how to become rich - Donald Trump - millionair audiobook

Succeeding Through Failure

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. --Michael Jordan, Former Professional Basketball Player and Entrepreneur

How did failure get such a bad name? When did it become something to avoid rather than something to learn from? If you fear failure, did this come mostly from your parents or other caregivers, or mostly from your school experience, or both?

I guess I was lucky that my parents didn't care how I did in school. I don't ever remember the word 'failure' being used as I was growing up. It wasn't a concept that I even thought about. My view was that I would keep trying to do something until I became good at it.

I remember that I wanted to get good at free throws. We had a basketball hoop in our back yard; I would spend hours practicing free throws and I finally got really good at it. I can't remember how many I could do in a row, but it was a lot. It never occurred to me that I wouldn't succeed at getting good at it - with enough practice. I did this with many things in my life, and I was able to get good at many things. It didn't matter to me how long it took - what mattered was that each time I 'failed', I learned. I didn't even see it as failure when I missed a shot - it was just a learning experience.

Looking back, this was such a blessing for me. When I read one of my favorite books, "Mindset" by Carol Dweck, I realized what a blessing this part of my childhood really is. People who fear failure have what she calls a 'fixed mindset.' This means that they are so afraid of failure that they never even make the effort to try. If you are stuck in your life, you might be stuck in a fixed mindset, being too afraid to make the effort required to succeed, because you have such a judgment on failure. You might be operating from a belief system that if you can't do something well right away, people will judge you as stupid.

This fear may be keeping you stuck.

People who don't worry about failure have what Dr. Dweck calls a 'growth mindset.' This means that they receive great joy in making effort toward what they want and don't even think about the outcome.

This has been my experience. I don't think much about the outcome, and I receive great joy in the effort. I've found, like Michael Jordan, that I've succeeded due to learning from my many failures, but I actually never even saw them as failures. They were just learning experiences.

If you are stuck in your life, I encourage you to let go of focusing on the outcome and instead focus on the joy of making effort. When you focus on the effort, then you can receive great joy in the process of learning something.

I remember when I was about eight years old and someone gave me a gift of a pogo stick. I decided I wanted to get really good at it, and I had so much fun practicing it over and over. I have no idea how long it took me to get good at it because time wasn't important to me, but eventually I could ride that pogo stick forever without falling. But I had to be willing to fall over and over to reach that goal.

If you are willing to fall or 'fail' over and over, you will eventually get where you want to go!

Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is the best-selling author and co-author of eight books, including "Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You?" and "Healing Your Aloneness." She is the co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding® healing process. Learn Inner Bonding now! Visit her web site for a FREE Inner Bonding course: http://www.innerbonding.com or email her at margaret@innerbonding.com. Phone sessions available.

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Personal Development

Entrepreneurs will benefit greatly if they take the time to understand and master two important factors in order to achieve ultimate success - the external and the internal. The external refers to the marketplace, the environment, and other factors that exist outside of the entrepreneur and the business.
The internal refers to the conditioning, weaknesses, fears and doubts of the entrepreneur as a business leader and a person. Continuous personal development is an important part of being a successful entrepreneur. Time must be set aside every day to focus on what improvements can be made internally to improve not only the business but also the quality of the entrepreneur`s life.
Personal development and professional development go hand in hand. Effectiveness is largely a result of the kind of habits that successful people have developed over time. These habits can be learned as part of an entrepreneur's personal development. These habits include inspired action, balance, flexibility, discipline and planning. All of these habits can be learned over time.
Personal development is a lifelong journey. The more you know about yourself, the more you will know about others and you`ll find that your relationships improve. Consider it an investment in your future and the future of your business.
The first step is to make a realistic assessment of your current level of personal productivity. This doesn`t just mean how well your business is doing. Your personal life must be a part of this assessment as well. Perhaps you need to do a better job of scheduling time for both your business and your family, or maybe you have a hard time dealing with change. Whatever your challenges turn out to be, you cannot address them until you know what they are.
The next step is to develop a plan for your own personal development. That plan can be as simple as reading self-help books on the specific habits you need to work on, or it can include taking classes on line or at a local community college to address your personal area of weakness. Working this into your already busy schedule can be difficult if you allow it, but it`s very important. Get up a little earlier if necessary, but set aside a quiet hour for reflections, study and growth. Unless you make your personal development a priority by devoting time every day, you will never experience any improvement.
Another great strategy for personal development is to find a mentor. Learning from somebody with more experience than you can greatly reduce your learning curve, allowing you to develop much faster. Not only can mentors teach you from their experience, they can use that experience to spot your challenges and help you develop your own personal improvement plan. You can find mentors locally, or you can search online for a professional business mentor who can design a plan that meets your needs for your personal development.
Personal development is an important piece to the entrepreneurial puzzle. Your current level of personal effectiveness can only take you so far. Create a vision a level of success far beyond what you are experiencing today and then you look for ways or steps that you can take to improve yourself first. You will grow into the vision you hold. It's only through developing the habits of success that you will ever gain the tools, people and events you need to rise to the next level and beyond. Your future success depends on your dedication to your own personal development.

Author Bio:
Susan Bagyura creator of The Biz Success Training to Starting a Business,guides women entrepreneurs through the worries, fears and don`t-know-how-to as of starting a business to successfully owning their first business.
For More Information visit: www.thevisionaryleader.com

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How to Think Like a Prosperous Person This Year

An interesting thing happened in my country last year. Our economic scale took a tilt in the wrong direction. SA now has more people on social grants than earning incomes. Margaret Thatcher once said that the problem with socialism is that, eventually, you run out of other people's money to spend.

Is our thinking keeping us poor? The verse says, 'As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.' If that's true, then believing yourself to be a poor person will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And believing yourself to be wealthy will work the same way.

I've been on both sides of the scale. I've experienced what it's like to have a local church deliver food baskets to my family, and I've experienced what it's like to take delivery of a new 5-series BMW. I recommend the latter. But I also firmly believe that the difference between wealth and poverty is not the presence or absence of coins. It's about mindset. And our national mindset needs to change. We need to stop creating dependency, and start creating entrepreneurs.

How successful is your current mindset? Here are 5 ways to think like a prosperous person this year:

1. Choose not to believe in recessions

2009 hits, and the world screams 'Recession!'

People who heard these cries and took them to heart immediately began offering excuses for not acting in money-generating ways. They sang the same song until they believed it themselves: "No one's buying; there's too much competition; there's no money available." Their self-fulfilling prophecies came true, because they ceased to act in money-generating ways. Their attitude created their reality. Every step they took (or failed to take) confirmed their original premise.

Wealthy people do not believe, for one second, that there is not enough money to be had, and consequently, they practice money-generating behavior regardless of the moods and vicissitudes of the world around them. They continue to see clients, sell products, do deals, carry out initiatives, make calls, move forward, and act and behave in ways that generate wealth, even as others throw up their hands and declare: "Times are tough."

Next time you feel that times are hard, go out onto the streets and count the Range Rovers. Then make the choice to change your beliefs.

2. Don't blame the jeans; own the bum

"The wash-machine shrank my jeans again." We've all done it - chosen to blame the jeans rather than own the expanding bum - but when we do it with our careers and financial lives, we surrender our God-given right to fight.

Jeans come in many shapes and sizes. So do the mental jeans we like to select and blame for the size of our problems: It's the economy; the old government; the new government; the state of the industry; the excellence of my competition; the area in which I live, etc, etc, etc.

Blaming the jeans doesn't help your situation. It merely burns up mental energy that you could have used on enterprising endeavors. You can spend the next thirty years blaming the jeans. And you can die in poverty. But why would you want to? Rather, choose to ruthlessly own the bum. Your success is down to you, not external scenarios. Until you take that idea to heart, you are unlikely to fight hard enough to move forward.

3. Don't fall for the finite Pool Fallacy

A great many of us believe that one person having money means another must be poor. This is the Finite Pool Fallacy, which says that there is only so much money to go around.

I don't believe it. I believe that money is a wellspring, which is constantly refreshed and regenerated through the growth of new businesses and by the rise of entrepreneurs.

Finite Pool thinking is dangerous. If we believe that there is only so much to go around, then the only way in which we will act to get money is to... ? Yes, you guessed it! To take it from others. Our government thinks this way.

In places like Korea, economic empowerment goes like this: 'We need to grow our wealth, so let's create an automobile industry and take on Europe and America!'
In South Africa, economic empowerment goes like this: 'We need to grow our wealth, so let's take it away from those who have it.'

That's very small thinking. It's the 'less for everyone' approach. I believe in wealth creation. I believe in building, growing and generating, not simply taking away from those who have.

4. Let go of the pathological need for a job

We are still telling our children that they need to grow up and get a job. Job, job, job! We are pathologically hung up on jobs. It's like we're desperate to sell our energy to make someone else rich.

Firstly, you can't manufacture jobs falsely. If they don't exist, you can't create them out of thin air. And the worst thing we can do is to invent more token jobs in already bloated government departments. But I like to ask: why on earth would you want a job anyway? Why would you want to work incredibly hard to make someone else wealthy?

Publications like Forbes, and pretty much every book ever written on becoming truly wealthy, consistently point out that it's almost impossible to become wealthy through traditional employment.

Most people are happy to trade that possibility for what they perceive as security. But is that security real? I have a friend - a director - who often says, 'My security only extends to the next 25 working days and no further.' That's how quickly work-place contracts can be terminated. And he happens to work for a bank that recently laid off thousands of people, which proves his point.

So in essence, we trade the prospect of growing our own wealth for a form of stability that is largely an illusion.

We also argue, 'Well, someone has to do the work.' True. Let me put it to you this way: Someone has to be a street-sweeper. Do you want to be that person? You can. Or you can choose a mindset that will create prosperity for your family.

5. Focus on the top-line, not the bottom line

When we discuss sound financial behavior, for businesses or families, we tend to put the emphasis on the wrong thing. We tell people that goal number one is to save. And it's a good goal, but it's not the most important goal. This is a mindset of watching the bottom line. I believe it's more important to attend to the top-line: your income.

If you are not earning enough, no amount of saving will get you through. That's why I advocate using only an incidental amount of energy toward saving. The majority of your energy should go toward generating more. That means selling, or building, or doing deals, or raising your value through further study or promotion or positioning within your market. We need to put much more emphasis on increasing income than we do on limiting expenditure.

'As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.' That's the original verse. The modern interpretation is: 'If you think it, you will become it.'
So ask yourself, at this moment in your life: Is your thinking keeping you poor?

Douglas Kruger is a professional speaker and author of three books. He speaks on the topics: 'How to Position Yourself as an Industry Expert,' and 'Is Your Thinking Keeping You Poor?' Meet him at http://www.douglaskruger.co.za. Follow him on Linked In or Twitter @douglaskruger. Email: kruger@compute.co.za

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