lenovo Thinkpads are the pinnacle of design and durability made just for executives and IT professionals. A lot of IT professionals I know also favor Thinkpads for its durability and sleek look.

But in my opinion, it all boils down to the following reasons:

• Sleek, geeky but professional design – some people may consider the Thinkpad’s black matte finish as boring and non-fashionable. But for me, it shouts “PROFESSIONAL!” in every direction. The matte finish goes very well with the power look of any executive or emphasis the cool geeky image of an IT professional. The strong but well defined design give Thinkpads the “i mean business” image and will always be an eye catcher in any conference room.
• Great Power comes Great Responsibility – Thinkpads do not just look sturdy and professional but also emphasize durability and reliability. The superb processing power is well protected by Lenovo Thinkvantage technologies which make Thinkpads a good choice for those who are conscious about their data. All within a strong and durable case that will protect the internals from physical damage.

• Choose: Track or Touch – Excluding keyboards, Thinkpads provide their owners the choice of not two but atleast three ways to input data into their systems. You can chooose between, a regular mouse/trackball, Touchpad or the very intuitive Trackpoint (also known as the eraser or the nipple). Personally, I prefer using the the trackpoint since it provides a speedy way of switching between the keyboard and my pointing device. From a typing position, it is faster to start using the trackpoint than to shift to the touchpad or a mouse. This is very important for times where space it at a premium.
• Its the GHOSTLIGHT, I mean Thinklight! – while others prefer the backlight keyboard (are we talking about cellphones here?), I prefer using the Thinklight to light up my keyboard in dim places. Besides you can even use it as a notifcation method for Pidgin IM messages when you’re using a linux based operating system.
• Full Keyboard Layout – Thinkpads (atleast the non-Edge models) always use the standard keyboard layout, unlike other laptops that try to cram everything by scattering the periperal keys like DELETE or HOME keys to the side, Thinkpad’s still retain layouts that are similar to desktop computers while still using space efficiently.
• Open Source friendly – Most Thinkpad models (except maybe for the ones that have NVIDIA OPTIMUS graphics cards) are Linux compatible out of the box. This allows almost carefree deployments of Linux based operating systems into the enterprise.

Sure some will argue, that Thinkpad’s are generally more expensive, but I will always say, you get what you pay for. For all the security and durability Thinkpads provide, I will always be assured that recommending Thinkpads will result on very few “support requests” from people who heeded my advice.

My current machine is a Thinkpad X100e, which the descendant of a long line of other Thinkpad laptops I have used. Here is a quicklist of Thinkpads I have owned or used at work

1. Thinkpad x31
2. Thinkpad x41
3. Thinkpad z61m
4. Thinkpad r40
5. Thinkpad r51i
6. Thinkpad x61

And none of them disappointed me. Sold some these for a fair amount because people know that Thinkpad, even second hand ones, are for keeps.

Like most parents, I love my son and upcoming baby so much. That is why I constantly want to improve on how I can help mold them to loving christians who will constantly bless others with their God given talents. In the process of learning on how to best love my children, I have come to discover the importance of filling up a child’s love tank.

What is a Love Tank?

From experience, a love tank is simply a reservoir of compassion, affection and love that one can share to others. This reservoir determines the dispostion of many people and how they look at life. There two types of love tanks. The one which is whole and the other is broken. Everyone starts with a whole love tank. And from the day we are born, God starts pouring love and graces into our love thanks. This may come directly from Him or from other people around us.

A person with a full love tank, is a person who continuously bless the world and shares the love he receives because of the fact that he has no choice but to share it, otherwise it would be wasted. This comes as a natural consequence of having a full love tank – love flows out from the person to others easily. But a person with an empty love tank will constantly find ways to fill himself up even if he needs to punch holes into someone else’s love tank. This type of person is what most people call “toxic people” or “emotional vampires”.

How do we fill up or empty our children’s love tanks?

As we mature and grow older, our experiences will either keep our love tanks whole or start punching holes in it. Bad or traumatic experiences will punch holes our love tanks resulting in draining our love tanks. These experiences can be other people need love from you, traumatic events that you experience as you grow older. On the other experiences compassion or regularly getting immersed in wonderful experience like having a personal relationship with God, bonding with your parents etc. Great and fantastic experience also help reverse the effects of bad experience.

For my children, here are some things i always try to put in mind.

1. Positive way of reprimanding – growing up kids will always try to explore their surrounding. The magazine rack, the TV, your computer or even your cellphone. And sometimes since we anticipate that they may handle stuff badly, we scold them in advance like “Don’t touch that! you’ll break it!” or “Stop it! You’re irratiating me!”. These things especially if said in an upset way, causes our kids to think that they” never do any thing right.
2. Start with a loving voice – sometimes my son really does something really naughty. While some other people will immediate call this to his attention, I prefer coming up to him, and telling him in a very gentle manner that what he’s doing isnt really nice and I would be happy if he stops, I do this several times before i actually start become a little more authoritative. I believe that my son has to be given a chance to know whats happening and is given a chance to correct himself.
3. Never trick them – I see some adults that try to take advantage of a child’s needs in order to get them to be affectionate. For example, If a child wants something from an adult, the adult would say “kiss mo muna si tito” or “hug mo muna si ninang”. Normally, this would be alright, if the adult would really give what the child was asking for but sometimes they just don’t and the child may not really feel bad, but I know from experience that some of these “tricks” can be engraved in a child’s memory.
4. Mean what you say – During mealtime, my son would occasionally refuse to eat his food, and sometimes telling him “last subo na” will actually prod him to actually eat, but the problem was since the “last subo na” routine works, they will always say it for the succeeding subo just to make sure the child eats. I believe that this confuses a child even if done in an early age. I do not do it for my son and i discourage it in my family.
5. Spend time and do boring stuff with them – I truly believe that the activities we do with our childre but consider boring are the activities that our children will always remember. People always say LOVE is spelled T-I-M-E. And I agree with this with all my heart.

There are other stuff, on how we can keep our children’s love tanks to be empty, and the above items are just a few. But the bottom line is that, if we are able to raise our children with love tanks that are filled to brim, I truly believe these children will bless the world even more

Having a mentor is all the craze nowadays.At almost every level of profession, people often speak about how they are working on some aspects of their lives with the help of their mentors. And having a mentor that helps you about a particular part of your life really boosts your chances of success.

Me? I want to be successful in all aspects of my life – from my spiritual to my financial life. Being part of the Light of Jesus community, I have grown to admire Bro Bo Sanchez and his very inspiring talks on how to have a balanced christian life. Every week, my whole family makes a great effort to attend one of the many Feast’s (The Feast Pasig in particular) so that we can hear more about the talks of Bo. And to see him so successful really inspires me and I really really wanted to ask him to be my mentor. I mean, He’s successful as a Dad, a husband, an entrepreneur and servant of God, asin wow! I just so wanted invite him to lunch or dinner, sit with him really really pick his mind of all his wisdom.

And YAY to me! I found out that Bo Sanchez CAN be my personal mentor! I just discovered that he has this online mentorship club wherein members can download a truck load of Bo Sanchez’s power talks about how to become successful in my financial life. He calls his mentoring club The Truly Rich Club!

For a simple fee of 500 Pesos, I get to receive multiple blessings which includes being able to download Bo’s talks about financial freedom. All I have to do is just download the MP3′s, sync it with my music player then I can listen to Bo anytime and anywhere: While commuting/driving to work, during your lunch break. Its like having Bo give me a one on one talk on financial freedom and I’m so loving it!

But don’t take my word for it, here is a quick video from Bo himself:

Sounds great right? So if you’re interested, you can go to the Truly Rich Club website: http://www.trulyrichclub.com/ and I hope you’ll be blessed as I am.

So like a good student that I am, I consulted some of my mentors on how I can help myself in getting the “groove” back into blogging. After I share some of my blogging mistakes, they were good enough to provide some sound advise on stuff I can work on to improve my blogging skills. So I’d like to share of the things I’d be focusing on.

Blogging Best Practices Checklist

After getting up to speed with my mentors, I was able to put together a list of good stuff I should be watchful so that I can be on my way to having a better blog.

• Select my Blogging Platform – a good blogging platform will be the foundation of my blogging experience. Since I will be spending a considerable amount of time with the blogging platform of my choice, it should be make my blogging experience as fun as possible.
• Setup a blog that follows good user experience practices – Having a blog with good content is good but a blog that follows good user experience practices like having user experience website elements into my blog.
• Setup a blogging editorial schedule – for someone who needs to put blogging into my regular routine, I’m seriously considering doing the 30 Day Blog Challenge in this blog since I believe by doing so will help me build the habit of blogging regularly and consistently.
• Set a regular time to review user comments – as advised by Dorothy aka Earthprincess it is important to give good focus to your readers by properly responding to their needs and comments.
• Interact with Social media networks – best way to market my website is through social media so i better put together a social media marketing plan.
• Implement an Internet Marketing strategy – just like business websites, a blog will greatly benefit from internet marketing. This increases both traffic and the brand name of my blog.

Wow, another long list. Well, my next step is actually expounding on the items I outlined above. And it would be interesting on how I can move forward considering the work load I have now with my full-time sponsor (read: employer).

Today, I have decided to yet again to make an attempt in blogging for passive income. This would be quite another nostalgic experience since I already “started” blogging several times. But hopefully i can move at a better pace now than before. But as I move now with renewed enthusiasm, I pause to reflect on what are things I have done wrong in the past.

Blogging mistakes I made

• Not having a goal set – like any other project, blogging for passive income needs to have a goal. I wrongfully assumed that things will fall into place if I just churn out regular blog updates. I should have set some personal goals for me and my blogging activities to help me focus.
• Not having an editorial schedule – the success of any project relies on how regularly follow your activity loop. I always thought the things i should be writing will all just come to me. But unfortunately, since I’m not a natural writer, writing blog updates eventually became a chore. An editorial schedule, allows me to organize what I would like to write, when I should write it and when I should publish it.
• Not interacting with my readers – the best way to encourage visitors to keep coming back or even better, subscribe to my blog’s RSS feeds is to reach and interact with them. Visitors will notice if a blog is dead and will like not go back to it nor refer it to friends.
• Not doing keyword research and targeting about my topic – the web is bursting with different articles, blog posts and even status updates. With the search engines indexing hundreds if not thousands of new pages a day, it wouldn’t be a surprise if there are similar articles to my post. Not doing proper keyword research and targeting it properly means I have wasted my time since my articles would not rank well in my intended topics.
• Not reading my posts aloud – the best way to spot grammatical errors is to read your work aloud. Several times I just hit the publish post button just to get it over with. It was only when my wife read the post did I discover my unique way of mutilating the English language.
• Not doing any link building – incoming links are the primary way search engines gauge the importance of a web page/site. I tend to get lazy about link building since I feel that it’s too much work, but if I wanted to really start earning from my blog/s, I should do proper link building.
• Not pushing with it – in other words, quiting. It is hard to really swallow my pride but I do have to admit, I quited several times in blogging. So now I a fresh start and I am determined *not to quit*.

Wow. This is quite a list. Guess I should move along now.

Moving forward with blogging for passive income

So with my mistakes clearly identified, I’m looking into making the proper corrections and setting my blogging skills back on track. I know its going to be a challenge. But, I do have my emotional whys that will help me push forward with this. In my next blog post, I will be trying to outline some of the things I’d like to do in order to address my mistakes.

If you can say YES to all these questions, why are you reading this? Go write a book. Potential readers are waiting to be enlightened. You will probably make millions and be featured on the Oprah show.

If you can’t, then you are normal.

The bad news is, abiding inner peace is a rare phenomenon. Everybody I know has times of feeling frazzled, frightened, inadequate, frustrated, envious, vindictive, or just plain awful. Permanent peace is generally reserved for the dead. To be alive means to struggle, to grow, to have doubts, and to fail. We are hard-wired to explore and dominate our environment, and we tend to be unhappy when things don’t unfold the way we expected.

The good news is, no matter how little inner peace you feel, it is always possible to move in a positive direction. No matter how bad things get, there is always at least one thing you can do to improve your situation. Often it is a simple, physical thing, like washing the dishes or finishing that overdue report. The resulting sense of achievement will help to unblock the channels of creativity

There are probably 1001 ways of making your walk easier. Brainstorm as many as you can, as fast as you can, in writing. Pick one. Circle it on your list, add the date, and make a concerted effort to take action. Stick with it for 21 days, and observe the results. If it doesn’t help, discard it and start something else. If it made a positive difference, keep it and add another one whenever you feel up to making the additional effort. When you feel like brainstorming a new list, start with your active items and their start dates. There is no need to rush. If you manage two helpful changes in six months and keep up that pace, you will have twenty new behavior patterns in place five years from now

Here are a few to get you started.

1. Stop blaming – Even if you can pinpoint who or what is responsible for the unpleasant aspects of your life, that knowledge will not help you feel better. Your task is to take constructive action about what is going on here and now.
2. Choose your battles – If you fragment yourself trying to fix everything that is wrong with the universe, you will never finish anything.
3. Allow other people to own their own emotions – If your mother is unhappy because you choose not to spend next Christmas with her, that is her problem. She owns that emotion, and she is the one who has to deal with it. It is not your responsibility to manipulate her into feeling differently about the situation. Acknowledge the existence of her negative feelings without judging them, smile so she will know that you still love her, and move on..
4. Make self-care Job #1 – If you think that is selfish, consider this: if you burn out and become non-functional, other people will be inconvenienced by the task of looking after you.
5. Take time for yourself – Unstructured time when you can do what you feel like, as well as structured time for fun activities.
6. Laugh – Hang out with people who make you laugh. Silliness is not a sin – it’s therapeutic.
7. Seek balance – Balance work and rest, companionship and solitude, your needs and others’. Consider and honor your physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, particularly in relationships.
8. Learn to distinguish between needs and greeds – Never go into debt for something that is unnecessary.
9. Learn to listen to yourself – but listen to the good stuff. You can get negative stuff also from yourself.
10. Improve your spiritual connection – The answers you seek are often at a deeper level.

A lot of power and money has been acquired by people who claim to have the Ultimate Instant One-Step Solution to Inner Peace. Don’t go there. This is a life-long journey.

– Saleesh Kumar Subrahamanian