Southwestern Advantage Blog

From the fall of 2010 to the spring of 2013, I lived in the Rocky Mountain states. I spent one year in Montana, one year in Wyoming, and one year in Colorado. Now, if you’ve ever been out that way, you know two things: 1) it’s absolutely beautiful, and 2) it’s not very densely populated, especially Montana and Wyoming. One thing that this means is that to visit any city other than the one where you live, you have to drive at least an hour, sometimes three or four. I don’t know about you, but I get highway hypnosis pretty bad if I don’t keep my mind occupied while I’m on the road. So, when I would drive anywhere, I liked to call people on the phone. As you can imagine, though, sparsely populated areas don’t have the best reception. (If you don’t believe me, just watch any wireless provider commercial—the coverage maps are almost non-existent over the Rockies.) This led to some fairly awkward phone conversations. “Guess what happened? <static static> bro...

We aren’t as busy as we think.  Have you ever noticed how some people seem to have extra hours in the day? They go around being involved in about five million different things, plus have time for work, school, church, family, and a social life. And here you sit, just trying to figure out how to make time for getting your laundry done between the homework, the job, and having a least a little bit of a social life. What gives? The answer is SCHEDULE (or as business gurus call it, time management). Those people who seem to accomplish everything and then have time left over have a schedule and they stick to it. Now, a lot of people react to the word “schedule” the way they react to the word “budget.” It seems to reek of constriction and suck all the fun out of life. But the reality is just the opposite . Being on schedule, like being on a budget, simply means knowing what you are doing with your time and making intentional choices about how you want to use it. Just as a good bu...

I follow a lot of people on Twitter. It’s kind of like my daily headlines—if it’s important, it’ll show up. But it’s better than just having a newspaper because I can create the atmosphere of news I want to be exposed to; I can make sure that most of my headlines will take me to things that will help make me a better person today than I was yesterday. That means I follow a lot of people like Dave Ramsey ,  John Maxwell , and of course Southwestern Advantage . (I also follow Mental Floss because I love trivia.) Another one I follow is Inc.com , and last year, they tweeted a headline titled “Want to Be More Effective? Try a Mental Detox.” Intriguing, right? After all, who doesn’t want to be more effective at what they’re passionate about? So of course I clicked. Now, if you can, I recommend reading the whole article: the author lays out four things you can do on a regular basis to keep yourself focused on the important things and to do them better. But I just want to focus o...

We all make mistakes. It is an unfortunate aspect of human nature that we are neither omniscient, to make only the correct decision in every situation, nor omnipotent, to make everything occur as it should be. The reality is that we often make the wrong decision, or we make the right decision, but with poor execution. The common result is that things don’t turn out how we want them to. We may end up frustrated or embarrassed, and oftentimes the pain of making a mistake can be big enough to prevent us from trying again. The worst lie we can tell ourselves is that we are our mistakes . And from time to time, we are all guilty of doing this. We all have a tendency to believe that if we were a better person, a smarter person, a more attractive person, a braver person, a (insert your comparative adjective of choice) person, we would not have made that mistake. And maybe that’s true. Maybe a smarter person would have known to act differently. Unfortunately, when we fail to...

English is a very rich language. It has a long history and a massive lexicon. According to Wikipedia (the highly-esteemed compendium of knowledge and wisdom), some sources indicate that over 1 million words in the English language. It also says that over 8,000 new words are added each year. With such a vast pool to draw from, some words will be considered improper or, shall we say, "dirty." Colloquially, these words are sometimes referred to as "four-letter words," however I think the dirtiest word in our expansive vocabulary has not four letters, but six. That word is " should ." Why is "should" such a dirty word you ask? The problem is that "should" allows our imagination to parade around as reality. Another part of it has to do with the context -- when we use the word. "Should" is a word that exists in both the past and the future, but never in the present. This is dangerous because the only reality we know is the p...