Mike Bowler

I see that the Wealth and Business Show is on this Saturday in Ajax (that's the town, not the technology). They've got a good lineup of speakers; the three that I've heard before are all excellent and the rest look quite interesting.

We're planning to have a table at the show to promote EasyBrandingTools.com. If you're at the show then come on by and introduce yourself.

My wife and I went to see some of the teachers from The Secret in Toronto yesterday. The event was organized by the Power Within and featured Secret teachers Lisa Nichols, Jack Canfield, John Assaraf, Bob Proctor and Peak Potentials founder Harv Ecker.

Harv is the only one who wasn't actually in the movie The Secret but the material he's been teaching for years is very much in line with what's covered in the movie so he fit right in. Having already been to his Millionaire Mind Intensive, he didn't cover much here that was new for me.

Lisa Nichols was up first and was absolutely fabulous. She is such a dynamic speaker in person and had the crowd with her right from the moment she started. Her focus is helping teens and I can only imagine how powerful her teen events are.

Jack Canfield, creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, was up next. I felt that he started off slow but by the end, he was fabulous. Strangely, my wife didn't think he started off slow at all - she really liked the entire presentation.

John Assaraf gave a really interesting talk along with the most amazing demonstration of how your brain filters out information that I've ever seen. I can't say much about it without spoiling it for others who haven't seen it. This clearly demonstrates that you can be totally oblivious to opportunities right in front of your face.

Bob Proctor was the last speaker of the day. As I look at the successful people who really impress me, it's amazing how many of them credit Bob Proctor as being the mentor who really got them going. People like Loral Langemeir and James Ray and John Assaraf. Knowing this, my expectations on Bob's talk were extremely high and he didn't disappoint.

I came away from this event with lots of notes and action items for my companies and myself. A really good day.

I just got back from the Real Estate and Wealth Expo in Toronto. I was really looking forward to presentations from Tony Robbins, James Ray and Loral Langemeier and I wasn't disappointed. All of them were amazing. Any one of these speakers would have justified the cost of the weekend - being able to see them all was a real bonus.

I hadn't realized that Bill Bartmann was also speaking there so this was a happy surprise. He talked about getting a loan for your business and I got some very good tips out of this. This is my third time hearing Bill talk and he's always great.

James Smith was a real surprise. I'd never even heard of him before the Expo and was really impressed. He's based in Toronto and was talking about Real Estate here. He puts on a very amusing and informative presentation.

Richard Branson's talk was very interesting although not really useful as I didn't take away anything that I can use in my own business. Still interesting in any case.

A number of the talks I went to were duds. I don't mind the speakers pitching their products but I do expect that they're going to provide the information listed in the abstract before doing that. Some of the speakers chose to spend most of the session pitching their product without covering the material they were supposed to. I wonder if they realize how this makes people less interested in their product.

Overall, it was a great weekend. There were five exceptional talks and one interesting one and they definitely outweigh the duds.

The Real Estate Wealth Expo is coming to Toronto on March 24 and 25. They have a whole slew of speakers including Tony Robbins, Donald Trump, George Foreman and David Bach and many others.

I'd go to this just to hear Tony Robbins speak. Having all these other speakers as well makes this a must-see event.

This was asked as a comment to an earlier article and I thought it was interesting so I'm moving it to the top.

Bernard Ng asks...


The kids game has simplified the concepts enough that the kids pick up the basics really quickly.

I introduced my seven year old niece to Cash Flow for Kids yesterday and she picked up the basics with no problem. She now understands that there are two kinds of income (active and passive) and that one is better than the other. She understands that fewer expenses is better than more expenses.

This was her first exposure to money concepts and after an hour of playing, she was really starting to grasp a lot of the concepts. She also had an incredible time - she didn't want the game to end. I think we'll all be playing again today

Naturally, there must be someone to teach the concepts to the kids as they're playing. The rulebook isn't so simple that the kids can pick it up entirely by themselves. Having said that, the game makes it really easy for me to teach the kids about finances.

Cashflow (in or out) is represented as physical tokens that the kids put on their gameboards. Passive income, for example, is represented as green circles. The bigger the circle, the more money it's worth so the $10 circle is smallest and the $1000 circle is the biggest. Older kids can follow the actual money values written on the circles while the younger kids just understand that bigger circles are better than smaller circles.

Active income is represented by blue triangles and expenses are red squares. This gives everything a visual and tactile feel that the kids can easily understand. As with the adult games, you win by having more passive income than expenses. Because all the cashflow is represented by tokens, it's easy to see when you have more green circles than red squares. This kids just love this.

A couple of months ago, I went to a really inspirational talk given by a self-made billionaire, Bill Bartmann. Bill started out in a life of poverty and is now the 25th richest man in America.

I see that he's returning to Mississauga on Jan 18 to give another free evening talk. I've already made my reservation and I highly recommend this one.

You can register here. If you found out about this talk from this blog then please use my name, Mike Bowler, in the "who referred you" field on the form.

As you can see on the right, Bill has also written a book on becoming successful. I haven't read this yet so I can't comment on it, however, I do plan to have it read before this event.

Fast Track to Cash Flow is holding an evening session on real estate investments next Thursday. This should be interesting so I've registered.

My son has been showing a real interest in the Cash Flow games so I think it's time to pick up a copy of Cash Flow for Kids. He's really intrigued by Cash Flow 101 but the rules and the math are far too complicated for him. The Fast Track events usually have the Cash Flow games for sale at their events so this is likely a good time to pick up the kids version.

The Millionaire Mind Intensive was a little over a week ago and I'm still excited about it so I figured I'd follow up with another post.

The goal of the weekend was to change our habits and address our fears regarding money. As a "takeaway" from the seminar, we have a 90 day workbook with exercises to do each day. By the end of the ninety days, all of these activities should have become ingrained habits, replacing the non-supportive habits that we previously had.

I was noticing changes in my own behaviour in just the first few days after the seminar and the daily exercises are reinforcing that new behaviour. One of my problems going into the seminar was procrastination and I've noticed that just in the first couple of days, I've been doing less of that. Things that need to get done are just getting done.

There is another Intensive being run in Toronto in November. If you're not sure whether this is for you then I'd recommend you take a look at the book. If the book makes sense to you then you'll likely get huge value out of the Intensive. If the book just doesn't work for you (it doesn't work for everyone) then the Intensive might not be right for you either.

Remember that buying a copy of the book gets you two free tickets to the Intensive. This would normally cost $1295USD per ticket and would easily be worth that. I understand that the free tickets will only be there for the first printing of the book - when they go to reprint, the free tickets will disappear.

If you decide to register for the Millionaire Mind Intensive and you had learned about it from me then please use registration code 265480. That just lets them know who had referred you.

Peak Potentials also offers a number of other courses and based on the fabulous experience I had with this one, I plan to take quite a few of the others.

I've spent the last three days at the Millionaire Mind Intensive put on by Peak Potentials. They're not kidding when they call this an "intensive" - the shortest day of the three was twelve hours long and energy levels remained consistently high throughout the three days.

The only thing holding us back from becoming fabulously successful is ourselves. We have all been "programmed" by our role models and peers into thinking and believing in certain ways. Sometimes these beliefs are empowering and help us achieve success but often they aren't. The purpose of this seminar is to identify the beliefs that we have and to remove those that aren't empowering us.

This event was fabulous and I'd highly recommend it to anyone. There will be another Millionaire Mind Intensive in Toronto in November so if you want to discover what's holding you back, this is an amazing opportunity.

The book shown here, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, offers a taste of what you'll experience in the seminar. They are doing a special promotion with this edition of the book where just for buying the book, you get two free tickets to this seminar. Having taken the seminar now, I have to say that this is a fabulous deal.

I went to the Millionaire Mind Evening last night, put on by Peak Potentials. The speaker was T. Harv Eker who recently published the book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. I read this book a couple of weeks ago and had really enjoyed it so when I discovered they were doing a live event in Toronto, I had to go.

The basic premise behind their material is that as we have grown up, we have all been programmed with a "financial blueprint" based on how our parents and role models treated money. Unless we take conscious steps to change our blueprint, we will always deal with money as our role models did. For most people that means that it is very difficult to make large sums of money and even harder to keep it.

The material is designed to help you "re-program" your financial blueprint with the goal of becoming and staying wealthy. I can't begin to cover the material as well as Harv has, so I'll just recommend that you pick up a copy of the book or see when they're doing a live event in your area.

One interesting point is that the book went to the top of the New York Times best seller list in it's first week of publication. This is apparently unheard of in the publishing business.

I have accepted the position of secretary at the Durham IT Association so now all positions in the executive are filled for the next year.

At the last meeting of the Durham IT Association (DITA) the issue of taxes for service work came up. While we all charge GST on our work, most of us had been under the impression that services were except from PST. As it turns out, the rules have changed and there are certain situations for which PST applies to services.

For this months meeting, we asked Arden Vanderhorst to speak on PST as it relates to service work. Arden is a chartered accountant based in Whitby and is very active in the Durham business community. I've known him for a while through his association with the Whitby Chamber of Commerce.

The rules for PST are anything but clear. There are so many special cases and gray areas that it's almost impossible to know for sure if you need to charge it. If you have specific areas that you are concerned about, you can request a ruling from the government but that could take six months to get an answer back. It would appear that if you are working in one of the gray areas then it's best to charge PST just in case.

The group had quite a few specific "what if" questions and Arden was helping us understand the code as it's written. Unfortunately, there is a significant amount of ambiguity in the wording. For example, one of the conditions revolved around whether the code was handed off as source or as compiled code. This opens questions about code written in scripting languages such as ruby where you only ever ship source.

I'll be mentioning the Durham IT Association (DITA) periodically so I figured I'd better explain a bit about the group. Durham Region is the area immediately to the east of Toronto (Canada) encompassing Pickering, Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Bowmanville, Courtice etc. DITA is a not-for-profit organization serving the IT market in Durham Region.

DITA is split into two distinct groups: business and professional. I'm a member of DITA and attend meetings for both groups.

DITA Business

The DITA Business group is open to any full time IT focused business in Durham Region. We meet once a month to discuss business issues that affect the IT area. Companies that are either not based in Durham or are not full time businesses are welcome to attend the meetings as guests but are not eligible for membership.

There are a lot of businesses in Durham who need IT services but aren't aware of what skills are already in the area. Often they end up hiring companies in Toronto to solve their problems simply because they didn't know about the local businesses that could have done the same. Part of the mandate of DITA is to promote these local IT businesses.

DITA Professional

The professional group is focused on individuals, not companies, and has a purely technical focus. Unlike the business group, there is no membership. If you're interested in the topic then come out and learn something new. Last night we were experimenting with Ubuntu Linux, a friendly distribution of Debian. The topics are always technical and anybody is welcome. Like the business group, we meet once a month.

The annual vote at the Durham IT Association (DITA) was last night. There are still a couple of votes to be collected but only two positions have multiple nominees so we know who will be filling most of the positions. The final results should be in by next week.

This weekend was the Fast Track to Cash Flow seminar at the International Centre. This is an intense two days focused on improving and managing cash flow. The main theme was building businesses to generate cash flow and then investing that money into real estate to keep the cash flow steady. There were a number of people who use real estate as their primary business but the majority of attendees seemed to be small business owners or future small business owners who want to learn how to grow their businesses and how to protect their cash flow.

Mixed in with the roughly 800 attendees were about a dozen teenagers, most without their parents present. It was refreshing to see the next generation getting interested in business.

There was a heavy emphasis on the Rich Dad philosophy but I consider that a positive thing as I'm a fan of the Rich Dad books. This was the second Fast Track event that I've attended and both have been very worth the time.