Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Wealth File #5 Rich People Focus on Opportunities, Poor People Focus on Obstacles

This is a chapter-by-chapter summary of a book by T. Harv Eker’s Secret of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth (2005) series. One chapter, one article. Read this summary, buy the book. Enjoy!

Wealth File #5:

Rich People Focus on Opportunities.

Poor* People Focus on Obstacles.

Poor people’s primary mindset is “What if it doesn’t work?” or more often, “It won’t work.” Rich people, on the other hand, take responsibility for the results in their lives and act upon the mindset, “It will work because I’ll make it work.” Rich people expect to succeed. These are completely opposite mind-sets. Poor people see obstacles while rich people see opportunities. Poor people focus on the risks while rich people focus on the rewards. No risks, no rewards. Harv Eker states that as soon as there is an opportunity, rich people gather as much knowledge as quickly as possible to make their decision. They go for it or not. Poor people claim to be preparing but what they’re usually doing is stalling. They’re scared and wait until the opportunity has gone along the way.

“The idea is to get in the game with whatever you’ve got, from wherever you are. I call this entering the corridor,” says Eker. The point is that no luck – or anything else worthwhile – will come your way unless you take some form of action. “I call this being an ACTION-TAKER.” The author advises us to enter the corridor and then correct along the way. So, act and enter the corridor before you feel perfectly prepared. You will never be perfectly prepared, never! Entering the corridor means getting into a business, learning about a business, not from the outside (Yes, I will have my first small business with my partner next year! Yea!). So, if you want to become a hotelier, for example, it is wise to visit a hotel first. And also, work in a hotel first. Get to know how a hotel works from the inside. From the outside, you don’t see a thing…

If you really want to learn a business, get into it, says Eker, “You don’t have to own the darn thing from day one.” If you remember Harv Eker’s motto: Action always beats inaction. And don’t be the poor person who is still preparing, planning, analyzing and waiting… If you’re always “preparing” and “getting ready,” it’s like you’re waiting for someone else to take the chance. Don’t wait and see but act and see. You can still do some corrections along the way, it doesn’t need to be perfect from day one. If you’re like me, a guy, you’ve probably been in a situation like this (if you’re a lady, imagine): You’re out with your friends and there is a girl you like in the same bar. You wait and wonder what you’re going to say to her – you’re preparing (but you’re also stalling because you’re afraid of rejection or whatever). Suddenly, Bang! There’s another guy with her. You’ve just missed the damn chance! That guy is not better than you, he just took action. That’s the difference! You've outwaited the opportunity.

So, from now on – TAKE ACTION. Get in the corridor when there’s an opportunity. Action always beats inaction. Don’t wait for the opportunity to pass. Place your hand on your heart and say, “I focus on opportunities over obstacles,” “I get ready, I fire, I aim!”

[*I need to note that the Harv Eker makes it clear in this book that he does not mean to degrade poor people. He does not think that rich people are better than poor or middle-class people. They’re just richer.]

I Have A Millionaire Mind!

As A Man Thinketh #3 Don't Dwell Upon the Mistakes of Yesterday (Move On)

“Do not dwell upon the sins and mistakes of yesterday so exclusively as to have no energy and mind left for living rightly today, and do not think that the sins of yesterday can prevent you from living purely today”

(James Allen)

It’s been said that the majority of conversations by men over forty are about the past. Sometime it’s about the ‘good old days’ and sometimes it’s about the deals gone bad, the ‘if I only had’ stories, the missed opportunities, etc.

Letting our “sins and mistakes of yesterday” dominate our thinking today robs us of our present joy and our future happiness. It causes us to miss the opportunity of today! John C. Maxwell, in his outstanding best-seller Failing Forward, gives some great practical advice: “To move forward today, you must learn to say goodbye to yesterday’s hurts, tragedies and baggage. You can’t build a monument to past problems and fail forward.”

Take time right now to list the negative events from your past that may still be holding you hostage. For each item you list, go through the following exercise:

1)    Acknowledge the pain

2)    Grieve the loss

3)    Forgive the person

4)    Forgive yourself

5)    Determine to release the event and move on

Your best days are definitely ahead of you if you treat your “mistakes” as necessary lessons to be learned. If you understand that each lesson brings with it a certain amount of wisdom, you can understand how truly enhanced your life is becoming. Many people can’t achieve the success of their dreams because they won’t leave their past behind. They won’t tear down the monuments they’ve built to their old hurts and problems. “Don’t dwell upon the sins and mistakes of yesterday.”

Think about it!

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Creative Mind: The Characteristics of the Creative Person

Creative thinkers combine ideas and information in ways that form new solutions, ideas, processes, or products. “The hallmark of creative people is their mental flexibility,” says creativity expert Roger von Oech. “Like race car drivers who shift in and out of different gears depending on where they are on the course, creative people are able to shift in and out of different types of thinking depending on the needs of the situation at hand.” Look at table below to see some primary characteristics of creative people. Underneath all these qualities lie a desire to learn, a drive to question, and a commitment to keep an open mind.  

CHARACTERISTIC	EXAMPLE
Willingness to take risks	Taking a difficult, high-level course
Tendency to break away from limitations	Entering a marathon race
Tendency to seek new challenges & experiences	Taking on an internship in a high-pressure workplace
Broad range of interests	Investing new moves on basketball court and playing guitar at an open-mike night
Ability to make new things out of available materials	Making curtains out of bedsheets
Tendency to question norms & assumptions	Adopting a child of different ethnic background than the family’s
Willingness to deviate from popular opinion	Working for a small, relatively unknown political party
Curiosity and inquisitiveness	Wanting to know how a computer program works

Source: Adapted from T. Z. Tardif and R. J. Sternberg, “What Do We Know About Creativity?” in The Nature of Creativity, ed. R.J. Sternberg (London: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Try some or all of the following strategies to boost your creative abilities.

Be curious. The more information and ideas you gather as you think, the more perspective you have to build a creative idea or solution. Collect information and ideas from reading materials, people, the Internet, anywhere – and record them on smartphone or in writing. Branch out and cultivate new interests. Seek out new experiences and take in the ideas and perspectives that you encounter.

Shift your perspective. At first, a problem may look like: “The house isn’t quiet when I study.” If you take a wider look, you may discover hidden causes or effects of the problem, such as “I haven’t chosen the best time of day to study” or “I haven’t let my housemates know that I need quiet.” Question your assumptions; ask people you trust for their perspectives; read in order to discover new ways of looking at situation.

Don’t get hooked on finding the one right answer. There can be lots of “right answers” to any question. The more possibilities you generate, the better your chance of finding the best one. Also, don’t stop the process when you think you have the best answer – keep going until you are out of stream. You never know what may come up in those last gasps of creative energy.

Break the rules sometimes. All kinds of creative breakthroughs have occurred because someone questioned a rule or an assumption. Women and members of minorities can vote and hold jobs because someone questioned a rule – a law – many years ago. Even the rules of logic don’t always hold – following strict logic may cause you to miss analogies or ignore your hunches. At one time in the not-so-distant past, for example, it made no logical sense that two people could talk to one another while in different cities – and now the telephone is a fact of life (Just thinking, how logical it was for you to read my blog from you smartphone or laptop from the invisible World Wide Web in the year 1800).

Ask “what if” questions. Set up hypothetical environments in which new ideas can grow. “What if I knew I couldn’t fail?” “What if I had unlimited money or time or energy?” See what idea, however outrageous, comes from a “what if” question – and then think about how to make it happen. Don’t necessarily make it happen, but – think. Just by asking the question “what if” you can boost your creative ability.

Take risks and, when necessary, embrace failure. Even though failure is always a possibility, taking risks is the only way to make your highest goals reachable. If you insist on playing it safe, you may miss out on the path – often paved with failures – leading to the best possible solution or situation.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

References and Suggested Readings:

1. Roger von Oech, A Kick in the Seat of the Pants (1986)

2. Roger von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head (1998)

3. J.R. Hayes, Cognitive Psychology: Thinking and Creating (1978)

Starbucks Experience and the Idea of Small Win

For those of you not wanting to add on additional calories, ask the barista to make your drink "skinny".
They will use nonfat milk, no whip, and sugar-free

“Many great ideas start small at the beginning” (Richard Angelus)

When Howard Schultz founded what would become Starbucks, the baristas wore bow ties, nonstop opera music played, and the store had no chairs. “We made a lot of mistakes,” Schultz regularly acknowledges. Schultz and his team learned from them as they did countless other experiments. Drawing upon his observations of Italian coffee houses, Schultz’s grand vision was to create a different kind of coffee experience that he called the “Starbucks experience”: where people experience great coffee in a communal place. As for the specifics, the Starbucks store and experience of today looks almost nothing like Schultz’s original concept.

The Starbucks we know emerged by carefully adapting to customer feedback through a series of small wins. In fact, Schultz described Starbuck’s mentality as: “the value of dogmatism and flexibility.” As long as ideas were in accordance with company principles, Schultz believed they should just say yes to customer requests.

So, for example, Schultz was initially determined to avoid using non-fat milk since he didn’t think it tasted as good as regular milk and because it was at odds with the Italian coffee experience. When customers kept requesting non-fat drinks, Schultz relented. The success of those drinks became an important small win and soon much more: non-fat milk would grow to account for almost half of Starbucks’s lattes and cappuccinos. “In hindsight, the decision looks like a no-brainer,” Schultz wrote in Pour Your Heart Into It, but that direction wasn’t obvious; it was the fast pace of sales that proved the point.

[Reference: Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries by Peter Sims (Free Press, 2011), page 146-147]

Small wins, win.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Barriers to Creativity #9: "To Err is Wrong"

Creativity, like common sense, is supposed to be common. Creativity is natural and spontaneous. Yet it is not exhibited as frequently as it should. Experts believe that there are several reasons for this. These reasons are called ‘Barriers to Creativity’. ‘Barriers’ are the thing that stop us from thinking creatively and the reason that make us not as creative as we should be.

Barrier #9: “To Err is Wrong”

From a practical standpoint, ‘to err is wrong’ makes sense. (Err means ‘be mistaken’ or ‘incorrect’; ‘make a mistake’). Nevertheless too attached to that belief may undermine our ability to generate new ideas. If we are more concerned with producing the right answers rather than original ideas, then we’ll by-pas the imaginative phrase of creative process. We need to test assumptions and challenge the rules. The creative thinker realizes the potential value of errors. They are stepping-stones to new ideas.

The history of discoveries is filled with people who used erroneous assumptions and failed ideas as stepping-stones to new ideas. A large part of creative thinking is not to be afraid to err. We learn from our mistakes.

           

To err is right, sometimes.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

*These 10 barriers to creativity are taken from creativity expert Roger Von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative book. Summaries mine. 

Story of Idea #3: From Correcting Mistakes to Liquid Paper

“Anything that increases the stress on a system leads to a jump to a higher level of being.

Instead of breaking down physically, you jump through a creative Eurika!

Experience into a higher state of mind.” (Ilya Prigogine)

In the 1950s when the electric typewriter was first introduced to the market, a kind-hearted boss bought one for his secretary. The new electric typewriter fascinated Bette Nesmith Graham, who had to struggle with a mechanical model all along, as it would save her from having sore fingers from pounding the keys.

Bette’s joy was short-lived. Being unfamiliar with the soft-touched keys, she made mistake after mistake until her waste-paper basket was full of incorrectly typed letters. She was unable to finish a single letter at the end of the day.

Bette thought hard on ways to overcome the problem but no solutions came. Finally she gave up and switched her thoughts to the reaction of the boss. He had invested a lot on the new typewriter and would be very disappointed if she was unable to work more efficiently. She could even lose her job.

In the midst of her sad thoughts, an idea suddenly flashed into her mind. She remembered that in her art training she had learned to paint over mistakes with a special paint called Gesso. Eureka! That’s it!

Bette rushed home to find a tin of white paint and used her small paintbrush to paint over her mistakes. Thus the corrector fluid, Liquid Paper was born. In 1972, she sold the company to the Gillette Corporation for US$50 million!

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Quote from Dr. Yew Kam Keong’s You Are Creative: Let Your Creativity Bloom! 3^rd Edition (Petaling Jaya: Advance Quest Sdn. Bhd., 2007) pg. 18