7 Life-Changing Skills You Can Learn Even If You’re Broke

Skills are the gateway to a better quality career and life.

The problem is, money is tight for most of us after covering rent/mortgage, car payments, and just maintaining our quality of life. But don’t worry, there are many ways for you to acquire new skills without breaking the bank.

Here are seven life-changing skills you can learn even if you’re broke (and where to learn them).

1. Public speaking

When Warren Buffett was asked to give one piece of advice to recent graduates, he said that improving your ability to communicate and speak publicly is one of the most valuable skill sets you can develop.

Most of us don’t have regular opportunities to improve our speaking skills, but there are cheap options you can take advantage of to start practicing immediately.

Where to go: The International Toastmasters organization puts you in a tight-knit community of supportive people with the same goal as you: to improve public speaking skills. Having been a Toastmaster member myself, it’s one of the most affordable ways to get consistent feedback and practice around a great group of people.

2. Personal finance

As basic as it seems, getting your personal finances down is something many people haven’t yet handled. It’s one thing to remember that you should spend less than you make, it’s another to know the details of how much you should be saving, where you should be allocating your funds, etc.

Where to go: A great book that will teach you how to automate your personal finance is I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi, and as scammy as it sounds, it delivers real value. A free app worth checking out is Mint.com, which automatically integrates your bank accounts and analyzes your spending, budgeting, and income for you in a visual and easy-to-understand application.

3. Investing

Once you have your personal finances in order, it’s time to start investing. None of us can get the wealth we want without investing our way there. If you’re not 100% sure which avenue you should pursue (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc.), it’s worth investing some of your time to learn about it before you get into the game.

Where to go: Check out a tool like Investopedia, which has an abundance of resources to teach you the terminology of investing, and even have a virtual stock market platform that allows you to invest “fake” money into the stock market. Wealthfront is another great option to go to, which automates your investments for you depending on your goals, risk-tolerance, etc.

4. Foreign language

We’re quickly entering a multilingual era, where everything from culture, business, and people are integrating globally. Whether you’re looking to advance your career, form a deeper connection with your family & friends, or looking to travel in the near future, learning a foreign language is a life-changer.

Where to go: The good news is, learning a language has never been easier. Take advantage of free options like this Learn A Language Challenge, delivering 10 new most common words in your inbox every morning. Or if you’re busy, like most people, you can check out Duolingo, which is a gamified application, or Rype, which offers unlimited private language lessons 24/7.

5. Web/Mobile development

Have a great idea, but no idea how to build it?

Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars on developers or agencies, why not take the time to learn it yourself? Learning how to code has never been more accessible and affordable, and luckily it’s also in huge demand.

Where to go: Check out free options like Codeacademy, which has you building real applications and websites on their platform, while giving you real-time feedback.

6. Speed reading

Books are a game-changer in our lives and careers. They condense the knowledge of experts and thought leaders into one place, and can significantly improve the quality of our lives. The problem is, books can consume a lot of time, especially if we’re busy with our work and personal lives.

One way to overcome this is to increase our reading speed. The faster you read, the more books you can read in less time.

Where to go: First, you should take this quick reading speed test to see where you’re currently at. With speed reading, you can either go the technology route, with apps like Spreeder, or you can try to improve your own reading speed through free courses.

7. Meditating

Meditating has been scientifically proven to increase happiness levels, reduce stress, and enhance productivity to get more done throughout the day. While it was once an uncommon practice, meditation is becoming more mainstream in our culture–for the better.

Where to go: There are free (with premium options) apps like Calm orHeadspace, which will guide you through a meditation practice if you’re just getting started. All you need is 10 minutes a day, and you’ll quickly begin to build a habit that will positively impact your life.

Which of these life-changing skills were your favorite? Share this with someone that’s also trying to learn something new!

How To Remember 90% Of Everything You Learn

Wish you could learn faster?

Whether you’re learning Spanish, a new instrument, or a new sport, we could all benefit from accelerated learning. But the problem is, there’s only so much time in the day.

The key to accelerated learning is not just putting in more hours, but maximizing the effectiveness of the time spent learning.

The Bucket And Water Analogy

Let’s say you were to fill up a bucket with water. Most buckets should not have any problem retaining the water inside, until it starts overflowing at the top.

But in reality, this isn’t how our brains function. In fact, most of the information that enters our brain leaks out eventually. Instead of looking at our brain’s memory as a bucket that retains everything, we should treat it for what it is: a leaking bucket.

While the leaky bucket analogy may sound like a negative connotation, it’s perfectly normal. Unless you were born with a photographic memory, our brains weren’t designed to remember every fact, information, or experience that we go through in our lives.

How To Remember 90% Of Everything You Learn

The development of the Learning Pyramid in the 1960’s — widely attributed to the NTL Institute in Bethel, Maine— outlined how humans learn.

As research shows, it turns out that humans remember:

5% of what they learn when they’ve learned from a lecture (i.e. university/college lectures)
10% of what they learn when they’ve learned from reading (i.e. books, articles)
20% of what they learn from audio-visual (i.e. apps, videos)
30% of what they learn when they see a demonstration
50% of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion.
75% of what they learn when they practice what they learned.
90% of what they learn when they use immediately (or teach others)

Yet how do most of us learn?

Books, classroom lectures, videos — non-interactive learning methods that results in 80-95% of information going in one ear and leaking out the other.

The point here is that instead of forcing our brains on how to remember more information with “passive” methods, we should focus our time, energy, and resources on “participatory” methods that have proven to deliver more effective results, in less time.

This means that:

• If you want to learn how to speak a foreign language, you should focus on speaking with native speakers and gain immediate feedback (instead of mobile apps)
• If you want to get in shape, you should work with a personal fitness trainer (instead of watching Youtube workout videos)
• If you want to learn a new instrument, hire a local music teacher in your city

Ultimately, it comes down to this…

Time Or Money?

How many times have you heard someone say, “I don’t have time to do X…”

I’m certainly guilty of this myself, as I’ve made excuse after excuse about the lack of time I have in my life.

But time is the greatest equalizer of all. No matter who we are, where we are in the world, or how much we strive for efficiency, there are only 24 hours in each day. Every single minute is unique, and once it’s gone, it can never be regained, unlike money.

“You May Delay, But Time Will Not.”
― Benjamin Franklin

So if we all have 24 hours in a day, how do we explain the success stories of young millionaires that started from nothing, or a full-time student going from beginner to conversation fluency in Spanish after just 3.5 months? They learned how to maximize for effectiveness instead of only efficiency.

Let’s say person A spent one hour learning a language and retained 90% of what they learned. And person B spent nine hours learning and retained 10% of what they learned. Doing simple math, person B spent 9x more time learning than person A, only to retain the same amount of information (A: 1 * 0.9 = B: 9 * 0.1).

While the exact numbers can be debated, the lesson is clear. The way to have more time is not to go for small wins, like watching 5-minute YouTube tutorials instead of 15-minutes, but to go for big wins, like choosing the most effective method from the beginning. Or constantly relying on free alternatives, when investing in a premium solution can shave off months, if not years, worth of struggles, mistakes, and most importantly, time.

It’s making the most out of the limited time we have by focusing on solutions that deliver the most impact, and saying no to everything else.

The ability to retain more knowledge in an age of infinite access to information and countless distractions is a powerful skill to achieve any goal we have faster.

By learning how to remember more information everyday, we can spend less time re-learning old knowledge, and focus on acquiring new ones.

We’re all running out of time, and today is the youngest you’ll ever be. The question is: how will you best spend it?

5 Ways To Create A Powerfully Productive Mind

How often do you feel busy, but feeling as if you’re not actually getting anything done?

Days go by and you feel consistently overwhelmed with so many things on your plate, but you don’t actually make any real progress on anything meaningful.

Then we look around and wonder how so many others we look up to seem to get so much more accomplished…

Unfortunately for us, we live in the most distracting era in all of human history. While there are a ton of tools, apps and notebooks to help us prioritize and schedule our tasks, our mind only has limited processing power. When too many things are going in, it gets bogged down and our focus will constantly be switching all over the place. This leads to that wonderfully frustrating feeling that is procrastination.

A mind that is overwhelmed cannot effectively take anything new on. Creating a powerful mind capable of focus and productivity starts with taking back control of everything entering it.

Here are 5 tactics I’ve used and shared with many others that you can implement to dramatically boost your minds ability to focus and fend off procrastination

1. Control your Physical Clutter

How does your environment look around you? Is it organized or chaotic with items scattered all over your desk or bedroom? Our physical worlds tend to be a reflection of our mental worlds. You may wonder how this matters in being more productive, but a messy physical world actually draws energy from our mind. Energy and focus we could be using towards more meaningful things… If our room is a mess or the kitchen needs to be tidied, every-time we see this it will draw energy as we’re reminded of what we need to do. An excellent resource on this, is Marie Kondos book on “The Magic of Tidying Up.”

“When you put your house in order, you put your affairs in order too.” – Marie Kondo

The more minimalist of a life we can practice the more productive space we can create in our mind. Going through old items and clothes and removing them (I recommend donating clothes) can make you feel like you lost 10 pounds of mental load. Steve Jobs actually wore the same outfit each day so he didn’t have to exert any energy thinking about it and could instead focus on the tasks of the day ahead. This is an extreme example, but it emphasizes the power of this…

2. Control your Virtual Clutter

How many notifications are on your phone right now? Better yet, how many unread emails are in your inbox? A few years back I reached a point where I had several thousand unread emails in my inbox. It was to the point where even just opening my inbox made me instantly feel overwhelmed. Much like physical clutter, virtual clutter is a VERY real thing and can cause us to expend tons of unnecessary energy each day.

What can we do about it?

Unsubscribe to emails you don’t find any value in, ask to be taken off email chains that you don’t need to directly respond too and really decrease the amount of email coming in. Once done, I highly recommend practicing inbox zero to really optimize your time spent there. Social media can also be a huge energy drainer with the amount of negativity that seems to be rampant on it recently. Clean it up just like your email. Be relentless, your mental energy and state is yours to protect. Un-follow people who post things that you find are taking you find are negatively impacting your mindset.

The more of this energy we take back the more we can use it towards important things.

3. Become unafraid of saying NO

If you find yourself in the state we described above, of constantly feeling overwhelmed and busy you should probably be saying no more often then you say yes. Think about it, if we are already procrastinating and behind on things, how will saying yes to taking on more items or event invitations possibly make that any better? Many people (including myself at a time) are afraid to say no to people, don’t be.

Darren Hardy, former publisher of success magazine tells a story of a company trying to bring on Richard Branson as a speaker. They called three times to Bransons assistant, offering more money with each call, but each time the assistant did not pass on the message. Why? Branson was locked into his 3 current strategic objectives he was working on, and speaking was not one of them. He had specifically instructed to say NO to anything note related to those 3 objectives.

While I believe we should always make time for important events but it is only by saying no that we can truly control our energy, focus and time.

4. You lack a defined schedule

One of the bluntest pieces of productivity advice I ever received was the following. “If it’s not on your schedule, it does not exist.” When we try to accomplish things without setting aside planned time to do them usually one of two things happen. 1. It never gets done. 2. It gets done bit by bit taking far longer than we wanted. We need to create non-negotiable scheduled time to complete the important tasks we need to get done to reach our goals. Point #3 above becomes important when people ask you to do things during this time.

Think about someone who wants to get into better shape. If they simply just try to “fit in a workout when they’re free”, we know will probably never or very rarely see this person in the gym.  We need to plan the time when we will workout and ideally have it at the same time each week. Being productive toward your business, career, or almost any goal should be handled the same way.

5. Upgrade your lifestyle

In order to help create a powerfully productive mind, we need to build a lifestyle that creates energy to be our best self. If you are frequently tired and without energy you may need to look at your daily habits. Don’t neglect your sleep, your nutrition or your fitness. Treat and care for your mind and body like a Rolls Royce and they will give you the energy you need to get more done, battle procrastination and get you exactly where you want to go in life. My own life changed dramatically when I emphasized all of the above, having more energy in my 30’s then I did in my early 20’s.

Our billionaire friend, Richard Branson also agrees and says how he finds working out each day gives him 4 extra hours of productivity. 

10 Simple Hacks To Fall Asleep In 30 Seconds, Backed By Science

awn. It’s easier said than done trying to actually catch some Z’s, and there is an entire spectrum of people, all desperately trying to claim back the realm of sleep and their quality of sleep. We all want high quality of sleep, and yet so many of us find ourselves tossing and turning hours after we hit the pillow, unable to slip into the Land of Nod.

However, we all deserve to get the kind of sleep we deserve, and so we’ve rounded up some of our best and most useful sleep hacks to try and help you find it a little bit easier to curl up under the covers and nod off. So, without further ado, here are ten of our simple sleep hacks…

1. Read A Book Before Bed

One of the best and renowned sleep hacks is to turn down the lights, snuggle down, and have a quick read of a good bedside tome. It doesn’t have to be particularly highbrow reading, although reading something you find boring or stale might well induce your visit to the Land of Nod. Reading helps facilitate sleep by forcing you to remove yourself from electronic equipment – items designed to keep your mind visually stimulated – and into a relaxed activity. So, next time you’re struggling to get to sleep, try picking up one of those books on your bedside. It might just be the thing to help.

2. Set A Formal Bedtime

Setting a formal bedtime – as in a time in which you force yourself to go to bed every evening – can be extremely beneficial in terms of helping you get to sleep post-haste. Not only can setting a formal bedtime help you physically, it has some strong psychological benefits. Setting a certain time for you to go to sleep helps your mind recognise that it is time for you to start unwinding and relaxing, much in the same way a child learns to sleep through the night. A regular bedtime also helps your brain adjust its levels of serotonin and melatonin, and helps balance your circadian rhythm out. In short, all good things, and essential sleep hacks that you should implement if you want to be asleep within seconds.

3. Eat A Healthier Diet

We know everyone keeps extolling the virtues of a healthier diet, and believe us, we’re sick of it too. However, if you’ll hear us out, adjusting your diet to help you get better sleep, might just be worth it. Research has found that increasing your intake of fruits, vegetables, and pulses can help improve your sleep and the time it takes for you to go to sleep dramatically, thanks to enhancing your levels of magnesium, potassium, or other essential minerals that your body needs. Even incorporating more turkey – rich in tryptophan which helps induce drowsiness and sleepiness – can help make the distance between awake and sleep much easier.

4. Keep Your Room Cool

The last tip we can offer to help you get to sleep quicker, is to make sure that you keep your room as cool as possible – but not too cool. Years of scientific research have found that your body temperature is key when trying to get to sleep, as your body temperature naturally drops when you start to nod off. Therefore maintaining a cool, but not cold temperature in your room is essential. Similar to the way how coming out of a hot bath makes you feel sleepy thanks to your body’s temperature drop, the best course of action is keeping a fan or a window open to keep cool air circulating, and then taking the opportunity to snuggle down. Lovely.

5. Practice Yoga Before Bed

If you fancy exploring something a little less orthodox, then research suggests that doing a spot of yoga can help relax your body and help you get to sleep in record time. In terms of sleep hacks, yoga has long been touted as an avenue worth exploring; certain sequences such as ‘Salute to the Moon’ are designed to be slow, gentle movements that promote a feeling of relaxation and which help relieve any bodily aches that might keep you up at night. Yoga gets a lot of attention for its health benefits, but if you’re stuck on a sleepless night, try your hand at some yoga and find yourself relaxing and nodding off immediately.

6. Meditate

The meditation revolution keeps on rolling through our cities and cultures, touted as a huge help for anyone who needs it – and with good reason. In terms of being simultaneously rudimentary and revolutionary, meditation has been commended as a kind of cure-all for a large swathe ofphysical or psychological ailments – in this case being unable to go to sleep. Meditation allows you to calm your restless mind and focus on the kind of slow, rhythmic breathing that helps make sleeping better. In fact one of the suggested breathing techniques, the ujjayi breath (or ocean breath), is perfect for calming you down and helping you nod off to sleep.

7. Drink Some Warm Milk

Sometimes the old wives’ tales turn out to have some common sense or a grain of surprising truth in them. For example, the old adage about drinking warm milk helping you go to sleep, turns out to be not only true, but a beneficial sleep hack for anyone trying to get to sleep quicker. Warm milk, or similarly crafted milk-based beverages, may have shaky standing as a soporific thanks to the ongoing debate over the actual effectiveness of tryptophan in aiding sleep. However,psychologists have considered that drinking warm milk may have an unconscious psychological effect, and that it relates to the childhood experience of breastfeeding and the comfort associated with it. So, if you want to have a little sip of something before you hit the hay, try a glass of warm milk, rather than the traditional boozy nightcap. You’ll feel better for it in the morning – in more ways than one.

8. Cut Out The Caffeine

One of the best sleep hacks out there is to cut out of the most prevalent addictive chemicals out there: caffeine. Yep, we’re all guilty of partaking in some caffeine at one point or another, whether it’s in our tea, coffee, or even out of chocolate. However, if you want to make sure you go to sleep as soon as possible, try and cut caffeine out of your diet after a certain point in the day. Studies indicate that cutting off your caffeine intake after 3pm helps improve quality of sleep, and the time it takes for you to get to sleep. So, if you want to try something to help you nod off in record time, try ditching that late evening cup of coffee, and see what happens.

9. Turn Off The Electronics

One of the biggest, best sleep hacks for the modern-day person, is to remove those pesky electronics from your bedroom to stop you playing with them. Numerous studies have found that the blue light from electronic devices disrupts your brain’s ability to begin relaxing for better quality sleep, as well as the likelihood of being unable to properly relax before hitting the hay, thanks to devices intended to keep you engaged. Instead, try and turn off your laptop, phone or tablet about an hour before you go to bed, so that your mind can unwind properly, and you can get that all-important quality of sleep that you deserve.

10. Invest In Some Blackout Curtains

This can be an issue no matter what your bedroom situation is, but it is always worth investing in a solid pair of blackout curtains if you’re looking for a great go-to sleep hack. With more and more light pollution in the day-to-day – your neighbour’s backyard spotlight, the streetlamps outside, everyone’s car headlights coming in at 1am – it can be harder and harder to sleep with all that extra light pouring in and messing up your chance at sleep. Blackout curtains are a great preventative measure, as they’ll make sure your sleep is longer, better, and is much less likely to be disturbed.