All You Need Is a Glass of Water

“Growing up, The Glass of Water Technique was my go-to technique. I found it to be very successful for those times I felt sick. For example, if I had a stomach ache I would go into my level and energize a glass of water. Then, while drinking the water, I would tell myself, “This is all I have to do to rid myself of this stomach ache.” I would also imagine myself feeling healthy and strong after I drank the energized glass of water. And it worked every time!”

More recently, I used this technique to revive a plant of mine. I bought a plant, that I’m sorry to say I was neglecting and one day I noticed that my little plant was not doing so well. That night I decided to energize a glass of water and give it to the plant. As I watered the plant with the energized water, I pictured the plant growing big and strong. I have been doing this for a couple of days now and I am proud to report that my plant is look more alive than ever!

The Glass of Water technique is also used whenever you need information or guidance. It is excellent for making decisions, finding misplaced objects and gaining a deeper understanding of life’s challenging situations. When we do not know the solutions to problems, we lack the necessary information. Once we have enough information, answers and solutions usually become obvious.

Here is an explanation of The Glass of Water Technique.

The Glass of Water exercise is a technique used for solving problems and goal achievement.

• At night, just before retiring, get a water glass and fill it with water. While drinking approximately half of the water, close your eyes, turn them slightly upward, and say to yourself, “This is all I need to do to find the solution to the problem I have in mind.”
• Then, put away the remaining half glass of water, go to bed and sleep.
• In the morning, upon awakening, drink the remaining half-glass of water, then close your eyes, turning your eyes slightly upward, and say to yourself, “This is all I need to do to find the solution to the problem I have in mind.”
• With this programming, you may awaken during the night or in the morning with a vivid recollection of a dream that contains information that you can use for solving the problem, or during the day you may have a flash of insight that contains information that you can use for solving the problem.

Remember with The Glass of water technique you enter your level automatically as you close your eyes and turn them slightly upward while drinking the water. Also, get creative with your Silva Method Techniques…I used it to revive my plant.

From silvamethodlife.com

Warren Buffett Buys This With His Billions .. And It Makes Him Happy

With an estimated fortune of $46 billion, Warren Buffett can buy pretty much anything he wants. Unlike many of his fellow billionaires, however, the world’s second-richest man has no interest in expensive symbols of wealth.

He told CNBC and Yahoo Finance’s “Off the Cuff” that he’s “never had any great desire to have multiple houses and all kinds of things and multiple cars.” (See the video here.)

Buffett, who famously still lives in the modest Omaha house he bought for $31,500 in 1958 and drives a Cadillac he bought “about 6 or 7” years ago, said his idea of a perfect day involves being alone with no interruptions so he can read and think.

Flipping through his nearly empty appointment book, Buffett told CNBC Squawk Box co-host Becky Quick his money does buy him one thing he values very much: his freedom. For him, freedom is the key to a happy life.

Reading plays a big role in that happy life. Buffett said he starts every morning by reading two of the five daily newspapers he devours each day, starting with the Omaha World-Herald. (His company bought it late last year, even though he's said the newspaper industry faces a "terrible" future.)

Buffett often jokes that he reads corporate annual reports with the same intensity that other men reserve for Playboy magazine.

Buffett told Becky he has a “disgusting pile” of books by his chair. “I just keep going at them and I never get tired of reading.” Most of those books are non-fiction. He especially likes biographies.

While Buffett prefers reading printed words on paper, he’s also a big fan of the Internet because it provides instant access to the sometimes obscure information he uses to make investment decisions. “The amount of time that it’s freed up for other things is just incredible.”

His one luxury is a time-saving private jet, “the only thing that I do that costs a lot of money.” Even though he loves the plane, he would pay even more to give up his jet but keep the Internet. “I would gladly pay half my net worth just to have that kind of information available to me. They haven’t figured out how to charge me what it’s worth. That’s one of the problems they’ve got.”

Instead, he’s gradually donating most of that enormous net worth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other charities, while making sure he has a few billions left for books ... and other necessities.

From cnbc.com

Some People Just Don't Have What It Takes To Make A Great Real Estate Investor

As I watch the election results come in from around the country, it’s hard not to contemplate all of the hard work each of the candidates invested to get to this point.

The thought of organizing a campaign of that magnitude while doing interviews, preparing for debates, managing campaign personnel, strategizing, etc. seems overwhelming for a single candidate.

Most people simply don’t have what it takes to ever legitimately run for elected office.

However, certain individuals have the skill sets, temperament and personality to endeavor to a nationally elected position.

I think the same holds true for real estate investors. There are certain character traits that are inherent in most real estate investors that enable them to be successful in what they aspire to. Just last week I was having lunch with an old college roommate who said something that I thought was quite profound.

As much as he was struggling to figure out what his next career move was going to be, he said he knew he wasn’t cut out to run his own business. While he is a very intelligent, hard-working individual, he knew his natural skill set simply doesn’t lend itself to being a business owner.

I think the same could be said about some people when it comes to real estate investing. Some folks simply don’t have the character traits that make a great investor.

Now when most people think about the kinds of adjectives that describe a successful investor, they think of words like creative, tenacious, self-starter, salesman, negotiator, persistent, and I would definitely agree with them. These are definitely the type of qualities in an individual that will help them be good real estate investors. However, there are three character traits that are rarely discussed, but I would consider extremely valuable as a real estate investor:

The Three Essential Character Traits of Successful Real Estate Investors

Intuition – Knowing where to buy, what to buy and who to sell to is paramount for any real estate investor. While any smart investor will study existing data carefully before developing an investing strategy, there is certainly an element of intuition involved with any real estate decision. Do I accept this offer or wait for another higher one? Do I buy in this neighborhood or do I think it will decline over the next several years?

Making these types of buying and selling decisions can be a lot like playing poker. You never have all of the facts, but you make the best decision based on the information available as well as what your gut is telling you.

Adaptability – I wrote a blog last week about the speed at which the real estate industry changes. Any investor that wants to stay profitable and relevant needs to continually stay abreast of changing trends and adapt business models to stay current. Having the ability and foresight to make these types of strategic changes midstream is what sets successful investors apart from the rest.

Patience — While patience is rarely regarded as an important quality in real estate investing circles, I think it is one of the most important ones. Whether it be waiting to buy the right deal or waiting to get the right price on a sale, learning to be patient with your investments is of utmost importance. Too many investors have purchased bad properties because they weren’t willing to wait for the right ones.

Investing in real estate is not rocket science. It does not even take a college education to be good at it. Some folks are naturally talented while other develop their investing skills over time. Either way, knowing your strengths and weaknesses as an investor is critical to improving your chances at prospering in this business.

From biggerpockets.com

Book Review: 'The Warren Buffett Portfolio'

Books on Warren Buffett dominate the bookshelves at the investment section of bookstores. Among the sea of Warren Buffett books, Robert G. Hagstrom's name stands out. He has written three books: "The Warren Buffett Way," "The Warren Buffett Portfolio" and "The Essential Buffett."

According to Hagstrom, his second book, "The Warren Buffett Portfolio," is meant to be a companion, not a sequel, to "The Warren Buffett Way." He claimed he unwittingly passed lightly over two important areas: portfolio management and intellectual fortitude in The Warren Buffett Way. TheWarren Buffett Way gives the reader tools to pick common stocks wisely, and The Warren Buffett Portfolio shows you how to organize them into a focus portfolio and provides the intellectual framework for managing it.

I introduce readers to Hagstrom's second book The Warren Buffett Portfolio.

Takeaways from The Warren Buffett Portfolio

- Focus Investing: Choose a few stocks that are likely to produce above-average returns over the long haul, concentrate the bulk of your investments in those stocks and have the fortitude to hold steady during any short-term market gyrations.

- Phil Fisher was known for his focus portfolios; he always said he preferred owning a small number of outstanding companies that he understood well to owning a large number of average ones, many of which he understood poorly.

- Using the tenets of the Warren Buffett Way, choose a few (10 to 15) outstanding companies that have achieved above-average returns in the past and that you believe have a high probability of continuing their past strong performance into the future. Allocate your investment funds proportionately, placing the biggest bets on the highest-probability events. As long as things don't deteriorate, leave the portfolio largely intact for at least five years (longer is better), and teach yourself to ride through the bumps of price volatility with equanimity.

- Buffett has a different definition of risk: the possibility of harm or injury. And that is a factor of the "intrinsic value risk" of the business, not the price behavior of the stock. The real risk, Buffett says, is whether after-tax returns from an investment "will give him [an investor] at least as much purchasing power as he had to begin with, plus a modest rate of interest on that initial stake."

- The optimal portfolio is a focus portfolio that stresses big bets on high-probability events, as opposed to equally weighted bets on a mixed bag of probabilities.

- Measure management this way: 1) Review annual reports from a few years back, paying special attention to what management said then about strategies for the future. 2) Compare those plans to today's results: How fully were they realized? 3) Compare the strategies of a few years ago to this year's strategies and ideas: How has the thinking changed? 4) Compare the annual reports of the company you are interested in with reports from similar companies in the same industry. It is not always easy to find exact duplicates, but even relative performance comparison can yield insights.

- Stock prices disengage from the intrinsic value of a business for various reasons, including psychological overreaction as well as economic misjudgment. Focus investors are perfectly positioned to take advantage of this mispricing. But, to the degree they incorporate macroeconomic or stock market predictions inside their model, focus investors will diminish their competitive advantage.

- For Buffett, investing is a series of "business" pitches and, to achieve above-average performance, he must wait until a business comes across the strike zone in the "best" cell. Buffett believes investors too often swing at bad pitches, and their performance suffers. Perhaps it is not that investors are unable to recognize a good pitch — a good business — when they see one; maybe the difficulty lies in the fact that investors can't resist swinging the bat.

From gurufocus.com

Related Books

The Warren Buffett Portfolio: Mastering the Power of the Focus Investment Strategy

The Warren Buffett Stock Portfolio: Warren Buffett Stock Picks: Why and When He Is Investing in Them

Book Review: 'The Warren Buffett Way'

Books on Warren Buffett dominate the bookshelves at the investment section of bookstores. Among the sea of Warren Buffett books, Robert G. Hagstrom's name stands out. He has written three books: The "Warren Buffett Way," "The Warren Buffett Portfolio," and "The Essential Buffett."

According to Robert Hagstrom, his second book, "The Warren BuffettPortfolio," is meant to be a companion, not a sequel, to "The Warren Buffett Way." He claimed he unwittingly passed lightly over two important areas: portfolio management and intellectual fortitude in The Warren Buffett Way. It gives the reader tools to pick common stocks wisely, and The Warren Buffett Portfolio shows you how to organize them into a focus portfolio and provides the intellectual framework for managing it.

I introduce readers to Hagstrom's first book, The Warren Buffett Way.

Takeaways from The Warren Buffett Way

Business Tenets = basic characteristics of the business itself

1. Is the business simple and understandable?

- Understand the revenues, expenses, cash flow, labor relations, pricing flexibility, and capital allocation needs of every single one of your holdings.

- Investment success is not a matter of how much you know but how realistically you define what you don’t know.

2. Does the business have a consistent operating history?

- A steady track record is a relatively reliable indicator. When a company has demonstrated consistent results with the same type of products year after year, it is not unreasonable to assume that those results will continue.

- Avoid purchasing companies that are fundamentally changing direction because their previous plans were unsuccessful. Undergoing major business changes increases the likelihood of committing major business errors.

- Avoid businesses that are solving difficult problems. Turnarounds seldom turn.

3. Does the business have favorable long-term prospects?

- A franchise as a company whose product or service 1) is needed or desired, 2) has no close substitute and 3) is not regulated.

- A franchise that is the only source of a product people want can regularly increase prices without fear of losing market share or unit volume.

- A franchise has the ability to survive economic mishaps and still endure. A great company is one that will be great for 25 to 30 years

Management Tenets = important qualities that senior managers must display

4. Is management rational?

- The most important management act is allocation of the company’s capital.

- Deciding what to do with the company’s earnings — reinvest in the business, or return money to shareholders — is an exercise in logic and rationality.

- If the extra cash, reinvested internally, can produce an above-average return on equity — a return that is higher than the cost of capital — then the company should retain all its earnings and reinvest them.

- A company that provides average or below-average investment returns but generates cash in excess of its needs should return the money to shareholders.

- Dividends put reinvestment risk in the hands of shareholders.

- Repurchases are preferred as shareholders are rewarded twice, first from the initial open market purchase and then from the positive effect of investor interest on price.

5. Is management candid with its shareholders?

- Likes managers who report their companies’ financial performance fully and genuinely, who admit mistakes as well as share successes, and who are in all ways candid with shareholders.

- Data should be disclosed in a manner that helps the financially literate readers answer three key questions: 1) Approximately how much is this company worth? 2) what is the likelihood that it can meet its future obligations? and 3) how good a job are its managers doing, given the hand they have been dealt?

- Managers who confess mistakes publicly are more likely to correct them.

- The CEO who misleads others in public may eventually mislead himself in private.

6. Does management resist the institutional imperative?

- The institutional imperative is the lemming-like tendency of corporate management to imitate the behavior of other managers, no matter how silly or irrational that behavior may be.

LeBron James earns praise from Warren Buffett for business mind

LeBron James is earning high praise in high places.

Warren Buffett, 82, is the second-richest man in America, a person whose business acumen has been lauded the world over. Worth an estimated $46 billion, Buffett does not take his investments lightly, and he has taken an interest in 27-year-old James of the Miami Heat.

“You have to get to know him,” Buffett said, according to The Miami Herald. “LeBron’s not initially really talkative. He’s savvy. He’s smart about financial matters. It’s amazing to me the maturity he exhibits. I know that if I had been famous at that age, I would have had trouble keeping my feet on the ground.”

James has a net worth of $110 million and was the fourth highest-paid athlete in 2012,according to Forbes.com. Tiger Woods—who was listed at No.3—became the first athlete to earn $1 billion dollars, and James wants to be next. He certainly has people in his corner who know about accumulating wealth. Not many people can count Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and rap mogul Jay-Z as friends.

MORE: Knicks win over Heat offers temporary relief

James didn’t attend college, famously making the leap from high school to the NBA without missing a beat. That has had no bearing on his ability to make savvy business moves—and it doesn’t hurt to turn to Buffett for advice every now and then.

At the root of James’ place as the most bankable NBA player is his personality and prodigious talent. His first season with the Miami Heat, which ended in an NBA Finals loss to the Dallas Mavericks, resulted in a 17 percent increase in the Heat franchise’s value, pushing it to $425 million, according to Forbes. That number increased to $457 million after James’ second season in Miami, in which the team finished with an NBA championship win over the Oklahoma City Thunder. James also helped add $111 million to the net worth of team owner Micky Arison.

The best season of James’ NBA career did more than earn the NBA’s most recognizable player his first championship—it also added validation that only increases his earning power. James currently holds lucrative endorsement deals with Nike, Coca-Cola, State Farm, McDonald’s and Samsung, and the list is bound to grow. James’ most publicized venture was the deal with Fenway Sports Group that made him a minority owner in the British soccer team Liverpool.

But James made it known he will be selective in business moves, something he has already done with his pool of friends and advisors.

“I’ve got a lot going on right now,” James said. “I’m not looking for too many new opportunities—unless it’s a good one.”

From aol.sportingnews.com