Kat Kuan

Welcome To My Blog

Kat

A Poetry Book By Dean Jackson for Returning To Yourself

By

If you enjoyed my documentary Finding What’s Real (all videos out now! you can watch here), I think you’d enjoy this book of poetry by Dean Jackson called The Poetry of Oneness: Illuminating Awareness of the True Self.

I found out about this writer because I was watching Kim Kardashian’s Instagram Stories, haha! She gets a lot promotional gifts from her other celebrity friends who are coming out with new products and such. Anyhow, her friend Adrienne Bailon sent her a gift of new jewelry pieces from Adrienne’s new collection and included a note with this quote.

She dances to the songs in her head. Speaks with the rhythm of her heart and loves from the depths of her soul.

Excerpt from Dean Jackson poem

It’s such a moving quote! I started looking it up and reading more quotes from Dean Jackson on Google Images, and then I stumbled on some poetry books that he had written. Hence how I ended up buying The Poetry of Oneness!

When I first opened the book, let’s just say, it was not the most beautiful in terms of graphic design. But then I read in the forward that he intentionally designed the book with a lot of white space so that readers could write down their own thoughts and inspirations as they read the poems.

So yeah! Once I got past that part, I really enjoyed the poems! Don’t let the appearance of the book fool you about what kind of gems are inside the book.

I can’t express how deep some of the poems are. Sometimes I felt like “OMG! The poem’s talking about me!” Or you feel like the poem describes a relationship you have with someone. I found the perfect one to describe my relationship with my fiance and it literally made me cry. The jist is that these poems are about life, love, truth, and what really matters.

It’s great to read right before you go to bed – in solitude. It’s quite calming. Much better experience than looking at your phone right before sleeping.

I was thinking it’d be a nice gift idea for someone who may appreciate a good poetry book or some nice words of wisdom. Hmm *wheels turning in my head.*

Anyhow, my favorite poems in the book are “Butterfly,” “Self-Acceptance” and “Only You Know.” If you get it too, let me know which ones you like!

The Poetry of Oneness: Illuminating Awareness of the True Self

Other recommended books:
Grace Over Grind
Love Warrior
The 10X Rule
The Miracle Morning

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. And of course, I would recommend this book regardless.

Magical Bridge Playground: A Place for Everyone to Play

By

It’s rare to find a place where everyone, regardless of age or ability, can come together and play. And that is why Magical Bridge Playground is such a special place. It’s designed to be inclusive of the 1-in-4 people amongst us who have physical / cognitive disabilities, autism, visual / hearing impairments, medically fragile, or are part of the aging population.

The Story

The founder Olenka Villarreal wanted a playground where her disabled and non-disabled daughters could play with their friends. They had very different needs and she found that the existing playgrounds didn’t cater to these needs well. She gathered a team of volunteers together, created the vision together, fundraised, and made this a reality over the course of 7 years. The playground opened up in 2015 in Palo Alto, CA as a socially inclusive playground, where all are welcome. Now it has over 25k visitors a month!! Wow!

Olenka and her friend Jill Asher went on to create the Magical Bridge foundation, and Santa Clara County has allocated $10M in funds for more playgrounds like this!

My Visit to the Playground

Here are some snapshots from my first visit to Magical Bridge Playground. Hint: If you go early in the morning, no one else is there and it’s having a whole playground to yourself!!

I love how colorful everything is and how many different play structures there are!

I had never seen these before!!

They have little descriptions on what the different play zones are, who it’s for, and the science behind them. Neat!

Community Stage

They have a bunch of different slides too. Slides are my favorite – so much fun to go down!

Omg the baby slide in the tot zone is too cute!!

Alright, that wraps up the photos that I took at the Magical Bridge Playground. All I can say is how impressed I am with this place. They put a lot of thought into making this a place for everyone. They collaborated with play experts, educators, therapists, families living with different disabilities, and landscape architects. They’re very conscious of the health and wellness benefits of play as well. It’s a magical place!

They also have other local authors and concerts this summer in the playground. Check out their Facebook page for the event line-up.

The success of this playground has led to even more of these Magical Bridge playgrounds being planned for around the Bay Area – with locations planned for Mountain View, Morgan Hill, Redwood City, and Sunnyvale.

But there is still a $1M funding shortfall to kick off construction of the Mountain View playground. So please consider donating to this nonprofit if you want to see this playground come to your city. I already made my contribution! You can donate here: http://magicalbridge.org/mtnview/

Storytime Event

Also, I’ll be doing a storytime for my book Use Your Voice at Magical Bridge Playground in Palo Alto on Sunday, June 2, 2019 from 3-5pm. Check out the Facebook events page for more details and to RSVP!

Thank you for reading! Hope you have a chance to check out this place and get to experience it for yourself! The pictures do it no justice.

The 10X Rule Book Review

By

This book was excellent!! I was so excited to start writing a book review for ya’ll before I even finished the book. This book is called The 10x Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure. This audiobook was 7hr 30 min long, and it captured my interest the WHOLE time, and left me wanting more from this author Grant Cardone. I continue to watch his videos on his YouTube channel.

What is the 10X Rule?

The 10X Rule is about taking massive action (10X action) in order to achieve success in life, business, any area of your life. Grant says that if you want to achieve a certain goal, it’s going to take 10X the amount of effort AND time that you think it will take.

He says that oftentimes, people underestimate how long or how much effort it’ll take to finish something. So then when they put forth a little effort and don’t get the results they were hoping for, they give up. But he says, DO NOT GIVE UP. And keep funneling in massive energy and time towards it (and money if you have it). Because you have to commit and invest in something, in order for it to happen. You can’t just invest pennies and be cautious with small risks and expect a big return.

Who Is He?

Grant Cardone has built a sales training empire and a huge real estate portfolio – he’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. His wife Elena Cardone is his business partner, and she describes him as a beast. At first, I didn’t know much about him, but after going through this book, wow Grant Cardone is a beast. He has this fire within and intense focus and ability to go after what he wants, no matter who or what is standing in his way. The way he reads this audiobook is with the same fervor he attacks life – he is very passionate and has a very urgent tone of voice that convinces you to act now. I actually listened to the audiobook when I was running on the treadmill and it really motivated me to push harder on the treadmill, haha!

Four Types of People

He talks about how there are 4 different types of people when it comes to taking action.

  • People who don’t act, and won’t be convinced to act. They like making excuses.
  • People who retreat and do what’s safe, perhaps because they tried it before and they saw that it didn’t work out.
  • People who do an average amount of action and convince themselves they’re doing enough.
  • People who take 10X massive action and are very successful in what they set out to do.

He says that the biggest trap is the third group of people – people who do normal amounts of action and convince themselves they’re doing enough. They’re in denial basically. But they haven’t created enough momentum. They haven’t committed enough. They haven’t gone all in. They’re still stoppable if some big obstacle happens, or they don’t act with the urgency they need and opportunities slip away.

Count Results, Not Effort

He says don’t pat yourself on the back for trying or for putting forward some effort. He says to focus on the result. For example, he says if you called someone 40 times and still haven’t closed the deal, it’s basically as if you didn’t call at all – in terms of results. So he emphasizes results. Sure, there are other benefits to growing and learning from putting forth effort, but he says that you need to push yourself to get the result you want.

10X Goals

The 10X rule is about putting forth 10X effort AND also having 10X goals and dreams. He pushes you to think bigger than your wildest dreams. He doesn’t want you to dumb down your dreams to make them more reasonable / achievable. He wants you to 10X your biggest dreams. Now that was a way of thinking that I haven’t been pushed to do in a long time! Isn’t it weird that we live in a world where we’re not challenged to think of the biggest, wildest possibilities for ourselves? Instead we’re encouraged to think small? Hmm that’s not cool.

His Own TV Show

Grant gives an example of how he wanted to have his own TV show. But he started with no connections in the TV industry. He details the steps that he took to get his foot in the door and land his TV show. It wasn’t like the opportunity just came to him and fell in his lap. This guy had to HUSTLE and show up at people’s offices to ask for appointments and had to invest his time and money to move things forward (even fly out for trips without a guaranteed meeting). He had to take a gamble on things hoping for the chance that it may work out. He didn’t wait for the TV networks to move forward with his show, he convinced the guys in charge that he was the one for the job and moved the timeline forward. I was amazed at his story because it took guts and such a strong belief in himself to practically create space for himself in this industry.

The Early Days

Grant also talks about his early days when he had nothing and was starting off. He was 25 and had just gotten out of a drug rehab program. He had gotten fired from a bunch of jobs, and got his start by cold calling and knocking on doors to gain customers. None of these people knew him and he kept showing up and calling them – even at nighttime and even on weekends. People started to be impressed with how persistent and how hardworking he was. And he built up his businesses from there. He still does things like that – picking up the phone and calling. So you can’t say that Grant inherited lots of privilege and that’s why he was successful. This guy literally built it all up from scratch and a lot of hard work.

The basic gist is that whatever is too much trouble for other people, he’s willing to do that and go above and beyond for his clients and for his business. He doesn’t shy away from hard work. He knows that taking incredible amounts of action is the only way to move towards your goal.

Obscurity

Another interesting point he made was that a new entrepreneur’s biggest challenge is obscurity. Just not being known by enough people. That’s why marketing is so important. Potential customers can’t buy from you if they don’t know who you are or what you’re offering!

In those early days, he didn’t have any money to spend on advertising, so he had to keep making phone calls and going to people’s offices to become known. Now he uses social media, his YouTube channel, talks, books, partnerships and more to broaden his network.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I thought this was a really good book to light some fire under me to get me to take more action. And it really depends what you need in your life right now. If you want someone who will soothe you and encourage you and tell you that you are enough as you are, then I would check out other authors / resources like Louise Hay. If you want someone who is more blunt and will tell you to start hauling a** and work harder, then Grant Cardone may be your guy. There’s a time and place for both types of methods to motivate yourself. 🙂

One Word on Massive Action

I leave you with one more thought from Grant. He said something interesting about the 3 types of people listed above who aren’t really taking much action: If you look more closely at their life, they are probably taking massive action on some other area of their life – maybe video games, or shopping, or a TV show, or some other area of their life. I can vouch for this theory. In the past, if I wasn’t taking massive action in my business, I was probably obsessing over something else that wasn’t important. Or just being extremely distracted by it and sinking a lot of time into it. SO if you’re going to take massive action on something in your life anyways, make it be on the thing that will make the most difference in your life. Make it count!!

If you’re ready to 10X your life, here’s the book. The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure.

If you enjoyed this article, sign up for my newsletter HERE!

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. And of course, I would recommend this book regardless.

Transformed by Kat: Alice Shares Her Story

By

Excited to share the latest client before & after photo!! This is Alice and she shares her styling journey below.

“For the last quarter century of me dressing myself, I’ve stayed with the tried and true (and boring) uniform of a (probably black) shirt and jeans. Once a year I’d force myself to go to the store and if the item somewhat fit, I’d buy it. Being overweight didn’t help this relationship I had with “fashion”.

I didn’t want to wear clothes that drew attention to me until Kat showed me the possibilities. She completely changed the game for me by helping me realize that beautiful, well made clothes didn’t have to be super expensive and that dressing well didn’t have to be uncomfortable.

In fact, the new work pants she helped me find are more comfortable than yoga pants! I honestly haven’t felt so comfortable, beautiful, and most importantly, confident, in my own skin since I was a kid. Not to be dramatic but a whole new world has been introduced to me and I can’t wait to explore it.”

Thank you so much for sharing, Alice!! You are glowing and I couldn’t be happier to see your confidence shining through.

#styledbykatkuan #transformedbykat

Update on Miracle Morning 30-Day Challenge

By

If you remember, last month I wrote about the book The Miracle Morning by Hal Erod. I took on his 30-Day Challenge and tried to do the routines every day for 30 days. Over a month has flown by already! Below are the results on how I fared.

Quick recap first: The Miracle Morning routine consists of these 6 activities. You can do them for as long or as short as you’d like, but you’re supposed to do all of them each morning.

S – silence
A – affirmations
V – visualization
E – exercise 
R – reading
S – scribing (also known as writing or journaling)

The Last 30 Days

I tracked all of it in a spreadsheet, or sometimes on paper in my journal.

As you can see, there are a bunch of gaps in odd places. Some days, I did none of the activities, usually days when I had a meeting early in the morning. I traveled one weekend, so that was completely blank. But for the mornings when I had nothing immediately pressing to do, I was able to get through (most of) the SAVERS activities.

Another chart to visualize how many times I did each activity

You’ll also notice that my biggest weak spot is exercise. Often it’d be easy to do the 5 other tasks, but then I’d procrastinate and then not exercise.

Despite the inconsistencies in my routine, I still feel like I practiced each activity enough times to gain some new insights which I share below.

Silence

Prior to this challenge, I never had the time or discipline to sit in silence for a few minutes, but now I look forward to it! I crave that silence sometimes. It’s a moment to feel at complete peace and to be receptive to whatever God / the Universe has to offer you.

I’ve heard of it described this way. If prayer is asking God for something, then meditation (or silence in this case) is listening for the response.

Hence, I would clear my mind and try to listen. Oftentimes, a phrase or word or some sentiment would pop into my head. Then I would immediately write it down in my journal so I could remember it.

I would “hear” things like: Trust and soften your heart. I have everything I ever wanted. Let my heart sing. Unwaver. And so on. Sometimes I’d write these early morning thoughts on my Twitter account.

Affirmations

Another good habit! I initially started reading aloud affirmations from lists that other people created (Louise Hay or T. Harv Eker). I didn’t know how to come up with my own affirmations nor had the energy to do so.

But then as I started reading more self-improvement books and watching videos, I started to come across empowering sayings that I wanted to capture and keep repeating to myself. So I started creating my own list of affirmations that are relevant to my life. Things that may feel uncomfortable to say because I didn’t feel that confident about them being true yet. But that’s a sign you’ve got to keep repeating it!!

Here are some examples of affirmations on my personal list:

  • I will lead people to their destiny.
  • I will be all that I can be.
  • I have laser focus. 
  • I have immense self discipline.
  • I will never give up. 

Here’s one I heard in a video from JLo that I added to my list too. She ages backwards, so I think I’ll give it a shot! 😉

I am youthful and timeless at every age. I am ever evolving and my life is full of joy and adventure. 

Jennifer Lopez

Visualization

My Vision Board – YouTube video about it here

I do one of two things here: 1) I look at my vision board and just read it and take it all in. Or 2) I close my eyes and visualize the day unfolding beautifully. I envision the meetings and people I’ll be meeting and all of those things going smoothly.

Visualizing good things happening in my day does make the tasks I have to do that day less scary. It’s not a bad thing to visualize things working out well!

Exercise

Ahhh I just cringe when I think of this one. That’s probably the problem right there, ha! Anyhow, I have to say that I’ve exercised more in the past 30 days than before, so that’s a good start.

Other than that, I know I could’ve done better. I am just being too lazy. *Facepalm*

I did experiment with different types of exercise (dance, strength training, yoga, pilates, stretching, treadmill, stairmaster), and even different time durations. Hehe yes, I did 1 minute exercise days and that even counts. (Hal Erod says so himself!)

So if you really need some motivation, you could do 1 minute of jumping jacks or a 1 minute plank. Or you can move up to 10 minute yoga exercises that you can find online. Or sometimes I’d walk to do errands like grocery shopping. The fresh air does a body good!

I’m going to need to keep experimenting. This is something I’m going to need to conquer!!

If you don’t make time for exercise, you will have to make time for illness.

Unknown

Ouch, yes.

Reading

Oh I like this one! Reading is a luxurious time for me. Sadly, I can’t just sit there and get absorbed into a book for hours when I have a full day ahead of me. But reading a few pages picks my energy up. It makes me feel great that I’ve learned something new before even getting out of bed!

I usually have multiple books I’m reading at once, and I don’t finish all of them. And I have an audiobook or eBook on hand as well. So I choose from any of those books.

Reading books is an old love that I’ve returned to as an entrepreneur. Back when I was in the corporate world, I had no time to read books! My only advice: make time by getting off your phone! LoL

Scribing or Writing

I love my writing time as well. It’s a time to pour out all my ideas and worries and frustrations onto the page and then let it all go. Sometimes I spend a little too much time on this one compared to the other activities!

I usually start with 3 things I’m grateful for in my SELF journal. Then I move onto my notebook for freehand journaling. I like to rewrite the same list of goals on a regular basis as well.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve filled up many many notebooks with my random thoughts.

Ripple Effects

Going forward, I’m going to keep doing these miracle morning activities. I find tremendous value in silence, affirmations, and visualization and they are very quick to do. I think they made the most difference in my life because I hadn’t done them before. Reading and scribing take a little more time, so I can’t do them if I’m in a rush.

This is literally the beginning of having a routine in my life. I had no structure to my life prior to this. So I’m going to piggyback off this routine and start to add other healthy habits that I want to do. For example, writing my blog or checking my finances or anything else.

I heard that once you have ONE thing that you do every day, then you can use it as a trigger so that once you do that thing, then you immediately do a second activity. And by repeating that with additional activities, you slowly build up a whole day or whole life of healthy habits and routines that take less willpower to get through. *Crossing fingers* That’s the hope, people!

Here’s The Miracle Morning book if you want to check it out.

Other recommended books by Kat:
Managing Energy Not Time
No B.S. Time Management
The Most Soul Baring Book I’ve Read

P.S. If you found this article helpful, subscribe to my newsletter HERE.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. And of course, I would recommend this book regardless.

No B.S. Time Management

By

If you like advice straight and blunt, Dan Kennedy will give to you. In his book, No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, Dan does not hold back from laying down the law when it comes down to how to manage time effectively. He is such a stickler for time, and while you may scoff at his unconventional methods (i.e. using a fax machine), his numerous achievements at running multiple businesses and writing numerous books is no joke. He protects his time and gets sh*t done.

It’s a sizable book at 240 pages, I read the eBook version and found it was quite gripping. I couldn’t wait to read more. It got a little bit dry in one section – Chapter 14 where it became a rant about taming technology, but I stuck through it, finished it, and thought it was overall a worthwhile read!

If you are protective about guarding your money, you should be even more protective about your time! I am guilty of letting time slip by innocuously as I endlessly scroll through my phone, sigh.

How He Manages Time

Anyhow, he emphasizes understanding the worth of your time – even calculating how much each hour and minute of your life is worth. He talks about setting firm boundaries and not allowing “time vampires” to suck away your time. Example of a time vampire: someone who often drops by your office just to ask you something that ends up taking a lot of your time.

Even though he is running multiple businesses and has many private clients, he only has 1 staff person – his assistant who works on the other side of the country. He works from home and contacts her every once in awhile. The reason she is not in the same physical space as him is because then he would get interrupted a lot more. By being in different offices, they limit communication to the specific methods – faxing, FedEx documents back and forth, short check-ins. He used to have a staff of over 40+ people and go into the office on a regular basis. However, he found that when you’re too available to your employees/team, then they ask you for things that they could have figured out themselves. So he finds it best to work at home (no commute and less interruptions) with just one staff person on the other side of the country.

He also guards against interruptions by not having a cell phone. Yes, that’s right, he doesn’t have a cell phone. He did try having one once, but got so frustrated with it after 2 weeks that he threw it out his car window and never had one again. He also doesn’t have email. Yes, pretty crazy! He does his work through fax, FedEx packages, phone call appointments, and in-person consultations. It took me awhile to wrap my head around this that he wasn’t actually kidding.

He even has these strict communication rules with his clients, where they need to setup appointments ahead of time. His phone appointments are 20 minutes long, so that he can squeeze in 3 meetings into an hour. And once a month, he has these phone call days, to take care of all these calls. If there’s an emergency, the clients contact his assistant who will triage it appropriately. He requires his clients come to where he’s located, so he can save time by reducing air travel time and fatigue.

While I found some of his methods very strict, I do see the value in having those firm boundaries so that he can have as much uninterrupted time to do deep focused work. He describes the benefit to his clients in this way: when they’re meeting (on the phone or in-person), they have his FULL ATTENTION. Whereas if he was available 24/7 by phone, then they would only receive his partial attention because he could be in the midst of doing something else.

I have to admit, Dan Kennedy has seriously thought about the costs of everything – the cost of travel, interruption, context switching, etc.. By being intentional about how his time is used, he is able to have more time to relax at the racetrack in the evenings or spend time with family.

Similar to what I had learned in the last book I wrote about on The Power of Full Engagement, being extremely efficient with your time DOES NOT mean working all the time.

Dan Kennedy has budgeted time for the projects and clients that are important to him and budgeted time to enjoy life as well. That sounds like a good deal to me.

Quotes From the Book

Here are some of the quotes I wrote down:

“If anything, the passing of time has stiffened my resolve about safeguarding it, wisely investing it, enjoying it, and bringing upon any who would steal it, waste, or abuse it.”

“Is what I am doing, this minute, moving me measurably closer to my goals?”

“Just as the person who cannot tell you where his money goes is forever destined to be poor, the person who cannot tell you where his time goes is forever destined to be unproductive- and, often, poor.”

“One of the most significant things that you can control to a great extent, is association- your choices of whom you permit into your world, whom you give time or invest time with, and whom you look to for ideas, information, and education.”

“To get anywhere with an idea, you must concentrate ALL your thoughts on ONE task at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until they are brought into focus.” -Alexander Graham Bell

“There is only one success- to be able to spend your life in your own way.” – Christopher Morley

My Takeaways

One suggestion he made is to have clocks in every room of your house. Then you won’t lose track of hours passing by. You’ll always be conscious of what time it is, so you can know if you’re on track or need to move onto the next thing. I usually use the clock on my phone, so my action item is to buy more clocks for my place!!

I’ve also decided to use timers more often for my work. If I take an afternoon break or a lunch break, sometimes I’ll set a timer so that I don’t get too carried away. In addition, I’ve gone back to using Toggl and even downloaded the app on my phone too for when I’m not doing laptop work. (See earlier blogpost where I talk about Toggl.)

If you’re feeling frantic / pressed for time, here’s the book if you want to adopt some new time management techniques: No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs

For more thoughts on productivity and priorities, check out some of the episodes on my podcast What Kat Found Out, also available on all major podcast players.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. And of course, I would recommend this book regardless.

Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time Movie Review

By

Oprah Winfrey says, “The message of this film is that you are enough. It is the number 1 lesson that Maya Angelou gave to me: you are enough.” (From a YouTube interview of the cast of A Wrinkle in Time.)

After hearing her say that, I was intrigued and had to check out the movie for myself! One of the highlights is the all-star cast including Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and the director Ava DuVernay. All of these women are extremely inspiring and carry themselves with such grace and kindness.

I remember reading this book as required reading in school growing up. Even though I read it, I frankly didn’t really understand it. It’s originally a sci-fi book by Madeline L’Engle. But now that I’ve seen the story unfold on the big screen with beautiful cinematography, I see how it reveals deep lessons about life and people. Maybe I had a hard time visualizing it back then or didn’t have the perspective of why those lessons were important.

Anyhow, it’s the story of a young girl who goes on a time-space travel search for her father with the help of her younger brother, a classmate, and 3 supernatural women: Mrs. Which, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Who. They teleport into other dimensions and meet a variety of quirky characters. Along the way to find her father, the young girl’s character is tested and she is forced to look within herself for the strength to continue.

I won’t give away the story, but I really enjoyed the movie. The costumes, makeup, and special effects are also breathtaking. This was my favorite song from the movie: Magic. Sia’s voice is amazing and just transports you to another world.

Also, here’s a beautiful quote from the movie, spoken by Mrs. Who (played by Mindy Kaling) whose character only speaks in quotations by famous people.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

Rumi

Wow, gives me chills.

Alright, well that’s enough tidbits. Check out the movie if it sounds interesting to you!

A Wrinkle in Time

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

MileIQ: A Tool for Tracking Car Mileage for Business

By

Ever since I filed my initial business paperwork with the State of California and had a CPA help me setup my finances, I have been using the MileIQ app to track the miles I’ve driven for business. Now that I go see clients and take them shopping, there’s a lot more driving. Hence it’s worth tracking this for a tax deduction at the end of the year.

You install the app on your phone and then you don’t have to worry about it. It automatically tracks all the miles you’ve driven from location to location. You can also login to your account on the desktop.

Dashboard

Here are some snapshots from my MileIQ dashboard. Once you classify drives as personal or business use, then you can see the breakdown of how many miles are for each category. There are more specific categories as well if you want to specify what type of personal or work drive it was. Hm I’m not so good at using those other categories as you can see.

I’m not a tax expert, but I believe you have to have records to know what the purpose of the business drive was for if you want to deduct it. I have been adding manual notes when I classify each drive, so I know what the trip was for. My work Google calendar also has record of the meetings that I have on each day.

Custom Reports

The other convenient part of MileIQ is that you can generate custom reports of your drives based on your preferred time window, which vehicle, and what type of drives you want to include. This “Reports” feature is useful at the end of the year when I’m prepping to do my taxes and I need a cumulative number of how many business miles I drove.

Tax Deduction

I know there are 2 ways to calculate your business deduction for your car – either manually through every actual expense that you had for your car that year OR you can take the standard IRS mileage rate. I’m too lazy to track all the expenses I had for my car, so I use the standard rate per mile. For 2018, I believe the IRS says the rate was 54.5 cents per mile driven.

I don’t need to do the precise calculation myself. In TurboTax, I just entered in the total miles driven on my car and total business miles driven on my car, and TurboTax handles the rest. According to my MileIQ report for 2018, I drove 2044 miles for my business!

For more details on how I did my own taxes, see this blog article.

Email Reports

MileIQ also emails you weekly summaries of your mileage reports and monthly summaries. This can be annoying if you haven’t been classifying your drives and is a guilty reminder you should be. Oops. On the other hand, the emails are useful because one time the app wasn’t working, and it stopped tracking, so I realized I had to go in and fix it. Anyhow, here’s my summary from last month. See how much it’s worth when you track your miles!?!

MileIQ monthly mileage summary via email

Mobile App

There’s a mobile app as well, where you can swipe left or right to classify a drive as personal or business. I was really bad at classifying them before, so the backlog really grew. So in doing my taxes this year, I had to go back and classify almost 10 MONTHS of drives from Feb – Dec 2018, not remembering why on earth I drove to certain locations!! Now I’ve decided to classify them as the drives happen. It’s fun to swipe too! 😛 As you can see, I’m all caught up for March!

So that wraps up everything about MileIQ!

If it’s something that interests you, you can get 20% off an annual subscription by using my referral link. I’ve been an annual subscriber for almost a year now, and will be renewing for another year! Or you can try the free account and get 40 free drives per month.

Note: The links in this post are Refer-A-Friend links to MileIQ. This post is not sponsored.

Thanks for reading! For more recommendations on apps, tools, movies for business or personal development, check out the “Recommended” section on my blog.

Pros and Cons of Doing My Own Business Taxes

By

Hallelujah! I’ve finished my 2018 taxes. It was no easy task. This year, my second year in business, I decided to do my own taxes with TurboTax. (Last year I had a CPA do them for me because I had zero clue about what was involved.) Since doing my own taxes this year was quite the harrowing experience, I wanted to summarize the pros and cons.

Pros

  • Save money instead of paying a CPA to do it for you
  • Understand the finances of your business better
  • Get more organized with documentation
  • More in control of when it goes done instead of relying on someone else’s schedule

Cons

  • You could be doing it wrong lol
  • Takes a lot of time and research
  • Can get stuck on questions that you don’t know how to answer
  • Could be missing out on some deductions

It is quite a tricky balance. Doing my own taxes was a huge time commitment. When it comes down to it, the hours that I spent on it probably could have been spent on my business earning enough to cover the cost of a CPA. However, despite all those cons, I feel like the educational value I got from the experience far outweighed everything else. And the long-term effects of this newfound knowledge will serve me well beyond the tax season.

Yes, taxes are a necessary evil to keep your business running. But at the same time, the process is so detailed that you must pour over the details of every dollar that went in and out of your business. I was in Google spreadsheets forever filtering, categorizing, sorting, and summing up all sorts of columns and things. I had to login to all my accounts and figure out when things happened and make sure I didn’t miss anything.

In a way, it was re-living my entire past year and all the financial decisions I made and results I received. It made me extremely reflective on what were some not-so-great choices about how I spent my money and what activities were very effective in getting an ROI.

It made me very aware that even though a new business owner gets BOMBARDED with ads for classes, tools, events, resources, etc.., in the early days, you really don’t need all of those things. You need to get your way to a good business model and try to operate as leanly as possible.

I know that going into this coming year, I’m going to try to keep impeccable records and do proper bookkeeping as I go. Because I don’t want to deal with the frustration of going through a whole year of records at the end of this year, like I had to do for last year. Once you know the documentation and format of numbers you’ll need for tax time, it makes it easier to know what to keep and to use some sort of organizational system. Mine is still a bit ad-hoc at the moment. 🙂

Highlights on What I Learned

  • Track every source of business income
  • Count inventory at the end of each year (books in my case)
  • Download all business bank account and credit card statements for record keeping
  • Track car mileage for business purposes
  • Track all home expenses, figure out size of home office, and you can get a deduction as a % of your home expenses
  • Some expenses like phones or internet bills can also be deducted at a percentage based on how much you use them for work vs. personal use
  • Track business expenses. Here are some examples for me last year: advertising/promotional costs (like online ads, book launch party, business cards, supplies for events), business travel (went on a trip to NY for a workshop with my business coach), legal and professional fees (coach, lawyer, professional association membership dues), meals with clients or when traveling, educational expenses (classes, magazine subscriptions, events), shipping supplies (for my book), software subscriptions, license and fees (city business license fee), equipment (vlogging camera and payment reader), and other miscellaneous expenses.

It’s pretty great how many deductions you can get as a business owner! It’s just that you need to keep good records to back up everything you want to deduct, in case you get audited (hopefully not!).

Screenshot from TurboTax Home & Business edition
Part of the business deductions list

I also must include that I could not have finished my taxes without the amazing help of my CPA friend Wendy (@thetaxmuse). She specializes in working with creatives and small business owners and has free tax tips + resources on her Instagram page (go follow her!).

Wendy and I (inadvertently twinning at the chamber expo event!)

I attended 3 of her group tax workshops, where she thoroughly answered so many of my newbie tax questions. Her first workshop was actually last year back in October, when she first advised us entrepreneurs to start getting our papers in order and reviewing the year’s numbers. (Even though I started back in last Fall, it still took me a long time! I wasn’t very organized…) Anyhow, without her help, I can’t imagine being able to do it on my own otherwise.

Hence, if you decide to do your own taxes in a future year (it’s probably too late to do that this year), try to find someone you can ask for help. Turbo Tax is great, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out where to put numbers or how to answer their multiple choice questions.

Okay best of luck! Hope you can get lots of tax savings $$! And more importantly, I hope you can become more empowered with tracking the numbers in your business!

If you enjoyed this article, you can check out more business articles on my blog or sign up for my mailing list here.

Photo by 3Lopez

Managing Energy Not Time – The Power of Full Engagement Book Review

By

I really enjoyed this book by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz called “The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal.” What a mouthful to say the whole title!

I listened to it as an audiobook – about 4.5 hrs long. Here is the biggest takeaway I got from the book.

Renewing Yourself in Short Periods of Time

When the authors studied high performance athletes, they noticed that the really good basketball players had a routine of resetting themselves in between shots. Then they were able to get their energy back up again and go out and play hard. This made me realize – it’s not about the time length that you take to do self-care and go meditate / do yoga. It’s what you do in the SECONDS or MINUTES of downtime that can help you reset your mind.

They gave some examples of how one woman was able to adjust her work routine so that she could eat lunch outside at a local park to renew herself. I like that idea!

As for how I can apply that to my life, I think listening to my favorite music puts me in a good headspace. So if I needed to do an activity in a small period of time, I think listening to a couple songs can get me relaxed and also ready to get revved up again.

The authors argue that we can’t just keep going and working hard nonstop at all hours of the day, for days and months on end (cough cough Silicon Valley). They talk about ways to renew our energy and that it’s a cycle. Having more balance gets us to a good flow where we can have time for all the things that are important for us (health, family, activities we enjoy) instead of being overwhelmed and drained by everything we have to do.

So to get more done, we need to recover more often and more quickly.

Healthier Habits that Boost Energy

They also talk about other practical techniques and the other factors that are involved in managing our energy. They highlight activities that may feel good in the immediate moment (not exercising, smoking, indulging in an unhealthy meal), but can wreak havoc on your energy levels in the longer term. It helped me become more conscious about habits that I have that either drain or boost my energy.

Their case studies of people are also really interesting – one guy is overworked, his marriage is not doing so well, and he rarely has energy for his kids. Sounds like a common narrative. By working with him on building new habits, they help him transform his life so he can have quality time with his wife over breakfast, go to work, exercise, and also come home early to be with his kids and be present with them.

I like how the authors are realistic. They acknowledge that people just don’t have time these days. They’re not prescribing a ton more activities for you to add onto your TODO list. Instead, they make a convincing argument that it’s about finding activities that create more energy, not finding more time.

Check it out if you’re interested in managing your energy better.
The Power of Full Engagement

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. And of course, I would recommend this book regardless.