Personal Finance – Why You Need Momentum to Succeed With Your Personal Financial Plan
If you already have your simple personal cash flow plan and are working towards financial freedom, you might find that staying on track is the hardest part. I talk to people all the time who know what they need to do to achieve financial freedom or stay in good health, but the problem is almost always sticking it out for the long-term. In this article, we’ll be looking at how important momentum is when it comes to sticking with your commitment and how you can use it to stay focused and on track with your financial freedom plan.The Power of MomentumThe hardest part of your financial plan should never be staying committed; the hardest part should be getting started. The reason why people lose sight of their commitment is because they lose their momentum by making something called an exception. The motivational speaker Zig Ziglar said that exceptions are the most dangerous thing that we face in life because they get us off track. However, if you never make exceptions and stay consistent, you’ll build more and more momentum until it becomes all but impossible for you to give up or to lower your standards.Think about this, when the space shuttle leaves earth, it exerts more energy during its first few moments than it does for the entire trip to the moon and back. This is because once it gets moving, its momentum carries it, and as long as it doesn’t stop, that momentum carries it for the entire trip. However, imagine if it was making multiple stops along its way, how much more energy would it expend having to gather momentum and start moving again? It’s the same with your financial plan, if you stick with it EVERY day no matter what; it gets harder and harder to give up as the habits become solidified.However, once you start making exceptions like: “I can’t write in my spending journal today because I’m too busy,” or “I can’t take out my investing money this paycheck because of ____,” you start to lose traction and you have to work that much harder to get going again. Always remember this: A little bit which is applied consistently is MUCH better than a LOT which is applied inconsistently. In other words, it’s more important that you set aside a few bucks every day or write in your spending journal for 5 minutes every day than trying to knock it out in huge chunks whenever you “get around to it.”How to Maintain Your MomentumMaintaining your momentum in working your financial plan is all about having a set of daily habits to repeat on a consistent basis. In other words, set aside 15 minutes of “no matter what” time to work on your financial plan and write down your spending habits for the day. Set aside a certain percentage of money out of each paycheck for investing, and do not stray from it. Pretty soon these habits will become so commonplace; it’ll be hard for you to NOT do them.Be successful!
Signs of a Successful Small Business Owner
When starting a new business, there are numerous signs that can indicate whether you’re succeeding as an entrepreneur or aren’t. A small business can be risky. This is particularly true if you specialize in a niche that bigger companies already excel in. However, if you display some particular qualities, it’s a sign that you’re doing a good job to stay afloat.That’s because small business owner who have a positive attitude towards success are the most likely to get a taste of it than his counterparts. Their counterparts focus only on stability and nothing more. While business success has a lot to do with your initial idea and how you build upon that idea, it still depends on your personality and capabilities. Here are the few signs of a successful small business owner that you should develop as part of your personality.You Like To Form CollaborationsMost successful entrepreneurs display this common trait. They understand the importance of having a well-connected network in the business world. Nevertheless, just like in every other change, collaboration needs to start from within your business. This means you’ll need to start delegating tasks effectively. Another crucial part of this is building good relationships with everyone on your team. This includes your employees and suppliers.Of course, you also need to establish a position in the network of small businesses. It’s unwise to act alone without any partners. You needn’t form friendly relationships with your competitors. However, at the least, you should be on good terms with other small businesses that complement yours. By obtaining a position in the community of other businesses, you’ll be able to create new opportunities that can benefit others. Moreover, others can do the same for you. What results is a beneficial support system that allows all members to rely on one another.You Have Your Eyes Set on the FutureYou never know what the future holds, especially if it’s for something as volatile as a new startup business. That’s why successful entrepreneurs share a common characteristic of looking towards long-term future goals.Some struggle to stay afloat amidst a rocky economic climate, and such desperate conditions can lead to business owners not looking farther than the near future. Such thoughts are understandable, but think of it this way; acting upon well-structured long-term goals at the same time as day-to-day tasks can ensure far more than financial stability and simple peace of mind.Your Leverage the Benefit of TechnologyNowadays, when it comes to operating a small business, it all comes down to incorporating the use of technology, whether in marketing, management, or everything else. Technology and software have made it easier for entrepreneurs and small business owner to meet their goals, and now with services like Google AdWords and personal assistants, functions have become much more streamlined than ever before.Take websites, for instance, they’re a business’ online identity and that’s where most potential customers will go to check whether your brand is legitimate or not. Then comes social media, which is a useful marketing tactic that produces results without requiring you to spend too much of your ad revenue. Then there are other business-related applications like customer support live chat software, fixed responses for keywords and budgeting tools that boost your productivity so you can focus on product quality.You Love to LearnYou’re never ready to run a business until you’re prepared to improve yourself by learning from others. You may be determined to make it through with a method involving trial and error, but that costs precious resources; you need to start learning from others’ success and failures. Data is the most powerful weapon that a business can possess because it helps you discover trends and important details.If you aim to learn about what strategies lead to profitable ideas and which ones are just downright terrible, you’ll be able to devise a solution of your own. The best way to fulfill your curiosity is to read and look into insights regarding management, marketing, customer satisfaction, and product quality. Archives can provide you with numerous researches and surveys conducted by different companies. While it isn’t necessary that the results apply to your business, you’re still bound to learn something.You Don’t Just Think; You ActWhile we’re at it, we might as well establish that being a smart business owner doesn’t mean that you’ll never have to take risks; it’s merely the ability to take risks with confidence. One sign that your business will soon see the light of success is that you don’t just think, you also act when the time is right. This sign is associated with the confident ability to make good decisions, even if they’re risky.It’s true that before you put any plan into action, you need to examine it carefully all the way through. However, if you become stuck on the evaluating stage, you’ll miss your chance to implement your idea. That’s why you should have some faith in yourself and build confidence in your abilities to make a good decision.You Seek FulfillmentThere are many small businesses operating in the market, but very few businesses owner seek fulfillment. The rest of them, however, only look at it as a means to make ends meet. Success-oriented entrepreneurs always chase after their goal of doing something fulfilling for a living. Your ability to see value in everything you create is contributory to success because you’ll want to build upon ideas to increase that value.If you realize these traits in yourself, then congratulations; you have what it takes to turn your small business into a success! However, even if you don’t, do not fear! Owning a small business can change you as a person. But, it depends on you whether you take something positive from the experience. All these above-mentioned aspects will greatly improve not just the quality of business, but your life as well. If you can learn to find a hint of success-oriented personality within yourself, then you’ve hit the jackpot.
The Heart of Education is the Student’s Learning – The Library and the Librarian
The heart of education is the student’s learning. The responsibility of the librarian is to develop knowledge so that learning will become more lastingly significant, more permanently meaningful and more personally satisfying. Perhaps, much of what the students learn will wear out or become obsolete. But information skills learned in libraries will continue to be functional indefinitely or for as long as they are needed (Mangay, 2004).The school/college library is a vital partner in knowledge management and should share with the school/college their responsibility to systematically design, carry out, and evaluate the total process of learning and teaching (Herring, 1982). In which case, the library assumes the role of mediator between pupils/students and learning resources, and between teachers/lecturers and instructional resources. The library contributes to a meaningful, satisfying and challenging education, if directly involved (Mangay, 2004).The school/college library should be seen as an integral part of the school/college organization and not as an orphanage. Its development cannot be isolated from development in education because it is a part of the education system. The library is unique in that its users are part of its education, acquiring skills in the effective use of information to meet certain learning goals. The library is not merely a support to the curriculum but an active part of the curriculum.Education generally is moving from traditional class teaching of restricted subject/modules, towards more individual work, group learning, project work, research and making increasing use of non-book as well as book resources. The disappearance of streaming in the school curriculum plays a vital role in the search for methods or sources that will cope with the great variety in the learning capabilities of pupils/students.The traditional ‘chalk and talk’ approach of teacher/lecturer centred education has been modified. Teachers/lecturers now spend their time to introduce pupils/students to topics and explain concepts and methods in a lecturer-type situation. Pupils/students are required to learn for themselves and by themselves and where possible as their own pace. We continue to see the gradual growth of the use of the ‘newer media’ alongside the ‘older print’ medium (Mangay, 2004).School/college libraries offer a learning environment within which the pupil/student can learn and practice the techniques of enquiring and research. Their collections express anticipated requirements of all teaching units and special interests of the school/college, and in addition, pay particular attention to the personal cultural and recreational interests of young people themselves, so that reading and enquiring become natural habits of life.Libraries are now entering a new stage of development in the information age. New educational developments have strengthened the role and importance of school/librarians. They have the task of fulfilling the natural role of school/college libraries as a centre for learning and the exploitation of all available methods of communication. The library is a communication centre. Its commitment and concern for the encouragement of reading and enrichment of the individual’s imaginative and creative life remains undiminished (Taylor, 1980).It is the responsibility of the librarians to ensure that clientele develop the skill to find, use, evaluate and retrieve materials according to the clientele’s own felt need and purposes. He should provide reference and guidance services when the clientele’s skills are not adequate to the search problem at hand (Grass and Klentz, 1999). Librarians are often viewed as providers of resources, rather than co-teachers who share common goals. The librarian is an educator, custodian, organizer and disseminator of knowledge. The library therefore, enables the student to investigate context beyond curriculum.Effective library use will enhance library-consciousness of young people; transform non-users and enthusiastic students to become lifelong readers and learners. Library-consciousness will also change the opinion of students who think his/her purpose in the library is only to study lecture notes or charge mobile phones without the ability to make research for assignments, project-writing or other academic assessments. The library enables users to develop lifelong literacies. It helps to increase individual student efforts and attainment; creates a new look at the use of information, and it is a stimulus for the academic community (lecturers, staff, students, researchers).Finally, the library should be recognised and utilized by other professional colleagues in the learning enterprise (Lance and Loertsher, 2001). It brings professional clientele by the resources provided, thus facilitating richly-improved lecture notes fruitful to students’ learning, project writing, term papers, assignments and of course, examination. Better approach will be taken on modules taught and ‘notes-making’. This stimulates partnership between lecturers and the librarian. The work of the librarian is of high-quality and he/she makes valuable contribution to the academic community (Grass and Klentz, 1999).BIBLIOGRAPHYGrass, J. and Klentz, S. (1999). “Developing for authentic learning”. Teacher Librarian, 27(1), pp.22-25.Herring, J.E. (1988). School Librarianship. 2nd ed. London: Clive Bingley.Lance and Loertscher, D.V. (2001). Powering achievement: school library media-programs, make a difference – the evidences. Sam Josa, California: H. William. Research and Publishing.
Mangay, S. (2004). The need for provision for an effective school library system in Sierra Leone. (unpublished).Taylor, L.J. (1980). A librarian’s handbook: supplementary papers and documentation, containing new policy, statement, standards of service and memoranda of evidence, and a fully revised direction section. Vol.2. London : The Library Association.
Route Analytics and Netflow – Technology For Managing IP Network Unpredictability
Today, businesses increasingly rely on applications to deliver top and bottom line results from greater business process automation, and individuals consume vast and growing amounts of IP-based media. As a result, enterprises and service providers are building larger and more redundant networks to ensure traffic delivery. Unfortunately, the resulting network complexity is causing them to hit the limits of traditional network management technology. The reason: IP is not inherently predictable.Why Aren’t IP Networks Predictable?IP’s distributed routing intelligence makes it efficient and at the same time unpredictable. IP routing protocols automatically calculate and manage traffic routes or paths between points in the network based on the latest known state of network elements. Any changes to those elements cause the routing topology to be recalculated dynamically. While this keeps IP networks highly resilient in case of network failures, it also creates endless variability in the active routing topology. A large network can be in any one of millions of possible active routing topology states. In addition, application traffic patterns are by nature unpredictable. Network problems – router software bugs, misconfigurations, hardware that fails (often after exhibiting intermittent instability) – can add to that unpredictability.The Challenge of Managing Complex IP NetworksWith routing and traffic changing dynamically over time, it is a real network management challenge to ensure predictably high application performance. Take troubleshooting for example: when an end user reports an application performance problem that doesn’t stem from an obvious hardware failure, the root cause of the problem can be quite difficult to figure out in a large, redundant network. IT engineers don’t know the route the traffic took through the network, the relevant links servicing the traffic, or whether those links were congested at the time of the problem. Even determining which devices serviced the traffic at the time of the problem in a complex network can be nearly impossible.Traditional Network Management Only Goes to a PointThe overarching architectural principle of traditional network management is to gather information on a vast number of different “points” in the network, then correlate various point data to infer clues about service conditions. They key mechanism for doing this is the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), which gathers information from point devices such as routers, switches, servers and their interfaces.Clearly, “point data” is useful – for example, an interface or device that fails, runs out of memory, or is congested with traffic is important to know about. However, the sum of all this point data is much less than the whole picture. Just knowing that an interface is full of traffic doesn’t tell you why it is full. Where is the traffic coming from and going to? Is the traffic usually on this interface, or was there a change in the network or elsewhere that caused it to shift to this interface? If so, from where, when, and for how long? Without answers to these questions, there is no real understanding of the behavior of the network as a whole, which robs the point data of much of its contextual meaning. This lack of visibility not only impacts operations processes like troubleshooting, but also engineering and planning. For example, without understand network-wide dynamics, change management and planning can be fraught with errors that stem from not knowing how changing a particular device will impact the entire network’s routing and traffic.Route Analytics with Netflow-Visibility into Network-Wide Routing and Traffic DynamicsLuckily, there’s a way to peer into the dynamic behavior of IP routing and traffic flows using a combination of route analytics and Netflow technologies. Route analytics provides precise understanding of network-wide routing by passively peering with selected routers via routing protocols such as OSPF, IS-IS, EIGRP and BGP to receive all available routing information, then computing an always-up-to-date, network-wide map of all routers, links, advertised and withdrawn network addresses, and traffic paths. Every time the network changes in a way that impacts routing, the routing protocols provide real-time updates which keep route analytics completely accurate. Since route analytics understands all paths, it can very efficiently provide network-wide traffic information on all links by collecting Netflow data at key traffic sources such as data centers and Internet peerings, then map traffic flows over their actual pathsThe Benefits of Route AnalyticsRoute analytics provides a new and far more useful picture of network and service behavior that helps network managers ensure that their networks are adequately engineered to deliver a complex, changing matrix of application traffic at various service levels. For example, engineers can use route analytics to model a change of high priority traffic caused by the anticipated rollout of a new application. The simulated new traffic will be overlaid not on some abstract model, but on the traffic and routing matrix as it actually exists in the network. Depending on what it shows, engineers can catch potential impacts before moving ahead, or proceed with confidence in the rollout, knowing that the network will continue to support existing application requirements.Troubleshooting also gets much faster, since engineers can see the route/path that a particular application traffic flow traveled across the network at the time a problem occurred, then analyze all links to see if key applications or CoS were breaching their volume thresholds. If there was congestion, further analysis can show whether a routing issue caused traffic to shift, or, if additional, unexpected traffic was present, where it originated, its destination and the route that included the problem link. Even if a routing or traffic problem isn’t the root cause, knowing the precise path provides the most accurate possible starting point for examining devices and interfaces involved in servicing application traffic.