Training

It is now five minutes to three on a Saturday afternoon in late August here in Tokyo, Japan. I am on a train travelling out to Kisarazu, which is a city in Chiba Prefecture about ninety minutes from Tokyo Station. I am typing this on my MacBook Pro and generally trying to make good use of my time.

As I got on the train I thought what would I do if I didn’t have my computer with me and how would I pass the time from Shinbashi Station to Kisarazu Station.

Below are ten things you can do to pass the time while commuting. Naturally, the ideas I give are applicable for Japan and my not be appropriate in some other big cities in the world. One idea I can think of right off the bat is the idea of sleeping on the train. In Japan you see some real pros at this and you wonder how they wake up in time for their stop.  Obviously in some other big cities the idea of sleeping on the train is not the best idea in the world as that opens you up to the less desirable elements of society and their wicked ways.

So lets gets started, what can you do on the train to make the time pass more quickly and to make the best use of your time productively or otherwise?

1. Read a book. In today’s society maybe the pastime of reading has gone out the door with people having full access online to newspapers, magazines and different websites. Whether you are reading the actual book or a book on tablet or phone, at least you are expanding your mind and maybe even learning something as well. A university on rails, so to speak.

2. If you know that you can sit down and it is not going be crowded, like the train I am on at the moment then why don’t you take your computer along and do some work? I had to write a blog post today. I basically knew I had ninety minutes stuck on a train so I decided that I would write this. It is amazing. Thirty minutes have passed since I got on the train and it feels like about five.

 3. If reading or writing is not your thing then use a MP3 player and listen to books or listen to different recordings of motivational speakers or the like. When I was back in New Zealand for a short time I would on occasions walk to work. It took me approximately one hour. In that time I would listen to Anthony Robbins on my iPod. It was very interesting and he came up with some very interesting ideas. Another good thing for me was that I couldn’t hear the dogs barking at me. For those of you who don’t know, I’m not the biggest dog fan in the world.

4. This wouldn't be a popular idea in Tokyo or any part of the world for that matter but you never know what you are going to discover. Why don’t you strike up a conversation with the person standing/sitting next to you? I know that in Tokyo you might get the very shy, don’t know where to look because it wasn’t part of the text book when he or she was growing up brush off or you might strike it lucky and get talking to someone who is very fascinating and has lived all over the world. Who knows if you don’t try? The amount of times I haven’t spoken to the attractive looking female sitting next or across from me is uncountable.

5. Make your time on the train productive by using it to think, I mean really think. Not about what you are going to have for dinner tonight or what the women you saw last night looks like naked, I mean think about ideas you can use to improve yourself, or ideas you can use in your work to increase your income or ideas to improve what you do and who you are about. You can write down any ideas on your phone and take action on them when you are no longer on rails.

6. If all of this is too intellectual or sounds like too much hard work then I suppose if you really must, you could play games on your phone, tablet or console. Not the best use of time in my book but at least you are doing something fun and the time passes quickly.

7. If you are on the commute home you could splash out and treat yourself by buying what are called in Japan, Green Car tickets and sitting in “ first class’’ luxury and having a drink or three. As long as you are not a nuisance to the others around you may get the ‘salaryman’ sitting next to you joining in and the time will pass very smartly.

8. Most of the time when you are commuting you will need to be standing up, so having a beer or writing the next Pulitzer Prize winning novel may not be applicable. If you have a little bit of room and if you are like me, and your bag is quite heavy then you could use it to do some weight training. Most of the people around you will be thinking you are crazy but don’t worry about what they think as you are there improving yourself and your body. Imagine if you did that every day. Look out Arnold!!!

9. As I am writing this a young man across the row in front of me is doing his English homework. I wonder if I should help him out. A half of me is saying why not and the other half of me is thinking he doesn’t want my help. I shouldn’t disturb him. My point here is look out for opportunities like that to help people. Whether it is standing up and giving your seat over to an elderly or physically challenged person or helping a junior high school student with their homework, you are doing a good deed and what are they going to say, “Go away?”

10. If all of the above is too much then you can just sit down or stand up and watch the world go by. Of course there is nothing wrong with that. Although in saying that you are wasting maybe a couple of hours a day where you could be very productive and getting things done and maybe even change the world.

Commuting on a train does not need to be wasted time. You can use it as productively or as wastefully as you want, it is your life after all. Remember one thing, those two hours on the train a day, you can never get back so why not use it?

As I finish I would just like to say that I am fifteen minutes away from my destination, so by the time I finish proofreading this and maybe making any alterations I will be at Kisarazu and I would feel like my train ride was not a big waste of time. I am quite proud of myself but I wouldn’t want to do this everyday. There is only so much train time a man can take. 

Sport!!!

It is interesting what sport does to some people. To some people the need to be out on a Saturday and Sunday living their dreams and running off the week's stresses. To others it means sitting in front of the television watching other people play their dream and basically drinking off the week's stresses

So what is it about sport that makes us want to travel to play or follow your favourite team or sit up half the night waiting for our favourite team to run out onto the field?

It's interesting when you live overseas you will go to unbelievable lengths to watch your favorite team play at the local sports bar but if you were at home you might not even bother.

For many people sport is about being social. It is about joining a team to play something that you love with a bunch of people who share your passion and want to share that passion with you. It is why the aforementioned people will seek out a sports bar to watch their national team play to feel part of a community or part of a country.

For other people it is a challenge. They want to challenge themselves, to get better at something, to see how far they can go. To see how far they can push themselves to succeed. To see if those people that they see on television are any better or any worse than themselves.

At the end of the day (to borrow a phrase often used in sport interviews) it is all about being social, it is all about doing exercise that helps us live a long and healthy life and when it comes to supporting our team, we like to do that because generally we have played the sport ourselves, we know what is going on in the game as we have experienced the emotions that the players are going through on our television screens or the stadium. We may even know some of them personally and we like to see them do well on the big stage.

Sport is great, sport is fun and the benefits are huge.

The "learnings" of a book

I was reading a book this afternoon and it gave the story of a couple in America who were working for a company. The company was not doing very well and the owner decided to close it. The couple could see potential in it and went to the owner to see if they could purchase it from him. He knew that they couldn't afford it and told them so. They borrowed and begged for the money and finally got the money together. Anyway, to cut a long story short, at the time of writing the company had 300 employees and was grossing $50 million a year. Not a bad effort I must say.

When asked they gave 10 things to the secret of their success. (By the way, have you seen that movie, a 1980's movie with Michael J. Fox in it? I quite enjoyed it) I will list those ten things and give my opinions on the 10 things:

1. Keep a single focus. I think that my mind tends to wander and it takes forever to get back on track, whereas if I knew where I was going and what I was doing and that was clear in my mind most days would be easier because I had a focus I knew what I should be doing.

2. Keep a long term view and think ahead. It is very easy to focus on the present and agonise about the past. I tend to do that all the time, that is agonise about something that happen 16 and a half years ago that probably no one remembers and if they did they would laugh about it anyway. Think forward, have vision, that's what great leaders have, vision.

3. Do not panic. Panic is just a waste of energy. Step back and have a look and make informed instead of rushed decisions.

4. Develop a network and inventory your assets. What this means is that your friends, family, ideas and talents are also your assets. It doesn't have to be just hard assets. So if you have some kind of talent then you can leverage that.

5. Think possibilities and believe in the possibilities. You got to have options and you brainstorm until you find the right one or ones for you and then once you have decided you have faith in your decision and go for it.

6. Conserve you money. Yep! Don't follow my lead and spend it like it is going out of fashion or as my mother would say, "fritter."

7. Always be careful with your special team. That is your family and friends. You whole world might crumble and you could be in the middle of a pile of s**t but your family and friends will always be around. Look after them and they will look after you.

8. Surround yourself with positive people. It can very tiring being around negative people. it can be so demoralising for the soul, so why do that to yourself? Surround yourself with people who see the glass half full and tend to have that great smile on their dials. You will feel a lot more positive about things and you will get things done.

9. Don't take rejection to heart. Everyone gets rejected and it is how you react to it that shows what kind of person you are.

10. Look at every problem as an opportunity. This is another way of looking at the glass as being half full. You have a problem, you could do as I do and run away and hide under the nearest park bench or you could go great, I have this problem in my life what is the opportunity I am missing here? What can I learn from this?

There you go, sounds easy, doesn't it? It could be, so lets get to work and build something spectacular.

Social Media - Is it Social?

Recently a friend of mine here in Japan invited me to join Empire Avenue. For those of you who don't know what Empire Avenue is let me see if I can explain it although I must admit I'm not 100% sure myself.

Empire Avenue is basically game in that other players buy and sell shares in you. At the beginning I thought that your online activity on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ allowed you to get a higher price on your share price. I thought that this was directly related meaning if you tweeted then you price would go up. This is not true. The more social media activity you do the the more desirable your profile then people will more likely buy your shares and then your share price goes up. Confused? It took me about a month to work this out. I'm not confident I've got the whole idea but I suppose the whole idea of anything new is to dive in and work it all out later. If you study and study it you will never do anything and you might as well have done something else with your time.

Thanks to Empire Avenue I have started a Twitter account, I'm a lot more active on Facebook than I used to be in that I "like" a lot more, I try to post and share things and just generally use the site a lot more. A friend of mine introduced me to Hoot Suite which has helped me with Tweets. I'm sure if I tweeted manually I wouldn't tweet at all.

Social media is certainly here and here to stay. People are using it as a marketing tool or as a way to keep in touch with family and friends and you would think that with many people using Facebook and the other sites that everyone is happy with it but like other things there are always detractors and I met one of them yesterday. I have just spent a week with a couple of women and then I asked if I could connect with them on Facebook. They were both negative about Facebook in that one said she likes to keep he life separate meaning family, friends, work are all separate. Fair enough. the other woman thought that Facebook was not social at all and that was to the detriment of society as a whole because we hide behind our computers and don't get out and actually meet people. I can see her point there and I agree but social media does have it's place so the following are five reasons why I like social media and more specifically, Facebook.

1. It is easy to catch up with old friends and also keep in touch with family, especially cousins who may not be in your generation.

2. Information can be shared very easily. After the Tohoku earthquake in 2011, Facebook was an essential part of people's lives as information was sent back and forth.

3. It can be used for both social reasons and business reasons and in fact some larger business businesses actually have departments in which someone's job is to look after the social media of the business.

4. Even though you may never get to meet with the person face to face, it gives you an opportunity to connect with people from all around the world and get their perspective on life.

5. In terms of Twitter it allows you to have in one place a base to hear from people that you might admire or idolize and you can even interact with them by asking questions. We know with some famous people their security doesn't even let you near them.

Social Media is social if you use it to supplement your "off-line" life. When you start to find yourself sitting at a computer for 15 hours a day then you might have a problem when you go out into the wide world.

There you go. As I said before, social media is here to stay. All I want to know is, what is it going to be like in 10 years time. That will be interesting.

The comeback

Hello everyone. Regular readers of this blog will note that I haven't posted for a few months and for you fans out there, I apologise for that. However, I would like to use this forum to talk about something that happened to me recently.

I returned to Japan about a month ago and last night when it seemed about 1000% humidity and I was literally swimming in my clothes I questioned that decision but I digress.

I'm reading a book, well I've just started it really. Basically what it is saying is that it only takes a minute to change your life. That sounds all very dramatic, doesn't it but it is true. Usually something will happen, or someone will say something or you will have an epiphany  and you are forced into action.

I had that the other day, I won't go into details but someone said something to me that really got to me and I thought about it and the more I thought about it the more I wanted to do something, not to prove this person wrong but to prove to myself that I can do things if I put my mind to it.

So as the book says I had that one minute where I thought f**k, I better change here. I know that it is slow process and things won't happen over night but if I remember that minute and what was said to spark me then I should be on the right track.

That is the secret as I wrote above, it is to keep remembering that moment and to act on that because if you don't and if I don't you and I might as well go and live in a cave somewhere and only come out to hunt deer and collect wild berries.

For those of you who are curious to what the book is I'm reading here is a link to it on Amazon. As I said I'm only a short way through it but hopefully this book and what was said to me the other will provide that spark to bigger and better things.

Watch this space!!!

Thank You 2012!!!

It has been awhile since I last posted on this blog. A couple of months in fact. What is my excuse, I hear you ask. Well, I suppose there are a couple of them. In November I was concentrating on the Nanowrimo competition. This is the event that challenges you to write 50,000 words in 30 days. They say that 50,000 words in the minimum for a novel. I managed to successfully complete that which I was very happy about. Also December is quite a busy time for the industry that I am working in at the moment. I do have a few days off now to reflect on what happened in 2012 and what I think will happen in 2013. So, Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all celebrated appropriately and are looking forward to the new year as much as I am.

What have I learned in 2012? What are the lessons that I can take away from 2012 that I can use in 2013? Lets have a look. I think that this is a good exercise for everyone and if you have a few spare minutes, try this exercise. You might learn something about yourself and discover something that you can take advantage if this year.

What have I learned in 2012?

1. I have learned who my true friends are. So thank you very much to each and everyone of you. You know who you are. It is in times of hardship that you find out about yourself and you find out about who cares for you and who really, truly wants you to succeed. It is all very well that you find someone entertaining when they are on top of the world but when they are sliding down that slippery path and you can help them get back on their feet then they will remember that for the rest of their lives. If they don't, they are idiots.

2. I have learned that it is important to plan. It is important to plan for your day to day activities, for your monthly activities and for your annual activities. I am not the best at planning for the future even though that was my job for five years in Japan. I have found that if you take a few minutes to sit down and plan then activities can become a lot more easier and as long as you take action on those plans.

3. Things don't happen overnight. For example, this year I want to lose weight but I continue to eat sweet food and not exercise and then when I do eat a salad and spend one hour on the cross trainer I expect to have a six pack the next day. Unfortunately life doesn't work that way. My friend gives me grief for starting things and never following through with it. But I keep on doing all the same things. What was it that Mark Twain said? The definition of insanity is doing all the same things but expecting different results.

4. Working in the hospitality as been interesting and I am really appreciative of the opportunity I have been given in 2012 to work in a catering company and it is interesting that I have always wanted to try and work in bar, I never thought that it would be at the Awapuni Racecourse though. One thing that I have learned is that I would rather be on the other side of the bar, not serving it. I have had some wonderful, both positive and negative experiences at the bar and have gained some great knowledge about life. I understand know that you have to go with your gut when presented with work to do. So often I would wait back for guidance when I knew what to do and should have done it.

5. Cashflow. No, not the Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad board game. I have been slack with cash flow the last five years, relying on other people to bail me out when I needed it. For someone who is at my age, this is not good. I have learned that even if you do have a dream and you do want to build a business, you still need to pay bills and eat and you need to have cash coming in. Whether it was pride in not wanting to go back to my old job for cash or some bad advice or whatever I didn't do the correct way. Lets just say that it has been nice in 2012 to get some money coming into the kitty.

6. I like living in Japan, especially in Tokyo. I lived in and around Tokyo for nearly 15 years and I effectively grew up there. I was educated in New Zealand but I became an adult in Tokyo and I would love to go back there in the near future. Whether that is this year or next, I'm not sure.

7. When I put my mind to it I can accomplish things. When I don't give 100% to what I want to do i just give a typical Blair Leighton half assed effort which is not good for anyone and frustrating to myself and the people around me. In November I was determined to finish 50,000 words in the Nanowrimo competition and I did it. It was difficult and challenging at times but to get there was very satisfying and I will if I can like to do it again in 2013.

8. I am fat. I don't exercise enough and I eat the wrong foods, especially too much sugars and junk food, period.

9. Many people have told me over the years and they still tell me now that I am an intelligent person. It is just recently that I have thought about who says these things, who I hang out with and who I talk to. I realize that if I wasn't intelligent these particular people wouldn't say what they say and more importantly they wouldn't hang out with me.

10. One of the most important things I have learned in 2012 is that no matter how bad things are going you can always make the decision to turn them around and that can happen this second. You have two choices, the first choice is to wallow in your mediocrity and just follow the crowd or you can make the decision to do something about it, make the decision to set a goal and follow through. Take appropriate action and to always focus on it and accomplish it.

I wish you all well for 2013. I hope that you can achieve everything that you put your mind to and lets say that we meet in 365 days time to review 2013 and it isn't a sob story but a story of all different achievements and accomplishments. Happy New Year everyone.

10 mistakes I make everyday in my work effectiveness and how to fix them

As regular readers of my blog will know I am working in a menial job and have failed in a job that I didn't really give 100% to. Even in my job now, I don't really give 100% and even though at times I work long hours, I don't really work hard and sometimes that is frustrating.

What are 10 mistakes that I make on a daily basis and how can I fix them? Lets have a look.

1. They say if you fail to plan then you plan to fail. I am not a great planner, in fact I can say that I am a lousy planner. Even today I had a whole lot of things to do at my work and went from task to task with no structure in my work and in the end I just had to sit down for five minutes and think about what I had to do, prioritize them and get started on the most important thing on the list. I think I have talked before about the difference between urgent and important. Urgent things are going to make you feel good while important things are going to get you somewhere.

2. I think from the moment I get up, and this can take a while I have no drive. I mope around thinking that I should get going because I am going to be late for work. I know that if I wake up earlier and do my novel writing or do some reading or even write this blog post then I start the day on a good note. I get some momentum going and if I finish a task successfully then I'm looking to start something else. All of my life I have decided that staying in bed is the better option. Maybe that attitude is why I am where I am.

3. Yesterday in my blog post I talked about procrastination and this is what hinders my work effectiveness. If I follow the suggestions in this blog then I should be on the way up.

4. I have a tendency and this is been with me all of my life, I tend to find the most difficult ways of doing things. Also I don't think big picture and will spend a large amount of time doing things that are not very important and should only take a few minutes anyway. I noticed that last week. I was working with a particular guy and he would be doing three things at once and I would do my one thing and of course his way was much more effective. This comes back to I should have just thought about it and it would have cut off a lot of time.

5. I don't do the hard things. I shy away from it. In financial planning I didn't do the cold calling. In my current job, if we have something heavy to be moved I am nowhere to be found. I run away. I think I have written before that I am better if I run towards my problems, to embrace them, to say that I want to have them in my life to help my grow and in the same way if there is something difficult to then my hand will be up, volunteering to do the job.

6. People consider myself as being quite punctual. I will get to a meeting with lots of time to spare. But when it comes to getting up and going to work I am always exactly on time or even a couple of minutes past the time I should be. Only on precious few occasions do I actually get to work super early and prepare thoroughly.How can I fix this? Set my clocks forward 15 minutes? Think about the fun that I will have when I get there?

7. I don't use my intuition at work. Especially at the job I am at now I have to find out whether or not it is OK from a superior before doing it. On the occasions that I do something, the bosses usually back my work anyway, so what am I scared of? I know this isn't really good advice but what is wrong for just going for it. Throwing caution to the wind. Sure I am going to make mistakes but in all reality I am going to get results rather than playing it safe.

8. I don't work at a good pace. The Japanese have borrowed a saying from English and it is "my pace." That is certainly me. I do everything at a sedate pace. Some people at work have asked me if I am ever busy because they think that I never look it. Brian Tracy talks about trying to improve 0.1% everyday. What if I work at a pace 0.1% faster than the day before? After 100 days of work I would be working 10% faster. That is doable.

9. They say that work is work and it shouldn't be a place to socialize but you do spend a third of your life with these people so it would be better if you get to know your colleagues so then if you do have lunch with them you have something to talk about. I tried to talk to them today but one said that i am too brainy for them. Obviously I wasn't reading the situation very well and should provide more appropriate topics for discussion.

10. I think this is so important that I will write it again, my planning is terrible. Just take five minutes to plan and the whole day will be more productive.