March Monday 2nd

After a great sleep in we headed off to Disneyland, a 45-minute drive from West Hollywood. My partner was so excited as it will be her first trip to Disneyland. We arrive around 12.45pm and only have three hours to explore as much as we can as I have comm itted to catching up with an old friend who lives in LA later in the day.

Even though I’ve been to Disneyland over a decade ago and I can’t remember much of it, which is good as everything seems new again.

Three hours is certainly not nearly enough time, but it’s a quick overview of the Wonderful World of Disney. Several days is probably needed to fully take advantage of the whole park and I certainly look forward to a return trip.

With the Qantas monopoly to LA now broken, thanks to Virgin, people can fly for as little as AUD$900 economy return or $5,000 business class from Sydney to LA. The days of paying $14,000 for business class on Qantas and having to pay extra if you’d like a smile with your service is now gone.

With lower fares, not only is it good for tourists but it also makes it far more viable to do business in the US and I’ve been considering options to expand over here for some time. I could easily live in LA for several months of the year. The winter weather is amazing.

See the photos in the Photo Gallery.

After Disneyland I get to catch up with a friend I haven’t seen for two years. She is a very successful TV presenter in LA and presents an Entertainment show every night broadcast across America on the 911 of entertainment news. She is 7 months pregnant with her second child and looking as healthy as ever and still working.

We head off to Dinner at Argos in Melrose Place at 6.45pm, one of Hollywood’s top restaurants to catch up with four friends, two from NZ who have moved to live in LA and two American friends we caught up with the night before. We discuss spending July and August in the South of France with my American friends as I’ve been planning for some time to take July, August and September off this year to live in Europe and Southern France, near St Tropez and Cannes, as this is one of my favourite parts of the world.

We all agree it’s better to rent a nice house than stay in hotels which can spoil a holiday by constantly moving from one hotel to the next. We also plan to charter a yacht for a week while in Southern France and invite 20 select friends and interesting people to join us for a week. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long-time and never actually made it happen. This year, one of my New Year resolutions is to work less, socialise more and exercise more. So I’ve already halved my work schedule and scheduled in a lot more holidays and taken up playing tennis and shed 4kg in no time.

Ironically, my companies tend to perform better when I go on regular holidays than when I am working in them. And of course my managers prefer if I’m out of the country so they can get on with running the companies and divisions without me coming up with a new idea every second day.

This is a concept I’ve been teaching for a decade now. For people to outperform they should take regular holidays; however, I forget my own lessons and over the last 18 months I was so busy working that I had actually became less productive and had taken fewer holidays. When the going gets tough, the tough go on holidays! I’ve jokingly been telling friends that this is my motto for 2009.

Actually, with the recession and worldwide downturn, I think this will encourage many to simplify their lives and develop a better work-life balance. This will ensure they don’t keep deferring their life to “one day they’ll get around to it” and decide to start doing the things they’ve always wanted.

How many people say “I’ll take the kids to Disneyland one day?” Instead of setting a goal, committing to it and making it happen, most people just talk about it. The biggest challenge many have – apart from the lack of money, which is usually from lack of definite purpose – is the lack of time. We can always find the money for the things we are most committed to.

This is why I wrote this book, which is about how to develop a millionaire’s lifestyle inside 12-months without even needing to become a millionaire. As I highlight, a quality of life has more to do with planning and how to free yourself from being chained to an office desk than money. For instance my office is wherever I am in the world. With technology such as BlackBerry phones, I can run a dozen companies from anywhere in the world.

This can be duplicated by many people now to run their jobs remotely if they knew some simple but effective strategies covered in this book. I have also created a HomeStudy program on these concepts, which was filmed late last year in Melbourne and I now teach it at 21st Century Seminars.

We finish dinner and my American friend takes us to a mansion his friend owns in Beverly Hills that sits on the hill
overlooking the whole of LA. A great spot to live with many US$15 to $20 million homes in the street. My partner is very much into art and was thrilled to discover he had a real Picasso drawing which she had a photo taken with. I talk my mate into coming to Las Vegas to join us there and he decides to rearrange his schedule.

Off to bed after another huge day and ready to head to Las Vegas in the next few days.