4 Countries – 7 Business Class Flights – 1 Month – 1 Carry-On

My Singapore – Australia – New Zealand – Malaysia Trip Starts

My well-anticipated trip is near. I have been waiting for this trip so long that now it feels hard to believe I am leaving Toronto in one week (as of this writing). 

I am departing Toronto on Nov 23, 2018. My first stop will be Singapore. From there I will complete my travel in this order:

Singapore to Melbourne

Melbourne to Auckland

Auckland to Sydney

Sydney to Malaysia

The full trip is almost a month long. I will be regularly updating my:

Blog (www.ahmeddawn.com

Instagram (www.instagram.com/adawnjournal)

YouTube Channel (www.youtube.com/adawn)

If you haven’t subscribed already, subscribe now my YouTube channel, as it will feature all the videos I will be sharing with you. I concentrate on travel videos, business class flight review videos, business class airport lounge reviews, food videos, packing tips, travel tips and hacks, and much more.

My YouTube subscriber base is growing exponentially and I will be able to bring you more travel videos in the future.

As my main purpose is to film my travel experiences, I carry various cameras and travel gadgets. But I am still able to pack everything in one carry-on. I will provide you some tips on how to pack and travel with only a carry-on in the future.

I hope you follow this journey and I will see you shortly from the other side of the world. This post was written in Toronto, Canada on November 18, 2018.

How To Motivate Yourself In Difficult Times

Take Inspiration and Motivate Yourself

There are times when it can be difficult to motivate yourself to do pretty much anything. These times can spring from anything from tiredness to fear, and there are certainly cases where the reluctance to act can be caused by a medical condition, but what it boils down to is that a reluctance to act, which can be extensively damaging, is often the product of a combination of matters and can be hard to overcome. In these situations you need to look at the problem head-on and say “I’m not going to be broken down by this – I’m going to break it down”. Although this is generally easier said than done, managing it brings many rewards.

The ability to stick at things even when it seems difficult or pointless is something prized highly by bosses. It wouldn’t be fair to say that apathy is endemic in society, but it is troubling to see talented people laid low by a lack of confidence, especially when that lack is brought on by what amounts to an arbitrary failure. Say, for example, that a person has competed in a talent contest or an open training session for a sports team. In such cases, talent is very much in the eye of the beholder. Coaches and record execs have often made the decision to plump for one of two people based on a very subjective selection criteria. The people who have been passed over may have gone on to assume that they would never succeed, but that is not always the case.

Witness the NFL. Every year teams draft players to feature in the playing squads that will take them through a season, and they have their selection criteria set ahead of time. It is universally accepted that guys selected in the first round of seven are expected to succeed, those selected in the second and third rounds are hopefuls, and below that you may have a 50/50 chance of making it if you put everything into the game. In 2000, Tom Brady was selected in the sixth round by the New England Patriots. Nine years later he has won three Superbowls, being voted Most Valuable Player in two of them. 2000 was widely viewed pre-Draft as a thin year for quarterbacks, and five were selected before Brady. The truth is that sometimes people don’t realize what they have passed up.

There are stories like this in all categories, and every time it is the story of the individual who was passed over for an arguably less talented person because it’s just this simple – opinions differ. If you let one person’s evaluation of you be the one that sticks, and it’s a negative opinion, then you don’t give anyone else the encouragement that might be the difference between choosing you and passing you over. Keep in mind that sometimes people need to keep trying in order to succeed – take inspiration from one of the many who may not have got there first, but have stayed there longer than those who did.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com site. This article originally published on the above website on August 8, 2009.

Canadian Real Estate

Number of House Sales is Falling Fast, Prices Not So Much

First Published Date : February 19, 2009 ADawnJournal.com

The Canadian Real Estate Association has released its latest figures, and with them comes the news that house sales are falling in number as the housing market continues to feel the pressure of the global credit crisis. The headline of the latest figures is that sales have fallen by 41 per cent in the 12 month period from January 2008 to January 2009. With sellers reluctant to put their houses on a market that is filled with fairly anxious customers, the level of sales will naturally fall. What is positive, though, is that the prices on house sales are staying relatively constant by comparison.

While things south of the border continue to lurch while we wait for the results of President Obama’s stimulus package, Canada is showing many other countries that house prices do not need to fall anywhere near as fast nor as far as they have been elsewhere. One of the most remarkable pieces of news is that house prices have actually stabilized in recent months, with no fall since November. The good news overall is that the meltdown which has happened in the US seems unlikely to be repeated in Canada.

The Teranet-National Bank house price index – a highly technical database which uses enhanced data to compare year on year house prices – has shown an actual small rise (+0.6%) in prices between November 2007 and the same month in 2008. The same comparison for the USA has shown an eighteen percentage point fall – and a 25% fall overall since 2006. And although it is true that the figures seem to depend hugely upon the people providing them, the most reliable, respected indices are showing positive signs for the Canadian housing market.

There is certainly no disputing that numbers are falling still – houses are not being sold in such large numbers as they were before – but there are signs that the problems are being addressed. When sales fell off in 2008 this happened in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto – where house prices are relatively high. Consequently, people in those cities are less likely to put their houses on the market in 2009, until things improve at least. Sales in Montreal, Winnipeg and Ottawa, comparatively, have remained more constant – unsurprisingly, as these are higher-priced cities.

As a rule, higher-priced houses are not being sold quite as often as before, with consumer confidence inevitably falling as a consequence of the fears over jobs – Canada, seen by many worldwide as an example of how to run an economy cautiously but positively, recently announced record job losses in one of the biggest signs yet of how global this crisis is. In the lower price cities, prices are beginning to rise while they fall in the higher priced cities. But overall the big news from the latest figures is to be summed up in one sentence: not the best news, but a lot better than some others are getting.

A Dawn Books Website Ends

ADawnBooks.com Discontinues

Hello everyone. Today I am going to show you my website ADawnBooks.com, which features all my books before taking it down. In the past, I have had 5 to 7 websites powered by WordPress for which I would write and maintain on a regular basis. However, this was taking lot of time and resources. Besides, I had to always chase after my programmer to fix things here and there, which became a nuisance.

To simplify my life and everything, I decided to keep one active website: ahmeddawn.com. As I am more concentrating on YouTube, this makes perfect sense and I don’t need to spend time worrying about maintaining all these websites and chasing after my programmer.

I still hold 35-40 domains, but they are parked domains and I don’t need to maintain them. I will have more videos on the Internet and websites in the future. Thank you for watching. Please subscribe and like.

The End of Canada’s Personal Financial Website

From Internet Dummy to Internet Guru

www.adawn.net Is Merging Into www.canadapersonalfinancewebsite.com

When I started Mind Over Matters – Canada’s Personal Finance Website in 2006, I had no idea about how to run and maintain a website. I did not know anything about the things which you need to marry and live with on a daily basis if you run a blog or a website, such as:

HTML/CSS

Web Hosting

Domain Forwarding

RSS Feed

Feed Aggregators

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get, pronounced wiziwig)

Pings

Trackbacks

Traffic Stats

Affiliate Programs

Contextual Advertising

This is just a few worth mentioning, not a complete list. I’m not saying that you need to have in-depth knowledge of all these subjects, but you need to have a basic idea of how they work and how to apply them to your website.

So much has changed since 2006. I have absorbed a lot of material in the last two years and I’m easily able to maintain a site these days. When I started A Dawn Journal about a year ago, my goal was to provide my readers with interactive, quality writing and useful information covering all aspects of life. A Dawn Journal was able to attract more traffic than Adawn.net within the first two months of its launch and since then it has been keeping me busy day and night, along with my 9–5 job.

I Can’t Keep Up Anymore

Now I have reached a moment where I am not able to keep updating both of my sites on a regular basis. I have not updated anything on Adawn.net for over six months and I have come to the decision that in order to serve you better through A Dawn Journal, it will be in ADJ readers best interest to close Adawn.net and concentrate on Adawnjournal.com. Adawn.net and Adawnjournal.com have similar types of articles and I will be moving all Adawn.net articles to Adawnjournal.com.

An Emotional Decision

The decision to shut down Adawn.net is not an easy one for me. Adawnjournal.com exists today because of Adawn.net and Invest Now became a published book because of Adawn.net. The idea to publish a book struck me one day while I was writing for Adawn.net and after two years of hard of hard work it became a reality.

What Does the Future Hold?

The whole process to close down Adawn.net will take about 3-4 months. Once it’s down, it will make my life a little easier and I will be able to concentrate on ADJ even better than before. Down the road, when I quit my regular job and start living a full dot-com life, maybe I will launch Adawn.net again or even come up with other sites–only time will tell.

Enjoying Serving You

ADJ has an increased level of traffic and it’s going up daily. I enjoy writing for you and your love and encouragement are what keeps me motivated and keeps me going. The main reason I decided to keep ADJ and shut down Adawn.net is because ADJ is a blog site and blogs connect authors with readers on a personal level; blogs build lasting relationships that regular sites can’t. When I see my readers making comments on ADJ and sending me email saying how helpful an article was or how they like and appreciate what I am doing, it means a lot to me—that’s the essence of this blog.

Last Word

Let me say something very important I leaned in the past couple of years:

You can learn anything you want; you only need the willingness to learn. Take me, for example; I transformed myself from internet dummy to internet guru–only because I wanted to learn. I did not have anyone to teach me; I gathered everything I needed online by doing online searches.

Be consistent. Be consistent pursuing your goals and never give up. There were moments when I felt like giving up. There were moments when my negative inner-sense almost took over my positive inner-sense. But instead of giving up, I consistently pursued my goals and that’s why ADJ is still alive today.

Finally, I would like to end today’s post by saying thanks to all my readers and sticking with ADJ for this long. I hope this lasting relationship will continue for years to come.

Update (Feb 9, 2009) :

Since this post went online, I stated getting emails from readers asking not to end Canada’s Personal Finance Website and not to get rid of www.adawn.net domain. I never thought this post would generate so much traffic and become the most popular post of all time. I would like to thank you all for your love and support. Based on your feedback and after careful reconsideration, I have started a new experimental site Canada Personal Finance Website. The purpose of this new site is to experiment what kind of traffic it gets and how long it takes for this site to get on Google Search Results first page. So far, it seems to be doing very well. Unlike my original Canada’s Personal Finance Website (which was not a WordPress blog), this  new Canada Personal Finance Website uses WordPress as its blogging platform. WWW.ADAWN.NET domain is kept alive and being forwarded to WWW.CANADAPERSONALFINANCEWEBSITE.COM. Without my reasers’ support, all these would not have been possible. I thank all of you again and I will keep you updated on any new issues on www.adawnjournal.com.