Your journal can be your guidebook to lifelong success!

Are you keeping a journal? As a writer you should be and it can be your best friend.

A journal is a working tool that you can, and should, refer to each day. It can be a source of ideas and opportunities that will increase the power of your life and grant you a fulfilling year.

Here’s how to create one that’s truly powerful and will be a source of pleasure to work with.
To start, realize that you want your journal to be more than a diary. You want it to reflect the daily occurrences of your life, true, but you also want it to be a learning tool for both yourself and those who use it after you. You want to refer to your journal for ideas and strategies that you’ve thought of, but you don’t want to wade through the dozens or hundreds of pages just to find the idea you’re looking for.

So let’s start with the physical structure of your journal. Any collection of paper will do, but to get the very most from your journal, you should have a perfect bound book. That means we’re not talking about three-ring binder paper, or high-school notebooks. You can use these if you want to, but they’re not going to help you to achieve your goals.

The more professional your journal looks, the more likely you are to bring it with you everywhere.
By the way, if anyone asks you what it is, tell them it’s the most important life tool you’ve ever created. It’s your journal. Be proud of the fact.

Number all the pages in the upper right hand corner. Any location is fine, as long as you can get to a page quickly. Make sure you identify the book with your name and your contact information.
Yes, a reward will be offered for the safe return of the journal. As you create your journal, you’ll find it’s worth a lot more than you think it is right now.

Page one is the index of your journal. This will take two or three pages of your journal, so give yourself enough room.

On page four you have the section called General Notes. I’ll explain what this is in the next few moments. You’ll need to leave about seven hundred to eight hundred lines for the entire year.
And that’s how your journal starts. It’s just that simple. Now let’s get to the nitty gritty. At the end of the day (or the middle of the day or at the beginning of the day) whenever you’re ready to put something into your journal, just go to the General Notes Section, and write down the date. Now, what are you going to write about? Is it something that happened to the kids, or your business, or your family, or your cooking, or your leisure time, etc.? It doesn’t matter what it is. Just ask yourself what the main topic is for this item. Let’s suppose it has something to do with your weight-loss project.
Write down, “Weight Loss, Page 5”

Go to your Index page and just below the line that says, General Notes Page 1, write Weight Loss Page 5.

Now go to page five. Title the page Weight Loss, date the first line and write about your weight loss experience.

Hey, something just happened with your business. Go to the General Notes page, write the date on the next line and follow it with Business, page 6.
Business isn’t in the index yet, so, go to the index and write just below Weight Loss, “Business Page 6.”
Turn to page 6, title it “Business” and write down what you want to say.

When you get to the end of a page but still have more to say (but the following page is another topic) just write “Continued on page…” and then write the page number of the first available page. Go to that page and continue writing.

Of course, all of this last little bit could be eliminated if you were using a binder and could add pages, but it doesn’t look nearly as sophisticated and binder paper has a tendency to tear, fall out of the binder and get lost forever.

Of course every entry is interesting and it makes for a delightful hobby. It might even be more than a little interesting to those generations yet to come. But you’ve got to make your journal more than a collection of diary entries.

Every time you write something in your journal, you should ask yourself two questions: What can I learn from this? And, how can I use this immediately to improve my life?
These are two separate sections of your journal and they may well be the largest ones. You don’t have to refer to the event that caused the revelation. The fact that you’re writing the information down in one of these two sections means you’ve already proven it to yourself and verified it with your own experience.

If you fell to the floor because you used a chair instead of a step ladder you don’t have to write about the event a second time. Just say you must use the right tool for the job. What are you going to do? Each time you have a job to do, you’ll go though a written list of the right tools needed, and you’ll make sure you have them before you begin.

Go through a painful experience with the dentist? You now decide proper cleaning and flossing will become an absolute commitment not only for yourself, but for your family as well.

Within a couple of days you’ll start to realize just how helpful a journal can be to improving your life, your health, your wealth and to achieving your goals, too.

Every week, review these two sections. Are you maintaining those decisions? If you do, your life improves. If you don’t, it won’t. That’s the real magic of a journal.

So get it started and keep it going and you will find the joy and usefulness of this wonderful tool.

Come back next time for more tips, tricks and techniques to assist you in your writing,marketing and sales efforts. Remember we're all in this together and I'm pulling for you.



Mahalo.



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Where Do Ideas Come From

Where Do Ideas Come From
(Hint: No storks involved)

Ah yes writing is a fun and satisfying pursuit, yet it is also one of the most frustrating and excruciating endeavors one can ever undertake. In a way it's just like Golf. The biggest obstacle and problem writers of all levels have is coming up with new and unique ideas. In fact the most frequent question I get is: “Where do you come up with your ideas?” The answer I give depends upon the questioner's sincerity, level of interest in writing and of course if I like them or not.

But how can one keep coming up with ideas? Is there a secret place where ideas are teeming, waiting to be picked like apples from a tree? Maybe there's a secret website or magazine just for published writer's that allows one to claim one idea a month for a year? Or is one born with them?

Ideas are the bane of all wanna bes, but it doesn't have to stop you, the true believer, that is one who truly believes in your writing ability and dream.

One treasure trove of ideas are Television and Movies. Yes these waste lands of the mind can actually be a goldmine for your idea generator. Let's face most of the junk on these days are just the same ideas regurgitated ad nauseum to the point of ridiculousness. Same with movies, and it is not like this is anything new. Let's face it there are no real new ideas out there, just adaptations of the same themes.

For instance take the story of “Jaws”. How many novels and movies have come out that repeat the theme, yet most are different enough that unless you take it apart critically you would think they are different stories (the movie “Grizzly” comes to mind as one that isn't so transparent as they even have the triangle of the Park Ranger, the Scientist and the grouchy old Helicopter pilot in place of the ship captain).

The trick is of course to take what you see and add your own spin, your own take, your own situation. It is easier than you think, if you give it any thought. There is a phrase for this technique, called:

Creative Plagiarism.

Yes it is legal and even ethical as long as you don't steal the exact names, places and language as the original. Compare say “Perry Mason” with “Matlock”, “Law and Order”, and “Boston Legal”. See any similarities? Of course. Are there differences? You bet! Would one confuse one for the other? Not really. But again they are basically the same as they are all lawyer based TV shows and they always end up with the main characters winning against all odds, based upon some small clue they pull out at the last minute.

Another example (possibly the most famous) is “Romeo and Juliet” compared to “West Side Story”. Again if one parses the two stories one finds that they are basically the same, but there are enough differences to satisfy all.

This works as well for the written word. Take an old TV show and rewrite it as a novel or short story. Modernize the characters, the attitudes and props and you have a new story. Did some movie or show eave you unsatisfied? Rewrite it in your own image.

Well this is just one of the many sources of ideas. Use these to kickstart your creativity, and once you start the creative juices flowing you will discover many resources for ideas you never realized existed.

Ideas are all around and easy to spot if you train yourself to see.

Mahalo.

Come back next time for more tips, tricks and techniques to assist you in your writing,marketing and sales efforts. Remember we're all in this together and I'm pulling for you.



Mahalo.



********************************************************************



For environmentally smart resources to help you with your Online Business check out

http://www.renspubhouse.cz.cc/products.html



Fast easy resources to help you with your marketing, save a tree by not wasting paper, be environmentally correct and have some fun and learn something to boot!

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