Pursuit of Excellence

Items in italics are direct quotes from the articles below

https://www.inc.com/benjamin-p-hardy/how-to-learn-in-2-days-what-normally-takes-6-month.html

Research has found that having clarity about your goals is essential to having motivation to achieve those goals. If you’re not clear on what you’re doing, it’s hard to be motivated. Which is why seemingly easy tasks, like sending a fax, could end up taking months. There’s a lack of clarity on how to do it, so you don’t – until either you have to or it’s too late. Can you relate? Unfortunately, having a lack of clarity is why so many people settle for less than their dreams. Said Robert Brault, author of Round Up the Usual Subjects, “We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” You want clarity so bad that you’re willing to settle for lesser goals, simply because the path to getting your true goal is less obvious. The Mormon church has seen success in training young missionaries in speaking foreign languages efficiently. The MTC uses context-based learning.

The system is simple:

    Learn a concept

    Practice and use that concept in a real-world scenario

    Get coaching and feedback

    Repeat

    Get coaching and feedback

“If you want lasting change, you’ve got to give up this idea of ‘trying something.’ You’ve got to decide you’re going to commit-to-mastery. Most people dabble. They say, ‘I’d like to change my body,’ or ‘I’d like to make my relationship better.’ These people don’t have enough detail to follow-through.” – Tony Robbins. There are four important steps to applying context based learning: get a teacher, repetition until your learning becomes unconscious, set specific goals with a hard time line, and tracking and accountability. If you want to accelerate your ability to learn then take the time to read this article and apply its process. The author outlines step 2 with four important sub-steps:

1. Repeated learning of a small set of information. If you’re playing basketball, for instance, that might mean shooting the same shot over and over. The key here is to go beyond the initial point of mastery.
2. Make your training progressively more difficult. You want to make the task harder and harder until it’s too hard. Then you bring the difficulty back down slightly, in order to stay near the upper limit of your current ability.
3. Add time constraints. For example, some math teachers ask students to work on difficult problems with increasingly shortened timelines. Adding the component of time challenges you in two ways. First, it forces you to work quickly, and second, it saps a portion of your working memory by forcing it to remain conscious of the ticking clock.
4. Practice with increasing memory load – that is, trying to do a mental task with other things on your mind. Put simply, it’s purposefully adding distractions to your training regimen.

Essentially, you want your understanding of something to be fluid and flexible. You want to be able to apply your learning in different contexts and for different purposes. Thus, you learn your skill in-and-out. I’ve quoted heavily from this article because we live in the Information Age. We have access to too much information, and it takes wisdom to discern the valuable information from the garbage. As humans, we need to start unlocking the next portion of our mental capabilities. It may require proper diet and exercise. Ultimately it requires commitment. Personally, I blog to absorb new pieces of information and at the same time teach myself new habits not just for strengthening my mind, but for reaching more people. What is your lens that you’re using to live your life. Can you make a difference?

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/active-trading/102815/how-identify-mispriced-stocks.asp

Investors hoping to maximize their gains try to identify stocks that are mispriced, creating long opportunities for underpriced companies and short opportunities for overpriced shares. Not everyone believes a stock can be mispriced, particularly those who are proponents of the efficient markets hypothesis. Efficient markets theory assumes that market prices reflect all available information regarding a stock and this information is uniform. Such observers also contend that asset bubbles are driven by rapidly changing information and expectations rather than irrational or overly speculative behavior. Many investors believe markets are mostly efficient and some stocks are mispriced at various times. In some cases, the entire market can be pushed beyond reason in a bull or bear run, challenging investors to recognize the peaks and troughs in an economic cycle. Information on a company might be overlooked by the market. Small-cap stocks are especially prone to irregular information because there are fewer investors, analysts and media sources following these stories. In other cases, market participants may miscalculate the magnitude of news and temporarily distort a stock’s price. Relative and intrinsic valuation both focus on a company’s financial data and fundamentals. Technical analysis helps investors to identify mispriced stocks to identify future price movements by the behavior of participants in the market. In a relative valuation, the P/E ratio is used to take the earnings of a company to help determine the underlying value of a company. The price-to-book (P/B) ratio is used to show how much a company’s valuation is generated by its book value. P/B is important in the analysis of financial firms, and it is also useful for identifying the level of speculation present in a stock’s valuation. Relative valuation is useful for evaluating companies within the same industry. Intrinsic value doesn’t rely on future performance. Intrinsic value is calculated using financial data and may incorporate some assumptions about future returns. Discounted cash flow (DCF) is one of the most popular intrinsic valuation methods. DCF assumes a business is worth the cash it can produce, and that future cash must be discounted to present value to reflect the cost of capital. Another way to calculate intrinsic value is through residual income valuation. Technical analysis involves looking at the price charts and trading volume to identify mispriced stocks. It’s looking at current information and determine if supply and demand issues exist and taking advantage on those price discrepancies. One approach requires in depth analysis, and the other can be done through a daily surface level inspection. What is your strategy? What is your exit strategy? Why are you doing what you’re doing?

If you are interested in creating a budget, then contact me for a financial checkup in the contact me section. Also, learn more about the self-lending principle in the mustard seed section.

This week, I’ve included The Secret to Self-Motivation | One of the Best Speeches Ever from the Video Advice YouTube channel.

“If you think you know it all, you’re a fool for sure; real survivors learn wisdom from others.”

Proverbs 28:26 MSG