Rediscovering Passion

Passion for life is a very important thing and as we get older, unfortunately, many of us lose our passion for life. I’m sure you have noticed that little kids seem to have the most passion for life. For a kid, most things are new to them and, as we all know, novelty is what they thrive on.

In our later years, we’ve seen so much and done so much that most things are not new to us. That makes it easy to lose our passion. You may feel that you have lost some of your passion and you ask yourself, “Why don’t I have passion for my life now?” or “Why don’t I know what I want in life?” Those two questions are particularly bothersome if you once had great passion for the things you did and then, as you got older, you lost some of that passion.

If that has not happened to you, maybe someone you know and care about has hit that wall. Far too many people give up on life. They fear striking out in aggressive, new directions. They fear risk. They fear the possibility of failure and losing what they have.

With some new insight and some very directed work, that passion for living can come screaming back for you or someone you love that you want to help. It’s all about continuing to turn what you really want, what you dream of, into specific goals and then transforming them step-by-step into reality – your reality!

A good way to start is to write it all down. First, ask yourself specific questions, like the ones I list below. Write down the thoughts that each of these questions stimulate. Don’t just think about them.

1. Do I want to substantially raise my level of contentment and fulfillment?
2. Do I want to become a better person?
3. Do I want to be known as a person of accomplishment?
4. Do I want to be in great physical and mental shape with ideal health my entire life?
5. Do I want to live a very long, active life?
6. Do I want to make a fortune – a million dollars, or $10 million, or even $100 million? (Think of all the good you could do with that much money!)
7. Do I want the choices and possibilities in my life that making my own fortune could give me?
8. Do I want to leave the world a better place than I found it?
9. Do I want to help others as I help myself?
10. Do I want to travel and experience the entire world and its cultures?

Again, be sure to write down your honest responses to the self-searching questions above. It’s a good idea for you to develop some of your own life questions and answer those too!

In fact, add two last questions for yourself:

1. What do you have a true passion for in your life?
2. What part of your life or past life, including your childhood, got you so excited that you totally lost track of time?

Our Short Lives Needs Big Passion

 

 

I just asked a printer to print a couple thousand copies of my book, How to Ignite Your Passion for Living, since I ran out of copies to sell or give away. I was reading a bit of what I wrote many years ago and I was surprised to realize that the words in that book were reigniting my passion, so I wanted to share some of those words with you.

Let me start with Chapter 2 which is entitled, “Short Life needs BIG Passion”.

• Life really is too darn short to live without passion.
• Time squandered is wasted–gone forever!
• Don’t be like those who, later in life, realize that they missed out on so many opportunities. I believe most people, when looking back at their lives, are in more pain over the things they didn’t do than over things they failed at while trying to do them.
• We receive long-lasting benefit, and yes, even deep satisfaction from working hard and giving something worthwhile our all.
• There are many who think the way to achieve satisfaction in life is by going after pleasure. They think that more and more pleasure will put more contentment in their lives. So sorry. It doesn’t work that way.
• There’s a huge difference between deep, enduring satisfaction and fleeting pleasure; between passion and a good time. At a gut level you already know this. The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake leads to misery.
• It’s also not easy to always remain at a high level of satisfaction and contentment with an effervescent passion for life. There are plenty of setbacks. Even, at times, huge fists of adversity may pound us in the face.
• Setbacks and adversity often reveal to us the great lessons of life if we would just learn from them.
• I’ve certainly had my share of setbacks, even tragedies. I wouldn’t choose to be faced with these tragedies but I must say that, since they did happen, they served as huge life lessons and wake-up calls that I don’t think I could have learned any other way.

Give these words some thought, set big goals, and go after them with all your energy and heart. You won’t be sorry!

 

And if you would like a copy of How to Ignite Your Passion for Living, you can get it here on my website.

 

 

Creating Your Own Novelty

 

I’ve written before on this great thing called “novelty” and how it can excite our brains big time. In today’s COVID world we may feel like we are totally locked down, but I’d say it’s time to use our brains and think our way out of and beyond the lock down. Now, how do we do that?

Well, there is one thing that could help you now while giving you a great experience later. How about taking lots of time to research and plan a big novel trip or vacation, so when the pandemic is over, you are ready to take that great trip! I mean, if we are smart and use our brains, we could plan lots of novel things and maybe even carry some of them out right now. Like, hey, how about writing a book? And while you’re at it, draft a plan for selling that book online or to bookstores. In other words, create your own novelty.

Have you ever noticed how children and young people are always trying something new, pushing themselves, eager for adventure while older people seem to be content to do the same things they always have done and in the same old way? That’s really just a generalization as I know many older people, myself included, that still continuously seek out new and challenging experiences. However, there is a sense of complacency that is easy to fall into as we get older or as the obligations of our life wear us down.

As physical energy wanes so does our ambition and, next thing we know, our brains turn off and we are just living on autopilot. It’s at that point that making any change in our lives gets very, very difficult. The thinking is our brains don’t wear out the same way as the rest of our body. Normally, the brain is still willing and able to do its job – learning, solving problems, and amassing knowledge even when we physically feel worn out. But when faced with a lot of stress or just dull repetitious experience the brain deteriorates.

To keep your brain in top shape, give it the novelty it craves. Educating yourself through books, television shows such as those found on PBS and the History channel, and quality information on the internet will certainly help, but remember, your brain is a multi-sensory organ. Keep that great word and concept of novelty in your mind and pursue it always. Feed it. Don’t let COVID trap you.

We all can still get out of the house and experience new sights, smells, sounds, flavors, and textures. New experiences will boost both your physical and mental energies and motivate you to do even more. In fact, if you have lots of time on your hands, go and create a bucket list of that stuff you always wanted to do before you kick the bucket. Yes, just like Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson did in that movie The Bucket List. I sure know that having my own bucket list motivates me especially in these COVID times.

Ok, you and I know what to do. Now so let’s go and do it!

Duplicating Success

 

As I mentioned last week, I love a good success story and have often tried to get to know these big successful people. In a few cases, they even offered to be my mentor. I really believe that the mentoring was one of the most important contributors to my financial success.

I’m also a huge believer in seeing what other super successful people do and then going out and doing the same thing. I did it with my first book after seeing what Joe Karbo, author of The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches, did to sell his books. I got to know him and then did the same things he did, selling 2 million copies of my first book.

And a long time ago, I read of a guy that converted his apartment units into condos, selling them to existing tenants or new buyers. I took that idea and converted 70 plus apartment units I had in Pennsylvania to condos, quickly selling out to most of the renters who were already in them and, wow, did I make a quick profit of over $7 million! Did that surprise me and please me? Oh yeah… big time!

I also looked to other people when I started fixing up houses. Realizing that the decorating part wasn’t really my thing, I picked other people’s brains to get the ideas I needed. Picking people’s brains is pretty easy since people like to talk about themselves and what they do for a living. I would simply take designers, architects and other professionals to lunch and get ideas for the cost of a meal. I would also look at other nicely fixed up houses. I have gone so far as to exactly copy the look of a neighboring house I was fixing up because I wasn’t sure what to do with it. That little bit of copying got that house sold super-fast!

It’s amazing when I travel to new and different countries too. I see a lot of ways people in other countries are being successful and not just when it comes to making money. For instance, in Europe, people eat much smaller portions, have tiny refrigerators because they buy food fresh so often, and they take time to relax when they eat. We could learn a lot from the way they eat over there that would be healthier for us all.

All of these things are something that anyone can copy and, yes, that means you! Keep your eyes and mind open and you might just see things you can duplicate to make a better life for yourself and maybe even make a fortune.

Inspired by Success

I absolutely love reading about super successful people and many times I go out of my way to actually meet them and get to know them. Just paying attention to other success stories can teach you a lot and help you find your own big successes. Here is an old story of success but one we can learn from all these years later.

Wallace A. Wright Jr. is an excellent example of what leverage can do to help a person have super financial success. He had a dream of converting an old, beat-up bus barn in Salt Lake City into a collection of quaint shops and galleries based on San Francisco’s famous Ghirardelli Square.

It all started back in 1973 when Wallace, an Air national Guard pilot, was in a jet fighter streaking across the West. He’d led a formation of three F86 jets on a training flight to San Francisco. There, he saw, for the first time, the celebrated Ghirardelli Square–a chocolate factory turned into a potpourri of quaint shops and galleries. That’s when he thought, “Wow. Now that’s what I’d like to see in Salt Lake City someday.”

Mr. Wright had the ambition and the dream, but he needed the big, long lever known as “other people’s money”. It took some time, and he had his difficulties, but he eventually found that lever and less than a decade later, a 10-acre plot, once the home of slumbering streetcars, became Trolley Square. Back in its day, his development, Trolley Square was Salt Lake City’s biggest man-made attraction.

Trolley Square is now a vibrant, shopping-entertainment complex. Some of the 30 retail shops are anchored, at seemingly improbable angles, beneath the steel girders and glass skylight of the old car barn roofs. Wrought ironwork abounds. So do ornate staircases, woodwork, and stained glass, much of it salvaged from doomed mansions before they crumbled under the wrecker’s bulldozer. I’ve been there many times and it truly is impressive. I even had the privilege of meeting and getting to know Wallace.

I think this story is incredible and shows all of us how powerful the brain, and a determined spirit, can be. We should all note that he made his fortune by just being very observant of other people’s success and pushing himself to actually go out and do it. We all should be looking out for things that show great success and put our minds and bodies to work to do something similar.

Be Your Own Champion

These pandemic times have pushed me to go back and read some of my journal entries starting in February 1975 all the way to right now. My writing and the goals I logged has excited me to do more goal setting and more writing in my journals.

I have also been re-reading my blogs. I just re-read a post I wrote back in 2009 where I talked about my good friend and Olympic champion Jimmy Shea. He set goals for himself and then, with a ton of perseverance and very hard work, he won, not one, but two gold medals–one in the World Championships in 1999 and another in the winter Olympics in 2002.

I hope you will take the time to read the attached blog about Jimmy Shea and hopefully it will motivate you to make lists and set goals for yourself.

From the post “Meeting a Champion …” April 29, 2009:

This is a picture with me and Jimmy Shea Jr. He came to one of my book signings at Costco. Jimmy is an Olympic champion with quite a story. Jimmy describes his life and reaching his goals, overcoming blocks to becoming a champion:

As a youth growing up in Lake Placid, NY, Jim’s involvement in sports helped him overcome the doubt he experienced due to his battle with dyslexia. Having a severe learning disorder taught Jim the importance of perseverance and hard work, a lesson emphasized by his father and grandfather, both Winter Olympic athletes.

When Jim competed in the 2002 Winter Olympics (in the Men’s Skeleton), he became the only American to have the distinction of being a third generation Olympian. In 1932 his Grandfather, speed skater Jack Shea, became the first American to win two Winter Olympic Gold medals. In 1964 Jim’s father, Jim Shea, Sr. competed in the Nordic Combined at the Innsbruck Winter Olympics.

Jimmy also believes in giving back. He founded the Shea Family Foundation to help young Olympians in the sports he and his family have competed in for generations.

It’s great meeting people like Jimmy at book signings – thanks for coming!

 

So, while we all have tons of time, we should be putting our minds towards great goals we want to set for ourselves. We have the time to make those lists. And, as you know from reading my blog, making lists is critical to future success as is the act of writing them down. Those are great first steps to being your own champion!

Persistent Genius

Let’s look at another famous and super successful person this week, someone who had some very tough times and setbacks that, for many if not most people, would have forced them to give up and say goodbye to their big dreams and great hopes. I think you may have heard of him – his name is Albert Einstein.

Einstein didn’t even start talking until he was 3 years old and didn’t read at all until he was 7. That by itself wouldn’t be classified as tough times or a big setback but later, when he was in school, he poorly. He wouldn’t respond to the teacher when asked a question or he would take forever and then would whisper a response. He was also known for being incredibly forgetful and absent- minded. He would often forget to put on his socks and many other basic things. Many people believed that Albert Einstein was mentally retarded although he did excel at mathematics from a young age and even taught himself algebra and geometry one summer when he was 12 years old.

At the age of 16, he applied to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich but was turned down after he failed the entrance exam. He was advised to finish his secondary schooling, which he did, successfully enrolling in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Zürich Polytechnic school at the age of 17.

Quoting from Darcy Andries great book, The Secret of Success, Is Not a Secret, “It was not until after the first of Einstein’s theories, the ‘Special Theory of Relativity’, was published that the scientific community truly recognized his talent. However, even then many scientists attacked his theories, calling them ‘worthless and misleading’ and asserted that Einstein ‘has not a logical mind.’ None of these kinds of comments and failures stopped him. He became professor extraordinary at Zurich, and later a professor of theoretical physics at Prague. The highlight of his scientific career came in 1921, when Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics.”

So, here’s a guy who had many reasons to pack it up and not chase any big dream or goal but, wow, look at what he did and who he turned out to be. Even though I am pretty sure that good ole Albert didn’t have a clue that 100 years after winning the Nobel Prize he would still be famous and known worldwide. Alex Johnson, a reporter for MSNBC, said this about Einstein: “Albert Einstein’s impact on the world was so immense that any assessment must range beyond science to take in the multifarious ways he changed culture.”

These stories and many others certainly inspire and motivate me to never give up on my hopes, dreams and goals. I hope you feel the same way.

Success is Measured by Obstacles

The famous Booker T. Washington once said, “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.”  Darcy Andries, author of The Secret of Success is Not a Secret, certainly underscores that comment in terms of the obstacles that have often proceeded the rise of so very many famous and successful people. Her book lists more than 250 super successful people who persevered through huge setbacks and failures to become big-time successes.

Take Rowland Hussey Macy, who tried and failed many times before he found success. He tried to start and operate a needle and thread store in Boston, and later a store that sold European-made dry goods. He failed both times. Then, after an unsuccessful store in Marysville, California, opened with his brother during the 1849 goldrush, he returned to the East Coast to open another dry goods store in a town north of Boston, an endeavor that eventually forced him into bankruptcy. He then moved to New York City and opened yet another store which ended disastrously when it was robbed and then burned down. Ugh.

Most people, I think, would have given up at that point but not Rowland Macy. He rebuilt, opening a little fancy dry goods store at 14^th Street and 6^th Avenue in New York City, north of the city’s other dry goods stores, called R. H. Macy & Co. After initial encouraging sales, he expanded, eventually occupying 11 adjacent buildings, each selling different categories of merchandise and effectively launching what we now call a department store.

By the 1870’s Macy’s store was averaging more than $1 million in annual sales and it has grown ever since. Now known simply as Macy’s, would you believe that little shop has grown into more than 850 stores and has gross sales in the double-digit billions?

I don’t know about you or your significant other, but my wife certainly helps Macy’s stay in business and thrive. I don’t know whether to thank Rowland Macy or complain! Unfortunately, I can’t do either since he checked out of life in 1877 at the young age of 55. But I’ve got to hand it to him – with all those setbacks spanning a period of nearly 14 years, he kept at it anyways and, I think most people would admit, he did okay for himself in the end.

 

Never Giving Up

Last week I talked about the fact that there is really no big secret to big success. In the beginning of the great book by Darcy Andries, The Secret to Success, she quotes a very smart and very successful man, Colin Powell. He said, “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.” Then Darcy made the wise comment that “You can learn a lot from failure, but that requires you to continue moving forward despite having failed.”

As promised, I want to share with you some of the setbacks and failures of a few famous people who never would give up and who eventually were very, very successful. I want to start with the great basketball player Bob Cousy, who was my hero when I was a young man playing in a great basketball tournament in the Olympic stadium in Rome, Italy.  I wanted so badly to be like Bob Cousy and play professional basketball. We won the Rome tournament and I got a basketball scholarship to Utah State University but that’s as far as I got. No pro basketball for me.

I wish I had known back then Cousy’s story of all his setbacks, turndowns, and losses.  I really think that if I had read that story back when I was struggling as a University player, I would have doubled down and not given up. I think I would have done more and practiced more and pushed myself to the limits, maybe even seeking out a personal coach. Here is a summary of Cousy’s story.

Bob Cousy didn’t pick up a single basketball until he was 12 years old and although he tried, he was cut from the school team twice back then. He kept practicing and practicing though. Then he slipped and fell and broke his right arm but he still didn’t give up. He just switched to using his left hand to shoot ball. Wow. He was now ambidextrous and became the star player of the team. After high school, he went on to play college and earned an All-American statue 3 times, helping his team win 26 straight games. He turned pro in 1950 and went on to be voted MVP in 1957 and then received many other great honors including induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1970.

Think about that and what huge determination and perseverance it must have taken for him to stick with his dream. We all have setbacks and losses so the real key or secret to success for almost any goal or venture is to NEVER, NEVER GIVE UP! It’s a very wise person who seeks help from others through books and seminars, or pushing super successful people to be your coach, your teacher, and your inspiration.  So, bottom line here is, if you have set big goals and dreams and you haven’t yet been successful yet, rededicate yourself to those dreams and never give up.

Affirming Your Success

In my post last week, I quoted Richard Paul Evans’ book, The 5 Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me, and, of course, the very first lesson is simply “Decide to Be Wealthy”. In other words, make a commitment, set goals, and then, of course, act on those goals. To do this, you need the right mindset, one that is consistently and firmly placed in your head.

If you are smart, and have done even a little bit of homework, you know that things like fancy, expensive cars are not important and, in fact, will slow you down as surely as the value of that fancy car will drop in value. Your money needs to be put into assets that go up in value. Working hard on creating a great, big image of wealth is not the road you want, or should, take. Remember your goal is to BE wealthy not just to look wealthy.

Even if you are in terrible financial shape right now, it’s never too late to set big, financial goals and go to work on them. Once you make the decision to become wealthy, those little things called affirmations or self-talk can be a huge help. I know from experience that making a list of affirmations that I then repeat to myself on a regular basis gave a big boost to my mental attitude and lead me to actions that made me millions of dollars.

Chellie Campbell, a great writer of books and articles, has some great affirmations. I will share with you 14 out of a list of 50 super affirmations that help her and her many readers. I encourage you to take a look at this list and repeat them over and over in your mind and out loud too. It’s amazing how just saying stuff like this to yourself, even though they may not yet have happened, can bring about changes that do end up happening.

1. People love to give me money!
2. I am rich and wonderful.
3. I am now earning a great big income doing what satisfies me.
4. Something wonderful is happening to me today–I can feel it.
5. All my bills are paid up in full and I still have all this money.
6. My affirmations work for me, whether I believe they will or not. (This is for the skeptics among you.)
7. A lot more money is coming into my life. I deserve it and will use it for my good and others.
8. All my clients praise me and pay me!
9. I am a money magnet!
10. Money comes to me easily and effortlessly, waking and sleeping.
11. I am now highly pleasing to myself in other people’s presence.
12. I walk, talk, look, act, think, and am rich!
13. I am a winner–I win often and I win big!
14. I now receive large sums of money just for being me!

Wow. That is quite an amazing list of affirmations. Obviously, they are not all happening right now, but studies have shown that repeating affirmations to oneself can bring about many changes that eventually make things happen just like the affirmations that were repeated.

So, when you really decide to be wealthy, and mean it to your core, then repeating affirmations like these will not sound or seem out of the question or ridiculous. I had and have my favorite affirmations over the years and my first couple were:

• I will save at least 10 to 15% of my gross income for later investments
• I will be a millionaire by age 30 (Oops I missed that one. I became a millionaire at age 31.)

Go ahead and make your own list of affirmations and try and keep repeating that list over and over and I think you might be surprised, like I was, how greatly they help us to reach our goals.

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