It's My First Time Filling My Tax Return

In all my years of being a productive member of society I have never filled out my own tax return out of fear. My biggest fear was to mess it up so much that the Government would come bursting through my door and arrest me.
Because I was afraid, I spent close to $100 a year on "experts" to fill my tax returns. Over 10 years that's $1000...

$1000 is a lot of money so this year I decided to fill out my own return and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to fill them out. Don't get me wrong, I still had to do some research online to figure out some of the terms but I think I got through it okay for my first try. If you have your T4, RRSPs receipt, and have little else to declare then you should try one of the free tools online this year(Turbo Tax & HD Block). If you can't figure it out you can always revert back to your old method.

I used HR Block this year (FREE) and I doubt that I will ever pay someone else to do my taxes again (unless my tax return becomes more complex).

My Next Books

If you're a reader than chances are you wonder which book to buy next even though you may have a hundred books that you still haven't read in your library. During such episode I asked myself which subject I should invest in and "Astrophysics" came to mind (for some reason).

My philosophy, when choosing books of a subject that is unknown to me, is to look for those that are at the top of the field and see what they have either wrote or what they've read.
If you do a search on astrophysics online chances are that the name of "Stephen Hawking" is going to come up since he's a renown astrophysicist, thinker, and author. He passed away in 2018 but luckily is books have lived on and are still widely available.

Needless to say that my choice of books was made clear to me - I ordered 2 of Stephen Hawking' earliest works (A Brief History of Time & The Universe in a Nutshell) on amazon and I can't wait to get them!

Our Selves

In the age of social media, where everyone can choose to share anything about their lives online, it's important for us to reflect on the type of image of ourselves that we wish to project to the world. We typically have 3 "selves".

• Personal - Your personal life is what happens within yourself - it whom you really are inside and when nobody else is around.
• Private - This is the person you choose to be around your friends and family.
• Public - This is who you are in public. You may refrain from talking about specific subjects or be on your best behavior while in public as you know that your reputation is at stakes.

Think of an onion where Personal is at the center and the subsequent layers are Private and Public.
The difference between our personal self and our private self is sometime minimal but may be vastly different than the person we choose to be in public. Who we are in Personal and our Private life isn't necessarily what we want people in our public life to know. Knowing who we are in our personal and private life can help determine what we want, or don't want, to go into our public life.

I'm one to believe that if you have evils in your personal or private life that it will eventually be found in your public life. If we think of Tiger Woods, or Bill Clinton for example we can clearly see that the mistakes they've made in their private lives has had a negative impact on their public life and ended up costing them much.
The opposite can also be true where someone has a bad public life but is actually good in his private and personal life but we don't typically learn about those situation as much because private/personal matters are typically not talked about.

If you decide to share bits and pieces or your life just think about the consequences that may come as a result and keep in mind that what you post online can be viewed by anyone - forever.

Suggested Books from Leadership & Liberty

The Leadership & Liberty books contains blog posts from Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward. It's an okay book but what I like the most about the authors is that they are providing a list of suggested readings. The book they suggests are among the bests I have ever read and thought I would share it with you guys.

Attitude and Success

• See You at the Top, Zig Zigglar
• The Greatest Salesman in the World, Og Mandino
• Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations On and Off the Cour, John Wooden
• The Psychology of Winning, Dennis Waitley
• Life is Temendous, Charlie "Tremendous" Jones

People Skills and Principles

• How to Have Power and Confidence in Dealing With People, Les Giblin
• How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie
• Personality Plus, Florence Littaeur
• Bringing Out the Best in People, Alan Lloyd McGinnis
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covery

Leadership

• It's Your Ship, Captain D. Michael Abrashoff
• The Cycle of Leadership, Noel Tichy
• The World's Most Powerful Leadership Principle, James C. Hunter
• The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, John C. Maxwell
• Launching a Leadership Revolution, Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward

Historical Leadership Illustrations

• The Founding Fathers on Leadership, Don T. Phillips
• Scuttle your Ships Before Advancing, Richard Luecke
• Churchill on Leadership, Steven Hayward
• Character Counts, Os Guiness
• The American Leadership Tradition, Marvin Olasky

The History of Liberty

• The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria
• The 5000 Year Leap: The Miracle That Changed the World, W. Cleon Skousen
• How the West was Lost, Alexander Boot
• The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk
• The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas

Economics

• The Economy in Mind, Warren T. Brookes
• Economics in one Lesson, Henry Hazlitt
• The Making of Modern Economics, Mark Skousen
• Human Action, Ludwig von Mises
• Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

Politics and Governance

• Politics: Easy as P.I.E., Bob McEwen
• The Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega y Gasset
• The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek
• The Creature from Jekyll Island, G. Edward Griffin
• Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert H. Bork

I have only read but a few of the books mentioned above. This list is for my own safekeeping as I'll be sure to pick those up and read them. How many of those books have you read?