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How To Change Your Mind To Achieve Time and Financial Freedom

Back to the million dollar question. Do you ever wonder why you are stuck in the rat race to an extent you feel that your life is all about paying bills and then die? And no, you are not lazy. You you rise up very early in the morning, come back home extremely late, and at times you have to burn the midnight oil while trying to eke out a living.

Then there are some people that barely do anything, but have their lives all figured out. They often go for holidays, have lots time to spend with their family, and always have lots of cash flow. Their life seems too good to be true. However, this is not so; you too can be free as a bird with enough time and cash to enjoy the fine things that this life has to offer.

Achieving time and financial freedom entails changing your mentality about the subject of time and money. The first step in learning how to change your mind will require you to stop complaining about not having enough cash but focus on figuring out why, you are broke despite your efforts.

The disturbing yet thought provoking questions

Thus instead of making excuses, I started asking myself disturbing yet thought provoking questions such as:

• Why do some people have more time and financial freedom than others?
• Can I attain time and financial freedom while doing any kind of job?
• Does the convectional advice about getting good grades, a good job, good benefits, and good investments really work?
• If this traditional advice is misleading us, why we then follow it blindly?

These questions are quite disturbing and even worse, you will not like the answers you will get. I took further initiative to pose the same questions to some of my friends, and colleagues. Everyone seemed totally sold out to the traditional ‘rat race’ way of life; i.e. work no matter how much it pays, involves an exchange of time for money.

“Everyone seemed totally sold out to the traditional ‘rat race’ way of life…”

I did not like this system at all because it seemed that it would never bring me time and financial freedom I yearned for. Thus, it was either I was being unrealistic or the rest of the world was going about it all wrong.

The need to change your mentality about how money is made

So as to solve the ‘me against the world’ dilemma, I set out on a mission to to educate myself on how  to change my mind to achieve financial freedom without sacrificing on time.

I plunged myself into reading books, listened and watched videos on how to achieve time and financial freedom. Fortunately, on my quest to open the Pandora’s Box, I stumbled upon a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It is a book a boy and his best friend who compared how their fathers earned and spent their money.

This book was instrumental in enabling me to compare and contrast the different perspectives about money and time, enabling me to attain new discoveries that I have never heard of before. Some of these new discoveries brought about a sense of creative tension and also a sense of frustration from within.

“These new discoveries brought about a sense of creative tension and also a sense of frustration from within.”

They shook the very foundation of my traditional beliefs about money and how it is earned. As I progressively understood the concept of how the rich perceived, used and earned money, I began to let go of my traditional beliefs.

Some food for thought

• Does your job give you time and financial freedom or does it just involve an exchange of time for money?
• Think of someone who has attained both time and financial freedom? How did they accomplish it? Is it through conventional or non-conventional ways?

This article is not meant to provide absolute solutions to your financial woes. But it serves a stepping stone to help you question the status quo in your life. It is meant to stimulate your thinking to begin the journey of learning how to change your mind to achieve time and financial freedom.

Eric Gichuru

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Is it safe to use the unsecured network?

The answer to this question is that, it is not completely safe to use these unsecured networks, however by taking the necessary precautions one can connect securely to an unknown network.

Though it is not possible to achieve absolute security, the goal of network security is to make is extremely difficult for one to get exposed to security threats. Currently, computers and other devices, such as PDAs and smart phones can access connect to unsecured Wi-Fi wireless networks in most of the public places such as airports, coffee shops, hotel lounge making it easier for hackers to access private information and data of unsuspecting internet users.

An un-secured network is a network that has no security protocols or has outdated security protocols. The risks one is exposed to when connecting to an unidentified unsecure network; be it wireless or cable include; malicious insertion, network imitations and threat from network scanners among others.

This simply means that by using these networks, users are leaking sensitive information to hackers with special tool to access it. Such information may include passwords of the sender, personal addresses of the sender and receiver, and other sensitive personal information such as bank accounts.

Exemplar

To further elaborate this situation, take an example when mailing a letter, one places the letter in the mailbox which the mailman later picks and delivers to the recipient.

A malicious attack in this case would involve an unauthorized individual who is not an employee of the post office, accessing or intercepting the letter before it could get picked up the mailman. As such, the attacker could do whatever he pleases with the contents of the letter; he could read the contents, change the content, and even destroy the letter. Similarly, this is what is likely to happen when one does not take precaution while using an unsecured network.

All hope is not lost

However, all hope is not lost, there are security measures one can take when using to an open and unsecure network. There are two instances: connecting to an unknown network using your own device and when using an unknown device.

Such tools that come in handy in these instances are Https & Https everywhere. Https encrypts sensitive data using SSL/TLS. Thus, when accessing websites enter https instead of http; this will encrypt and decrypts login information, user page requests and other web pages that are returned by the Web server thus protecting man-in-the-middle and eavesdropping attacks.

Https Everywhere is a slightly advanced Https technology that uses a whitelist of sites or rather major sites that we use to access other sites such as Google, Wikipedia and popular social networks by automatically activating inbuilt security of these sites.

Another effective method is the use of Virtual Private Network (VPN) which makes the unidentified networks function as a single logical unit thus making it possible to easily monitor, secure/encrypt this point. Moreover, users should always implement more secure practices when accessing such kind of networks.

Such practices include use of unique and strong passwords, use of two-step authentication where possible, keeping the firewall active, turning off file and printer sharing, visiting strictly secure sites, use secure web applications and finally limiting the time periods connected to the network.

When using an unknown device the above mentioned tools and security practices apply other than not using weak passwords and configuring firewalls.

A more secure solution is to use a flash disk or a USB external hard drive mounted with a bootable operating system such as Linux OS, which separates the web operations from operations of the device thus creating a secure environment for the user.

Eric Gichuru

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One of the major problems with real estate photography is that the homes come in various sizes, shapes and styles filled with photography uncooperative things such as of corners, shadows, lights, windows, objects, and many more.

In this industry, a picture can be worth up to millions of dollars and can convey more than a thousand words, thus there is need to understand how to produce awesome pictures in such uncooperative environment.

HDR Photography

HDR Photography presents a powerful solution to shooting in places that have poor lighting and numerous other obstructions. The High Dynamic Range (HDR) or fusion is an innovative photo shooting technique that produces photos with a broader range of visual interest and intensity that cannot be achieved through normal photography.

To achieve this effect, our photographer takes multiple different exposures of the same object instantaneously. These images are then carefully selected and combined by layering them to generate a single unique photograph that has achieved balanced lighting and optimal detail in the shadows and highlights of the architectural features or landscape.

The resulting image has greater contrast and depth and is more vibrant and is appealing to the human eye.

As such an HDR image starts off as several images of the same capture but having varying exposure, used to achieve detail in the midtones, highlights, and shadows, which widens the total light range the final image. The resulting image has some sort of an oil painting look.

The HDR, images are emerging as a suitable alternative to other convectional photography methods such as flash guns or use of multiple lights.

Eric Gichuru

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