4051. Victimhood is a choice, not an event;
4052. Ideas are potential value, not value in
themselves. If you don’t follow through
on a good idea, it won’t improve anyone’s life, not even your own;
4053. Money does not have to control our
lives. Unfortunately, we often let
it. We do this by believing that it has
power, that it holds intrinsic value (either good or bad) and that it
represents solutions to problems;
4054. What our money does is reflect who we
are. If we use our money to serve
people, that’s a good thing. If we use
it to buy cocaine, that’s a bad thing. The truth is that it’s not the money that
matters; it’s the context in which it is used;
4055. Apparently, auto body shops get a lot of
business the day after (heavy) snow or rain;
4056. The only time we are in debt, in the true
accounting sense, is when our liabilities are greater than our assets, those
things that provide income or potential cash flow in our lives. We do want to avoid true debt (i.e., having
more liabilities than assets), but we don’t want to avoid incurring liabilities
(i.e., owing something to someone else) that can be beneficial to our
productivity, value creation and prosperity.
In fact, in many instances, the way to increase our prosperity and
wealth is to increase – not decrease – our liabilities;
4057. The name of the game of wealth is not to
focus on ridding our lives of as many liabilities as possible. Rather, it’s to identify which liabilities
are consumptive (i.e., take more value from our lives than they put into it)
and which are productive (i.e., provide more value to our lives than they take
from it) and then focus on increasing our productive liabilities;
4058. Correctly understood, debt is bad, but
liabilities are essential to building wealth;
4059. Any time we concentrate on fear and scarcity
we are, by default, limiting our potential;
4060. If it’s right that you attract people who are
like yourself, it makes sense why a relationship or a marriage ends when one
person changes and the other doesn’t;
4061. You personally don’t need money in order to
launch your business; you don’t need money to make money. The prime mover in this case is still you and
your human life value. If you need cash
to start a business, you’ll need to develop the concept, research, provide
evidence of a demand in the marketplace, perhaps write a business plan, do as
much implementation as you can and then convince other people to give you the
money you are looking for;
4062. The “solution” to put more money into things
– with little thought given to strategic use and wise management – in an effort
to make them more productive is evidence of a society that believes that money
is a primary cause of action and production, that money has power and that
material things have intrinsic value.
Oftentimes giving an individual, a company or other institution more
money for the sake of having more money develops a system of waste,
misallocated resources and entitlement;
4063. When people or institutions claim that they
need more money in order to be more effective and productive, more often than
not what they actually need is better management rather than more money;
4064. Ignorance is one of the most uncomfortable
feelings to deal with, yet truly scrutinizing our beliefs is key to our
progression;
4065. Without actually knowing a person intimately,
understanding her/his intentions, purposes, mission, and mindset, we have no
way of accurately judging her/his life;
4066. Exploitation can only occur in an environment
of deception or coercion. But again, we
cannot find evidence of either in the amount of money that individuals have,
since money is a byproduct, an aftereffect.
The only way to determine if a situation is exploitative or beneficial
to all parties is to know the people involved;
4067. The belief that money comes through
exploiting others is a false conception that thrives in an atmosphere of
scarcity. In abundance, every
transaction, economic and otherwise, is a win for all parties involved. In scarcity, we believe that we can only win
if other people lose. Hence, if we want
to win, we’ve got to make other people lose;
4068. Just because a person doesn’t have a nice
house and car doesn’t mean that s/he doesn’t create a lot of value in the world
and neither does it necessarily mean that s/he’s broke. People are assets, not material things. Material things are external reflections of
what is going on internally in the minds of people, but this doesn’t
necessarily mean that those with little or no material things are poor or that
those with a lot are rich;
4069. Pride and envy are two aspects of our
tendency to judge people based on their material possessions. They emerge in our lives when we place the
emphasis on material things, not on people.
The truth of the matter is that, just like money, in a world of cause
and effect, value creation is the cause and material things are the effect;
4070. Virtue is not given by money, but that from
virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private;
4071. One of the most important lessons we can
learn in our quest to prosperity is that we don’t have to wait until we have
money to be able to prosper. Prosperity
is achieved by creating value, by maximizing our human life value;
4072. Having more money doesn’t change our
fundamental nature; it merely brings out more of who we already are. If we’re charitable by nature, more money
will give us more opportunities to be more charitable. If we’re naturally greedy, more money will
allow us to be greedier. The point is
that we must become our ideal selves in the present moment, regardless of the
amount of money that we have. Money can
neither save us nor damn us; that choice is up to us as individuals;
4073. A chicha morada (i.e., Peru’s classic
beverage made of purple corn, pineapple & spices) reminds me of
pomegranate-cherry juice;
4074. The pepperoni sauce at Graffiato
(GraffiatoDC.com) in D.C. is good, but a little overrated;
4075. Pepperoni sauce tastes like tomato soup with
a “hit” of pepperoni;
4076. To prosper, we must relinquish our grip on
selfish and shortsighted desires and serve others. The paradox is that the less we focus on our
desires and the more we help others get what they want, the more we get of what
we want;
4077. Our happiness or misery doesn’t depend on the
amount of money we possess. There are
miserable people with money just as there are miserable people without
money. If we’re not happy, then we’re
not prospering. Our happiness is the
single best indicator of our level of abundance. Prosperity brings happiness and happiness
brings prosperity. You can’t have one
without the other;
4078. That which we obtain too cheaply we esteem
too lightly;
4079. If you want to elevate your life and become a
manifester, then you have to change what you’ve believed to be true about
yourself that has landed you where you are;
4080. In order to increase our chance of healthy
rewards, we must do everything in our power to decrease our risk or chance of
loss;
4081. No investments are inherently risky; it is
people who make them safe or risky. It
is people who make investments productive or not. Just as money and material things have no
intrinsic value, neither do investments.
What is risky to one person could be the safest investment in the world
to another;
4082. Your primary concern with any investment –
even more important than the potential returns – is the value proposition. If you know exactly how you are creating
value in the marketplace, your chances of failure are significantly reduced. If you do good market research and know that
people will value what you’re doing, then you have an excellent chance of
success, depending, of course, upon your skill in implementation;
4083. The way to mitigate risk with any venture is
through increasing knowledge and applying universal principles. Investing well is a product of knowledge, not
of luck;
4084. The investment standards that Warren Buffett
adheres to are the following: 1. Know
what you own; 2. Research before you
buy; 3. Own a business, not a stock;
4. Make a total of only twenty lifetime
investments; and 5. Make one decision to
own a stock and be a long-term owner (i.e., Buffett is speaking of something
entirely different than the “long-haul” accumulation approach; he’s teaching
you to hold on to a stock because you’ve done proper research and you know it
will increase in value. He’s not talking
about holding on and riding out downturns in the market because of fear of
loss);
4085. What we must realize is that every decision
we make in life involves opportunity costs – every decision, without exception,
means sacrificing the potential benefits of the paths we don’t take. Therefore, the goal isn’t to eliminate
opportunity costs; it’s to recognize them, take them into account and by so
doing maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of each of our decisions;
4086. The most important way to overcome the myth
of risk is to learn how to reduce your risk to near zero in any investment
opportunity. This is accomplished
through education, understanding your abilities and how to produce value with
them and aligning with principle instead of being driven by technique and
strategy alone;
4087. Karl Alzner is (now) the (Washington)
Capitals leader in consecutive, regular season games played at 423 (and
counting);
4088. We are taught that insurance is a necessary
evil at best and that the smartest route is to get minimum coverage with the
lowest possible premium payments. The
underlying goal is to accumulate enough assets to be “self-insured” – to have
enough money in the bank to cover every eventuality that insurance would
protect us from. Once we achieve this
state, we can eliminate any insurance that we aren’t required to carry by law
and save the expense of premiums. The
fact is that there’s no such thing as self-insurance; either you have insurance
or you don’t. You either have a way to
transfer your risk of loss or you retain that risk;
4089. Simply having a lot of money in no way
protects you from the loss of that money.
In fact, the more money and assets a person has, the more important
insurance becomes to protect her/him from the risk of loss. Self-insurance is really no insurance and the
unnecessary assumption of risk;
4090. The best way to be financially free and to
feel confident in utilizing our assets productively is to reduce the risk of losing
those assets, including our own knowledge and abilities. By transferring risk to those more
efficiently equipped to manage it (i.e., insurance companies), we protect
ourselves from unforeseen losses and release the fear that we might not have
accumulated enough assets to cover the losses we might face. Proper insurance coverage can dramatically
improve our ability to think abundantly and therefore be creative and
productive;
4091. The national average percentage of uninsured
motorists is 13.8 percent;
4092. When we retain risk we’re hesitant to act and
to produce because we’re not certain what the result will be. Hesitation means decreased productivity and
decreased productivity means that we’re kept from living up to our full
potential;
4093. Every moment you spend worrying about loss is
a moment that you are not thinking productively and you can never recapture
those lost moments;
4094. When we utilize insurance properly, we can
have true peace of mind and be actually protected from negative circumstances. We must never confuse peace of mind with
laziness and naïveté – true peace of mind comes from applied knowledge, which
requires effort and stewardship. The
less worry we have in our lives, the more productive we will be and insurance
is one excellent way to legitimately eliminate worry;
4095. People should transfer as much risk as
possible away from themselves. The less
risk a person is exposed to, the more wealth s/he can create;
4096. Being self-insured requires allowing vast
resources to sit stagnant;
4097. The best way to reduce our insurance expenses
is to get as much insurance as possible;
4098. Insurance coverage must be designed to
protect human life value, not just property value;
4099. Insurance coverage increases our financial
freedom and productivity, regardless of our age or financial situation;
4100. The more assets a person has, the more
insurance s/he should have;
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