I met with someone this morning – a real winner. My objective is to build a long-term relationship with him and do lots of mutually-beneficial business over time.

What did I sell him? We met in a bookstore, and I sold him a copy of “Atlas Shrugged”. At least, he was headed for the cashier with the book in his hand when I waddled out. That’s possibly the biggest favor I will ever do for him. But my strategy for turning that meeting into a goldmine goes beyond recommending a book that will change his life.

Seek to Add to Your “Eagles List”

Having established his credentials, and my due diligence having shown that the man is a winner of the highest caliber, I simply add his name to my “Eagles List”. These are winners (many who assume they’re on that list are not) with whom I intend to build strong, trusting, lucrative relationships /goldmines. They are few and far between, hard to find, and like gold nuggets in tons of dirt, so one should value such a discovery. These people represent less than 1% of the population.

1. The people on my Eagles List receive regular communication and value form me.
2. I regularly introduce them to good people, good deals, and good Joint Ventures, look for overlap with them in my own JVs, and generally seek to add value to their lives.
3. I monitor these relationships carefully, and when evidence reveals that they’re not who I thought they were, or they make bad choices, they are simply removed from my list (and go spiraling forlornly into outer darkness).

Building a Winners-Only Network

Winners understand reciprocity and they think big. If your network creates your net worth, it’s crucial that you avoid losers and parasites at all costs. By carefully and consistently building value and relationships with the right people, you earn the right to their time and advice.

Jim Rohn said, “Asking is the beginning of receiving. Make sure you don’t go to the ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so the kids won’t laugh at you.”

Winners know other winners, and it’s all about who you know.

Business is a Courtship

Think about a successful Joint Venture as the culmination of a courtship. Proving yourself as being professional, reliable, honest, and able, and creating trust and reciprocity, has to happen before smart entrepreneurs will work with you and introduce you to their friends. And they WILL judge you by the company you keep and your track record.

Jim Rohn again: “Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.”

When you put enough wood on the fire, you can heat your home.

My cleaning lady would rather slave away and sell her time and sweat for $20 an hour than take the time to build a business. An employee who commutes three hours a day and works nine hours for a measly salary and no security would make a lot of money if he devoted twelve hours a day to brokering Joint Ventures.

• Why is it so difficult for people to move from cleaning closets and doing mind-numbing jobs to becoming successful entrepreneurs?
• Why do they need a boss to make sure they work?
• Why would someone spend twelve hours a day, doing what he hates (statistically, most people hate their jobs) to make $5,000 per month, when he can spend twelve hours to create financial freedom and retirement within a year?

It doesn’t make sense. Or does it?

I tested it – I gave my cleaning lady copies of three of my books and a few DVDs. I directed her to my websites. I told her I would be happy to answer any questions she had. She has never mentioned JVs again. She works hard, has a great attitude, and talks about cleaning and her family, and how much they need money.

Why People Are Stuck

Why are people stuck on their financial prisons, when they can free themselves with entrepreneurship?

1. The average IQ in North America is 98. NINETY-EIGHT.
2. And we are conditioned by the liberal media, the sly mystics, and the matronly academia to believe business and money is bad.
3. People pay $35,000 to get an MBA that they can use to get a better JOB. Crazy.

Stupidity, conditioning, fear of the unknown. “Better the devil you know”, “Too good to be true.” Sad, isn’t it? Not really. 98% of people will never become wealthy. That’s just the way it is. Accept it.

Here’s my point:

Entrepreneurs, let’s stop trying to rescue those who prefer to wallow in the waters of quiet desperation. Let’s stop casting pearls before swine.

• Let’s withdraw our generous offers and make people come and ASK for our help.
• Then make them PAY for it, so they recognize its value.

After all, they happily pay for their cigarettes and beer, don’t they? Atlas should shrug more often.

Stop wasting your time with losers, posers, parasites, and wanna-be’s. Make people prove themselves.

If they stop producing, cut them loose. That means FIRE them. Let’s become a lot more selective.

Why are cults so successful? They enforce very strict discipline and rules. They exact massive payment from their members. Perhaps we could learn from them.

Up the Ante

Let’s increase the quality of those with whom we communicate. Let’s up the ante. Let’s throw up more barriers and stop being so generous and altruistic. Make them ask, make them pay, and make them perform, and the eagles will soon reveal themselves.

The cream will rise to the top – it doesn’t need encouraging. The good ones will show up and motivate themselves. You don’t have top motivate a winner, and you can’t motivate a loser. The turkeys will stay away and attack you at every opportunity. DollarMakers has a new policy: we don’t accept Members back once they leave. And as we get more selective, the quality and income increases.

Stop trying to sell yachts to the homeless. Stop expecting idiots to read Shakespeare. You don’t see the price of Rolex going down. Stop begging people to succeed. Don’t give your cleaning lady books – give her a box of donuts.

1.  Outdated Advice:

“Look at me,” purrs the seminar leader, “I’m rich because I invested in real estate in Florida. Do what I did, and you’ll get the same results.” Fine, except that the real estate market, the money situation, laws, mortgages, and a host of other things have changed dramatically in the past eight years since the guru made some money. And did he make his money in real estate, or in the seminars he’s been running to teach others how to do it? The same goes for Internet Marketing, foreign exchange scams, investments, and on and on.

2.  Motive:

What does the presenter of the advice have to gain or lose when you accept his advice? What is his vested interest and agenda?

3.  Authentic Knowledge:

How do you know this person advising you actually has the authority and insight to offer you good advice? At the end of many of the talks and seminars I present, I have people slithering up to ask me if they can give me some “Constructive Criticism.” I ask them how long they have been presenting seminars, how many people they have spoken top in the past 23 years, and how much money they have made, before they advise me on my presentation. Most of them are passive aggressive losers who wish to castigate me for calling people “fat” or using the word “loser”. Go figure. Someone once said, “Never take advice from someone who doesn’t already have what you want”. I would add, “And make sure they earned it themselves, under the same circumstances you currently face.”

4.  Consider the Source.

Consider the source of the advice.  A bank manager or a teacher can’t tell you how to get rich – they aren’t making money themselves! Never take advice from people who even are more screwed up than you are. And let me assure you, truly wealthy people will NEVER tell you how much money they have, and they seldom flaunt it. Read “The Millionaire Next Door”. Anyone can put doctored income statements and fake checks on the internet as “proof” of how much money they made. The Internet is a dangerous place; it’s where the worst people hide. You can be anything you like on the Internet.

5.  Consider the Setting.

Are you being offered incentives, meals, drinks, and holidays in order to get you to hand over money? Are you getting whipped up into an emotional frenzy and told that if you don’t invest quickly, you will lose? Is there pressure to buy NOW? Are you being wined and dined, patted on the back, and manipulated? Is religion being used? Wake up and smell the coffee.

6.  Beware of Statistics.

Be very aware and careful of the use of statistics. Have you heard the one about the river-crossing statistician who drowns after determining that the water is, on average, only three feet deep? This, says author Sam L. Savage, is just one example of the “Flaw of Averages.”

7.  Manipulation Tactics.

Be careful of social manipulation, “Group Think”, peer pressure, greed, the use of sex, and quick, but short-term financial relief.

Personally, I have seen enough conmen and scammers to last me a lifetime, and the worst of them appear on seminar stages, behind pulpits, and at Franchise Shows. They come in all guises, always smiling and hugging.

Remove Risk

I hate risk, so I use Joint Ventures to create wealth. I do business with little time, no risk, no cost, no overhead, no marketing or sales budget, no selling, no employees, no inventory, and no sleepless nights. I create multiple streams of residual income so that I don’t have all my eggs in one basket, nobody can control of manipulate me, and everything I earn is 100% pure profit. If that appeals to you, check this link.

• If your family doesn’t call you a workaholic fanatic and your spouse doesn’t have to beg you to “stop working”, you’re probably not doing what you love.
• If you regard what you do as “work”, you’re a mercenary / prostitute.
• If you have to be persuaded, reminded, cajoled, and threatened to do what you do, you’re simply a paid, robotic slave.

But if you can’t stop thinking about what you do, and regard it as a hobby, a mission, a cause, and a pleasure, you’re probably damn good at it, and you’re probably making serious money. If not, learn how to monetize it and get rich.

Going Through the Motions

Without passion, there’s no perfection, production, or power – simply automatons going through the motions to survive. You see them in most businesses – the glazed eyes, the apathetic attitude, the lackadaisical approach, the thinly veiled, passive aggression, and the sloppy, slow, sluggish movements. The indentured employees who sneeringly deign to serve you, but would obviously rather be sucking on smelly cigarette outside.

Wanted: True Believers

“Workaholic” is a word with a negative connotation that demonstrates that the person using it doesn’t understand someone who is passionate about their work. We wouldn’t call someone a “Golfaholic” or a Swimaholic” or a Vacationaholic”, would we? The word, “Fanatic” applies to true believers. When you believe in what you do, and your work creates value for others and profit for yourself, you should be pleased to be called a fanatic. It’s not like you’re strapping on a bomb to blow up a few local kids…

Living a Happy, Fulfilled Life

People who have been smart enough to align their values and beliefs, their passion and their purpose, with their lifestyles and work, who live a life of integrity and congruity, and who do what they love, create massive value and live happy, fulfilled lives. It’s a choice.

If you mix with like minded people whom you love, like, and respect, and who add value to your life, and design your life according to your own agenda instead of someone else’s, and only do what you’re passionate about, guess what? You’re probably rich, or getting there fast. Your passion will excite and energize you.

Designing a Life or Making a Living?

It helps to look at life in a “black or white” manner. We can either affect the world around us and be change agents, or we can be the scum on the water that is blown this way and that by any prevailing wind.

• We can either create our circumstances or react to them.
• We are either designing a life or making a living.
• You’re either buying jewelry and fur coats for your own wife or your boss’s wife.
• You’re either in control or being controlled.

Like the Cadillac advertisement that goes,

“They say the nail that stands up gets hammered down. Be the hammer.”

Passion Equals Profit

Passion equals profit. Conformity and compromise equals chagrin. Passion will change your life from privation and penury to power and pleasure.

• Do only what you love.
• Love what you do.
• …And take charge of your choices.

Passion will allow you to rise like the phoenix from indigence and fear to abundance and affluence. True passion opens the doors, crushes your competition, boosts your beliefs, and rockets you to riches. Passion is the horse that will take you wherever you want to go in life.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself, in order to move from tactician to strategist, and from selling your time to using your head:

1. What else could your customers buy, before, after, and during their purchase from you, and who could you arrange that they buy that from, while you receive a piece of all the resulting, ongoing transactions? Back end = 100% pure profit.
2. If you gave them an incentive, how many businesses / people could you arrange to enthusiastically, systematically, and consistently refer business to you? Unlimited, qualified referrals from a trusted source with a high closing ratio is the result.
3. How much extra value would you like to add to your current transactions at no cost or risk to you? This can increase transaction values and closing ratios and drop your attrition rate through the floor.
4. How could you piggyback on the distribution, excess inventory, unconverted leads, marketing, sales, and other resources of twenty other businesses? Scrap that marketing budget.
5. How can you arrange to stop paying for promises and only pay for results, which will essentially allow you to have an unlimited marketing budget? Fire those coaches and consultants right now.

When business owners realize that they’re working too hard and too long for too little, and that they’re only realizing around 10% of their potential profit, they suddenly open their eyes and start thinking like real business owners instead of broke, self-employed, salespeople who BS themselves even more than they do everyone else.

You can move from the soup kitchen to the Four Seasons faster than you think. Stop paying for a Rolex and getting a Timex. But remember that the man who wears a Timex can’t teach you how to buy a Rolex.