Give me 5 minutes a day and I'll give you a happier, more successful life

A man was passing through a small town and decided to stop for a soft drink. He parked and got out of his car. In front of the store was a girl, about 8 or 10 years old and a dog. The man was impressed by the dog and asked

“Sweetie, does your dog bite?”

“No, my dog doesn’t bite, mister.” the girl said.

The man reached down to pet the dog and suddenly the dog lunged and bit his hand.

“I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite!” the man cried out.

“That’s not my dog” the girl answered.

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It was summertime and a man walked past several boys with a dog. “What are you boys doing?” he asked.

“We are competing to see who wins this dog as a prize. Whoever tells the biggest lie gets to keep the dog.” One of the boys said.

The man was shocked at the morals of these young boys, competing to see who could tell the biggest lie. He decided he would do his good deed for the day and encourage them to find a more honest way to compete for the dog.

“Boys, it’s not a good idea to tell lies. Why, when I was a boy I became a Christian at an early age and I didn’t tell lies after that. In fact, I was so blessed by the Lord that I became a preacher.” He talked and talked, going on and on about how bad it is to lie and how he didn’t do that kind of thing. Eventually he paused to see if he had any effect on the boys. They were staring at him with strange expressions on their faces.

“OK, give him the dog. None of us can tell that big of a lie!” one of the boys said.

Success

A man who studied 500 of the most successful people in the world wrote a number of books about his findings. One idea that he stresses in his writing is:

“One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat. Every person is guilty of this mistake at one time or another.” ¹

They struck gold

A man named Darby lived during the gold-rush days of the west in the USA and moved to an area where many were finding gold. He searched for weeks and finally found  gold. He covered up the mine and went back east to raise money from friends and relatives so that he could buy the equipment he needed to mine the gold. Because he was so enthusiastic, many agreed to invest money in his gold mine.

He mined a sizable amount of gold with his uncle, but not enough to pay off the debt. In doing so he found that this was one of the richest mines in Colorado! He kept working, bringing up more gold and bringing it to the smelter.

Darby and his uncle drew up more gold and were very happy. But then the unimaginable happened. The vein of gold was mined and they found no more veins. They searched day after day but could not find any more gold.

They quit too soon

They grew weary and decided to quit.

They took the machinery that mined the gold and sold it to a junk man for very little money. They did not realize the junk man was very clever. He called in a mining engineer to investigate the mine and apply his knowledge of mines to search for more gold. According to the engineer, the original project failed because the owners were not familiar with “fault lines.” The amazing thing he found was that the owners had quit digging just three feet from a mother lode, a huge vein of gold. It pays to learn about how to accomplish your goals in life. There is a lot of information out there that can help you in just about any endeavor.

The junk man made millions of dollars from the mine because he knew enough to seek expert advice.

So it seems that it might be a sad ending for Darby. But the truth is that he learned a very important lesson. He realized he had stopped just short of millions of dollars’ worth of gold. He realized that he quit too easily and that even though the chances looked bleak, he should have kept going and sought expert advice.

Successful in the end

So Darby began to sell insurance. Many try and fail at this endeavor. But Darby had learned his lesson, he learned to keep going no matter how bleak things look and to seek advice. He learned not to give up when a potential buyer said no. Because of the lesson he learned he was able to sell more than a million dollars of insurance every year, and that was in the days when a million dollars was worth much more than it is today.

“More than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known told the author their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them. Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one when success is almost within reach.” ²

More ideas like these in my books. Writing these books changed my life for the better. I hope they help you too. my books

My facebook: Ideas For Success

1 Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill page 22

2 Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill page 23

Some people are deeply in debt and feel there is no way to get out. They say that the economic times are just too tough now. Or they say that since they have a job, there is a ceiling to the amount of money they can make. But many experts say that is not true. The quote below is from Joe Vitale. I don’t agree with all of Joe’s ideas, but I heartily agree with some of them.

When I talk about past recessions and the opportunities they presented, someone will usually say, “But things are different now.” My response is that they are and they aren’t. Yes, we live in a different environment than past generations. Technology has made our lives easier and more complicated at the same time – and it has also brought us more opportunity.

These days you can start a business from your computer, you don’t physically have to go find a market or open a brick and mortar store as people in the past did. One of my favorite stories is of Ashley Qualls – a self-made millionaire before she was out of her teens.

Ashley, who was only 16 at the time, started a website called whateverlife.com from her home in Michigan. She wanted to help her friends get cool layouts for their MySpace pages and provide her friends with easy to understand HTML tutorials. When she started her website, she gave all the designs for free. She earned her money from the advertising revenue. It was a very simple concept. Ashley saw the need and wanted kids her age to be able to get really nice page designs for free. The website now receives several times more traffic than most circulations of popular teen magazines including Seventeen, Teen, Vogue! – combined.

Back in 2006, someone tried to buy whateverlife.com from her for $1,500,000 and she turned down the offer. In September 2006, Ashley attracted enough money to buy a home for $250,000 cash. She works out of her basement employing family and friends and is attracting more money everyday.

Vitale, Joe (2012-05-29). Attract Money Now (Kindle Locations 251-263). Hypnotic Marketing, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

I have heard of many accounts of people who learned the right mindset and begin to make enough money to not only get out of debt, but also become able to give away a lot of money. Faith is powerful. Many times Jesus said that if you have a little bit of faith you can do anything, even move a mountain (stronghold). Matthew 17:20. A stronghold can be either good or bad. In the Old Testament, a city on a mountain was a stronghold. If the enemy held the city, it was bad. If friendly people held the city on a hill, it was a good stronghold.

It is the same with you. You have good and bad mountains in your life. A bad stronghold might be an addiction. Most of us are addicted to overeating. Realize that any stronghold can be overcome.

 2 Corinthians 10:4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.

Many books have been written about how to make money. Most of them deal with your mindset. Most financial counselors agree that mindset is important for creating wealth. If a person is sure they can’t make money, they tend to “bury” their money, just like in Matthew chapter 25. Two servants doubled their money, but one servant buried his in the ground because he was afraid. He had the wrong mindset. He didn’t have faith.

People who have a bad attitude about God often end up with a bad mindset for making money. Others think that money is sinful. But Jesus said that the master (who was a symbol of God) was pleased with the people who doubled their money and displeased with the wicked lazy servant who buried his money because he had a bad attitude about God.

In the past I blogged about Og Mandino, the gifted trainer of salespeople. Read it here. He turned poor potato farmers into wealthy salesmen. They sold life insurance, one of the hardest things to sell. They did it because they completely changed the way they thought about themselves and others.

I know that some reading this may be going through difficult financial times. Have hope! You don’t have to stay where you are. Jesus said that he came to give us life and to give us abundance. John 10:10

I have seen many miracles happen and heard about even more. Keep the faith and a miracle will happen to you.  Verses about the power of faith.

Here is another quote from Joe Vitale:

I knew two hospital surgical techs that were facing a foreclosure on their home. The husband, Kenny, said he’d been in a state of depression for weeks and unable to see any options. I asked, “Options for what?”

He replied, “Options to keep our home.”

“Why are you so convinced those are the only options?”

He stared at me for a while like I’d grown a horn on my forehead. But a home is just a thing – nothing more, nothing less. His emotional attachment to that home was altering his perspective. There are many options and opportunities that we encounter every day, but we are so sure that only one type of option or opportunity will work that we don’t even consider any other possibilities. This doesn’t mean it’s easy. Kenny and his wife wanted a solution that included rescuing their home from foreclosure. I asked, “What would happen if you lost the home. Then what?”

He thought for a moment. “We’d have to start over.”

“And what would that look like?”

Again he thought. “Well we could relocate to an area with higher pay as our hours have recently been cut at the hospital.”

His wife chimed in, “We could even become traveling techs who earn even more money since we wouldn’t have a house to hold us here.”

As they talked, ideas flowed. Within an hour, they were convinced that losing this home was perhaps the best thing that could happen to them as it had prevented them from pursuing other opportunities that would have attracted much more money.

They had been so caught up in the drama and chaos of the foreclosure that they hadn’t looked at it objectively, in a detached manner. Once they removed all the negative emotions they attached to the event, they were able to think of many good things that would come from it. 

Vitale, Joe (2012-05-29). Attract Money Now (Kindle Locations 295-309). Hypnotic Marketing, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

 

By the way, I bought this book for 99 cents on Kindle from Amazon.com.