Make it a habit to learn. Mohamed Gandhi said, ‘learn like you are going to live forever’. This is true because in the nature of life itself, just by being alive, we learn a lot. We always have something to learn from life. Even when you become a granny, when you reach your old age, you need to learn how to be a good granny and how to take good care of yourself as an old person. Learning just doesn’t stop. You must make it a habit to read, to explore things, travel, see different things, and experience different things. This is what will lead you to success. This is how you will get new business ideas. School is a small part of learning; the most learning one gets is in the form of lectures by life itself, so live and learn.
Develop a habit of starting things – don’t wait for people to start trends and then follow. You must learn to lead, and don’t be afraid to start something new that is not usual to your society. This is how you start new markets; this is how you become a young billionaire, when you develop new markets, with less competition or no competition. You must make it a habit to create things, to start things, and you will see how new markets are created. Start trends; be a leader in your field of business and watch yourself become successful.
Make it a habit to create value. Make yourself useful to the next person, and strive to be useful. This is how you get wealth. Your wealth will come from the money you will receive from other people for being useful to them; it is that easy. When you are useful, people will pay for your services or products, as long as they are useful. It is vital that you make it a habit to create value for the other person. Learn to sell value, and make it a custom to work on your own.
There are many good habits you can develop to make yourself successful in your quest for wealth. Throughout this book is advice on how you must go about creating wealth. It is full of actions you need to take towards wealth and living the life of your dreams. It is very important to make a habit of all the things mentioned in this book, like making it a habit to be positive about life, and working with a goal in mind. There are a lot of habits you can develop in this book, and making things into habits helps you to take the advice in this book and put it into actions.
So, own up to any advice you like from this book and put it into action by making it a habit, something you live by. This is how you will successfully put these words into action. Make this book useful in your life by putting words into actions. Nothing will happen no matter how many times you read it, for as long as you do nothing, when you don’t take actions, you achieve nothing. You have to put the words into actions and making them a habit is the best way of making knowledge work for you.
Every business is ideas for sale
Every business is selling an idea, a way of doing things that makes life better, easier, comfortable, and so on. People buy ideas. It is written in this book that everything man ever created started as a thought. This means that whatever you buy, in its most basic form, is an idea. The car you own is someone’s idea, people came up with the insurance idea for the insurance you pay for it, and this book is an idea. Everything really, started as a thought. This is a good way of looking at things. When you think about what value you can create to sell to people, first think from this perspective, that everything is an idea. People buy ideas, so all you need to do is to come up with an idea, and then start selling it to people as a service or a product, created from your ideas, depending on the business field you are interested in, and depending on human needs and wants that you can happily meet. Look at human challenges faced by people, by companies, by you or anyone, and come up with an idea, a solution to these challenges. Meet one human need or want, build your business based on that and build an empire. That’s how you create wealth.
14.EMOTIONS FOR SUCCESS
Emotions and how they affect your success
Emotions are what give us energy to perform any task. Emotions are made up of energy, which is what we use to perform work, or to do things. The fact that our emotions play an important role when it comes to the creation of wealth can’t be said enough. It is through positive emotions that we are inspired, that we get up on our feet and do something about our lives.
Emotions are human fuel, enabling us to live. Emotions are made up of feelings. You can lose your eyes, or your hearing, but the sensor that you won’t be able to live without is your sensibility, which is your awareness or your emotional response to something. It is through a feeling that you are alerted to the need for food, because you feel hungry, and it is through a feeling that you are alerted to the fact that you feel pain or are damaging yourself.
Every action we take has some emotions attached to it. It is because of this that our emotions become vital to our success. When we feel down most of the time, we will not do any productive work, which will make success just a dream. It will never happen unless you take note of that emotion and channel it to a positive thing. Feeling low or tired might come at the end of the day, when I am about to sleep, and because it will help me sleep, without the use of sleeping pills, I just make it a habit that emotions are channelled to a positive activity, where they help me achieve the activity at hand, like sleeping in this instance.
Yes, positive or negative, emotions can be used in a productive way. It doesn’t matter if they are positive feelings or negative feelings, they can be channelled to a positive activity like in the example above. As long as you learn to be emotionally mature, when you know how to control your emotions by telling your mind that now is not the time to be lazy, and that lazy time will come at the end of the day, when you will enjoy lazing around, but now it is time to work, your mind will get used to that routine. It becomes your bodily rhythm.
It is self-discipline. You learn to control your emotions by developing emotional habits and training your reaction to emotions. This is how. Your mind need lazy time, your mind need crazy time, sad time, stupid time, angry time, nag time, be irritated time; your mind needs these emotions as much as it needs sleep time. These emotions are all natural, and they must happen for you to stay sane. If you are happy all the time, you are not normal, or you have to fake it. There is no way you can be happy all the time. Emotions must go through highs and lows; it is natural, it is just what happens. Even when you have all the money in the world, you won’t be happy all the time.
The trick here is taking control of your emotions. What works for me here, which I think will work for you too, is controlling your mind. This is the only way I know that works when it comes to being emotionally intelligent. Your mind uses tricks. It tricks you subconsciously and through habits, it tricks you into doing a lot of things for its desires, like reading this book. It must have tricked you enough to get you this far. I am not complaining, I am not saying it is a bad thing, I am just telling you this so that you know that your mind influences your actions. It tricks you more than any person would be able to, because you will believe yourself more than you will believe anyone else.
Since your mind works through tricks, and it is susceptible to tricks, you can trick your mind to do things your way. This is how you control your mind. There is no other way; you have to trick it, that’s why people do things to remove other things from their minds. It is tricking the mind, keeping it busy with something to avoid thinking about something else, which is a bad strategy to me, since when you avoid things they find a way back to your life again and again. The better way for me is to sleep all day, think about the solution if it is something that needs to be solved or spend a lot of time sleeping to while away time. Since I know time heals all, if it is something I need to accept and move on from, sleeping and lots of lazing around helps me to move on. The same lazy feeling which might be negative in a work environment is vital to heal yourself emotionally, and to move on. In this sense, it becomes positive.
This is what I am getting to. You can control your emotions by allocating time for your feelings. This is how I trick my mind. If I feel lazy as I am typing this, I just tell myself just two more pages, then I will be done for the day. I can then laz
e about the whole afternoon. This allocating of time gives my mind the energy needed to complete the task at hand. It is an energy boost. There is a reward, yeah! My mind is inspired, and laziness becomes a reward. It is no longer a negative thing. You can’t get rid of feeling lazy, as your mind needs that lazy time. You must have time to laze around; it is natural.
So when you are in the middle of an activity or work and there is a feeling that hinders your performance and your productivity, it works to allocate time for that feeling and keep working, because there is now time allocated for that feeling. If the feeling still persists, when you have the privilege of self-employment, you give in and rest for some time. You will resume work again when you feel better because you know you won’t do a great job and be productive when you are not feeling great.
Allocating time also trains your mind to exchange emotions. When you feel down one moment, it won’t last for the whole day when you say, okay, at this hour, I am going to lie down and think about what is bothering me and what is making me feel down and work on the solution. If it is something huge, like career challenges or making hard decisions, which is one of the big stress factors, or it can be anything, as long as it is bothering you, it is great to allocate time to think about it. Decide to sleep on it; you will always have a solution in the morning.
It also works well when you feel angry. It stops you from acting out the anger when you can pace your feelings. Contain your anger until you are away from the source of anger, then when you feel it, you won’t be able to do any of the stupid things that people do when they are angry. So allocating time for our emotions is vital to help us learn to control our emotions. If we learn to control our emotions we learn to control ourselves, and if we control ourselves we find success and wealth.
You must understand that there is no negative feeling. You can direct your feelings to a positive outcome. All your emotions are necessary and need to be felt, and the best way of managing them is allocating time for them. When you are sad, you can be sad for a certain period of time, but not for the whole day, or the whole year. You must at least give yourself grieving time if it is something you need to grieve about, but do not avoid your emotions. It is not good for your health and they will always come back again until you feel them. Emotions are energy; they make taking actions possible and are vital to our success, so it is important that we learn to control them.
Passion and desire
Like what you do and do what you like. Going a little deeper into having passion, it is about liking yourself, being content and valuing who you are, believing you matter in this world, and that you are important. That’s where passion starts. You define who you are as one and the same thing with what you do. That’s where passion is born. It is a feeling and feelings depend on thoughts about what you do. No matter how much you wish you were able to do something, as long as you fail and keep failing, your passion for it will ultimately die. Recurring failure kills passion.
The wise choose their passion, where to put it, and what to be passionate about. You must be passionate about things you know for sure you are good at, so choose wisely where you place your passion. You will see someone sticking to doing something, and even when it is so obvious he is failing over and over again, he takes the same actions while expecting different results. He keeps at it because of passion. He realises later that he is wasting his time, which becomes a waste of time, energy and money in most cases. People turn out to be less passionate about their strengths because they come so easy to them; they take them for granted and that’s where you must focus and place your passion. Choose what to be passionate about based on your strengths. Be passionate about your strengths.
It can’t be said enough; a feeling is the energy that enables us to take actions. Without energy we can’t do anything so feelings are very vital when it comes to taking actions towards creating wealth, and actions towards living your dreams. At the forefront is the feeling of passion and desire. Passion for what you do helps you when facing the challenges that come with your chosen career or field of trade, while desire for the life you want to live drives you to actions. It is the fuel that will get you to your dreamland. It is important to know and cultivate these feelings. Use these feelings to your advantage. Everyone has desires, everyone has things they are passionate about, and when you recognise these feelings and apply them to your everyday activities, you will find success at what you do.
Find your passion
Now, where do you feel at your best? What makes you feel alive? What makes you tick? Do it. We prosper and grow in places that please us. Go for the things that you enjoy doing: go for passion, this is what makes life great and worth living.
Emotions for success
As discussed earlier, your emotions play an important role in you achieving your goals and dreams. The same applies to the creation of money. Emotion is the driver. You need energy to act, to be active and perform tasks, and emotion is energy in motion. How you feel about the task at hand will determine how well you perform the task. If you don’t like your job, you are not good at it and will not do that well at it, but when you do enjoy it, you will do well at it.
Doing well is what will make you achieve your dreams and financial goals. The problem is that people are stuck in jobs and activities they don’t enjoy doing and still hope to do well and achieve their dreams. If you are not enjoying yourself at what you do, you will not succeed. The strategy here is to look for activities that you enjoy doing. Whatever it is that you enjoy doing, find a way in which you can share your interest with other people where it will be valuable for the next person.
An example would be where a young boy is fascinated by computer games and likes playing them so much that his parents hate the way he is into computer games as they don’t see the benefit. But then the kid grows up to be a game developer, games retailer, game review writer, designer, professional player, and so on, where he can get paid doing what he has a natural passion for. That’s where work becomes fun. It is not a strain on him to stay all day every day thinking about and playing computer games, as this is where life becomes fun.
Look at it this way: most of our life is spent at work, eight hours a day, maybe five days a week if you are lucky. It is all spent at work. So isn’t it a good idea that this should be something you enjoy? If you enjoy what you do most of your time on this world you will have a pleasant life. This is how you enjoy your life and most importantly, it increases your chances and almost guarantees your success in your life.
Sometimes you might enjoy what you are doing at your job, but because of pressure from your boss, the environment and colleagues, and limited chances of doing what you enjoy in a job environment, you will not enjoy yourself. That’s why we encourage self-employment, where you can work when you feel like it, at your own pace, the way you want to, without any pressure or orders and rules.
How badly do you want something?
This is the question you must ask yourself. This is what determines if you will act on your desires or not. It depends on how badly you want success. What are you prepared to go through to get where you want to go? When the road gets tough, will you keep going? Some people give up so easily. You can easily tell when what they attempted to do didn’t mean anything to them. Maybe it wasn’t their dream; it was someone else’s.
You need to really desire what you dream of. When you really want something, not a day passes by without thinking about it. When you take the power of your desire and put the feeling into your actions, you will achieve your dreams in no time. We act on feelings; the power is in our emotions. Desire is an emotion, and it can take you places.
The power of our desires puzzles me sometimes, when I see people losing everything they worked for and patiently built because of their sexual desires. It really shows me that our desires can drive us beyond our mind’s capabilities if they can trick a man’s mind into doing things he looks back at and asks himself, ‘what was I doing? Now I have lost my family and dignit
y’. Desire is very powerful when used in a productive way; it can make you do amazing things and look back in disbelief and think, ‘did I do that?’
When you apply it to your dreams you get to work with a powerful tool. There is no way you will give up on your dreams when you have developed a desire for them, and when you are honest about what you want. When you spend time making goals about things you don’t really want, things that are just for status, just because everyone wants them so you must also try to fit in, you must want them to be considered normal, you will not get anywhere, and you will not achieve anything.
You must want it badly enough to be able to win over all obstacles that you face. You must desire to be successful that badly that you will face any challenges that come with it. If you are not prepared to face the challenges that come with the success you want, you won’t succeed. Maybe you don’t want it, or maybe you are doing it because everyone is doing it. Your desire for success will always determine your fighting spirit, which will determine if you succeed or not.
How you take risks shows how badly you desire something
Money- Wealth Creation Guide Page 26