Tax time is definitely a pain.

The U.S. tax code is a lengthy document (over 50,000 pages at last count) that few people can really understand (including our current Secretary Of The Treasury which is somewhat frightening).

It’s riddled with puzzling (and at times hilarious) questions such as these gems which I encountered over the weekend:

Did you rent a farm and receive part of the crop instead of cash for the rent?

Why yes I did!  I’m sure glad someone at the IRS thought to include this question otherwise I might have missed it.  And this one:

Enter the amount of any gambling losses, but only to the extent of gambling winnings. It is important to keep an accurate diary or similar record of your gambling winnings and losses.

Umm….ok, nice to see the government giving gambling advice.

But I guess I can’t get too upset at the government acting very…well, government like.  They don’t know any better.

But a private company…well that’s another story.  And this is what I always found especially infuriating about Intuit’s TurboTax product.  It’s not just that it’s a bad piece of software – it’s that it’s bad yet so darn successful!

• It gets TONS of negative reviews on Amazon.com, but since there are over 40 different versions listed (they put up new ones each year) their bad reviews keep getting pushed down.
• It has “designed obsolescence” – which means they went out of their way to break it every year so you’d have to buy it again.
• It’s user interface looks like it was designed by programmers and accountants instead of normal people.

This is why I was so excited to see someone finally come along and clean TurboTax’s clock.

The last two years I’ve used TaxACT.com and it is a breath of fresh air.  It is fast, clean, simple, and makes sense out of incomprehensible IRS documents (perhaps their most impressive feat).

By the way, I’m not getting paid to recommend them.  They are just that awesome that I wanted to tell people about it.

Best of all, it is way cheaper than TurboTax.  Filing your federal return is FREE.  If you want to do a state return it’s just $9.95.

Overall, I’m so impressed with these guys – they nailed a great freemium product, probably put up with TONS of hassle getting it to work with the IRS, and have a product that really beats the pants off TurboTax.

Even if you have been using TurboTax for YEARS, it’s time to BREAK the addiction, stop paying your money to Intuit each year for their inferior product, and make the switch to TaxACT.com.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

P.S. Doing your taxes is way easier if you’ve been doing your financial statements each month!

Generally speaking, if you are answering your phone, opening snail mail, chatting, emailing, even talking with other people at all…you are NOT working.  Sorry to say it but you’re not.  Work is when you are alone, by yourself in your room, with all communication devices turned off.  20 minutes later you’ll actually be in the zone and then you’re really working.  That’s when you get real writing done.  That’s when you can strategize about the next moves for your company.  That’s when you can design great marketing.  That’s when you can design great art or great engineering.  That’s where breakthroughs happen.  That’s when you see connections between completely different ideas and how they could be better together.  That’s when you really produce instead of just reacting to things all day.

It’s a fragile state that you can be broken out of easily too with any sort of interruption.  Doing this type of intense mental focus isn’t easy, and it’s quite rare to do it for 8 hours a day (it’s like sprinting for 8 hours a day – you’ll need a long recovery period).  But it’s totally reasonable to do this for maybe 3 or 4 hours a day, staggered with periods of rest.  Most people have huge mental routines to prepare themselves for these intense sessions, and we avoid them psychologically.  Ok…first get coffee, then browse headlines, ok finally settling in for some work…put on favorite soundtrack…..avoid a dozen other temptations…and GO.  And usually every 90 minutes or so you’ll have to break out of that state and take a mental breather for 20 minutes.  You need the breaks to recover mentally and physically to keep blood sugar up etc.  It’s a mental marathon.  But it’s also the only way to get real work done.

Link to the video here.

Try to have more of these intense mental sessions every day on something you love and have the potential to one day be the best in the world at.  It could be practicing guitar, or it could be building the next great web company.  Stop talking about doing something and go do it today in an intense, focused session.

Case in point: someone recently started spamming my tutoring site with messages like these:

This type of scam shows up often on CraigsList.com and it just recently hit my site for the first time.

By the way, if you haven’t seen it before it goes like this: the person makes an offer to pre-pay a large amount up front. They send you a phony money order. After you’ve received the fake money order they say they are going to have to cancel and ask for a partial refund. You send them a refund (with real money), and a week later the bank comes back to inform you that the money order you tried to deposit was fake.

You can spot these because usually (1) the person is out of country (2) the grammar is poor (3) they will refuse to talk to you on the phone (3) they want to make a large payment up front.

Manual Process vs. Automated Process

It’s annoying for the tutors to receive these messages, and it might be tempting at this point to create a “manual review” process where a human being would look at each tutor request before it gets sent.

This however, wouldn’t be very passive.

Instead, you can often use your “community” of users to be a police force for you. Wikipedia (and a number of other sites) have employed this model very successfully with a self policing community.

The solution I came up with was to add this line to the end of all emails:

Then I built a little system so that if enough people report the spammer, the account will get deleted and they won’t be able to bother anyone else.

Some interesting things to think about when building a system like this:

1. If you notify the spammer that their account has been banned/blocked. They will probably start using new email addresses or be more motivated to get around your system. Instead, I set it up so the spammer gets NO INDICATION that their messages are being blocked. That means they will happily go about trying to send new messages and working hard…UTTERLY WASTING THEIR TIME as punishment. Maybe this subtle form of punishment will eventually cause them to reconsider their line of work since it will accomplish nothing.
2. You don’t want to ban the person if just one person flags them as a spammer. The tutor could use this maliciously if they want to avoid getting negative reviews or block the user for any other reason. Therefore you must try to get a “consensus” from the community by getting a few different opinions. The exact right number is debatable, but the more people mark them as a spammer the more confident you can be about banning them.

Most business owners don’t think about the cost of answering one extra phone or email. “It will just take a second” they say. It makes them feel busy (which is very different than being productive) to solve easy problems. Instead, they should be working “on” their business, not “in” it.

If you want to make a truly passive business, you need to put systems in place to handle 99% of whatever might happen automatically. Even if your automated solution works only 90% as well as the human solution, it will still be worth it. Every phone call or email DOES count, because you want to scale your business up to 100 or 1,000 times it’s current level without hiring any employees. Hiring employees isn’t the answer (managing/hiring/firing them is just another job and isn’t passive). Instead, focus on building business systems to automate as many tasks as possible.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

What part of your business do you wish you could automate? Post a comment below.

This is going to be my first video blog. I’m trying out a new format. Please let me know which one you like better (written or video) in the comments!

A couple things I noticed on the video that I think could be improved: I’d like to keep it shorter and denser with information. Also I realized that I never sound very EXCITING when I talk. I think doing more video blogs over time I’ll get better. Probably a combination of video and some written outline or graphs could be a good combination. Let me know what you think!

Here is the written equivalent…

I’ve practiced this for a long time myself, but it just occurred to me again the other day and I thought I’d post about it: in general the mainstream news (television, radio, and print) is an utter waste of your time. And worse than that, it’s probably preventing you from becoming successful.

There are a few reasons why…

1. The News Is Full of Negative Stuff

The old saying in media is true that “if it bleeds it leads”. The news tends to overreport negative events like murders and crashes because it gets ratings. You can’t help but have these things affect you over time, and it slowly but surely starts to make you think the city is dangerous, or that the world is hostile, or that opportunity isn’t out there. All of course are incorrect, but whatever you spend time watching and reading becomes your reality.

2. The News Is Designed To Scare You As Entertainment

The story of the little girl who was kidnapped is addictive to watch. It robs you of your time. The story is designed just like an entertainment show, to keep you hooked waiting for what will happen next.

Some people would say its important to watch this because it gives you valuable safety information. We can prove to ourselves that this isn’t true by looking at the statistics.

Statistically, you are very unlikely to get kidnapped, die in a plane crash, or to choke on a small plastic toy. Yet this is what gets the media attention. I wrote about this a while back, how humans are bad at estimating risk. After 9/11 many people were scared to fly, and this perception caused about 1.4 million people to drive instead of fly to their holiday destination, effectively killing about 1000 people in additional auto fatalities (you’re much more likely to be killed in a car crash than a plane crash).

The news isn’t giving you valuable safety information on things that are likely to kill you (it’s boring to report on heart disease), its designed to scare and keep you watching.

3. It’s Biased

I couldn’t believe it the other day when I accidentally spent a few minutes on Fox News and then on CNN as I flipped through the channels. Fox news was essentially crucifying Obama while CNN was vigorously defending him. Of course not directly, but by the guests and hosts on the show.

I couldn’t believe how blatant it was. In theory the news should just report the facts and let us make up our own minds, but they (mainstream media) can’t even do that today it seems.

4. It’s For The Most Part, Irrelevant

99% of the stories you see on the news can never, and will never affect your life, period.

The reason is that its tailored to a wide audience. So you will have to wade through all sorts of junk you don’t care about that wastes you time to get 1 or 2 nuggets of useful information.

The Solution

So if mainstream news is a colossal waste of time that is polluting your brain with negative thoughts, what is the solution?

The first step is to spend as little time on it as possible. Reading a book on marketing could make you an extra $100,000 this year whereas watching a show on a tornado 1000 miles away will never affect your life one bit.

So, I spend about 20 seconds (literally) per day reading the news. This is no joke.

I do it with a new aggregator service that delivers articles to my inbox (I use Yahoo News, but Google News is great too). I just scan the first 5 headlines or so (they are ordered by importance) and delete. If I see something that is interesting or could really affect me (which is rare), I read deeper. This is better for a few reasons…

Its fast. With about 20 seconds per day of scanning headlines, you can know enough to know what’s happening in the world. At least as much as any reasonable, intelligent person needs to know.

Its unbiased. News aggregator services send out news based on what is being said in hundreds or thousands of news sources. You get the most important based on collective thought, not one person’s agenda.

Its more targeted. You can get email updates on specific areas like business, sports, or whatever is important to you.

Try it out. And with all your extra free time you should start reading and watching material that is WAY better than the news. You should be watching speeches by important innovative leaders in your field, blogs in areas that interest you, and listening to audio books in your car instead of the radio.

In fact, every morning while I’m eating breakfast I don’t read the newspaper. I read blogs (in Google Reader) like Signal vs. Noise, Seth Godin’s Blog, and The Four Hour Work Week to fill my mind with relevant, though provoking, educational, motivating material. And then I go take on the day. Because of this I’m much more effective during the day than if I’d started it by watching a story on Britney’s trip to rehab. Blogs in many ways are the new unbiased, educational, positive newspapers for successful people I think.

I went back and reviewed some of my 2007 new years resolutions. Some I had accomplished (buying my first investment property and making it cash flow) and some are still in progress (sale of a business). But in all honesty, the majority of them I had not accomplished, primarily because they are no longer goals. I guess my goals change often.

Nevertheless, I think its awfully worthwhile to write your goals down (and far more often than once a year!). Here are a few tips on your 2008 resolutions:

• Write them down
  Goals in your head are no more than ideas. Writing them forces you to get all the details. (Yes, typing counts)
• Make them measurable
  Saying “I want to earn more” isn’t measurable. You can never know if you actually achieved it or not. Saying “I want to earn $76,500 in the year 2008″ is measurable.
• Don’t forget the how
  Careful what you wish for. Saying “I want to weight 146 lbs” doesn’t specify how. There are some unhealthy ways to accomplish that, and you want to be specific.
• Keep it positive
  Focus on what you want, not what you don’t want. Instead of saying “I stop hating my boss”, try “I get a raise and promotion”.
• Use the present tense
  Saying “I’m going to…” or “I will try…” is weak. Write the goal as if it has already taken place. “I date Heidi Klum.”
• Make them ambitious yet possible
  Force yourself to reach, but if you make them too ambitious you’ll be disappointed. There should probably about a 50/50 chance of accomplishing it in your own mind.

• Make them public
  I don’t always recommend telling your goals to people who won’t be supportive, but making them public in a supportive place will help you stay on track. We’re more likely to follow through with peer pressure, which is why…

You have the opportunity to write your #1 goal to accomplish in 2008 below. Please leave a comment (sticking as best you can to the guidelines above, doesn’t have to be perfect). If you leave your email, I promise I’ll check up on you before the end of 2008 to see how things are going!

Robert Kiyosaki makes a great point about this in Cash Flow Quadrant (aff), as have many other authors, that just because you’re self-employed it doesn’t mean you are financially free. Many entrepreneurs end up buying themselves a job – sure they don’t have a boss, but they are still putting in 10-12 hours per day. (Typical examples include shop owners, or businesses where you are the primary talent, like consultants, etc).

But, I’m starting to realize that it’s not a clear answer most of the time whether income is passive or not. It typically exists along a spectrum, and I like to find out where it is on the spectrum by asking this question: If you were to disappear to Tahiti, how long would you continue to earn money?

Here are some examples along the spectrum…

• A blue collar job – only paid when you clock in, you don’t get paid for even 1 minute you aren’t there.
• A white collar job – you could sneak in late or take a long lunch (a few hours), but you also get time off for sick leave, and vacation…so a few weeks in some cases
• Mom & Pop shop owner – You’ve got to be there each day to open and to close, so typically no more than a day or two if you can get someone to cover for you.
• Mom & Pop shop owner with management (or kids) – once they get management, they make a lot less money, but could potentially disappear for a few weeks to a month. The problem is that if you leave for much longer than that, the business will start to deteriorate. Theft, dirt & grime, laziness of employees, etc start to creep in. Only what’s measured gets done.
• Self-employed business owner – this is like my tutoring business…it would continue to earn money for a month or so if I disappeared, but income would steadily decline as I wasn’t bringing in new clients, sending paychecks, etc.
• Owning real estate that you manage yourself – Could last six months probably without you doing anything, but it may not be prudent to do so. Tenants would call with repairs, could miss rent, etc. Some upkeep is required.
• Owning real estate with a management company – Could disappear for a year or so and the checks would continue to come in. You may need to be called once in a while for massive repairs, lawsuits, or insurance claims (fairly rare events).
• Passive investor – As a passive investor (think large appartment buildings, shopping centers, hedgefunds, REITS, stocks, LLC’s, LLP’s, etc) you could literally disappear for several years, having never seen the business, and you wouldn’t need to feel guilty. It’s someone else’s job to manage the project day to day.
• Handing all your money to a financial planner – again, several years.

This is part of the reason I’m transitioning more and more into real estate right now (it has other factors like rate of return and tax benefits that I think make it better than stocks or typical financial planner type investments too).

Some of the mentors I’m working with own apartment complexes that they literally haven’t been to in years. They don’t have a key to the place. They wouldn’t even know how to get on the property if they had to. Their phone number isn’t listed on any registry of people to call. And that’s exactly how they want it!

How long could you disappear from you current (or ideal) job, and continue to earn money?

Well today, I’m going to share the second secret I use to getting more learning done, and this one works well even if you aren’t an “audio learner”. If you learn best by actually seeing words on a page, instead of hearing someone speak, then this will work well for you.

The secret is: speed reading. Yes, it is real and it works. In fact, it’s not just speed reading, but speed comprehension too.

Before I learned this, I always had the assumption that speed reading was bogus, or that people were basically skimming the material without getting full comprehension.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it in fact is real, and it does work.

Here’s a simple explanation of how:

When you first started reading you had to look at each letter in a word and sound them out, right? “C” sounded like “cuh”, “A” sounded like “ah”, and “T” sounded like “tuh”. That spelled “cat”.

But eventually, as your reading improved, you didn’t have to look at each letter. You could just look at the whole word and your brain would instantly recognize “cat”.

Your brain did this on it’s own without any special training.

Well, in the same way that you don’t have to look at each letter to read a word, speed readers don’t have to look at each word to read a sentence. They can look at a phrase, or entire sentence, and just SEE it all at once. High speed cameras can be used to watch the eyes of speed readers and see that they only have one or two focal points per sentence or even paragraph!

This sounds difficult, like you would need some genius ability to accomplish it, but almost anyone can do it with practice. With a series of exercises you can slowly retrain how your brain reads.

Reportedly, John F. Kennedy was able to read at an incredible pace, and there have been a number of other famous speed readers throughout history. But one thing is for sure: the benefits are enormous.

If you could just double your reading rate (which is what I was able to do in one month), then you are now able to cover twice as much material in a given day. Either that, or you can do the same material you are doing now in half the time!

There are two ways you can learn to speed read. What I did was take a self taught course, using this book which I’d recommend on speed reading.

I did a series of exercises that took about a half hour per day, for one month. At the end of that time, my reading rate had doubled (with the same level of retention, which is tested as well). My reading rate continues to grow today.

To be honest, it was not easy to do those exercises. Some days it was boring, and I really didn’t want to do them. But I’m so glad that I did, because doing those for one month, gave me an incredible investment in myself that will repay itself MANY times over for the rest of my life!

Of course, if you don’t feel like you have the discipline to make yourself do all those exercises, you can always take a local speed reading course, which I highly recommend as well.

If you read for an average of one hour per day, then speed reading is like getting an extra hour of reading done every day. How would your life be different if you read for an extra 365 hours every year, for the rest of your life? What would you do with all that extra knowledge? All those extra books? I have no way of knowing, but it sure is exciting to think about. You owe it to yourself to learn to speed read, so get started today! This book is a good place if you have the dicipline, or you could sign up for a speed reading class.

Either way, if this sounds exciting, take some action RIGHT NOW to make it happen before you have a chance to forget.

In the next post in this series, I’ll share with you one final tip I use to get more learning done EVERY day, without spending any additional time.

Generally speaking, PEOPLE DON’T CHANGE.

You can beg them, plead with them, argue logically with them, appeal emotionally to them, and threaten them, but at the end of the day those people will fall back on their old habits. In fact, you could say that human beings are little more than habit forming machines! The only way we can change is from within. By deciding we will change for ourselves, not because someone else wants us to.

I remember reading a story about a martial arts master who had studied and taught for more than 30 years. After getting his black belt in judo at a young age, he went on to study many other disciplines including Tae Kwon Doe, Thai Kickboxing, Brazilian Jujitsu, and Kung Fu. One day he was leaving his house when a carjacker ran up to him and waved a knife in his face, demanding his wallet and keys. Instinctively, the master disarmed the man and threw him to the ground in one perfectly executed judo throw. The police were called, the carjacker was arrested, and the master took a moment to let his adrenaline subside. It was then that he realized what had happened. Despite studying martial arts for 30 years, it was his oldest habit of judo that his brain reverted back to in his moment of need.

It had been imprinted upon him through REPETITION at a young age, and never left despite years of additional training. How can we use the power of habits to our advantage? The secret lies in repetition.

Building positive habits into your daily routine is an essential skill that all successful people use. When they face an insurmountable problem, they break it into small chunks and build a new habit to chip away at it.

For example, let’s say you had a sales target of $1 Million this year for your business. Why not develop the HABIT of spending half an hour on marketing every single day for a year.

Let’s say you wanted to lose 50 lbs? Why not develop the HABIT of jogging for 20 minutes five days a week.

Let’s say you wanted to write a book. Why not develop the HABIT of writing non-stop for an hour, three days a week.

Unsuccessful people will get super motivated one day and try to do it all at once! They might work for 12 hours straight on marketing and spend their entire budget, starve themselves and run 5 miles in a day, or write furiously for an entire weekend. After expending all their energy, they’ll be exhausted and quickly slip back to their old habits. Moreover, they will be disappointed at the mediocre results, and the painfulness of the experience will condition them not to try it again.

Successful people, on the other hand, take a different approach because they understand the power of HABITS. They don’t over exert themselves! Instead, they break it into small steps. Spending half an hour a day on marketing is easy enough and can even be an enjoyable activity, jogging for twenty minutes fits nicely into their schedule, and writing for only an hour leaves their mind fresh and full of ideas.

A year later the successful persons’ superior HABIT will have paid off ten fold and the unsuccessful person will be in the same spot they were a year ago.

Aristotle once said that: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

What major problem have you been facing in your life or business? Looking at the whole thing can be scary and lead to avoiding it all together. Instead, break it into small chunks, and develop the HABIT of doing a little bit on a regular basis.

I call this “creative avoidance” (I don’t think I came up with this, but I can’t remember where I saw it first). The stress of making this important decision is painful, and since our minds are designed to avoid pain, it will “invent” small easy tasks to fill your time.

The problem with tough decisions and creative avoidance is that they can be huge time wasters. The decision causing you all that stress is typically the most important thing you need to get done that day, but it’s also the only thing you aren’t making progress on!

About a year ago I was starting a new company. I had made lots of progress by incorporating, developing the product, deciding on a name, and plenty of other things, but I just couldn’t decide on a logo. I had hired someone to make some sketches, but none of them came back great. Then I designed a bunch on my own, but none of them looked quite right. Finally, I had a few of my graphic artist friends put together some sketches, and still nothing was jumping out at me as being perfect!

As I sat there will all these sketches in front of me (actually they were thumbnails on my computer), I just couldn’t make a decision. I narrowed it down to about 5 designs, and asked the opinion of some friends. Their comments varied so much that there wasn’t a clear winner. This was starting to really stress me out, and my creative avoidance kicked in! I tried working on other things like the website, press releases, and the final revisions to the product, but everywhere I turned the logo was holding me back. I couldn’t launch the website without a logo, I couldn’t send out a press release without a logo, and I couldn’t engrave the product with my logo!

I realized one day that this logo decision was holding back my entire progress and I’d probably spent far too much time on it already. I resolved to decide that day, no matter what, and just went with my gut instinct. I really wasn’t sure I’d made the right choice at the time, but it allowed me to make progress and freed up my mind to focus on more important things.

This story illustrates an important point: AS ENTREPRENEURS WE MUST BECOME COMFORTABLE WITH INDECISION.

Part of the job description is that there will be tough decisions to make and it’s our job to make them! In fact, whenever a tough decision comes up, take a moment to say to yourself “awesome, this is why I’m so successful, I take tough decisions and make the right choice, I’m about to make some big progress”.

Don’t allow yourself to be paralyzed by decisions. I’m sure you’ve been to meetings before where everyone talks and talk but nothing is decided! It’s very frustrating, but the reality is that everyone is too scared of making a mistake down the road, so they don’t act and nothing gets done.

As it turns out some great research has been done on the topic of decision making and EIGHTY PERCENT OF DECISIONS SHOULD BE MADE RIGHT NOW, EVEN IF YOU ONLY HAVE PARTIAL INFORMATION!

Of course there are those few decisions that have such far reaching implications, it’s worthwhile to get some more info. The way you remove the stress from these big decisions is by deciding a date to make the decision, no matter what.

Even if you still don’t have all the information by that day, you must decide. If everyone involved knows there is a deadline to make the decision, they can plan around it and minimize their worry.

I think you will find that your fears about making the wrong decision are almost always overestimated. We as human beings tend to vastly overestimate that type of thing.

General George S. Patton had a few choice words on this subject, including:

“Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality in a good leader.”

and

“I would rather have a good plan today than a perfect plan two weeks from now.”

Thank you George!

How does quitting your job improve your health? Here are a few ways:

1. You Actually Get Enough Sleep
   If you’re like most Americans, you don’t get enough sleep. Many factors contribute to this, such as the long hours many companies require, rush hour traffic requiring you to leave earlier and earlier, and all those great programs on late night television (just kidding!).In all seriousness though, sleep deprivation is a big problem. As a result, many employees ending up drinking many cups of coffee or drinking caffeinated soda every morning to try and stay awake. It usually doesn’t work and can take it’s toll on your body.While caffeine can make it difficult to fall asleep, it sure doesn’t make it fun (or productive) to be awake. The National Commission on Sleep Disorders estimates that sleep deprivation costs U.S. companies $150 Billion each year. Terrible disasters such as the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown and the Exxon Valdez oil spill were both linked to extremely sleep deprived workers.When working for myself, do you think I feel guilty about taking a nap in the afternoon? Of course not! I’m my own boss and I know what’s best for own body. It’s been a long time since I worked for someone, but being in a constant state of sleep deprivation is one thing I won’t miss.By the way, if you find yourself wide awake at night, and totally exhausted during the day, you have something called delayed sleep phase syndrome. I struggled with this for years when I was younger. I talked with several doctors about it and it went unresolved for years. Finally, a friend told me about light therapy you can use to reset your circadian rhythm (your biological clock). If you suffer from this problem as well, you can check out the home treatment option I used.After all those years, this was the one thing that really helped me adjust my sleeping schedule.
2. Exercise
   Most people who I see enter high stress jobs (such as investment banking, consulting, and those in the medical field) end up gaining quite a bit of weight in their first year. The reason is partially due to stress, but it’s also because they can’t find time to exercise. I can remember coming home from a long day at the office (where I was sleepy all morning). I made it through rush hour, and finally made it home. About the LAST thing in the world I wanted to do at that point was drag myself to the gym because I was exhausted.Now that I work for myself, I exercise four or five times a week! My favorite time to exercise is before lunch (10 or 11am) when I have lots of energy and an empty stomach. Then I reward myself with something good for lunch. Another great thing about exercising in the morning is that the gym is less crowded, and when I got to my martial arts classes, I get more one on one time with the instructor. You see, everyone else has to exercise in the evening due to their work schedule, so those are the busiest times.
3. Eating Right
   The final way that being self-employed improves your health is by making it easier to eat right. When I worked in the corporate world, we were always on the run. I’d rush out of the house each morning, being lucky to grab a piece of toast as I was headed out the door. Inevitably, by lunch time I’d be starving and we’d run down to a local restaurant or the food court where the meal options weren’t quite ideal. Finally, I’d make it home in the evening and often stop to grab some fast food. You see, it was hard to find time to go the grocery store and even if I had everything I needed in the fridge, putting together a proper meal was tough after a long day.Fast forward to today where I eat small meals throughout the day. Many health professionals recommend this as the healthiest way to eat. Eating small meals has the advantage that (1) you are never hungry and (2) you never get sleepy after eating. Whenever I’d eat a big lunch at work, my eyelids were feeling pretty heavy in the afternoon. Now I have high energy and higher productivity by snacking as I work during the day. As I type this very letter I’m eating a left over salmon filet I grilled last night and just had a handful of almonds a minute ago. Since I have time to go to the grocery store now and cook, I spend less money on food and eat healthier. I haven’t been to a fast food restaurant in more than a year.

I don’t know anyone who would start a business solely for the health benefits, but it sure is a nice added bonus if you’re thinking about working for yourself!