• Do you find that although you’re honest, loyal, hard-working, committed, and conscientious, yet you’re not making money?
• You attend the seminars, read the books, and apply the principles, but nothing seems to work?

Don’t worry; there is a rational reason.

Your Values Determine Your Value

Leverage is what it’s all about in business. That is, after all, how the rich get rich.  And that’s why I love being a Joint Venture Broker – I use leverage.

How about getting leverage on your mind, so that you can accomplish your goals faster and easier? It costs nothing, and it’s simpler than one might imagine. They say, “Affirmations, like ‘I’m happy, healthy, and successful’, consistently spoken out loud with enthusiasm and belief, work.” Well, that’s at a very basic level. One can ramp that up significantly.

Stepping Up Affirmations

• One man lives in a trailer park. He is an obese, unhealthy smoker who seldom reads books of any value and spends most of his time playing computer games and whining about the government, upon which he relies for his income.
• Another lives in a nice home, provides for his family, loves his work, develops his mind, stays in shape, and has big goals.
• They were both abused as children, grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, and suffered hardships.
• They are twin brothers.

Circumstances Reflect Philosophy

In Ayn Rand’s amazing book, “Atlas Shrugged”, which I am reading for the third time, John Galt says that one is “remaking the earth in the image of one’s values”. He shows that the construction of our circumstances is an ongoing process. Our values and beliefs are the result of our philosophy. Your circumstances reflect your philosophy and self-esteem.

The loser in the trailer park didn’t end up there one day, suddenly, buy accident, as if by magic. His philosophy directed his choices, which took him down that road. The winner also built his lifestyle – choice by choice. Millions of volitional choices got both these men to where they are today. There is no mystery.

The Sum Total of Your Choices

Your lifestyle and circumstances are the sum total of the choices you have made in your life. Where you will be in the next few years, and where you will end up, is your choice. You hold your future in your own hands.  Every cent you earn and spend is your choice.

Ask the man in the trailer what he thinks about man’s responsibility, about freedom, the role of government, business, and about “luck”. He will explain his philosophy to you. Look at the books he reads, the places he goes, the things he does, the people he mixes with, what he does with his time, and you will see his philosophy. The same goes for the man who has a good life.

Anyone Can Change

Can the man move out of the trailer park lose weight, and create a life of success and happiness? Of course he can, but his philosophy would have to change. His philosophy makes him happy playing the role of a nicotine-addicted victim. He does what he enjoys doing!

• He prefers the company of drunkards and losers to winners.
• He loves feeling sorry for himself.
• He hates the idea of taking responsibility.
• He doesn’t WANT to change; if he did, he would!

His is a philosophy of collectivism and socialism. He believes the world owes him a living, and he blames his family and the world for the fact that he doesn’t have a nice house like his brother.

We like to believe that people can change, and they can. But we need to understand that most of them WON’T change, because they don’t want to change, and often because they don’t believe they CAN change.

You Can’t Give or Force Change

You can’t solve someone’s financial problems by giving them money; you have to teach them to MAKE their own money.  But you can only do that if they WANT to earn more money themselves. Chances are, they expect someone else to earn it and GIVE it to them – they are parasites.

Change is Simple

If you WANT to change your life, it’s actually simple. Find someone who has what you want, someone who has created a lifestyle that you want for yourself, and then adopt their philosophy.

I personally modeled successful men whom I admired, learned their beliefs and values, and emulated them. I adopted the philosophies of men like Paul J. Meyer, Jim Rohn, Earl Nightingale, Napoleon Hill, and Winston Churchill, and then I refined my philosophy into one of Objectivism, as portrayed in “Atlas Shrugged.”

Leonard Peikoff said,

“The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era’s dominant ideas. In times of crises, these men need the guidance of some kind of theory; but, being unfamiliar with the field of ideas, they do not know that alternatives to the popular theories are possible. They know only what they have always been taught.”

Most of us depend on our own limited, fear-based, scarcity-oriented frame of reference when it comes to our perception, interpretations, and choices. We’re unaware that we are dealing with a miniscule amount of information, and therefore severely limiting our choices.

Explore Fearlessly

My ex father-in-law, Peter, was a brilliant man, a real-life rocket scientist, and a crazy Hollander. He had an amazing brain and could read four books a day. Perhaps this explains my daughter’s high IQ, but I digress.

Peter’s mind eagerly leaped over boundaries and explored the unknown like a young collie dog off the leash in a forest. And because he fearlessly exposed his brain to every possible philosophy and insight, he continually expanded his frame of reference and deliberately questioned his own conclusions and interpretations. One has to have high self-esteem and loads of courage to do that.

Why Everything Looks Yellow

We are all conditioned by our education, environment, culture, past experiences, and families, and we are all locked in to one or another cult, and all this conspires to limit our awareness of the options and alternatives available to us. So we tend to operate and make choices within a very limited sphere of possibilities.

Like a goldfish in a bowl, compared to a fish in the ocean. Like a prisoner in a cell compared to a world traveler. Like the average person. Life and business is a magnificent buffet, with millions of exciting food options laid out before us, but the blinders we wear and the shackles we choose restrict us to a diet of broccoli and green bananas. We’re like people wearing sunglasses with yellow lenses – everything looks yellow.

How to start becoming aware of your limitless options and potential:

1. Read the right books especially books that disagree with and challenge your present philosophy. Free yourself from preconceived ideas and “hardening of the attitudes” by looking at the opposite. If you’re a capitalist, talk with a socialist. If you’re religious, talk with an atheist. If you love meat, talk with a vegetarian. Expand your mind.
2. Mix with the right people. Open-minded libertarians, freethinking rebels, bums, millionaires, artists, and outcasts will teach you more than college professors, mystics, and male schoolteachers (men amongst boys and boys amongst men). Learn from people who have already created what you want, and especially those who disagree with you.
3. Travel widely. It amazes me that people restrict their travel and repeat the same destinations, when there is a great, big, exciting world out there to discover.
4. Ask lots of “What if?” questions. What if everything you believe is wrong? What if the most important person in your life died tomorrow? What if you lost your main income source? What if you were suddenly paralyzed? What if you won millions of dollars? Play with your mind. Climb over the fence of reason and run around with brave and silly explorers in the field of the unknown and forbidden.
5. Challenge your present philosophy. Have the guts to start asking the hard questions. Why do you believe what you believe, and how is it helping you to live a life of joy, fulfillment, and adventure? What cults do you belong to? Start asking, “Why not? By whose authority? How can you prove that?”

It’s YOUR Life.

Freedom is a choice.

• We don’t fear failure per se – we fear the opinions of other people.
• The only one whose opinion counts, is YOU. It’s YOUR life. And you only get one.
• Stop allowing scalawags and parasites to steal your joy.

A free life starts with the attitude that makes it possible. Ayn Rand said,

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. Why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world – to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we REALLY want.”

Decide what you want out of life, discover what beliefs are stopping you, and break free.

In regards to money, wealth, and business, the best system I have found, and that which offers me the greatest potential and freedom, is to broker Joint Ventures.

Watching Richard Attenborough’s “Life of Birds” on PBS last night, I saw a striking example of nature’s socialist counterpart – the Cuckoo. There are so many parallels, and the analogy clearly describes the win/lose basis of socialism.

Nest Intrusion

Female European Cuckoos lay their eggs only in the nests of other bird species. The cuckoo egg usually closely resembles the eggs of the host bird (one of whose eggs is often removed by the cuckoo). The host may recognize the intruding egg and abandon the nest, or it may incubate and hatch the cuckoo egg.

Caring for Someone Else’s Babies

Shortly after hatching, the young European Cuckoo, using a scoop-like depression on its back, instinctively shoves over the edge of the nest any solid object that it contacts, including, of course, the eggs of the host bird! With the disappearance of their eggs and rightful offspring, the foster parents devote all of their care to the young cuckoo.

Frequently this is an extremely difficult task, since the cuckoo chick often grows much larger than the host adults long before it can care for itself. So you see a pair of small foster parents working very hard to keep up with the voracious appetite of an outsized young cuckoo – another bird’s young.

Socialism is Cuckoo!

Socialism tells us: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

So here we have the Cuckoo, laying her eggs in another bird’s nest, and having someone else raise her offspring, while her baby kills the offspring of the host bird! The producer (the host bird) does all the work, and ends up with nothing, while the parasite (Cuckoo) does no work and simply breeds more losers. Talk about the welfare state!

Here we have a clear, combined example of the perils of affirmative action, unions, collectivism, the dole, racism, statism, and multiculturalism! Scary!

The Perils of Socialized Government

Next time you hear people talking about socialized medicine, “giving back”, “sharing the wealth”, and raising the minimum wage, remember the Cuckoo. Socialism allows the government to steal your wealth and make you work for those who won’t take responsibility for their own lives. It forces you to sacrifice your family and quality of life for the leeches in our society. And it’s partner in crime, mysticism, simply reinforces this poisonous philosophy.

Ayn Rand said, in her wonderfully prophetic book, Atlas Shrugged, “I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

You deserve the fruit of your labor;  don’t let some Cuckoo politician or witchdoctor steal it from you.

The purpose of DollarMakers is to teach people how to become financially free. In order to do so, they need to free their minds first.

One of the biggest surprises I received in my life was while I was working on a BA Theology at a Bible College and at the same time doing a BA Psychology at university. To my horror, I discovered that I was involved in a cult. At that time, I still didn’t realize that cults take many forms – they are not only to be found in the realm of religion. The more I studied, the more I saw!

Multi-Level Marketing to Belong

For example, MLM can be described as a cult, which would explain this article that claims that the odds of winning from a single spin of the wheel in a game of roulette in Las Vegas is:

• 286 times as great as the odds of profiting after enrolling as an Amway/Quixtar “distributor”
• 48 times as great as the odds of profiting after enrolling as a Nu Skin “distributor”
• 22 times as great as the odds of profiting after enrolling as a Melaleuca “distributor”

Could that explain why people will spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives with no reward, just to “belong”?

What is a Cult?

Here is a good explanation. Read it and look at your life. You might be very surprised. In fact, once we understand group dynamics and conditioning, we realize that some families operate like cults, and that often, child and senior abuse is contingent on a cult-like relationship. Also, understanding cults explains why otherwise intelligent people will believe and do ridiculous things that make no sense to “outsiders” who can view the situation objectively and rationally.

Margaret Singer, Ph.D.  psychologist author of “Cults in Our Midst”, said:

“Deprogramming – that is, providing members with information about the cult and showing them how their own decision-making power had been taken away from them.”

This site exposes a lot about cults, and this is another excellent website to look at.

Breaking Free

It’s hard to accept and realize that one is involved in a cult, but the price of freedom is acknowledging the bars on our cages and confronting our jailers and conditioning.

Without sufficient motivation and determination to break free, however, we might decide that the pain of escape from our comfortable prison is greater than the pleasure of freedom. People can react violently when they’re faced with the prospect that they might be hoodwinked, that their safety is imaginary, and that what they have believed and paid for for a long time is, in fact, a con job. But a small number do break free, and that’s whom this article is for.

I always recommend the book, “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, in the hopes that it will free some people in different areas of their lives, as it has me, particularly in the area of our philosophies about business, money, family, responsibility, guilt, altruism, mysticism, and freedom.