There are many different points of view of the stock market. Having lost quite a bit of money in stocks my father says “stocks are just too risky”, others will quote statistics like “historically stocks have yielded a better average return than other traditional forms of investing”, some advocate daytrading (only keeping each stock for a short period of time like hours or days) as a way to financial affluence.

Yesterday I fell in love. If you are not a car nut like me this will probably sound a bit silly but I fell in love with a car. I was out at a dealership and had 4 different cars that I wanted to look at, two of them were in my price range and the other two were on the upper limit of my price range. But the first car that caught my eye when I entered the dealership was a charcoal grey 500 series BMW just outside of my price range. Even though the car was a used one, it looked just like new and was obviously very well taken care of. The best thing about it though was the interior, it was fantastic, it was so good in fact that it redefined for me how good a car interior can be. Inside that car I felt right at home, there was nowhere I could look that was not made of a quality material and seemed like a natural part of the design. Before getting too caught up in a car outside my price range I decided to look at the cars I originally wanted to look at but after having had such an experience with the charcoal one none of the other cars seemed like proper cars but rather like cheap imitations of the real thing. I found myself back by the charcoal BMW for some more drooling but to my luck the dealership was closing and I left without trading in my left arm for the car.

When I was 22 I worked as a telemarketer for a while. I was selling book subscriptions over the phone. I know you are now grinning a bit and thinking “what a lousy and despicable job” and it is probably not entirely without reason that telemarketers have a bad reputation. For me though, it was a chance to learn a bit about selling and at the same time earn some money to finance my studies (and parties ). Also, at first I actually liked the job: I could offer people a good deal; the books were cheap and mostly pretty popular. Of course the reason why it was a good offer was because people would be signed up for a subscription in the hope they would later buy other books at full price but the good thing was that nobody was bound to this subscription and you could cancel it any time. Later though, the company changed its policies, not only was the price of the introductory offer increased, there was also introduced a minimum amount of books you had to buy at full price. Suddenly I did not like the deal I could offer people and I started to feel bad about selling the books. Of course my job satisfaction as well as my sales plummeted and I soon quit the job.

I think most people live in a world of shoulds : You should eat healthy food, you should not smoke, you should go to work every day, you should not hurt peoples feelings, you should love thy neighbour, etc. It all reminds me of the Henry Thoreau quote “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” as all these shoulds are present exactly because the actions are not something that comes naturally to most people and probably conflicts with their desires and passion.

Much has been written about setting goals in your life and designing your destiny instead of relying on fate to fulfil all your dreams and desires. It is no wonder that so much has been written about goal setting, as it is very important and is often neglected. But before you can plan your journey towards your goal, you will need to know where you are.

What is the meaning of life? A question I think most people have wondered about at times. The question is a general one about all people alive, but normally each individual decides what to believe according to religion, intuition or philosophy. If you are a religious person you probably think something along the lines of “God has decided on a purpose for my life” and you are confident that this purpose becomes evident in the challenges and experiences of your life. If you have a more intuitive “New Age” personality, you might believe in reincarnation and that you are on earth to learn the lessons you did not learn in your previous lives. Or if you, like me, is more philosophically inclined you have probably reached some kind of conclusion by way of arguements and counterarguements.

The game Monopoly is about competing against others in order to get the best locations where you can build houses and hotels, so that you can later demand rent from those who visit your locations. As the game progresses, each player becomes part of a feedback-loop where the rent you collect enables you to build more houses (and even hotels), which in turn let you collect more rent. The player with the best feedback-loop (and some luck) will over time start to dominate, this in turn forces the opponents to sell some of their locations and the dominance will be increased until one player has a sort of monopoly of the board.

Often when people ask me something, I want to reply “Ask Google”, as a lot of the questions and problems people have could be solved quickly by searching for 30 seconds on Google. Mostly people do not ask because they will not bother to search on Google, they either have not thought about the possibility that Google could help or they tried but could not find the answer to the problem. In this article I will try to explain my way of searching, as I rarely have a problem finding what I am after and use Google all the time for my own questions. Although the title is “How To Search On Google”, most of my tips will work on any major search engine but Google just happens to be the one I use.

Do you feel like a free person? Do you feel that you are free to do whatever you please? Or perhaps you feel like a slave to your current situation, without possibility of parole? Is your day filled with things you just have to do, but do not really want to do. If you are at the bad end of the spectrum you have probably just lost sight of your dreams and goals. Let me explain.

Even though I am not a professional cook, I would venture to say I know something about the art of cooking. My curious nature is not limited to technical issues, and in the kitchen my curiosity has led me to discover a few points that I feel are essential, if you want to be confident about your cooking skills. If you feel inadequate in a kitchen, but would like to improve, this article is for you.