The big news this week was that Facebook experienced an outage for six hours!
Facebook also owns Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, all of which experienced an outage between 3am and 9am on Tuesday morning Australian time.
It cost Facebook $3.6m in advertising revenue in the United States alone and wiped $6billion off founder Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth. (Don’t feel too sorry for him, he’s now only worth $122 billion…).
Nearly 3 billion people throughout the world have a Facebook account. I imagine many of them were hitting the ‘refresh’ button over and over, during that six-hour period.
Truth be told, I had no idea it happened until I read about it in the news.
Not because I don’t use social media – I have Facebook, Instagram and Messenger – but because I was hitting a different ‘refresh’ button.
Every year in September or October I take a week off; the destination varies but the criteria is somewhere that’s not home and has local attractions that are walkable (i.e. to minimise car use). I then make sure I leave the phone in my holiday rental for the day while I go off and do things.
This allows me to ‘turn off’ and recharge the batteries as we hit the final straight of the year.
Mental Health Australia is promoting its Make a Promise campaign, encouraging everyone to make a mental health promise to remember to look after your wellbeing. Maybe switching off from social media every now and then could be your promise?
With the prevalence of smart phones, the lines between work and home have been blurred. The post-pandemic shift towards working from home has likely made that even more prevalent. If we allow ourselves we can be accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which is not only very unhealthy but also completely unsustainable.
Success (financial or otherwise) is a marathon race. You need enough energy to see it all the way to the end. Therefore, it’s important to make a concerted effort to turn off from time to time. Whether that’s taking a week off, turning off at night-time during the week, or one or two days over the weekend.
Which leads me to my bulletproof tip for this week
BUILD POSITIVE HABITS
Our habits define us, so make positive ones. Identify your habits — positive and negative. Focus on eliminating or overriding the negative by amplifying the positive. Build new habits by identifying productive behaviour and taking action, repeatedly. Commit to 21 successive days of a new habit and you will land yourself on the right path.
Our lives are the sum total of our habits. Habits are small decisions we make and actions we perform every day. Some are highly productive and propel our lives forward.
Peek inside the life of a successful person and, at some level, it will be underpinned by good habits, whether they pertain to exercise, diet, work, financial matters or relationships.
I detail nine good habits in my book that I’ve observed successful people use to underpin their success, and which I have copied from them.
They are:
- Wake up early
- Make the first hour of the day yours
- Get your heart going
- Get enough sleep
- Practise gratitude and humility
- Visualise
- Spend time with like-minded people
- Be a reader, be a leader
- Turn off
By the way, Dr Phillippa Lally, of the University College of London, found that it took the average person 66 days to form a new habit.
You can download my Habits book FREE here; it’s a book I built that will help you build new, good habits over a 21-, 42- or 84-day period.
PS here are the best books I’ve read on habits:
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
- Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R Covey
Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr Joe Dispenza
Question
We’re trying to buy our home and are participating in ‘online’ auctions. What are your thoughts on Zoom auctions, and do you have any tips or tricks you can recommend?
Answer:
There’s lots of online auctions going at the moment because of lockdowns. In Melbourne, every auction is online right now.
My personal opinion is that an online auction won’t get as much emotion out of buyers as an in-person auction.
When it comes to tips and tricks, there’s not much difference between online and in-person auctions. I recommend getting pre-approval from your bank before going to the auction as most auctions are done on an unconditional basis (i.e. not subject to finance). Secondly, have a hard ceiling on the amount you’re willing to pay for the property. Finally, there’s no rules when it comes to how much you have to increase your bid by; you can increase your bid by $500 if you want to! Just because the auctioneer asks for a certain figure, doesn’t mean you have to pay it. I recommend going up in increments of $1,000 or $5,000 if you’re getting toward the upper range of what you’re willing to spend.
Having said all that, if the auction is online, it would also pay to have a strong internet connection! That’s something you don’t have to worry about at an in-person auction.
Interestingly, I am also seeing a lot of ‘hybrid’ auctions around the place – held both online and in person. For these ones, I think there is a strategic advantage to having someone at the auction for you – connected via phone – who can bid on your behalf. It offers a strategic advantage to bidding via Zoom; you can get some feedback on the room, and it takes away any potential confusion or connection issues that the online bidding process can throw up.
Good luck!
It’s never too early or late to grow your wealth
P.S. Personal finance is cited as the single biggest cause of stress for one in two Australians. It doesn’t have to be the case for you. Get the book.
