My wife sent me an email the other day with an excerpt from Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life, a book by Brian Tracy. After reading it, I thought it would be worth sharing with all of you:

The Great Truth:

“You can learn anything you need to learn, to accomplish any goal you can set for yourself.” This principle offers a way for you to take complete control over your future. When I was young and struggling, failing and frustrated, this principle came along to change my life.

Generally speaking, no one is smarter than you, and no one is better than you. Just because someone is doing better than you doesn’t mean that he is better than you. It usually means that he has just learned how to succeed in his particular field before you have. And whatever someone else has done, you can probably do as well.

This is not an easy rule, but it is definitely simple. You, too, can learn anything you need to learn to accomplish any goal you can set for yourself.

This is something that I know I agree with, but hadn’t heard put so succinctly before. So take it for what it’s worth.

Last weekend I wanted to do something nice for my wife. I know that she really likes Italian food so I thought it might be fun to take her out to a new place that we hadn’t been before. We don’t normally go out to eat all that often, so this seemed like a nice treat for the both of us.

So I went to Restaurant.com to try and find a place that I could take her to. After browsing for a few minutes, I found La Gra Italian Tapas. A $25 gift certificate usually sells for $10, but they were running a 70% off promotion so I only paid $3 for it. The only stipulation is that we had to spend a minimum of $35 to use the gift certificate.

The restaurant was a nice small place in an older area of town. Tapas style apparently means that the dishes are meant to be shared which was nice since we both got to try out a couple of different things. We started with an arugula salad followed by a sausage and shrimp pasta as well as a beef speidini dish. Overall it was a great time.

If we hadn’t used the gift certificate from Restaurant.com, the bill would have come to $42.21 which is nothing extraordinary for such a place. However, with the gift certificate the bill came to just $17.41. So I have to ask the question. Why wouldn’t you want to use these gift certificates if you’re going to go out to eat anyway?

If you’re looking to start a business or have already started a business, it’s probably a good idea to get yourself some business cards. I know that it can sometimes be difficult for me to remember someone’s name and what exactly we talked about if I had only met them briefly. When I have a business card from this person though, it makes things a lot easier to remember. You also might want to think about getting yourself some business cards is you run a blog yourself. A little offline marketing never hurt anyone, and it can help you get keep in touch with some great contacts.

So if you’re going to get yourself some business cards, you may as well get yourself free business cards, especially if you’re not completely convinced that you want them. And you can pick some of these out over at Vista Print with multiple designs to choose from. I’ve used their service myself already before and can say that I was quite pleased with it. The cards came out nicely and they arrived pretty quickly. The whole process was simple and painless. So try them out and see if you like what you get.

Well, the rebate checks are finally being paid out this week. I’ve already heard from a few people who have received them, but as of yet I’m still waiting for mine. I’ll be honest though, I’m not all that anxious about it since I figure it’ll eventually get here. I also don’t plan on spending it right away either so it’s not going to matter much when it does finally get here.

The government would like for everyone to take these rebate checks and go out and spend them. This is then supposed to give the economy a boost, which I don’t disagree with. It’s not however, what I would recommend to anyone reading this. The government is perfectly alright with you thinking that it’s giving you a gift with this check. But you should remember that this is a rebate of your taxes, money that already belongs to you. You should use it in a manner that will best help your personal financial situation.

If you have debt to pay off, then pay it off. If you need to boost your savings and emergency accounts, do it. Perhaps you’d rather invest in a particular company instead of just buying the company’s products. Just don’t feel pressured to go out and spend the money on consumer items just because that’s what the government thinks it wants you to do.

I also think it’s interesting that the government wants to give people money and then tell them to just spend it. All of this spending is what has gotten people into the problems they face. Out of control spending is what leads to the average American to have some amount of credit card debt. All this spending is how people went out and bought houses that they knew they realistically couldn’t afford. At some point we need to break out of this cycle of rampant spending. Why not begin by not spending this rebate check on more unnecessary consumer spending?