Risky is the New Safe (15 page)

Millions of mind viruses generated by the media, organized religion, and the government are swirling around, telling you to be selfless and take care of others. And if you buy into this crazy philosophy, you are doomed to a life of lack, misery, and frustration—of unrealized dreams and settling for mediocrity. You have to think differently, way differently.

Living a life of self-sacrifice enables others to take advantage of you and, when practiced long enough, will ultimately destroy you. You have no purpose in life, other than placating others and seeking their approval, which you can earn only by giving up your own happiness. This is sick, twisted, and dysfunctional.

Every time I discuss this, someone trots out the examples of Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and so on, as though that somehow negated the logic of the argument. It doesn't. They both acted in total alignment with their own values and sense of self, and you can see that their “selfishness” benefited millions of people.

If you see your main purpose in life as serving others, you have an extremely low opinion of yourself. You won't believe you are worthy and will experience a tremendous amount of lack and limitation in your life, not to mention you'll probably be personally responsible for the founding of at least three chapters of Codependents Anonymous!

Insanity is a lack of reason or good sense. We could certainly define it as unsoundness of mind rendering a person unfit to maintain a relationship or look after his or her own needs for emotional well-being and survival. People who spend their existence worrying solely about the needs of others and not themselves are not noble, benevolent, and spiritual. They are just crazy. And to quote Melvin Udall, Jack Nicholson's character from the movie,
As Good As It Gets
, “Go sell crazy somewhere else; we're all stocked up here.”

People who don't look after their own needs first, really can't help others in a healthy way. They can console them, participate in their drama, or enable their codependence, but they can't offer them real, meaningful help.

Want to save the world? Great, it needs all the help it can get. Start by making sure your own needs are met first. Get the money thing out of the way. Get yourself in a position of strength—and you'll be amazed how much good you can do!

In the beginning, your purpose is not to serve God or save the world. (Although at some point that may become the case.) Your purpose must be following the path to reach your potential. Which, by the way, is the
best
way to serve God and what God wants most from and for you. Your purpose must entail getting your own needs met first and evolving into the best person you can be.

This is not about using people, taking advantage of others, or just grabbing what you want for yourself. It is about making sure your own needs are met, walking your path, and then seeing where that leads you. And as you know from the previous acts, the greatest opportunities are the ones that solve challenges for other people.

To reach success requires that you discover the path you are meant to walk. It is the challenge you were placed here to solve. This though, is just the first step. Once you solve that challenge, the next one will appear. And that challenge won't show up until you are overqualified for the first one. Success is simply a continuous process of conquering challenges.

It's not about judging or comparing. Your first path might be meeting the need of your local Domino's Pizza store for a delivery driver. Begin where you are and grow from there.

As your consciousness evolves, so will your challenges.

If you are at a stage in life where you're wondering the path for you, seek for clues by asking yourself:

Finding the things you really care about offers great clues to where your path may lead. However, it's only fair to warn you what may happen when you find your path.

It may require sacrifice, and often does. The universe will test you to see if you are serious. You even may be attacked, ridiculed, or ostracized for the path you take. Now if
all
those things happen—you've probably found your true path!

As your challenges progress, they deepen into your purpose, and your purpose pulls you forward. Every problem exists only because a possibility exists. If the possibility were not there, neither would the problem.
And this is where an important process takes place: that of moving from self-consciousness to cosmic consciousness
.

We all begin at self-consciousness. The focus here is on you and your personality, which must be protected at all costs. You're a slave to desire and want instant gratification. You're chasing the next raise, next promotion, or next job. At this stage, selfishness means getting something before someone else gets it first.

As you practice daily self-development, your conscious grows from self-consciousness to cosmic consciousness. At this stage you've learned to master your desires and enjoy the journey.

It's not that you forsake all pleasure: It is just no longer an end in itself. It is transmuted. (Just as we discussed with sexual energy.) You receive gratification, but it is purified and experienced through the right thoughts and actions. Now you are meeting your own needs, and as a result, are able to help many others. You graduate to service and contribution—still through the prism of selfishness—however, it is enlightened selfishness.

At this stage, you get more joy from sponsoring an opera than you receive from buying a Ferrari. You may still buy the Ferrari, but your enjoyment is enhanced by driving it to the opening gala of the opera production that you sponsored.

For companies, this is when they evolve from just beating last year's profit margins to looking at ways they can continue to grow, while preserving the environment, improving working conditions, rewarding critical thinkers, and fostering innovation. When people and companies think selfishly, they ultimately produce more value.

As Ian Percy says in
The Profitable Power of Purpose
:

You need both economy (money) and ecology (meaning) in everything you do. My opinion is that, before anything else, you need an ecological statement of purpose. This is the purpose that makes whatever you are doing worth doing.

This is what lights the fire in the belly and puts the sparkle in the eyes. This is what unites and inspires the entire organization to do something grand and transformative. This is like falling in love with your work and your work falling in love with you. You don't just have a purpose, the purpose has you.

When working with companies, Ian's first admonition is simple:
You can't have peak performance without first having a peak purpose
. For people and companies—and companies are simply people in collaboration—an enlightened self-interest in pursuit of a purpose creates magic.

At some point, while chasing success, you'll reach a stage where no amount of cars, cash, or homes will satisfy you. That's because money and material things don't provide happiness. Money and material things do allow you self-expression, which provides happiness.

But when your self-expression is only about you and scoring more points than anyone else, the victory is a shallow one. You'll reach a stage where you will hunger for something with more meaning. You understand that prosperity isn't really about reaching success, but living a successful life.

Even companies reach a stage where success has to become about more than better dividends, bigger market share, and squashing the competition. Companies take on the culture of their leaders and as the consciousness of the leaders develops, so will the culture.

The path to prosperity is making the natural transition from success to significance.

That's the real journey from self-consciousness to cosmic consciousness. Great Teachers of many ages all taught this, although they each used different words to describe it:

I'm using a different label than James Allen did, and he used a different one than the Great Teachers. But we're all talking about the change of consciousness that develops in a human being who is practicing enlightened self-interest. You seek accomplishment, but not for its own sake. You seek continuous challenges and new achievements because those are the next steps of your natural evolution.

For people at this stage of enlightenment, mediocrity is a sin
.

Not sin as most people define it, but in its original meaning in the Bible, to “miss the mark.” Your mark is to live a life of your fullest potential. People with enlightened consciousness are driven to higher achievements and excellence because to settle for anything less than that would be denying their gifts and renouncing their own greatness.

Everyone
is born with this state of consciousness. Unfortunately for many, they allow negative programming to cloud their judgment and alter their core, foundational beliefs. That's why so much of the work I do with people is about unlearning instead of learning. I do believe we all know innately that our greatness exists and is waiting to be called upon. And that's the most important risk you will ever take: daring to be great!

As this book has progressed, I've been posting some excerpts and soliciting feedback on my blog and social media feeds. Some of the people who have followed my work for a long time have been quite perplexed about my choice of subject matter. Not a small number have asked a fascinating question: Why is a guy who is supposed to be a prosperity and success guru writing a book with all this gloom and doom?

It's a fair question in light of the little they've seen until now. Let's face it, so far I've outlined:

• Disruptive technology will eliminate millions of jobs.
  
• You could soon be replaced by an animal, or even a clone.
  
• Your government is probably run by the ethics of a Ponzi scheme.
  
• There could be a New World Order.
  
• Everything they told you about the ego is wrong.
  
• Selfishness is good.
  
• Cataclysmic change is coming.
  

That's all pretty earth-shattering, mind-bending stuff. Certainly some people will view all these changes with fear and trepidation. But as you've probably realized by now, these changes actually offer the greatest opportunity to create wealth in human history.

We are living in the most fascinating, extraordinary, and yes, challenging time ever. And in those challenges lie the most lucrative opportunities.

There has never been a better time to be alive. Really. There has never been a better opportunity to create success. Really.

But safe, conventional thinking doesn't work any longer. If you want to really break through in this new environment, there is no question that playing safe is now actually quite dangerous. You must be bold and break the mold. Sameness creates comfort. Difference creates opportunity.

Seek out the challenges. Determine what the problems will be and who will be facing them, because therein lie the greatest opportunities for contrarians, critical thinkers, and people willing to take risks.

Next, look for opportunities to practice leverage
.

Of course, the term
leverage
comes from the action of a lever that pivots on one point and is used to move an object at a second point when a force is applied at a third. In the prosperity sense, we're using leverage to utilize a small initial investment of money, time, or effort to gain a high return on that investment. Leverage allows you to quicken your wealth building the way compound interest accelerates your savings account. Businesses that allow you to practice leverage are always superior wealth-building vehicles than linear ones.

Whether it is leveraging your money with real estate, leveraging your time through network marketing, or leveraging your knowledge as an information entrepreneur, you accelerate the speed you accumulate wealth because, all other things being equal, leverage beats trading hours for currency.

Working hard is good, but working hard at a traditional job is more likely to keep you just over broke than it is to create wealth. There are millions of jobs—and millions of businesses—where working hard all day, every day will not make you rich. You are doing a straight trade of hours for currency, and there simply are not enough hours in the day.

If Jimmy Buffet only got paid to sing “Margaritaville” live, he'd never enjoy the lifestyle he has created by recording it once and selling it millions of times. J.K. Rowling and Oprah Winfrey didn't become a couple of the wealthiest people on earth by trading physical labor for a salary; they used their creativity and harnessed the power of leverage brilliantly.

So look for problems to solve, become a critical thinker to solve them, and be mindful of opportunities to create leverage. But to become a wealthy individual or a successful business still requires one more thing . . .

Being a contrarian certainly helps, as does understanding trends and discerning the difference between hard and soft ones. You must be thoughtful of which patterns are cyclical or linear. By using this information and doing some critical thinking, you can make some pretty certain assumptions about where the future is headed.

But it's still more than that, because what we're really talking about can best be described as
prosperity consciousness.
And that is a mindset. A mindset driven by abundance, not lack. Not the fear-of-loss mindset that most people have, but a mindset of possibilities.