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Now we're going to think about cooking at home. This is something that has steadily declined over the last thirty or forty years in the West as fast-food outlets have burgeoned. This is roughly the same period over which an epidemic of obesity has spread across the same countries. Is it a coincidence, 1 wonder? It’s a bit paradoxical too; every time I turn on my TV, there's a cookery program on. Masterchef this, Cake Bake-Off that. You’d have thought that that would have seeded a new revolution in home cooking. But no, fast food is as popular as ever. On top of this, and as I said before, there are simply millions of cook books available. Is anybody actually cooking from these books or are they just looking at the pictures?

I was recently looking at an old photo of hundreds of workers pouring through factory gates, probably about ninety years ago. There must have been something like two hundred men in that photo and there was not a single fat person to be seen. Not one. This was long before the advent of cheap burgers, chicken nuggets, pizzas and all the rest of this stuff. All of them ate their meals at home, every one of them. Fast food just didn’t exist. It’s not the full story, of course, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that meals cooked at home are likely to be lower in fat and sugar than their restaurant chain counterparts.

Now, many people don’t know how to cook themselves a decent nutritious meal. The education system must bear some of the blame here. Time was when both boys and girls, but girls in particular, learned the fundamentals of cookery. Or self-reliance, as I’d call it. That doesn’t seem to happen much these days. Now, this isn’t a cookery book, it’s a book about your attitude to food, so I’m not going to go into the details of how to prepare individual dishes2. But a few general principles are worth discussing.

When you cook your own food, you are investing your own time, money and effort into it. This alone is likely to encourage you to take it seriously. And because you have control over the finished product, you are in a position to manipulate just about every aspect of its preparation: ingredients (especially how much fat & sugar), cooking method, cooking time, cooking temperature, herbs and spices, sauce, garnish. You name it. Aren’t you much more likely to appreciate a meal that you’ve prepared with care and attention yourself than one that’s been anonymously thrown together out of a series of plastic bags in the back kitchen of a fast food outlet? I think so.

I ought to point out that buying and preparing your own food can also be a lot cheaper than continually buying from the chains. You can buy supermarket packs of meat, fish and vegetables at a fraction of the price charged in restaurants. You’ll need to put your own time and effort into it, of course, but standing in the kitchen being thoughtful and imaginative about your next meal has got to be better than lolling on the sofa in front of re-runs of I Love Lucy, gulping down a burger from a polystyrene packet, hasn’t it?

Now, many people, faced with the prospect of cooking a proper meal for themselves, and possibly the whole family, are likely to grab a recipe book and follow it line by line. That’s all very well for a beginner but it’s not what I call cooking. You could just as easily be reading out instructions on how to build a dog kennel. I’ve never been an advocate of recipe books. They don’t help you to develop your own ideas and skill set. Simply following instructions is not the way to leam. You need to experiment and do things for yourself to begin to understand your food and how to prepare it. So my recommendation is to take a look at the recipe books by all means, see what sorts of foods you’d like to cook, get the ingredients together then shut the book and start teaching yourself You’ll find that it’s a far more satisfying approach to cookery.

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Pay yourself first

Always pay yourself first before you use it for your expenditures. At least 10% of your income should go to your savings. This is the money you are going to use for investments and build your wealth.

Control Your Expenditures

Think about all the things you are getting for yourself. Do you really need it or because you want it?

Most of the time we are attracted to material things but we can live without it. Instead of eating out at expensive restaurants for your date, why don't you try cooking a meal for your romantic evening?

Be creative and find ways to control your spending.

Invest Your Money

Learn how to invest your money. If you don’t have an idea or investing is foreign to you.

Get some books or learn from a mentor.

It's important for you to grow your money otherwise it will lose value every year due to inflation and rising costs.

Preserve Your Wealth

Always be careful of the investments you make. If the deal sounds like it's too good to be true, then it's probably is. Safe guard your money and take calculated risks. Be an intelligent investor and take Warren Buffet's advice. He gave 2 rules to his company's CEOs. "Rule No 1 - Don't lose money.

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1 Fortune 500 Company Executives • Believe In Reputation Management

You want to get a competitive edge? Start DOING what nearly 60% of big time executives say they SHOULD be doing but aren't!

2 Professional Marketers Say "Trust" Is Number One for Making a Sales Worthy Impression

Most marketers feel that trust is what makes the sale. Do you trust someone with a bad reputation? Neither will your customers.

3 MOST People Use Social Media to Decide What to Buy

It is no secret. Social proof is powerful. If your social media reputation is lacking, you lose.

4 More and More Large Companies Are . Hiring Full-Time Online Reputation Managers

Want to know what big companies think about reputation management? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics they think highly enough of reputation managers to hire them full-time and pay them handsome salaries.

5 More Adults Are On Social Media Sites • Than You Think

We can't dismiss social media as a young person's world anymore. The people with the money and the spending power are moving online and making decisions based on what they find there.

6 The Public Trusts Social Media...

Do you ever wish your customers could just get to know you better? If they knew you better they would buy your product or service. They can, and they want to via social media!

7... More Than You Know

Think about that for a second! Even the most personal parts of our life are affected by our online reputation.

8 People Are Using Social Media To Gain An Edge On Their Competition. That Means You.

How often are you being searched for online by your competitor or a fellow colleague? More than you think. Are you caring for your reputation like you should be?

9 Employees Feel Pressure to Manage • Their Online Reputation

If 1 out of every 10 employees think they need to be building their online reputation, shouldn't you as a business owner be doing the same?

10 Social Proof Reigns Supreme and • Traditional Advertising Is Dying

Guess what, your reputation goes before you and social media only ensures that. No matter what ads you are running, no matter how many banners you put on your storefront, it will be the recommendations of peers based on your reputation that will bring customers to your doorstep ready to buy.

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Twitter is a powerful tool. But I haven’t seen very many marketers actually using it effectively.

All the ‘gurus’ are telling us to follow EVERYBODY, then send out tweets to every single person who has ever tweeted on our subject. Plus all these Twitter software packages make that kind of stuff so easy…some of it is even ‘set it and forget it’.

Ok, so everyone’s telling how to use Twitter…right?…what’s the big deal?

The ‘big deal’ is that these techniques suck.

I’ve read my fair share of Twitter spamming guides. Why? Because they were pitched as legitimate guides for getting targeted traffic from Twitter, and lots of it. However when I opened ‘em up to browse through, most of them recommended things like mass replies, mass follows (with specific details to help you avoid getting your account banned…which were effective for about 1 week until Twitter updated its security to detect these deceptive tactics…again), and other spammy techniques.

This tells me that there’s tons of people out there who’ve read these guides and think that they are legitimate ways to get traffic from Twitter…and that’s just plain scary. Sure, these poor souls could use the techniques to get SOME traffic from Twitter, but at any second Twitter could ban their accounts for spamming. Destroying hours and hours of effort and hard work.

They have no idea that this dagger is hanging over their heads, ready to fall at any second.

If we can skip over the fact these techniques are borderline spam. These techniques are just plain not effective. They turn Twitter into a numbers game, a very small numbers game.

A game where only a teeny tiny percentage of the people you contact on Twitter will ever respond to you or take the action you’re asking them to. And often, these ‘gurus’ tell you to use deceptive tricks to get people to click through your link on Twitter. Again, not very effective. And won’t build your business.

These ‘gurus’ have the Miracle Twitter Formula upside down and backwards.

They’re not targeting specifically who they want to interact with. Most of the time they leave it up to the software program to help them out, and maybe they’ll throw in a keyword or two to help it along. This is the ‘spray and pray’ strategy. Where they spray their message out there to every sing person they can, and then pray that a few of them are the right people and are willing to respond.