Profits Are Better Than Wages by Jim Rohn

My mentor, when I was 25 years old, dropped a phrase on me that changed my life forever when he said, “Profits are better than wages. Wages will make you a living. Profits can make you a fortune.”

You know it is a bit difficult to get rich on wages, but anybody can get rich on profits. Profits change your whole attitude, even if you start part time—whether it’s part time on your entrepreneurial business, network marketing company or service business.

It can be a landscape business in the summer or hanging Christmas lights in the winter. It can be training, consulting or tutoring. It can be your hobby, such as painting, writing, crafts, woodworking, computers or cooking. But once you start investing even part-time effort into your own business, you will find how much more exciting it is to get up in the morning and go to work on your fortune, even if you’re only spending a few hours a week doing it.

The Great Leadership Challenge by Jim Rohn

If you want to be a leader who attracts quality people, the key is to become a person of quality yourself. Leadership is the ability to attract someone to the gifts, skills, and opportunities you offer as an owner, as a manager, as a parent. What’s important in leadership is refining your skills. All great leaders keep working on themselves until they become effective. Here are some specifics:

Learn to be strong but not impolite. It is an extra step you must take to become a powerful, capable leader with a wide range of reach. Some people mistake rudeness for strength. It’s not even a good substitute.

Next, learn to be kind but not weak. We must not mistake weakness for kindness. Kindness isn’t weak. Kindness is a certain type of strength. We must be kind enough to tell someone the truth. We must be kind enough and considerate enough to lay it on the line. We must be kind enough to tell it like it is and not deal in delusion.Next, learn to be bold but not a bully. It takes boldness to win the day. To build your influence, you’ve got to walk in front of your group. You’ve got to be willing to take the first arrow, tackle the first problem, discover the first sign of trouble. Like the farmer, if you want any rewards at harvest time, you have got to be bold and face the weeds and the rain and the bugs straight on. You’ve got to seize the moment.

Here’s the next step. You’ve got to learn to be humble but not timid. You can’t get to the high life by being timid. Some people mistake timidity for humility. But humility is a virtue; timidity is a disease. It’s an affliction. It can be cured, but it is a problem.

In addition to reading and listening, you also need a chance to do some talking and sharing. I have some people in my life who help me with important life questions, who assist me in refining my own philosophy, weighing my values and pondering questions about success and lifestyle.Humility is almost a God-like word. A sense of awe. A sense of wonder. An awareness of the human soul and spirit. An understanding that there is something unique about the human drama versus the rest of life. Humility is a grasp of the distance between us and the stars, yet having the feeling that we’re part of the stars.
Here’s a good tip: Learn to be proud but not arrogant. It takes pride to build your ambitions. It takes pride in your community. It takes pride in a cause, in accomplishment. But the key to becoming a good leader is to be proud without being arrogant.
Do you know the worst kind of arrogance? Arrogance from ignorance. It’s intolerable. If someone is smart and arrogant, we can tolerate that. But if someone is ignorant and arrogant, that’s just too much to take.
The next step is learning to develop humor without folly. In leadership, we learn that it’s okay to be witty but not silly; fun but not foolish.
Next, deal in realities. Deal in truth. Save yourself the agony of delusion. Just accept life as it is. Life is unique. The whole drama of life is unique. It’s fascinating.
Life is unique. Leadership is unique. The skills that work well for one leader may not work at all for another. However, the fundamental skills of leadership can be adopted to work well for just about everyone: at work, in the community, and at home.

Today’s Word: WILLING johnmaxwellteam.comReceive inspiration and encouragement videos from John C. Maxwell with the 'A Minute With Maxwell' daily free videos.

How to go from Employee to Entrepreneur

Most people are not raised as children in an entrepreneurial family, therefore, their model for earning money is a “job”, working for a company and a boss who places them in a strict horizontal job function where one day is mostly like the previous day.
Over time this condition creates an underlying deep dependence on someone else providing the job or earning options available to them, and whatever becomes available is still mostly horizontal and again clearly defined.
In this situation of employee your income level is totally determined by someone other than yourself.
Over the years this dependency deepens and becomes habitual. One might change jobs but the condition of dependency still persists and grows stronger as we grow older.
There is however a “payoff” from this situation! Some or all of these conditions most likely apply to you as an employee:
You’re working days and hours are pretty much routine; 9-5pm and not too much stress during those hours.
Your benefits are in place like health insurance and 401(k)
Your coffee breaks are specified as to time, and your vacations are paid vacations and also specified.
The workday ends around 5 PM and you have the rest of the evening to do what you want to do.
By Friday, you can’t wait for the working day to end, anticipating what you’re going to do or enjoy over the weekend…. Clearly the happiest day of your working week is Friday.
By Sunday night you are anticipating Monday morning without much excitement and perhaps even dread of going to your job.
Let’s face it. We humans are conditioned early in life to feel safe and comfortable with routine… the job solution. But when you consider the actual financial fitness of most “employees”, it becomes obvious that the vast majority of employees working today will need to work past their planned retirement date to survive in old age.
We must also admit that we humans have great potential and inclination to procrastinate. So most as they say “kick the can down the road” and simply stay with their routine and hope that they will not be one of the sad financial statistics in their old age.
However the clock stops for no one. You become older and your financial recovery time is shortened everyday and your marketable work skills are becoming obsolete as those days pass.
In other words – - – when you might need the money the most, nobody will be interested in providing it to you.
What then will be available to you? Haven’t you noticed how many retired people today are working packing groceries or doing menial jobs?
If you think this is not a serious problem for millions of people as they reach retirement age, you are simply not keeping up with the financial crisis that we will be living with well into the future.
Governments around the world are facing the need to cut entitlement and retirement programs or face bankruptcy. The same goes for the corporations of America. The assurances of the past will be changed in the future. No more guarantees… To be continued in the next article…
To your success,
George Zalucki