WEALTH WARRIOR The Personal Prosperity Revolution
WEALTH WARRIOR The Personal Prosperity Revolution
Steve Chandler
Wealth Warrior: The Personal Prosperity Revolution. Copyright © 2012 by Steve Chandler All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from the publisher. Maurice Bassett P.O. Box 839 Anna Maria, FL 34216-0839 Contact the publisher:
[email protected] www.MauriceBassett.com Contact the author: www.SteveChandler.com Editing by Kathryn McCormick and Chris Nelson ISBN-10: 1-60025-040-8 ISBN-13: 978-1-60025-040-8 Library of Congress Control Number 2012946882 First Edition
To Michael Neill
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Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................................... xi Introduction: How to create worldwide prosperity ....................... xv Chapter 1 How could I possibly make any money given my past history? ..................................................................... 1 2 My perfect escape from work and adulthood ........................ 4 3 No ambition, no goals, no dreams even ................................. 8 4 Work ethic and the wealth it produces can be built and strengthened? ....................................................... 10 5 A drunk seeks his fortune .................................................... 14 6 Now I’ll work hard to get my thinking clean (and sober) .................................................................. 17 7 My work-ethic gene theory begins to fall apart like a bad game of Angry Birds ........................................... 21 8 Oh, come on, like a book can really change someone’s life ...................................................................... 24 9 It’s really true that it isn’t about the money ......................... 26 10 How to stop trying to save the world from the outside in, and start saving ourselves from the inside out ................ 31 11 Your beliefs are always your only real problem .................. 34 12 Your money problems can be explained by looking at your daily calendar.............................................. 37 13 When the student is ready there are teachers showing up every day .......................................................... 39
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Contents (continued) 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35
What happens when your whole occupation is worry? ....... 42 Society will always be working against me ......................... 44 What about letting the chips fall where they may and just muddling through?.......................................... 46 Create relationships like you would a painting, one bright dab of color at a time .......................................... 47 Yet I was going bankrupt at the time ................................... 50 What if I based my life (like most people do) on what I can GET? ............................................................. 53 All the beliefs that kept me stuck in myself were useless and depressing................................................. 54 Another teacher arrives with another piece of the warrior puzzle ...................................................................... 56 How can I help? Who can I serve? Who can I help? What can I do? ..................................................................... 58 A gut check for the get freak................................................ 61 Why marketing and manipulation will push people and money away .................................................................. 64 How your social self is devastating to your income ............ 68 Stupid question: Do I need a college degree to make good money in today’s world? ................................... 71 In what way is wealth like happiness? ................................. 74 If I just slow down, life will show me where money comes from............................................................... 76 You don’t need a weatherman to introduce a brainstorm .... 81 Put your helmet on, strap in, and buckle up: get ready to experience Cosmic Habitforce ......................... 85 First, let’s figure out if life is really worth living ................ 89 How to get rid of all your problems ..................................... 91 It’s time to look at your to-do list and go basically negative on it ........................................................................ 92 Financial sluggishness and sloth are often caused by information...................................................................... 94 What if you had one hour to change your life forever? ....... 98
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Contents (continued) 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57
What if I am too shy to let people know what my service is?..................................................................... 102 Why it makes no sense to live and let die .......................... 104 Choosing what to do has more power than studying what to do........................................................................... 108 Practice creates talent; and sometimes you practice so much that you end up gifted .......................................... 113 This formula works if you really use it every day ............. 117 Drop the marketing and replace it with the delivery of magic ............................................................................. 119 Okay, then, how do I motivate myself? ............................. 120 How I became a conspiracy nut ......................................... 122 The key to productivity is creative subtraction .................. 125 Stay on the path of service, no matter what the defense (the universe) throws at you ................................. 128 Playing small will spread into your work and eventually it will shrink your life ....................................... 130 I could be out there serving people but my mind and my emotions have sent me back to bed ....................... 133 Okay, really now, who is John Galt? ................................. 136 Are you finally willing to go berserk? ............................... 137 Attacking life means seizing the day and then going out there and making things happen ........................ 138 You always become what you choose to think about ........ 140 I despise that person because all he thinks about is money ............................................................................. 142 In my previous life I would always quit before the best energy had a chance to kick in.............................. 144 Life coaching looks like a phony profession that seeks quick and easy money .............................................. 146 Now let us try to dance with the abundance of the universe .................................................................... 149 Your lizard is not going to make you any money .............. 151 If money is not about greed, then how do I start making some? .................................................................... 154
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Contents (continued) 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70
Why must I keep reinventing myself? ............................... 158 One good way to wreck our bodies and our minds ............ 160 Why is everyone talking about passion? What if I don’t have any? ................................................................ 164 How would you like to be a mad scientist and an inventor when it comes to who you really are? ................. 167 Now here’s a secret insider’s trick that can make you some real money................................................ 171 Okay gang, now let’s get out there and benefit from some shocks! ............................................................. 174 This is inside every heartache I feel ................................... 179 Yes there actually IS a cure-all .......................................... 181 Talk to real people—ask for what you want ...................... 182 What to do when your wife’s look says, “WTF?” ............. 184 This kind of “service” does not pass the giggle test .......... 188 This is the powerful formula I spent years and years not wanting to learn .................................................. 192 How to be a wealth warrior ................................................ 194
Publisher's Afterword ................................................................. 197 Recommended Reading ............................................................... 199 About the Author ......................................................................... 200 Join the Wealth Warrior Movement ............................................ 202 Books by Steve Chandler ............................................................ 203 Audio by Steve Chandler ............................................................. 204 Bonus Chapters from Time Warrior ........................................... 207
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Acknowledgments Kathy Eimers Chandler Fred Knipe Terrence N. Hill Steve Hardison Maurice Bassett Will Keiper Sam Beckford Ron Wilder Rich Litvin Michael Neill Rett Nichols Darlene Brady Lindsay Brady Michael Bassoff Mary Hulnick Ron Hulnick Ken Wilber Colin Wilson Susan Motheral Sherry Phelan Byron Katie Jonathan Keyser Angela Hardison Michelle Nassau Chris Nelson Mar Chandler
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From Michael Neill: Question of the day, with thanks to Clarence Thomson:
What’s missing from your life and how do you keep it out?
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Introduction
How to create worldwide prosperity I honestly believe it’s one person at a time. I know that may sound naïve as big nations keep moving vast sums of borrowed money around trying frantically to keep their treasuries afloat. How could one person counter that? But recently a client of mine told me about one person. One person donated a gift to his small college in the midwest. And it was an anonymous cash gift of $100,000,000. Yes you read that right, one hundred million dollars. Steve Jobs was one person, and look at all the wealth (and jobs) he created. True, too, with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. He was one person, one nerdy college student in a dorm creating a network for the school to connect with online. Creating. A woman I know is a wonderful actress. She could have remained simply an actress forever, but instead she divined a mission to teach women to become amazingly strong, sexy and fit through pole dancing. Sheila Kelley. The S Factor Workout. Check her out. Although S Factor now employs hundreds and serves tens of thousands, Sheila Kelley started it from zero. Nothing. And now all this. Sheila, too, is one person. I myself pay various coaches, designers, event planners,
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airlines, bookkeepers, accounting people, etc. I pay them money and add to their prosperity. They serve me so well. And I am able to pay them because my books, my training, my coaching and my seminars sell. In fact, my books sell in China. China pays me for that... China pays one person. Our government borrows money from China just to make the interest payments on its own out-of-control debt. But I don’t borrow from China. The money China sends me is for work I have done. I don’t owe China anything. They owe me. They pay me. I am one person. You are one person. We can create worldwide prosperity one person at a time.
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The warrior’s approach is to say “yes” to life: “yes” to it all. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. Joseph Campbell
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Chapter 1
How could I possibly make any money given my past history? Life’s tough. It’s tougher if you’re stupid. John Wayne
I had two alcoholic parents. I had a wife with a medical disorder who was hospitalized and who left me with four children to raise on my own. Those were my excuses. And you have to admit they’re pretty good. Pretty dramatic. How could you ask someone to overcome that? How would someone ever learn to create wealth with those kinds of things to deal with? Wait. It gets worse. (Or better, depending on where you’re coming from.) I had (what I thought was) a birth defect. I was missing a gene that most humans had. It was the gene that provided you with a work ethic. People talk about a “work ethic” as if it’s a quality like blue eyes. You either have it or you don’t. I didn’t have it. How can you make brown eyes blue? With contacts? Too temporary and irritating.
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That’s how I felt about my work ethic as I emerged from high school—clueless about how I could make a living. Would I go to college? Of course! Not because I wanted to learn anything or do anything with my college experience. But because it would buy me some time away from having to work. We are all somewhere on the developmental ladder. And most people are growing, and, yes, ascending. Except for me. I was stuck. No upward development for me. Development did not look fun. It looked like work. Little did I know that the secret to growth and wealth was less than a heartbeat away. I just couldn’t feel my heart at the time.
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It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. Frederick Douglass
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Chapter 2
My perfect escape from work and adulthood Like I said, my high school years featured no work ethic at all. My grades barely allowed me to graduate. I certainly couldn’t get in to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where all my friends were going. So rather than go to a lesser school in Michigan I chose to go for some wild adventure: the University of Arizona! Great party school, far from home. The perfect escape from work and adulthood. Except that even at the University of Arizona you had to show up for class, turn in your homework and take your finals. And that was beyond my capacity. To put forth that kind of effort? No way did I know how to work that hard. So drugs and alcohol became my answer. I would take drugs to study (supplying chemically the energy I was incapable of generating on my own). And it worked. But really? It didn’t. Because of the alcohol part. Way too much alcohol that wild freshman year. A friend of mine and I knew that campus may not be a good place to study for our finals. Too many distractions were there. So we rented a cheap hotel room in Tucson, far away from campus. A yellow motel out on Miracle Mile, with a nice
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pool. We thought we could really focus on our final exams there. And it was actually working for awhile. In fact, our plan might have succeeded except for one thing. The alcohol. We got far too carried away with the weapons-grade, 180 proof pure something or other we had bought in Mexico, and it wasn’t long before we’d decided to forget the books and instead stage a water ballet for the guests at the hotel pool. Although we were thrilled with our performances in the pool, I’m glad it wasn’t filmed because I’m not that good of a swimmer, and I’m sure if the guests got any value from the show it was all the unintended comedy. My friend and I failed our final exams—especially the ones we didn’t show up for. Which in my case was all of them. When the letter arrived home back in Michigan all our suspicions were confirmed: this kid has no work ethic. He is SUSPENDED from the University of Arizona due to bad grades. He has one more chance next year to prove he can study. Another failure will result in his being banned from attending this fiesta college forever. Banned from attending a great party school? How sad and weak was that? Of course my father was appalled and embarrassed, but not actually surprised. He had identified my lack of ability to make any kind of sustained effort very early on in my life. My chores were never quite finished. My grade school teachers said I was the laziest they’d ever had. “Why did we ever think college was a good idea for him?” “Because what’s the alternative?” my mother would ask my father. “A job?” And they both dissolved into laughter. Oh no. No way can we picture this boy holding down a job. So it was back to college. And this time I was scared.
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Because I got the message. If I failed this time, I would have to learn how to work for a living. Unimaginable to me. That was an impossible scenario that I wasn’t about to put to the test. No, I would learn to stay in school. The answer would be in a wiser use of drugs and alcohol. This time, when exams were coming up, I’d back off of the alcohol and increase the use of amphetamines. Who says I can’t learn anything in college? I learned to stay in school! Barely, though. Just barely. Because although I was not kicked out ever again, it was three years before I achieved the rank of sophomore. My parents were getting nervous because their friends’ children were all talking about going back to Ann Arbor for their senior year. Some would be going on to law school. Many already had jobs lined up. And here they were unsure if I’d ever become a sophomore. By this time I began to acknowledge that there was something seriously “wrong” with me. My alcoholic drinking had become my real job. I didn’t “know” I was an alcoholic, but I was. And it would get worse before it got better.
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A sense of entitlement guarantees that eventually you will see yourself as a victim. Ezra Bayda
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Chapter 3
No ambition, no goals, no dreams even It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating. Oscar Wilde
Why am I telling you all this? How can this story about my life possibly make you rich? Hey, just trust me. This is important: When you add alcoholic drinking to no work ethic, you get zero achievement. I’m sure this isn’t news to you. Everyone knows someone who has been caught up in this no-win kind of loop. And let me just mention here that although I now have thirty-some years clean and sober through the grace of God and a beautiful 12-step program, I do not see sobriety as particularly heroic. I’m very grateful for it, but it’s not a highlight on my resumé. I see celebrities and politicians’ wives getting standing ovations on TV talk shows for their newfound sobriety. Here, let me stand up and applaud you for going a certain amount of days without falling over drunk! Heroic! Not to say I don’t admire people in recovery, because I certainly do. They have found the courage to change the
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things they can and the serenity to accept the things they can’t. No small thing. But in my case it was important for me to get real about all of this and understand what a truly heroic effort was all about. So in recovery I decided I would have to achieve the serenity that came with accepting that fact that I was born without the ability to work. Not only that, it was worse. I had no ambition, no goals and no dreams. Nothing. Just empty when it came to all that. Who knows why, really? I now know it wasn’t genetic. I now know that work ethic can be built from nothing, and even strengthened at will. But back then? It might have been my growing up with hugely successful (by the measure of money and social status) alcoholic parents. What was the lesson there? For a small boy? Work hard and become successful and you’ll be drunk and depressed for the rest of your life? Who knows what beliefs took hold in the brain of a very impressionable young boy? And when it comes to creating a good life, beliefs are the only problem. Why tell you this sad history of mine? Because there is something great inside all of this. Something I might even call the heart of the wealth warrior message: IF I CAN DO THIS ANYBODY CAN.
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Chapter 4
Work ethic and the wealth it produces can be built and strengthened? Back to the exciting news I kind of jumped over before: work ethic can be built and strengthened. That would soon become my breakthrough. That would be my life being handed back to me after all those years. I’d been alone for so many years with my lack-of-achievement gene. To realize that there was no such thing was nothing short of a rebirth for me. I finally graduated from college. After only twelve years! A bachelor’s degree in creative writing (what’s that?) with a minor in political science (huh?). But before you start mocking me for having taken twelve years to get a bachelor’s degree, please know that I took four years off from that hero’s journey to join the army. And I had great adventures in language school (the Defense Language Institute), doing electronic spying on the Russians while in Berlin. After that I was on to psychological warfare. But still, even in the army, the missing achievement gene kept showing up. I was honorably discharged, which was something. But my rank at the time was Private First Class. For those of you
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unfamiliar with the military ranking system, I won’t go into any great detail about it, but I will say that taking four years to become a Private First Class is not a great achievement. I’m sure you’re thinking, How is this underachieving guy going to teach me anything about making money? I think that’s my point, though. I wanted to set this up just right for you. Please realize: if I can do this, anyone can. And in working with so many people over so many years who have experienced various similar levels of loserdom, I can report that it’s true: anyone can do this. Anyone can go warrior and create prosperity for themselves. But in order to make money you have to know who is doing the making. In my case, if it had to be that same “me” who was missing a work ethic, then it would have been a lost cause. The same with you. Your sense and experience of who you really are is the first step toward making money. Because if it’s going to be that old collection of hurt feelings and fears you call “you” then we’re in for a rough ride. For you to create wealth in ways that are free, imaginative and prolific, you have to have access to your higher self. Higher self? The real you—you at your best. You when you surprise yourself. Don’t you surprise yourself once in a while? That’s the “you” I’m talking about. That’s the real you. The rest is fears and bad memories. At least, that’s my experience and the experience of the clients I coach. What do I know beyond that? I am only an authority on my own experience. I’m not an authority on anything else. But here’s where it actually gets exciting. This old, struggling “you” is not natural or “real.” Your higher self is the most natural “self” for you to be.
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You were meant to thrive. But you’ll only find this out when you take action.
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It is important that you get clear for yourself that your only access to impacting life is action. The world does not care what you intend, how committed you are, how you feel or what you think, and certainly it has no interest in what you want and don’t want. Take a look at life as it is lived and see for yourself that the world only moves for you when you act. Werner Erhard
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Chapter 5
A drunk seeks his fortune So
now I’m out of the army and in the world as an adult, looking for work but not having a work ethic. Not fun. The drinking continued until it became unsustainable. I identify with Woody Allen, who said he knew he was drinking too much when he came home one night and tried to take his pants off over the top of his head. I wish my embarrassments were that minor, and that funny. My embarrassments were humiliating. My drinking was out of control. I remember one night I was on the roof of my mother’s house, yelling at the moon. The family members and friends in her house kept trying to talk me down, but I refused to come down until they got the President of the United States on the phone. It was a long night. This is a man? This is a grown-up man? There were many more incidents like that, and much more shame and misery. I got jobs I then quit so I could drink more. I became a sportswriter for the daily paper. One night, when I found out that the game I was supposed to cover was on the radio, I sat in my apartment with a bottle of wine and a notebook and “covered” the game that way. My story in the paper the next day was filled with vivid visual descriptions of the players’ heroics. The paper’s photographer said he didn’t see me at the game and I said I was covering it from inside
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the crowd—an experimental perspective. Unsustainable. Finally I got help. And that’s where this story really begins. This is the point in my biography when I began to find my higher self, and the higher power that gives it life. Without this turning point: no chance for wealth, no chance for warrior and no chance for any kind of peace inside. Turning points are so powerful. And you can create one any time you want. But who knew?
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In every moment you have a choice: to live the life of spiritual practice, or retreat into comfort and security. Ezra Bayda
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Chapter 6
Now I’ll work hard to get my thinking clean (and sober) That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. Steve Jobs
My recovery changed my life. The world through the eyes of a clean and sober force was a new world. I went to meetings and learned and cried and laughed—and prayed I’d never drink or use drugs again. There was a sign on one of the walls in a meeting room that said, “YOUR BEST THINKING GOT YOU HERE.” That was dark humor indeed. All the best thinking I had ever done landed me in a room full of hopeless alcoholics whose lives were basically ruined. So much for clever thinking. So much for the supremacy of thought. That’s where I began to see that there was more to life than the thoughts that flew into my head like Hitchcock’s birds. In my past, the darker my thoughts, the more I believed
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them. Each thought was a freshly-caught bird—each thought I believed. And those caged birds (thoughts believed) were who I was. Except they weren’t. In fact they were just thoughts flying into my head. Another sign on the wall of another recovery meeting hall said, “JUST FOR TODAY.” That sign never left me. I later built my whole time warrior training and coaching around that sign. It’s the most counterintuitive sign ever put up in any room anywhere. Why? Because it eliminates the future. In fact it eliminates the hypnosis of linear time altogether, and linear thinking as well (always, in the past, a dreary cocktail mix of paranoia and regret). What did “JUST FOR TODAY” really mean? When I got into those recovery meetings my biggest worry was that I was now going to have to go the rest of my life without a drink. Impossible to conceive or believe. But they told me I wouldn’t have to do that. “Í don’t have to quit drinking forever?” “No, of course not.” “Well, does that mean you’ll teach me how to drink sensibly? Like other social drinkers?” “No, we’ve never seen that work for people like us.” “Then what do you mean?” “Just for today, don’t drink.” I was stunned. That seemed so doable. But wasn’t that just a trick? A way of putting blinders on a horse? They told me, “Today is all you have. It’s part of your spiritual progress to see that.” That took a lot off my mind. I was really worried about this sobriety idea. Because not only did I believe I was missing a work-ethic gene, I also thought I lacked a “follow-through” gene. I would start things
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and not follow them through to completion. In my mind I was absolutely incapable of following through. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t good at it. So the “JUST FOR TODAY” sign in the meeting hall gave me my first taste of freedom and my first flirtation with this wonderful thing I call the “higher self.” (You can give it any name you want.) Many years later I would admire the achievements of UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. He won more national titles than any coach before or after him. And his method was to eliminate the future. He called it, “Make each day your masterpiece.” And when he got his whole team to devote all their skills and attention to today’s Wednesday afternoon practice (instead of the upcoming “big game”), they became the Zen Masters of college basketball. Linear thinkers could not beat them. Because Wooden’s boys were always in the moment they were in. There is no reference to the future in this good phrase: Give us this day our daily bread.
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When you ain’t got nothin’ you ain’t got nothin’ to lose. Bob Dylan
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Chapter 7
My work-ethic gene theory begins to fall apart like a bad game of Angry Birds I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one. Leonard Cohen
I was sober now. The monkey was off my back. But the circus was still in town. All those negative beliefs were still there. Yet the stressful beliefs I had about myself and my life were beginning to look like nothing more than fleeting thoughts. Birds flying in. Birds flying out. What used to be a web of beliefs, thoughts and the absolute “truth about life” had now become merely birds-in-birds-out. I no longer had to cage them or believe them. Maybe now I could create from zero. I could start from nothing. With nothing to lose. Was it really true that I might recover completely from this seemingly hopeless condition? That I could leave behind my disease? (Disease? What is this “disease” called? It’s called “Being drunk all the time.” It’s called destroying the gift of life. It’s called a willful pollution of consciousness.)
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Yes, it was happening, but it presented me with some new challenges—the main one being: “How do I make money?” This was a frightening question to a person with no previous sustained work experience. But my newfound freedom and sobriety, and my newly-restored full head of consciousness, was open to anything. If I could stop my drinking I could do anything. So I decided to learn how other people made money. I knew my father made a lot of money but I never knew how. He didn’t know how to teach me. He was never home anyway, flying around the world tending to his many businesses. He once took me to a movie called The Carpetbaggers. It starred George Peppard as Jonas Cord. He told me that the movie was a pretty good illustration of his own life. The hero was a heavy-drinking, brilliant, power-hungry, womanizing business genius who destroyed himself in his quest for continued achievements. Wow! Thanks, Dad! I’ll see if I can do that, too. I wanted to learn to do it differently. One day at a time. But I was confused until a good friend noticed my confusion and gave me a book by Napoleon Hill called The Master Key to Riches. The book blew my mind. One of those book experiences where you say, “And the rest is history.” Well... Maybe it didn’t happen that quickly, but it was a great start. I was on the path now. One book would lead to another. Those eight wasted years of college were being made up for. I was now reading day and night. I became a college of one. And the best part was that what I was reading was not just good information. It triggered new and unprecedented action.
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A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. Franz Kafka
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Chapter 8
Oh, come on, like a book can really change someone’s life Really. Can a mere book change a life? I laugh when I hear cynical people ask me that question, as they often do. I laugh again when skeptical pessimists proclaim, as gospel, “You won’t find it in a book!” Ah, but maybe you can. Not only did I, but almost everyone I know and now work with in this field (personal development?) found it first in books. But first things first. Let’s get back to “nothing.” This whole idea of starting your life over. The entire concept of nothing. Beginning all over from nowhere with nothing. As in, now I have nothing to lose. When people arrive inside that nothing space, books change lives. Over and over I see it. And what are books but heartfelt messages from one human to another? Those messages change lives. My life was changed forever by The Master Key to Riches because it showed me the way forward. It wasn’t that greed or an obsession with riches was suddenly in play. It was more basic than that.
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It was about creating a livelihood. It was whether I could develop within myself what it took to make a living. A good living, let us say, and not just surviving, staying technically alive until I died. The Master Key to Riches led me to Napoleon Hill’s more famous Think and Grow Rich. Then came the domino effect. I became obsessed with books that would create inside of me, inside of nothing, a set of operating principles that would guide me for the rest of my life. In the movie Meatballs, Bill Murray is a camp counselor for poor kids. Across the lake is a camp of rich kids. Each year the two camps play each other in a kind of camp Olympics that includes races and games, and everyone participates. After the first day the poor kids are way behind in the score. Rather than giving them a pep talk that tells them they can win, Murray tells them it doesn’t matter. He says the rich kids have all the advantages, but it just doesn’t matter. Soon the whole poor kids’ camp is cheering, “It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter!” I won’t spoil the ending, but the movie was so inspiring to me and my children that after seeing it many times the kids would often march around the house chanting, “It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter!” One frightening night their mother was taken from them and put into the hospital for what we were told would be just short of forever. The children took up the chant two days later. “We have no mother now…and we have a father who has no idea what he’s doing…but we don’t care. Why? Because it just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter!” I would hear them chanting that down the hallways of our home and saw how all our spirits were lifted. Not by some positive reassurance that things would be okay. Not by hope. But by the thrill of starting from nothing. Starting life over again in this empty, zero moment.
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Chapter 9
It’s really true that it isn’t about the money Money won’t create success, but the freedom to make it will. Nelson Mandela
It
wasn’t the prospect of money that lit me up inside when reading the books I was reading. It was the process by which that money could be earned. It was the idea that energy wedded to creativity led to riches. It was the key element of staying on the path—or, as Napoleon Hill called it, having a “definite major purpose.” Later, when I was doing time management work with client groups, I delivered the same master key: stay on the path. Allow your definite major purpose to guide your choices throughout the day, instead of letting other people do it. Trying to please other people? Isn’t that the point of life? Not exactly. A warrior does not please. A warrior serves. Without a definite purpose guiding me I would always be sidetracked. I would always have my day guided by other people’s feelings instead of my own plan. It would be a day of pleasing people and winning their approval.
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And that was always at the heart of it. It isn’t that Facebook or LinkedIn or email or tweets or texts are a waste of time. They are not, all by themselves, a waste of time. When people believe that they are confusing the map with the territory. They are trying to kill the messenger. The real addiction is not to social media or the Internet, or to tweets and texts and emails. The real addiction is to getting other people to LIKE me, and to approve of me. How do I shake that addiction? Because there can be no definite major purpose-driven life with that addiction being active and dominating my day. Maybe just like any other addiction. Maybe I could kick it one day at a time. Just for today! Just for today I will have my definite major purpose guide my actions. (As opposed to the imagined feelings of others.) In Outwitting the Devil, a book by Napoleon Hill not released to the public until just recently, he calls the fundamental problem plaguing unsuccessful people DRIFTING. How much of my day do I spend drifting? And how much of my time is spent on the path? It hit me. There is a path to wealth for all of us and the reason we don’t realize this is because of our drifting. If I am completely honest in evaluating my past three work days I will see just how much of my time has been spent drifting. The sidetracking that’s conscious, chosen and restorative is fine. It’s the drifting that’s unconscious and not spotted or owned up to until later that’s deadly. Deadly to one who has set out to create wealth. Certainly not deadly to people who believe they are here on this planet to live up to the expectations of others. Many of my clients who hire me to coach them in wealth creation think my early guidance on a purpose-guided day is
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going to cost them their relationships. They think their fragile network of people who “like” them will dry up and blow away like dead flowers if they aren’t constantly watering that network with texts and emails, tweets and posts, phone calls and Skyping. That’s the point when I like to introduce the next important component in wealth creating: service. And especially the distinction, the exciting contrast, between serving and pleasing. To understand why you are not making the money you want to make, I first want to see where you are not serving. That will give us our turnaround strategy. Businesses fail because they don’t serve. Individuals too. Yesterday Kathy and I decided to drop into a new little restaurant that just opened in our area. It was in a strip mall, and when we arrived we noticed that the signs were confusing and uninviting. Were they even open yet? The door handle had a kitchen towel wrapped around it, for whatever bizarre reason, and when we tentatively walked in we heard abrasive music, a kind of nightmarish Latino-techno sound, simulating the effect of electrified fingernails pulled across a slate blackboard with a tiny, over-amped accordion for back-up. The inside felt gloomy and we took our places at a booth after trying to find someone to tell us whether we should just seat ourselves. After a while a large, young, high school-aged boy with a high school-logo golf shirt on approached our table slowly and spoke to us in a painfully shy, soft teenage monotone, as if this were the last place he wanted to be but his parents made him get a summer job. Talking to him was a little bit like talking to a house plant you have been watering but it still doesn’t seem to want to grow. We felt bad for being there and making his day so uncomfortable. The food was not that great and the music got worse as the meal went on. Very few people were in this “NOW OPEN”
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new restaurant, and we predicted that very few would ever be there. So what was going on? There was no commitment to service. Even the most basic question (“Who can we hire to serve tables that our customers will LOVE talking to and being with?”) was not being asked. I wondered how much money was borrowed to start this restaurant. And what the excuses will be when it fails. (“We didn’t borrow enough! It takes money to make money! We needed more capital to make a good go of it. We were in a bad location.” Etc., etc.) No. It was far more simple than that. People were not being served.
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This I mean to whisper to my mind. This I mean to laugh within my mind. This I mean my mind to serve til’ service is but magic moving through the world and mind itself is magic coursing through the flesh and flesh itself is magic dancing on a clock and time itself the magic length of God. Leonard Cohen Beautiful Losers
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Chapter 10
How to stop trying to save the world from the outside in, and start saving ourselves from the inside out When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives. Joseph Campbell
Serve the world with what you love to do. What would you do with your time if money were no issue and you didn’t have to “work”? And I don’t mean “how would you passively entertain yourself.” That only lasts three days. Having all the pleasures and material dreams you ever dreamed of? Three days. All that stuff up there on your law of attraction treasure map on the wall? Three days. Three days of that glut and then you feel bored, bloated, vaguely nauseous and guilty. The path is where you want to be.
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For pure joy. What active, moving, action-oriented path would you take with your life if you did not need money? That’s a great fantasy/inquiry because it helps you know your own strengths. We don’t want to have you playing out of position. If you’re a true quarterback, why are you playing tight end? If you are playing tight end—“stuck” in a job you don’t like—be great at that job as you plan for a different one. The bad (job—or anything else) is the source of the good. If Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) can make a concentration camp work for him—if he can find joy inside that sorrow—surely you can make your job work. Create a side job, Plan B. Call it a money-making hobby if you like. Soon you’ll transition to it. Then, once you’ve transitioned and are enjoying your new work, create another Plan B. Produce something and sell it on the internet. Serve people on the side. For fun and profit. What do you love to do? Monetize it. What fires you up? Light that fire, then monetize the fire.
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INTERVIEWER: If your house were on fire, which object would you take with you?
JEAN COCTEAU: The fire!
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Chapter 11
Your beliefs are always your only real problem Don’t believe anything negative about yourself. If you have an unproductive habit, simply get busy. Replace it with the habit that would serve you better. Nothing is permanent. Everything changes, including you. Especially when you decide to go warrior. Stop it with the random input of information. Read the things that make you productive. Read what lifts you up into your highest self. Pick out the people who make you laugh, sing and dance. Subscribe to their blogs. Michael Neill sends out weekly coaching tips. Subscribe and watch your life get better. I do the same. My blog is called iMindShift for a reason: I write it to shift my own mind—and maybe even yours. I try to write what I myself would want to read each day. Otherwise it is too easy for random, rotten and polluted information to fill your head each day. Worry and fear are the main dishes served up by the media. Your wealth and your creativity need not be disconnected. Thrive. Deliberately and consciously. Know the difference between information and transformation. Always lean toward transformation. Take in only what changes you for the better. The movie Waiting for Superman changed me. For the
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better, forever. The movie Just Go With It, with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler, made me want to vomit and spend my life in bed, never leaving the house, never entering this vulgar world of narcissists. I want to get better at choosing. More Superman, less vomit. Watch what you love and the inspiration will follow. *** Emerson said service would always be compensated. Read his essay called “Compensation.” You can find it now (as in today) on the internet. He writes that compensation won’t always be immediate, so, “If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your debt.” (www.emersoncentral.com/compensation.htm) Because “ungrateful” isn’t the point. The point is to create compensation, not someone else’s instant gratitude. That’s just pleasing people for instant gratification (our national pastime until we wake up to this thing we call warrior). The warrior does not live to please others. The warrior serves. The warrior is loved and respected by others because of this profound service. “What do you think of me?” said one of Ayn Rand’s nasty characters to her book’s hero. Her hero said, “I don’t think of you.” Warrior.
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Everyone can be great because everyone can serve. Martin Luther King
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Chapter 12
Your money problems can be explained by looking at your daily calendar My client comes to me and we look at his day planner and calendar for the previous week. I have only one question: Where is service happening? Sometimes I can’t find it anywhere. Sometimes just here and there. But it’s where we start. Service is going to become the master key to riches if my client is willing to stay on the path. “Aren’t you a life coach?” he asks me. “No, I just help people make money.” “That’s pretty shallow and cynical… it doesn’t sound very spiritual to me. It sounds materialistic.” “Whatever you choose to project is fine with me.” I like to start with the money. No matter what it makes people think of me. Because the money will lead us back to see whether there is service, true service, or not. I always follow the money.
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So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and people able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that people who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the people who produce. Is this what you consider evil? Francisco d’Anconia from Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand
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Chapter 13
When the student is ready there are teachers showing up every day Ron
Hulnick is the president of the University of Santa Monica. He is also one of the teachers, authors and founders of the whole spiritual psychology movement in the world today. I’ve known him as a friend, and we’ve worked on various projects together for many years. What I love most about Ron is how cheerfully relentless he is in spreading the good word about his work. Every time I see him, and I mean literally every time, he lights up and tells me the latest good news about what his school is doing in the world. “You won’t believe some of the things that are happening right now!” he says as soon as we see each other. Then he tells me about the latest USM prison project. Or the new German and Portuguese translations of the latest book by him and his wife, Mary. Or the man who just donated a million dollars to help USM go online. Every time I see him he is brimming with good news. “Well, lucky him!” one might say. “I’d be Mr. Positive too if someone gave me a million dollars.” But maybe one would have it backwards. Ron is not in a positive, good-news-spreading mood because someone gave him a million dollars. Someone gave
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him a million dollars because he is a positive, good-news-spreading person. (Emerson says life is a perpetual teaching of cause and effect. True cause and effect.) Ron Hulnick creates good fortune by who he is each and every day. And who he is is created by internal and external language. Both verbal and non-verbal. Ron is good news itself—at the level of soul. (St. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.”) Ron Hulnick doesn’t wait to see if his teaching will make any money. He had been a psychologist, a university president, a coach, a seminar leader and an inspirational writer long before the wealth flowed back into him and his school. He gave before he got. And he still does. But here is the point (and he makes this point, too): Anyone (including you) can do this. We all have good news to spread. Whether we want to admit it or not. Why wouldn’t we want to admit it? Because maybe it doesn’t fit our story. I was the worst at this. Mine was a story of martyrdom. I was always the ultimate victim of circumstance. So I told everyone my victim stories. I was Ron Hulnick’s evil twin brother. He shared good news, I shared bad. This always bought me some sympathy. It had people feel for me, which was my hidden motive. Feel for me, will you? One day I took a seminar on success (since I had none) and there was a questionnaire for me to fill in at the beginning. One question in particular woke me up: “Would you rather be a) envied or b) pitied?” I circled “pitied” then dropped the pen on the table in surprise and disgust. I pushed back my chair and picked up the paper again and stared at the word I had circled. PITIED! Are you serious? How sickening was that? All of a sudden I had air sickness. I wanted a vomit bag. Could this be true?
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How dysfunctional would a human being have to be to answer the question that way? That was right around the time I discovered Nathaniel Branden and his powerfully clear books on self-esteem. That’s when a major component of reinventing myself began. Soon I started to do phone therapy sessions with Dr. Branden, and I later flew to California to meet with him at his house in Beverly Hills to work with him further. We did his sentence-completion exercises until I finally grasped his final and deepest teaching: NO ONE IS COMING! I put it up on my wall. At first it was frightening. No one is coming? Who’s going to bail me out? But soon it was liberating—no one was coming to live my life for me. No one was coming to earn money for me. The power to do all that was now back in my court. Game on.
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Chapter 14
What happens when your whole occupation is worry? People without a project worry a lot. I learned this by studying myself. Worry becomes the project. The brain wants to DO SOMETHING. So, without a project, it worries. People without projects worry about their health. They worry about their family members’ health. They worry because they don’t have any other project. When they are fully engaged in a project, they don’t have time to worry. If a health challenge comes up, they only think about it in terms of their project. Will this health matter get in the way of my project? Will it interfere? If the answer is no, they don’t even think about the health matter any more because it’s back to the project. So don’t worry when your coach asks you to convert and change your “dream” into an immediate project. Your coach knows what he’s doing.
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Light the fire, don’t warm yourself by it. What you are being, the stand you take in life, creates what you’re experiencing. Not the other way around like 98% of all people think. Werner Erhard
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Chapter 15
Society will always be working against me One
of the primary obstacles to creating a strong and prosperous profession for myself is society itself and the culture we live in. If I let the violent, gross and cynical philosophy of the main media and entertainment outlets just randomly pour into my mind, then it isn’t long before my mind is not my own. I went to a party a few days ago and noticed that people there were talking about current events and just repeating what various media people were saying. Word for word in some cases. They had no minds of their own. Which proved to me once again that information is not inconsequential or simply benign. It consumes our attention... our precious and valuable attention. We become prosperous when we learn to fix attention on our purpose, on service-oriented activities and on useful information. Our attention will be the source of our wealth, so if we allow the poisoned, random waters of everything that poses as “news” or “edgy new entertainment” to wash in, we have nothing left to work with. No freedom.
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Information gobbles up our attention. So the warrior counters it. A long walk. A meditation. A time for solitary swimming. An hour playing a musical instrument. A half day alone in a room with just a legal pad and silence. Silence and solitude are where fortunes are born. There are inspiring movies, helpful, motivating blogs, uplifting people to talk to... I can program my mind one way or the other. Warrior or worrier. It’s up to me. What I give my attention to expands in my life. Am I choosing and creating? Or do I just wake up and allow our toxic culture and society to wash over me like a wave? Always my choice. And choice is a beautiful thing.
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Chapter 16
What about letting the chips fall where they may and just muddling through? That’s one approach, but it’s just an approach. Just like, as an alternative approach, an airplane could try landing upside down. It’s just not a very functional approach, and because all approaches are optional, why not choose one that gets me on the ground safely and smoothly? Such as, “Life is a gift; what do I want to use it for?” That whole idea of using your life for something was alien to me until I read Napoleon Hill and learned that I could have a definite major purpose, and that if I stayed on the path and didn’t waste my days with drifting I would be fulfilling that purpose every day. (I’m repeating myself for a reason. Stay with me.)
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Chapter 17
Create relationships like you would a painting, one bright dab of color at a time The next big thing I learned about wealth creation came from meeting someone. (And when a book is truly life-changing, like Hill’s books were for me, how is that different from meeting someone? A book is just a way of meeting and talking to someone you don’t know—like I am talking to you right now.) I met someone who changed my life dramatically. He was a young assistant track coach at the University of Arizona named Mike Bassoff. He had just been through a very traumatic time. He had walked into the office of the head track coach Willie Williams one day and found him dead. A suicide. Williams had been a colorful, charismatic mentor to Mike, and Mike was in shock. When the offer came to leave coaching and join the development office, Mike jumped on it. He welcomed the change of scenery. He didn’t know anything about fundraising other than what he had learned staging a successful benefit run for the athletic department. But he was willing to learn more.
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The University wanted to see if it could raise money and build a cancer center on campus for research and treatment, and they put Mike in charge of the project. Mike’s greatest skill coaching track had been in the area of recruiting. He’d created a way of communicating with athletes’ families so that they were reassured that the University of Arizona would be a wonderful place for a young person to begin an adult life, not just in sports, but in personal education and skill-building. “I somehow knew that recruiting was all about relationships,” Mike said. “We out-recruited other schools because of the relationships we created.” Mike saw his job as one of simply creating relationships— not just recruiting athletes. And through the strength of those relationships, athletes chose his school over others. This is what Mike taught me. Success is all about creating relationships, and relationships are all about giving. You give your time, your love and your attention, and you create a relationship. This was different from what the world outside was saying about relationships. The world seemed to say that a relationship was something that happened to you when the chemistry was right, when two people understood each other, felt a bond, and experienced an almost serendipitous connection. Mike Bassoff said otherwise. A relationship is yours to create. You build it. Like a house, one brick at a time. You create it. Like a painting. One dab of glorious color at a time. When Mike hired me to help him (I owned an advertising and PR firm at the time, and he’d admired a political campaign I’d run for a congressman) he said he didn’t know anything about fundraising, but if it was anything like sports
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recruiting it would be all about relationships. I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about. It turned out that what I learned from him about giving before you get would change my life forever.
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Chapter 18
Yet I was going bankrupt at the time Now let’s pause for a moment to note that I was the owner of an ad agency and PR firm. True. But I was also going bankrupt. My family life was in turmoil because of the medical challenges faced by my children’s mother, and because of my own inability to be strong with money. I was barely keeping my company afloat. I had some skills for writing and creating, so clients came to me, but I had no talent for creating wealth, and my debts were nightmarish. That’s when I got the relationship piece, and Mike’s key to it all: giving. Giving? But wasn’t fundraising about taking? Don’t you learn in fundraising to make the big ASK? Not in Mike’s world. “The way we’re going to build this cancer center is by creating relationships,” he said, “and the way we are going to have those relationships grow is by giving. Small donors will turn into major donors. That is, unless I’ve got this all wrong.” Mike laughed and so did I. He might have it all wrong. We really had no idea if the two of us would succeed in raising any money. But we were excited about trying. (Spoiler alert: the Arizona Cancer Center is now one of the largest,
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best-funded and most prestigious cancer research centers in the world.) *** Some people call it the universe. Some people call it God. We called it the Giver, and our mantra became, “You can’t outgive the Giver.” Turns out money was not about getting. It was about giving. If you gave all day and stopped focusing on getting, you would create wealth. That’s what Mike taught me. No matter how small a donation someone made to the Cancer Center (which back then was just an idea without a building or anything), Mike and I would give more back to the donor. We made a creative game out of it. All our meetings were about what we could give people who contacted us. The meetings were never about what we could get. I was starting to learn: A life based on giving becomes a life that produces wealth. A life based on getting is a life of anxiety and money problems. We gave small donors talks by research doctors. We gave long letters reporting breakthroughs in cancer research. Mike gave his time and effort to each donor. If a donor had a sister with cancer in Iowa, Mike would have one of the Arizona doctors make phone calls to have that sister cared for by the best people. Even if that donor had only given $100! Mike explained it to me. He had a miner’s scale he had bought to make his point. (You’ve seen those scales, with two brass plates on a chain? When a miner would put a gold nugget in one plate the scale would tip up until he put another nugget in the other to balance it.) Mike would tip the scale one way and say, “She gives us $100 and now our challenge is to tip the scale back in our
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favor.” He then pantomimed putting nuggets in the other side. “We make calls, we help her sister, we give her time and attention, we send her a letter…” And the miner’s scale would tip back in our favor. “Never let the donor outgive you,” said Mike. “That’s our game, and that’s our job.” Soon the money was pouring in to the cancer center. People made it their pet cause. They could really see the effect their donation was having because Mike stayed in such close contact with them after their gift, reporting everything, thanking them repeatedly, and getting other people to thank them, too. Giving and giving all day long. It made the work worth doing. And no matter how much we gave, we couldn’t keep up. We couldn’t outgive the Giver, try as we might. While participating with Mike in this amazing success— this huge illustration to me of how wealth is created—I was also continuously reading my Napoleon Hill books and noticing that he was urging his readers to always go the extra mile. He said, always do more than what you are paid for, and soon they won’t be able to pay you enough. The book was giving me the philosophy of success, while Mike’s work and mine were becoming real-life verification. I love it when that happens. When an exciting philosophy turns out to be exactly how the world works.
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Chapter 19
What if I based my life (like most people do) on what I can GET? I am thinking back to some of the summer jobs I had in the car factories in Detroit. (And I had these summer jobs not because I had a work ethic, but because all the other kids worked, and my father made it mandatory. I would rather have stayed home.) One thing I noticed about working in the car factory was that their rule was NEVER! ever do one bit more than what you are paid to do. If I stayed a minute or two after the horn sounded, a union guy would be yelling at me for doing that. “I was just finishing up,” I would say. “No, you don’t get it, kid. We don’t do that. I ever see you doing that again you will lose your summer job.” I learned that the minimum was what was expected, not the maximum. You took what you could GET from the car company and you gave as little back as you could for it. How are those car companies doing right now? And how is the Cancer Center doing? No comparison. A graphic illustration of where wealth comes from. And a graphic contrast between the effectiveness of going the extra mile versus doing as little as you can get away with.
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Chapter 20
All the beliefs that kept me stuck in myself were useless and depressing Many
people think wealth comes from manipulation, powerful connections, lawyering up, crony favors, and coercion, because that’s how Hollywood and the media portray it. (A star actor accepts twenty million dollars to star in a movie that tries to make wealth look immoral.) But the irony is that wealth comes from the opposite of that villainous caricature—wealth comes from serving. So through the years, all the union pressure coercing wage inflation and benefit excesses and retirement payouts only resulted in the car companies going bankrupt, and then in the bankrupt companies begging for a bailout from a corrupt group of politicians who had to borrow the money from China. China! Where they teach a strong work ethic. At a very young age. Wait a minute! Did I say “teach” a work ethic? I thought, always, you were either born with one, or not. And that was another breakthrough that was occurring for me. I realized I had as much ability to work as anyone. My old belief that I didn’t was just that, a belief. And not a useful one.
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Not if I wanted to make money. In fact I soon discovered that all the things I believed about myself were useless. Not to mention untrue. But useless, mainly. Because they kept me focused on myself and not on the next person I could serve.
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Chapter 21
Another teacher arrives with another piece of the warrior puzzle “Find
somebody who has a problem,” my friend Steve Hardison would tell me, “and solve it for him.” That was the path to money. Steve Hardison is a very wealthy business consultant and life coach who is a former high tech executive and copier salesman. He wakes up each day and serves. He gets on his motorbike and rides to the store and notices a man trying to fix his broken-down car. Steve gives him a ride home on the back of his bike, then brings him back with the right tools and parts and helps him fix his car. Steve is waiting in line at Costco (or was it Sam’s Club?) and the man in front of him has a huge basketful of birthday supplies, cake, etc., and cannot get his card to go through. Insufficient funds. “No problem,” says Steve to the cashier. “I’ve got this. I’ll pay for him.” The man is astonished. He thanks Steve profusely for the generosity. He tells Steve he is going to a birthday party for an eighty-year-old friend. Would Steve like to come meet the man he just bought the party stuff for? Sure! Steve goes to the party and enjoys meeting everyone.
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Steve’s days go like this. He serves from morning to night. On the phone, in person, family, friends, clients (me) and—most often—complete strangers. Many of my other books tell stories about Steve Hardison and how his coaching changed my life, how it taught me to use my energy and imagination to create the career I wanted. Steve would take me into his backyard with a magnifying glass and show me something. He would hold the magnifying glass over a dry leaf and let the sun’s rays concentrate like a laser on the leaf until it began to smoke and burn. “The sun is you when you’re not focused,” he would say. “But when you are focused throughout the day on who you are committed to serving, then you get fire. You get your result.” Most people are like the sun. They shine on everything. Every email. Every call coming in. Every knock on the door. Every text and tweet. They shine on it. They shine here, there and everywhere, but at the end of the day there is no fire. They don’t understand. At some level they know that they are spread too thin all the time, and that life, for them, is one distraction after another. When they hear the slogan, “Winners focus, losers spray,” they immediately nod their heads. So they know. Deep down they know where true results come from. But deep down is no help. Out front in reality is where the fire needs to be.
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Chapter 22
How can I help? Who can I serve? Who can I help? What can I do? Steve
Hardison is in the stands at an Arizona Cardinals preseason football game and he is using binoculars to look at the players on the sideline. He spots former collegiate star quarterback Matt Leinart, now a third-stringer, standing with his helmet off, looking empty and depressed. Steve recognizes the expression. It says, “I am powerless. I have lost hope. I don’t know quite what to do.” Steve saw the same expression on my own face twenty years ago, when he first met me. I was broke. I was trying to raise four children on my own. I had never given a speech or coached anyone or written a book. I was a “marketing director” trying to help save a failing company through marketing tricks and public manipulation. At the time none of us realized an important truth (recently pointed out in the magazine Fast Company) that “Marketing is like sex. If you have to pay for it, you’re a loser.” Matt Leinart on that sideline looked like a loser, and Steve could see it through his binoculars. And because he lives to serve, literally, every day, all day, he got excited. “I think I can help him,” he said to himself. “I can serve him.”
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Steve is a devoted, dedicated religious man who takes the scriptures seriously. “I don’t believe in Jesus,” he says, often unsettling fellow churchgoers. “I believe Jesus.” Now, after the game, he gets on the phone and tries to reach Matt Leinart. After two days of calling and calling he reaches Arizona Cardinal offensive lineman Deuce Lutui, who was Leinart’s close friend and teammate at USC. “You’re too late,” Lutui tells Steve. “Matt’s been traded. He left for Texas today. But, tell me, who are you? What did you want Matt for?” Steve explains what his coaching is about, how he works with people for a year at a time, turning their lives around and helping them enjoy the fruits of commitment to a definite major purpose. (Early in his life, Steve, too, was a fan of Napoleon Hill.) Deuce Lutui says, “Maybe you could help me.” Steve listens as Deuce talks about his life as a professional football player who never lived up to the potential he showed in college. “I’m the Lindsay Lohan of professional football,” Deuce tells Steve, who laughs and says, “Come to my house and let’s talk.” A few days later, Steve is confronted at his front door by a 385-pound Tongan, overweight for his position by more than forty pounds. After a few hours with Steve, Deuce Lutui is no longer the Lindsay Lohan of professional football. (And for those of you who don’t follow the supermarket tabloids like I do, Lindsay Lohan is an actress who continuously messes up her life and career with drugs, alcohol, traffic accidents, jail time, you name it.) Deuce will never again say he’s the Lindsay Lohan of football. In fact, after his first long session with Steve he texts him, “Thank you, Coach! TBOLITNFL!” TBOLITNFL means “The Best Offensive Lineman in the
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NFL,” and this is Deuce’s newly-created identity—his personal internal commitment. Take a minute and look up TBOLITNFL, Google it, and learn the whole Deuce Lutui story. Deuce is now a powerful 340 pounds playing for the Seattle Seahawks. Success comes from focus. Winners focus. Losers spray.
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Chapter 23
A gut check for the get freak The pathway to having isn’t wanting. If you want something, you need to have a different relationship with it, other than wanting it, in order to have it. Werner Erhard
Early in 2008 I started a school for coaches. It was for life coaches and business coaches, the hottest, fastest-growing professions in the world at the time. People coaching other people. It was a wonderful movement. It reminded me of being in recovery and someone saying, “Hey, get a sponsor!” A sponsor was just another person who had more sobriety than you did. Your sponsor helped you work through the twelve steps of recovery. And the key word is “work.” “Work the steps,” and “work your way through.” Without your sponsor you would not work. Or, at least I would not work. Who wakes up in the morning and says, “What can I work on?” No one. At least the no one known as me. But that’s the strange thing about work, because when I did do the long hard work I felt great joy, whether it was my
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sponsor getting me to work the steps, or later my coach getting me to work the principles of wealth creation (service, creativity and staying on the path). After receiving a great deal of powerful life and business coaching from Steve Hardison over the years (www.theultimatecoach.net), I began coaching people myself, and soon I was coaching coaches. And I noticed something strange. Coaches were afraid of money. No, that wasn’t it. They were afraid of selling. They were afraid of asking for money for their coaching. That was it. So coaches started marketing themselves instead. They put in long hours and good money on websites and other marketing activities and they noticed that nothing was happening. They weren’t getting clients. I was fortunate enough to know why marketing wasn’t working for them. My own coach had worked with me for years on how to get clients. He taught me to practice serving and creating relationships based on service. I had all the clients I ever wanted or needed, but the coaches I met did not. So after coaching a few of them very successfully one-on-one, I started a school. Not a school to teach people how to be coaches, but a school to teach coaches how to get clients. The school was an amazing success. It was based on my own internal questions, “What would really serve these coaches? What can I give them that will make them prosper?” Every time I did that, with the students in my school, with individual clients or with any business I was doing workshops with, I enjoyed success and wealth. Always asking, What can I give them that would serve them the most? It always came down to that. A life of GIVE versus a life of GET. The people who focused all day on what they could GET were not getting much of anything. The people focused on
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what they could give were getting a lot. That’s why marketing and massive branding and PR efforts were not working for coaches. Every communication was a GET communication. Between every line of copy or email blasts was I WANT! I WANT! I WANT YOUR MONEY! That pushes people away. To put it mildly.
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Chapter 24
Why marketing and manipulation will push people and money away Coaches (and all people doing business offering services for pay), out of their fear of asking for money, were pushing people away with all their covert manipulations designed to GET people’s money. So my school began for them. For these coaches to become prosperous they would have to slow down, start serving their prospects and stop marketing to the world. So now we have two scenarios—one based on GET! And one based on GIVE. The scene based on GET is about how the coach would formerly try to GET a client. He would meet with his prospect and begin his manipulation. He would start in with his passive aggressive verbal maneuvering in an attempt to make coaching look attractive to the prospect, and he would end the conversation with some kind of awkward request or question. The prospect would always say, “Wow, that’s a lot of money, let me go think about it.” And indeed it was a lot of money. And for what? Just talking to you? “No, no, I’ll make your dreams come true!” “Right. Let me get back to you on that.”
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That’s our GET scenario. And no wonder coaches HATED doing it. Anything you hate doing is going to enter your procrastination file. These are the things your subconscious mind chooses to put off, to spare you the pain. Your subconscious whispers in your ear, “Let’s procrastinate on that one.” Even if you mean to do it. Even if you tell yourself, “I’VE GOT TO DO MY SALES TODAY! I DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY!” your subconscious says, “I understand, but let’s procrastinate on this one. Just for today. Just put it off for today. You can sell tomorrow when you feel better and can better withstand the pain of it.” That’s the world of GET. Sound familiar? You might have noticed it’s not just about coaches and clients. It’s about anything and everything. It’s about romantic relationships and it’s about family feuds. Getting doesn’t get it. The world of I WANT is a repulsive world. It is sometimes known as stalking, and it can literally be a crime. Now let’s look at the world of GIVING, the opposite scenario, between coach and prospect. The prospect enters the coach’s world and a conversation begins. The coach is not thinking, “How can I get this person to be my client?” The coach is thinking, “How can I serve this person?” “Tell me your situation,” the coach may say. And the prospect starts talking, telling a wonderful story about how all is well. “That’s so great,” the coach says, but the coach knows that to truly serve this person, I need to know where the problem is. What is her great challenge? What keeps her up at night? I want to know that, because if I can solve it for her I will have truly served. In my coaching school I would often use Leonard Cohen’s song lyric:
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There is a crack in everything— That’s how the light gets in. And there is a crack in every story of “life is wonderful,” and that is how the light gets in. And that crack is where the coach enters into the world of the prospect. Soon the coaching prospect describes her biggest challenge. Now we are getting somewhere. The coach says, “Let me see if I can help you with that. Are you open to some coaching?” Yes, yes. And that’s when the fun begins. Because now the coach is working with the prospect and serving. Maybe even for hours. I want to help this person! I want to solve this problem for her! Any money exchanged hands yet? No. And that’s where the GET people go crazy. “You’re giving your talent away for free!” they say. “I won’t do that!” And the GET freak becomes indignant, especially when I say, “Okay. Tell me how many clients you have.” “Well I’m just in a slow period. It’s summer.” “Then tell us what’s in your bank account right now. Come write it on the white board for all the other coaches to see.” “No way! That’s offensive. That’s materialistic! I don’t base my life or my success on what’s in my bank account.” “Good thing you don’t.” “I mean, there are more important things than money.” “Which is why you would never serve anyone without being paid?” “What’s my bank account have to do with anything?” “It tells you how many people you are serving, and to what
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degree you are serving them.” In the second scenario, the prospect, after being thoroughly and exhaustingly served, asks the coach, “How do we continue this? This has been so helpful!” Notice when you are living a life of GIVING rather than getting, people always ask you how they can continue. Just like in romantic relationship-building: “When can I see you again?” But the GET freak never experiences that. The GET freak has the hardest time creating the relationships that lead to love and money. Because they hate “selling” so much, they never climb into it and make it their own. They never inhabit the role. They never create a one-man or one-woman show out of it. They never get creative. They never allow it to become a natural form of self-expression. Selling never evolves for them. It never becomes a way of giving their gift. It never gets to giving. It always degrades into getting. None of that kind of self-induced pain is necessary in professional life. We just think it is.
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Chapter 25
How your social self is devastating to your income Samantha was a coach who only had a few clients. She was a truly gifted and talented coach, trained in spiritual psychology, and a godsend to her clients. But Samantha had a problem. She lived, all day, inside her social self. There was almost no professional self showing up anywhere. Therefore her communications with prospective clients were not getting her any business. She would send me her emails to her prospects, and she would recount her conversations on the phone and in person. Everything she did, every communication she made, achieved her social self’s objective—people really liked her! They were always so pleased by her emails and so happy to have met with such a sweet person. But no one was hiring her. Samantha was on automatic. She was lost in habituation. She was addicted to her own comfort zone, which had quickly become a womb of scarcity. She lay curled inside it throughout the day, as if to say, “Everyone must like me first. Then we’ll get down to talking business.” She asked me to evaluate her latest emails to a prospect. “Sam,” I said, “in these emails you just don’t sound like
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the leader they’re looking for.” “How do you mean?” “You sound like a follower. You sound overly-accommodating, as if they have all the power and you have nothing.” “I was raised to be that way.” “Precisely.” “How can I be different than how I was raised?” “Practice.” For me, and for all the clients I work with, the path to strength is always through a willingness to engage in a new habit called practice. People become wealthy only after they decide to turn pro. Your professional self does not (and could not) emerge automatically from childhood. By definition it is a creation. It requires time and maturity to develop. When Samantha began behaving as if she was the professional in the equation, she began getting clients very quickly. Is this a mystery? Is it a process that only a progressive coach knows how to teach? My professional self says, “Yes!” But no! This has been clear for a long time. Back to Emerson, in the 1800s: “We spend our entire lives looking for someone who will make us do what we can.” Make us do! Like a grownup makes a child go to bed. Because sleep is good. It restores and grows the child. Samantha was not making anyone do anything. She had not become a professional. But through the mysterious magic of practice she began creating a professional self. This was her proudest creation, because she was in charge of it. No more blaming her parents for what she was like. I told her that her previous self was not anything real.
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“That’s not what you are like, Sam. That’s what your robot is like,” I said as she kept trying to convince me that her weakest self was somehow more “authentic” than her underconstruction professional self. Why is it more “authentic” to be a slave to other people’s previous programming of you? Why not create yourself based on who you choose to be? Is that not more authentic? Just acting out old programming is not authentic at all. And furthermore, there is no money in it. (Because there is no service in it—only pleasing.) Fast forward: Sam is now independently wealthy.
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Chapter 26
Stupid question: Do I need a college degree to make good money in today’s world? Credentials
were vital in the old world—the world of my father and mother. You’d apply for a job and people would say, “Where did you get your degree?” or “What’s your degree in?” In my own life, as the years went on, things changed. No longer were people all that interested in what college you attended. Yet they still felt like they had to ask. Many companies would ask me: What are your credentials? “Alcoholism,” I would say. “Bankruptcy and divorce.” And you know what? They didn’t care. Oh, they weren’t exactly happy with my credentials. But they moved quickly to the next question—the question they really wanted to ask: “Can you help us?” “Yes, I think so, so let’s do a pilot seminar, a trial workshop, and find out.” I ended up training more than twenty Fortune 500 companies and a couple hundred smaller businesses, schools and organizations that way. Not because of my credentials. But because it turned out that I could help.
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That’s good news for all of us today. It’s no longer who you know or what your credentials are. Now it’s WHAT YOU CAN DO! This allows you to build your skills and deepen your professional strengths any way you like. Knowledge? It’s all online now. What do you want to learn how to do? It’s all right there. It’s not that colleges aren’t good. Of course they are, for so many different things. It’s just that they no longer contain the master key to riches. Not long ago an older man told me in subdued, breathy tones (the kind of voice reserved for the most sacred stories of suffering and victimization), “I am sad that I was never given the education that I should have had. Not being given that educational advantage, my ability to get a high-paying job has been limited.” And I could hear the hushed reverence in his voice as he described the tenets of his victim religion. It was deeply personal for him, and the fact that he was “sharing” his weakness with me was an example of how “authentic” he had learned to be. Except for one little thing. One flaw in the presentation: It was all nonsense. He could have learned anything any time, including that very moment. That very minute, that very day. He could learn anything. People hire you today because of what you can do. Your past history might be somewhat interesting, but your skills and (personally developed) talent are really what they want. It’s not whether they are impressed. It’s whether you can help.
WEALTH WARRIOR
Work is love made visible. Kahlil Gibran
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Chapter 27
In what way is wealth like happiness? Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly. It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service. Henry Ford
This is the same Henry Ford who said that if he had listened to his customers he would have made them a better horse and buggy. That would be his way of pleasing them—instead of serving them. But he lived creatively inside the question, “What would SERVE people?” So he made cars. People didn’t understand. But as you can see, they took to the idea rather quickly because it was an amazing service. Extra mile service. Customer astonishment. Look at the success of Apple. Everything they have made has always been cooler than it needed to be. Way cooler. They didn’t need to make something that amazing to sell it. Wealth flows into that mindset.
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Don’t look at the money. Look at the service. How profound will you go? How bold will you be in serving?
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Chapter 28
If I just slow down, life will show me where money comes from Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect. Ralph Waldo Emerson
If we sit and reflect (or stand and reflect, or even better, take a good slow walk and reflect) on Emerson’s words we realize that we see cause and effect everywhere. This came to me abruptly and joyfully once at the end of an extremely powerful coaching session with my coach, who spent our entire two hours together getting me to see that I was CAUSE in all the matters I thought I was EFFECT in. Especially with money. What causes me to increase my flow of wealth? Increased service. Increased creativity. Increased focus on a single path. Increased awareness of opportunity and potential relationships. Increased awareness of (and discipline around) life’s greatest time-waster, pleasing people instead of serving them. And another very vital cause: play. It is vital because an overly serious person is not all that fun to hang out with. To increase your flow of wealth you need other people
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communicating with you. I don’t want to be overly serious about money or even service. I want to play games. Sincere? Yes. Committed? Yes. Serious? Why? Once I was facing a salary negotiation with a boss who was an insecure, vicious miser, someone for whom money was more serious than God (and I don’t mean that description to sound negative or judgmental, because, after all, I did understand that he was, technically speaking, a human being). But my victim mind thought I was getting paid about onefiftieth of my true value to his parasitic system. I had a friend at the time named Forbes who said he would help me negotiate a fair wage by coaching me for an hour ahead of time. I was an ignoramus at that time in my life, which is to say that I had no idea about the causative role of my own thoughts. I thought feelings were produced by external events and annoying people. So I was upset about my life (and wage) situation. Forbes could see I was serious. He also knew, fortunately, something I did not know, and that was this: a serious person is a wealth-repellent. “We’re going to have some fun today!” he shouted across the parking lot as he saw me slowly getting out of my car, the weight of the world on my shoulders. At the time I was both a martyr and a victim, a single father with full custody of four active children, trying to make ends meet at home while laboring for a fool’s wage during the day. Fun? This guy Forbes is not like other people. Does he not get the seriousness of my situation? No. He doesn’t take seriousness seriously. He never sees seriousness as a profitable, productive operating principle for wealth-generation. Sincerity, yes.
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Commitment? Most important! Seriousness? Counterproductive! By the time we were inside the conference room and he was standing at the white board, he could see that we were not on the same emotional wavelength. To me, money was a life and death matter. To him? A field of play. “Hey,” he said, “you look really down. Tell me what’s going on with you. Can’t you see this is only money we’re talking about?” “Easy for you to say,” I said (or maybe I just thought it). “You’re financially successful. I’m not.” “Okay,” he said. “Let’s find out why that is, and let’s get you an agreement you like with your employer.” Then we began to play. He did role-playing exercises with me and I was laughing by the end of our time together. At this point he said, “You cause the money to come into your life and you also cause it to stay out. If there’s any way you can trick—or program—yourself into remembering this, it would be valuable for you. I recommend getting a license plate that says CAUSE on it.” That was one of the most fun encounters of my life. And the only reason I made up the name “Forbes” for my friend was to protect his privacy and identity because I do not have his permission to tell this story. But many of you will guess who “Forbes” is. Yes, I got a very fair wage after that session, and my tormentor-boss turned out to be a great guy who could laugh and smile along with me throughout our contract talks. Then came my second shock. It was my second wake-up call on the value of spirited play when it came to money (versus grim, greed-based reaping). I had started my career as a seminar leader, and although I was capable enough, I wasn’t putting my best self forward in
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my work. That very same coach took me aside and encouraged me to lighten up, to just be me and tell the funny stories I told in private about being a father, and about all the failure I’d experienced in my life. “Stop trying to look so successful,” he said. “Just be you. Stop trying to look like you’ve got your act together. People aren’t buying it anyway. Just be you. Stop teaching—just share your experience. Have fun. Fly.” Fly? Me? I remembered a quote I loved from Chesterton: “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” So I began to play. I began to share stories rather than teach. People started laughing. I didn’t have to go far for the funny stories. I just told them about my life. I can’t emphasize enough what a life-changer it was for me to stop taking my life seriously. It changed the nature of money completely. It introduced a game element that wasn’t there before. Before? Money was oxygen. Picturing myself without money was picturing myself having an asthma attack. Low cash flow asphyxiation. I would apply this breakthrough later in my consulting work with business clients. It was always true (although profoundly counterintuitive and hard for them to learn) that the more they played the more they made. The more creative and innovative they became, the more they served and earned. They also became more compassionate about their customers because they were no longer focused on themselves. That’s what play does.
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Each of us creates solely out of a clear mind, a free-flowing mind, creativity just flowing nonstop. We don’t need pain to be creative. In fact, it’s limiting. If you look at yourself during times that you’ve done things that you’ve absolutely loved, you haven’t been suffering. You were free. Byron Katie
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Chapter 29
You don’t need a weatherman to introduce a brainstorm People couldn’t believe that seriousness was not an important part of financial success. They would thunder at themselves and their sales people: “Let’s get serious, people!” There was one business owner who was really Mr. Skeptic about my creative brainstorm coaching and training. So I decided to show him how it worked. We divided his team of employees into two groups. I allowed Mr. Skeptic (not his real name) to choose a big problem facing the company. The problem was the warehouse. No one got along with the warehouse. The warehouse never delivered supplies to sales or service fast enough because the warehouse was stubborn and clueless. This had been going on for years, and none of the “solutions” (personnel and systems changes) worked. I divided the groups of employees randomly, about twenty people to each conference room. Mr. Skeptic watched as I got up in front of Group A, put the problem up on the whiteboard and appointed a discussion leader. “You’ll have ninety minutes together to work on a solution to the problem of the warehouse. As you know, this is a very
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SERIOUS problem that affects revenue and morale. Please take this time together seriously and develop the best solutions you can find.” Mr. Skeptic was pleased with what I told Group A. “That’s almost exactly what I would have said,” he said. “That’s your problem,” I said. “That’s why there has been no solution.” He looked at me with an agitated squint. He said, “I don’t think I’m tracking you on this one.” We walked across the hall to the other conference room that held Group B. I chose a leader then stood at the front of the room. “You guys know what a brainstorm is?” I asked. “Have you ever been in a brainstorming session?” A few hands tentatively went up. Most people shook their heads no. I knew what a brainstorming session was because I used to work in an advertising agency and we would develop ad campaigns for clients this way. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said, “and the main purpose is going to be for us to have fun.” Mr. Skeptic looked skeptical. “We’ll go around the room,” I said. “Around and around. Each person is going to toss out an idea on our subject—How to Create a Relationship with the Warehouse that Works and Everyone Enjoys. The object of the game is to keep the ideas coming—and they can be totally off-the-wall, stupid ideas. Do not over-think any of this. We are here to fill the whiteboard with ideas, the more out-of-the-box the better. We are here to have fun. At the end of our ninety minutes we’ll vote on the three best ideas and present them to Mr. Skeptic.” (Although I used his real name.) Now the sessions began. I took Mr. Skeptic into the hallway so he could watch the two groups work. Group A was subdued and almost
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argumentative in tone as they worked on their serious company problem. Group B was almost raucous. We heard laughter and happy shouts in the room that held Group B. After the ninety minutes were finished, Mr. Skeptic and I went into Group A and got the serious rundown. Their solutions were mostly versions of things that had been tried before. They said to us, “We knew we weren’t going to solve this in an hour and a half. This problem has been with us for eight years.” We went to Group B. Everyone was smiling. The whiteboard was completely full and additional sheets of flip chart paper were taped to the walls. Most of the ideas were hilarious, bizarre, unusable and even, in one case, X-rated. But the three they had circled were fascinating. The top three as voted for by the group contained the idea that the company later adopted to solve forever the warehouse problem. It happened when one person during his turn around the room said, “Why don’t we take over the dispatching of their inventory? The real problem is always the dispatcher, so why don’t we do the dispatching ourselves?” The room had laughed and the leader dutifully put it up on the whiteboard. But when it was voted one of the three best ideas, Mr. Skeptic got interested. He later took the idea to the warehouse, thinking they would refuse to turn their most important position over to another department. He was surprised when the warehouse loved the idea. “We hate hiring for that position,” they said. “And our dispatcher takes nothing but abuse all day. We’d love it if that became someone else’s responsibility.” And so it happened, and so a problem was solved. Not by the group that took the problem seriously, but by the group that did not.
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Fun means you are going to be spirited and creative. Fun means you will be energized and innovative in your quest to provide the service (or product) that creates wealth.
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Chapter 30
Put your helmet on, strap in, and buckle up: get ready to experience Cosmic Habitforce Habits are the answer to anything we want to change in life. They control what we do. And, eventually, they make what we do easy and automatic. They feel like they control us, but when we are clear we see that we also create and control them. So it is a kind of paradox. They control us, but we control them. This force is so powerful that Napoleon Hill called it “Cosmic Habitforce.” Wow. That’s like a gamer’s phrase. They say Hill is too old-fashioned to have an impact in today’s world. And in a way this might be true. If you give a young person The Master Key to Riches or Think and Grow Rich they might be immediately turned off by his antiquated language and sexist diminishing of women and references to industrial heroes young people never heard of. But what a loss to miss his principles. Especially the role of habit in creating wealth. First we form our habits, then our habits form us.
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We almost never realize that habits are under our control, because changing them always has to occur outside our comfort zone. Habits are our comfort zone. It may be one person’s habit to walk three miles every morning and another’s to have three doughnuts and a Coke. Those habits were formed. They didn’t just show up. But they are not comfortable to change. What’s your relationship to discomfort? Are you ready to change that relationship? Are you ready to experiment with it? MAYBE START HERE: Which of your various habits produce income for you and which do not? If Napoleon Hill is too old school for you to relate to, then I recommend Tim Ferriss, a young dancer, martial artist, man of the world who wrote a brilliant book called The 4-Hour Workweek. Notice the genius of his book’s title. It calls to the world’s laziest people and the world’s most ambitious people simultaneously! But Ferriss delivers inside his book. Especially his section on the 80/20 rule. Hardly a new concept, but he gives it new life. 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. If you can grasp that and apply it, you can transform your wealth creation immediately. Especially if you have your own business or professional practice. You can go back through your daily calendars and see that 80% of your activities are not wealth-producing. (They are usually people-pleasing activities, or habitual internet and email surfing to see if anyone “likes” you or your ideas.) By identifying the 20% that produces wealth, you can expand it to 30 and 40 and now 50% of your day, and your income will more than double. Just theory? No. It actually works.
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When my clients—who are consultants, coaches, and sole practitioners of any kind (lawyers, accountants, personal trainers, etc.)—look at their calendars and they can see that the one activity that brings them business and money (a sales conversation, maybe) is being shoved down to 20% or less of their time, they discover the master key to increased riches. So I want habituation to serve me, not hold me back. If my 80/20 keeps happening out of habit, I want to step outside my comfort zone every day and take a look! I want my habits to be power sources created by me to insure I become as productive as I can be with my time.
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To change one’s life, start immediately, do it flamboyantly, no exceptions. William James
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Chapter 31
First, let’s figure out if life is really worth living I have written about William James in many a book, but his story of near-suicide is worth looking at over and over again. He became the father of American psychology and a major force in philosophy as well, but that was after a walking tour of a mental institution left him so depressed he wanted to die. He thought: Why go on? Why even bother? The mental breakdowns he saw could happen to anyone. All the misery he saw there, all the people drooling and talking to themselves. So he decided to conduct an experiment on himself. He decided to give himself a year to see if life was really worth living. He wanted to see if he could consciously and deliberately form the habits that would lead to happiness. It was not a comfortable year, because that’s the nature of habit formation. It is uncomfortable until it is comfortable, and if it is continued it somehow becomes miraculously automatic. Cosmic Habitforce! William James proved to himself, and later to everyone who read and believed him, that the habit of happiness can be deliberately formed through practice. And as we can all see by looking around us, happy people
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succeed faster than unhappy people. So there’s another reason to develop the habits (service, creativity, purpose) that lead to happiness.
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Chapter 32
How to get rid of all your problems You never suffer from a money problem, you always suffer from an idea problem. Robert H. Schuller
Even the word “problem” is a problem, because just thinking about it brings me down. When I am down, I am not creative. I am not innovative. I am not entrepreneurial in my thinking. Opportunity knocks but I can’t hear it, because this problem is the noise in my head. So how to shift? How to see the problem but then immediately convert it into a creative project full of fresh ideas and a plan of action? Simply by asking that question! Given this problem, what’s a good plan of action? Ask, and the mind will open. The problem is now a project.
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Chapter 33
It’s time to look at your to-do list and go basically negative on it There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Peter Drucker
Drucker’s
deceptively powerful point can change the way you live your day. It’s the soul of the incisive Tim Ferriss book, The 4-Hour Workweek. It can get you to see that your NOT-TO-DO list is even more important than your to-do list. In Time Warrior I presented an unorthodox, non-linear approach to making your life powerfully simple—by carving away all the inefficiencies and all the people-pleasing chatter while focusing solely on your definite, wealth-producing purpose. Anyone can do this. You can try it, starting now. Make your NOT-TO-DO list every morning. See what remains TO DO. Then jump all over what’s left. Do it with enthusiasm and even some bizarre flamboyance. Wake the world UP with who you ARE and exactly what mission you
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are ON. Do NOT DO all that off-mission stuff that has been cluttering up your past days.
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Chapter 34
Financial sluggishness and sloth are often caused by information To bankrupt a fool, give him information. Nassim Taleb
Who’s
winning? Information or you? Are you consuming information and using it to transform yourself? Or is information consuming you? Is it dominating your attention and leaving you without any personal career to focus on? Information consumes your attention when your attention could otherwise be a valuable FORCE in the creation of prosperity. When author Michael Neill and I conducted a six-month Financially Fearless course we spent a lot of time talking about the difference—and the choice—between information and transformation. Some people take a course like mine and Michael’s on the subject of information. They think they need to learn more information about how to become financially fearless. For them there’s always one more piece of information around the corner that will provide the tipping point. And with that final bit of information, they’ll know what to do.
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But it never happens. Because the only thing all that information is really doing is consuming their attention and overloading the cellular files in the brain. To really acquire power, you want transformation, not information. Transformation means change. Change for the better. In the seminar Michael and I were delivering, it would mean changing from being financially terrified to being financially fearless. How might we illustrate that? How could we dramatize the difference between information and transformation? Michael had an idea. Many of our twenty-five attendees were coaches and consultants. All of the attendees were independent business people. Most of them also had major league western-society money fear—as in, “Money is my oxygen!” Michael and I talked about his transformative idea and then he introduced it to the group. We were holding our seminar at a nice resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. Our people loved their break time because they could go out by the pool or relax in their rooms or sit in the spacious lobby. But this would be the break from hell. “We have an exercise for you,” said Michael to the room full of people, whose pens were poised to take down more information. “For the next hour, we want you to make money. We want you to go out of this room and make as much money as you can for the full sixty minutes, and when you come back, you will report to the room how much you made.” I could see the fear and nervous anxiety in the faces of the people in the room. This was not what they had signed up for.
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“Can we use our phones?” one person asked. “Of course,” said Michael. “No rules or restrictions. Your only job is to make money during this hour. Use any means you can think of—phones, laptops, whatever.” More nervous questions came up and after we answered them all we released the people into the outside world. This would be transformation or it would be nothing. For days our people had been in a workshop atmosphere, asking questions and taking notes, but now they had to take action. Michael and I talked to each other while they were out of the room. Most of the people in our course were frustrated around money. They were afraid to charge what they were worth. They were afraid to initiate sales conversations. Our theme was that money was not oxygen—money was just a means of exchanging value. It was a number. A code you enter to get inside the gate. And once you become fearless (through practice combined with enlightenment) the fee you charge no longer has an emotional component. It doesn’t scare you. It’s not unkind or unfair to the other person. Because they don’t have to pay it. It’s just a number. Our students were there to learn to speak their fee as if it were a phone number. When they gave out their phone number they didn’t have sweaty palms or shortness of breath or a quavering, trembling voice. It was just a number. And their fee for service is just a number, too. Like a passcode. This is the number you need to use to get access to my biocomputer. No emotion around that. No fear. Part of the transformational work we do with clients whenever they increase their fees is to have them say their new fee a thousand times. In the car, in the shower, so that it loses all meaning. When you repeat any word over and over again it loses meaning.
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Money is just a way to exchange service and value with someone. There is no need to weigh the money’s number down with a dozen scary stories. Michael and I kept teaching: Don’t give meaning to the money. Give meaning to the service that produces the money. And how did our brave people do in their hour of making money? Read on and I’ll tell you.
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Chapter 35
What if you had one hour to change your life forever? Now
the hour was up and our students were coming back into the room laughing and talking in excited tones. “Okay,” said Michael as he jumped off his stool and went up to one of the flip charts. “Who wants to go first? Who wants to tell us how much you made?” The first person to raise her hand was a woman I’ll call Frannie. Frannie looked shy and said, “I made ten dollars.” Michael wrote down “$10” on the pad. “How did you make your money?” “I was so upset,” Frannie said. “I was so scared by the exercise that I went to my hotel room and called my mother. I know I was supposed to use all sixty minutes to make money but I just couldn’t do it. My mother calmed me down and then I went out by the pool and saw a busboy taking his lunch break. I asked him if I could sit next to him, and he was happy to talk to me.” “Okay, then what?” “Well, I told him I was a coach, new to my career, and asked him if I could practice coaching him. He said yes and we had a great session. He was really excited and took my card and said he wanted to pay me something. I said okay and he gave me a ten dollar bill.”
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Frannie held the ten up for the room to see, and the room cheered. The next hand up was Damian’s. “I made $20,000,” he said. There was a collective “wow” and then clapping as Michael wrote “$20,000” on the chart. “How did you do that?” Damian said, “There was a guy I’ve been talking to for over a year about being his business consultant. He has a small business in Encino. I called him and said, ‘Do you have time to talk to me? I have something very important to say. This call will either be, by the time we’re through, the last time we ever talk to each other, or the first session in a year-long agreement.’ After forty minutes of very direct coaching I said, ‘If you’re in, send me my $20,000 today and we’ll start next week—if you are out, I’m wishing you luck and a good life.’ He said, ‘I’m in! The check’s in the mail today.’” The room cheered again. We now had $20,010 on the board. Jennifer raised her hand. She was giggling. “How much?” Michael asked. She said, “I am from Scotland as you know, and it wasn’t the right time zone to be calling back there. So I didn’t know what to do.” “What did you do?” “I sang.” “You sang?” “I went into the lobby and saw a couple sitting there and I introduced myself and said I was doing an exercise in a seminar and would they mind if I sang them a song. They looked happy. I was surprised, so I sang my favorite song, ‘The Nearness of You.’” “Will you sing it here?” I said. And Jennifer sang. It was indeed sweet and beautiful.
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“What happened after that?” “Well, they gave me five dollars! I didn’t even ask! So I started going around the whole resort, through the lobby, out by the pool, and I asked people if I could sing for them, and most of them—not all of them—gave me money! I didn’t even ask. People saw other people giving me money and it just caught on!” “How much did you make?” “One hundred and ten dollars!” The room cheered and Michael put the total on the board. “What did you learn?” I asked Jennifer. “All my life I have been afraid I might go broke and be a bag lady or a homeless person,” she said. “Even after I started making some money coaching, I was never sure I could keep it up. But here, with nothing, no ideas, I made $110 in an hour—with just my voice.” “And a fearless willingness to offer it and give it away,” Michael said. “Don’t forget that.” (A fearless willingness to offer is often the only thing missing. Not new information on how to offer.) The rest of the room reported their earnings—the final total was over $65,000 after all was said and done. People were astonished. Many made more in that impromptu hour than they had in the weeks prior to our seminar. What happened for them? Transformation. They left their comfort zones and changed from safe to adventurous. All change occurs outside your comfort zone. This is true physically, mentally, spiritually and financially. No change can occur inside your comfort zone. Push your body past the weight it is comfortable lifting and it will grow stronger. Push your self past its own comfort zone and you will grow stronger. Do this every day and the affirmation “Every day, in every way, I’m growing richer and
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stronger” will no longer be just an affirmation. It will be a confirmation. Oh these are just rich people playing around with money to burn in Scottsdale. What about real people? Well, for one thing, these were real people, with real lifelong fears, and the money was real money. That busboy didn’t live in Scottsdale, and the resort was not a haven for the rich by any stretch of the imagination. In my neighborhood at home a man named Rocco goes from house to house trimming bushes, washing windows, hauling trash, getting paid for serving any way he can. This is not a rich neighborhood. This is just life. You can load up on information about anything. Where does it get you? Information on how to play guitar! You can read Eric Clapton’s life story, watch Martin Scorsese’s movie about George Harrison, study instructional books and watch YouTube videos about guitar techniques. That information will consume your attention. It will eat you up. There will be nothing left of you. Or, you can pick up a guitar and play. You can sit across from a guitar teacher and play and play and play. What does this have to do with making money? It’s the same process. When I read The Master Key to Riches I didn’t see it as information. Because it transformed me. It changed who I was being and what I was doing. Use information as a tool for transformation. Only. Do not use it for its own sake. It won’t get you anywhere. In fact, it can bankrupt you. A warrior doesn’t stay at home reading books about weapons. She chooses her weapon and ventures out.
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Chapter 36
What if I am too shy to let people know what my service is? When self-promotion is done right, it’s help. Help everyone. Peter Shankman
There is a village and you are its newest resident. You have just moved to this village. You are a doctor. You don’t tell anyone you are a doctor because you don’t want to come across as looking superior to the other villagers. So you settle into your small home in the village. The neighbors like you because you are humble and self-effacing. One night you hear a disturbance in the cottage next to yours. Human voices. Some yells, then silence. You look out your window. All seems quiet. All seems okay. The next morning you see an ambulance pull away from their door. You step outside and ask what happened. A little girl died last night. She had a seizure and no one knew what to do. The nearest hospital is 100 miles away. She died. You could have saved her life. Rather easily. But they didn’t know you were a doctor. “Self-promote? I’d rather die. Or let other people die.” It is a service for people to know who you are and what
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you do. It is not bragging. Stay focused on whether something is a service. Not on whether you will be “liked” or not.
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Chapter 37
Why it makes no sense to live and let die So
if the coaching prosperity school was a success—as it was—why not think bigger? Why not always keep thinking bigger? Not out of greed, but out of keeping my brain alive, active and growing? Almost a physical thing. Fending off dementia by practicing the discipline of thinking big. Like an entrepreneur thinks. So how about the All of Humanity Prosperity School? It expands the target market a bit. And it eliminates a lot of my pacing and cursing and worrying. Remember that one of the guiding principles of wealth creation is not to worry. And remember, too, that the best way not to worry is to have a project you are engaged in. Without a project, you descend into worry. Your project becomes worrying. Your mind has to spin somewhere, and if it can’t click and lock its gear’s teeth into a creative project it will look outward and worry about other people and the world at large. As mine did. I was worrying about political matters and the recession and the depression.
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So my project became the All of Humanity Prosperity School. You can sign up for the school yourself by going to my website (www.SteveChandler.com) and clicking into the Wealth Warrior Movement. That’s it. That’s the new school I have. All of humanity. Big enough? Do you qualify for admission? Are you part of humanity? Doesn’t feel like you are at the moment? Not a group you’d like to be associated with? So why am I even saying all this? Risk all comes to mind. Or, like my coach used to recommend as a daily practice: Lose face. People think this shouldn’t be inside a book, this should be outside or at the back of the book. Isn’t that where everyone else puts it? Isn’t the goal of life to be like everyone else? So you can stay safe till death? We (meaning “I”—but whenever you see “we” or “you” like I’m teaching you something, please know that I always need to learn this too) have become afraid to announce and communicate our value. Our true service. All of us. So why point this fear out in a book and then be afraid in that same book to rectify it? Remember the doctor in the village. The doctor was shy and unassuming. He didn’t want people to think of him in a certain way, so he kept to himself and a little girl died whom he could have saved. Maybe I could save someone, too. For example, what if someone does better with audio than with books and I offer a program that has lots of webinars and audio files about how to create wealth—but I’m too afraid to mention it inside my book because of what people would think. I would be like the doctor. Plenty of people don’t read these days. They don’t like it. But they listen. They listen in their cars, they listen on the treadmill at the gym, they listen on a walk through the woods.
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They listen in bed at night. That’s why I make so much audio for this new school. One of my audios is about the doctor’s fear of self-promotion. It’s related to an earlier audio I made on SERVING vs. PLEASING. How we confuse the two. How we stay broke because we confuse the two. How bad communication and time management habits are focused on pleasing people and winning their approval instead of serving people and receiving payments for the service. My new program is about your SOCIAL SELF versus your PROFESSIONAL SELF. We sure know how to socialize and relate to society. We have been trained in that 24/7 since we were children. “Be good!” Mother used to say. “Thank your Grandma,” Father would command. All day long we were trained to develop that social self so that it could be consistently pleasing. But things go wrong when we are older. We give away too much in negotiation. We call it “win-win” to cover the cowardice. We become horribly weak and impotent at self-promotion. Worse, we believe self-promotion is immoral. Disgusting, even. “Don’t brag!” Father used to say. “Don’t look so conceited.” Telling the village that you’re a doctor, and a very qualified one at that, goes against all your years of SOCIAL training and programming. Talking about audio programs in a book carries the same taboo: “He just entered the sleaze zone! He lost his credibility right there. Previously I had seen him as an altruistic man, out to heal the planet’s poverty, but talking about his audios showed me who he really is: Satan.” But how can you help anyone with your product or service if they don’t know about it? How can you do something for someone (serve them) if they don’t know what you can do?
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Let people know who you are and what you can do. If you are a personal trainer, everyone should know. If you have a blog you are writing, why hide that? If you are the best receptionist your company has ever had why not let that person at the party who said she was just named president of a local company—why not let her know that you are a great receptionist? In case she is ever looking for one. How else can you really serve her? By staying inside your cottage while the screams echo through the night? This was a huge hurdle in the journey toward making money, for me and my clients: recognizing how that “humble” social self kicks in automatically throughout the day. That sweet, unassuming, self-deprecating social self who interacts with everyone. In the old days your very name would tell people what you did. That was a great system! John the carpenter soon became just John Carpenter. Steve the chandler (maker of candles) soon became Steve Chandler. The moment John Carpenter was introduced to you, you might say, “Can you come fix my staircase? I’ll give you six chickens.” It was a world where your skill for service was who you were. The creative and colorful mystery writer Rita Mae Brown says, “I believe you are your work.” And while that may not be totally true, it’s an effective place for a warrior to come from.
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Chapter 38
Choosing what to do has more power than studying what to do In the 1930s the richest and most successful man in the world was Andrew Carnegie. He would also become one of the greatest donors of money who ever lived, determined to give away everything he had by the time he died. But it wasn’t just money that he wanted to give away. He wanted to give away his functional philosophy of wealth-creation. He believed anyone could attain the riches he had attained, and he said, “The world needed a practical philosophy of individual achievement which would permit the humblest worker to accumulate riches in whatever amount and form he might desire.” One of the central principles in Carnegie’s philosophy was to “Have your heart fixed on what you want.” I call it the path. Choose your path and put your heart there. What is the service you want to provide? What is the product you want to create? What is your offering to the world? “I don’t know what I want to do,” Barry said to me as we sat in my office in Arizona watching a dust storm start to blow outside the picture window.
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Barry was suffering from a lifelong habit of feeling vague and indifferent. He believed that his definite major purpose in life would have to come to him. Maybe it would arrive in a waking dream or a spiritual vision. He was in his late thirties and the vision had not arrived yet. He was still waiting. I suggested to him that he was dying. I suggested that every day was taking him one step closer to a big, dark nothing. This seemed to get his attention. People are often hypnotized by a childish sense of forever. Like Barry was. They think things will eventually be given to them if they wait for eternity plus a week or two. I decided to ask Barry a question that might wake him up further. “Have you ever considered working for your vision?” “What do you mean?” “If you want a vision of who you want to be, what’s stopping you from developing that vision? Like an architect might develop a small community in a third world country? What stops you from crafting it and bringing it into existence yourself?” He sat in silence. Finally he stood up and walked to the window and looked at the dust storm. Life was happening outside. Nothing was happening inside. Barry thought that was how it worked. “I didn’t know you could do that,” he said. “What about all those people who have a calling? They just feel called to do something, like be a doctor or a singer, and they answer their call?” Barry was like everyone who believes their childhood experience ought to never end. Things should just appear. Like in the womb, and in the months after the womb. Everything should be provided. Just cry and it’s yours.
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You didn’t have to do anything other than occupy. Occupy your space and wait for what you demand. And the occupying you were doing was not actually “doing” anything; it was just being you in your space. Barry wanted a calling or profession to come to him from simply occupying his own space in a soft chair. If I was going to succeed as his coach I would have to have him see that the real magic is in what you create, not in what you expect to receive. (Listen, Barry: Expect nothing. Create everything.) “Why don’t you choose a profession?” I asked Barry. “Why don’t you select one, and then put your energy into it? As an experiment. Not because it’s the right thing to do, but just as an experiment.” Barry looked puzzled. “How would I know what to choose?” he said. I asked him what happens when he goes to a restaurant and someone hands him a menu. How does he know what to order? “I just pick something.” “Based on what?” “Based on what appeals to me, I guess.” “Based on what calls to you?” Barry laughed, “Yes, I guess in a way it calls to me.” But for the calling to occur, don’t you first have to do a few things? You have to read the menu. And reading isn’t easy. Ask the forty percent of adults in Detroit who can’t do it. It’s not automatic. You don’t just put the menu in front of your face and have the selections appear in your brain. You have to focus. You have to think. Finally, you have to choose. Those are three extremely important actions you must take before you can order any food. These actions were the actions I wanted Barry to respect
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and understand. They would be the same actions he would eventually have to take in choosing his work: focus, think and choose. You don’t receive your calling, you choose it. For some people—maybe those whose recollections are intended to make them the stuff of legends—it may feel like they “receive” their visions, but even then they must choose. Barry was encouraged to see his life as a menu. First he would focus, then he would think and then he would choose. “Okay, I’m seeing this,” he said. And he actually looked energized. This happens with everyone who has been put to sleep by the ether known as “entitlement” and who then wakes up. The new energy in Barry came from seeing his own power. He saw a glimpse of his ability to create. To do good work and cause things to happen. “Now what?” he said. “How do I focus, think and choose a calling?” I asked him to set that aside for now and tell me about his life. Who does he envy? Who does he think has a fun job? Whose work would he like to be “given”? What would be his least favorite job? What subjects in school did he like the least? What class did he look forward to? We were starting to narrow things down and get a picture. I told Barry about my friend Lindsay Brady (now an author and noted hypnotherapist). Lindsay had a similar crossroads moment when he, too, had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. So he found a phone book in his house and he opened it to the Yellow Pages. He knew his job, whatever it was, would have to be in there. So he treated the Yellow Pages like a menu and went through every page, every service, every profession, and circled the ones that looked most appealing to him. He knew intuitively that life and success were all about choosing.
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They were not about merely wanting. Barry’s life thus far was a life of waiting and wanting. No wonder nothing good was happening “to him.” Lindsay Brady narrowed his choice down to three things, airplane pilot, hypnotherapist (though he had no idea what that was all about) and beekeeping. He is now highly accomplished in all three. People who talk about his success might even be saying that these things always called to him and he just followed his heart. Later the story might get better. People might say he saw his north star and climbed up onto his spiritual unicorn and followed the light into his field of passion. But what he really did was choose. And after he chose, he found out what action steps were needed, and he followed them. He stayed on his path, allowing only his purpose to guide him. Barry’s story also ends well. Like so many people trapped in their own outside-in beliefs, he became happier and happier the more he worked and created an inside-out path. The focus of power shifted from the world (the womb) to Barry himself, the independent creator, the cause of his life’s work.
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Chapter 39
Practice creates talent; and sometimes you practice so much that you end up gifted It isn’t about the money itself. It’s about the strength. It’s about building the mental muscle that has you effectively serving and being rewarded for your service. That building process is the real prize, the true joy. The money is just a number. It’s your score, and your confirmation that you have served. If it were only all about the money we would not see so much tragedy and disaster when unearned money lands in people’s laps. Studies of lottery winners’ misfortunes are now well-documented. Three out of four lottery winners wish they hadn’t won. It was a nightmare of bad spending and loss of integrity and self-respect. It was wealth without the warrior. You have to have the creative experience or the wealth will actually work against you. I saw it in my own home when my father became financially successful and my mother no longer had to work or even raise her children. With maids and childcare people
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doing the real work around the house, she descended into alcoholism and pill addiction. Money was not such a great thing for her. Unearned money never is. Later in life, after the divorce and long years of sad isolation, she set her addictions aside and went on a spiritual journey. She took a path through religion not unlike Dan Millman’s peaceful warrior, and found fulfillment. She became a good mother and grandmother. She volunteered at the local hospital. It showed me that it’s all about a purpose, a path and a practice. Drifting away from my path is easier than ever these days with so many charming and entertaining temptations. The smart phone beeps and all kinds of wonders open up. All my favorite singers and writers are at my fingertips with their latest offerings. Not to mention my friends. (I used to have just a few good friends and now I have a thousand. Liking me!) So to do anything worthwhile I must fight for devoted space. I must fight for some silence and solitude. And I am not hesitant to use the words “fight” or “warrior” in this context. A warrior masters purpose, path and practice. A warrior fights through temptation. “As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.” Emerson is right. It’s even better than fighting through temptation. In defeating temptation, the warrior takes on the strength of the temptation. The bigger the rejected temptation, the greater the new strength! Like those video games in which you go to another level
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after killing enough of the little aliens at this level. *** It is only in silence and solitude that you yourself create great things. Otherwise, other people’s great things will be crowding in on you all day long. Today I still receive small royalty checks from songs my genius songwriting partner Fred Knipe and I wrote together years ago. The money tells me someone is still being served by that music. The solitude and silence Fred and I had to learn to carve out with warrior swords was gold. Fred himself had a number one Billboard hit, and he and I wrote many songs that were recorded by record label artists in Nashville, California and Europe. But to get to that, we first had to stop listening to other people’s songs and start creating our own. Previously we had been living in LISTEN ONLY mode. Albert Einstein said there comes a time in life when you must stop reading other people’s books and start writing your own. Instead of filling your mind all day every day with what other people have done, start creating. What will you create that produces wealth? What product, what skill, what talent, what entertainment, or what service? Wait a minute, did you say talent? How does one “create” a talent? Practice creates talent. Even though no one will believe that (until they experience it for themselves). Until they experience it for themselves, they will believe that talent is delivered by genetics. “You got your voice from your father… He could sing like a Broadway star!”
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Society’s myths leave us all genetic victims. Passive and powerless. How can we create ourselves from that position? There are a couple of areas in my life where I have been called “talented.” I know it’s not talent, at least not the way most people think of talent—as a gift. “He has a gift.” “Oh my, yes. Indeed he does.” I know the hours behind the “gift.” They don’t know those hours. But here’s what’s funny. I don’t want to tell them. I would rather be thought of as gifted—endowed with huge talent— than set the record straight. It’s more fascinating and charming and myth-making to believe that Superman has had these powers since birth. So people with “talent” keep the myth alive for reasons of self-image. They don’t want to let the cat out of the bag. Look at Leonard Cohen. What a gifted songwriter! A born poet. Glorious words and rhymes flow from him. Easy as breathing out. He has the gift. But really, more than any other songwriter, he stays on the path. His famous song “Suzanne” took him years to write. Years! One song. He wrote over 100 verses over the years before selecting the four that are in the song. An amazing amount of time on the path. But the reward? He gets to be Leonard Cohen. The gifted one. Leonard Cohen! Hallelujah! (One of his best songs.) His gift is worshipped by other songwriters who only write five verses and then keep four.
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Chapter 40
This formula works if you really use it every day If you already have a business, the 80/20 rule will make you money faster than anything I know of—if you use it rather than just agree with it. There are high-return activities and low-return activities throughout your day. If you can see them clearly, you can become a wealth-creating master. However! There are temptations that arise throughout the day. Temptations that lure us off the path. When we give in to those temptations we sink down to a weaker position. But when we say no, we don’t sink down. We rise up. We grow wings with every “no.” (But no sounds so negative!!! Saying no feels like I am denying myself, depriving myself of comfort and pleasure. And saying no to other people—people who want to talk or email with me—makes me feels like I am being mean to people.) But that’s exactly it. The biggest problem there is. The inability to say no. That’s why I like the language of rising. I like the picture I have of the strength of wings. It feels more positive than
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saying no. So rather than saying no and denying myself and others, I rise above the temptation with a strong flex of wings. So the strength inside the wings grows. And the more I rise up the easier it is to fly around, and then eventually to soar. Now temptations that called me off the path are an easy flap of the wings—then gone!—almost effortless. Rather than denying myself, I am adding strength. Like with a weight for my arm. Each lift makes my arm stronger. Lifting the weight is like saying no to the weight. You will not dominate me or defeat me. Each lift is a kind of rising above the strength of the weight. Some weights are stronger than my arm so I can’t rise above them yet. Some temptations will take more practice and training. Therefore a gentle but exhilarating regular practice like Tai Chi or piano or yoga is a metaphor that also works here, in case you don’t care for “warrior”—severe militaristic self-discipline or willpower. Some things make you money, some do not. Some days are diamonds, some days are rocks. Those things that do not make money ought to be clearly identified as such. So that you don’t fool yourself by saying that your three cumulative hours spent posting and reading inside social media were your way of “building my tribe” or “strengthening my data base” or “cultivating leads” for your business. Just as lifting Styrofoam weights will not build one’s arm strength. Some activities are diamonds. Some are just not.
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Chapter 41
Drop the marketing and replace it with the delivery of magic You can get anything you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want. Zig Ziglar
Rather than trying to market my services throughout the day I will get money faster if I work some magic instead. I will always choose magic over marketing. Delivering my magic will spread word of mouth. This is why a garage band will set up a website and give away two songs from the new album on their site. Then those songs, when listened to, will allow the band to work its magic on the listener. The listeners are so delighted they return to the site to purchase the rest of the album. In olden times they would call that “releasing a single.” I call it magic. It’s giving before you get. Marketing is trying to get before you give. Marketing and advertising and publicizing are like trying to turn around so fast you can see the back of your head. Try as you might, it never works.
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Chapter 42
Okay, then, how do I motivate myself? Author
and business consultant Ron Wilder co-facilitates a coaching school with me. The other day he told our group about how he solved the problem of motivating himself to write every morning while writing his latest book, a political thriller called The 100-Watt War. He would sit down at his computer keyboard and place the morning newspaper next to him. If the words to his novel weren’t coming to him he would just type in whatever was on the front page of the newspaper. Soon enough the words to his novel would begin to flow into his mind and he could set the newspaper aside. No more jump-start needed. No more matches for the fire, it was now burning. This is an example of overcoming the fallacious myth of prior motivation. Most underachievers believe this myth. (I know I did, but only for forty-seven years.) The myth says you have to be motivated to do something before you do it. You can’t do anything you don’t feel like doing ahead of time. That’s a profound misunderstanding of motivation.
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Motivation and action ultimately arise mutually. They work together. But motivation does not have to come first. So if the one is not ready, the other can start. But they must eventually arise together. They are like two wings on a single angel. And soon you’ll see that the angel is you. If I don’t feel motivated I can start to write anyway. Soon the motivation catches up with the action and we have lift off. If I don’t feel like swimming I can just dive into the deep end of the pool anyway, and believe me I will then start swimming! This mutual arising, once it’s understood, is such a transformation—such a breakthrough for underachievers. Once underachievers begin to practice this they realize that they knew it all along. That wisdom was already there. (Because children utilize it often until advertising and society lure them into a world of attempted comfort and perpetual worry.) That’s why Nike’s slogan, “Just do it!” has been so popular and inspiring. We all knew that it was the master key to motivation all along. Just do it. Just let the games begin. But… you’ve got to prime the pump. You’ve got to blow on the embers You’ve got to jump-start the vehicle. The world is nothing but metaphors for how to go from underachieving to super achievement.
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Chapter 43
How I became a conspiracy nut It’s a castrating, emasculating culture – Now, why did I say that? I already regret it. Now I’m going to get up from my desk and walk funny for the rest of the day. Did I mean that? Or did I just mean what the great Emerson said: “Society is a conspiracy against the manhood of each of its members.” But even that’s still too sexist to make real sense in today’s world. Let’s translate it into what Emerson might have said today. Society is a conspiracy (entered into by all of us) against the courageous, independent individual in each of us. Man or woman. See it for what it is. Detoxing from culture and society—notes for my course outline: 1. Creators vs. Reactors CREATORS create their own community - create their own media resource list - create a lot of silence zones - create periods of solitude - my perfect seminar would be all people all day in silence
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with a pen and a legal pad REACTORS turn on the so-called news and REACT to it - go to every new movie no matter how violent, frightening or gross, and react to it - react to whatever gets posted that day in social media - react to job postings “available” if they are out of work (Whereas creators create action plans for finding work and developing relationships.) 2. Choosing/books, blogs and movies - Wealth creators choose their own culture - They choose their own society - They find the internet sites that give them ideas and lift them up - They read inspirational and thought-generating ideas from optimistic writers who love being alive in the global free market - They rent movies that inspire them and cheer them up - They read the books that give them new ideas about their profession - They read books that get them excited about life - They choose the elements of society and the culture that strengthen them and give them more inner resources - All day long they choose 3. Reactors react to what is randomly thrown at them - They do not develop the strength to choose - They watch whatever movie comes out - They read whatever anyone sends them - They allow society and the culture to pollute and infect their systems at random - Like going to a pharmacy and taking the first four pill
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bottles on the shelf no matter which drug is in them - So their lives and financial resources are not deliberately created, but rather accidentally formed by chance *** But it’s worse than chance. Because the media and entertainment companies they allow to wash polluted material into their brains each day are actually trying to come up with the most negative, shocking and alarming stories they can find to provoke fresh curiosity, and to seem postmodern, progressive and edgy. The reactor takes it all in without resistance and truly REACTS negatively—he or she shudders at the gross-out or gasps at the tragedy and then shuts down or simply seeks survival-level comfort. The creator is a warrior in matters of physical, mental, material and spiritual wealth. Solitude and silence are valued treasures—to be carved out of a random culture with a terrible, swift sword. A long walk. A meditation. A time for solitary swimming. An hour playing a musical instrument. A half-day in a room quietly doodling with a legal pad allowing ideas to rise up and present themselves. The mind is programmed one way or the other—creator (warrior) or reactor (worrier)—your choice. What do you let in to your life? At the end of today, the information I expose myself to will have gorged on my attention. It was not some meaningless passive flow washing over me. It washed into me. Ripped my cities to the ground. It can pollute like toxic water. But if I choose it wisely, it cleans, refreshes and inspires.
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Chapter 44
The key to productivity is creative subtraction It seems like adding would be the answer. Right? What’s missing? What do I need to ADD to my life? Adding! Adding activities, adding projects, adding contacts, adding toys, adding networks to join, adding friends, adding investors, adding knowledge, adding new dreams. But subtraction is the real key—because subtraction leads to simplicity and power. Bruce Lee said he did not fear the opponent who knew (and had added an additional) 10,000 kicks. He feared the opponent who practiced one kick 10,000 times. My time management seminars and Time Warrior book infuriate some people and liberate others. The infuriated don’t want to simplify, they want to add. They want to add tricks and schemes and tools and rules and apps and information. (Steve Martin once said he wanted his business card to say, “Master of All Space, Time and Dimension.”) But taking away, or subtraction, is the key to mastering time. Subtraction the way Michelangelo subtracted.
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He subtracted creatively. He stood in front of a huge slab of marble with hammer and chisel and began taking away what was not necessary to the statue, the beautiful angel in the stone. Utilizing the non-linear time warrior system to make your professional work more profitable is a matter of being able to take away, to eliminate and say “no” to all the things that keep you so busy all day not making money. What makes you money? Do that. What do you fill your days with to give yourself the feeling of being busy? Take that away. Like a dieter takes away carbs and sugar from the body to reveal an angel in the stone. Is it easy being simple? No it is not. But no pain no gain applies here. Creative subtraction is a microscope that shows you your work life at a cellular level, that lets you see with clarity all the busy little cells swimming around with unnecessary hyperactivity. Those are the ones you want to take away. A warrior takes those away. Sometimes when a struggling business asks me to coach them back to prosperity I ask them to put their last twenty customers’ or clients’ names up on the white board. We then go through each name and determine how that person came to the business. We make a list of the activities that led to those customers coming in. Now we have our high-return activities identified. We now do more of that and less of the other stuff. Success comes to those who are willing to eliminate the other stuff. Fear is often a new problem when you dedicate yourself to subtraction. Because the low-return activity was not done completely out of ignorance. Sometimes the high-return
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activity is much harder to do, scarier to enter into, than the easy, low-return busyness. But you must go there anyway. Talk to the people you are afraid of. That’s where the money is, because you become more resourceful each time you do it. The two ways I know of to eliminate fear are 1) to challenge the thought that produces the fear, and 2) to do the thing you are afraid of doing whether you feel scared or not. Both ways work. And when you are willing to do both with regularity, money no longer becomes a problem. Consciousness is raised. To master anything, consciousness must be raised. And the good news is that it feels good to raise consciousness. It’s the ultimate “high.” So much you can see from way up there! (And you think to yourself: what a wonderful world.)
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Chapter 45
Stay on the path of service, no matter what the defense (the universe) throws at you Big, bold acts of service often require connection. With another human being. I once performed an act of service for Matt Furey. You may have heard of him. He is an author, national champion collegiate wrestler, martial arts champion, and fitness and internet guru. It was years ago. He didn’t know me from Adam. And he had a rather intimidating aura—like, he could snap your neck and leave you in a wheelchair in half a second if you displeased or annoyed him. He had that look. I set out to annoy him. Because he didn’t respond when I sent him a book of mine and a note offering to serve him. I had seen a small flaw in his communications, and I knew I could really help him. But he didn’t respond. So I sent another book and another note. Nothing. Then I did so again. And again and again and again until he finally contacted me. I said, “I see a way I can serve you. I admire your work.”
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He told me he’d never experienced the kind of relentless approach I had made toward him. Why did I do that? he asked me. I was watching a football game, I told Matt. And I saw a running back hit the line trying to get the two yards needed for a touchdown. He was stopped. Jammed up. Nothing there in the middle of the line. But his legs did not stop digging and churning. Most runners quit at that point. What’s the use? What’s the point? But this guy kept churning. He spun off the jammed part of the line and hit another part of the line even harder but there was nothing there either! This took place in nanoseconds, but his legs never stopped pumping. Then he spun his body a third time and took the run outside the jam-up in the middle, and with two defenders clinging to him—two 300-pound freaks of nature pulling him to the ground—he made a final thrust of both legs and took himself and them across the goal line. Touchdown. Game over. “I get it,” said Matt. We had a good time working together. In my previous life I would never have kept at it. I would have jumped off the path at the first sign of rejection. But now I know that staying on the path is the secret. And, really, what do I care what people think?
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Chapter 46
Playing small will spread into your work and eventually it will shrink your life If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. Bruce Lee
My
friend Franzi recently attended a week-long leadership seminar featuring Werner Erhard and sent me notes about her experience. At one point an audience member stood up and gave Werner a rambling, heartfelt tribute of gratitude for the forty years of teaching that Erhard had done, so life-changing for so many people. Rather than thank the person, Werner stunned him into silence by saying “Thanking me is too small.” He then said, “Be it!” I thought about that for a long time. Where have I myself been showing up too small? Where do I just automatically and robotically play small?
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As I looked back on my life I saw that playing too small has always led to money shortages. Because when I was being small, I wasn’t really serving. I was just trying to win approval. And my bank account would soon become as small as I was. Reminder to myself: money is a reflection of bold and creative service. (And remember, again, when I say “money” I do not mean money acquired through gambling on stocks or through inheritance. That money destroys people. That’s jailbird Bernie Madoff’s money and the money of his get-rich-quick, something-for-nothing “investors” attempting to game the system.) I want money that is a reflection of love and service. To have it I have to, as Werner Erhard says, BE IT. Be the change I wish to see. Be the difference-maker I have always wanted to be. And reading about it is a vital first step, but if that’s all I do then I am being “too small.” I can always reboot. I can always play bigger. I can always take a deep breath and expand my vision. I can always do a dramatic U-turn while my GPS is saying “RE-CALCULATING.” I’m never really stuck. I can feel stuck, but I am never really stuck.
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You don’t ever need more money than you have. When you understand this, you begin to realize that you already have all the security you wanted money to give you in the first place. It’s a lot easier to make money from this position. Byron Katie Work and Money
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Chapter 47
I could be out there serving people but my mind and my emotions have sent me back to bed There is no defined limit as to how much money you can acquire in what little time. If any definition exists it does so just in your mind and in your emotions. Stuart Wilde
People
started calling me a wealth warrior in one of the organizations I coached because the methods I used tended to create increased income. I was nervous when I first heard that phrase because it sounded so mercenary. A hired gun for money. Soldier of fortune. No loyalty to any good cause other than making money. But it has grown on me. Because I have seen how the opposite of the wealth warrior (the victim of circumstance posing for the cameras with a protest sign and a begging bowl) is somehow now being celebrated. Anyone suffering any kind of misfortune is now celebrated by the media as some kind of hero. In Hero, his book about the life of Lawrence of Arabia,
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Michael Korda writes, “We have become used to thinking of heroism as something that simply happens to people; indeed the word has been in a sense cheapened by the modern habit of calling everybody exposed to any kind of danger, whether voluntarily or not, a ‘hero.’” I’ll go with the older definition. The hero being someone who actually does something. The media wants it otherwise. Any victim status at all makes you a hero. “We know from a history of this family, it’s very hard being a Kennedy, either being a blood Kennedy or being married to one,” Kennedy biographer Laurence Leamer told CNN. “The overwhelming celebrity, the attention, the obligations, the expectations that you’re supposed to do something with your life. It’s very, very hard.” Very, very hard! In the media’s eyes it was not very, very hard being a Kennedy generations ago when the money was earned, and every Kennedy was working in focused, dedicated ways. But the more the money got handed down to generations that did not earn it the harder life got for those media-pitied heroes of misfortune. Drug addiction, philandering, suicide and self-induced tragedies of all kinds victimized the children and grandchildren of the original earners. One of the primary sins of humanity identified by Gandhi was: “Wealth without work.” Napoleon Hill changed my mindset on all of this with his books. And he did not make me more greedy or selfish. The opposite: he made me better able to help others. Because he showed me that the source of money was always the work one did to serve others. The willingness to always go the extra mile for people. So many people have benefitted from what he did for me.
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And his new book, Outwitting the Devil, is pretty cool, too! Amazing that a man dead that long can publish a new book. The power of a true hero.
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Chapter 48
Okay, really now, who is John Galt? Don’t be miserly with your strengths, with your intelligence, and with your creativity. Look for outlets. Look for challenges. Find out what makes you feel most alive and figure out some way to earn your living doing it. Nathaniel Branden
For
years Nathaniel Branden was not only my psychotherapist, but he was also my philosophical mentor. Ayn Rand’s mysterious and heroic character John Galt in Atlas Shrugged was based on the young Nathaniel Branden, which gives you an idea of his personal power and influence. My entire life changed when I found out what made me feel most alive and then figured out a way to make a living doing it. So what I mean to say is that I do not just give you that Nathaniel Branden quote because it sounds nice, like the people who post platitudes and cheery slogans on social media every day and don’t live any of them. I give you that quote up above because it has changed my life for the better. I want to do what he says. And I mean that every day I want to: Look for outlets. Look for challenges. Find out what makes me feel most alive.
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Chapter 49
Are you finally willing to go berserk? If you’re going to win anything—a race, yourself, your life— you have to go a little berserk. George Sheehan
George
Sheehan is one of my favorite authors. He wrote absolutely wonderful books on running. If you are a runner, or are thinking about it, or are even a devoted walker, check him out. He was an athlete/philosopher. He was also a record-setting runner for advanced age groups. His formula for winning is excellent. When I leave that key “berserk” part out, I tend to lose ground. I tend to not make much of a difference. Which is why I keep this quote handy. It’s usually a person’s unwillingness to go crazy (in a good way) that has them stuck with a boring and financially demoralizing life. That was certainly true for me in the pre-warrior years. I was frozen with fear. Cryogenically frozen by my anticipation of other people’s judgment of me. Berserk breaks that ice.
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Chapter 50
Attacking life means seizing the day and then going out there and making things happen Let a person who has to make their fortune in life remember this maxim: Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world always yields; or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and it will succumb. William Makepeace Thackeray
I studied Thackeray in English Literature classes in college, and later enjoyed the movie Barry Lyndon based on his novel. He was an amazingly productive, creative artist. Yet his secret—quoted above—sounds like it was written by a military man! Which just shows me once again that there is a certain warrior element to creating. And especially to making a fortune, and producing wealth in one’s life. And I don’t mean to leave women out of this because Hunger Games and Brave show us that the woman-as-warrior is a very powerful archetype (and intriguing prototype). What I love about the warrior word and the attacking word is that they wake me up into action. They take me out of the passive mindset in which I’m waiting for fortune to find
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me… standing on the widow’s walk longing for my ship to come in. Time to come down from there and dare the world to match my enthusiasm.
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Chapter 51
You always become what you choose to think about In
my coaching prosperity school I would send out daily messages via email to inspire coaches to build their practices and their wealth. I signed my messages: ON TO PROSPERITY, Steve. Because I really meant that. Notice I didn’t sign it, ON TO GETTING BY! Or, ON TO FEELING OKAY ABOUT YOURSELF! Because, really. You get what you focus on.
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The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time. Willem de Kooning
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Chapter 52
I despise that person because all he thinks about is money When
people envy financially successful people they often say, “All he thinks about is money.” But the opposite is true. What he is actually thinking about is the creative work he is doing. His mind is filled with new projects and new people to serve. And that’s all he is thinking about. The money comes in later because people have been served so brilliantly. The person who is struggling with money, who never has “enough” money, is actually the person we are talking about... he is the person who is always thinking about money. It becomes an obsession for him. Fortunately it only takes a simple mind shift to turn that whole game around. From worrier to warrior.
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Discipline is remembering what you want. David Campbell
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Chapter 53
In my previous life I would always quit before the best energy had a chance to kick in Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second. Give your dreams all you’ve got and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you. William James
Find a path and stay on it. Don’t quit. Keep walking. You will arrive. You may get tired and winded, but the second wind will always kick in for you when your body, which is bluffing, realizes you are not going to quit. We place too high a value on comfort. We have lost the old fashioned work ethic. No one has ever written a book called Great Moments in Human Comfort (though I have been tempted). But a mind shift to warrior can transform you in an instant. Now you are working nonstop for the pleasure of working. And because you don’t quit, you get your second wind and
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you pass everyone else on the road to freedom. Because they don’t even know what a second wind is.
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Chapter 54
Life coaching looks like a phony profession that seeks quick and easy money My
profession of coaching is somewhat suspect for good reason. Anyone can be a coach at any time; so one doesn’t have to be certified or educated in a graduate school. The other day my cab driver in L.A. told me he was a coach. I declined his offer to coach me. But not until after I’d thought about it for a minute. Sometimes that kind of easy self-certification leads people to fall victim to the myth of easy money. Money for nothing! I’ve always been good at giving advice and people always ask me how to solve their problems, so I’ll be a coach! Easy money is the wrong way to make money. It focuses on the wrong thing: the money itself. Instead of the service. Real, reliable, sustainable, repeatable service. That’s where real money comes from. Here’s what I used to tell the coaches who came to my school to learn client acquisition. I told them this so that they would not stay mesmerized by the false god of money for
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nothing: I believe the first responsibility of a coach is to make friends with prosperity. Learn EVERYTHING about how other coaches do it. The information is here in the school. The information is right here… …but the transformation is not. The transformation is in the actions you take. There is a distinct difference between coaches committed to turning PRO and coaches “trying this out to see if it’s a fit for me,” as one would try out multi-level marketing or a real estate program for flipping houses. You know when you are committed to success. It’s when you get audios and other information and LISTEN and TAKE NOTES and ACT on the notes the very next day. Those who are not committed, those who are still seeing if “coaching is a fit” will put these audios off till later, when they can get to them. If they went to law school they wouldn’t do that, and if they went to medical school they wouldn’t do that, but they want coaching to be easier than that. They want to be “comfortable” with being a coach. They want abundance to align with their good, altruistic intentions. And of course they fail. Financially. And they later tell their friends and family, “It turns out it wasn’t a fit.” These people want a coaching school to be a quick and easy way to find out how to get clients. They want it to be like speed dating. There is never any way around this truth: your success is ALWAYS directly related to the time and effort you put into developing your profession. Success in this field does not occur because you have
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found your easiest gig. No, in this field, even MORE than in law and medicine, effort is the way… and the reward.
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Chapter 55
Now let us try to dance with the abundance of the universe If I give myself the task of learning to trust the abundance of the universe, I face an uphill climb. If the universe is abundant, I can either notice it or not. I can celebrate it. Or, after a long, futile search, I can deny it. But I won’t have to trust it, ever. Because it either is or it isn’t. For years I wrestled with the mind-made scarcity that my thoughts created. So I never encountered the abundance. I always tried to trust it first! And because the task was not possible to achieve I never trusted the abundance of the universe. Trusting is that impossible task that you put between yourself and doing something worthwhile. Adults think they have to trust things before making an effort, which is why they most often settle for a low-effort, “safe,” habituated life. If they could forget all about trusting—just drop it as a prerequisite—life would get very interesting very quickly. There would be adventurous breakthroughs everywhere. I’m always using the example of a child learning to swim or ride a bicycle.
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When we did that as children we never trusted the water or the bicycle. Because if we had had to fully trust that the water would hold us up or that the bicycle would not tip over, none of us would know how to swim or ride bikes today. So, without trusting the water, I got in the water. And without trusting the bike, I got on the bike. That’s how I learned to swim and ride a bike. Trust was not a factor. It never is. Except in the mind of an inactive adult. Children are natural warriors. Adults are not. Adults have to practice and train to recapture the warrior mindset. Once they do, however, life gets exciting again. Now they can go enjoy the world the same way a samurai warrior enjoys the field of battle.
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Chapter 56
Your lizard is not going to make you any money Without deliberately practicing the warrior mindset, my life was dominated and governed by imaginary threats. I saw a bad driver in traffic as a threat to my future well-being. I yelled and flipped him off. When somebody didn’t answer my email, I saw it as a threat to my financial life or a threat to my career or a threat to my need to be loved and approved of. Without the warrior mindset I was obsessed with worry about money and love! I thought about them all day long. Instead of taking repeated glorious actions that lead to them, I thought about them! I brooded upon them. I worried a lot. Most of us imagine that money and love come from outside of us. But they absolutely do not. They come from inner wisdom and strength. Getting this wrong can cost us an entire life of happiness. Most people get this wrong. As Colin Wilson so eloquently writes in Poetry and Mysticism, we form our habits of social safekeeping and turn them over to the robot. (Our habituated social selves.) The robot drives our car, and does most everything else somewhat automatically. However, a robot cannot and will
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not dream. This is why dreams now only occur at night when we are asleep. Lawrence of Arabia said we ought to be aware of someone who dreams during the day, while fully awake. That person will achieve great things. Most of the time our robot sees threats where there are no threats. So, let’s say some poor innocent guy is trying to drive his pregnant wife to the hospital and I see him as a total jerk who’s jeopardizing my safety on the highway, and I’m flipping him off and honking and yelling obscenities. I am dysfunctional in my anger. This trapped angry ego is what Seth Godin sometimes calls the “lizard brain,” a phrase that comes from Robert Bly’s wonderful book, Leaping Poetry. The lizard brain is just the amygdala, the survival part of the brain. It will always be a part of my biology, but I don’t have to live there all day. The lizard cannot dream. Or plan. Or create. Or serve. If I recognize that the lizard brain is where my current threat-based thoughts are coming from, and if I can be awake to this fact, I won’t get caught up in all these bursts of anger. I can relax and stay on the path to my financial goal. Anger is dysfunctional, but it can be converted into service if one is awake to what it is. My friend Sam Beckford (my co-author on 100 Ways to Create Wealth) used to flash with anger about conditions in Africa. Some of the drinking water was unfit for humans. Now he has evolved and become enlightened about how his brain works. (It’s there to serve him and others.) He now puts all that formerly wasted angry time and energy into creating money. Then he donates the money to groups that build wells in Africa. Anger is a war you declare on yourself. That warrior instinct is better turned toward productivity. I call it being a wealth warrior, but you can call it being a charitable donor and a philanthropist if certain words don’t
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work for you. People feel flashes of anger because they’re coming from the lizard brain, and because they are so obsessed with being “consistent” and approved of they’ll add a lot of mental energy to justifying their anger. To really building a case for why they should be angry. Meanwhile they have money problems. Which makes them even angrier about life. The first step is to notice that you don’t have to take every little flash of anger and spend the rest of your life justifying it. That’s where people really go wrong. That’s where they make themselves dysfunctional and reduce their potential for developing inner strength. It’s in that ongoing justification: like the family members who call and say, “Can you believe that Josh didn’t even show up at Thanksgiving?” Now all of us are on the phone talking about it. And what this is is an attempt to justify and get support for an uncomfortable feeling of anger. But when I see it, and I can identify the flash as a passing biological blip from the lizard brain, I am all of a sudden using my larger, fuller brain, including the right side of my brain, the most creative part of me. I can now see that my justifications were just a misuse of my imagination in an effort to explain what the lower brain felt. And this was absolute madness. Because that bigger part of the brain, the creative imagination, could have been creating the wealth and health I wanted. But instead it was caught up in justifying the anger that I felt. Once we can see this, we’ve got a new sense of freedom. And freedom comes first. Then prosperity.
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Chapter 57
If money is not about greed, then how do I start making some? A lot of people asked me about this book once they learned it was about making money because they feared I might have gone over to the enemy. “Why are you favoring greed and material riches when we’re in the middle of a recession?” “Why use a military image when we should be seeking peace on the planet?” “I thought you were all about giving and service. Now you write a book about money?” Good questions. But maybe this system of exchange of services (money) is not about greed. Maybe it’s about mutual service. (Unless you don’t have “enough money.” Then you will probably try to convince me that money is all about greed.) Maybe money just shows you whether or not you have served people. So how do I create wealth in this world? 1) Get the fire inside you started. 2) Then let the fire serve someone. When Bob Dylan writes, in his book Chronicles, about
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how much he admired Joan Baez before he met her, he says, “I’d be scared to meet her. I didn’t want to meet her but I knew I would. I was going in the same direction even though I was in back of her at the moment. She had the fire, and I felt I had the same kind of fire.” We don’t question what he means by the fire. We read on, knowing full well what he means by the fire. But sometimes I wonder, though. Do we really? Do we know it from experience? Do we feel the same fire? Do you have to be a poet or a singer to feel it? No, no. We all know what it is to have that same fire, no matter how briefly we have experienced it. My own life’s turning point came when I discovered I could light that fire all by myself. It took me more than fifty years to discover this. But I’m slow in these matters. You can get it today if you want. For the first fifty years of my life I thought the fire only happened when something inspired me. It was something that had to happen to me. And the reason I believed that was because that was my only experience up till then. You have to go by what you know, don’t you? How do I start the fire in me today? This gets tricky. Because fire starts with fire. Which sounds like the ultimate Catch-22. If I need fire to start fire how do I get that first fire going? How do I light the fire within? Well, come on, let’s play charades. “I don’t feel like playing charades.” You know how to feel like it? You play. And so even though you don’t feel like it, you play anyway and now you find you are loving it. So, you light the fire within by taking the action that you would be taking if the fire were already lit—and that lights the fire. The action lights the fire.
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And yet… The whole world is sitting around waiting to find something that will start the fire. I had a coaching client who said, “Tell me what I should want.” And I said I would never do that. Can you hear the absurdity of his request? Because here was a guy with a lot of talent and a lot of options. He could do so many things and yet he didn’t “know what to choose.” He couldn’t figure out how to choose. He said, “Tell me what I should want” because he was paralyzed, not doing much of anything. But how can I tell you what you should want? Pick a project, get into it and get out of your mental paralysis. You can’t start a fire with water. You can’t start a fire with dirt. It takes a fire to start a fire. When people understand this, they finally see that the action itself is what starts the fire and creates the passion in them—and the desire to do great work.
WEALTH WARRIOR
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. Steve Jobs
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Chapter 58
Why must I keep reinventing myself? You don’t have to. You can stay as stuck as you are. Like I did. (But only for a large number of decades.) But now I love reinventing myself. I love impermanence. I love that I’m ever-changing. I love being flexible. I love being open. I love being creative. I love redesigning everything on a whim to serve others better and be happier and have more fun. Yes, reinventing myself is actually a fun thing to do. Reinventing myself is an exercise. It’s a dance. It’s a song to sing. It’s a process, and when I really start to get the swing of it and the habit of it and the fun of it I can see that it serves me (and the planet) every time I do it. Companies and individuals who reinvent themselves are more prosperous than the ones who stay stuck. Stuck. Like a guitar player who wants to weld his guitar strings in place once they’re in tune. It does not work. It does not work to stay “safe” (code for “stuck”). The business climate? It may get worse before it gets better, but you don’t have to get worse. You can get better while it is getting worse.
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If you are willing to consciously, regularly reinvent yourself. More on how to do this later. Right now I have a little rant I want to do.
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Chapter 59
One good way to wreck our bodies and our minds You and I are standing this very second at the meeting place of two eternities: The vast past that has endured forever, and the future that is plunging on to the last syllable of recorded time. We can’t possibly live in either of those two eternities— no, not even for one split second. But, by trying to do so, we can wreck both our bodies and our minds. Dale Carnegie Gentlemen songsters off on a spree, doomed from here to eternity. “The Whiffenpoof Song” by Yale’s Whiffenpoofs. Based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling, Gentlemen-Rankers.
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gentlemen in the song are doomed because they regret the past and fear the future. Peter Diamondis and Steven Kotler wrote an exciting book called Abundance. It is not about channeling your spirit guide and picturing expensive things. It’s not about the law of attraction. It’s full of research and discoveries about the positive developments that are happening globally. Now. In the now.
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This now. The media won’t enjoy reporting the kind of material the book offers: breakthroughs in world peace, improvements in the world’s water supply, and the prospect of future prosperity. Because ratings go down when the news is good and up when the media sounds the alarm. And ratings are the only way the media brings in any money. Unless they borrow it, like The New York Times did from billionaire Carlos Slim of Mexico. Seth Godin writes in a blog post about the media, “In a relentless search for clicks, profit-focused media companies are racing to the bottom as fast as they can get there.” Should we care about this? Godin says yes, “We should care about an influential industry (media) that creates and amplifies fear, on deadline, distracts us, and festers, like a fast-growing tumor diminishing the healthy tissue around it.” We are drawn to alarming things and the media makes money off of that attraction of ours. We get hooked on worst case scenarios. Soon we are living all day long in our own negative imaginary future. And pharmaceutical companies are more than ready to step in and help with that. There is no healthy way to live in that future. There’s no now there. This was the whole maddening (to some) point of the time warrior program I delivered on non-linear time management as the only way to get your life back on track. To bring your life back to the joyful, creative place where it was when you were young. When you were young IT WAS ALWAYS NOW. But it maddens adult people to think in non-linear terms. They make a fist and pound the table when they hear about it. Bang! Sometimes they throw the book at a wall. After a lifetime of linear thinking (“Time heals all wounds… It takes time.”) they find their brains scrambled by the non-linear
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option. After a lifetime of thinking in segments, plodding along, one damn thing after another, they are asked to now think like a starburst, and it is not easy. The only good use of any future is artistic. You paint a picture of your positive imaginary future on your whiteboard. Then you PULL THAT PICTURE—WITH EVERY OUNCE OF STRENGTH YOU HAVE—into the present moment.
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Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. William Faulkner
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Chapter 60
Why is everyone talking about passion? What if I don’t have any? “Following your passion? What a bunch of BS!” That was billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. He is one of the most creative, energetic and passionate warriors on the planet. But he believes, as I do, that “following your passion” (as a necessary first step to creating success) is overrated. Especially when the very concept of passion is what’s keeping you out of action. I can’t tell you how many people I know who are not doing anything to serve others because they are still frozen by their inability to find or follow their passion. They’ve heard that’s where you have to start, but they just can’t find it! Mark Cuban says this in his wonderful blog (blogmaverick.com): 1. When you work hard at something you become good at it. 2. When you become good at doing something, you will enjoy it more. 3. When you enjoy doing something, there is a very good chance you will become passionate or more passionate about it.
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4. When you are good at something, passionate and work even harder to excel and be the best at it, good things happen. Don’t follow your passions, follow your effort. It will lead you to your passions and to success, however you define it. This I mean to whisper to my mind: don’t follow your passion, follow your effort.
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Pick something you love about your life right now and then go back into your past and see how the bad things that happened back then actually led to creating what you love now. What might that teach you about anything that is currently happening in your life that you see as bad or imperfect? John Groberg Spiral Up Yoga
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Chapter 61
How would you like to be a mad scientist and an inventor when it comes to who you really are? We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. Joseph Campbell
I was not a time warrior. And I was certainly not a wealth warrior. Until I was. So what happened? I reinvented myself. I most certainly did. (With a lot of help from my friends. Friends who didn’t think anything when I sang out of tune. Friends who did not get up and walk out on me.) The really deep reason that I wanted to reinvent myself was my realization (and realization for me means making real for me) that reinvention was all there was anyway. In other words, I invented my “self” (my presenting egoic personality) to begin with. And when I could see that my whole personality—who I thought I was—was an invention, freedom arose. My previous identity was all made up!
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And it was made up during childhood of various responses to things that scared me. People accused me, or people frightened me, or people threatened me, and what I came back with was a way of being that countered that and made me feel somewhat safe. Personalities: People who have come up with different ways of being that make them feel safe. Some people invented a really boisterous, bossy, controlling way of being, and when it was refined later in life it looked more like just being a leader—aah, he’s a real leader!—but actually it was invented to counter something. Other people are shy and reclusive as they shrink away— they never say much in meetings—but that part of them was invented too. It’s not as if it is in their DNA to be shy. It was an invention to cope with or respond to something— or to have a safe way of being, a way that wouldn’t embarrass them further. We invent these safety masks along the way in early childhood and we create a few more reinventions around the junior high school and high school era, so that the huge fear of being embarrassed by our peers gets countered. So, do I want to continue to be the “ME” that a five-year-old and a fifteen-year-old, and an eighteen-year-old made up? Do I want to live with that forever? Are they the best me? Are they the wisest me? Do I really want to live from a five-year-old’s perspective of how scary the world was? Do I really want to live from a fifteen-year-old’s perspective of how scary other fifteen-year-olds were? How scary relationships were? That would be a nightmare, but it’s a very familiar nightmare to most people.
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The great companies in this world see the value of reinvention. They reinvent themselves almost every day. You never know who they are going to be next, or what they are going to offer you. Who knew I could buy groceries on Amazon? Or watch my son sing a song by looking at my “phone”? You can do that kind of reinvention too. With your “self” and your career. I mean, you’re inventing yourself anyway. Why not reinvent yourself consciously and creatively?
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The good life—the vita beata—is like reading a Russian novel: it takes 200 pages of struggling with the characters before one can start enjoying things. Then the agitation starts to make sense. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Chapter 62
Now here’s a secret insider’s trick that can make you some real money The best and most effective way to build your career is to do such a GREAT job with your existing clients that they renew, expand and refer others to you. That actually happens. When our service is an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10, we never have problems acquiring clients and building a practice. Ralph Waldo Emerson had the perfect formula for this: “Make yourself necessary to somebody.” Then: Stay on the service path you are on. Don’t let family and social “obligations” pull you from your path or you will end up resenting your family and friends and failing professionally as well. Be a warrior about carving out devoted time for client service. If you stay on the service path it doesn’t matter how slowly you walk the path—you will get to where you want to be. The only people not getting to where they want to be are the ones leaving the path. We went to the funeral service of a good friend recently and I still can’t forget the words of a song that was sung in memoriam:
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You can spend your whole life building something from nothing One storm can come and blow it all away… Build it anyway. Why did the song say “build it anyway”? Because it isn’t the something you built that is important, it is the Having Built It inside you that is important. That’s what will never leave you.
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Just as a package sent by mail can bear a stamp “fragile” or “handle with care,” imagine the opposite:“please mishandle” or “be careless, as it benefits from shocks.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Chapter 63
Okay gang, now let’s get out there and benefit from some shocks! What if we could just DROP our concern with how we are being perceived and only connect with people? And I mean really connect, like a magnet connects with metal. We would magnetize and hypnotize the entire world with our next project. Instead we forget to turn ourselves on. We forget to: START ME UP! Great song by the Stones. But I forget that I am the one who starts me up, no one else. I start me up. When they asked the great religious preacher John Wesley how he learned to give such mesmerizing speeches and sermons he said, “I just set myself on fire and let the people watch me burn.” And it doesn’t have to be loud and preachy. It can be a quiet fire. Where do I get this fire? How do I find it? You don’t find it. You write it out to yourself. Like a stage direction. Then you read it and internalize it. And then you let the cameras roll. You go out and get it wrong and make a lot of mistakes.
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You are willing to fail forward. Better than that, you enjoy failing forward. When my grandson was five years old he came to me one day and said, “I love being right.” I said, “Do you?” “Yes, I love being right.” “I like being wrong,” I said. He stopped and he looked at me… stunned. He said, “You like being wrong?” “Yes.” “Why do you like being wrong?” “Because when I am wrong, I can learn something. When I’m right, I don’t learn anything.” And he thought for a minute and he started to smile, and he said, “I’m going to like being wrong now, too!” I said, “That could be fun for you.” So later it happened that I saw him (maybe a month or two later) with a little friend, and when he introduced me he said, “That’s Lalu”—that was his grandfather name for me— “That’s my grandfather, and he likes being wrong.” The other kid looked at me in amazement that I liked being wrong. Kathy, my wife, was in the room at the time. She smiled at the boys and said, “That’s why he’s happy so much of the time.” And how funny that was. But this illustrates something that I think is really important in the area of wealth creation and learning how to prosper. And that is being okay with failure and getting it wrong and staying in action and building on what I learn from mistakes. With my coaching clients we call it “game film.” We call it “game film” because I want them to see that any type of “failure” we talk about in the immediate past can be emotionally neutral. If something didn’t go their way, say
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they didn’t come up with a sale, or they didn’t have a negotiation go their way, we would review the conversation as if we were reviewing game film. I don’t want to make them wrong or have them feel guilty about how they didn’t close their deal. So it’s just game film. Just like when a team, after playing a big game, will all gather together the next Monday and watch film of the game that they played. By watching this game film they can learn so much about how to play next week’s game. They can see where they were out of position and how the other team scored because of it. They can learn wonderful things from this. I remember years ago one of my clients was Dick Tomey, head football coach of the University of Arizona Wildcats. One of the things I noticed about Tomey was that after a game in which his team lost, he always had this strangely energized expression on his face. His eyes were sparkling and he didn’t look exactly happy, but somehow he did look positively focused. And after his team won a game there was a strange foreboding or brooding look on his face as he trotted off the field. And I thought that was interesting, because of course most coaches celebrate wins. And when they lose they look angry and upset. But he was the opposite, in a very subtle way. So I asked him about it one day and he said, “I see what you mean and I’ll tell you why that is. When we lose I’m really excited about all the alterations we can make and everything we can learn from our film of the game. I’m ready to go. I’m ready to really fix this team and shore it up and make it strong for next week based on what we see on the film—all the things we can do differently. But when we win? Well, we get a kind of feeling of being invincible, there’s nothing really left to correct, we only need to show up next
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week. And I don’t like that. I get upset with that attitude, so I’m worried when we win about how to keep the intensity and how to keep people focused. So that’s what you are seeing in my face after each game.” Whenever clients of mine or I have had some breakthroughs in building wealth, or when our own careers start to generate more income, it is usually related to a willingness to take a new approach to failure. We are eager to benefit from things we did “wrong” and things that didn’t work. Most people try to forget what doesn’t work because they have a bad emotional reaction to it. They think “That’s too bad and it’s sad and I wish I hadn’t lost that deal or I wish I hadn’t lost that customer!” But if I can change that to, “Boy, this is terrific, I’ve got a lot to learn here, there’s game film to watch, I’m not afraid to watch it because this customer I lost last week is going to show up again in another identity soon and if I haven’t learned by then how I lost the customer this time around, it’s going to happen again and again.” Most people who are not doing well financially do have patterns—things that keep happening again and again that cause them to lose business. They make it worse when they deliberately shrink their consciousness when bad things occur—as in, “I don’t want to think about the bad news, I want to move on, I need to stay positive, I don’t even want to look at it.” It was interesting to me that Bill Gates of Microsoft once said, “We built our company on customer complaints.” Because when the customers would complain about any part of his computer or software systems they would really be fascinated by the complaint and stay with it. They would have teams studying the complaint so they could change their systems to resolve it. Whereas most people in business operations try to sweep
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customer complaints under the rug, or minimize them and try to get rid of them quickly. “Here’s somebody who’s upset.” “You talk to him.” “No, you talk to him!” “Alright. He’s okay. I talked to him and he’s happy now.” They see complaints as emotional issues. Somebody’s emotionally upset, so I want to make him feel better and hopefully he will go away and I won’t have to deal with his upset any further. But this approach misses the real gold in the situation.. There’s tremendous learning available inside the complaint if they slow down and study it like a game film. Part of creating prosperity is to lose the evaluation of events as negative and positive and see them instead as neutral material—the way a comic sees “negative” things in his life as fresh material—something to build from, something to use for a more prosperous future.
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Chapter 64
This is inside every heartache I feel Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit. Napoleon Hill
This quote becomes an old cliché if I’m not careful. But I don’t want it to be a cliché. I want to have this quote written on my soul. I can’t have it be just some catchy information I try to remember. Because it can free me to spring into action and get extremely creative in response to heartache and adversity. And I have had a ton of financial heartache and adversity over the years. But in the past I always let it take me out of action. So I could wallow in my victim story. So I could just sit there stunned by “misfortune.” Until I learned this truth. Misfortune always (and by that I mean always) contained the seed of an equivalent benefit. Seeing this, I could now grow the seed right away and not wait for “time” (linear time) to heal anything. Dr. Martin Seligman in his excellent book, Flourish, calls the practice of instantly finding the benefit in adversity “posttraumatic growth,” and he backs it up with rather thrilling and
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extensive research studies. Our society and media are fixated on post-traumatic stress because of the strong bias toward (and financial interest in) tragedy. But if I want my life to get better instead of sadder, I’ll go with Dr. Seligman and his proven findings. I’ll bypass the traditional misery, and embrace his verification of post-traumatic growth.
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Chapter 65
Yes there actually IS a cure-all Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all. Tim Ferriss
I love learning from people younger than I am. Tim Ferriss is one of my favorite authors and teachers, and I can say that he has, in many ways, improved my warrior status when it comes to creating a life. Are you trying to make money in a way that is not exciting for you? Step up the excitement factor. Watch the effect it has on your income. Stop shooting for happiness. You are aiming too low.
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Chapter 66
Talk to real people—ask for what you want Basic human contact—the meeting of eyes, the exchanging of words—is to the psyche what oxygen is to the brain. If you’re feeling abandoned by the world, interact with anyone you can. Martha Beck
Often our wealth-creation projects involve staying at home, or being in front of a computer. A lonely place to be. Yet abundance comes from serving others. So any time you are feeling down, or under-motivated, reach out and communicate. Wealth through service is a relationship game, and relationships are created by contributing to the lives of others, sometimes with just a simple, helpful conversation. I was in a seminar led by Byron Katie once when she said, “You could have anything in the world you wanted if you were willing to ask 1,000 people for it.” So far no one has disproven that. Because people tend to quit before they reach 1,000. Before they reach 100? Before they reach 10.
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I have a coach for fitness. A coach for marriage. A coach for golf. Why would I not have a coach for money? Robert Kiyosaki
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Chapter 67
What to do when your wife’s look says, “WTF?” My
friend Ron Wilder is an author and master business coach whose career decision to start an independent business resulted in failure and despair. When he struck out on his own, Ron figured it would be simple—just put out a shingle and clients would show up. He had already done great work for other consulting firms. Why should independent consulting be that hard? But he struggled. Immensely. All sorts of distractions showed up while no clients were showing up. Ron’s dad got very sick and his grandfather died within several months of him starting his business. He took off a lot of time to deal with those issues. (First lesson of solo entrepreneurship: you get as much unpaid vacation as you want.) After several months, he was bleeding cash and depleting savings, with no clients to show for it. He had a home “office,” but he would wander around the house all day, wondering what to do. His daughters were little—three years old and eighteen months—and his wife was not working outside the house. She was very supportive, yet Ron could tell that her concern was growing. She’d ask how he was doing, but as the months
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went by he could see the increasing fear in her face. “Eventually she’d look at me like ‘WTF?’” he said. “She could tell that I was not succeeding in this new venture and was wondering what I was doing all day.” Her worry started out as a concern for Ron, but soon it shifted to concern about her kids. Was her family going to be okay? This guy is just walking around the house looking lost. He isn’t making any money. One night after a tearful conversation with her, Ron realized that he was at a crossroads. Life could not go on like this. She went to bed and he went to his computer to look at Monster.com. He spent several hours looking for jobs. He was ready to go do whatever it took to support his family. “But I really didn’t like my options—none of the positions I saw would be using the consulting skills I had developed. I felt like I’d always be trying to fit myself into a very small box.” At that moment a question occurred to him. If his goal was to create a business that allowed him to use his talents and create the income he wanted, what, exactly, was missing? Because at this point he either had to figure that out or go get a small box job. “The answer came very quickly. What was missing was sales skills. I must either learn how to sell what I do or… give up.” The next realization was even simpler: It was time to make a commitment. So he did—Ron decided to master sales. Not just dabble in it. Not just become competent. But to master it. He promised himself he would convert sales from being the big thing missing in his life to being a powerful presence in it.
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That was eight years ago. Today Ron Wilder has read more than a hundred books on sales and invested almost a quarter of a million dollars in sales training and coaching for himself. He learned and practiced what he learned. Information has become transformation. And because of it, he’s created a thriving business—doing his best work ever—and is now completely secure in his ability to keep getting clients. If he had had a sales job in some company, they probably would have made a similar investment by sending him to sales training. And they themselves would have kept most of the financial benefits of that training. When he made the investment in himself, he was the one who decided how big the returns were going to be, and he himself would keep 100% of those returns. “That’s why I’m a huge advocate for individual investment in coaching and training—not corporate-sponsored training. Skin in the game means everything.” Ron says, “Nathanial Branden advised us to realize that ‘No one is coming.’ That’s the bad news—and the good news. The bad news is that no one is coming to rescue you or bail you out—you have to do it yourself. But when you accept that, it becomes not just good news, but great news. The great news is that you get to truly become an owner and take 100% responsibility for the results you are getting in your life. And when you take ownership and then take action—you get to enjoy what Arthur Brooks calls ‘earned success’—the essential ingredient for true happiness.” Arthur Brooks has written an inspired book called The Road To Freedom. In it he reveals a massive number of research findings that show that money actually is—in an important sense—the root of all happiness. As long as it’s earned money. Because true happiness flows from the action you took to
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earn it. The service you delivered. Today Ron Wilder is one of the happiest people I know.
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Chapter 68
This kind of “service” does not pass the giggle test When I say the word “service,” what do you think of? If you are leaning toward warrior, then I know you are not thinking of “public service.” Often people think of politicians who have been in the government for long periods of time—senators, congressmen, people like that—as being somewhat heroic for spending their lives in “public service.” We see tributes and very expensive dinners featuring toasts to these politicians who have “given their lives over to public service” as if it was a tremendous sacrifice on their parts. This whole “public service” idea has inflicted confusion upon the word “service” in the worst possible way. Because this senator (Republican or Democrat, doesn’t usually matter) sitting there being toasted and roasted is someone who has lived a lifestyle of deal-making and good-old-boy favor-trading while never having to pay for anything. He is being chauffeured and flown around the world like the king of Brunei—on government money. Not his money. He has a huge staff running around doing work for him so that even if he has to sit in a committee hearing you can see the staff around him buzzing like bees—a staff of people who
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have done all the real preparation for that meeting. So, where’s the “service” they are all talking about? Not only does this “public servant” live off other people’s money and do no work of his own, this same public beneficiary gets rich, and receives huge speaking fees. When he comes into office, his net worth is x and when he leaves office it’s 100 times x—how did that occur? Service! Really? No. Some company he did a political (financial) favor for is now going to have him come speak for $50,000 at their big dinner. When presidents come into office without a lot of money and leave multi-millionaires, even though their presidential salary was not all that big, we have to wonder about the term “public service.” It’s a mockery. It’s hilariously mislabeled. It hardly represents a service to the public. This is one of the reasons it’s sometimes hard for clients of mine to understand that the source of all wealth is service. Because they hear terms like “public service” and “a life of service” about these people whom they know are not serving. They know that these people are actually being waited on hand and foot. While performing “public service” from the back of a limo. It’s a tremendous disservice to so tarnish this glorious word. Part of seeing the source of wealth for you and me is to clean up that word and give it a fresh new understanding, so that it really means something. It really means helping someone else, assisting another person, and delivering actual value. Politicians are not public servants. We just call them that
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because we’ve fallen asleep. It’s like the hotel operator said to me this morning. This is your wake up call.
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SORRY: TEMPORARILY OUT OF SERVICE I won’t produce wealth when I’m out of service. Get it? Out of service. Will not work. Because when I am out of service I am out of service. This I mean to whisper to my mind. Every day.
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Chapter 69
This is the powerful formula I spent years and years not wanting to learn I didn’t want to learn this. I held out for years. But I finally accepted it: The harder I am on myself, the easier life is on me. The easier I am on myself, the harder life is on me. And when I talk about being hard on myself, I don’t mean criticism. I mean doing hard things. Hard exercise. Hard work. And the hard job of saying NO to all the people I used to waste my life on as I tried to please them and win their approval. The degree of difficulty involved in saying NO is why I use the word warrior. And the victory that comes from saying YES to creativity, focus and service is why I use the word wealth.
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Each day we demand more from society so that we can demand less from ourselves. Don Colacho
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Chapter 70
How to be a wealth warrior Expect nothing. Create everything.
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The psychological result of building up wealth is a feeling of accomplishment, mastery and success. Drs. Ron and Mary Hulnick Financial Freedom in 8 Minutes a Day
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Publisher’s Afterword
Our commitment to your personal prosperity revolution A message from Maurice Bassett: Steve and I invite you to build on what you’ve learned in Wealth Warrior today by joining the Wealth Warrior Movement. We are committed to supporting you in creating your own personal prosperity revolution! In fact, that’s the sole focus of the inner circle group. And how do we do that? By serving up transformational materials that help you to take ownership of, announce and communicate your own value, strengthen your NO muscle so that you have it when you need it, and say YES to creativity, focus and service. To get things started, we invite you to experience a downloadable audio program from Steve’s ten-program CREATING WEALTH Audio Series. All Wealth Warriors receive this audio series as part of their membership. Use the audio we send you as a tool for transformation. Use it as a tool for finding your inner Wealth Warrior and building prosperity for yourself. Write me at
[email protected] to request the Wealth Warrior audio and please let me know how I may be of service to you. I serve as the director of the movement, I love what I do and what our good work does for people, and I care about the steps you take on your warrior’s journey, right
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from the very first step. Now… Go warrior, venture out and create prosperity!
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Recommended Reading Do the Work, Steven Pressfield The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill Straight Line Leadership, Dusan Djukich Antifragility, Nassim Taleb Life Expectancy, Will Keiper Change Your World One Word at a Time, David Firth Expect to Win—Hate to Lose, Matt Furey Financial Freedom in 8 Minutes a Day, Drs. Ron and Mary Hulnick The Road to Freedom, Arthur Brooks The 100 Watt War, Ron Wilder Poke the Box, Seth Godin The Small Business Millionaire, Sam Beckford and Steve Chandler
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About the Author Steve Chandler is a world-famous personal success coach to people from all walks of life, including bestselling authors, public speakers, CEOs and media personalities, small business owners, university faculty and leaders, major account salespeople and the world’s top business and life coaches. As a corporate trainer he has worked with over thirty Fortune 500 companies and more than 600 other organizations in the areas of goal achievement, ownership culture, and sales and leadership. He has also served as a fundraising consultant and trainer to non-profits and is the co-author of the bestselling Relationshift: Revolutionary Fundraising. Chandler is also a nationally recognized keynote speaker with over 1,000 speeches given throughout the U.S. and Canada. He is the creator and leader of two year-long Steve Chandler Mastermind groups and five Steve Chandler Coaching Schools for top-level business coaches, marketing consultants and life coaches. He has also served as a visiting teacher and lecturer at the University of Santa Monica graduate program in Soul-Centered Leadership and as a special guest coach on the award-winning TV reality program Starting Over. Chandler is the author and co-author of dozens of books,
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including the bestsellers, Time Warrior, 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself, Reinventing Yourself, 100 Ways to Motivate Others, 17 Lies That Are Holding You Back and Fearless. His books have been translated into more than forty foreign-language editions. He is the creator and writer of the popular blog www.imindshift.com. Chandler is a graduate of both the University of Arizona (Creative Writing and Political Science) and the elite Defense Language Institute, Presidio of Monterey, California (Russian language). He is a Cold War veteran, with four years of military service at the U.S. Army Security Agency in Berlin, Germany, and Psychological Warfare at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Chandler lives outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and can be reached at www.stevechandler.com.
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Join the Wealth Warrior Movement JOIN Steve Chandler’s INNER CIRCLE today and receive: • Books by Steve Chandler and others • The acclaimed audio series CREATING WEALTH • A full year of Monthly Wealth Webinars (LIVE and recorded for you) with Steve Chandler and special guests who share their personal stories and inspiring advice about creating prosperity • A full year of 3 fresh emailed Wealth Tips and Prosperity Motivators written by Steve and sent to you each week • Unexpected goodies and surprises GO TO www.stevechandler.com to register
If you put together the best of Anthony Robbins and Wayne Dyer it still wouldn’t be half as good as what Steve Chandler offers. Dale Dauten Boston Globe
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Books by Steve Chandler Time Warrior The Life Coaching Connection Fearless The Woman Who Attracted Money Shift Your Mind Shift the World 17 Lies That Are Holding You Back 10 Commitments to Your Success Reinventing Yourself The Story of You 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself How to Get Clients 50 Ways to Create Great Relationships The Joy of Selling RelationShift (with Michael Bassoff) The Small Business Millionaire (with Sam Beckford) 100 Ways to Create Wealth (with Sam Beckford) 9 Lies That Are Holding Your Business Back (with Sam Beckford) Business Coaching (with Sam Beckford) 100 Ways to Motivate Others (with Scott Richardson) The Hands Off Manager (with Duane Black) Two Guys On the Road (with Terrence Hill) Two Guys Read the Box Scores (with Terrence Hill) Two Guys Read Jane Austen (with Terrence Hill) Two Guys Read Moby Dick (with Terrence Hill) Two Guys Read the Obituaries (with Terrence Hill) Powerful Graceful Success
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Audio by Steve Chandler CHOICES for a More Powerful YOU (Includes the following twelve downloadable mp3 audio programs by Steve Chandler) 1) Are You a DOER or a FEELER? We all have a choice to be a “Doer” or a “Feeler.” Steve shows how the mind, body and spirit are intertwined and how we can move beyond feelings-inspired resistance and build more DOING into our lives. 2) Choosing “I don’t know what to do” and “I don’t know how to do it” are common complaint-themes in people’s lives. Transform the “I don’t know” lie by choosing. Yes, it really is that simple. Learn how to use the power of choosing to move out of stagnation and into action. 3) Expectation vs. Agreement Creating agreements works wonders. Up-vibe your personal and professional relationships by learning to create agreements instead of expecting others to do things (and then being disappointed when they don’t). 4) Information vs. Transformation Break free from “information addiction” by applying, testing and experimenting with what you’ve learned. Step out of your comfort zone and into transformation. Steve shares his own experiences of transformation-based learning. 5) Is It a Dream or a Project? Steve shows how we can get what we want by cultivating a
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mindset of choosing. Move beyond wishing and dreaming and have your life’s adventure be one of choosing and converting dreams into projects. 6) Purpose vs. Personality Everything looks frightening when you’re living from your personality rather than from purpose. Make friends with purpose and take it with you throughout the day. To live from purpose, wake up to what you’re up to and practice it. 7) SERVING vs. PLEASING People People often confuse serving people with pleasing people. Steve shows how the Owner mindset is serving and the Victim mindset is pleasing. This program gives clarity on what serving is and does and how you can benefit from making it a life practice. 8) TESTING vs. TRUSTING TESTING vs. TRUSTING is a distinction which can truly strengthen your day! The active path of testing and testing and testing throughout your day can become your path to mastery of any activity you wish to master. 9) The How To vs. The Want To Coming from a place of “Want To” means the “How To” is never a problem, because the best “How To” is to have more “Want To” than you’ve ever had before. 10) The Owner / Victim Choice Based on the bestselling book, Reinventing Yourself. Owners have an awareness of their own freedom of choice and they love to make and keep agreements. They own their own spirit and energy and have a sense of personal responsibility and self-control. Victims are victims of circumstance who navigate their days based on their shifting feelings.
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11) Who You Know vs. What You Do It’s who you know – that’s how you succeed in life. Wrong! It’s really all about what you do and how you serve. Put your creative energy into your work first and foremost, rather than into networking and collecting “friends.” 12) Why Should I Reinvent Myself? Reinventing yourself can be a fun thing to do and people who get really good at it can see that it serves them every time they do it. Embrace reinventing yourself as a way of being and experience the fun and the joy that it can bring you. CHOICES for a More Powerful YOU and other audio programs are available on SteveChandler.com Email Maurice Bassett at
[email protected] for a sample audio program.
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BONUS CHAPTERS FROM
TIME WARRIOR How to defeat procrastination, people-pleasing, self-doubt, over-commitment, broken promises and chaos
Steve Chandler
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Introduction What is non-linear time management? Non-linear time management is a commitment to action in the present moment. It's looking at a task and choosing NOW or “not now.” If it's not now, it's got to be NEVER, or placed in a time capsule that has a spot on the calendar and therefore out of the mind. The mind must remain clear and empty of all future considerations. In non-linear time management there is no line extending from my mind into the future. No tapeworm of unfinished business coming out of my body. Non-linear time management is best expressed by Elvis Presley when he sings, “It's now or never, come hold me tight.” The old-fashioned time management programs had a huge, burdensome focus on the future. The line of tasks stretched out forever into the future. It was fear-based and it was overwhelming to have so much of a future to carry around with you. It resulted in massive, pathological procrastination. Everything got put off in the name of perfectionism. Nothing was bold or reckless anymore. Therefore there wasn't much astonishing success happening for the world-weary practitioner.
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But when I teach people to go non-linear, a strange thing happens. New life and energy come in. When they open their emails they don't get to save them for later. They have to deal with them if they open them. Like little attackers in a computer game, there is no longer anywhere to hide. Life becomes a great game and everything is handled right now on the spot. All fear comes from picturing the future. Putting things off increases that fear. Soon we are nothing but heavy minds weighing down on weary brains. Too much future will do that. Only a warrior's approach will solve this. A warrior takes his sword to the future. A warrior also takes his sword to all circumstances that don't allow him to fully focus. I am a coach by profession, and when I work with a client who is “overwhelmed” with too much to do and not enough time to do it I will often ask them to give me an example of one of the things they are burdened by every time they think about it. The client will give me an example and we will do that thing right now. The client is amazed. The only thing missing in this client's life was a bias for action. Most people think too much. Then they compound that problem by studying the feelings that come up for them as a result of that thinking. All this time that they spend thinking and feeling they could have been taking action. In a non-linear way. Linear time starts with your birth and ends (at the end of the line) with your death. Along that long linear line it's just one damn thing after another. Then the lights go out. What was the point? Non-linear time management stops all that weary nonsensical treading on the road to one's destiny. Rather than inching along horizontally you must simply rise up. Your life can now become vertical. Now you don't
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postpone challenges, you rise to them. You become a warrior. And it works. How, exactly, does it work? This book will show you exactly how it works. Steve Chandler Phoenix, Arizona January 2011
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The successful warrior is the average person with laser-like focus. Bruce Lee
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Chapter 1
Why not do something with your time? Bruce
Lee identified the warrior as an average person with laser-like focus. But what if the average person has no focus, laser-like or otherwise? We average people are usually too diffuse to connect with anything. We scatter our forces. We try to please. We unconsciously change ourselves every day while desperately trying not to. We try to cling to the foolish consistency known as a permanent personality, but it never holds. One foul mood sweeps in and no one recognizes us. Or a buoyant mood overcomes us and we get our hopes up. Then the mood fades and we become someone else again. Who are we? Buoyant or foul-tempered? We fight to regain control and come in somewhere in the middle. We don’t want people to be afraid of us, but neither do we want them to expect too much. All our personalities, therefore, are crafted from the most hair-raising mediocrity. It’s the middle way. Team Mediocre. All the energy it takes to try to hold this mediocre personality—this one consistent person—together could have been used to create something. But who knew? I mean really, when you were growing up,
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who told you that? You had a hard enough time dealing with Santa not being real. How were you to handle yourself being a total fabrication?
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Chapter 2
How to keep your soul alive To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying 'Amen' to what the world tells you to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. Robert Louis Stevenson
When
I accept the role of time warrior, I will seek first to keep my soul alive. Instead of what most people do. They try to keep their fake identity alive. As warrior (not worrier) I will wake up and create my day based on how I prefer to serve this world. And I can do this in any format, including washing dishes at the hotel, if I do it with enough love, energy and humor. People who do “lowly” jobs with love and energy find themselves being promoted and offered other “better” jobs very quickly. Because they understand what Robert Frost meant when he said, “The way out is through.” Other people “stuck” in “lowly jobs” where they imagine they are being unjustly “nickeled-and-dimed” are always looking for a way out. Never seeing that the way out is through. A warrior does not “get out.” A warrior goes through.
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Chapter 3
No, you’ll never find time You will never 'find' time for anything, if you want time you must make it. Charles Buxton
And just how do you make time? It’s made in your mind. By slowing down. Paradoxically. By creating your day. By being ruthless. With great swings and swipes of your samurai sword. You develop a brutal grace. Cutting out the unnecessary. Instead of letting your calendar abuse you, and letting people use you. Why do you let all these other people clutter up your day? Because you want to please them? Because you believe their approval is everything? I have never seen a greater time-waster than peoplepleasing. The nervous habit of scurrying around trying to win the approval of others. Answering all their emails the minute they come in, taking their every call, fulfilling every request… interrupting myself and my own dream over and over. There’s no time left for achievement. For creation. On this matter of people-pleasing, I learned more in Byron Katie’s nine-day school than in any other nine-day period in
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my life by a factor of about a thousand. Katie says, “God spare me from the desire for love, approval and appreciation. This would be my one prayer because the answer to this prayer brings the end of time and space.” That’s non-linear time management in a nutshell. So Katie, what is there when there is no time and space? She says there is energy, love’s pure energy. She says, “It’s the energy of pure unlimited mind, set free in all its power and goodness.” A time warrior is a peaceful warrior but a warrior still. Peacefully taking a sword to all those negative, frightening, depressing thoughts that are automatically believed… so that a great, timeless, active day can be created. A day with no time in it unless you want to make some.
