Making Your Dreams Come True Starts With:
1. Making your dreams come true starts with claiming YOUR dreams as your own, not anyone else’s.
2. Making your dreams come true starts with freeing yourself to really dream out of joy, not out of fear or obligation.
3. Making your dreams come true starts with knowing who you really are and what could really make you happy.
4. Making your dreams come true starts with knowing God has set His best plans for you and you are never alone in your journey.
5. Making your dreams come true starts with that feeling of pure love within your heart.
6. Making your dreams come true starts with knowing you have the power to make your dreams come true. If God is with you, and has a plan for you, how could your dreams not come true?
7. Making your dreams come true starts with admitting to yourself that you will make mistakes along the way, but that’s alright because you will learn from them and your wisdom will help you in reaching for your dreams.
Category: Career and Money
Earn Money by Converting Books to Amazon’s Kindle
I have just learned how to convert my e-books into Kindle format so that I could sell them at Amazon. But I have also learned that once I acquire this skill, I could also earn money by converting other people’s books into Amazon’s Kindle. Just today, I’ve found 21 jobs available at odesk.com for that! It seems like e-book formatting is an in demand work nowadays. Estimated pay per my research is from $10 to $100 per book. I have also seen some available services for $5 at fiverr.com, though some of these only offer it at $5 for the first 30 pages of the book, and then you need to add more as the pages increase.
Hence, there are two ways by which to earn money by learning how to convert books into Kindle:
1. By offering your services at freelance sites like odesk.com
2. By converting and selling your own e-books at Amazon
To help you get started, you can download Amazon’s guide “Building Your Book for Kindle”. Once finished, you can preview the result of your work using the Kindle Previewer. Good luck to us! If you need someone to assist you in converting your e-books, maybe you could even hire me for it. 😉
Tips:
1. If you are finding it hard to remove many unnecessary formatting from your document, you can copy the entire content and then paste it to Notepad first. After which, copy from Notepad and paste to a new Word document.
2. If you have made too many carriage returns that you want to delete, you can use the Find and Replace function of Word. Just type ^p^p in Find and leave the Replace field blank.
Some Weird and Some Interesting Freelance Jobs
I was browsing the internet this morning when I got acquainted with some weird and interesting freelance jobs as posted in THE PENNY HOARDER website:
Check out the following:
1. Get a job at NASA and get paid $5,000 a month just for having a bed rest for 60 days! (I discovered this too late, though. )Read more…
2. Get a job that pays you $3,500 just for eating at fastfood restaurants for 3 months. Read more…
3. Be an online jury and get paid $30 per case. See http://www.trialjuries.com
4. Earn money by reviewing websites. Read more…
5. Earn money by teaching language online. Visit http://www.italki.com/
6. Earn money for writing at $50 per article. Read more…
Considering how I’m thinking about earning more from freelance sources recently, this blog has helped a lot in opening up lots of ideas, even weird and funny ones. 😉
The 5 Real Dangers Of Being In The Wrong Career:
1. Being stuck forever
If there is one thing that’s very close to hell itself, it’s being stuck somewhere, especially when you don’t like the place you’ve been imprisoned in!
Why get stuck forever?
Consider this one word – inertia. That tendency of a moving body to remain in motion, and that tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest.
While at first, you only thought of slowing down towards your desired path, you fail to realize how you are also slowly being robbed of your momentum to reach your goals. Each day, when you decide to stay where you are, your inertia at rest becomes stronger. It gets harder and harder to move until one day, you’ve lost all desire to make that change in your life. You’re stuck forever!
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”
2. Wasting very precious time
Assuming you don’t get stuck forever, and that somewhere along those years, you’re able to break away from that wrong job that’s been your comfort zone, still you would have wasted very precious time along the way: time you could have spent doing what you love doing, time you could have spent enhancing your skills and your God-given gifts, and time you could have shared your passion with the world who needs it badly.
If there is one commodity in this life that’s so valuable, it would be TIME. You can’t turn back time. No matter how much money you possess, you can’t buy an extra hour of your life. In fact, we have no ability to predict how much time we’ve got left! Is anybody certain he’s going to wake up to another day? Is anybody certain he’s going to pursue his dreams tomorrow? Dreams he decided not to pursue today?
We don’t know how long we’d be able to live anyways, so if today is all you’ve got, how would you spend it? Would you RISK it that you have not been able to do the most important mission you were supposed to do? What legacy then are you going to leave behind?
Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
– Matthew 6:27, NIV
3. Limited income
We often think that by doing other “income-generating” jobs in the meantime, we’d be able to earn enough money to someday afford us the “luxury” of being able to do our passion. But what we don’t realize is that while we keep on getting stuck with jobs we don’t like, we also limitour income potential. Why so? Because it is only by unleashing our full potentials (doing the jobs we LIKE) are we able to unleash unlimited returns from the world which benefits from the best of our true gifts!
“What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.”
-Julia Cameron
4. Forgetting your gifts
As long as we neglect our gifts, we run the danger of forgetting them altogether sooner or later. Man is a creature of habit. And what habits are formed as long as we continue in careers we don’t like?
Let me give you an example. John has a passion for painting. His early school teachers noticed it in him even as a child. But his parents won’t approve of it. They wanted him to get a decent office job that earns him a stable income to raise a family. That’s what he did. At first, he thought he would just please his parents, and then later, still be able to practice his passion. But as the years went on, he found it more and more difficult to change paths. He got used to his daily routine of going to the office, looking forward to going home, and then entertaining himself by watching some tv when he got home. Everyday, he would drag himself to the office, do the minimum required of his job, and be content with the salary he got. At first he would remember how good he was at painting, but later on he starts to doubt himself. A few years more and his dreams would be nothing but distant illusions he couldn’t achieve anymore. Well, everybody else told him so, especially the people he worked with everyday.
5. Losing your soul
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? – Mark 8:36-37, KJV
This is the greatest danger of being in the wrong job. This was also the reason why I had to finally let go of the job I had which didn’t resonate with my true passion.
I noticed that my soul was slowly dying. I didn’t like the person I was becoming, and I was getting worse every day. Even the people close to me are being affected. I easily got angry, because I was so frustrated with myself. I lost my patience quickly because I wasn’t satisfied with what I have. The material things I had were no longer enough to satisfy me, and I have so endangered my soul to get addicted to these things in increasing doses just so to find some fulfilment. In the end though, I knew I couldn’t find true meaning in all these things.
When we settle for a job we don’t like, we are rarely aware of how it could eventually change us within. We didn’t know that by trying to escape from our true passion, we are also escaping from who we really are. In effect, we are actually starting to live a LIE. And when we live a lie, all our other values start to crumble one by one. The first one is truth, the second is courage, the third is hope, and then joy and love. In the end, what will you have left with you?
Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste,
it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference,
you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes,
your grudge distils a poison in the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.
– Kahlil Gibran
5 Things to Remember When Reaching for Your Dream
- If The Work Seems At First Impossible
“Every noble work is at first impossible.” – Thomas Carlyle
Not every dream or calling we’re going to have is something that has ever been done before. We may receive a calling where only a few have ever dared to venture. But if we are certain of our purpose, must we turn back because of our fears?
Note that the impossibility in this perspective comes more from the outside than from within. Deep within, you KNOW that you can accomplish your calling. You may even already have a clear idea HOW you’re going to accomplish it. But then you hear all the many voices around you, voices that seem to say you CAN’T!
Come by a quiet place for a while. Lock yourself up in a quiet room, and there before God’s Presence, be still. Listen only to His voice, and then see what the response of your heart will be. You might well hear your own heart excitedly saying YES!
Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped. – Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
2. The Value of Time and of Small Efforts
When transitioning, it is important to realistically assess one’s timeframe towards achieving our goals. We should have set deadlines for ourselves so as not to continuously put off what needs to be done. More importantly, we should never underestimate the value of time and what we can do today. What can we do today?
We often think that for all that we want to get done, we have but very little time to fit it all with the limited time we have. But this thinking doesn’t help us in any way. It only overwhelms us, freezing our efforts and sooner or later stops us from doing anything of value with the time we do have.
The truth is that we can do a lot today, not A LOT in terms of thinking about EVERYTHING we need to do, but A LOT in such a way that we can SPREAD all the things we need to do through the timeframe that we do have.
For instance, we may do only so much TODAY, but if we do valuable things today and with every succeeding day, we can do A LOT through a timeframe of TWO YEARS! That’s 730 days! Imagine if we only spend one hour a day in doing valuable things that contribute to our goals, then we’d have already spent 730 hours by that time. Start little by little, brick by brick, hour by valuable hour and your little efforts will yield BIG results in due time.
3. The Persistent Voice of Calling
One of the usual signs of a true calling is its PERSISTENCE. It’s like there is a persistent voice that cannot rest until you listen to it, until you heed it. It’s that DREAM you’ve had ever since and never seems to vanish no matter how much you try to bury it.
Hence, to most of us, it no longer seemed real, it had just been our SECRET DREAM, that dream we rarely reveal to others for fear of being ridiculed or joked at.
Even then, it doesn’t vanish. And in times when life seem empty and meaningless, it calls us again, whispering clues as to which doors remain open for us to go to.
When Mother Teresa was called to serve the poorest of the poor, her spiritual advisor urged her to forget about it. She tried, but she couldn’t ignore the noble task God has planned for her all along.
4. Providence Will Come!
“Let us more and more insist on raising funds of love, of kindness, of understanding, of peace. Money will come if we seek first the Kingdom of God – the rest will be given.”
-Mother Teresa
Providence comes just at the RIGHT TIME we needed it, not before, and certainly not too late!
When we’re just starting out with our calling, we may fear we’d lack the resources we need in order to accomplish it. It’s but natural and prudent to think of provisions, but it requires faith to take the first step out of our comfort zones! How much prudence indeed is necessary? How much money do we need in order to accomplish our goals? To some people, it never becomes sufficient.
Wisdom and faith should both play a part in our discernment and actions. It isn’t enough to be wise, yet many times, it also isn’t enough merely to leap forward without thinking about our plans.
There are times when we do need to step back and wait until we have enough resources. But there are times when we have to move on and allow God to also work his miracles in our lives.
Mother Teresa didn’t wait to be a millionaire in order to help the poor. She carried out her mission by helping one person at a time. Along the way, help arrived. People came to reach out in service. Philantrophists gave out generous sums and helped her raise millions to help the poor all over the world!
“My daughter, I assure you of a permanent income on which you will live. Your duty will be to trust completely in my goodness, and my duty will be to give you all you need. I am making Myself dependent upon your trust: if your trust is great, then My generosity will be without limit.” – (Jesus to Sister Faustina, Diary of Divine Mercy)
5. You Can Always Begin Somewhere
We can’t wait for everything to be perfect before we proceed with our dreams. We have to begin somewhere, and we CAN!
When we’re really able to seek our true passion, we’d be able to find a channel for expressing it right where we are. We don’t have to wait until we’re the executive of a big company, or when we become a chef of a big hotel, or a famous singer or celebrity. We can express our passion NOW.
If you have a passion for singing, you can sing right now right where you are. You can inspire the people around you. You can lift your voice to God as though in prayer, offering your most sacred work, your passion.
If you have a passion for writing, you can write right now. You can contribute a poem to your school or company paper. You can even blog about it over the internet. There are countless social media sites you could use in order to reach people.
We wait longer than is necessary. Along the way, our souls become empty, they die slowly, until the flames of passion vanish from our hearts. Why allow your soul to die? Begin today, live today, this is the only time we are certain to possess.
“Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.” -Goethe