Rich Beyond Words

I’m involved with a company called Tempel Entertainment in Austria.

We organise fat clubbings and give away even fatter prizes.

The last prize was to be picked up in a hummer, together with 4 friends from home and to be taken in a limosuine to the clubbing.

The dude who won the prize lives in a real one horse town. He was picked up outside the church so the chaffeur could park and turn around.

His buddies were picked up along the way.

I’m the one in the orange handing out the champagne to the winners.

At the end of the vid you’ll see my daughters handing out another prize of an iphone.

Depending on whether we get permission from the council, next prize will be to arrive in a helicopter!

Marie Forleo

I guess I am leaving this announcement to the last minute, which is a reason to slap me.

I don’t reckon you are gonna be all that busy on a normal Tuesday evening. But I could be wrong.

I’m inviting you to come and partake in a live interview with Marie Forleo.

I’ll fill you in on who she is just in case you haven’t heard about her yet.

Marie Forleo is a successful business woman, choreographer, life coach and author. She wrote the book, “Make every man want you.”

She’s about to launch her Rich, Happpy and Hot programme which lasts all of 10 months where she takes you by the hand and shows you step for step how to build up a profitable business. Online.

We need more women mentors – the internet marketing scene is dominated by males.

Yours truly – me: Claudia is going to interview her.

To see a video of me and register for the interview click HERE.

Hey,

You know I’m just such a soppy thing sometimes, especially when it comes to animals.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that I’m vegan because I just can’t possibly think of eating them just to saitisfy my tastebuds. And truth is I feel darn healthy and have been told I look fantastic – I am 46 in about 45 days and stilll wear the same size from 20 years ago.

But actually I just wanted to show you this lovely video.

Don’t you think it’s gorgeous too?

And while we’re on the subject let’s talk about Louis Armstrong who was a man that came from a poor background in an era where racism was acceptable. Loius had to enter through the back door to come and play for the people who were eager to hear his music. Miles Davis revealed the same treatment in his autobigraphy.

Even though he had all odds stacked against him he became a world star. Every where in the world every one knew who Satchmo was. He put his heart into his music.

Here’s the same wonderful world video again but this time minus bambi. Check out Loui’s face, you can see with what passion he is singing.

So the point is if you dream it and take action you can do it. Louis didn’t just dream about playing the trumpet and singing songs. He picked up his trumpet and blew into it. He sang songs. He was unstoppable.  He was authentic down to the last DNA cell in his body.

You and me we can make more of ourselves. Every day is another start, another opportunity.

Sadly most people have been misguided, given false information.

Take a talented kid that loves drawing and painting. He wants to become an artist. At home and at school he is told, “Don’t be ridiculous, you’ll never make a living like that. Who do you think you are anyway? Picasso?” So the kid forgets about his paintbox and struggles through school forcing formulas into his brain that he couldn’t care less about. He lands up with a hum drum job, earning enough so he can uphold the status quo of the system. A cog in the machine.

Truth be said, Picassos painting wasn’t THAT marvellous – that’s why so many envious people said, “I don’t get it, this guy is earning millions and my 4 year old could scribble that together.” Well that’s it – they just don’t get it. Having a passion and giving up your need to always be right about everything goes a long way. Picasso felt he derserved millions – he really wasn’t hung up about it.

If you haven’t already read Stuart Lichtman’s Book – How to make money for anything fast – you are missing out. I know the title seems so how can i say? Cheesy? – but watch out because inside is a whole course on coming to terms with where you are now, who you really are, and a plan to overcome all the excuses and bullshit that is the way. It’s excellent, at least be brave enough to sign up for the FREE Mini Course.

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address to Harvard graduates of 2008: “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.”

Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

if you’re wondering why I’ve plastered this post with pictures of myself it’s because what I’m about to tell you is so darn interesting.

I was watching Galileo which is one of those TV programmes which has all sorts og interesting stuff. Anyway on this particular series some clever people were saying that each person has a left and a right face. So after seeing the experiment on TV I thought I’ve got to try this out on myself. I always knew that my left and right face is different. One look in the mirror told me so. I know my smile is skew. I was kind of shocked by the results and I nearly didn’t publish it for fear of revealing my neanderthaler aspects to the world! (Every woman likes to show only her best self) But what the heck? These are my pictures. I did this with photoshop. I ruled a line down the middle of my face and then copied the separate halves and stuck the mirror images together.

It’s like I can see my kind self and my mean self. Ouch!

Hello and hello – it’s true I’ve been very neglectful of the Rich beyond Words Blog even though every day my life is a statement of being rich. I don’t mean for this to sound like a yadda yadda brag thing because thats not my style.

But I tell you one thing I can testify to is that gratitude gets you heaps. Every day my life is unfolding more beautifully as I reach out for my dreams. And I don’t mean it in a material greedy way even though I think poverty sucks. I’m talking about feeling totally happy and grateful because the sun is out – the winter is over.

It’s so rejuvenating and often I think back to my poor days and again I don’t mean it in a material way but on reflection that time when my spirit seemed so impoverished instead of feeling grateful for what i had i was bitching and whining – even on beautiful sunny days.

But I’ll tell you one thing I went through an incredible process in the winter it was kind of like my cocoon phase and now the butterfly is emerging.

Serious.

I didn’t do it on my own I was guided by an incredible person – Dr Gayek of The Science of Being Well Networks

So I suggest you go check it out to – this is the ultimate Mind, Body & Soul programme on the internet.

I promise as of today I’ll be a good girl and blogging a lot more regurlarly.

How To Change Your Beliefs

It’s incredible what people believe to be true.

These beliefs ultimately will make or break you.

People are so sucked into the area of false beliefs.

Take organised religion for example. Organised religion keeps people in a stupor second to none.

Or the Tee Vee. What good comes out of all that crap they show on TV?

It keeps the masses right there where the so called big organisations want you. They fill you up with programmes of medoicre lives. People widshing they were richer, thinner, happier. Comedy that’s not even funny. Then come the advertisers to tell you what you need to eat, drink, do, watch,wear and be to be at all.

My friend it’s time to question what you believe about anything.

Do you have any beliefs?

Take this crazy video for example: It’s about Female Circumsicion.

[rich]TMSQPDd1B2g[/rich]

How on earth do people land up believing that hog wash?  I’d say this belief causes a lot of unnecceassary hurt and pain. And it’s totally unfounded. They don’t even have a religion they can blame it on like unfortunate muslim women. Although I read that it doesn’t say it any where in the Koran that a woman should be circumsized. And why would people want to that to a woman any way? I’m not going to get into a whole tirade of doing that to women because this post is about whether beliefs serve us or not.

If you really want to find out if your beliefs are serving you, you have to and I MEAN have to check out Byron Katie’s The Work.

In The Work you are confronted with 4 questions which will totally help you find out what you’re believing and whether this is serving you or not.

The questions are:

1. Is it true?
2. Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do you react, what happens, when you think that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?

Go check out The Work. There are free work sheets to sort out what you’re believing.

Recommendation of the Day:
Think Right Now CD’s.

Want to install a new set of beliefs about yourself?

I did. And I used Think Right Now CD’s to get there.

Quite a simple process really. These CD’s are not subliminal – you hear every word being spoken like: I am organised now.

It’s repeated 3 times with various statements, over a very soothing and relaxing one beat per second soundtrack to get the message home. The best thing is you don’t need any special time to listen to them. You can listen while you sleep or wash the dishes.

AnywayI used them and am very pleased with the results.

At least check out the Think Right Now website and sign up for a really helpful news letter!

Hi and good Morning!

If you ever feel like you’re not the smartest person around then welcome to the club. Some times I feel quite dumb especially when my kids ask me to help them with their math homework.

I don’t know how often you ever wished your IQ was higher.

But for me well I did some times wonder if we were all born equal in the brains department – take my brother and father for example. They’re clever dudes – you know Dipl. Ing stuff. But as for me I’m just me with no titles.

Now I’m not saying you have to have any of those titles to be rich because as we all know there are people out there who are not degreed to the hilt making loads of boodle.

I’m talking about when you know within your self that you are more intelligent than what you seem to be revealing.

Maybe you don’t know what exercises to do or what books to read to get that greater level of intelligence.

Or maybe you grew up like I did where men are generally thought of to be more clever and therefor encouraged more to blossom into full intelligence.

I’m sure you know what I’m trying to convey here.

Maybe you just missed out on some information oe even WORSE, you actually believe that you just don’t have what it takes to improove your intellegence.

Luckily for me I’ve opened my mind a lot.

I know now that I can always make more of me and that includes expanding my intelligence levels.

Incredible Guide to Increasing your IQ and discovering your Genius.

This product comes with loads of things you can do to:

• Improve your overall brain power

• Intellectual diversity and creativity

• Learn to solve problems

• Hone up on your reading ability

• Increase your memory

• Get your thoughts in order

• and tons more

 This system is sooooooooo comprehensive – there’s nothing like this at Amazon or any where in the Internet.  Okay there could be and I just haven’t discovered it yet. In the mean while I’ve found this and am totally over joyed with my new genius product.

Listen I spend a fortune trying out all these things.

One - because I’m curious and genuinely want to know what works.
Two – because I have a burning desire to make the most of me and my life.

You could say I’m a product junkie but you can rest assured I wouldn’t recommend anything to anyone if I thought it sucked. That would just be a sell out to my own sense of integrity.

Plenty times I’ve bought stuff and felt like I was ripped off and I don’t ask for my money back even though all these people offer a money back guarantee.

Ooooh and the bonuses … I especially love the Brain Harmonic IQ Increaser Audio.

But I can go on and on. Why don’t you just go check it out for yourself?

Wow! I read in the Mind power news Journal that I live in one of the happiest countries in the world!

The research was done by Adrian White, an analytic social phychologist at the University’s School of Psychology. He anaysed data published by UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the WHO, the Veenhoven Database, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer, and the UNHDR, to create a global projection of subjective well-being: the first world map of happiness.

Anyway Austria is 3rd on the list with Denmark being 1st and Switerland is 2nd. Actually I was very surprised when I read this because I often encounter complaining individuals. In fact I’ve met more complainers here than in other places of the world.

If you look at my contact page you’ll see that I’m often in South Africa as well. Even though they have power failures, crime and no sopcial security I find the folks there to be a rather happy bunch. Must be the African sun.

But the fact remains that the Happiness Map was constructed according to these facts – Countries that have easy access to health facilities, individual wealth and access to education contain happy people. I must admit that Austria does have all that – it’s quite a social system. Apparently capitilism does not make people happy.

You can get all the details here.

Anyway to show you how i happy I am here’s a picture of me working in my pjamas!

Any one that can work from home in their pjamas has a reason to be happy!

It wasn’t always this way – I used to have the blues – not because I was picking cotton – just because…. I just decided to get happy cos i was so sick and tired of myself. I didn’t do it with feel good drugs – Don’t laugh I did it by listening to CD’s at night while I slept.

It was about that time whilst listening to the CD’s I thought to myself , “Hmmn now all I need is to learn how to make money online so I can stay at home.” So I promptly looked around and did Tellman Knudson’s Ultra Marketing Course which is all explained in baby steps and got me up and going.

Seriously I’m always learning and finding things to take my level of happiness further.

Another thing I’ll say is that I find the statement about how money can’t buy you happiness a bit ridiculous. Okay, okay I know some folks will take offence but for one thing money does open your possibilities but you know what’s the most insane thing? You have to find how to be happy first – you have to align your thoughts with those emotions you’d be having as if you already had everything you think will make you happy. Phew not so easy, and even me - I have relapses but am getting better and have my CD’s to listen to when I fall back into the pits.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s78jm5PIUDI]

Byron katie has such a good way of ending the internal suffering which a lot of us tend to impose upon our selves.

I love the way she handles these situations. She calls them enquirys.

It’s worth watching the video and then going to her website and downloading a mini sample of her book “The Work”.

Yes I’ve done it.