I recently received an inspiring e-mail from a young acquaintance of mine, Jay. I had not seen Jay for more than thirty years, and really only came to know him when he contacted me to inform me that his father, Jack, had passed away. Jack was a genuinely good human being, so I was saddened […]
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The other day I was talking to a woman who, in a dispirited voice, told me that she was stressed to the point of not being able to focus on her work. I told her that, when all is said and done, stress is just a state of mind brought on by an external event. […]
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A twenty-nine-year-old entrepreneur awakens before dawn to meet the challenge of a new day. Across town, a house painter goes through much the same ritual. The two men do not know each other, but, without realizing it, they will soon meet. The young man heading east in a late-model Datsun and the painter traveling south […]
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Forget that Walmart employs 1.4 million people in the U.S. alone. Forget that it saves consumers billions of dollars each year on retail purchases. Forget that its employees, on average, earn about double the minimum wage. The raw-meat crowd is salivating. Bring out the class-warfare script. The word from some disgruntled employees is that Walmart […]
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I was talking to a friend (“Bill”) a few weeks ago, and in the course of our conversation he happened to mention something about the business troubles Dexter Windbag (pseudonym) had encountered in recent years. I had no idea the guy was still alive, and had no interest in hearing about his troubles. Nevertheless, my […]
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Finally, the trees are back — my trees. The trees have once again shut off the outside world from my veranda. Almost makes me feel like a modern-day Thoreau, except he couldn’t see a golf course in the distance. The global cooling of winter seems to have treated my trees well, and they appear anxious […]
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I’ve written a lot about the importance of acting sooner rather than later and not taking an inordinate amount of time to plan every small detail in advance. Nothing says this more succinctly than the old aphorism: Money loves speed. When I mentioned this in a recent seminar, one of the attendees asked me if […]
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A few days ago, while reading an article in Time about how to lower stress, I was reminded of the words ofwisdom that a very successful friend of mine once shared with me. He explained that in the past, when things got tough in one of his businesses, he focused on slashing overhead to the […]
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If you’re a mature adult, you already know that to accomplish anything worthwhile in life takes effort. Nevertheless, millions of people seem incapable of grasping this self-evident truth. It’s as though they’ve never heard of Murphy’s Law: Nothing is as easy as it looks, Everything takes longer than you expect, And if anything can go […]
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“Leo,” the centimillionaire guest for one of our Mastermind Sessions, shared with members his strategy for handling big paydays. He said that throughout his career, whenever he received a big chunk of income, the first thing he did was carve out an amount sufficient to cover the income taxes he would have to pay on […]
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