Wealth Warrior

WEALTH

WARRIOR

The Personal Prosperity Revolution

WEALTH

WARRIOR

The Personal Prosperity Revolution

Copyright © 2012 by Steve Chandler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Maurice Bassett P.O. Box 839

Anna Maria, FL 34216-0839 Contact the publisher:

[email protected] www.MauriceBassett.com Contact the author:

www.SteveChandler.com

Editing by Kathryn McCormick and Chris Nelson ISBN-10: 1-60025-040-8

ISBN-13: 978-1-60025-040-8

Library of Congress Control Number 2012946882 First Edition

Contents

Acknowledgments ... xi   Introduction: How to create worldwide prosperity ... xv  

Chapter

1 How could I possibly make any money given

my past history? ... 1   2 My perfect escape from work and adulthood ... 4   3 No ambition, no goals, no dreams even ... 8   4 Work ethic and the wealth it produces can be

built and strengthened? ... 10   5 A drunk seeks his fortune ... 14   6 Now I’ll work hard to get my thinking

clean (and sober) ... 17   7 My work-ethic gene theory begins to fall apart

like a bad game of Angry Birds ... 21   8 Oh, come on, like a book can really change

someone’s life ... 24   9 It’s really true that it isn’t about the money ... 26   10 How to stop trying to save the world from the outside

in, and start saving ourselves from the inside out ... 31   11 Your beliefs are always your only real problem ... 34   12 Your money problems can be explained by

looking at your daily calendar ... 37   13 When the student is ready there are teachers

Contents (continued)

14 What happens when your whole occupation is worry? ... 42   15 Society will always be working against me ... 44   16 What about letting the chips fall where they

may and just muddling through? ... 46   17 Create relationships like you would a painting,

one bright dab of color at a time ... 47   18 Yet I was going bankrupt at the time ... 50   19 What if I based my life (like most people do)

on what I can GET? ... 53   20 All the beliefs that kept me stuck in myself

were useless and depressing ... 54   21 Another teacher arrives with another piece of the

warrior puzzle ... 56   22 How can I help? Who can I serve? Who can I help?

What can I do? ... 58   23 A gut check for the get freak ... 61   24 Why marketing and manipulation will push people

and money away ... 64   25 How your social self is devastating to your income ... 68   26 Stupid question: Do I need a college degree to

make good money in today’s world? ... 71   27 In what way is wealth like happiness? ... 74   28 If I just slow down, life will show me where

money comes from ... 76   29 You don’t need a weatherman to introduce a brainstorm .... 81   30 Put your helmet on, strap in, and buckle up:

get ready to experience Cosmic Habitforce ... 85   31 First, let’s figure out if life is really worth living ... 89   32 How to get rid of all your problems ... 91   33 It’s time to look at your to-do list and go basically

negative on it ... 92   34 Financial sluggishness and sloth are often caused

by information ... 94   35 What if you had one hour to change your life forever? ... 98  

Contents (continued)

36 What if I am too shy to let people know what

my service is? ... 102  

37 Why it makes no sense to live and let die ... 104  

38 Choosing what to do has more power than studying what to do ... 108  

39 Practice creates talent; and sometimes you practice so much that you end up gifted ... 113  

40 This formula works if you really use it every day ... 117  

41 Drop the marketing and replace it with the delivery of magic ... 119  

42 Okay, then, how do I motivate myself? ... 120  

43 How I became a conspiracy nut ... 122  

44 The key to productivity is creative subtraction ... 125  

45 Stay on the path of service, no matter what the defense (the universe) throws at you ... 128  

46 Playing small will spread into your work and eventually it will shrink your life ... 130  

47 I could be out there serving people but my mind and my emotions have sent me back to bed ... 133  

48 Okay, really now, who is John Galt? ... 136  

49 Are you finally willing to go berserk? ... 137  

50 Attacking life means seizing the day and then going out there and making things happen ... 138  

51 You always become what you choose to think about ... 140  

52 I despise that person because all he thinks about is money ... 142  

53 In my previous life I would always quit before the best energy had a chance to kick in ... 144  

54 Life coaching looks like a phony profession that seeks quick and easy money ... 146  

55 Now let us try to dance with the abundance of the universe ... 149  

56 Your lizard is not going to make you any money ... 151  

57 If money is not about greed, then how do I start making some? ... 154  

Contents (continued)

58 Why must I keep reinventing myself? ... 158  

59 One good way to wreck our bodies and our minds ... 160  

60 Why is everyone talking about passion? What if I don’t have any? ... 164  

61 How would you like to be a mad scientist and an inventor when it comes to who you really are? ... 167  

62 Now here’s a secret insider’s trick that can make you some real money ... 171  

63 Okay gang, now let’s get out there and benefit from some shocks! ... 174  

64 This is inside every heartache I feel ... 179  

65 Yes there actually IS a cure-all ... 181  

66 Talk to real people—ask for what you want ... 182  

67 What to do when your wife’s look says, “WTF?” ... 184  

68 This kind of “service” does not pass the giggle test ... 188  

69 This is the powerful formula I spent years and years not wanting to learn ... 192  

70 How to be a wealth warrior ... 194  

Publisher's Afterword ... 197  

Recommended Reading ... 199  

About the Author ... 200  

Join the Wealth Warrior Movement ... 202  

Books by Steve Chandler ... 203  

Audio by Steve Chandler ... 204  

Acknowledgments

Kathy Eimers Chandler Fred Knipe Terrence N. Hill Steve Hardison Maurice Bassett Will Keiper Sam Beckford Ron Wilder Rich Litvin Michael Neill Rett Nichols Darlene Brady Lindsay Brady Michael Bassoff Mary Hulnick Ron Hulnick Ken Wilber Colin Wilson Susan Motheral Sherry Phelan Byron Katie Jonathan Keyser Angela Hardison Michelle Nassau Chris Nelson Mar Chandler

From Michael Neill:

Question of the day, with thanks to

Clarence Thomson:

What’s missing from your life and how do

you keep it out?

Introduction

How to create worldwide prosperity

I

I know that may sound naïve as big nations keep moving vast sums of borrowed money around trying frantically to keep their treasuries afloat.

How could one person counter that?

But recently a client of mine told me about one person. One person donated a gift to his small college in the midwest. And it was an anonymous cash gift of $100,000,000. Yes you read that right, one hundred million dollars.

Steve Jobs was one person, and look at all the wealth (and jobs) he created. True, too, with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. He was one person, one nerdy college student in a dorm creating a network for the school to connect with online.

Creating.

A woman I know is a wonderful actress. She could have remained simply an actress forever, but instead she divined a mission to teach women to become amazingly strong, sexy and fit through pole dancing. Sheila Kelley. The S Factor Workout. Check her out.

Although S Factor now employs hundreds and serves tens of thousands, Sheila Kelley started it from zero. Nothing. And now all this.

Sheila, too, is one person.

airlines, bookkeepers, accounting people, etc. I pay them money and add to their prosperity. They serve me so well. And I am able to pay them because my books, my training, my coaching and my seminars sell. In fact, my books sell in China. China pays me for that... China pays one person.

Our government borrows money from China just to make the interest payments on its own out-of-control debt. But I don’t borrow from China. The money China sends me is for work I have done.

I don’t owe China anything. They owe me. They pay me. I am one person.

You are one person.

The warrior’s approach is to say “yes” to

life: “yes” to it all. We cannot cure the world

of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.

Joseph Campbell

Chapter 1

How could I possibly make any

money given my past history?

Life’s tough. It’s tougher if you’re stupid.

John Wayne

I

I had a wife with a medical disorder who was hospitalized and who left me with four children to raise on my own.

Those were my excuses. And you have to admit they’re pretty good. Pretty dramatic. How could you ask someone to overcome that?

How would someone ever learn to create wealth with those kinds of things to deal with?

Wait. It gets worse. (Or better, depending on where you’re coming from.)

I had (what I thought was) a birth defect. I was missing a gene that most humans had. It was the gene that provided you with a work ethic.

People talk about a “work ethic” as if it’s a quality like blue eyes. You either have it or you don’t.

I didn’t have it.

How can you make brown eyes blue? With contacts? Too temporary and irritating.

That’s how I felt about my work ethic as I emerged from high school—clueless about how I could make a living.

Would I go to college?

Of course! Not because I wanted to learn anything or do anything with my college experience. But because it would buy me some time away from having to work.

We are all somewhere on the developmental ladder. And most people are growing, and, yes, ascending.

Except for me.

I was stuck. No upward development for me. Development did not look fun. It looked like work.

Little did I know that the secret to growth and wealth was less than a heartbeat away.

It’s easier to build

strong children than

to repair broken men.

Chapter 2

My perfect escape from work

and adulthood

L

My grades barely allowed me to graduate. I certainly couldn’t get in to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where all my friends were going. So rather than go to a lesser school in Michigan I chose to go for some wild adventure: the University of Arizona! Great party school, far from home. The perfect escape from work and adulthood.

Except that even at the University of Arizona you had to show up for class, turn in your homework and take your finals. And that was beyond my capacity. To put forth that kind of effort? No way did I know how to work that hard.

So drugs and alcohol became my answer. I would take drugs to study (supplying chemically the energy I was incapable of generating on my own).

And it worked. But really? It didn’t. Because of the alcohol part. Way too much alcohol that wild freshman year.

A friend of mine and I knew that campus may not be a good place to study for our finals. Too many distractions were there.

So we rented a cheap hotel room in Tucson, far away from campus. A yellow motel out on Miracle Mile, with a nice

pool. We thought we could really focus on our final exams there.

And it was actually working for awhile. In fact, our plan might have succeeded except for one thing.

The alcohol.

We got far too carried away with the weapons-grade, 180 proof pure something or other we had bought in Mexico, and it wasn’t long before we’d decided to forget the books and instead stage a water ballet for the guests at the hotel pool.

Although we were thrilled with our performances in the pool, I’m glad it wasn’t filmed because I’m not that good of a swimmer, and I’m sure if the guests got any value from the show it was all the unintended comedy.

My friend and I failed our final exams—especially the ones we didn’t show up for.

Which in my case was all of them.

When the letter arrived home back in Michigan all our suspicions were confirmed: this kid has no work ethic. He is SUSPENDED from the University of Arizona due to bad grades. He has one more chance next year to prove he can study. Another failure will result in his being banned from attending this fiesta college forever.

Banned from attending a great party school? How sad and weak was that?

Of course my father was appalled and embarrassed, but not actually surprised. He had identified my lack of ability to make any kind of sustained effort very early on in my life. My chores were never quite finished. My grade school teachers said I was the laziest they’d ever had.

“Why did we ever think college was a good idea for him?” “Because what’s the alternative?” my mother would ask my father. “A job?”

And they both dissolved into laughter. Oh no. No way can we picture this boy holding down a job.

Because I got the message. If I failed this time, I would have to learn how to work for a living. Unimaginable to me. That was an impossible scenario that I wasn’t about to put to the test.

No, I would learn to stay in school. The answer would be in a wiser use of drugs and alcohol. This time, when exams were coming up, I’d back off of the alcohol and increase the use of amphetamines.

Who says I can’t learn anything in college? I learned to stay in school!

Barely, though. Just barely.

Because although I was not kicked out ever again, it was three years before I achieved the rank of sophomore. My parents were getting nervous because their friends’ children were all talking about going back to Ann Arbor for their senior year. Some would be going on to law school. Many already had jobs lined up.

And here they were unsure if I’d ever become a sophomore.

By this time I began to acknowledge that there was something seriously “wrong” with me.

My alcoholic drinking had become my real job. I didn’t “know” I was an alcoholic, but I was.

A sense of entitlement guarantees that

eventually you will see yourself as a victim.

Chapter 3

No ambition, no goals,

no dreams even

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Oscar Wilde

W

How can this story about my life possibly make you rich? Hey, just trust me.

This is important: When you add alcoholic drinking to no work ethic, you get zero achievement.

I’m sure this isn’t news to you. Everyone knows someone who has been caught up in this no-win kind of loop.

And let me just mention here that although I now have thirty-some years clean and sober through the grace of God and a beautiful 12-step program, I do not see sobriety as particularly heroic. I’m very grateful for it, but it’s not a highlight on my resumé.

I see celebrities and politicians’ wives getting standing ovations on TV talk shows for their newfound sobriety. Here, let me stand up and applaud you for going a certain amount of days without falling over drunk! Heroic!

Not to say I don’t admire people in recovery, because I certainly do. They have found the courage to change the

things they can and the serenity to accept the things they can’t. No small thing.

But in my case it was important for me to get real about all of this and understand what a truly heroic effort was all about. So in recovery I decided I would have to achieve the serenity that came with accepting that fact that I was born without the ability to work.

Not only that, it was worse. I had no ambition, no goals and no dreams. Nothing. Just empty when it came to all that.

Who knows why, really? I now know it wasn’t genetic. I now know that work ethic can be built from nothing, and even strengthened at will. But back then?

It might have been my growing up with hugely successful (by the measure of money and social status) alcoholic parents. What was the lesson there? For a small boy? Work hard and become successful and you’ll be drunk and depressed for the rest of your life?

Who knows what beliefs took hold in the brain of a very impressionable young boy?

And when it comes to creating a good life, beliefs are the only problem.

Why tell you this sad history of mine? Because there is something great inside all of this. Something I might even call the heart of the wealth warrior message: IF I CAN DO THIS ANYBODY CAN.

Chapter 4

Work ethic and the wealth it

produces can be built and

strengthened?

B

That would soon become my breakthrough.

That would be my life being handed back to me after all those years. I’d been alone for so many years with my lack-of-achievement gene. To realize that there was no such thing was nothing short of a rebirth for me.

I finally graduated from college. After only twelve years! A bachelor’s degree in creative writing (what’s that?) with a minor in political science (huh?).

But before you start mocking me for having taken twelve years to get a bachelor’s degree, please know that I took four years off from that hero’s journey to join the army. And I had great adventures in language school (the Defense Language Institute), doing electronic spying on the Russians while in Berlin. After that I was on to psychological warfare. But still, even in the army, the missing achievement gene kept showing up.

I was honorably discharged, which was something. But my rank at the time was Private First Class. For those of you

unfamiliar with the military ranking system, I won’t go into any great detail about it, but I will say that taking four years to become a Private First Class is not a great achievement.

I’m sure you’re thinking, How is this underachieving guy going to teach me anything about making money?

I think that’s my point, though. I wanted to set this up just right for you. Please realize: if I can do this, anyone can. And in working with so many people over so many years who have experienced various similar levels of loserdom, I can report that it’s true: anyone can do this. Anyone can go warrior and create prosperity for themselves.

But in order to make money you have to know who is doing the making. In my case, if it had to be that same “me” who was missing a work ethic, then it would have been a lost cause.

The same with you. Your sense and experience of who you really are is the first step toward making money. Because if it’s going to be that old collection of hurt feelings and fears you call “you” then we’re in for a rough ride.

For you to create wealth in ways that are free, imaginative and prolific, you have to have access to your higher self.

Higher self?

The real you—you at your best. You when you surprise yourself.

Don’t you surprise yourself once in a while? That’s the “you” I’m talking about.

That’s the real you.

The rest is fears and bad memories.

At least, that’s my experience and the experience of the clients I coach. What do I know beyond that? I am only an authority on my own experience. I’m not an authority on anything else.

But here’s where it actually gets exciting. This old, struggling “you” is not natural or “real.” Your higher self is the most natural “self” for you to be.

You were meant to thrive.

It is important that you get clear for

yourself that your only access to impacting

life is action. The world does not care what

you intend, how committed you are, how

you feel or what you think, and certainly it

has no interest in what you want and don’t

want. Take a look at life as it is lived and see

for yourself that the world only moves for

you when you act.

Chapter 5

A drunk seeks his fortune

S

Not fun.

The drinking continued until it became unsustainable. I identify with Woody Allen, who said he knew he was drinking too much when he came home one night and tried to take his pants off over the top of his head.

I wish my embarrassments were that minor, and that funny. My embarrassments were humiliating. My drinking was out of control. I remember one night I was on the roof of my mother’s house, yelling at the moon. The family members and friends in her house kept trying to talk me down, but I refused to come down until they got the President of the United States on the phone. It was a long night.

This is a man? This is a grown-up man?

There were many more incidents like that, and much more shame and misery. I got jobs I then quit so I could drink more. I became a sportswriter for the daily paper. One night, when I found out that the game I was supposed to cover was on the radio, I sat in my apartment with a bottle of wine and a notebook and “covered” the game that way. My story in the paper the next day was filled with vivid visual descriptions of the players’ heroics. The paper’s photographer said he didn’t see me at the game and I said I was covering it from inside

the crowd—an experimental perspective. Unsustainable.

Finally I got help.

And that’s where this story really begins.

This is the point in my biography when I began to find my higher self, and the higher power that gives it life.

Without this turning point: no chance for wealth, no chance for warrior and no chance for any kind of peace inside.

Turning points are so powerful. And you can create one any time you want. But who knew?

In every moment you have a choice: to live

the life of spiritual practice, or retreat into

comfort and security.

Ezra Bayda

Chapter 6

Now I’ll work hard to get my

thinking clean (and sober)

That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the

end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

Steve Jobs

M

The world through the eyes of a clean and sober force was a new world.

I went to meetings and learned and cried and laughed—and prayed I’d never drink or use drugs again. There was a sign on one of the walls in a meeting room that said, “YOUR BEST THINKING GOT YOU HERE.”

That was dark humor indeed. All the best thinking I had ever done landed me in a room full of hopeless alcoholics whose lives were basically ruined.

So much for clever thinking. So much for the supremacy of thought.

That’s where I began to see that there was more to life than the thoughts that flew into my head like Hitchcock’s birds.

them. Each thought was a freshly-caught bird—each thought I believed. And those caged birds (thoughts believed) were who I was.

Except they weren’t.

In fact they were just thoughts flying into my head.

Another sign on the wall of another recovery meeting hall said, “JUST FOR TODAY.”

That sign never left me.

I later built my whole time warrior training and coaching around that sign. It’s the most counterintuitive sign ever put up in any room anywhere.

Why? Because it eliminates the future. In fact it eliminates the hypnosis of linear time altogether, and linear thinking as well (always, in the past, a dreary cocktail mix of paranoia and regret).

What did “JUST FOR TODAY” really mean?

When I got into those recovery meetings my biggest worry was that I was now going to have to go the rest of my life without a drink. Impossible to conceive or believe. But they told me I wouldn’t have to do that.

“Í don’t have to quit drinking forever?” “No, of course not.”

“Well, does that mean you’ll teach me how to drink sensibly? Like other social drinkers?”

“No, we’ve never seen that work for people like us.” “Then what do you mean?”

“Just for today, don’t drink.”

I was stunned. That seemed so doable. But wasn’t that just a trick? A way of putting blinders on a horse?

They told me, “Today is all you have. It’s part of your spiritual progress to see that.”

That took a lot off my mind.

I was really worried about this sobriety idea. Because not only did I believe I was missing a work-ethic gene, I also thought I lacked a “follow-through” gene. I would start things

and not follow them through to completion. In my mind I was absolutely incapable of following through. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t good at it.

So the “JUST FOR TODAY” sign in the meeting hall gave me my first taste of freedom and my first flirtation with this wonderful thing I call the “higher self.” (You can give it any name you want.)

Many years later I would admire the achievements of UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. He won more national titles than any coach before or after him. And his method was to eliminate the future.

He called it, “Make each day your masterpiece.”

And when he got his whole team to devote all their skills and attention to today’s Wednesday afternoon practice (instead of the upcoming “big game”), they became the Zen Masters of college basketball. Linear thinkers could not beat them. Because Wooden’s boys were always in the moment they were in.

There is no reference to the future in this good phrase: Give us this day our daily bread.

When you ain’t got nothin’

you ain’t got nothin’ to lose.

Chapter 7

My work-ethic gene theory begins

to fall apart like a bad game of

Angry Birds

I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one.

Leonard Cohen

I

All those negative beliefs were still there. Yet the stressful beliefs I had about myself and my life were beginning to look like nothing more than fleeting thoughts.

Birds flying in. Birds flying out.

What used to be a web of beliefs, thoughts and the absolute “truth about life” had now become merely birds-in-birds-out.

I no longer had to cage them or believe them. Maybe now I could create from zero.

I could start from nothing. With nothing to lose.

Was it really true that I might recover completely from this seemingly hopeless condition? That I could leave behind my disease? (Disease? What is this “disease” called? It’s called “Being drunk all the time.” It’s called destroying the gift of life. It’s called a willful pollution of consciousness.)

Yes, it was happening, but it presented me with some new challenges—the main one being: “How do I make money?”

This was a frightening question to a person with no previous sustained work experience. But my newfound freedom and sobriety, and my newly-restored full head of consciousness, was open to anything.

If I could stop my drinking I could do anything. So I decided to learn how other people made money. I knew my father made a lot of money but I never knew how. He didn’t know how to teach me. He was never home anyway, flying around the world tending to his many businesses. He once took me to a movie called The Carpetbaggers. It starred George Peppard as Jonas Cord. He told me that the movie was a pretty good illustration of his own life. The hero was a heavy-drinking, brilliant, power-hungry, womanizing business genius who destroyed himself in his quest for continued achievements. Wow! Thanks, Dad! I’ll see if I can do that, too.

I wanted to learn to do it differently. One day at a time.

But I was confused until a good friend noticed my confusion and gave me a book by Napoleon Hill called The Master Key to Riches.

The book blew my mind. One of those book experiences where you say, “And the rest is history.”

Well... Maybe it didn’t happen that quickly, but it was a great start.

I was on the path now. One book would lead to another. Those eight wasted years of college were being made up for. I was now reading day and night.

I became a college of one.

And the best part was that what I was reading was not just good information. It triggered new and unprecedented action.

A book must be the ax

for the frozen sea within us.

Chapter 8

Oh, come on, like a book can really

change someone’s life

R

Can a mere book change a life?

I laugh when I hear cynical people ask me that question, as they often do. I laugh again when skeptical pessimists proclaim, as gospel, “You won’t find it in a book!”

Ah, but maybe you can.

Not only did I, but almost everyone I know and now work with in this field (personal development?) found it first in books.

But first things first.

Let’s get back to “nothing.” This whole idea of starting your life over. The entire concept of nothing. Beginning all over from nowhere with nothing.

As in, now I have nothing to lose.

When people arrive inside that nothing space, books change lives. Over and over I see it. And what are books but heartfelt messages from one human to another?

Those messages change lives.

My life was changed forever by The Master Key to Riches because it showed me the way forward. It wasn’t that greed or an obsession with riches was suddenly in play. It was more basic than that.

It was about creating a livelihood.

It was whether I could develop within myself what it took to make a living. A good living, let us say, and not just surviving, staying technically alive until I died.

The Master Key to Riches led me to Napoleon Hill’s more famous Think and Grow Rich. Then came the domino effect. I became obsessed with books that would create inside of me, inside of nothing, a set of operating principles that would guide me for the rest of my life.

In the movie Meatballs, Bill Murray is a camp counselor for poor kids. Across the lake is a camp of rich kids. Each year the two camps play each other in a kind of camp Olympics that includes races and games, and everyone participates. After the first day the poor kids are way behind in the score. Rather than giving them a pep talk that tells them they can win, Murray tells them it doesn’t matter. He says the rich kids have all the advantages, but it just doesn’t matter. Soon the whole poor kids’ camp is cheering, “It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter!”

I won’t spoil the ending, but the movie was so inspiring to me and my children that after seeing it many times the kids would often march around the house chanting, “It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter!”

One frightening night their mother was taken from them and put into the hospital for what we were told would be just short of forever. The children took up the chant two days later. “We have no mother now…and we have a father who has no idea what he’s doing…but we don’t care. Why? Because it just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter!”

I would hear them chanting that down the hallways of our home and saw how all our spirits were lifted. Not by some positive reassurance that things would be okay. Not by hope.

But by the thrill of starting from nothing.

Chapter 9

It’s really true that it isn’t

about the money

Money won’t create success, but the freedom to make it will.

Nelson Mandela

I

It was the idea that energy wedded to creativity led to riches. It was the key element of staying on the path—or, as Napoleon Hill called it, having a “definite major purpose.”

Later, when I was doing time management work with client groups, I delivered the same master key: stay on the path. Allow your definite major purpose to guide your choices throughout the day, instead of letting other people do it.

Trying to please other people? Isn’t that the point of life? Not exactly.

A warrior does not please. A warrior serves.

Without a definite purpose guiding me I would always be sidetracked. I would always have my day guided by other people’s feelings instead of my own plan. It would be a day of pleasing people and winning their approval.

And that was always at the heart of it. It isn’t that Facebook or LinkedIn or email or tweets or texts are a waste of time. They are not, all by themselves, a waste of time. When people believe that they are confusing the map with the territory. They are trying to kill the messenger.

The real addiction is not to social media or the Internet, or to tweets and texts and emails. The real addiction is to getting other people to LIKE me, and to approve of me.

How do I shake that addiction? Because there can be no definite major purpose-driven life with that addiction being active and dominating my day.

Maybe just like any other addiction. Maybe I could kick it one day at a time. Just for today! Just for today I will have my definite major purpose guide my actions. (As opposed to the imagined feelings of others.)

In Outwitting the Devil, a book by Napoleon Hill not released to the public until just recently, he calls the fundamental problem plaguing unsuccessful people DRIFTING.

How much of my day do I spend drifting? And how much of my time is spent on the path?

It hit me.

There is a path to wealth for all of us and the reason we don’t realize this is because of our drifting.

If I am completely honest in evaluating my past three work days I will see just how much of my time has been spent drifting.

The sidetracking that’s conscious, chosen and restorative is fine. It’s the drifting that’s unconscious and not spotted or owned up to until later that’s deadly. Deadly to one who has set out to create wealth. Certainly not deadly to people who believe they are here on this planet to live up to the expectations of others.

Many of my clients who hire me to coach them in wealth creation think my early guidance on a purpose-guided day is

going to cost them their relationships.

They think their fragile network of people who “like” them will dry up and blow away like dead flowers if they aren’t constantly watering that network with texts and emails, tweets and posts, phone calls and Skyping.

That’s the point when I like to introduce the next important component in wealth creating: service. And especially the distinction, the exciting contrast, between serving and pleasing.

To understand why you are not making the money you want to make, I first want to see where you are not serving. That will give us our turnaround strategy.

Businesses fail because they don’t serve. Individuals too. Yesterday Kathy and I decided to drop into a new little restaurant that just opened in our area. It was in a strip mall, and when we arrived we noticed that the signs were confusing and uninviting. Were they even open yet? The door handle had a kitchen towel wrapped around it, for whatever bizarre reason, and when we tentatively walked in we heard abrasive music, a kind of nightmarish Latino-techno sound, simulating the effect of electrified fingernails pulled across a slate blackboard with a tiny, over-amped accordion for back-up. The inside felt gloomy and we took our places at a booth after trying to find someone to tell us whether we should just seat ourselves. After a while a large, young, high school-aged boy with a high school-logo golf shirt on approached our table slowly and spoke to us in a painfully shy, soft teenage monotone, as if this were the last place he wanted to be but his parents made him get a summer job.

Talking to him was a little bit like talking to a house plant you have been watering but it still doesn’t seem to want to grow. We felt bad for being there and making his day so uncomfortable.

The food was not that great and the music got worse as the meal went on. Very few people were in this “NOW OPEN”

new restaurant, and we predicted that very few would ever be there.

So what was going on?

There was no commitment to service.

Even the most basic question (“Who can we hire to serve tables that our customers will LOVE talking to and being with?”) was not being asked.

I wondered how much money was borrowed to start this restaurant. And what the excuses will be when it fails. (“We didn’t borrow enough! It takes money to make money! We needed more capital to make a good go of it. We were in a bad location.” Etc., etc.)

No. It was far more simple than that. People were not being served.

This I mean to whisper to my mind.

This I mean to laugh within my mind.

This I mean my mind to serve

til’ service is but magic

moving through the world

and mind itself is magic

coursing through the flesh

and flesh itself is magic

dancing on a clock

and time itself

the magic length of God.

Leonard Cohen

Chapter 10

How to stop trying to save the world

from the outside in, and start saving

ourselves from the inside out

When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It

has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.

Joseph Campbell

S

What would you do with your time if money were no issue and you didn’t have to “work”?

And I don’t mean “how would you passively entertain yourself.”

That only lasts three days.

Having all the pleasures and material dreams you ever dreamed of?

Three days.

All that stuff up there on your law of attraction treasure map on the wall?

Three days. Three days of that glut and then you feel bored, bloated, vaguely nauseous and guilty.

For pure joy.

What active, moving, action-oriented path would you take with your life if you did not need money?

That’s a great fantasy/inquiry because it helps you know your own strengths. We don’t want to have you playing out of position. If you’re a true quarterback, why are you playing tight end?

If you are playing tight end—“stuck” in a job you don’t like—be great at that job as you plan for a different one. The bad (job—or anything else) is the source of the good.

If Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) can make a concentration camp work for him—if he can find joy inside that sorrow—surely you can make your job work.

Create a side job, Plan B. Call it a money-making hobby if you like.

Soon you’ll transition to it. Then, once you’ve transitioned and are enjoying your new work, create another Plan B.

Produce something and sell it on the internet. Serve people on the side. For fun and profit. What do you love to do?

Monetize it.

What fires you up?

INTERVIEWER: If your house were on fire,

which object would you take with you?

Chapter 11

Your beliefs are always

your only real problem

D

Everything changes, including you.

Especially when you decide to go warrior.

Stop it with the random input of information. Read the things that make you productive. Read what lifts you up into your highest self.

Pick out the people who make you laugh, sing and dance. Subscribe to their blogs. Michael Neill sends out weekly coaching tips. Subscribe and watch your life get better. I do the same. My blog is called iMindShift for a reason: I write it to shift my own mind—and maybe even yours. I try to write what I myself would want to read each day.

Otherwise it is too easy for random, rotten and polluted information to fill your head each day. Worry and fear are the main dishes served up by the media.

Your wealth and your creativity need not be disconnected. Thrive.

Deliberately and consciously. Know the difference between information and transformation. Always lean toward transformation. Take in only what changes you for the better.

better, forever.

The movie Just Go With It, with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler, made me want to vomit and spend my life in bed, never leaving the house, never entering this vulgar world of narcissists.

I want to get better at choosing. More Superman, less vomit.

Watch what you love and the inspiration will follow. * * *

Emerson said service would always be compensated. Read his essay called “Compensation.” You can find it now (as in today) on the internet. He writes that compensation won’t always be immediate, so, “If you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put God in your debt.” (www.emersoncentral.com/compensation.htm)

Because “ungrateful” isn’t the point.

The point is to create compensation, not someone else’s instant gratitude. That’s just pleasing people for instant gratification (our national pastime until we wake up to this thing we call warrior).

The warrior does not live to please others. The warrior serves. The warrior is loved and respected by others because of this profound service.

“What do you think of me?” said one of Ayn Rand’s nasty characters to her book’s hero.

Her hero said, “I don’t think of you.” Warrior.

Everyone can be great

because everyone can serve.

Chapter 12

Your money problems can be

explained by looking at

your daily calendar

M

I have only one question: Where is service happening? Sometimes I can’t find it anywhere. Sometimes just here and there.

But it’s where we start. Service is going to become the master key to riches if my client is willing to stay on the path.

“Aren’t you a life coach?” he asks me. “No, I just help people make money.”

“That’s pretty shallow and cynical… it doesn’t sound very spiritual to me. It sounds materialistic.”

“Whatever you choose to project is fine with me.”

I like to start with the money. No matter what it makes people think of me. Because the money will lead us back to see whether there is service, true service, or not. I always follow the money.

So you think that money is the root of

all evil? Have you ever asked what is the

root of money? Money is a tool of exchange,

which can’t exist unless there are goods

produced and people able to produce them.

Money is the material shape of the principle

that people who wish to deal with one

another must deal by trade and give value

for value. Money is not the tool of the

moochers who claim your product by tears,

or of the looters, who take it from you by

force. Money is made possible only by the

people who produce. Is this what you

consider evil?

Francisco d’Anconia

from Atlas Shrugged

Chapter 13

When the student is ready there are

teachers showing up every day

R

What I love most about Ron is how cheerfully relentless he is in spreading the good word about his work.

Every time I see him, and I mean literally every time, he lights up and tells me the latest good news about what his school is doing in the world.

“You won’t believe some of the things that are happening right now!” he says as soon as we see each other. Then he tells me about the latest USM prison project. Or the new German and Portuguese translations of the latest book by him and his wife, Mary. Or the man who just donated a million dollars to help USM go online. Every time I see him he is brimming with good news.

“Well, lucky him!” one might say. “I’d be Mr. Positive too if someone gave me a million dollars.”

But maybe one would have it backwards.

Ron is not in a positive, good-news-spreading mood because someone gave him a million dollars. Someone gave

him a million dollars because he is a positive, good-news-spreading person. (Emerson says life is a perpetual teaching of cause and effect. True cause and effect.)

Ron Hulnick creates good fortune by who he is each and every day. And who he is is created by internal and external language.

Both verbal and non-verbal. Ron is good news itself—at the level of soul. (St. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.”)

Ron Hulnick doesn’t wait to see if his teaching will make any money. He had been a psychologist, a university president, a coach, a seminar leader and an inspirational writer long before the wealth flowed back into him and his school. He gave before he got. And he still does.

But here is the point (and he makes this point, too): Anyone (including you) can do this.

We all have good news to spread. Whether we want to admit it or not.

Why wouldn’t we want to admit it? Because maybe it doesn’t fit our story.

I was the worst at this. Mine was a story of martyrdom. I was always the ultimate victim of circumstance. So I told everyone my victim stories. I was Ron Hulnick’s evil twin brother. He shared good news, I shared bad.

This always bought me some sympathy. It had people feel for me, which was my hidden motive. Feel for me, will you?

One day I took a seminar on success (since I had none) and there was a questionnaire for me to fill in at the beginning. One question in particular woke me up:

“Would you rather be a) envied or b) pitied?”

I circled “pitied” then dropped the pen on the table in surprise and disgust. I pushed back my chair and picked up the paper again and stared at the word I had circled. PITIED! Are you serious? How sickening was that? All of a sudden I had air sickness. I wanted a vomit bag. Could this be true?

How dysfunctional would a human being have to be to answer the question that way?

That was right around the time I discovered Nathaniel Branden and his powerfully clear books on self-esteem. That’s when a major component of reinventing myself began. Soon I started to do phone therapy sessions with Dr. Branden, and I later flew to California to meet with him at his house in Beverly Hills to work with him further. We did his sentence-completion exercises until I finally grasped his final and deepest teaching:

NO ONE IS COMING!

I put it up on my wall. At first it was frightening. No one is coming? Who’s going to bail me out? But soon it was liberating—no one was coming to live my life for me. No one was coming to earn money for me.

The power to do all that was now back in my court. Game on.

Chapter 14

What happens when your whole

occupation is worry?

P

The brain wants to DO SOMETHING. So, without a project, it worries.

People without projects worry about their health. They worry about their family members’ health. They worry because they don’t have any other project.

When they are fully engaged in a project, they don’t have time to worry. If a health challenge comes up, they only think about it in terms of their project. Will this health matter get in the way of my project? Will it interfere?

If the answer is no, they don’t even think about the health matter any more because it’s back to the project.

So don’t worry when your coach asks you to convert and change your “dream” into an immediate project. Your coach knows what he’s doing.

Light the fire, don’t warm yourself by it.

What you are being, the stand you take in

life, creates what you’re experiencing. Not

the other way around like 98% of all people

think.

Chapter 15

Society will always

be working against me

O

If I let the violent, gross and cynical philosophy of the main media and entertainment outlets just randomly pour into my mind, then it isn’t long before my mind is not my own.

I went to a party a few days ago and noticed that people there were talking about current events and just repeating what various media people were saying. Word for word in some cases. They had no minds of their own.

Which proved to me once again that information is not inconsequential or simply benign.

It consumes our attention... our precious and valuable attention.

We become prosperous when we learn to fix attention on our purpose, on service-oriented activities and on useful information.

Our attention will be the source of our wealth, so if we allow the poisoned, random waters of everything that poses as “news” or “edgy new entertainment” to wash in, we have nothing left to work with.

Information gobbles up our attention. So the warrior counters it.

A long walk. A meditation. A time for solitary swimming. An hour playing a musical instrument. A half day alone in a room with just a legal pad and silence.

Silence and solitude are where fortunes are born.

There are inspiring movies, helpful, motivating blogs, uplifting people to talk to... I can program my mind one way or the other. Warrior or worrier. It’s up to me.

What I give my attention to expands in my life. Am I choosing and creating?

Or do I just wake up and allow our toxic culture and society to wash over me like a wave?

Always my choice.

Chapter 16

What about letting the chips fall

where they may and just

muddling through?

T

It’s just not a very functional approach, and because all approaches are optional, why not choose one that gets me on the ground safely and smoothly?

Such as, “Life is a gift; what do I want to use it for?”

That whole idea of using your life for something was alien to me until I read Napoleon Hill and learned that I could have a definite major purpose, and that if I stayed on the path and didn’t waste my days with drifting I would be fulfilling that purpose every day.

Chapter 17

Create relationships like you would

a painting, one bright dab of

color at a time

T

(And when a book is truly life-changing, like Hill’s books were for me, how is that different from meeting someone? A book is just a way of meeting and talking to someone you don’t know—like I am talking to you right now.)

I met someone who changed my life dramatically.

He was a young assistant track coach at the University of Arizona named Mike Bassoff. He had just been through a very traumatic time. He had walked into the office of the head track coach Willie Williams one day and found him dead. A suicide.

Williams had been a colorful, charismatic mentor to Mike, and Mike was in shock.

When the offer came to leave coaching and join the development office, Mike jumped on it. He welcomed the change of scenery. He didn’t know anything about fundraising other than what he had learned staging a successful benefit run for the athletic department. But he was willing to learn more.

The University wanted to see if it could raise money and build a cancer center on campus for research and treatment, and they put Mike in charge of the project.

Mike’s greatest skill coaching track had been in the area of recruiting. He’d created a way of communicating with athletes’ families so that they were reassured that the University of Arizona would be a wonderful place for a young person to begin an adult life, not just in sports, but in personal education and skill-building.

“I somehow knew that recruiting was all about relationships,” Mike said. “We out-recruited other schools because of the relationships we created.”

Mike saw his job as one of simply creating relationships— not just recruiting athletes. And through the strength of those relationships, athletes chose his school over others.

This is what Mike taught me.

Success is all about creating relationships, and relationships are all about giving. You give your time, your love and your attention, and you create a relationship.

This was different from what the world outside was saying about relationships. The world seemed to say that a relationship was something that happened to you when the chemistry was right, when two people understood each other, felt a bond, and experienced an almost serendipitous connection.

Mike Bassoff said otherwise. A relationship is yours to create. You build it.

Like a house, one brick at a time.

You create it. Like a painting. One dab of glorious color at a time.

When Mike hired me to help him (I owned an advertising and PR firm at the time, and he’d admired a political campaign I’d run for a congressman) he said he didn’t know anything about fundraising, but if it was anything like sports

recruiting it would be all about relationships. I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about.

It turned out that what I learned from him about giving before you get would change my life forever.

Chapter 18

Yet I was going bankrupt at the time

N

True. But I was also going bankrupt.

My family life was in turmoil because of the medical challenges faced by my children’s mother, and because of my own inability to be strong with money. I was barely keeping my company afloat. I had some skills for writing and creating, so clients came to me, but I had no talent for creating wealth, and my debts were nightmarish.

That’s when I got the relationship piece, and Mike’s key to it all: giving.

Giving? But wasn’t fundraising about taking? Don’t you learn in fundraising to make the big ASK?

Not in Mike’s world.

“The way we’re going to build this cancer center is by creating relationships,” he said, “and the way we are going to have those relationships grow is by giving. Small donors will turn into major donors. That is, unless I’ve got this all wrong.”

Mike laughed and so did I. He might have it all wrong.

We really had no idea if the two of us would succeed in raising any money. But we were excited about trying. (Spoiler alert: the Arizona Cancer Center is now one of the largest,

best-funded and most prestigious cancer research centers in the world.)

* * *

Some people call it the universe. Some people call it God. We called it the Giver, and our mantra became, “You can’t outgive the Giver.”

Turns out money was not about getting. It was about giving. If you gave all day and stopped focusing on getting, you would create wealth.

That’s what Mike taught me.

No matter how small a donation someone made to the Cancer Center (which back then was just an idea without a building or anything), Mike and I would give more back to the donor.

We made a creative game out of it. All our meetings were about what we could give people who contacted us.

The meetings were never about what we could get.

I was starting to learn: A life based on giving becomes a life that produces wealth. A life based on getting is a life of anxiety and money problems.

We gave small donors talks by research doctors. We gave long letters reporting breakthroughs in cancer research. Mike gave his time and effort to each donor. If a donor had a sister with cancer in Iowa, Mike would have one of the Arizona doctors make phone calls to have that sister cared for by the best people.

Even if that donor had only given $100!

Mike explained it to me. He had a miner’s scale he had bought to make his point. (You’ve seen those scales, with two brass plates on a chain? When a miner would put a gold nugget in one plate the scale would tip up until he put another nugget in the other to balance it.)

Mike would tip the scale one way and say, “She gives us $100 and now our challenge is to tip the scale back in our

favor.”

He then pantomimed putting nuggets in the other side. “We make calls, we help her sister, we give her time and attention, we send her a letter…” And the miner’s scale would tip back in our favor.

“Never let the donor outgive you,” said Mike. “That’s our game, and that’s our job.”

Soon the money was pouring in to the cancer center. People made it their pet cause. They could really see the effect their donation was having because Mike stayed in such close contact with them after their gift, reporting everything, thanking them repeatedly, and getting other people to thank them, too.

Giving and giving all day long. It made the work worth doing.

And no matter how much we gave, we couldn’t keep up. We couldn’t outgive the Giver, try as we might.

While participating with Mike in this amazing success— this huge illustration to me of how wealth is created—I was also continuously reading my Napoleon Hill books and noticing that he was urging his readers to always go the extra mile. He said, always do more than what you are paid for, and soon they won’t be able to pay you enough.

The book was giving me the philosophy of success, while Mike’s work and mine were becoming real-life verification.

I love it when that happens. When an exciting philosophy turns out to be exactly how the world works.

Chapter 19

What if I based my life (like most

people do) on what I can GET?

I

(And I had these summer jobs not because I had a work ethic, but because all the other kids worked, and my father made it mandatory. I would rather have stayed home.)

One thing I noticed about working in the car factory was that their rule was NEVER! ever do one bit more than what you are paid to do. If I stayed a minute or two after the horn sounded, a union guy would be yelling at me for doing that.

“I was just finishing up,” I would say.

“No, you don’t get it, kid. We don’t do that. I ever see you doing that again you will lose your summer job.”

I learned that the minimum was what was expected, not the maximum.

You took what you could GET from the car company and you gave as little back as you could for it.

How are those car companies doing right now? And how is the Cancer Center doing?

No comparison.

A graphic illustration of where wealth comes from. And a graphic contrast between the effectiveness of going the extra mile versus doing as little as you can get away with.

Chapter 20

All the beliefs that kept me stuck in

myself were useless and depressing

M

powerful connections, lawyering up, crony favors, and coercion, because that’s how Hollywood and the media portray it.

(A star actor accepts twenty million dollars to star in a movie that tries to make wealth look immoral.)

But the irony is that wealth comes from the opposite of that villainous caricature—wealth comes from serving.

So through the years, all the union pressure coercing wage inflation and benefit excesses and retirement payouts only resulted in the car companies going bankrupt, and then in the bankrupt companies begging for a bailout from a corrupt group of politicians who had to borrow the money from China.

China!

Where they teach a strong work ethic. At a very young age. Wait a minute! Did I say “teach” a work ethic? I thought, always, you were either born with one, or not.

And that was another breakthrough that was occurring for me. I realized I had as much ability to work as anyone. My old belief that I didn’t was just that, a belief. And not a useful one.

Not if I wanted to make money.

In fact I soon discovered that all the things I believed about myself were useless. Not to mention untrue. But useless, mainly.

Because they kept me focused on myself and not on the next person I could serve.

Chapter 21

Another teacher arrives with another

piece of the warrior puzzle

“F

That was the path to money.

Steve Hardison is a very wealthy business consultant and life coach who is a former high tech executive and copier salesman.

He wakes up each day and serves.

He gets on his motorbike and rides to the store and notices a man trying to fix his broken-down car. Steve gives him a ride home on the back of his bike, then brings him back with the right tools and parts and helps him fix his car.

Steve is waiting in line at Costco (or was it Sam’s Club?) and the man in front of him has a huge basketful of birthday supplies, cake, etc., and cannot get his card to go through. Insufficient funds.

“No problem,” says Steve to the cashier. “I’ve got this. I’ll pay for him.”

The man is astonished. He thanks Steve profusely for the generosity. He tells Steve he is going to a birthday party for an eighty-year-old friend. Would Steve like to come meet the man he just bought the party stuff for? Sure! Steve goes to the party and enjoys meeting everyone.