I had a good time sharing all my thoughts on what you can do to become a more productive, more valuable employee at your current job. It’s all advice that I discovered on my own, so I really believe in it. As a recap, here are the entries from the series:

• Show Up Early
• Have an Opinion
• Go Beyond (or Do More)
• Help Your Boss
• Do Something Before Work

I was going to add something on “Be More Efficient” or “Be Faster” but I didn’t want to get into a whole “this is how you become more efficient at work” type of thing. Each job is very different and I don’t think that kind of advice would apply to a broad enough spectrum of jobs the way the other posts do. But I do think it’s very important—efficiency is one thing I value above many many others. If you can do your job faster than someone else, you open up the doors to doing more, having more time to help your boss out, etc. So look around you and try to find ways of getting things done that are faster and more efficient—everyone you work with will thank you.

There was one comment on one of the posts that I wanted to highlight here:

I completely agree with your “Being A Better Employee” series. Your guidelines were taught to me years ago and have served me well in being outstanding from everyone else in a company. However, there is a downside that I hope you will address — when being the best employee a company can have doesn’t translate into financial compensation or, worst yet, your boss simply wants more and more of your diligent effort. Until you can change jobs, how do you tailor your effort?

This is one of the possible downsides of becoming a better employee. Your employer might just say “Great! Keep up the good work!” And it could end at that. I don’t think I touched on any direct link between my advice and any financial reward, but I think we all expect as much. If we’re a better employee, shouldn’t we be paid like one?

And the answer to that is a little tricky. If you think you deserve more, you must make the case for it. You have to put together an argument (think of it as going to court and “winning” your own case) and present it to your employer. If they value things like efficiency and some of the other qualities the series discusses, then you might be in line for some additional compensation. But don’t expect it.

The idea behind the series was to simply become a better employee. Why? Because times are tough and if you want to hold on to your job you better show that you’re more valuable than the person sitting next to you. If you do that consistently at every job you do, then hopefully monetary compensation will follow.

But what I had in mind in writing this series is similar to weight loss—we aren’t dieting for a while so we can lose weight—we’re changing our lifestyle so we can make a permament change in our lives. If you practice all the stuff I talk about in the series simply because you want to make more money, then I think you’ll be disappointed. You won’t enjoy work as much and you’ll become extremely bitter if you don’t get the raise/promotion you hoped for. All that hard work “for nothing.”

Maybe getting a raise should be a whole other series to put together…

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There is only one scenario that I can see where I’m doing this again next year, and I saw a few people doing this last week. If there is one specific item (or two) that I’ve researched, looked into, wanted/needed for a long time, and all of the sudden there is a huge sale price on it, then go out there and get that one item. You’ll save a ton of money and it’ll definitely be worth it. But if you go just as a general browser you may end up buying stuff just for the sake of buying stuff, and that can and will hurt your finances in the short and long run.

Which is exactly what I turned into on Friday: a browser. I didn’t have any specific plan or idea of what I wanted/needed (although, seriously? I didn’t need anything). So I got sucked into buying Watchmen, which I’m looking forward to (Trent’s review was fresh in my mind). I bought a new Wii game (which I returned, I’m proud to say). And then M and I bought Guitar Hero III: World Tour, which was one of Target’s doorbusters. Regular price? $99. We paid $59. So at least it was a great deal and now we can play against each other and that will be fun.

So what did I learn about myself during this year’s mad scramble on Black Friday?

• I think I’m hooked into the whole idea of finding an incredible deal, and that means I’m willing to get up REALLY early in the morning to get them.
• I don’t value my sleep as much as think I should.
• It’s pointless and I seem to enjoy it.

One reason I kept spouting about why I was going was that I wanted to check the pulse of the American shopper during these tough times. I wanted to see if the crowds would be smaller than they were last year. The studies said that shoppers would be spending about half of what they did last year for the holidays, and so far the results from Black Friday are contradicting that. What did I see? I saw huge crowds, but not nearly as big as they were last year. The line at Target snaked around the whole store, but only for the first 20 minutes we were in there. Afterwards it was smooth sailing. I also noticed that people in JC Penny’s were very specific about what they were buying. As we were walking into the store (they had just opened), there were already people waiting to check out. They went in, grabbed exactly what they wanted, and ran out to move on to the next store.

Did people really spend 3% more than last year? Not according to what I saw.

Anyway, I won’t make any silly predictions about next year because, as we all know by now, I’m just not good at that game.

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I just started The Snowball, but I wanted to share some first impressions in case anyone out there is interested in the book.

• It’s BIG: It’s over 1,000 pages and even though a lot of it is endnotes, it’s still a huge book. Not very portable and very heavy.
• Detailed: I read and loved Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, thinking that was the definitive version. But this goes into his past more, his family, his childhood, etc. It goes a lot deeper than that book. Which you may or may not like, but all these Tom Sawyer-ish stories, I think, are excellent.
• His father was a huge influence on him. The whole “inner scorecard” thing gives you a glimpse into the inner workings of all things Warren.
• A book: There was a book that had a HUGE influence on the young, socially inept Warren, and that was How to Win Friends and Influence People. He took to that book like a personal Bible in order to get himself socially respectable, at least. Which kind of worked.
• Innate Talent: Warren Buffett has a photographic memory, and that’s one of the things that makes him so great. That, along with his passion for numbers and figuring out the odds of something, are what turned him into a great investor.
• He was an entrepreneur from day one: He was creating businesses since he was a little kid, always on the lookout of ways to make money. From pinball machines to selling gum, he dabbled in everything.

This is all within the first 120 pages, so I have a LONG way to go, but it’s very interesting to see what he was like as a young kid and all the tendencies that he had then and have developed as he matured. You could see even then that this was going to be someone incredibly special.

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Check out this story from CNN on Steve Demeter, the guy behind the iPhone game Trism. Turns out he built the phone in his spare time and after the game became a smash hit (to the tune of $250,000), he decided he’d had enough and that he was quitting his bank job to develop games full time.

How sweet is that? I think that’s the dream for any aspiring whatever that does what he/she loves on the side. For example, I would love to just write and make a living off of that. Blogging, even, would be something I’d be open to. And that’s why The Writer’s Coin is here. Do I expect it to happen any time soon? No. But when you read stories like this it reminds you why you do what you do. Steve Demeter wanted to create a game, he did, and now that’s his new job. I like to write, so I do, and I would eventually like to do that all of the time (although I MUST put in a little note here about the prospect of sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper for the WHOLE day is a little nauseating).

Read the whole article and you’ll see another similarity to blogging: more and more people are crowding into the iPhone game-developing space. No doubt motivated by stories like this one. Most of these people probably have dollar signs in their eyes, but very few will actually see this kind of success. In the hey-day of blogging it was the same thing: a couple people made a lot of money at it and after a little while even postal carriers had blogs of their own (no knock on postal carriers, my analogy machine is still waking up right now).

ANYWAY, the other thing this story reminds me of is of my own phone application. I was supposed to flesh this out weeks ago and do one of two things: hire someone out to build it or learn Java and do it myself. I downloaded some Java tools and quickly realized the scope of what I was attempting. It’s not gonna happen—not with all the whining I already do about not writing enough (and recently, not reading enough). Mine was intended for the Android operating system, which is only on the G1 right now. You can’t charge anything for these apps until next year, so I didn’t even have a business plan for it.

In the end, my phone-application idea was just another one of those ideas you think about a lot and ultimately discard. How do you know which ones to really go after and which ones to let go of, though? I’m still trying to figure it out.

Now this post is getting long and meandery and pondery, and that’s kind of annoying. I was originally going to write about how important characters are in writing and in movies, but I got distracted and annoyed. Whenever this site starts feeling like a job, I throw a tantrum and just start writing about whatever. Probably not the best thing for readers, but that’s the way it is. It’s the cool thing about having your own site—I can do whatever I want and no one can tell me what to do. But will I add more readers/subscribers/fans? Probably not.

OK I’m done.

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I’m afraid this is one of those posts where you read the title and say to yourself, “Oh boy, what was this guy thinking writing a post about religion?!” And then you start getting into the post and you realize he’s done a bit of playing around with the words in the title of his post just to lure you in, because the post isn’t really about religion, but about how something similar to religion exists in the world of investing. So if you feel tricked or fooled (or bamboozled) then I’m sorry but at least I’m telling you all this right up front, right? So doesn’t that kind of make up for the sleight of hand and warrant a “Well, maybe I’ll check out what he wants to say after all?” Doesn’t it?

There are two broad schools of thought when it comes to investing and how the market works. It’s impossible to say one is right and the other is wrong—no one can say for sure. People on both sides defend their theory with staunch ferocity, and there is oftentimes a fair bit of name calling from one side to the other. Let’s take a look at why investors and theoreticians are behaving like theologians.

Efficient Market Theory

This theory basically says that the stock market is a perfect weighing machine for public companies. There is a whole bunch of information out there and the market takes all of it into account. In other words, there’s nothing you can do to exploit this huge machine because the market is so fast and efficient that it has all the rumors, speculation, and actual numbers baked into the prices of the stocks that belong in it. So if you hear a rumor about a company possible getting this new patent approved and you’re thinking of buying that stock…forget about it. That rumor has already been taken into account.

Sound boring? It is. This theory might appeal to people who believe in fate and want to resign themselves to doing nothing because—well, it won’t matter. The market will do what it has to do and there’s nothing you can do about it. That means that picking stocks is little more than gambling, although you could rely on things like consumer sentiment to guide your decisions.

“Wow, so many people are buying these iPods now, maybe I should invest in Apple because of it.”

With the Internet and all the whatchamagadgets that are out there today, it’s easy to be tempted into becoming an EMT-ite.

The “Other” Theory

I’m not sure what this one is called, but it’s the side that famed investors like Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch fall on. It’s also the side that all those books with titles like “Pick Stocks Like Pro!” and “Beat the Market!” fall on, unfortunately.

This side claims that the market is NOT efficient. Stocks go up and down based on the same stuff that EMT relies on, only that here the investor can exploit these inefficiencies by examining the numbers behind a company. If you have the patience and the stamina to wade through LOTS of numbers, this theory believes that you can make it pay off big time.

“Wow, Johnson & Johnson is trading at a very low P/E ratio right now and their books look solid, I should invest in it.”

If you’re ever read The Intelligent Investor—(or any of the other books that mention it) the bible for this side of the argument—you’re probably heard of the term Mr. Market. Mr. Market will quote you a price every minute of the day for a given stock, but sometimes he’ll go off on these wild, moody swings that you can take advantage of. Another book I’ve read that falls squarely in this camp is Rule #1 (check out my book store for other books worth checking out).

Which is Best?

Impossible to say. But both theories bring something interesting to the table. If you believe in EMT, how do you explain Warren Buffett? Luck combined with his penchant for buying and influencing the management of certain companies? Luck alone? If you’ve done any investing at all, you know that luck eventually runs out and Warren is still going strong.

I’m not sure where I fall on the spectrum, but my man crush on Warren Buffett probably puts me square in that second group. Lately I’ve been re-examining this though, and the idea of not looking at all those numbers and trying to create meaning out of them is pretty tempting…

Then again, I love wading through baseball stats and making my opinions based on them…if only P/E ratios and balance sheets were as interesting as OBP and WHIP.

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Real smart. Shall we go to the chart?

You see that red dot WAY at the top? That’s where I patted myself on the back. Appropriately enough though, here is the image I used for that congratulatory post:

Which is appropriate because my statement now reads something to the effect of -42%. Awesome! Was this the karma gods frowning upon my gloating or is this the market gods going through a little temper tantrum?

I don’t care, all I know is that I’m not retiring for a VERY long time. So screw you market gods! As for the karma gods…I shall sacrifice a cow in your honor tonight (I’ll get it with mushrooms and swiss cheese on a sesame-seed bun). Hopefully that will make up for my stupid, stupid, stupid decision to call myself “perfect.”

Other things I said in that post that were ridiculous? How about this doozy: “I accidentally timed the market to perfection.”

Ouch! How stupid was that one? At least I sort of made up for it with this jewel: “The lesson to learn here is an old one but good one: you can’t time the market.”

So if I wrote something that stupid relatively recently, how can anyone trust anything else that’s on this site? That’s part of the fun! If you can find the other 17 instances of stupidity, email them to me, and then send me a cooler picture than the one of a yellow SUV doing a cartwheel, you get a prize.

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We all know the upside of diversification, right? You don’t put all your eggs in one basket, you spread yourself across various industries and companies, yada yada yada. That’s great and all, but did you know that you can also keep yourself sane by diversifying? My patented “Diversification Sanity” system can help you keep the crazy away while you invest responsibly!

All it takes is a little perspective—it’s easy. We all know buying stocks causes certain emotions in people, so what you need to do is buy a stock that balances those emotions out. For example, say you own stock of Wal-Mart, which has done quite well this year. It’s the OTHER stock that’s gone up. If you own Wal-Mart, you’re probably an optimist. You probably think that the economy is going to get better tomorrow and no one will be shopping at Wal-Mart anymore (”ewww…Wal-Mart??!!”) because things will be so good they’ll be buying diamond rings at Jared’s.

Now, if you own a stock like Coach, things are different. You’re probably a pessimist and you think things are about to crumble (um…crumble more?), the economy will get worse, and pretty soon we’ll all be shooting people in the back to steal their toilet paper. Luxury goods will not only lay on the shelves, they will be a symbol of all things evil and bourgeois. People will be selling their soul to the devil on E-Bay and shopping at—you guessed it: Wal-Mart.

Why is this? Because all investors are fatalists: we all think the worst possible thing is going to happen to our stocks. That’s investing for you. But by diversifying at least you can play both sides of your mental instability and protect yourself at the same time.

And for those of you that haven’t started investing yet…aren’t you excited to come into the fold?

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I’ve written before about how important lists are to becoming more efficient, finding good deals, and getting things done (and saving lives, believe it or not). I really believe that writing things down not only helps you remember, it also helps to spur action. But the other day I discovered yet another way that lists can help me with my writing.

I usually have about 5–10 ideas in my head at one time. Some of them are for this site and others are for my fiction, and all of them go into my trusty notebook. So when I wake up in the morning to write, I flip through it and see what I want to pick from. But lately I’ve had a surge of ideas and I noticed my notebook had around 15 ideas that hadn’t been “done,” and I also had a whole bunch of little pieces of paper with ideas jotten on them. So I decided to sit down and copy them all onto a new sheet of paper inside my notebook.

This was the night before I was going to—in my mind—get them all done. It was impossible, but instead of having random thoughts on random pages, I wanted to have a very specific list (very reminiscent of Getting Things Done, which I almost read)

Instead of being randomly written in as “ideas,” I labeled this sheet “To do list.” This way I wouldn’t waste time flipping through pages and wondering what I wanted to write about. Here was the list—it was a very specific, very direct map of what I wanted to do the next day.

As you would expect, this made me incredible productive the next morning. I knew exactly what I was doing and I did it. But there was also an unexpected benefit: my mind had mulled over all of the ideas I had written down. Simply writing down a prompt like “EMT vs. Inefficient Markets” (coming soon to a post near you), got my mind thinking deeply about that topic. When I woke up the next day I had new thoughts on it. I had new thoughts on almost every bullet I had added to the list. My unconscious mind, knowing what I was going to do the next day, had helped me out and thought things through a bit more for me. It’s not quite “working in your sleep,” but it’s pretty darn close.

The lesson here? If you’re going to do something even remotely creative like fleshing out things on a list, take a little time the night before to actually write them down as specifically as possible so that your mind has some time to mull things over. It’s almost like preparing for an exam or a presentation, and the more preparation you do the smoother it will go.

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M and I love to take pictures, and that’s why I bought her a Canon SD600 camera a few years back. It’s compact and takes great pictures (she helps too, of course). She’s always getting compliments about her photos and I can tell how much she enjoys taking pictures. Plus she uses it for work too. In all, it’s been one of the best gifts I’ve ever given her, or anyone for that matter.

The problem is we like going to the beach too, and we like to take our cameras (I know, not the best combo). Both of them had started making this grinding noise when the lens came out or retracted. The culprit? Sand in the telescopic lens. But no worries, the camera still worked just fine.

Until this weekend. M’s camera would no longer open and an error message showed up when you tried to start it up. This was terrible news. I called Canon and they told me it would cost $90 to fix since the warranty was out.

So, being the cheap guy that I am, I decided to try and save us some money and fix the camera myself. If I could. Here’s what I did:

• TONS of research: If you’re having a problem, odds are a bunch of other people have too and they know how to fix it.
• More research
• I talked to M about me possible opening up her baby and trying to fix it (and got the green light)
• I bought one of those eyeglass kits with the tiny screwdrivers
• I took a deep breath
• I opened it up

I was nervous because I didn’t know what I would find underneath the casing, but I had a pretty good pictorial guide of what I would find and what I needed to do, so I just followed that. After 20 minutes or so, the camera sprung back to life! Success!

It still makes that grinding noise but it’s back to working the way it did before. We saved $90 and all is well.

The lesson? You can probably fix almost anything you own if you put some time into it. Researching ahead of time is the key and then having some patience and trusting yourself.

PS If you’re going to do this, make sure you have a container or something under you—those tiny screws get lost REAL easy in plush carpets…

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by Laffy4k

This one has less to do with work and what you do while you’re there than it does with having a nice balance in your life. In other words, it might just make you feel better when you’re at work if you’ve done something beforehand (or afterwards, if that’s your style—I just can’t get much together after work).

The Before

I used to set my alarm at 8:15am at my old job. I would shut it off, drag myself to the shower, wash up, and then hurry up and change. Then get ready for work. If I ran a little behind schedule, I was rushing to make it to work on time. By the time I got there I felt like I had just woken up and I wasn’t fully “there.”Was this all I had?

The Change

Then something happened one month and I got all jazzed up about getting into shape. So I started going to the gym, but I quickly realized I was too lazy to go after work: I was tired and I just wanted to watch some TV and relax. So I started going before work. That means waking up earlier, which is a nightmare to most people, but I quickly adjusted. And let me tell you, there is nothing better than walking out of the gym after a good workout and saying to yourself, “OK, let’s go to work now.”

You feel like you’ve already accomplished something in your day and that work is merely another place you need to be at, not THE place you HAVE to be at (although, yes, I realize we all HAVE to be at work). It was a fantastic feeling.

I kept the workout for around a month and then decided to do NaNoWriMo, and that also meant waking up early to write. That was a couple of years ago and I have been waking up early ever since (mostly to write, although I did have to train for the Urbanathlon).

Without this new routine, I would not be able to maintain this blog. I wouldn’t have this great side project that allows me to practice my writing and share my opinions with others.

The Point

The point of getting up early and doing something else is to make you feel like you’re life doesn’t just revolve around working. It also gives you time to get side projects off the ground, catch up on e-mail, read, etc. There are tons of things you can decide to do with your time before work:

• Exercise
• Write
• Start a hobby
• Read
• Drink some coffee
• Watch TV, the news, etc
• Start a side business
• Learn something new

I know, I know, getting up early is a nightmare for most people. You will get used to it. Trust me, I feel weird staying in bed past 5:30am now because I’ve been doing it for so long.

In the end, having something else on the side (whatever it may be), is likely to make you a happier person and so a better employee while you’re at work. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Check out the rest of the Being a Better Employee series.

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