Marcus Hiles - How to Find Time to Educate Yourself Daily

Marcus Hiles is an entrepreneur who firmly believes in educating himself daily. Many people say that they would love to read more books or study more. They claim that they are not doing so because they have no time and no opportunity. Yet many of those people spend up to several hours commuting to work by car or train, where they can listen to audiobooks and study. You can find time if you want to. It is just a matter of structuring your days.

First, you should free yourself from constant interruptions via phone and email. Science research shows that it takes a human brain twenty minutes to get back to where it was once it’s interrupted. This means that a one-minute phone call in reality takes twenty-one minutes of your time. Out of twenty-one minutes, one minute is spent on the phone call and twenty minutes is the time your brain need to go back and productively focus again on what you were doing before the phone call. Don’t check your email or answer your phone right away unless it’s an emergency. Start responding to voice messages and emails at your convenience. This way you will be able to get more done and will have more time left for educating yourself.

Second, start linking everything you do to your goals. When thinking about your self-education, think about how it will help you progress faster and easier towards your goals. Many people don’t read books or attend seminars simply because they do not have enough reasons to do so. Successful business people, such as Marcus Hiles, are not like that. This is one of the secrets to personal productivity: having more important reasons to be more productive.
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Marcus Hiles - The Significance and Brief History of Rice

Marcus Hiles is a talented real estate entrepreneur whose interests include charitable donations, wine, travels and rice. Of all the foods known to humanity, rice is one of the gentlest. The grains have curves on both sides and are connected at each end. 

In many Asian countries, people believe that rice is the connecting chain between heaven and earth. In many Asian countries, rice is a symbol of energy, life, fertility and beauty. The time and place of first cultivation of rice are not known. Pottery imprints of grains of rice in Thailand date to around 4000 BC. There, just as in many other places throughout Asia, including China and India, rice is a fundamental agricultural crop and is being used at every meal. Rice grows in a lot of places in the world, from the plains in Texas, to the mountains of Nepal, from the tropic of India to the dry parts of Australia. The only continent where people do not grow rice is Antarctica. 

In North America, the colonists started to plant rice in 1600s. By the 1700s, rice has become a valuable export commodity and has made a lot of money for some American plantation owners, especially in the Carolinas. The Industrial Revolution was the reason why the rice-growing industry eventually moved inland to states like Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas. The Gold Rush was the reason for rice being planted in California. Today, California and Arkansas are the top two rice-growing states in the country. 

Even though rice is a very simple grain, rice experts and enthusiasts such as Marcus Hiles suggest that there are more than forty-thousand varieties of rice in the world. Rice usually grows in paddies full of water. At first they look like green grass. As the plants keep on growing, the water drains. The rice is ready for harvesting when the color of the plants resembles the color of straw.

Marcus Hiles - Charitable Donations and Estate Planning

Marcus Hiles is a successful real estate investor who has donated over $2.5 million to various education causes.

Legacy giving and estate planning are the ways of dealing with what happens to your money after you die. If you don’t take care of this issue while you are alive, the process after you die will be much more confusing, complicated and expensive for all the involved parties. 

                                           

There are two main concerns when deciding on your legacy giving. The first one is establishing a guardian for minor children, if you have any. The second one is creating a will that will determine the distribution of your assets.

If you are like most people, you probably want a percentage of your estate to go into supporting a charitable cause that you were involved with during your lifetime.

Giving back can be a substantial part of your heritage. It represents the last opportunity for you to influence the world. There are three ways to think about your legacy charitable donations. They are memorial gifts, income replacements and strategic donations.

Memorial gifts are simply gifts that you include in your will. They show that the nonprofit was important to you and that you want to acknowledge your association with it. Income replacement is an endowment-style donation that will generate some income for the organization you are donating to. The typical endowment has an annual payout of about five percent of its value. This means that the amount of your gift needs to be at least twenty times what you would like to donate annually. 

Strategic gifts are usually larger gifts that enable charities to undertake major projects such as starting a new program, remodeling a facility or building a new one. For example, a gift from Marcus Hiles allowed for the construction of two large churches in two states.