Herman School of Business
Where is the Easy Money?
We click on the TV and get instant gratification. Entertainment is at our fingertips. Walk into your favorite restaurant and after drinks are ordered your favorite meal appears in mere minutes. Instant gratification. Turn the key on your car and varoom…off you go. We have ballgames year round to feed our need. My wife’s apple pie puts a smile on my face in seconds.
Why does it take so long to make money?
Because it takes work and work is hard. Work is something people forget when they write down their life plan. Finish school, get a job, meet a mate, buy a nice home, have two kids, make great friends and make a fortune. Huh? What about the work part.
There is one common thread that every successful person will tell you, write about, or discuss when you ask them how they did it. They worked hard. Really hard. And guess what, they didn’t say it took money or that they needed a Mentor or a Life Coach in every case, and nor did they have to have government help. They needed a good idea, the opportunity to pursue it, and the willingness to work harder than other people. Every time. I have yet to meet a person who became successful financially who said… “I woke up one day and after watching TV for a few hours I went golfing, then took my wife out to eat. We watched the kids play soccer and when we got home someone had left an envelope in the door with a million bucks in there. It was that easy.”
And therein lies a secret that you must learn or you won’t be able to keep doing the hard work. Make sure you love your idea and you love doing what it will take to make it successful…because it is work and will take a while before you get to the gold.
Using my real life example for your yardstick…two years ago I was working on my first book. I loved the process of writing and it is a good thing, because I worked more than ten hours a day for several months before we had the first one finished, and that was after many months of creating the idea. Book one hit the streets and marketing became the new hard work to accomplish. Book Store signings, marketing to newspapers, using PR people to get radio interviews, hundreds of telephone calls, thousands of emails. And book number two was being written, edited and published at the same time. Why? Because we realized while marketing book one that we “missed” on a few things to gain attention for my work and book two was created to gain a larger audience and propel me to the success that leads to money. With two books came more marketing. Speeches had to be lined up to focus attention on the work. Two years later we have been published in many newspaper articles, almost two hundred radio interviews have occurred all over the country, speeches have taken place and many large audiences are now scheduled for the coming months…and maybe the pot of gold is getting closer. Maybe. It will take a lot more hard work before that happens.
So, it is a good thing that I love the daily grind of writing, thinking, emailing, calling people, scheduling events, preparing speeches, attending functions, and networking with those who can help get me out of obscurity and into a high enough level of awareness that book sales hit a high level and the money spigot gets turned on.
In other words…I was willing to do the work to get here…and I am willing to keep doing the work to get there. Two years later the passion still burns and therefore I still have a chance to get to the other side of the rainbow. You could help a little if you would tell a friend to check out the books. C’mon, do a little work for your buddy Herman. Thanks.
- Posted: 24 June 2008
- Comments: 0
- Category: Business success
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