How Bad Do You Want It - McGraw Tim

When I'm here on this highway
Breathing diesel smoke
Driving hard for hours
Trying to make that Memphis show
People always ask me
"Son what does it take
To reach out and touch your dreams?"
To them I always say

Are you hungry?
Are you thirsty?
Is it a fire that burns you up inside?
How bad do you want it?
How bad do you need it?
Are you eating, sleeping, dreaming
With that one thing on your mind?
How bad do you want it?
How bad do you need it?
Cause if you want it all
You've got to lay it all out on the line

I get to make my living

Doing what I love

Every night I give my heart and soul

Sometimes that ain't enough

But brother, if you're like me

Looking down that road

Be careful of that wild wind, son

Sometimes it don't let go

Can you feel it?

Can you taste it?

Can you hear it knocking at your door?

How bad do you want it?

How bad do you need it?

Are you eating, sleeping, dreaming

With that one thing on your mind?

How bad do you want it?

How bad do you need it?

Cause if you want it all

You've got to lay it all out on the line

There's always a price you pay no matter what you do

If you're gonna climb that mountain to the top

It always comes down to

How bad do you want it?

How bad do you need it?

Are you eating, sleeping, dreaming

With that one thing on your mind?

How bad do you want it?

How bad do you need it?

Cause if you want it all

You've got to lay it all out on the line

How to avoid being an identity fraud victim

How to avoid being an identity fraud victim

The rise in the use of smartphones and social media by incautious consumers fueled the increase in identity fraud, and 2011 was a year of several big data breaches. Someone whose personal information is taken in a data breach ( high-profile thefts, such as the attacks on Sony Corp's PlayStation network in April 2011) is 9.5 times more likely to become a victim of identity fraud, Javelin found.

How to avoid being an identity fraud victim

• Password protect your home and mobile devices. Avoid exposing personal information that can be used by someone else for identity verification.
• Be careful about the apps you download. Only download through a service that monitors the apps, such as iTunes.
• Share information carefully when you are on a public wifi network.
• Monitor your credit cards by checking their use online or reading the statements carefully. Quickly report to your credit card issuer if you see any suspicious transactions.
• Take data breach notifications seriously. If your data has been accessed, consider subscribing to a credit-monitoring service, which is often is offered for free for a year by the company that had been breached.

For full article from source CLICK HERE

Find passion in life

Find passion in life

One of the most important ingredient that leads you to Financial Freedom is having Passion in life. What do Warrent Buffet, Bill Gates and the Forbes top 1000 have in common? They are deeply passionate about their business. They love what they do, day in day out. 

Don't wait until you are 70 years old and look back and said what if I had done something I love. Act now, don't just survive, choose success and happiness. Find passion in life. And help to make the world a better place for you and me.

Read the complete article CLICK HERE

How you can be successful

How you can be successful

To be successful one must try to eliminate greed, hatred and delusion.

What is greed?

Greed is a desire and pursuit of excessive wealth, things, status, and or power, which they think is of value. Greed is control by our thinking or intention. A split second of greed can cause us tremendous pain and suffering, mentally.

Watch this real life example of greed.

http://news.yahoo.com/video/miamicbs4-15750840/lauderdale-rolex-thief-caught-on-camera-28307768.html

Greed is the root of all evil, not money. Money is very useful. Since the beginning of time, greed has lead to the destruction of countless lives and nations. Wars, plundering, fighting, why? During that particular era or nation, the general public were told there were not enough of land, food, jobs, commodities etc. We were told by marketers there's not enough of “stuff”, could be oil, food, inventories. Good marketers create a sense of scarcity so the consumers will want that particular 'thing'. Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having humans who have wants and needs in a world of limited resources. It states that society as insufficient productive resources to fulfill all human wants and needs.

Example:

The movie Total Recall, what were the scarcity? Air that we breath.

Real live examples today are like share market, real estate. Due to greed marketers will create news, reports that certain commodity is getting scarce any everyone should get it for themselves. 

Before the housing bubble in America, everyone whom invest in real estate are feeling great, because their net worth has gone up. The more houses they own coupled with easy and cheap mortgages, the more houses they buy. It's a great formula in a bull market.

Marketers advertise there's scarcity of land and that's why the prices of real estate goes up. But as we can see today, after the bubble burst, what happened? The entire nation is in debts. Were there scarcity of land that caused the rise in real estate in the first place? What happened to the smart real estate investors? If they are smart and rich now, you know they were not greedy and escaped the bubble. Will it happen to other places? Sure, as long as theres greed involved.

Images of greed:

Human are creatures of habits. We should cultivate our selves to be generous. Look at Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, George Soros, Walton Family, Li Ka Shing, Jackie Chan. Tan Sri Vincent Tan from Malaysia pledged to donate at least half his wealth to charity through the “The Giving Pledge” campaign that was initiated by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, his wife Melinda and investor Warren Buffett. Chen Guangbiao, a chinese businessman, pledged to donate his entire fortune to charity when he passes on. Mavis Khoo, Singapore donates millions of her own money to cancer research. Terry Gou, Taiwan's richest man, with a fortune valued at $5.5 billion, said he plans to turn over his wealth to charity before he dies. Focuses much of his philanthropy on health care.

Why are they generous? One will say that “Oh, they have too much money” “Oh, They do it for advertisement” etc. What ever being said, it's their power over money, that's the reason they give. It shows you are in power of money and not the way around.

If we want to be successful we must not let greed delude us. Lets make this world together a better place for you, your love ones and me. Make peace, be kind and be gentle.

PayPal Co-Founder Max Levchin Hot Trends

Levchin described the evolution of PayPal — the online payment service whose 2002 initial public offering gave him the liquidity to get him started on close to 50 start-up investments.

In 2006, Levchin founded Slide — a social applications developer that Google (GOOG) bought in August 2010 for an estimated $182 million. Slide made social games but – in Levchin’s estimation its games were not its strength. Rather, what fascinated Levchin was the company’s ability to use data to find insights into consumer behavior. 

When Levchin started to invest in start-ups, he decided to apply three tests to decide where to invest. Over time, he has somewhat relaxed one of the constraints. The tests include the following:

• Does Levchin have a deep understanding of the company and its product?Initially, he would pass if he was not well-versed in a start-up’s industry. Now, he is more open to putting capital into start-ups where he does not have deep expertise.
• Does Levchin believe he can add value? By this, he means that if he does not think he can help the start-up with its strategy, its product development, or its team building; he will decline to invest.
• Does the start-up take advantage of what he thinks the world will look like in five years? Every year, Levchin likes to look at key trends and identify themes that help him predict how the world will be different five years into the future. Then he tries to invest in start-ups that have interesting ideas about how to take advantage of those themes.

Of the roughly 50 companies in which he has invested, one that best exemplifies Levchin’s approach to start-up investing is Yelp, the local business social review site of which he owns 13.2% with an estimated $100 million value. He first invested in Yelp in the summer of 2004 after meeting with two “really good technical guys he knew.”

What are Levchin’s themes for 2012? In addition to being interested in so-called big data — the notion of extracting useful insight from lots of data, that he discovered has become pretty popular among the technorati — here are three that strike me as unique:

• Data collectors and sensors. According to Levchin, “the proliferation of cheap data collectors and sensors (and rapidly falling costs of storing and processing such data) is exciting. Examples include accelerometers in phones and on wrists and hips; GPS receivers in every car, watch, and phone; cameras in practically everything, and indeed simple and ultra-cheap ID devices like RFIDs that helping us track things.” Levchin seeks applications that use all the data that these sensors collect in a way that’s profitable for start-ups and their customers.
• Valuing data. Levchin is also interested in businesses that can find data that has value to people. In thinking about this, he distinguishes between data narratives and data that companies, for example, would pay for. As an example, he mentioned that an insurance company might be able to buy a potential customer’s driving record for say, $1. If that potential customer ended up buying insurance from that company, then the $1 might be well spent since it would help the insurer set a profitable rate. If the driver went to another insurer, the money would be wasted. Levchin is seeking start-ups that can turn now “worthless” data into valuable information.
• Mis-allocated resources. Levchin sees all kinds of waste in the world and thanks to the ability to gather data inexpensively at the periphery and analyze it deeply at the center, he believes that markets can be created that slash this mis-allocation of resources. One example of this is in automobiles — some people have two cars in their garage that they never drive and others don’t have cars but need to travel 25 miles back and forth from their house to work every day. Levchin believes that a market could emerge that would match up the people without cars who need them with ones who have them but don’t drive too often. Similarly, Levchin sees an opportunity to create a service that brings trucks loaded with commonly purchased groceries to locations inferred from consumer location data, to maximize both convenience and sales.

For more info CLICK HERE

Planned Parenthood to get $250,000

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg , a billionaire with a long-term interest in public health, said he would give Planned Parenthood Federation of America a $250,000 matching gift — he will donate $1 for every new dollar Planned Parenthood raises up to $250,000. He is responding to the controversy over a breast cancer advocacy group that cut off most of its grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening, said Thursday that he would make up a large part of the missing money.

“Politics have no place in health care,” he said in a statement. “Breast cancer screening saves lives and hundreds of thousands of women rely on Planned Parenthood for access to care. We should be helping women access that care, not placing barriers in their way.”

Mr. Bloomberg then highlighted his contribution on Twitter, posting a series of messages asking his followers to contribute to Planned Parenthood.

 Planned Parenthood donations up 500 per cent

Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, issued a statement saying, “On behalf of hundreds of thousands of women nationwide who rely on Planned Parenthood for breast cancer education and screening, we are enormously grateful to Mayor Bloomberg. This contribution will help ensure that politics don’t interfere with women having access to health care. People all across the country have stepped forward in the last 48 hours to offer help and support, and the mayor’s donation will help ensure that no woman is denied breast cancer services because of right-wing political pressure campaigns.”

Mr. Bloomberg has been a longtime supporter of both the Komen foundation and Planned Parenthood. According to his office, he has given $555,000 to Planned Parenthood over the years. And he has given $200,000 to the Komen foundation, much of it in the form of matching grants to Bloomberg L.P. employees who have run in the foundation’s fund-raising road races.

To read more CLICK HERE

FACEBOOK IPO

FACEBOOK IPO


In less than a decade, the company has gone from a hobby to a multibillion-dollar enterprise and a worldwide phenomenon. For Facebook to have a multi billion IPO is a testament to the site's popularity. As of December 2011, the site had 845 million monthly active users (161 million active monthly users in the United States). In December 2004, the site just had about 1 million users. To go from 1 million to 845 million in seven years is super impressive.




But it's not just how many Facebook users there are, it's what those users do on the site. As of 2010, users were uploading 3 billion photos to the site every month. Fifty percent of all users logged on in a given day. And the average user spends nearly an hour on Facebook every day. Every 2 minutes, 1 million comments were made on the site. Those kind of numbers get investors and advertisers excited. 

The site is truly worldwide as there are more than 80% of Facebook users coming from outside the United States and Canada.

Earliest investors: PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel invested $500,000 in 2004, followed by Accel Partners, which invested $12.7 million in 2005

Biggest stakeholder: Mark Zuckerberg, who holds a 56.9 pre-IPO voting stake. Other top stakeholders: Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, DigitalSky Technologies; entrepreneurs Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus, Sean Parker.