The Life and Times of Ben Weinberg

What Is The Real Rate of Return on Investment?

“As you get older, you realize just how valuable time as a commodity is. You tend to start measuring the cost-benefit analysis or the return on investment that you are receiving not just regarding finances and how you spend or invest your money but also on how you spend your time.”

As you get older, you realize just how valuable time as a commodity is. You tend to start measuring the cost-benefit analysis or the return on investment that you are receiving not just regarding finances and how you spend or invest your money but also on how you spend your time. Unfortunately, this is a topic that we do not prioritize or learn about very well at a young age. Often, you must figure out what are the best ways to use your time wisely and your money.

There are numerous tools out there to help guide you find the real rate of return on your investment, but you must be the one making the decision on what you prioritize. We know for a fact that our time on this Earth is limited from the day we are born. Having such knowledge shouldn’t be morbid or despairing, but rather help us to prioritize how we spend our lives in search of a good use of our time, our money, and much more.

Now, not everything that we do in life should be correlated with a ‘cost-benefit analysis’ or ‘opportunity cost’ involved. Such behavior should be discouraged if you’re obsessing over how you spend every waking minute each day. You should be leaving some room for spontaneous actions that you enjoy regardless of if it’s geared towards health, wealth, and personal satisfaction. There are times each day where we have to commit to actions that take time when we would rather be doing something else and that is what adulthood entails sometimes.

The true focus is what can we do with our time that is free, which will help us in the long-term. If we have goals of wealth, health, and pursuing our own happiness, your time should be spent in looking in investing each day in building yourself up in each of these areas. For example, when we look at investing in our health, we know there are concrete things that can be done, which will help us with a return on having a healthier body, a healthier mind, and managing our stress and anxiety.

We may have to join a gym, change our diet, sleep more, and make time for exercising, and these are the kinds of investments, if done consistently, that can pay off in the long-term. These investments that I cite will not guarantee a longer life, but it is giving yourself the best possible chance of living a healthier life, especially if you are focusing on multiple investments.

In this case, the real return on investment may not be seen right away but you are likely to see some results if you’re consistent with your investments on a long-term basis. You can measure how your diet is helping you lose weight, how your sleep patterns have changed, and how much time you spend at the gym, the yoga studio, or in playing sports. These investments are measurable but the results on these investments will eventually show up in a real rate of return that will put you on a path that leads to a healthier life in the long-term. Returns are not guaranteed but if you are putting in the work over a long enough period, I believe the chances are good that you will be better off than you were years or even decades ago.

Similarly, how we save and invest financially for our long-term financial future, we can do the same with our health and our happiness. Everyone has different financial goals, and I won’t talk about specific investment advice to give, but you can always estimate to a degree what kind of percentage return you’re likely to get from your investments over a year or a decade or a century in terms of growth. These real returns will come to you but if you’re not consistently investing in building your wealth, those real returns will not be as impactful or as fruitful as you would have hoped. It goes to show that with either health, wealth, and happiness, that the earlier you invest in those facets of life and the more that you invest in them, the better off that you will be.

What makes someone truly happy is complicated and will differ depending on your emotional state, but I do believe spending more time with those who care about you, and you who care about them, enjoying more time spent doing the hobbies and interests that give you joy, and being able to invest time in learning new skills, exploring new places, or investing in your home and community, those kind of investments will have real returns on making you happier in the long-run. There will be times when what you did or do no longer makes you happy and that is alright. The key here is to keep trying out new things, keep meeting people, keep trying to be involved in areas of life that you think will make you happier, that is key in continuing to make those investments in building your happiness into the future to keep producing better and better returns.

Time is fleeting and you must prioritize health, wealth, and happiness in my view, which will give you those real returns in your life to enjoy and take joy in. Most of all, you have to know the difference as you get older between what’s give you actual returns for your hard work and efforts, and what you have to stop doing that is giving you no real returns. It is important to prioritize more of what will pay off in the future throughout your life and increasingly avoid those activities that produce a negative return and will leave you worse off.

It is one thing to be able to invest well in activities that bolster your life satisfaction, but you should also remember to avoid those other ways of spending the time that lower your real returns or negate them entirely. Be sure to know what a waste of your time is, if you can cut that activity out or lower your exposure to it and be able to replace the time spent on that activity with a good alternative. which you can take part in to continue to invest in building a life and a future that will make you healthy, wealthy, and happy.

The Gaslight Anthem @ The Anthem

Camera: iPhone 12

Location: The Anthem; Washington, District of Columbia

English Corner – Making Sure to Edit Your Presentations

“Getting peer edits or a peer review of the written part of the presentation will set you apart in a good way.”

Nothing takes away from a good presentation more than careless and recurring spelling and grammar errors that are noticeable to the audience. You could have an excellent looking PowerPoint with supporting details, crisp bullet points, and a stylish design, but if it is filled with English spelling and grammar errors, it will be a distraction from the overall presentation. As an English as a Second Language instructor, it is one of the first things I notice from a presentation, and it is an issue that I believe must be resolved before you present in front of an audience.

The presenter’s speaking ability, their cadence, tone, voice intonation, etc. are all key to having a good presentation but is not everything to its overall success. You have to remember the little details in a presentation and that includes making sure to edit and review your presentation as a non-native English speaker and learner. I am not singling out non-native English language learners alone because I have noticed grammar and spelling errors even from native English speakers due to being careless about it.

When you are learning English for professional purposes, it does no good for you to be careless about an important presentation. When you are just going through the motions of drafting up your presentation slides, it can be easy to just copy, paste, and hope that people understand your writing. People will not point these errors out to you after the presentation itself, but they will be taking note of the errors in the presentation, and it will be distracting them as they review what you presented on and how they feel about the subject matter itself.

In my view, it does show a lack of care and concern for your presentation when you don’t check for errors, review your spelling, or edit the grammar if necessary to make sure the written part of it is as good or if not to be better than what you verbally presented on. Depending on the type of professional English language presentation you are given, these kind of spelling, grammar, or written errors could hurt your ability to sell a product, to convince a business to partner with you, or to get the audience to agree with your thesis or your conclusion. When you put all your efforts into your 5-10-15 minute presentation in terms of your spoken English but neglect the hour or so needed to edit the PowerPoint slides for the visual aspect of it, the whole presentation will be setback as a result.

Do not let your presentation be derailed due to a few careless errors that could have been revised with just a few minutes of review and revisions. Your spoken part of the presentation is likely to be more intense, stressful, and time-consuming. However, it does not mean you should neglect the ability to write about what you’re presenting and to do so with as good of written English that you can muster. You are doing a disservice to your audience if you do not edit your written presentation whether they are notes, slides, or another form of written output that they will have to understand and digest.

If you are not comfortable with editing your presentation before you give it, be sure to check with your colleagues if they also know written English at the same level or higher than you, especially if they are advanced learners or it is their native language. Getting peer edits or a peer review of the written part of the presentation will set you apart in a good way. It shows that you care about all aspects of your presentation and are not self-conscious about your writing as a non-native English learner.

The peer editor will assist you immensely especially if you take the time to sit with them ahead of the presentation to review your errors, fix them together, and understand how you made them in the first place. The point of these professional presentations beyond just business or personal growth is to make you a better English speaker and writer. You can fix as many mistakes as necessary but if you are not learning from them for future presentations, you will continue to make them for future presentations much to your own professional detriment.

Getting your presentation reviewed by a peer or colleague you trust will help you immensely in various ways. It will help build your confidence, help you become a better writer by understanding the mistakes that were made, and even help you with networking purposes since you will be building a good relationship with your peer editor or reviewer in your field of study or work.

A presentation has two components usually: the written word and the spoken word. There may be an audio or a visual component but in professional English, the key parts that must be mastered in giving a presentation are to speak eloquently and with a concise and understandable tone, and for the written part, is to not make serious spelling, grammar, and other errors that are easily avoided with editing your presentations beforehand.

Please make sure to review and edit your written slides or notes before you present them to an audience in a professional or academic setting. If you need to get a peer to edit or review your written presentation, you should be doing that before you get on the stage or in front of the podium. You will become more respected and admired for your abilities to present in English as your 2^nd or 3^rdlanguage when you put the necessary efforts in beforehand to master the art of speaking in front of an audience and having your written work presented without major errors or mistakes. The English language is not an easy language to master, especially when it comes to using it for professional purposes, but you will become that much more of an advanced learner if you are able to write and speak in front of an audience on a serious topic or subject matter so others in your professional field will appreciate and recognize your hard work and efforts.

Skopje, North Macedonia

Camera: iPhone 12

Location: Skopje, North Macedonia

The Bill Always Comes Due

“It is an inevitability that we all must face and even when we try to push it out of our mind, that responsibility is there to provide lest we face any consequences that comes with not paying the bill.”

When we think about the moment of slight anxiety or stress involved with sitting in a restaurant, you’re satiated from a great meal of great food and drinks, maybe you’re surrounded by friends and family on a special night together, in all that joy and happiness, you still have that thought in the back of your mind, “the bill always comes due.”

There is no way of avoiding it and you’re going to have to pay it, one way or another. It is an inevitability that we all must face and even when we try to push it out of our mind, that responsibility is there to provide lest we face any consequences that comes with not paying the bill.

While you are under the expectations that any food, drinks, or other service at a restaurant always will come at a cost, we as consumers try to not think about that at all to be here and now in the present to enjoy what we have ordered with the company that we keep. It is a key characteristic of human nature that we often avoid thinking about the future even when we do at present is likely to carry its own kind of consequences. I use ‘the bill coming due’ as an anecdote for how what we choose to do, how we act, what we focus on and prioritize, will lead to what kind of bill we end up paying in the future.

Just like you would not want to pay a restaurant bill you cannot afford by understanding your budget and what you can afford to order off the menu of that particular reasonably priced restaurant, we should be aware of the fact that there are other ‘bills’ that can come due in the future that can cost us more than we bargained for if we are not careful about it. What we do in the present can help us manage our bills and how we handle our future by dealing with it in a responsible and mature manner now.

Let’s think about our health and how we manage it as there will be some kind of ‘bill’ handed down to us as we get older. It can be a clean ‘bill’ of health as your physician or doctor will tell you if everything goes well or it can instead be an array of expensive tests, surgeries, or procedures that lead to a hefty medical ‘bill’ that will cost us dearly beyond what we can afford, even if you have some form of insurance. How do we avoid this kind of ugly ‘bill’ of health? Well, I won’t dive into specifics as I am not a medical physician but how you eat, if you exercise, whether you stay active in your daily life, can help us pay off that ‘bill’ in advance or make it that much smaller to manage in the long run. There are common sense ways to manage the ’bill’ of health as it will come due at some point, and you have a measure of control over it in the present to make sure it does not bankrupt you or cost you with your health in the future.

In a similar way, one’s ‘wealth’ and how you manage it in the present can help you pay the various ‘bills’ that come due on a monthly, yearly, or longer basis. When you use part of your paycheck and weekly or monthly earnings to pay down outstanding debt or to save up for an emergency or to help yourself learn an employable skill, you are making sure that you will be able to pay for any bill that can come due because you have accrued your wealth and investments in a way where you will never be broke from these ‘bills’ coming due.

If you make other choices instead where you spend every dollar you make and beyond that, get into debt with various bill collectors including the credit cards and other loans you have taken out, the bills that come due will be beyond your accrued means, and you may be struggling for the rest of your life to get out from the ‘bills’ coming due that you have to pay or face serious financial consequences.

You do not want your health, wealth, or ability to earn a living to suffer because you cannot handle both present and future bills to come. You should make sure to think of the future to save, invest, and earn for a ‘rainy day’ fund that can overcome an unforeseen or unexpected bill coming due. Again, I am not making any specific financial recommendations to you as I am neither a financial planner or investor, but I do want to impart some common sense and wisdom in how to avoid future ‘bills’ by planning to save and invest for the future in some measurable way so the bills coming due will be paid for entirely without any stress or anxiety.

Lastly, it is unfortunate where we live in a society where it can cost exorbitant amounts to educate oneself for the workforce and for financial success, indebting ourselves in the process. I believe education is worth investing in if you are able to afford the bills to come due, but if you are in a cycle where you can’t get out of accrued bills or debt because you went for higher or professional education, please make sure that the investment that you make in the present will help pay off the debt in the future. The worst thing to do is invest in an education that does not end up paying for itself later and help with all the bills coming due to that investment.

Make sure you focus on those employable skills or to be a subject matter expert or practitioner, in an important area that will pay off because you invested in your education in a useful area. I know of a lot of people who cannot get themselves out of a debt or pile of bills, even with their extra years of education, because what they learned what not useful for the job market, and now they are stuck with bills that will never be paid off.

I am not against the idea of paying for more education but please make sure it is aligned with your future career or business goals. If you are not sure of what you want to invest financially in an education, there are many free tools and videos that can help you understand better of what opportunities are out there. I think it’s important to think hard about what bills you want to take on for your education because it is no good to have a debt burden that will prevent you from future job or educational opportunities because you have bills coming due that you must sacrifice your ideal career or business for.

Whether it is health, wealth, or education, you will have to pay the bills that come due, even if they come at an unknown future date. Make sure you invest in each area within reason that you will be able to afford to do so without suffering later for bills or obligations that you took on that you found were beyond your capacity.

Do not sacrifice your future by what you do in the present. Make sure you practice good health habits, invest in your wealth accrual with whatever route that you find is best for your goals, and to reasonably access educational opportunities that can create excellent business or career opportunities that you will not have to sacrifice either your health or your wealth to achieve. Remember that the bill(s) always come due at the end, but that does not mean life should not be enjoyed or taken advantage of, but to do so in responsible manner, where your present is secured in each of these three areas, and as a result, your future is prosperous, healthy, and full of opportunities.

Prizren, Kosovo

Camera: iPhone 12

Location: Prizren, Kosovo

Creating Something Out Of Nothing

“The greater the ownership over an idea, a product, a thing, or a concept that you create, the more investment you’re likely to have over it.”

Every one of us has a creative impulse that should not be ignored. It is important to tap into it throughout our lives to create something out of nothing. What better gift to share with the world than something that comes from within us alone and can bring something of utility to another person. I personally find that being able to create something that you made or built or established from your own hard work is the most fulfilling thing that one can do in life. It is beyond rewarding to see something that started from just an idea alone come to fruition through your own efforts.

While it can be exciting or interesting to help someone else build their dream into reality or help be part of that team that executes another person’s idea or vision, it simply does not compare to making your own idea into reality and having others work on that idea to help you develop it into something real. Fulfillment can come in many forms, but I find that making something of your own and having it go out in the world to be a successful product, service, or thing that will be used for months, years, or generations is one of the greatest joys that one can experience in one’s life.

The greater the ownership over an idea, a product, a thing, or a concept that you create, the more investment you’re likely to have over it. When you are the owner or the founder rather than an employee or a team member, the feeling of accomplishment that you have when it happens or becomes something that is fully realized, it is hard to go back to being in that complementary role going forward.

It is good to start small when you are creating something, and to set your expectations within reason. You don’t have to start building a massive business or a large product to feel its joyful effects. It’s best to start with a small project like an eBook, a small product you designed or built, or some kind of freelance service that you alone provide. Once you start to advertise, market, or sell that small product or service you built, it will give you that needed boost of confidence that can propel you forward with other ideas to implement.

When it comes to the act of creation, you must stick with it for a while whether it is an invention, a business, or a service because it will need some tweaking, refinement, or even a rebuild especially if people aren’t buying what you are selling. Sometimes, you’ll need to start over again with a different idea and other times, you’ll need to do a lot of revisions or tweaks to make it more palatable to your audience. Any creation has a strong possibility of failure but even if it does fail, you should rest easy knowing that the act of creating anything is something that not many people can do or even try it at all.

If you can create anything at all, that’s taking a step that most people are not comfortable with doing themselves. You may think that if you create or build something that isn’t successful that you failed entirely but that is not the case at all. If you take that pivotal step in creating something out of nothing, you went further than most people are willing to go. You should keep your spirits up by knowing that just because what you built, made, or created wasn’t exactly financially profitable or sold a lot of units, it does not mean your efforts were wasted.

When you build something from scratch, you gain valuable skills in that process that you would not get otherwise as an employee or team member. Creating something takes innovation, critical thinking, subject matter knowledge, and knowledge of the components of that product or service. Additionally, any kind of creation often involves website development, shipping / delivery, sales, marketing, advertisement, content creation, and networking with other people in that area of expertise. If what you first created did not reach your own goals or hopes, don’t stop creating.

Be bold enough to create something else and to keep trying new inventions, new products, or new services. I am a believer in a creator’s ability to keep tinkering with new ideas, trying out different ideas, and being able to revise their ideas to build something even better. Many inventors including Thomas Edison, one of the greatest creators in history, had to submit hundreds of inventions and establish hundreds of patented creations, before he was able to establish and market the early version of the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera.

Any great creator from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs to Elon Musk did not just stop with their one creation or one product or one invention, they used their talents and their ideas to propel themselves forward into different creative areas. You should build on a small success and use that fuel to try out other ideas in your area of expertise. If you can create something that generates a little bit of success, that motivation will carry you forward in being able to develop other ideas that may be even more successful. Do not be afraid to fail either. If you can be one of those people who can create, can invent, or can build something from nothing, you should know that you are a unique individual who is changing the world in a small yet measurable way. Even if you are not the next Thomas Edison, you are a creator in the world and that is quite the personal achievement.

Pristina, Kosovo

Camera: iPhone 12

Location: Pristina, Kosovo

Anatomy of a Scene – ‘The NZT-48 Pill’

How often have you thought about the possibility of taking one pill per each day that would maximize your brain’s full potential? With the movie ‘Limitless’ with Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro, this film poses the answer in the form of ‘NZT-48’, which can allow you to access everything you’ve read, heard, and learned without any true effort. This kind of wonder drug is purely fictional but many people in real life seek this kind of legal short cut nowadays whether it’s to focus, to lose weight, to improve memory, or to retain more information. In the film’s early scenes such as the one that introduce this magic pill’s effects, we get to see what kind of effects NZT-48 has on Eddie Moura, the main character.

This limitless pill is introduced as one that can improve focus, memory, knowledge retention, tidiness, and even make your intelligence that much more advanced especially after repeated usage. The scene that I would highlight shows just how effective it can be in multiple areas and how well the director shows how its daily usage turns a struggling writer into a financial tycoon and published author in just a week’s time.

The scene starts out with Eddie Moura taking the NZT-48 pill for the first time even though he knows it comes with risks and side effects. He asks, “worth the risk?” by breaking the fourth wall with the audience, and says in the narration, “what would you do?” It’s a pertinent question because due to how many months, years, or decades it takes to be successful naturally without any enhancements, supplements, or advantages, how many of us watching the scene would want to take the easy way out in life even if there were risks involved? It’s part of the reason why this scene is so powerful because we know Eddie will face consequences for using this pill eventually but as we are told, the benefits of the pill may outweigh the consequences at first making it a tempting magic pill.

Eddie’s changes start out small as his pupils dilate and he starts seeing the world much more clearly than before. He’s clear-headed, not anxious socially, able to think and act clearly, and is aware of his own personality traits that need improvement. He gets a haircut, builds his wardrobe with a stylist leather jacket, cleans up his messy apartment, and starts to exercise more frequently and seriously.

From there, Eddie, a struggling writer, finds “a surge of motivation” from the pill to finish the novel he had been failing to finish for years and writes it all in just a few days’ time. Eddie doesn’t stop at that monumental achievement as a new novelist. He learns to play the piano in just three days, becomes a master poker player knowing how to play the odds in his favor and winning a lot of money against the house, and becomes fluent in most languages just by casually listening to them as he goes on a daily run with the headphones playing different vocabulary for him to instantly memorize.

Eddie uses his newfound social and language skills to seduce a beautiful woman and begin to network and build relationships to put his newfound wealth to good use in the stock market. He explains key economic concepts to those around him, can hedge bets on the pharmaceutical industry (partly responsible for his NZT-48 usage), and flies to a far-off beach to enjoy drinks and food at a private mansion with some of his new friends.

These may be selfish desires on Eddie’s part, but he’s able to diagnose exactly what the medical issue is with his aunt and how to fix the issue. “I suddenly knew everything about everything.” He is able to not only explain complicated medical diagnoses but is able to explain complicated concepts simply enough for everybody else to agree and understand. Eddie has access to everything and a 100% capacity to do what he wishes with his life. He has no fears, no anxieties from taking the magic pill and can hold a conversation with anybody about anything.

However, towards the end of the scene, we start to see the drawbacks of this magic pill in how Eddie must keep moving forward or it’ll feel like he’s dying or suffering. We see this briefly in how he drives a Maserati at maximum speed much to the delight of his companion, but for which he has no conception of how dangerously fast he’s going and what the drawbacks can be of his new heart-stopping lifestyle. “I felt like I was going to explode…”

“Anybody ever jump?” Eddie says to his newfound friends on a massive cliff overlooking the ocean. “Are you crazy?”, one woman asks of him given it’s a few hundred meters above sea level. Eddie’s heart is pulsating and while he’s lost his fear including of heights, he’s beginning to see that he can’t pull back on the adrenaline, the curiosity, and the sheer exhilaration the pill is giving him. The pill does have a side effect and it can be a deadly one of not being able to slow down and to live life normally. Eddie constantly must be upping himself and creating bigger and bigger goals for him to accomplish.

We see this play out in the rest of the film as Eddie seeks to become more wealthy, famous, and powerful with the help of his magic pill. As much as the audience sees how exciting and fulfilling Eddie’s life had become since using NZT-48, the film is a warning against how taking the short cut of a ‘magic pill’ or a quick and easy fix can come with devastating consequences. It is a warning on how taking the easy way out may feel good in the short run, it can have side effects that can bring us down as a result.

This scene is shot very well and is rememberable because it shows just how much potential we all have and it’s not from a pill like NZT-48 as it comes instead from within us. We may not be able to write a book in a few days or learn the piano or be a star poker player like Eddie, but we do have the discipline, abilities, and motivation within us to improve ourselves even if it takes longer in the form of months, years, or decades. We can all learn to exercise more consistently, learn a new language quicker with consistent practice, and be able to improve our style, our conversational skills, and build our finances and our talents over a period of time.

Eddie Moura may have needed NZT-48 to reach the heights of human achievement, but the film’s message, especially in this scene, is that while the ‘magic pill’ is fictional, we can strive to achieve more through our own discipline, consistency, and hard work. We may not be as good as Eddie at everything or be able to be as accomplished as quickly, but this scene does show how with consistent effort, hard work, and beliefs, we can reach our own pinnacle as Eddie did.

It’s a fictional scene and movie about one man’s insatiable desire to use this ‘magic pill’ repeatedly to be the man he always dreamed of being without any regard for what this addiction can cause harm to him and others in his life. It is a cautionary story for each of us that while he was able to achieve great things much more quickly, it did cost him a lot as a result. We ourselves can achieve almost as many great things through our own natural abilities and talents, without a ‘magic pill’ needed, and not have to deal with the consequences of using the shortcut taken by Eddie Moura because of that. To be as ‘Limitless’ as possible, you need to work as hard as you can as consistently as you can to do the best that you can.