Attract Greater Wealth By Rejecting These Massive "Money Myths"

One of the interesting things that you will recognize is as you begin to become more of an expert and perceived as an expert inside of your field, you will be seen as being an expert, not just in the thing you talk about, but in everything. Your customers are going to want to know your opinion about every little thing because it's perceived that because you know this one thing so well, your opinion is valued on others. Now, Dan Kennedy calls this a gray zone, which makes today's episode Very unique. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today, Dan Kennedy is going to be talking to us about wealth. What is actual wealth and how is it accumulated? This is outside of the traditional expertise, traditional discussions that we have, but this topic is the reason why a lot of us are in the game. It's not just about making riches. It's not just about growing a business, having the impact. It's about wealth, something that lasts longer. How do you create true wealth? How do you identify it? And then how do you adjust your goals in order to achieve it? That is the episode we get to listen into today with Dan Kennedy. So without further ado, let's jump into attracting greater wealth by rejecting these massive money myths. I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. I presume that probably all of you— well, let me do it the other way. Is there anybody in here who has not read Think and Grow Rich? Elliot, really? You're kidding me. Did you raise your hand too? I haven't read it all. Well, it ain't that thick. I mean, you know. I mean, I know you're skinny, but you gotta go to the bathroom once a day, don't you? You know, couple pages every day. I mean, in a month or so you're done, you know, unless you're stopped up. I mean, gee whiz. Jim Rohn used to talk about recommending the book to people when it was still only in hardcover and have people tell me, well, you know, I'm gonna wait till it comes out in paperback. May I make a recommendation? Yeah. How many have read Hill's other stuff? The Laws of Success that it came from, Grow Rich with Peace of Mind? Not so many. Best book. Best book of the bunch. You should get your hands on that one. It's the one he wrote latest in life, and it's probably Grow Rich with Peace of Mind. It's probably the best of the bunch. How about Succeed and Grow Rich Through Persuasion? Oh, hardly any. Isn't that interesting? Napoleon Hill. It was written for a company called Holiday Magic. Which was a, what today we would call multi-level, what the regulatory folks called pyramid scheme. It was written for a guy by the name of William Penn Patrick at Holiday Magic as a combination sales tool for the distributors and a credibility device for Penn Patrick and Holiday Magic because he's all through the book. You don't know looking at it that it was written for Holiday Magic. That in fact was the point. As an aside, by the way, you can trace a lot of the self-improvement industry back to that. Zig was in Holiday Magic. Warner Earhart was in Holiday Magic before he was called Warner Earhart. Jim Rohn, who of course essentially birthed Tony. And so you can trace the lineage of a lot of this back to Penn Patrick. Anyway, so you're all familiar with Hill's work. Oh, and Phil brought me, which I'll show you later because there's something in it I want to quote. Phil Alexander, who's all the way in the back next to the camera. Phil is a great finder of ancient artifacts. And he's got 2 copies of the Napoleon Hill Magazine from 1921, which sold for 25 cents a copy, by the way, and was one of the many Hill business ventures that lasted a relatively short period of time. So there's not a lot of editions, but it's a real interesting thing to see. What a lot of people are not real cognizant of, and I want to be careful about this because I don't want to in any way invalidate anything in the books, but like so many of us, there's a vast difference between identifying what works, putting what works down in a book, and then actually doing it. Hill spent the latter years of his life fundamentally broke, and a lot of people don't know that, but at one point in time, I remember seeing a classified ad in Success Magazine where his original typewriter was for sale for $50 or best bid above $50. And Napoleon Hill was basically rescued late in life by Clem Stone and put to work as a sales trainer for Combined Insurance Companies of America. And that was like pretty much the last things he did in his career before he retired. And Stone basically kind of made him economically whole But when Stone got him, he was basically broke. By the way, there's another product you might want. Nightingale-Conant has, and they don't advertise it, but they have a set of videos of Napoleon Hill, the title of which completely escapes me. But what they really are, they're black and white, and what they really are are films of the sales training classes at Clemstones Insurance Company, and I think they're the only video available with Hill on them. Phil, you can probably find a set on eBay, God help us all, for $18.72 or something, but I think they're $300 if you buy them from Nightingale. And undoubtedly one of the reasons Nightingale doesn't advertise them much is their underwear tightens up at the thought of asking anybody for $300. But they do have them, and they will grudgingly let you buy them if you pursue them. And I recommend them. They're really fascinating. Anyway, Hill, who, you know, more— according to Inc. magazine, more self-made millionaires put Think and Grow Rich on their list of books that have influenced them than any other book other than The Bible and just about everybody in my circle, I mean, you couldn't walk into one of my clients' offices and not find the whole library. So here's the guy who wrote, if you will, the Bible about prosperity who winds up broke. And isn't that disturbing? And why is that? And Clem Stone, who was inspired by Napoleon Hill's work, winds up very, very, very, very, very, very rich. Stone finally— he passed away not too long ago at the ripe old age of 212 or something. Basically, he was, he was, he was too mean to die. I'm sure that was one of those funerals where there were people there out of respect respect, and there were people there who wanted to make sure. I met him and spent a little time with him when we did the Think and Grow Rich infomercial at Guthrie Renker, and he was then way up there and tough as nails. But he and now the Napoleon Hill Foundation, which he created, own all the intellectual property rights to all of the Hill stuff, and they believe they own the rights to, like, any word that might somewhere have been said once by Napoleon Hill. And they have a very aggressive law firm. I'm sure I'm not the only one. I know— anybody in here deal with that yet besides me? You have, haven't you? Yeah. Yeah, Phil, you have. They actually will come after you for using the word success or philosophy, and pretty aggressively too. But they and Disney, I think, are the two most aggressive protectors of intellectual property on the planet. But anyway, so Stone winds up really, really, really rich. Hill winds up really, really, really poor, although for a brief period in his time in his life, he was loaded. He was what the Millionaire Next Door guys call, what the financial planning industry calls, high income, underinvested. Meaning Rolls-Royces, overbuilt mansions that were when they are sold, they sell for 20% of what they cost to build, that kind of stuff. Having been one of those myself, I have some empathy for him. But anyway, he winds up broke, Stone winds up rich. And when I first heard this, it was disturbing to me, and then my curiosity was enormously aroused. One of the things that we'll talk about a little bit today and wind up with, what I'll end with today, is the paramount and primary reason I believe that Stone was rich and Hill was poor. But one is that Napoleon Hill had a philosophy built upon mostly observation research, interviews, you guys all know the story, which like all stories, incidentally, is slightly romanticized. But predominantly through observation, he had a philosophy. Stone took it and applied it, and the key word is applied or application. In an environment where it had a reasonable opportunity to produce money. And there's a real practical lesson there, which we'll come back to. The first half of the day I thought we'd spend on the— somebody asked a question, it's in the questions, the stack of questions. About me often referring to metaphysical stuff as airy-fairy, sort of joking, or they took it as a derogatory manner, but you use it. I took a class once in metaphysics, by the way. I failed the final exam. I was caught cheating, looking into the soul of the person next to me. That's for you. You can use it. I've tried to approach these things from a practical standpoint, and I find that a whole lot of the people who talk about this stuff, a whole lot of people I've read, a whole lot of the people that I've met, Their flaw in the ointment, in my opinion, is they are in— Dick Sutphen used to call them the sackcloth and ashes crowd. You know, they're into every part of the metaphysics except practical application. And, you know, you can't— I had an early mentor who said you can't eat philosophy, and you can't go down to the bank and put philosophy on a bank deposit slip. And he's absolutely right. And so practical application is critically important, but there are some conceptual things. And so I thought the first half of the day we'd talk about some conceptual things. And during the course of the day, I know there's a couple people came up this morning again and pressed me. I know there's immense curiosity about my personal sort of rituals and use of these things, which I'll be happy to tell you. But a lot of what I have to tell you is also from observation. One of the neat things about the way I've made my living is I've got to hang around with a whole lot of very affluent people, most of whom did not start with much and have built large incomes and in many cases some of them just large incomes and no wealth, but in many cases a great deal of wealth. And I tried to figure it out before this seminar, actually went through old client lists and current client lists, and I finally stopped at 130-some-odd people that I know for a fact are in the double-digit millions to $10 million net worth range who pretty much were at zero or, you know, just a decent income but no real wealth at one point in time. And so I've spent a lot of time with 130+ of these people, more time with some than others. And in recent years, I've seen a fair number of people. We commented on it yesterday, those of you that weren't here yesterday, the difference between the growth that has occurred And this is a compliment, by the way, for many of you. The growth that has occurred in many of the people who are at this alumni event from as recently as the prior alumni event is striking. And the growth is in two areas. It's in mechanical or technical skill. I mean, the effectiveness of their marketing, what they had to show versus what they had shown us before. The improvement in their copywriting skills, the improvement in their ability to craft offers, all of that is really quite remarkable. And there are any number of people in this room who've gone in the last 2 or 3 years from modest incomes to very big incomes. A number of people in this room who their current monthly income was their annual income. And, you know, that's— there's commonalities there too. You watch enough of them, you notice a few things. The other kind of growth is attitudinal, which is a little harder to put your finger on, but, you know, it's a closed loop. So, I thought we'd do the conceptual stuff this morning and then the practical application stuff this afternoon. People actually think and get ingrained in their heads that there's some kind of zero-sum game going on here, that money taken from this person and moved to this person enriches this person at the expense of that person. And certainly the liberal politicians either believe it or pander to it, one or the other. But a whole lot of people have it operating at a beneath-the-surface level that affects a lot of what they do and inhibits them in a lot of different ways. What they'll charge, for example, who they'll ask for money. Everybody in direct sales— Zig has a true story, Glenn Turner has a true story, I've got a true story. Everybody who's ever done direct sales much— by the way, is Bill Driscoll here today, or did Bill leave? Oh, Bill's here? Okay. I'll bet you got a story. 'Cause what's the current price point for an average house for a fire alarm installation? Okay. What, 10 years ago, $800? $900? Yeah, okay. So 10 years ago, my frame of reference for a fire alarm sale, a vacuum cleaner sale, a water purifier sale, a pot and pan sale, about $800. 20 years ago, $500, right? Yeah. And now you guys have got it up to $1,700. So this salesman— by the way, if any of you ever— let's see, how many of you have had a pot and pan pitch made to you in your house? God, you guys are deprived. How many of you have had a vacuum cleaner pitch made to you in your house? Okay, there's more of that. How many of you have had a fire alarm pitch made to you in your house? Good. Hey guys, somebody's out there. Okay, now how many of you have done any one of the 3 for $11? All right, well every one of you has this story. All right, because— oh, let's do books too. Encyclopedia. Okay, there you go. Okay, every one of you who's done this has some version of this story. You've seen it. And now it's $1,700, of course it's probably even more profound. So the fire alarm salesman with the stuffed dalmatian under his arm and the crying dog film, you know, marches into the house and discovers that he is in a place of relative poverty, at least by his standards. He is sitting across the table, the two kids are in on a threadbare carpet in in the living room. They probably have a good television, but pretty much everything else in the house, pretty much everything else in the house is obviously hand-me-down, beat up, falling apart, springs sticking up out of the couch seat. You know, you just clearly know that these people, aren't doing well. Conversationally, you know, you discover, you know, Papa hadn't worked in 4 months and, you know, the kid's got some kind of problem that causes big medical bills and on and on and on and on. And the salesperson becomes increasingly queasy about closing these people on the $1,700 firearm sale or the set— or the— what's a vac now? $1,700, huh? On the $1,700 vacuum cleaner. And so the salesperson becomes increasingly queasy about this and, and in many cases will not close. He'll deliberately throw the game at the end and toss that one aside and get out of there. And everybody then who has done this for any period of time has the person who rises up in the middle of the weak, wimpy, attempt to throw the ball game close and is almost offended that they are not trying to sell it to them. Glenn tells a story of actually being chased by somebody who was mad that he wouldn't sell them a sewing machine. Zig has a similar pot and pan story. If you've heard Zig's story about the indoor plumbing, customer that was saving up the money to put in indoor plumbing, and then he backed off and the people were annoyed and they really wanted the pots and pans. Huh? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they could put indoor plumbing in next year, but you know, gotta get the pots now. And of course the pots pay for themselves, you know, because they say, you know, So really they're free after 24 months of what you saved on utilities. The queasiness about price, about who somebody is selling to, about their ability to pay, their ability to afford it. Anytime you start to make those decisions for other people. It really reflects more about what's going on internally with you than it does with anything else. And the other thing to remember is, is that people who are without money that you perceive to be disadvantaged for one reason or another, and you question whether you should sell them something. Regardless of whether you get any of their money or not, they're going to be without money next week too. The reason they're without money has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with your existence, nor does it have to do with the way money works in the real world. It has to do with them. And whether you take it, somebody else takes it, the liquor store takes it, The church takes it, whoever takes it, I promise you somebody's getting it. Because if they're without money now, they're gonna be without money again. And most of them are gonna be without money permanently because they never fix the things that we're talking about that have to do with whether or not you have money. And it happens at all levels. I mean, we have people selling $50,000 programs to doctors at one time. Tracy's— I get all confused with familial relationships. Is Rod your uncle? Yeah, okay. I mean, Rodney and I were selling a $36,000 program to doctors in the early '80s, and at least 70% of the doctors who bought couldn't afford to pay attention, I mean, let alone a $36,000 program. But when you're selling help to people, when you're selling, when you're a success merchant, you always, there's only two buyers. There's the already extremely successful who don't need it, who buy everything because they practice the principle of a slight edge, and there's the starving and desperate looking for a life raft. The middle is not the market, and so if you only took the rich, you would starve. And so the queasiness has to go away. You got this doctor who just had his car repossessed, is having trouble keeping the lights on in the office, and is getting more calls from bill collectors than he is from new patients, and you're going to walk him down to 4 different finance companies and blast 6 of his credit cards to get $36,000 from him to put him into a management program. You can't have any queasiness. You can't have any reluctance, and you have to understand that the reason he's where he is has nothing to do with you, the guy who came before you, the guy who came after you. It all has to do with him, and there's plenty of money to go around. Nobody's ever gonna run out of dough, and there's no excuse to be broke in America. Anybody can tomorrow start from zero, and they can get a bucket and a sponge, or they you know, and these chiropractors. I mean, it's— I know lawyers who are broke. Can you imagine this? I mean, I'm serious. They get out of school with a license to steal money, and some of these people can't cut it. Well, it has nothing to do with any shortages. It has nothing to do with any money anybody takes from them. It totally has to do with them. There's plenty plenty of dough. And now we have all the recession stuff going on, you know, and the media is desperately trying to sell everybody the idea that things are bad and are going to get worse for a variety of reasons. And so some people believe that now that there's a shortage of money because there's a war. Other people think there's a shortage of money because there's a tax cut. Other people think there's no shortage of money. There's money everywhere. Just walk around, look around, you know, and you've got to get past the zero-sum game idea that when somebody gives up money to you, that you've profited and they've lost and there's less money over here now than there is over here. The money just keeps replenishing. It's always there. It's just some people don't see it. See it, and some people aren't smart enough to bend over and pick it up, but it's always there and there's plenty of it. The other big thing to get is there's mountains of dumb money out there. And so, if you want to, you can more than satisfy your needs just dipping into the pond of dumb money. One of my favorites. This is— I forget what catalog this is from. It's not Neiman Marcus, which you usually find this stuff in Neiman's. It's not Neiman Marcus, but here's— I don't know what catalog this is. Gentleman's Domain. This is owned by Frontgate. This thing's been in for 3 catalogs. They ain't wasting the space to have fun. For— where's the price point here? The Eli Bridge Company in Jacksonville, Illinois. Now give these guys points if they initiated this for getting themselves in a catalog. The Eli Bridge Company builds amusement park rides like the famous Scrambler, which is this thing. They've been building them for 100 years. And now for only $300,000, they'll put that thing in your backyard. They'll build you a 67-foot-high, 16-seat Ferris wheel. You'll need a 220-volt power outlet. Gee, no shit. And since it weighs almost 20 tons, you may want to have the patio checked out before getting started. For us, for us. By the way, that's right, you saw the shed shop infomercial. That, that the happy couple with the two sheds in their backyard, the his-and-her sheds. They're both retired and they're on Social Security and he's got one small pension. They're totally on fixed incomes. Two sheds. One ain't enough. The guy with the shed and the big pond in his backyard, you remember him? Oh, you should have heard his sob story. If you heard the sob story first, You would never think this guy's gonna pop for $20 grand of landscaping, a koi pond, and a shed in his backyard. I mean, the poor soul hadn't got two nickels. His whole family doesn't have two nickels, but somebody sold him a koi pond, and he likes his koi pond. For a $75,000 upsell, You can get the mobile model— these guys are funny— that folds for compact storage in any 80-foot-long garage. You can take care of this By the way, on 3 easy payments. Nokia has a new line of cell phones, and I know there are some of you in the room who like the latest doohickey. So if you don't have this, you gotta have it. It's made out of gold and platinum. And it sells for $20,000. It is an experiment in exquisite design and craftsmanship. Oh, it's also large, because obviously you don't want to have a $20,000 phone and have somebody not see it. Anyway, this, um, This oversized phone, here's how they explain this: there's a size-to-proportion balance that has a calming effect. Yeah, $20,000 phone. I had a client that sold a $3,000 coffee pot. I mean, that's even better than a $1,700 vacuum cleaner. There's plenty of money. And by the way, everybody, including everybody in here, has some kind of interest on which they spend dumb money. They spend silly amounts of money. Every single person on the planet does. Play golf, dumb money. Well, first of all, golf only exists because of marriage. No, there would be no golf. It had to have been invented It was invented in Scotland, right? The guys had to be married. This is a conversation of, we can't get out of the house. How are we gonna get out of the house? We'll invent this game, okay? And we'll make it look so stupid, they'll actually feel sorry for us playing it. So we won't use a straight stick, we'll have a doofusy looking bent stick. We'll make the game about hitting a little ball into a little hole, but let's put the hole like 400 yards away. That'll be good. We'll make it a long walk. I mean, seriously, the only reason golf exists is because 4 guys can't figure out how to get out of the house with a better excuse than this. And if they all go to their wives and say, we're going to go hang out for 4 hours in a bar and tell dirty jokes to each the wives say, no, you're not. But they say, we're gonna go play golf. Oh, well, I go play golf. So golf was invented because of marriage. But I mean, if you play golf, think of the dumb money you spent. I mean, and the people who sell to golfers know it's what Jeff Paul calls the irrationally rabid market, meaning all sanity goes out the window, we'll spend any amount of money. On that pastime. Every one of you has one of them. Might be boats, might be airplanes, might be raising Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs. Any amount, doesn't make any difference, right? Everybody's got at least one. Some people have like multiples, alright? And everybody's got one. Even poor people got them. Even poor people got them. Now it's proportionate spending. But even poor people got it. My brother's got no money, but he's got one of the most expensive pool tables you can buy. He's got a handmade, scientifically bioengineered, computer-designed, imported from somewhere personal cue stick. He's got a car that none of you would get in. But he's got a cue stick. The cue stick's worth more than the car. Doesn't bother him. Pool is his thing. Yeah, he is pretty good. Not good enough to make any money, but that's— I mean, he probably is good enough to make money. So there's all this money floating around being spent on all this stuff, and then people get tight about, oh, I'm a little queasy about closing this guy on $1,700 worth firearms. Hey, at least you're keeping them from burning to death, you know. I mean, a vacuum cleaner, at least the house is going to be clean. You know, the $1,700 pool cue ain't doing them a whole lot of good. I mean, so it's all this money floating around and yet people are all kind of tight. And I mean, you've seen it in our group how hard I've had to work just on price. Just to get people to inch up their prices. And some of that fear-based, but some of it is this issue of taking too much money from somebody. You know, I'm taking an unfair amount of money from them. I'm handicapping them. Well, what's all that based on? It's based on the thought that there's not enough money to go around and that it's very hard for them to replace replace that money. It's based on the idea that money is hard to replace. If you substitute the idea that money is easy to replace, then all the trepidation about how much you take from any one given person for whatever it is that you do goes out the window because it's easily replaceable. Very fluid. And it is easily replaceable. It's the easiest thing there is on the planet to replace. House burns down. The house you can replace, the furniture you can, you know, the pictures, your family heirlooms, your— that kind of stuff you can't replace, but the rest of it's easily replaceable. Money is easy to replace, but people think it's hard to replace, and everything they do is then kind of governed by that conditioning. The people who attract tons of money and have no hang-ups about taking it have come to the conclusion that there's an abundant supply of it, more than anybody could ever possibly use, and that it's easy to get more of it. We did the show of hands yesterday, the incredible commonality amongst successful entrepreneurs of those who have been broke or formerly gone through bankruptcy. And for those of you that weren't here yesterday, I mean, it's like the majority of the hands. And as somebody said, the rest of them are lying. But I believe the reason that is, is because that whole experience is a major step in discovering how easy it is to replace it. Because at the time you think it's terminal, At the time you think it's fatal because you think money's hard to replace. And then when you recover, realization begins to dawn. So the first big impediment to getting money is the idea that there are limits to it, that it's a zero-sum game, that it's hard to replace, that you harm somebody by taking their hard-to-replace money from them. There's a term people use. You know the term? We use it when, in some cases, in sales copy. You have to be careful about the vocabulary you use when you sell versus the vocabulary you believe. Here's the term: hard-earned dollars. All recognize the term, don't you? Hard-earned dollars. It's the implication. Hard to get them. Those of you that got— how many got kids? And how many times in the past month have you explained to the kids that money doesn't grow on trees? Where does that come from? Well, that's because everybody becomes their father, right? That's the deal. You know, and you find yourself saying the same crap that used to annoy you when they said it. We don't even think about it. It's been programmed in, and now at a particular point in time in life, we're regurgitating it and spitting it back out with no thought about what it's doing to us or what it's doing to the person that we're saying it to. But when we say it, what belief system are we communicating? Hard to get. Yeah. And any reinforcement of that that's going on for you is detrimental to you. It'll bind you up in all sorts of ways that you can't imagine if you're thinking it's hard to get. This is not in your manual, but I like it. Here's the caption: I know you miss the Wayne writes, Bobby. But they were weak and stupid people, and that's why we have wolves and other large predators. Here's programming that doesn't help you any. There's a whole now economic political push about excessive profits, and you will hear that term more and more and more and more and more in the media. It's in places it shouldn't be, like the Wall Street Journal. Fortune. Yeah, you won't find it— I haven't found it in Forbes, by the way, and I read Forbes every month. I haven't found it in Forbes, but you'll find it in the Wall Street Journal. It's a lot of talk about this whole issue of excess profits, and those of you that are incorporated undoubtedly know you're only allowed to take so much profit out of your own company every year without paying excess distribution taxes. Oh, it's taking too much money. And there's an idea, for example, much proliferated, attributed to Rockefeller, which he never had anything to do with, that the, the top person's compensation in a company should only be a preset multiple of the lowest wage paid in the same company. And so there's a lot of talk about the outrageousness of of CEO compensation has a ratio against what the broom pushing person's wage is. And so everybody's getting beat up on this idea of excess profits. And the ratio argument, for example, the CEO compensation is controlled by marketplace value. And if the guy takes too much money too many times in a row, the marketplace catches up to him and he's gone. So everybody like right now is screaming and yelling about Eisner and a handful of guys who took their $20 million bonuses last year even though shareholder value went down 18% and et cetera, et cetera. Well, if in fact he's being irrationally and unfairly compensated, A couple years from now, he'll be where the CEO of Sprint is this year. He'll be gone, and he'll pay hell getting hired anyplace else. The marketplace catches up, okay? But what the ratio argument completely ignores is his compensation is determined by marketplace value, even if it's a trailing indicator rather than a predictive indicator. The guy who pushes the broom That job has a finite definable worth, and if you base one on the other, there's no real rationale for that. It sounds good when you talk about it, but it doesn't make any sense. Further, incidentally, the longevity argument— big problem for those of you that employ people, because employees— employee mentality has been taught that the longer you do a job, the more you should be paid. You paid for doing it. The union is based on that. However, certain jobs only have a certain value. Doesn't matter how long you do them. If you tighten a bolt on the side of a doohickey, that's worth X cents, period. It can't be worth Y cents just because you've been standing there tightening the same bolt for 50 years. You didn't add any value to the— you're not tightening the bolt 50 times faster, that would make the job worth more money. You're not tightening the bolt in a way that cut the recall rate by 50%, that would make the job worth more money. But just tightening the same bolt at the same speed just because you've been doing it for 50 years didn't add any value to anything. But as you know, if you employ people, What do they expect? Annual rate, sure, periodic raises. Why? Why is that job worth any more this year than it was last year? Arguably, it might be worth even less, but it doesn't inherently become worth more, but people think it. And so they have in their head, I'm not going to— I will stop and do it. They have in their head now that it should be. The second thing on the list is this entire topic of people who are less fortunate than you are. There are some such people. I mean, there's obviously, there's an enormous amount of economic ignorance in the country, and people who've never had any experience exposure. You know, you can't really fault somebody for not getting a bucket and a sponge and going out there and being entrepreneurial and getting rich if they've never seen it, if they have no exposure to it, if they don't know it exists. But often, those less fortunate, that's a synonym purely for those less industrious. It's not that they haven't seen it. It's not that they don't know. It's certainly not that they couldn't go see it. They just don't. And to have guilt about them— but a lot of people have their money-making capabilities suppressed by guilt about these kind of issues. Oh, there's all these people less fortunate than I. Therefore, it would somehow be better if I didn't keep the next thing, the gap, if the gap didn't keep getting wider. Well, the gap, now here's some stats. This is really important because people don't get it. Inflation-adjusted incomes of families from 1998 to 2001 rose across all demographic groups. That's Ronald Reagan's rising tide lifts all boats. There's no way to raise the lower level without raising the top level. Can't happen. If we don't get richer, they can't get less poor. Can't happen. It's economically impossible. And so the old joke, the best thing you can do for the poor people is not be one of them. Second best thing for you to do for them is get as rich as you possibly can, because you're automatically going to pull some up. Why? Because you're going to spend more dumb money, and the more dumb money that's out there floating around, the more everybody benefits. But there's the argument about the widening gap. Oh, we got to do something about the gap. Got to do something about the gap. The gap's no wider than it's ever been. It's just more visible. There's always going to be a big gap. The issue of greed. Too often achievement, accomplishment, ambition is defined as greed. Is getting the most money possible for the goods or services you deliver. Greed or intelligence? Is it greed or ambition? Are you a better person if you voluntarily get less money than you could for the goods or the services you deliver? If these guys suddenly reduce their price on fire alarms to $1,400 from $1,700, Did the door into heaven get any wider when Driscoll drops? Opportunist. American Greetings, and maybe you've seen this in the news, American Greetings has rushed to the presses with a line of greeting cards to be sent to the military in Iraq. So if you have somebody over there you want to send a greeting card to, by the way, they're in the stores. And there's what they call the romantic ones. There's a picture of a great-looking babe in a camouflage piece of lingerie standing next to a bed, and the caption is, "I've got some maneuvers to show you when you get home." There's ones for there's one for sisters, there's one— they've created a whole line. And they're getting massive publicity, by the way, as a result of this. CNN, MSNBC, Entertainment Tonight, USA Today. I saw the first big critical discussion of this on some talk show last night, in which it should come to no surprise to any of us that, um, Janine Garofalo, whatever her name is, uh, thinks this is horrible, um, that we are profiteering, some company is profiteering on, on, on, on this tragic series of events. And if in fact they are going to sell these things, they should be giving all the money away. Well, of course, that's exactly the point. Good point. Yeah, Elliot said, as if she's not profiteering from the interview. Of course. Now, she may devoutly believe her position. By the way, I happen to think I would put her in a category with Hillary. And I mean, I think she believes her shtick. And by the way, I know— of course not. And I have more respect for somebody I devoutly disagree with who devoutly believes their position than I do anybody else. And I don't begrudge her getting on TV and mouthing off about it either, but it is an illustration of a position that is very often taken about this thing called opportunism. And yet what opportunism is, is entrepreneurship. That's what it is. See, every man's tragedy is somebody else's opportunity. That's commerce. Fire alarm business wouldn't exist if there weren't fires. You can't sell alarms if somebody wasn't having a house burn down around them. If there were no deaths, there'd be no business. So now they position their business as, as the mission to protect people, to save lives, That's how they sell it, but it wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the tragic problem in the first place. Cops wouldn't have jobs if there was no crime. If we could eliminate all the crime tomorrow, we'd have— I don't know, how many cops are there? Clinton claims he put another 100,000 on the streets, so I don't know, millions unemployed. Now what do we do? Now what? See, all commerce, the whole flow of where money moves, a big reason money moves is tragedy, disaster, crisis, problems, ugly, horrible human events. So one man's tragedy is another man's opportunity. Entrepreneurship is all about opportunism. Gas station raises its prices on the Friday before a holiday weekend. Is he an evil opportunist? What do you think? It's all part and parcel of what he must do in order to achieve maximum success in his business, because at other times during the calendar year there are price wars in his neighborhood and he sells his gas for less than it costs him in order to stay in business. If he's in an extremely competitive environment, he sells his gas at a loss the entire time in order to get repair business into the bays. There's all sorts of fluctuations in his business. He better make maximum profits when the opportunity presents itself in order to compensate for the times when he can't make any profit at all. The person who owns the convenience store in the middle of a gang-ridden ghetto where nobody else will open a store, and he mostly sells to people who can't get 20 miles away to the nearest supermarket. Therefore, he sells at double what you could buy the same products for if you could get to the supermarket 20 miles away. Is he an evil opportunist? Well, would you go open a store there? If his store's not there, how do they get anything at all? His risk is enormously higher than the guy 20 miles away with the supermarket. Every time he walks into his store, there's a pretty good chance somebody's gonna walk in the door, blow his head off, or try. His theft rate's probably 400 or 500% worse than the supermarket 20 miles away. For assuming all of that added risk, shouldn't he be an opportunist? Getting all this stuff out of your head and being okay with being the predator is necessary for maximum money. About those less fortunate, by the way, I have my favorite list. Actually, I have two lists. This trivia, but this is, this is the average person's list of reasons for not doing well. Some of them we hear from our people. Everybody in my city buys by price. Nobody in my town uses credit cards. Everybody in my town is whatever. There's a giant advertiser in my town. I never get the good leads. If you got salespeople, you hear that one. It's the time of year. There's already too many doohickeys in my town. That's the opposite of the people we talked about yesterday who are all panicked that some of them are going out of business. I hear this from clients, I like this one. What I do is so unique nobody understands it. Let's see, it's the economy, it's my spouse, my staff. Now here's the less fortunate list. This is, these are from actual interviews. This is People's biggest problem is getting to work on time. This is why they don't do well. Here's why they can't get to work on time. Sometimes my car won't start. The damn bus driver comes early. These are actual interviews. I'm not making this up. I can't hear the alarm clock. I used to have that problem. I put a coffee can on top of it. When it rang, The phone rings, you hear the sound. The dog hides my shoes. Is this incredible? I just can't get going in the morning. I'm not a morning person. Well, I shouldn't be required to get to work in the morning. I'm not a morning person. The 7th is better. My mother was never a morning person. It's mom's fault I can't get to work on time. It's hereditary. It's just too tough. It's unfair to ask somebody to be there at exactly the same time every morning. Now get this. These are the less fortunate people you are supposed to feel sorry for while you're making money. Of course they believe it, but see, their beliefs are not our responsibility. That's not our problem. Our beliefs are our responsibility, not theirs. You can't in any way help this nitwit who thinks because her mother couldn't get up in the morning that she can't get to work. You can't help her by making less money. That does her no good. And you don't hurt her by making as much money as is humanly possible. She still ain't getting to work. She's not gonna get there any later because you made an extra mil this year. She's gonna be just as dysfunctional as she is now no matter how much or how little money you make. Now here's my question for you. What is I don't have the slide. Page 12. What is your entrepreneurial responsibility? What is the entrepreneur's responsibility? What must you do in order to be fair and just and deserve your place on the planet? Well, here's what a lot of people think. They think your purpose, your responsibility in life is to provide jobs. You see that reflected in the communities that are busily trying to pass laws and in some cases communities and states suing companies to keep them from moving or closing. Because their responsibility is to provide jobs to the community. Is your responsibility to provide jobs? I hope you don't think so. A lot of people think your responsibility is to pay taxes. Is your responsibility to improve your customers' lives? Better get that out of your head. In our business, this is fatal. And it really isn't any other business. Now, it's pretty smart to sell them things that if they use them as you intended will improve their lives. That's smart. But it's not your responsibility to see that it gets done, nor should you lose any sleep over the fact that many don't. And in my business, see, a whole lot of what I sell, I mean, all kidding aside, the shrink wrap don't come off. And you will kill yourself in my business if you worry about making them take off the shrink wrap. Mostly they just get mad at you. Not my responsibility. I didn't have any of the fun of giving birth to them. They ain't gonna support me in my old age. Old age, they're on their own. Here's the thing, use it, don't use it, don't matter to me. It's one of the great lessons I learned early in life in the multilevel industry was I didn't want to be there because your money is dependent on actually getting them to do something. Lousy position to be in. Want the money and then leave it up to them to do something. If they do, they do. If they don't, they don't. And so again, like in my business, look at the numbers. We got what, 150 people here out of 46,000? Right? Why? You're the 150 you took off the shrink wrap. Am I losing sleep about the whatever that number is, 45,800? No, I got over it a long time ago. You got to too. If the guy puts the shed in his backyard and never moves the crap out of the garage into the shed, shed and still can't park the car in the garage, or as a more probable result, he moves all the crap out of the garage into the shed and then restocks the garage with more crap and still can't park the car in the garage, should Paul go out there and give him his money back? Well, yeah, sell him another shed. That's exactly right. Now we're getting it. Yeah, sell them garbage removal service, sell them how to do garage sales kit, sell them something. That's sell them something. The entrepreneur's responsibility is this: maximum profit and wealth to his shareholders. If you're the sole shareholder, that's you, then your responsibility is just to play fair.

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