There are many arguing that homeownership in America is not a good thing.

It keeps Americans from being mobile and able to move for job opportunities.

There are 56 million mortgages in the U.S. and 15% of those are under water. If prices come down another 10% approximately 27% of the homes will be under water. When homes are under water, most Americans have stopped making payments.

Where do these mortgage problems occur? Often in states that have high unemployment.

In his new book “Beyond the Crash” Gordon Brown says we are a global economy for better or worse and that the long run recovery depends on everyone working together. The greatest need is for consumerism which is spending by those that are capable to put everyone to work. The second advantage is that it takes people out of poverty

Globally 100 million people are out of work and over 400 million are in poverty. In India, the average income per capita is $1,000 a year. You are in poverty there if you are earning less than $10 a month. India has more people in poverty than the 26 poorest countries in Africa combined.

China is better, but the daily wage that keeps us from gaining on their manufacturing is only a few dollars a day. How do these people become global consumers? The U.S. and Europe are responsible for approximately 50% of global consumption and it doesn’t look like China, India or Africa are going to be contributing soon.

The BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China plus the 11 fastest growing developing countries consume only a fraction of what the U.S. and Europe consume.

In his 8 page article in the NY Times, Can Europe Be Saved?, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner, says that the European Union is forcing tough love on the failing countries in the EU. The Baltic countries are self inflicting deflation to be more competitive. The strong EU countries want the weak ones to do the same.

The U.S. and Britain are printing money to try and bolster their economies and avoid deflation. The problem with deflation is income decreases but debt does not unless everyone walks away from their debt, which is often difficult.  Countries like Argentina and Iceland defaulted and reduced national debt by up to two thirds, but not every individual can do that.

The problem with printing money until there is recovery is that too much money in circulation creates inflation which is more devastating to wages than recession. China is experiencing that now.

It doesn’t look like consumerism will take the global economy out of recession for many years. Just when people need to spend, the debt burden is forcing austerity.

What is your solution? You want to preserve your income. You want to create the skills that will make you valuable in the economy. You want to develop your creative and innovative skills to become a more important player in the entity in which you are employed.

You want to cut your living expenses to the bare minimum. You need to impose self austerity. One of the reasons governments and now states are in crisis is they had no reserves. Having gone through this crisis in the 1990’s, Asia has stock piled reserves. The countries like China, Japan, and South Korea have trillions of dollars in reserve to protect themselves against down turns.

In the final analysis, your best defense is savings. You want to have a savings surplus every month. The U.S. is trying to spend its way to recovery but no one knows whether deflation, inflation, or stability is waiting for us.

You want to be flexible if necessary and even mobile. The technology industry is prescient in that it certainly is making everyone mobile. How flexible is your life style to adjust to economic change or ability to jump for opportunity?

But, don’t over worry the situation. It won’t help. Your best productivity comes from a positive attitude and optimism. These come from health, fitness, self reliance, discipline, self esteem, and connection to community.

Get your own person in the best possible condition and mental framework possible for a human being, Enjoy your human capabilities and potential. Expand your awareness and contribution to the community. Find happiness in engaging in activities that express who you are and are the peak performance of your competencies.

You can still get into flow by learning and focusing. Your activities can be rewarding and bring happiness just as your life can be filled with important and meaningful experiences. Don’t live in denial thinking something will save us, but don’t sacrifice your years worrying about what may come.  Build self reliance, build capabilities, develop community and sail through the turbulent storm.

**

Read  Beyond the Crash by Gordon Brown, former British Prime Minister

Read    Can Europe Be Saved? by Paul Krugman   NY Times

More Resource Books for Education

Ideas for your future brought to you by

Kaalm Media Group
Research on Health, Performance, and Flow
Mission: To Deliver Life Transforming Ideas

Delivering through 8 websites, E Books, and Newsletters

1-760-231-8966. Services

So often assigned the task of recreating companies, cities, and countries, a few have asked why they can’t recreate personal lives.

In his book about Designers, “Glimmer”, Warren Berger discusses the Eastern Process and Western Process for Emergence.  Designers often choose to continue learning so that they can cover more demands for their services.

The Eastern process is to go broad and deep covering many topics. The Western process is more likely to go vertical where one becomes a specialist in one area.

Berger feels older people become better designers. They may not have the quick recall of younger people, but they have a broader base of knowledge in which to evaluate experiences.

“In the process of “Emergence” you keep moving away from the information you already know.” Berger. He explains it as setting up a line of T’s  TTTTTTT wherein you move wide and deep in new topics as you keep learning. I have had this propensity in developing my websites and explained it to my friends as ADD, but it seems I am part of a class of people who follow the same course.

Several neurologists quoted by Berger have defined happiness as a process. It is certainly one explanation and not to exclude others. They would say that the ability to enter “flow” is a recipe for continued happiness.

Flow is the process where a person engages in an activity in which they have competence and yet it is challenging. If the activity becomes boring or too difficult, they will drop out of flow until they find a new activity or develop more skills.

In this process, a person finds joy and they lose track of time. This activity is enjoyed without fear of judgment or concern for reward. The outside world seems far away. Athletes call it “the zone”.  I find it in my writing. I am sure many people experience it in their activities.

The second part applies to designers and certainly can apply to people in the arts or medicine, which is using their best talents to contribute to a larger good. This is an activity that lifts the spirit and creates positive brain chemicals that we call happiness.

Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania and former President of the American Psychological Association says happiness is more of a process than an end.

“The “emergence” activities that often lead to creative productivity engage a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens that can control how we feel about life. Creative activities also stimulate the brain’s septal zone- the feel good area- and that makes you feel happy.” Dr. S. Ausim Azizi Chairman of Department of Neurology at Temple University School of Medicine.

Emergence cannot be fully controlled but you can encourage it by setting up the right conditions. I have fallen into it by creating my morning sessions of writing and my afternoon sessions for research. They have run hand in hand for creating my own “emergence” system and the process has become for good reason, addicting.

Designers say they have 4 key lessons for Designing Emergence:

1>  Create your own eco system that is self sustaining and conducive to growth.

2>  Develop a strong supportive relationship with the community around you.

3>  Keep learning

4>  Keep creating and reinventing

We can look to a few real life examples of businesses that set up their own conditions of emergence.  Certainly Apple, Face Book, and Google have set the conditions to attract a community and expand with no certainty where it will lead. They continue to learn and broaden their interests horizontally and vertically. They seem to be on the cutting edge of creating what their community needs or desires.

Just as designers create their studios and their lives for continued growth to be more effective in helping others, we can do the same. It would seem to make sense that if our brain naturally responds so positively to these activities that we must be very close to our purpose when we engage in them.

If happiness is the outcome, how can we argue with the beauty of this process?

**

Read Glimmer by Warren Berger

Read Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Book Resources

Ideas for your future brought to you by

Kaalm Media Group
Research on Health, Performance, and Flow
Mission: To Deliver Life Transforming Ideas

and its assortment of 8 websites with daily postings, E Books and Newsletters.

1-760-231-8966. Services,

I don’t think we ever reach our true potential. It is a floating target.

As we get closer, it increases.

Let’s say you climb Mt Everest and reach the top. Is that your potential? Maybe not; because as you get closer to the top, you are closer to that goal, but your potential is increasing.

If someone is on a daily basis developing better relationships with their customers and becoming more ingrained in their community, what is their potential? As you get better, it’s hard to know your limits. Did Face Book in developing more visitors than Google reach its potential? Not yet evidently. Someone gave them $500 million to do more.

The better question might be what is our maximum rate of training or productivity?

Yes, its word games, but the concept can have daily consequences.

I love to run the stairs near my house at the beach. There are 40 steps that lead from the beach to the street. The first time I ever ran them last May I did it 5 times. With a few more attempts, I ran them 20 times. I wondered what was my potential?

How would I best train to hit the maximum of which I was capable? I decided to run every other day with in between days running on the beach and then some rest days. I soon hit 40 times and then 60 times.

One day my mind said I was too tired to run the normal 20 times I had settled into. I knew my body was rested and decided to let my body challenge my mind to see who was right. I went beyond 20 to my record of 60 times and then did 80 times.

Our potential to grow is the amount we can over come our mind’s resistance and still not blow up.

The mind is often lazy and a couch potato. Once you stretch your efforts beyond what the mind thought you could do, it becomes a coach and encourages higher goals. When I exercise now and decide to break a record, my mind doesn’t chirp in.

I have been writing daily and enjoying an increasing audience. What is my potential? That is hard to know. I only know that I can work harder each day to make the writing more interesting and useful for my audience.

The real question is what is my potential productivity on a daily basis to create a better product? How do I increase my efficiency, energy, inspiration, stamina, and competence?

Reaching a higher training plateau increases my potential to climb the stairs and learning how to be more productive on a daily basis increases my audience potential.

So to reach a higher training plateau I have to give consideration to nutrition, stretching, rest, optimum energy hour and so forth. To reach a higher productivity writing level I need to consider healthy eating, fitness, rest, research sources and techniques, optimum output periods, refreshing techniques, and optimum creative time.

Our potential is dependent on our optimum training or daily productivity and that is dependent on our optimum preparation.

It so happens, I eat mostly raw, exercise daily, and live at the beach, so for my work I can do everything I think I need. I am attaining my optimum energy because my digestion does not compete with my brain for blood. My brain is getting the nutrients that support mental energy.

My exercise relaxes my nervous system and supports optimum brain wave activity. Living at the beach gives me a nature connection that increases my level of appreciation, privilege, spirituality and ability to refresh.

The act of achieving Peak Performance is often living or being in the flow. Flow is engaging in an activity in which we have competence or practice regularly and becoming engaged to the point we lose outside distractions. Time melts away.

Having a passion that we can work on everyday and create our optimum productivity is not only flow, it feels like purpose. We were meant to be happy. Striving for our potential seems to be our culture.

Our potential may never be perfection, but only we determine the limits.

**

Ideas for your future brought to you by Kaalm Media Group and its assortment of 8 websites with daily postings, E Books and Newsletters.  1-760-231-8966. Services,

Our lives tend to be influenced by what the experts say. If we aren’t responding to them directly, it was our parents, our bosses, our mates and our friends

We may find we are saying to ourselves “I am doing this or fearing this because of what experts say.” We hear it in daily conversations.

The problem with so many expert reports reported by the media is they are producing results based on what is interesting and what will be popular. David H Freedan in “Wrong”

Very few of us read scientific journals. Very few of us would follow up on the facts to see if the experts were also supported by their peers. Very few of us would follow up to see if the results were based on a large study using a variety of subjects or is the result of multiple studies.

Scientists, researchers, and professors often live off grants that are given for subjects and test results that people will actually care about. Very few scientific journals nor the media are interested in negative results such as the fact coffee doesn’t help the liver.

This need to create popular results often leads to fudging the findings and facts. In his book “Wrong”, David H. Freedman, a scientific and business journalist digs into the way studies are conducted and the integrity of the facts we let guide our lives.

Real scientists, he says, like to couch their findings in probabilities, conditions, variable outcomes depending on the test subjects. They like to speak about their uncertainties.  The average person does not like reading about probabilities and having to weigh the outcomes depending upon the conditions with lots of variables.

These stories do not sell in the media. People want interesting results presented confidently that identify a problem and give a simple one serve all solutions. People like to identify gurus who have the answers we want to hear.

We will live in fear because someone says cell phones cause brain cancer or plastic water bottles are toxic. If the media runs with a story and it appears in fifty publications, that is often the only credibility we need.

The world is amuck with books on what makes companies powerful. The problem with companies like everything else we live with is conditions change. It has been pretty easy to write about the prowess of Toyota. I grew up with General Motors and John Wayne occupying the same heralded space on the pedestal.

Sometimes athletes, companies, and stocks are on a streak. That streak can end with a change in conditions. Big companies are subject to missteps, changes in technology, and changes in market needs. The reasons something is a success might also conceal fatal flaws. Maybe big winners become overly arrogant and fail to see their own vulnerabilities to change.

Unless scientific results are tested with gold standard double blind and a wide variety of subjects, the results are not likely to apply to everyone. Findings that have actually produced the same results over a long period of time are more likely to be true facts.

We make important investments often based on general opinions or expert opinions that are often right for only a short time.

Because we want results and stories that are simple, have controversy, broad appeal, colorful, with definite solutions, we are vulnerable to following bad advice.

The publication of stories that don’t really affect our lives cause little harm. Sometimes however, we might alter how we live and how we raise our children. We might change course or fail to take action because a story that might support our leanings gives us the confirmation we were looking for.

When on the edge of jumping into to some new advice, David would like to see us say “Hmm… I wonder how likely it will turn out this advice is worth following?”

“double-blind procedure – an experimental procedure in which neither the subjects of the experiment nor the persons administering the experiment know the critical aspects of the experiment; “a double-blind procedure is used to guard against both experimenter bias and placebo effects” Thesaurus

“The disadvantage to double blind experiments is that they are more costly and difficult to set up, as they will usually require a greater number of people, more rigorous controls.”  Answers.com

**

“Wrong , Why Experts Keep Failing and How to Know When Not to Trust Them” by David H. Freedman

Ideas for your future brought to you by Kaalm Media Group and its assortment of 8 websites with daily postings, E Books and Newsletters.  1-760-231-8966. Services,