Personal Development

Book Review: Delivering Happiness

December 17, 2010 By Vu Van 1 Comment

For December 2010, I picked up the book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh.

These past months have been super busy and I have been too busy to keep up with my postings on a regular basis. I was living in Indianapolis for a marketing rotation and as it was coming to a close, I had to prepare my trip back home. I read this book while waiting at the airport to catch my flight and spent the majority of the flight reading and finishing this book.

I really liked this book and could relate to the many stories that Tony shared during his youth. He shares his entrepreneurial youth and what got me was that we both read "Boys Life" magazine and did the same thing with the classifieds section. The lessons he taught during his childhood explains the path and lessons he had gained along the way to get him where he is today.

One of the main reasons why I selected this book was the back page of the book which listed the top 10 reasons why you should read this book and I think of all the reasons, I think #9 was explained the best of all in this book:

9: You want to learn about the path I took that eventually led me to Zappos, and the lessons I learned along the way.

When I read, I usually mark my book up best with underlines and stars as well as page folds to bring me back to that page to record the most impactful lessons for that book. In this book the most impactful pages for me was on pages 143 and 144.

There's a lot of buzz these days about "social media" and "integration marketing." As unsexy and low tech as it may sound, our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer's undivided attention for five to ten minutes, and if you get the interaction right, what we've found is that the customer remembers the experience for a very long time and tells his or her friends about it.

I feel that it is business practices such as these is the reason why Zappos is so successful. To get an inside glimpse at a great company and the person who built it, I highly recommend you get a copy yourself. I will be giving away my copy in January by selecting a random subscriber via Twitter or email rss subscriber. Follow or subscribe today and I just might contact you and send you my books that I read. FREE. To learn more about getting the books/audiobooks I read for free: MORE INFORMATION

To pick up a copy at Amazon.com: Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

Filed Under: Books, Personal Development, Reviews Tagged With: book review, delivering happiness, tony hsieh, zappos

Personal Growth: Do You Invest in Yourself?

December 11, 2010 By Vu Van 2 Comments

What does personal growth mean to you? The key word to focus on is the word personal and should be based upon the individual's interests and goals for their own growth. There are many different ways a person could invest in themself for personal growth, but make sure you know what it is that motivates you before spending money on products, classes and programs.

Many people spend their free time by entertaining themselves to fill in mind numbing activities such as watching t.v., playing video games or just doing nothing. Now these activities are not bad, but if all you do is play video games all day and not balance your life with personal growth as the years pass, you will have accomplished little but spend countless hours of entertaining yourself. I am not saying/telling everyone to stop playing video games, but to have balance in your life and to invest in your own personal growth.

One of my focused areas of development is in marketing and for me to gain knowledge in this area, I seek out programs that offer seminars and classes. I am currently registered for a seminar that will provide me with an official certificate so I can add it to my resume.

Now these developmental activities come at a cost, but when you think about it, it is an investment in yourself and your personal self interest. Invest in yourself and grow with your personal interests as the deciding factor. In my past experiences, I have never regretted spending money on myself to develop myself. Do a search and find some classess, certificate programs, continuing education classes or community classes to learn what you have always wanted to know or pick up a new skill. Below is a link for searching for local classes in your area or classes online.

Filed Under: Personal Development, Personal Innovation Tagged With: do you invest in yourself vu, http://www.vuvan.com/personal-growth-do-you-invest-in-yourself/395, invest in yourself now, personal growth

Make a Things I won’t Do List

September 3, 2010 By Vu Van

Do you have a "To-Do" list that you work on each day? Having a to-do list is a great way to keep our important tasks organized to ensure that we compete them. As we go through life and develop ourselves, we eliminate bad habits as well as learn new lessons from life experiences. Making a "won't do list" is another tactic you can use to keep track of these bad habits that you have eliminated as well as serve as a personal development diary of sorts to remind you of what not to do anymore.

A perfect example I can give you is if you have the habit of forgetting important dates for family members such as birthdays, anniversaries, etc. and you do not want to keep repeating this bad habit, put this on your won't do list. It serves as a goal sheet to keep you in line of making sure you don't repeat the bad habits or tendencies that gets you in trouble or something you wish to eliminate from your life.

You can simply add this on your smart phone by using the "notes" and keep a living won't do list that has new additions as you see fit. We complete things on our to do list all the time, but if we keep repeating bad habits in our lives, we need a way to track them and work on eliminating them.

Filed Under: Goals, Personal Development, Personal Innovation, Self Discipline Tagged With: do not do list, won't do list

Driving Home After Work: What do you think about?

August 31, 2010 By Vu Van

You finished a long day at work and begin your commute towards home and in between thoughts go through your mind about the day. What do you think about? Do you think about what you didn't accomplish for that day or do you think about the things that accomplished?

Every professional has tasks and duties that must be performed on a daily work day basis and believe it or not, things actually get done through the course of a day. Even if you are working towards a project to completion, things are progressing towards being done. If you find yourself constantly thinking about what you didn't accomplish for the day, you missed out on the celebration of what you have accomplished.

The negative thoughts that could cause stress, anxiety and worry is not a good way to end your day and it could carry forward to the next and create an ongoing cycle of dissatisfaction and burnout. How about innovating the way you think at the end of your day, during your commute home?

If you have set specific daily goals for yourself and plan out your day with efficiency, then whatever you have done for the day has already passed and all the worry in the world will not change anything other than create more stress for yourself. If you constantly run over things that you have to do during your drive home, then maybe it is time for you to change the way to set reminders or tasks for yourself and come up with a system that will give you a checklist of things to accomplish. What I do is use my smart phone to add tasks as soon as it comes up. This way, I know that I have my commitments in order and a quick look at my to-do list will give me the necessary information I need to know what I need to accomplish. This will save you a lot of headaches and not run the risk of not fulfilling commitments you give to people. If you do not have a working calendar that schedules your appointments, and you try to get by just by memory alone, then you run the risk of missing important meetings and deadlines.

Schedule important things that you need to do as well as the unimportant things that needs to get done. Find new ways to be productive and not wasting time thinking about what needs to be done over and over again.

Celebrate each day. Give yourself some recognition for what went well, enjoy the feeling of accomplishing good work and rethink of the things that went well throughout the day. Success breeds more success and by giving it the respect it deserves you can improve upon the past successes you have already done. Dwelling on the negative parts of the day, will do nothing but give you wrinkles and a bad attitude. Try thinking positive and remember the good work you put in, try it with a smile and drive home feeling accomplished versus worried or stressed. You will begin to feel energized for the next day and begin recognizing that you do produce good work. Celebrate it.

Filed Under: Business, Career, Personal Development, Personal Innovation, Personal Productivity Tagged With: cache:j12lo0d9ndej:www.vuvan.com/how-to-wake-up-feeling-energized-positive-after-a-holiday-weekend/210 had a great weekend back to work, started driving home after work, success, the thoughts afterwork, think postive thoughts after work

Self-Confidence Series: How to be more Confident

August 30, 2010 By Vu Van

Coming from a person who grew up with low self confidence, I have grown into a person that learned how to be confident and will share with you what I learned along the way in a series of posts, self-confidence series. I think this topic takes much more than one post to cover all the bases, so I hope you enjoy what I have to share with you as I reveal my phases of gaining self confidence in myself and my abilities and how you could apply this to your life to be more confident.

MY STORY

Growing up, I was the oldest of five kids and being the oldest usually comes with making lots of mistakes. My family was a first generation Vietnamese family that came to the United States so I grew up with a very small family and didn't have the vast network of older family members to guide me. I learned everything on my own and made lots of mistakes. I am also a very independent person so I tend to listen to myself when it comes to direction, and sometimes this could lead to some bad decisions. My mother and father were usually off working to support me and my brothers, so I was left alone many times to learn things on my own. My mother had me at a young age and because I was her first, didn't have the experience in raising a son so I was the blueprint for the other siblings that came after me.

I grew up with such a bad self confidence problem and to top that off, I had a very bad stuttering problem that made it even worse. I was also different in social situations because I was usually the only asian kid in my class, neighborhood, and this continued on as I went off to the Air Force and professional career. Now one of the main factors that caused me to have self confidence was the fact that I made many mistakes as I was growing up, yet making these mistakes is the main reason for my self discovery and foundation of my self confidence that I have today.

When I made mistakes and wrong choices, I would hear comments from others usually telling me things such as, I will never do well in school, I would never be able to anything well and so on and so forth. The problem that I have found was that I began listening to these people's comments and I would have the small talk in my mind before doing anything. I honestly didn't think I would ever be able to complete college, be good at public speaking, socialize with people and the list goes on. The interesting thing now is that, I graduated top of my class with Magna Cum Laude distinction, can give a public speech without any problems and can socialize with people in any situation. My chosen profession is is sales where I have to approach people I don't know, build a relationship and sell them products. You would never guess a person with low self confidence would ever be able to do this as their career, but I have done it successfully year over year.

So how did a stuttering asian kid, with a severe self confidence problem, break out of his shell and overcame the "small negative talk" within my own mind to come out the other side the total opposite of what many have thought I would turn out as well as myself? Well, it did take years of proving to myself that I am capable and to not listen to the negativity that others give, and learn from my own experiences and proved to myself that I am capable of anything.

NEGATIVE THOUGHTS & ENERGY

We all have a degree of negative thoughts that crosses our mind when we set out to do something, what I have learned is that I have to control this negativity that held me back from going for what I want. I also learned that I don't have to believe what others say about me, and choose to listen to myself as well as the positive feedback I get from others versus only listening to the negative comments. I have developed myself now to where negative thoughts do cross my mind, but my positive thoughts overpower them. What I do in situations where I catch myself over-thinking a situation and only focusing on the possible negative reactions of outcomes, I realize that I am ignoring looking at the opportunities to shine and do well. For example, lets say I have a speech I have to give in front of 100 people, and public speaking is a very scary activity and I believe it is one of the most feared things any human could possibly do. My old low self confidence side will start making a movie in my mind of all the possible mistakes I could make, I start to doubt myself and think "what if my stuttering comes back", or I say the wrong things, forget my speech and so on and so forth. Versus, thinking about how much I have prepared for this speech and that I have something important to say and no matter what happens, I will give it my best! If I only focus on what might go wrong, my positive energy is drained and filled with negativity. Confidence comes from controlling what your thoughts in your mind and to change the channel from negativity to positive thoughts. This doesn't mean that I am mistake free anymore, but I don't let mistakes stop me from giving it my all because the way I look at mistakes are lessons to make myself a stronger person.

BE BRAVE

Even though I had negative thoughts in my mind, I had the determination to go forth head on to tackle my challenges. I would meet my fears head on and in doing so, I learned over time that I am capable of doing anything. Now my first time doing something, I must admit I sucked, but as time progressed and I learned, improved and took the mistakes along the way to correct, I was able to build confidence in areas that I had problems with. A great example I have was my first attempt at public speaking. This is quite embarrassing, I was in front of my peers and over 300 people and as I was standing in front of everyone, I probably experienced the worse experience any person who fears public speaking could possibly do. I FROZE... my neck tensed, I could hear myself breathing, my palms got sweaty and I simply FROZE....the only words that came out of my mouth was... "I cannot do this" as I walked off the stage and walked my walk of shame. Did I give up? Heck no, I mean I just witnessed the worst I could possibly experience, yet I am o.k. I took that experience and learned from it and started learning how to give public speeches, read about how to be a great speaker, talked to others that I have witnessed give a good speech and ask them what they do. Most of the greatest speakers I have heard all tell me that they also had a huge fear of speaking and made numerous mistakes along the way. I learned that I had to practice, practice and practice. I also volunteered to give talks whenever I could. I learned to accept my breathing and hearing my own voice, it didn't bother me anymore and as time progressed, I receive comments from people telling me that they wished that they were as confident as me when they give a speech, and in my mind I simply say, "if only they knew", but I give them words of encouragement because I thought the same thing before. It takes the guts to be brave enough to make mistakes and to learn. Be brave enough to not listen to the negative thoughts and to focus on what you are doing and the positive side of things. If you are not brave, you will be in the same situation you have always been in. Life is exciting when you are able to push yourself to learn and progress. Do I still get nervous before giving a speech, somewhat but I am filled more with positive thoughts and being through about over 100 public speeches after that first horrible, one, I can say I can give a speech in front of any sized crowd.

POSITIVE THINKING

The psychology of self confidence has to do with positive thinking and to strengthen the positive thoughts you have, you must be brave enough to give yourself successful experiences to pull from. Yes, you will make mistakes along the way, but be positive about making them and learn. If you focus on the negativity, then that is what you usually get. Condition yourself to be used to awkward situations and prove to yourself that you can do anything better each time. As time passes you will progress into a person with much higher confidence that cannot be shaken because you have the solid positive learning experiences that shaped your confidence and your foundation. Don't let fear hold you back for what you want, listen to your spirit and heart and go forth. You WILL MAKE MISTAKES, accept that and choose to learn from them versus beating yourself up. Also, if people only give you negative comments that is not constructive, avoid these toxic energy sucking vampires and listen to the people who support you and give you comments that helps make you better. It is easy for anyone say, "you suck" but it takes you to decide if you want to believe them. Be brave, learn and grow.

NEXT PART OF THE CONFIDENCE SERIES: LEARN HOW TO TALK TO ANYONE.

Filed Under: Confidence, how to be more confident, People Skills, Personal Development, Personal Innovation, Public Speaking, Series Tagged With: an experience that made me more confident in myself, confidence learned, how can i be confident in my class, how to be confident and myself in public, how to be self confident, how to make myself self confident and positive and brave, my mind is overpowering me with negativity,, public speech on confidence, success, win, www.vuvan.com

Have you Visited your Library Lately?

August 25, 2010 By Vu Van

When was the last time you visited your local library? I used to visit the library and learn everything I wanted to know, but haven't been inside of one for the past 10 years. I guess it is much easier to google for information or visit the local bookstore and have never thought about the resources that I pay for by way of taxes. Today I rediscovered the joy of the local public library and was amazed at how much things have changed.

Things have changed to where I had to keep asking everyone for help, all the way to how to check out the books. My local public library is very clean with many of the new books you see recently published. The media selection was amazing and the technology to search and check out made things simple and met my need for finding information. I am again a fan of the public library.

I think I got lazy due to the access to information provided by the internet and blogs, but what I have realized is that I only get only a brief on information and most blogs only provide a quick post on a given subject. If you are in need to researching a topic, try visiting your library and checking out books and dvds on your subject versus just trying to find it on the web. I also have the habit of visiting my local big box bookstore and pick up a book and have forgotten about checking books out for free at the public library. I was like a kid in a candy store, because I love to read and when I go into a bookstore, I have to limit my purchases. Now, I can satisfy my thirst for knowledge and research and check out up to 30 items at a time. This is a great way to live frugally and save money since I won't have to buy the book out of my own pocket.

I also get much better research information versus trying to find it on the web, since most web sites try to sell you something and most information is just a crafty sales letter, rather than a book that is loaded with information. I suggest you visit your local public library, you pay for it, might as well use it. You might be amazed at the changes and it could save you some money and serve as a resource for your research needs or just a source to provide you with your recreational reading. Now all that is missing is a coffee shop and it is perfect!

I work on the road, and usually go to a coffee shop to do work during lunch and connect with the 1 hour "free" wifi provided if you order the $5.00 cup of coffee. Now, I will search for the nearest public library since most provide FREE WIFI, without the minimum purchase of a coffee and provide me with a quiet environment with nice chairs and tables to be productive. Rediscover the public library and be prepared to be amazed!

Filed Under: Books, Life, Money, Personal Innovation, Research/Survey, Wealth & Money Tagged With: cache:j12lo0d9ndej:www.vuvan.com/how-to-wake-up-feeling-energized-positive-after-a-holiday-weekend/210 how to wake up energized, internet, knowledge, visit your local public library