Many of us struggle with personal growth and self-improvement as it is a challenging lifetime pursuit. With 2017 in the rear view mirror and 2018 well upon us, can things be better than they were before?





"Learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job. If you work hard on your job, you can make a living, but if you work hard on yourself, you'll make a fortune."

- Jim Rohn

Work harder on yourself than on your job. Become an expert by choosing a specialized area. Study your trade and learn from others. Become more efficient by learning how you get done what needs to get done. Have an awareness of knowing your strong points and what you are best at doing. Be productive in knowing what and how much you get done to increase prosperity. Get a vision by having something you see that others do not, like a bigger picture. Create a mastermind by surrounding yourself with people you can learn from to get more value. Even if those others are gurus on blogs, in magazines and books. Forge a good reputation through what others know and think about you. Become an influence by remembering to be gritty, persistent and getting things done. Increase your popularity status by understanding how well your colleagues or audience see you. As my mother often told me, treat others as well as how you want to them to treat you. Get the right attitude to grow your prosperity by taking care of yourself and others.

Perhaps it remains easier to blame things or circumstances around us than ourselves. Making a transition is hard for anyone to do. Trust me on this. I am in the middle of a self-imposed transition right now. I am not only trying to change my way of thinking about things. That was the easy part. I am now trying to implement things.For one example, I achieved a portion of one of my 2018 resolutions on the first day of the year, self-publishing a self-help eBook called New Year, New You: How to Kick More Ass and Kiss Less of It in 2018 . If you prefer to think of me as a name rather than the Money Mensch, please think of me as my nom de plume, M. Bernard Bloom.You and I must to realize that it is not what happens that determine the major parts of our future because what happens is going on for all of us. All of us are faced with hardships, unpleasant tasks and hurdles placed in front of us. Rather, the key is what we do about it. To create our own greater success and prosperity, we must begin the process of change by doing something different.Prosperity is something one attracts rather than pursues. Instead of going after it, we must first improve upon ourselves and success and wealth will soon follow. We must set goals and resolutions for ourselves are a things that no school, college or university would teach you. Grit, determination, persistence and learning to make the right choices and seize the right opportunities can be just as or more lucrative than earning straight A's at your school.The perspectives and thinking that you adapt shape your life, and when you change your perspective, you can create an immediate shift in your own prosperity, life, job or business. To create success in whatever endeavors you pursue, always look for ways to sharpen your outlook.Since we cannot rapidly or easily change our circumstances to achieve our ideal of prosperity, we must begin doing things differently with the same conditions.Chances are, you are going to have the same job, same home and same relationships for a while. The kind of success that you and I are pursuing does not come to us overnight. We are not supremely talented and attractive YouTube sensations. Our hard-earned success will result from a process of first determining where we are at now versus where we would like to be, establishing measurable action steps that we can take to get to where we would like to be, and then doggedly pursuing it over the course of this year and years to come.I, myself, do not think that I will become fabulously wealthy and successful by the end of this year. But I do have a plan and ideas for things that I would like to achieve this year that will help me move further in that direction and I have listed them out in my '18 Resolutions post. I consider my list of resolutions to be a decent starting point for my continued self-improvement to be continued for more years after this one.I realize that we are on a challenging mission, but if we change for the better, everything will change for us. We do not have to alter our outer personalities, but rather our inner natures. We must not wish for things to get easier because they most certainly will not. Let us plan for ourselves to become better than we currently are.If we begin working on ourselves this week in the New Year and making these changes, prosperity will change for us. To have better, we must be better. It is a simple formula and yet many struggle with it. I have struggled with it for many years, myself.Prosperity includes many benefits but one often comes out more than others, and it is relative to our finances. The key to understanding economics is that we all get paid for bringing value to the marketplace, also described as the "real world." In my fantasy world, I would earn large amounts through my writing and eventually by speaking. Sharing my knowledge and creating. In my real world, I earn a modest amount by assisting businesses, developers and entrepreneurs invest and open businesses for the community that employs me. It takes time, energy and effort to provide value to this market, and it is a dog-eat-dog world out there. Survival of the fittest and a YO-YO economy: you're on your own.A fascinating psychological prosperity trait which I have read, heard and learned from Jim Rohn, one of the many gurus who has taught me self-improvement, is that it is possible for you to become two or three times as valuable as you now are and make two or three times as much money within the same time.This code of belief goes against the mold of what schools teach, or how most of us were raised, and what media depicts to the general public. They want rule followers, not rule breakers or what I would rather be, a rule maker.Thus, to build your own prosperity, you must increase your value. It is that simple. And if you can embrace this concept and apply it to your life, you will improve, develop and ripen a considerable benefit over those who do not or can not.In my case, my blogging and self-publishing is not doing it for me...yet. What I dream of doing, study doing, think of doing and eventually will actually do is launch an eCommerce website. I may just sell a lot of Chinese made crap that I would not want for myself. But many other people do want it and would purchase it. I cannot get the article about LDSMan.com out of my mind and would love to achieve just a small sliver of the success that Trevor Chapman has achieved. Anything to get me out from under the thumb of my new, young, hard-driving, naive and gung-ho Millennial boss.Wouldn't we all?Many people do not do much to upgrade their skills or value but rather blame the economy, their job, their boss or the state of their scarcity of income. If somebody is satisfied making minimum wage, then they will always remain at the bottom because it is the value they are bringing into the market place.What a pitiful way to live! To not grow, change or become more valuable. Why does one person make millions of dollars per year while others make only fifty thousand or less? Well, it is quite simple. That person has become more valuable to the marketplace than the other.I fully acknowledge that one's income does not signify one's total worth in the world. The one who has a lower income might be a good relative, friend, or member of the community which is a different kind of prosperity. However, economically it is a cold, hard fact that if you do not improve your skills to develop your value, your success and prosperity level will remain the same.That is why wealthy and prosperous people get paid so much. They have the skills, knowledge and know-how to create value from what they possess. But there is some good news for us: it has become a more equal playing ground. Nowadays, information is accessible and free almost everywhere. So it is up to you to decide how valuable you want to become, what is your definition of prosperity and how much you want to pay forward to others.Quite simple, isn't it? Well, maybe not so fast.In Yours Truly's case, I fully well know that it is my own lack of comfort or even liking of the most modern technologies that is holding me back. I believe that I have the wherewithal, desire, work ethic and determination to launch, continue and run a successful eCommerce site. I have the hundreds or few thousand that I am willing to invest in such a venture.What I do not possess is the comfort with website design, apps or trust in others who I could pay to assist with it. I would like to do it on my own, and the people who I do trust, my siblings, wife and children, do not have the tech knowledge to help me and my fear of them knowing that I failed at something also holds me back. Again, the truth due to my flimsy shield of anonymity.Do not wait for a raise as it is easier to climb the ladder. To be able to prosper, you must continually discover ways to use your keys to become more valuable. You have to create your own prosperity by sharpening your skills, learning better methods through resources and always striving to better yourself. Nobody but you and me are planning for your betterment and prosperity unless you are a rising star in a growing company or on the fast-track at your organization. If that is the case, I am happy for you and you may as well stop reading this post right now.For the rest of us, if we want or need a greater income, we must earn it by bringing greater value to our places of employment, our business or customers. We have the ability to create greater prosperity and happiness if we understand this step. We can always turn our lives around to increase our wealth.We need to work on ourselves and improving our financial and overall station in life, which is the fundamental point of the Money Mensch blog. We need to become better versions of ourselves instead of always comparing ourselves to others, like I have done for the past two decades. How can you and I become more valuable in this wide-open marketplace where either of us could own an online retail outlet by the end of the month? We can use the keys to our prosperity by improving upon the things that we already know, learning new things beyond our comfort zones and becoming better at everything that we do.Do something that provides more value for you to change your current income level. Here are a dozen tips to increase your prosperity and bring you value so you can get better than others.If we work harder on ourselves than on our jobs, then there will be no limits to our prosperity and success in whatever we pursue. It is high time for us to take responsibility for our financial well-being.So you and I commit now to becoming more valuable and growing our own prosperity. Remember that we are in control regardless of the external circumstances surrounding us and that the key to your own success and prosperity is in your own hands.