Should I Avoid Negative People?

As you may have already known, staying positive is one of key attitude we all should have to keep us motivated all the time. Whether you’re a business man, self-employed or an employee, staying positive is the only attitude that can make you happy and performing in your job. So now, you heard othe brilliant idea to stay positive is to “Avoid Negative People” around you. Yes it is a very famous phrase used by a lot of motivators out there:

“To Stay Positive, Avoid Negative People”.

Those negative people are most likely affect your attitude and influence you to become negative as well. On the other hand, the positive people influence you to become a positive thinking people. Yes, it is making sense but I’m going to challenge it.

Ok, do you see something is wrong here? Let’s me give you a scenario. If your wife is a negative people, are you going to avoid her? If your sons and daughters are negative people, are you going to avoid them? If your best friends are negative people, are you going to avoid them? No, you don’t want to avoid them, do you? Instead you want to get close to them to help them, don’t you think so?

So I come out a conclusion that the “phrase” is correct but need a little of modifications. Here you go:

“To Stay Positive, Avoid Negative People if you’re follower”.

You don’t avoid negative people if you’re a leader. You transform them and help them to become a positive person. Leader doesn’t focus on avoiding negative people to make them a positive thinker but only follower does. If you’re follower, which means you can’t control who you want to be (become negative when mix with negative people and vice-versa), you avoid negative people probably is a good thing to do.

So my next question to you, do you want to be leader or follower?

2006 & 2007 Greatest Accomplishment

Let’s see what I did well in the past and screwed up in the past as well:

What I Did Well

• I successfully ran out of my comfort zone and joined a new company. I learned a lot of things out of it. My learning curve shoots up exponentially. Most importantly, what I learned build up my competent area in my expertise.

• I successfully maintained my yearly income raise at 7% rate or higher in order for me to achieve financial freedom at 40. So far, this holds true in these 7 years of my working experience.

• I managed to move my parents out of their comfort zone too. They are staying in East Malaysia and I’m in the West Malaysia. I meet them once a year (sometimes more than that) and this is not a solution in long term. They have sold their house eventually and officially will move to West Malaysia in May 2008. They are going to stay at this house.

• I managed to start 2 blogs(i.e. software blog and financial blog) to generate income out of it. I set a very minimum goal to get a Google’s check by end of this year and I finally able to do it by 2007. This is also one of my second incomes. Although the earning is not as many as I wish, it is a good start and able to cover the cost I registered a domain which I don't use. :D Most importantly, I use blogging to help me to manage my thoughts and goals. I can also share what I learn to all of you.

What I Screwed Up

• I failed to survive in a new company. Perhaps I stay in the comfort zone for too long. Although I learned a lot of things in this new company and I realized that I cannot perform as good as in my ex-company for several reasons. When I know I can’t perform as what I expected, it translates to my next focal review which will not meet my 7% target. I rejoined my ex-company in different department with the second time of salary raise to maintain the 7% rate.

• I failed to start a business. I was once together with my wife and few colleagues planned to start a “comic bookstore” business. We did a lot of researches and we financially did not go for it. Starting a business is not as easy as I thought. It is not only time consuming but it requires a huge amount of capital. Maintaining a good relationship with your business partners is also another problem and needs to be managed well. For this experience, I realized that I don’t born naturally with business (not sure about internet business yet) and I don’t do well in sales too.

• I discontinued my second income on giving 1-on-1 tuition service. I stopped doing this because I wanted to put more focus on the new job which I failed eventually also. However, what I did is conflict with my personal financial goal which is to build my second income. Then, why I want to stop? I shouldn’t have discontinued my second income.

• I failed to exercise at least once in a week. I think in average I exercise once to twice a month. My target is once in a week only. Although I understand the importance of health, but I ignore it like the rest of you. This is my bad. Perhaps I should remind myself often that we need health to build wealth.

• I failed to track my financial status monthly. 2 years ago my wife took an initiative to track our finance daily. So, I told her tracking it daily is very hard. Sooner or later you’re going to stop doing it. Guess what, I’m right. Few months later she gave up and I took over her job. I have a brilliant idea to track it monthly instead by monitoring our bank account expenses. I have been doing this successfully until the last September 2007 I stopped updating it monthly until today. Reason is "Lazy" and "Busy" - a very popular reasons. Perhaps I should just change it to yearly instead of monthly or I can set a check point at every six months.

This is what I did well and screwed up in past 2 years. I hope I’m not a loser because I have 5 items in my screwed-up list as compared to 4 items in my success list. The screwed-up list will be used to help me to define my 2008 and 2009 goals.

Time flies! Whatever, I'm here to wish you HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008!