Expanding Your Context
| September 30, 2009 | Posted by Roshawn Watson under Uncategorized |
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By: Roshawn Watson
For those of you who are avid readers of business-related news, there are several great content sources that you already are or should be aware of. Some of the biggest players are Business Week, NY Times Business, Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal. Incidentally, I just found out that LIBOR is offering discount subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. For example, online-only subscribers can get the WSJ for $1.99 per week while print subscribers can get it for $2.29 per week. Thus, if you are in the market for a quality business news publication, you can partake in some savings.
Disclaimer: I am not a WSJ affiliate.
Regardless of which newspaper you decide to go with, it is vitally important to realize that there is value in just reading business and personal finance news even if you choose not to pay for a subscription. Robert Kiyosaki referred to this as a context-expanding activity. In other words, even if you don’t read any information that you can directly apply, reading business news affects the paradigm through which we see the world. This can be beneficial because it opens up your mind to opportunities that you might not have previously noticed. If you are aware of such opportunities, you can capitalize on them.
Let me give you an example from Thomas Stanley’s The Millionaire Mind.
Mel thought of himself as a “big city boy,” but he was drafted into the army and was stationed in the rural South. Instead of lamenting his fate like the rest of his comrades, he chose to study the area for economic opportunities. What he found was an up and coming community with the right infrastructure to support commercial real estate. He took his first foray into real estate investing by getting his dad to cosign on a loan for a commercial building that cost $7500 . He continued buying and ended up with a net worth in excess of $10 million and a cash flow of over $750,000 annually. His expansion of context allowed him to capitalize on opportunities rather than complaining about his fate.
Do we live in world of barely enough or a world or plenty? Our answer to this simple question reveals the lens through which we see the world. Whereas one may just see unemployment and a global financial crisis, someone else will focus on the abundance of opportunities. Both are a reality, but we often choose the our focus and reality.Life is choice-driven, so don’t focus on the reality that you don’t want.
Copyright 2012, Roshawn Watson, Pharm.D., Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.
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