Book Reviews
No Job Like An Odd Job: How To Make Extra Cash On The Side
Filed under: Employment & Careers, Weird & Wonderful, Book Reviews
If you're looking to make a little extra money then your best bet may be the tried-and-true method 
of working a part-time job in the retail or food service sector. That's according to Abigail R. Gehring's book, Odd Jobs: How To Have Fun and Make Money In A Bad Economy, an offering of more than 100 odds jobs if you want to make a buck or two without a long term commitment.
Many of these jobs are available by signing up with an agency that provides temporary employment. Once you're sign up, you are sent to odd jobs in your neighbourhood. When I did it, I sold Tupperware in a mall kiosk, picked up cardboard boxes in a Costco and spent a week putting different sizes of screws into really small bags.
of working a part-time job in the retail or food service sector. That's according to Abigail R. Gehring's book, Odd Jobs: How To Have Fun and Make Money In A Bad Economy, an offering of more than 100 odds jobs if you want to make a buck or two without a long term commitment.Many of these jobs are available by signing up with an agency that provides temporary employment. Once you're sign up, you are sent to odd jobs in your neighbourhood. When I did it, I sold Tupperware in a mall kiosk, picked up cardboard boxes in a Costco and spent a week putting different sizes of screws into really small bags.
Shark Tank's Robert Herjavec Gives You 'The Will to Win'
Filed under: Celebs & Money, Employment & Careers, Entrepreneurship, Television, Book Reviews, Small Business, Pop's Wallet
In Driven: How to Succeed in Business and in Life, Shark Tank's Robert Herjavec recounted how he went from a Croatian immigrant at eight-years-old to the founder and CEO of The Herjavec Group -- now the country's largest IT security firm and consistently topping lists as Canada's fastest growing technology company."We started The Herjavec Group ten years ago with three guys and $400,000 in sales and we finished at $125 million last year and just today, we bought another one of our small competitors that does $30 million a year," he says.
With results like that, it's no wonder he was recently named Ernst & Young's 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year in the technology group and is always pushing the limits of his own success even further. He wants you to reach new heights of success this year too, which is why he wrote The Will to Win: Leading, Competing, Succeeding (HarperCollins Canada) a sequel of sorts to Driven.
While Driven urged readers to take risks, take control of their lives, and stay true to their own visions, The Will to Win pushes them to refuse to accept mediocrity, use their power at the right time and always be willing to adapt and change, with some special advice from Herjavec's celebrity friends like Oprah, Celine Dion and UFC Welterweight Champion Georges St. Pierre thrown in for good measure.
We caught up to this Ferrari racing, marathon running, cyber security expert just long enough for him to tell us whether he's truly afraid of anything, why it seems like sometimes his investment offers get passed over in favour of the bigger fish in the tank and whether The Millennial Generation needs to invent their own job.
5 Great Books You Should Read This Year
Filed under: Budgeting & Planning, Entrepreneurship, Family Finances, Investing, Book Reviews
By Morgan Housel
Motley Fool
Mark Twain says, "The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." In that spirit, here are five great books I've read lately that you should read, too.
Motley Fool
Mark Twain says, "The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." In that spirit, here are five great books I've read lately that you should read, too.
Doris Inc: A Business Approach to Caring for Your Elderly Parents
Filed under: Budgeting & Planning, Family Finances, Health, Retirement and RRSPs, Saving, Book Reviews, Pop's Wallet
When it came to caring for her elderly mother Doris, Shirley Roberts thought she had everything under control.She would make the drive from Toronto to her mom's house in Cobourg every second Saturday and do whatever needed doing from cutting the grass to shoveling snow and basic household chores. She made sure that the neighbours would look in on her mother every so often and recruited a volunteer named Susan to take her mother to her medical appointments and grocery shopping, while coming over for tea and helping with the gardening.
Roberts thought she had all her bases covered, but then, on one of her Saturday visits, she found unopened mail, a burnt out hallway lightbulb, tea stains on her mother's blouse and expired milk and yogurt in her mother's fridge. Soon it became apparent that her mother had Alzheimer's Disease and Roberts had missed the signs and dropped the ball.
What she calls her "Solo Firefighter Approach" to caregiving, that had allowed her mother to live a semblance of an independent life for a year, wasn't working. She was simply putting out the biggest fires of the week. Her infrequent visits paled in comparison to the level of attention her mom really needed, but what could she do? Roberts had a full-time job running a marketing company in Toronto and a new man in her life, she quickly realized she could not devote the amount of time and energy she wanted to for her mother's care without sacrificing something very significant in her own life.
It was a harrowing dilemma that many adult children with elderly parents face.
"There's a tremendous need for a better approach to caregiving," says Roberts If you talk to the people in the healthcare field, the doctors, the nurses, the lawyers, they will all tell you this is an increasing need because families go into crisis, they don't plan ahead, they don't realize what's coming. We plan for having children, but we don't plan to take care of our parents and none of us are ready to die."
That's why she wrote Doris Inc: A Business Approach to Caring for Your Elderly Parents. It details how Roberts, a marketing executive, and her brother David, a chartered accountant, united their business expertise to manage their mother's care like a corporation.
Hotel Secrets Revealed: What the Front Desk Doesn't Want You to Know
Filed under: Bargains & Freebies, Buyer Beware, Travel, Book Reviews
If Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential exposed the seedy underbelly of the restaurant industry, then Jacob Tomsky's Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles and So-Called Hospitality does the same thing for the hotel industry.A 10-year veteran of the hotel industry, Tomsky worked his way up from valet parker at a high-class hotel in New Orleans to the coveted position of front desk manager at a luxury New York hotel. It's an industry he very much fell into after he failed to translate his philosophy degree into a career. Now, he's exposing all the dirty little secrets of the hotel industry in the grand and relatively recent tradition of books like Waiter Rant, Hotel Babylon, Concierge Confidential and Cruise Confidential.
As the latest in a long line of disgruntled hospitality employee exposés, we wanted to find the best secrets and show you how you can carve a path to instant upgrades and complimentary service, while avoiding the valets doing donuts in the hotel parking lot with your car, or getting stuck in room 1212 in New York City, so you get stuck taking the local calls of guests who don't know how to dial out at all hours of the day and night.
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Smart Thinking: How to Make Better Decisions in the New Year and Beyond
Filed under: Budgeting & Planning, Entrepreneurship, Weird & Wonderful, Book Reviews, Small Business
January's new year's resolutions often boil down to one simple pledge -- a vow to make better decisions than you did last year. Of course, this is easier said than done. After all, if it were so easy to make better choices, there would be no need for new year's resolutions in the first place. We all know that these resolutions are often rewrites for past regrets.So how do you do that? How do you change your previous pattern of behaivior and start making better decisions? How do you not get sucked into previous patterns? It's not as easy as flicking on a light, or is it?
Dr. Art Markman has the answer. The University of Texas psychology professor and cognitive scientist has written a new book called Smart Thinking: Three Essential Keys to Solve Problems, Innovate, and Get Things Done, which boils down how to make better decisions into a three-part formula that includes developing smart habits, acquiring high-quality knowledge and use this high-quality knowledge when needed.
He has unlocked the tools to replace self-limiting habits with smart thinking, understand how memory works, improve the quality of what you learn, present new information more effectively, better understand how the world works and finally, define and solve problems by finding the relevant knowledge from any area of expertise and applying it effectively.
Here's how...
Things Even the Laziest Person Should Do to Protect Their Identity
Filed under: Credit Cards, Fraud, Identity Theft, Technology, Book Reviews
Identity theft seems to be one of humanity's greatest fears. Just this week, Anderson Live profiled a woman who had her entire identity stolen to such an extent that the culprit was living life under her identity, having children and buying property all under the real person's name. When the thief was finally exposed, the victim had to go all the way back to high school year book photos, just to prove that she really was the person in question.Steve Weisman knows how she feels. The Bentley University law professor was a victim of identity theft himself when his gym locker was broken into in 2001. But instead of getting mad, he got even and became one of the world's foremost experts on this particular crime. To that end, he's written a new book called 50 Ways to Protect Your Identity in a Digital Age.
But people are busy and 50 seems like a big number to remember. Not to mention how we are susceptible to identity theft almost everywhere we go and practically everywhere we do business. There are the obvious ones like the ATM and our home computer, but then there's the possibility of our bank or somewhere else we do financial business with getting hacked. So, in short, no one is truly safe from identity theft and the thought of that can be so cripplingly overwhelming to some people that your personal security may not seem worth it. Plus, there's a lot to remember and a lot to guard and people are just generally lazy, technologically inept or just overwhelmed.
So, we asked Weisman the last things on earth any person should do to protect their identity and be at least minimally effective. If you remember nothing, but still don't want your identity stolen, at least hold on to the following advice:
The 50-30-20 Budget is the Only One You'll Ever Need
Filed under: Budgeting & Planning, Economizer, Family Finances, Saving, Book Reviews
If conventional wisdom says that to be financially responsible one should have a budget, why do so few of us operate without one?The answer is easy: budgets are hard to draft, and hard to live up to. Which is why so few of us can come up with a workable model that can keep our spending in line.
So it was a joy to discover that someone had actually simplified things to create a one-size-fits-all budget that anyone, regardless of net worth or anything else, can use.
The 50-30-20 budget was created by the eminently practical Elizabeth Warren. You might've heard of her. She was a Harvard bankruptcy professor recently elected to the US Senate. In 2011, Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi wrote a terrific book called "All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan," a book that should be required reading for every high school student in Canada. They've come up with a fool-proof way to create a budget that anyone can live with.
Amanda Lang on The Power of Why
Filed under: Employment & Careers, Entrepreneurship, Health, Weird & Wonderful, Book Reviews
Canadian business journalist Amanda Lang looks at the power of askingthe right questions in her new book, The Power of Why. Lang tackles the big issue of the Canadian productivity gap head on by looking at a solution: how to spark innovation in Canada. Currently the senior business correspondent at CBC News, Lang reaches out to business leaders and innovators and also looks at her own life to showcase how asking the right questions can lead to greater connectedness, innovation and productivity in the lives of Canadians.
The 'United Breaks Guitars' Guy Resolves Your Consumer Complaints
Filed under: Celebs & Money, Consumer Complaints, Entrepreneurship, Travel, Book Reviews
You probably don't know Dave Carroll, but you definitely know what happened to him. He's the guy who took a United Airlines flight from Halifax to Nebraska with a connection at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, only to sit on the tarmac there and watch the baggage crew fling his -- WAIT! I'll let him explain it ...That video has over 1.5 million views on Youtube (1,556,231 to be exact) and counting. When the video first debuted in 2009, Carroll's plight was picked up by every major news outlet worldwide, from the big four of CBS, ABC, NBC and FOX to 24 hour news networks like CNN, MSNBC and FOX News.
"Sometimes things live on the internet and they get their 10 million hits, but it's only there," says Carroll. "United Breaks Guitars was happening at the same time and both sides, the traditional media side and the online viral component, were working to fan the flames of each other, so it became a worldwide traditional media story and a worldwide viral hit at the same time, which was intense."
The whole crazy story is chronicled in Carroll's new book, United Breaks Guitars: The Power of One Voice in the Age of Social Media along with the beginnings of his new company Gripevine. Gripevine is a website where people can post their customer complaints which are forwarded past frontline customer service reps to the executives who can do something about it. These executives then get an opportunity to phone the person back and resolve the gripe for them.
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