When the chips are down
It is important to understand that the road to success is never smooth, and that there are challenges which come with deciding to choose your future. The only time the road to your destiny becomes smooth is when you don’t choose the terms. The moment you want to dictate what happens in your life, there will be obstacles. This book is trying to inspire you to take actions, to choose your destiny and not let fate choose it for you. Understand that there are rewards only when we take our chances and try to influence the future, and when we face the challenges that come with creating a future we desire.
They say when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. You must understand that the harder it gets, the more challenges you meet towards achieving your dreams; the closer you are to success. Don’t give up when you are that close. When you are faced with challenges, know that it is in overcoming those challenges that you will find success and achieve your goals. This is important to understand and live by. Don’t be that guy who stopped digging when he was so close to finding the gold, and don’t be the guy who starts trends and gives up before he receives the rewards, just to have other people take over and find success.
Every business owner will tell you this: there is a time when the chips are low and there will be a dry season. This is where you must hang on and wait for a rainy season. This is a fact on what happens when selling your value. You might have successfully created value, but don’t give up easily when you are faced with challenges when selling your value. Whatever it is you are offering, aim to triumph over the challenges. That is how you find success. When you are in rainy seasons, when things are going well in your business, save for a dry season. It is natural; these seasons do come and go, even in your sales. It will get hard, but don’t let it shake you; it will get easier.
The other important tool when it comes to facing challenges at what you do is love. I have said it before and I am saying it again; when you have love, when you have an honest passion about what you do, you will stick to it even when things are not promising. Even when you are not making any money yet, your love for what you do will keep you working; it will keep you believing in the value you produce. This is why love for what you do is so important. When you are faced with challenges, the love will give you the strength needed to succeed over the challenges. Know this and apply it in your life.
Common characteristics of successful people exist in you
People ask what it is that successful people do right. What’s their secret, what is their outstanding personality and attributes that help make them successful? There are no special attributes that you don’t have for success, there is nothing special about what they do or who they are. It is just like saying that everyone has hands but not everyone uses their hands. You also have the attributes they have. It is just a matter of using them. That’s the secret if you like calling it that. You have it in you; you just have to use it. Most of them are self-employed, which anyone can be. You just have to choose, and that’s why my advice to you is to work towards that for true success and freedom. I am and it feels great not taking any orders from anyone. I do what I like, when I like, the way I like it.
You can climb the corporate ladder if that is the success you are after but be warned, it comes with more pressure, while when you are self-employed, you take up the work you think you are up to; no one puts any pressure on you. That’s how the journey to your dreams becomes so much fun, when there is no pressure.
Successful people take risks, just like you can choose to. It is a choice; they know what they want and they go for it. They make their choices without any hesitation. They don’t have to report to anybody, and they are sure of what they want. They know and understand that in life you can’t have it all; you can be anything you want to be but you can’t be everything you want. You must choose what it is that you want and work towards it.
We must look at their attributes and realise them in us, and that we are not different to them. It is all about using the natural freedom that we all have, which is the free will we are born with, our ability to choose. Realise that there is nothing magical about these attributes; you also have the free will to exercise them, but whether you choose to is up to you.
It is important that we look at the personal traits of successful people to know that they are not any different to who we are, and to see those qualities they have in us. We need to recognise that if they can do it, we can as well. There are just many ways you can use to reach your dreams. I must repeat this here, knowledge is knowledge, it doesn’t matter how you get it. As much as formal education is important to the acquiring of knowledge, it is not all it takes to become wealthy. If this was the case, the Forbes 400 list would be filled with academics and professors, which is not the case.
There are many different ways people use to reach their dreams, and there is no one answer to how to be successful. It varies from person to person. It is important to take this into consideration, and to know that you also have personal attributes within you that will lead you to your wealth, which will lead you to success. This is what I call your values, and this is what makes you unique. This sets you apart and makes you stand out in the marketplace, which is vital for your success through making sales.
Take responsibility for your future
Blaming other people for your own circumstances will make you take no actions to do anything. Why should you act if it is not even your fault that things are the way they are? Let the person who is to blame fix it. No one is to blame for your circumstances; you are the one who is experiencing them, and you must take the responsibility and move away from the circumstances if you feel you are not happy with them.
Freedom comes with responsibility, and independence comes with being responsible for your life. That’s what they mean when they say that your future is in your hands. But people don’t want that, they have their future in their hands and hand it over to someone else as soon as they see an accepting hand. My future in my hands? No way. Just like something very hot, they drop it and give it to other people, making themselves vulnerable to exploitation and a lifetime of dependence on other people.
They do this so that they can blame other people for their challenges. They place the blame on the boss, the job and the government. They say ‘that’s why I am broke, it is the peanuts they pay me’, or ‘my boss is to blame’. You are the one who handed yourself to the boss with a big smile, you filled in the 10-page job application form, you even went for the stupid interview, you said ‘yes I can do it’, and when they told you the salary you said you would be happy with it. Two months down the line the same salary is too small for you. What were you expecting? Did you think it would double every month?
On top of that you still stay. You don’t just say, ‘this is not what I expected, I quit’, you just moan to your colleagues as they moan back at you. You gave your boss the responsibility for your future; you are waiting for that salary increase or promotion. If you look to other people for your future, you give away your responsibility, you give away your independence, you give away your power, and you give away your future. Do you realise how much is at stake here?
People do this without even thinking about it. It is the norm for them; they try to take out their misery by blaming other people for what they do to themselves. If you give away your power, you will never be truly happy. Take back your power, take back the responsibility for your life, and stop blaming other people for your own problems. You put yourself in those circumstances in the first place by giving up your power.
It is not right to point fingers at other people for our troubles. We must take responsibility, it is only then that we can control where our future lands. You become the pilot. It is you who experiences the future, whether pleasant or unpleasant, you and only you experience and live in those future circumstances. Why will you let another person determine that?
Being wealthy is about finding true independence, where you lead yourself. A lot of things don�
��t have that much control over you, you have control over them, and this is what wealth is. You lead yourself. You can now control your destiny, your life, and how it becomes. That is freedom. As you must know, what comes with freedom is responsibility. The two go together; you can’t have one without the other.
Wealth is freedom, and since you want wealth in your life, it means that you want more freedom in your life. You want to be the boss; this is what you really want. Going back to the fact that freedom comes with responsibility, this gives us the guidance to attain wealth. The direction to wealth is through responsibility, taking responsibility for your life and no longer blaming anyone for whatever happens in your life. You take matters that concern your life, and your future, into your hands. It is by taking responsibility for your future that you will find true freedom, which will lead you to wealth. You become rich in all parts of your life, by first taking responsibility for your life, for your future.
Live adventurously; this is how you find your fortune
Isn’t the best gift of life the fact that we can try something new every day? Right now you can decide to drop everything you do and you know how to do and try something totally new. This is life, and these are the things that make life great. That’s when you can say you are free. People learn to do one thing and affirm it to themselves that ‘this is what I can do, this is all I know’, and it becomes their safe haven.
They fail to find their potential in other things because they think, ‘I won’t quit this job; this is all I know, even if I am not satisfied with the pay, even if the boss is nasty, it is all I know’. How about knowing to do a lot of things? Having more than one skill? Remember what you think you know and can master now wasn’t something you knew when you started. You learned it, so you can learn another new skill.
Sometimes the things we like today won’t be the same things we would like and enjoy tomorrow. Does that mean I have to be stuck with writing even when I don’t enjoy it anymore? I don’t think so; I will just learn to do something else that I find interesting for me. We are talking about having multiple sources of income for your financial security and success in this book; do you think you will fit the bill if you only know how to do one thing, with only one skill? I don’t think so.
A good life is about living adventurously. This is the only way we can discover who we are; this is how we can discover our abilities, meaning our strengths. You have to try out things, especially when you haven’t chosen a career yet, and when you are still not sure about what you want to do with your life. It is true that sometimes we are not aware of our strengths, which are our wealth. In fact, many people are not aware of their strengths, which is why they lack the most basic things in life.
It starts here. You have to find your strengths; they make up your wealthy part. When you are aware of your strengths, when you express them, when you do what you naturally excel at, you become wealthy. Everyone has something they are good with; everyone has some talent that exists deep in their genes, developed over time since they were born, and INFLUENCED by the life they are exposed to, but the problem is that many people are not aware of their talents.
You have to be adventurous. You must try out different things; this is the only way you can find out where you strength is, where your talent is, and where your fortune is. It is vital that you find your strength. Once you know your strength you are already wealthy; you have discovered your wealth. This is what happens, and there is no way you will fail at what you are good at. This is where a lot of difficulty for people to achieve their dream stems from.
It just can’t be said enough; your personal strengths are what make up your wealth. This is what you should be focusing on and what you need to be developing. Another problem with having employment is that due to circumstances, people find themselves in jobs for which they are not skilled for and for which they don’t have strengths. This is why they fail to reach high levels in what they do. They just have to keep the job because there is no employment, so they have to hold on to the job because of the fear that they will not be able to provide for themselves if they leave the job.
This is where self-employment becomes vital. It is because it affords you time to be yourself; it gives you the option to do what you want to do. You don’t have to do things you find boring or things you find difficult to do; self-employment will lead you to doing things you like. You will start doing things you find easy to do, and this is what leads you to your strengths.
Living adventurously is what will help you discover your true strengths. It is what will open you to wealth. We ourselves don’t even know or understand why we are here; we form beliefs about it but the truth is that we are not sure of who we are. Our whole life is spent discovering ourselves. Life seems to be made for each person to discover and fulfil who they are in the ‘mist’ of things.
The only way we can discover things about ourselves is by experimentation. I don’t mean that you must conduct stupid experiments on yourself like experimenting with drugs or so on, I am talking about positive experiments like finding your career, and doing activities that make it possible to make a living from. This is the experiment I am talking about. Especially when your strengths are not so obvious to you, you need to experiment. You need to do things, try out careers, try out activities, see how you do in them, and make your judgement based on your performance. This is how you discover your strengths, by being active.
You have to be adventurous. Don’t be afraid to try things out and fail. Change things around; change careers, move things around. You won’t get the same results when you change your strategies, or when you change your careers. This is how they explain foolishness, by doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results each time. You need to change things around. This is why you are not wealthy yet; you are doing something wrong. Maybe it is true that the business you are in is just not for you. Look at your reasons for going into that business and study where you are failing. Do you still have a passion for it? Do you have natural strengths for what you are doing? If not, change the career or change your approach to wealth; change your strategy.
Be careful with this. Don’t lose focus and start running in circles because I said you must be adventurous, and don’t find yourself changing career after career with the excuse that you are being adventurous. By being adventurous I mean trying little things outside your career to see how you do in them. Through trying other things you will find your strengths. When you try out other activities, you might find that you do better at them than whatever it is you are currently doing. If that is true, this is when you can change a career, when you have already discovered where your strengths are.
You must only change a career when you are sure that your failures at what you are currently doing are purely from your lack of strengths in that field. Since you are already in that field, it is easy to notice the strengths needed to excel in that field. Be careful not to leave this career for the other because you are afraid of challenges. When you feel challenged in a career you change careers. As discussed previously this will lead you to running in circles. Every career has its challenges. Even the career in which you have natural strengths will have its challenges, but it is in facing and winning over those challenges that we find success. So being adventurous is about finding your strengths. You can only change careers when you are sure that you don’t have strengths in what you do, and only when you have discovered your strengths through trying out different activities. That’s when you can change careers. Examine your gifts, talents and interests and share them with the world. This is how you become successful.
Do it for pride; how failure can build confidence
Sometimes creating value goes beyond money and common beliefs. It comes down to thoughts of what you will want people to remember you by when you are gone. This is a crazy motive but I use it often in my life. I do things just for pride, I want to leave a legacy; I want people who get to know me to remember something about me, something
that can stay with them for the rest of their lives. I dream of leaving a legacy that will stand the test of time, for my name to be written in history books for many generations to come, and for people to say, ‘there was a man, he did this and did that’.
Now I know this sounds egocentric. This sounds like I am way out of my league, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The bigger your dreams are the more work you are inspired to put in at whatever you do. That’s where the saying, ‘shoot for the moon, you might land up among the stars’ comes from. I don’t limit myself when I dream. My dreams are as big as owning a spaceship and taking trips to the moon. There is no limit to what you can dream of, but wait, here is where I want to go with this; the greater your motive for your actions, in other words, why you must work and create value, the more likely you are to put in the work required to achieve your goals.
When you relate your work to pride, and when you want to do it for the reason that people must notice what you are capable of, you have a greater motive that goes beyond money. It is to create something for people to know about you; it is to do what you do just to make your mark, to let it be known you were here, and for your life to touch people who come into contact with you or your work. This is one of the motives that will see you through and make you be somebody in life. Besides money, there are other motives you can use to inspire you to action that will make you take steps towards your future.
Failure is also a good motive. It builds confidence in yourself, you gain more respect for yourself, and you gain more self-worth. This is how: when you try out things, you fail but you stand up and try again. You become proud of yourself. Besides your circumstances, you know that you are not a coward; you do make moves. Even when you fail, you must be proud of yourself. It gets you into the habit of trying. You have that fighting spirit; you know that you have to take actions, and that no matter the results, you have to stand up and try again.
Money- Wealth Creation Guide Page 9