motivational

This website is about motivational talk, and also contains resources about motivational speeches , motivational factors , and motivational dvd .

Title : The Richest Man in Babylon
Author : George S. Clason
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : the Richest Man in Babylon

To all of you out there who dread the drop of the bills on your doormat when you go home, read this and your life will be transformed. We live in a buy now and pay later society and this particular little habit is catching up on us all. This little book, though written in old English, is fun and easy to read. It's principles can be hard to apply but worth every bit of effort involved. This is your key to financial abundance. In the Secret all the Masters told of setting up a debt repayment plan and then getting on with life and watch the miracles start to happen. This little book tells you about finances and how to tackle them. Put this advice into practice and then watch your own miracles start to happen. I know, I am advising spending money on a book but sometimes you really do have to spend in order to save. This book really makes sense.

Title : Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Author : Robert Cialdini
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Priceless

I have been entertaining my friends at dinner parties with this book. Cialdini, who admits to being a bit of a sucker himself, shows all the ways we've been manipulated over the years by small gestures and situations contrived by salesmen.

There are so many good stories. The one about Joe Girard, a car salesman who sends out each month 13,000 cards every month to former customers with a card saying, "I like you". Surely people wouldn't fall for that? Yes they do, he made more than $200,000 a year selling cars. He's in the Guinness Book of Records.

There's the story of how the Chinese got the American prisoners in the Korean War to betray their country by setting them essay questions. There's accounts of the trouble we can get into when we insist on being consistent or make a vague commitment to supporting a cause.

Cialdini exposes loads of sales techniques and has some fascinating insights into what motivates us.

As a self-employed person I'm really grateful for this knowledge. This is a book that everyone should read.

Title : Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace, and More
Author : Joe Vitale
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Really good book!

I agree with the person that says that this book content "fat", things could be omited, but leaving all these things out, the book is great. His conversations with Dr. Len are very valuable information from first hand. I cannot avoid remember the book "a course of miracles" and see how many things are in common. Or remembering about how schamans say that we live in a world surrounded by corpses because we do not think that anything is alive. how we create our own reality and how we can change it, without anybody else, just been 100% responsable of everything that is in our lifes. This book goes beyond the secret, beyond the law of attraction. It is goes to the core of the self. I would recomended this book with my eyes close.

Title : Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-free Play
Author : Neil A. Fiore
Rating : 4 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Informative and practical

I gained a great deal of insight from this book. It helped me to see that I'm putting my life on hold through being a perfectionist. And it has given me lots of help in finding a way forward. A new 'me' is emerging as a result. Well worth a read.

Title : Sink Reflections
Author : Marla Cilley
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Excellent!

Great book, I was actually looking for something else entirely when I came across this book and so glad I did.

My house has always looked like a bomb had hit it I have a had a running battle with it every day, even when I was a stay at home mum I could never sort it out. This book is the 'lightbulb' moment and I'm really gradually getting it all sorted and so painlessly and dare I say actually fun...if you don't get inspiration from this book then you probably are not yet ready to declutter your life, I talked to my sister about it and she hasn't yet been able to see how it can help her, still very negative 'I don't have the time@ blah blah; I go to work full time and have 2 kids at home, she is on her own and not at work, she has even comented on how tidy, clean, lovely my kitchen is all the time and can't imagine how I manage it, I tell her that once I have washed up after tea (she has a dishwasher, while I wash by hand) it takes me 15 mins to wipe the sides, sweep the floor and shine my sink then I spend the rest of the evening watching tv or reading; she doesn't belive me but it's true.

My bedroom is becomming the haven I always wanted it to be, no piles of clothes that need to be ironed and/or put away, bed is made every morning and I no longer have sneezing fits every time I go in there due to overload of dust! I now spend time in my room relaxing while the kids watch tv or play music downstairs. All I can say is if you are ready to really sort out your home, open your mind and read this book. I have been on the website too and it's great.

Title : Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Author : Robert Cialdini
Rating : 4 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Excellent content somewhat marred by impractical conclusions

3rd edition/publication (2007), Collins Business Essentials, 320 pages (of which 280 pages for actual book)

Influence is another of the twenty books Charlie Munger recommends in the second edition of Poor Charlie's Almanack. Its content is excellent (and sometimes even hair-raisingly remarkable - as when he shows that media reporting of suicides actually causes more of them via the social proof bias) but I think Cialdini could have done a much better job of turning the research evidence into useful/practical advice. (The same problem manifests itself in Gilbert's book `Stumbling on Happiness' - though Cialdini's is the better book.)

I was discussing this book with a friend who had also read it and I thought he put it very well: Cialdini is one of those clever people who is not very wise. That is also why Poor Charlie's Almanack is so good and unusual: Munger is both clever and has deliberately attempted to distil a lifetime's worth of reading over a broad subject matter area into practical advice on how to live a successful/useful life.

In particular, Cialdini shows us clearly that a significant number of our psychological biases work completely unconsciously. (By that I mean it can be demonstrated that a certain bias has affected a group of individual's actions/conclusions whilst they strenuously deny they have paid any attention to or are even totally unaware of the biasing factor.) For example, Cialdini quotes one study where "men who saw a new-car ad that included a seductive young woman model rated the car as faster, more appealing, more expensive-looking, and better designed than did men who saw the same ad without the model. Yet when asked later, the men refused to believe that the presence of the young woman had influenced their judgements."

He then goes on to suggest various complicated ways to try to monitor ourselves to see if we are being affected by some of these biases - in order that we can attempt to limit the damage from faulty decisions (often in situations deliberately set up to cause our faulty decisions to be detrimental to us and advantageous to some other). For example, he highlights the "extreme caution" needed in auction situations where one encounters the "devilish construction of scarcity plus rivalry" - and suggests that we watch ourselves for signs of arousal so that we can stop short.

Well, I think Munger and his partner Warren Buffett have a much more practical and simpler way of dealing with that problem, based on the wisdom of the rustic that Munger likes to quote: "all I want to know is where I'm going to die so can avoid going there." The whole thrust of Cialdini's book is that these biases are often unconscious and are in any case often very strong (and usually much stronger that we believe/expect) - which is another way of saying you're unlikely to have good results fighting against them.

Much better to simply bypass the problem where possible and do as Buffett does and refuse to get involved in auction situations. Using rules like this, to paraphrase Munger on a different subject (tax shelters): if you always avoid auction situations you might miss out on the odd good deal, but overall your life is likely to be better.

This is also why I consider Taleb (Fooled by Randomness) to be much wiser than Cialdini: he understands that being aware of biases doesn't make them go away. You need tricks and methods to live successfully with them.

I also think the advice in Cialdini's epilogue is very poor. He suggests that we rise up to fight people/organisations who misuse our psychological biases for their own ends: "In short, we should be willing to use boycott, threat, confrontation, censure, tirade, nearly anything, to retaliate."

This is crazy advice: the effort and time required to do it would leave little for anything else and would also guarantee a miserable life focussed on negativity. It also shows Cialdini's lack of familiarity with good training principles (an excellent book on the subject is Karen Pryor's `Don't Shoot The Dog'). Plenty of research now shows that positive reinforcement (rewarding behaviour you like) is at least as effective as negative reinforcement and much more so than punishment. It also has the huge benefit of leading to a much more pleasant life.

However, even with those caveats (essentially that you have to do your own thinking about how to cope with the biases that Cialdini does an excellent job of laying out) it is still a very useful book.

Title : The Richest Man in Babylon
Author : George S. Clason
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Simple and effective

I've been hopeless with money since I first laid hands on it. I was in debt up to my eyeballs and spending whatever I earned and more. But with the simple concepts in this book, I am paying off my debt steadily and actually have savings for the first time in my life.

I highly recommend this easy/quick read as a life changer.