The Millionaire Course
Page 16
I slept and dreamt that life was joy,
I awoke and found that life was service.
I acted and behold! Service became joy.
— Rabindranath Tagore
Your infant grows at its own pace; sometimes slowly, sometimes instantly, in a quantum leap. As James Allen says, Be not impatient in delay, but wait as one who understands. Your infant business or career will soon grow to adolescence.
ADOLESCENCE
An adolescent business or career can take care of itself, including the basic needs of its employees, but it certainly can’t take care of its owners. In fact, the owners may still need to come in with some additional support if the adolescent stumbles for some reason, maybe because it’s trying something unproven or risky or new.
Just as in raising a child, great patience is needed to build a successful business or career. Don’t draw too much out of the company too fast. Keep retaining earnings in the company; keep saving personally.
Adolescents have voracious appetites — and they certainly can’t be depended on to support their parents. They may need additional support well into maturity, especially if they’re trying to do something innovative and creative.
ADULTHOOD
If you keep focusing on your dreams, and if you’re patient and persistent, your company or career will grow into maturity and be able to support you and many others abundantly. Then and only then can you reap the rewards of the powerful combination of your vision and persistence.
You’ll realize how much you have grown along with your business or career. You’re a far different person overseeing and shepherding an adult business and career than you were when you were constantly feeding your infant business or career. You have matured; you’ve become wiser. You have expanded in many ways, mentally and emotionally. You have discovered some secrets that have made your success solid, tangible, and inevitable.
Then things really get fun. One of the most satisfying, enjoyable meetings we have every year is in January, when we look at the previous year’s profits and decide what to do with them. This is certainly one of the greatest perks of a mature business.
A FORMULA FOR ONGOING SUCCESS
It took my company about five years to go through its infancy, and another five to go through adolescence. Even before it was profitable, we set up medical and dental care for all employees, paid for entirely by the company. Before it was profitable, I said to my employees, “Help me make a profit, and I’ll share it abundantly with you.”
Once we started making a profit, here’s the formula we evolved for profit distribution. (We saw the general formula in Lesson 5; now we’ll get more specific.) The exact percentages vary from year to year, depending on several factors — especially on the amount we need to retain in the company, because our accountant and bankers have their opinions about that, and we always listen to their input. In general, our goal every year is this:
• We donate 5 percent of pre-tax profits to charity.
• One-third of the remaining 95 percent is retained in the company for growth and expansion.
• One-third is paid to employees — part of it as cash bonuses and the other part to fund their pension plans to the maximum amount allowable by law.
• One-third is given to owners.
The numbers are flexible and can change from year to year, depending on circumstances. It’s an arrangement that works well for us.
PROFIT SHARING
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it until many more people put it into practice: Every company — whether making a profit or not — should have profit sharing with employees. There are no exceptions to this rule, because it’s one of the single best things you can do to build a company with an architecture of abundance.
As I’ve said, McDonald’s should have profit sharing. The U.S. Postal Service should have profit sharing. Your company should have profit sharing. If you’re an artist or someone else working independently, any assistants you have should have profit sharing — even if they only assist you part-time. It’s for your own good — the employers and owners benefit as much or more than the employees, because the employees contribute so much to the bottom line. Believe me: This is not a theory. This has been proven over and over, in thousands of different companies.
Here’s a simple way to put it:
Profit sharing unleashes a powerful creative force
that results in greater profits for everyone.
Profit sharing expands the pie of the profits so everyone gets a bigger piece. When you have profit sharing, you have the ingenuity of everyone working for the company, rather than the ingenuity of a relatively few people “at the top.”
It’s a great example of the power of partnership, and how it creates abundance for all.
ARE YOU A GARDENER OR AN ARCHITECT?
I’ve mentioned Kent Nerburn before: I love his writing — his books are the work of a great soul. He is also one of my closest and most perceptive friends.
One day he said to me, out of the blue, “Marc, you’re a gardener, not an architect.” That comment was food for thought, and it took me a while to understand what he meant. I came to see that, yes, there are many very different ways to build success, and some people are gardeners and some are architects.
Gardeners tend to grow things organically, planting tiny seeds and nurturing them into fullness with patience and persistence. Architects are able to draw up precise plans of whatever they intend to build; architects in the business world can build a great company by skillfully combining other pre-existing companies.
There are many, many different ways to achieve success. With the tools in this Course, you can design your own unique creation, whether you’re a gardener or an architect, or both.
FULFILLING OUR PROMISE
We’ve mentioned The Architecture of All Abundance by Lenedra J. Carroll, the mother and manager of the highly successful singer, Jewel. It is a book worth reading and rereading.
It was published in 2001, so I had already created the architecture of my abundance by the time I read it, but it’s one of those rare books that, if I had read it twenty-some years ago, would have compressed my first five years of struggle into just a few years, or even just months, and helped me reach my goals far more quickly.
Everything happens in its own perfect time — I was obviously not ready for success in those first years. I had a lot working against me, all of it my own creation. I had a great many conflicting core beliefs that eroded my ability to create a foundation for my dream. I had a lot of inner work to do. But now much of that work has been done, and my work has become showing other people how to realize their dreams.
This Course and The Architecture of All Abundance can both help you take a quantum leap into a much higher level of success, if that’s what you want. Both these books can show you how to create the success you want, as you choose to define it.
In the frontispiece of this book, we quoted some key questions from The Architecture of All Abundance:
What is a deeply satisfying human life,
and how do we design one?
How do we share that information with each other?
What are we here to do together,
and what are we truly capable of
in the realm of human excellence?
These questions cut directly to what is essential in life: What is a deeply satisfying human life? Of course, there is a different answer for each different individual. What does having a satisfying life mean to you?
Once you’ve answered that, how do you design it for yourself? The answers to those questions lead to the essence of this Course.
The answers to these questions are not mysteries
beyond our reach.
Fulfillment of the promise of our soul’s nature is possible.
It is why we are here. It is our birthright.
The answers are found only in the inner frontiers of Being.
— Lenedra J. Carroll
&
nbsp; The Architecture of All Abundance
The first chapter of The Architecture of All Abundance is titled “The Architecture of Stillness.” It is only within us, in the inner frontiers of Being, that we find the source of our true success.
You’ve certainly seen that by now: In order to answer most of the questions in this Course, you have to look within and draw the words from the depths of your being. You’ve probably already discovered the essential need for some time of reflection, whether it means taking walks alone, meditating, exercising, doing yoga, gardening, washing dishes, or whatever else works for you.
Start within, in stillness. Then ask a question: What does having a satisfying life mean to me? What do I dream of having? Of doing? Of being?
Then wait for the answers to arise.
Just by asking this question —
What does having a satisfying life mean to me? —
we set boundless energies in motion
that put great mechanisms to work for us.
MAKE A DEAL WITH YOUR DOUBTS
As soon as you imagine your ideal scene, you are almost certainly in for a fascinating bit of “inner theater” — I know I was. I’ve written about it earlier: As soon as I dared to dream about what I really wanted in life, in an ideal world, a huge number of doubts arose, immediate and forceful, all based on fear.
I ended up, after much discussion with myself, making a deal with my doubts and fears. I talked my inner critics into a compromise, into letting me try this experiment: I would try for a year, maybe two at the most, to do it the way I really wanted to — to create my ideal scene in my ideal way, in an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way. I genuinely felt that the end of a year or two I’d most likely end up agreeing with all my inner (and outer) critics and have to change my strategy and quit being lazy and become a Type-A workaholic, at least for a while.
I believed that was how the system worked: You had to work hard for your money.
My inner critics were absolutely sure I would fail in my foolish little experiment — after all, they firmly believe, they know, you’ve really got to work sixty to eighty hours a week to build a business. But they agreed to give me a year or two to try my hopelessly idealistic, ungrounded plan, to build my castle in the air, and try to do it in my own lazy way. They gave me a year or two to fail, to flop miserably, and come to the realization I had to work a lot harder in order to succeed in today’s world.
The lazy part of me thought the experiment was a good idea because it allowed me to be as lazy as I wanted to be and not have to seriously get to work.
Nearly every morning I affirmed all my goals were now coming into being in an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all concerned.
Within a year, there were all kinds of positive developments; within two years, I had no more doubt, and the inner critics were silenced. The process worked! Within two years, my start-up company was showing great promise, I had written a book and recorded an album of music. And, best of all, I was doing it in an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way.
There were certainly times during those first years I worked hard — sometimes old beliefs take a long time to completely change. I got a full-time job as a typesetter, working five days a week from 4 P.M. to midnight. Those were good hours for me, because I had much of the day to work on my various projects. Sometimes I’d be writing my book or making new plans at 3 A.M.
It took many years for me to really understand the phrase, “Work smarter, not harder.” It took many years until I found I could create the perfect work week for me, spending only about thirty hours at work, having thirty hours a week alone to myself, and spending about thirty hours a week with my family. (I’m counting the whole week, with weekends and evenings, and so we have about ninety waking hours on the average — a lot of time, when you think about it.)
It became clear to me that not only was it possible to work in an easy and relaxed manner, it was the sanest and most effective way to work in the long run. There is no burnout, stress is greatly reduced, and work and life in general are much more enjoyable. When you work this way, in other words, you have a life.
It’s certainly worthwhile to try your own experiment. Give yourself a year or two, and move toward your ideal scene in every imaginable way, in an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way.
Build in a lot of time for relaxation and rejuvenation. Take breaks when you feel like it. Allow yourself to be lazy at times. If you do, you’ll find you have a lot more energy at other times.
It’s the “Lazy Person’s Guide to Success.” Try it; you might like it. I saw this quote somewhere years ago. I may be paraphrasing, but it’s a great key:
Of course we build our castles in the air.
That’s where they should be.
Then we have to build a foundation under them.
— Henry David Thoreau
A SHORTCUT
Somewhere along the line, many years after I started working with these techniques, I found a shortcut. We’ve touched on this before, but it’s worth revisiting, for this bit of advice can be tremendously helpful: It is likely that you don’t need everything you think you need to fulfill your dreams.
When you imagine your ideal scene, when you list your goals, you are focusing your powerfully creative mind on doing, being, and having everything you want.
It can definitely be worthwhile to ask yourself afterward, What do I really want all that stuff for? What is the end result?
Find the answer in your own words. For most people, it has to do with a life of ease and happiness, fulfillment of some kind.
Now affirm that you have already achieved that end result. Find your own words; the affirmation may be something like:
I now have a life of ease and fulfillment.
So be it. So it is!
It might be much simpler than you think to create the kind of life you want. Affirm to yourself you’re working smarter, not harder; go through some of the exercises in this Course and you will probably be able to find shortcuts in places you thought you’d have a long, laborious journey.
TAKE IT EASY
We hear and say it a lot, and it’s one of the best pieces of advice around, when we stop and think about it:
Take it easy.
Affirm you’re doing things in an easy and relaxed manner — and soon you’ll be doing more and more things in an easy and relaxed manner.
Through it all, remember to take it easy. That’s great advice for all of us.
SUMMARY
• Every business, career, and life evolves through three stages: infancy, adolescence, and adulthood.
• When your business or career is in its infancy, you have to care for it constantly. You expect nothing of it, and have to support it completely.
• Your infant business or career grows at its own pace; sometimes slowly, sometimes instantly, in a quantum leap. As James Allen says, “Be not impatient in delay, but wait as one who understands.” Your infant business or career will soon grow to adolescence.
• An adolescent business or career can take care of itself, including the basic needs of its employees, but it certainly can’t take care of its owners — and the owners may still need to come in with some additional support if the adolescent stumbles for some reason.
• Don’t draw too much out of an adolescent company too fast. Keep retaining earnings in the company; keep saving personally.
• If you keep focusing on your dreams, and if you’re patient and persistent, your company or career will grow into maturity and be able to support you and many others abundantly. Then and only then can you reap the rewards of the powerful combination of your vision and persistence.
• Then things really get fun. One of the greatest perks of a mature business is profit sharing. Set it up so that employees share in the profits as much as the owners. This is a great key to ongoing success: Every compan
y that makes a profit should have profit sharing with employees. There are no exceptions to this rule, because it’s the single best thing you can do to build a company. Profit sharing unleashes a powerful creative force that results in greater profits for everyone.
• Build your success in your own unique way. Ask yourself: What is essential in my life? What makes it deeply satisfying? Then ask: How do I design it for myself? The answers will arise once you ask the question. Within your answers are keys to fulfillment.
• See if you can talk your doubts and fears into allowing you to make an experiment and try, for a year or two, to create your ideal scene, in an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way. This is a worthwhile experiment — one that transformed my life.
• It is not only possible to work in an easy and relaxed manner, it is the sanest and most effective way to work in the long run: There is no burnout, stress is greatly reduced, and work and life in general are much more enjoyable. It’s the lazy person’s guide to success.
• It is likely that you don’t need everything you think you need to fulfill your greatest dreams. Ask yourself, What do I really want all that stuff for? What is the end result? Begin with the end in mind, and you may find achieving that end is much simpler than you think.
• Great advice to remember: Take it easy.
• Find affirmations that work for you, and repeat them. Don’t underestimate the power of words. They change our lives. Here are a few suggestions: