“Diligence is the
mother of good luck.”
Self-made people
don’t believe in luck and how could they? Many of them worked
through millions of obstacles and came out ahead every time. But do
you think it was an accident? Do you think the same people come out
on top by sheer chance?
Benjamin Franklin
didn’t think so and you shouldn’t either.
But what was the
secrets to success?
They hold themselves
accountable. They don’t talk about luck or the economy. They talk
about what they need to do right now to get what they want.
“Beware of little
expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.”
I know you have
heard expressions like, “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” but
realistically, that is where you find money. “Oh, it’s only a
dollar,” is how iTunes makes Apple millions of dollars. Or, how
about we look at mutual fund fees? Those little numbers after the
decimal point makes banks billions of dollars. This small stuff
makes big things. So, you need to find your niche and “sweat the
small stuff.”
“Well done is
better than well said.”
People are obsessed
with their ideas. They talk about them and say things like, “if
only I had the time…” But lets look at this realistically. If Larry
Page and Sergey Brin just talked about creating a search engine
that tracked incoming links, we wouldn’t have Google. If Steve Jobs
just talked about creating a consumer-friendly PC, we might have
been stuck using mainframes and punchcards.
As Henry Ford would
have said, “you can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to
do.”
“Never leave that
till tomorrow which you can do today.”
Procrastination
kills business and success. I have wanted to start Prevential.com for more than 2 years and for
some reason I waited. Now instead of competing with 200 business
blogs, I’m competing with 2,000,000. I’m fighting a war with a
pellet gun and it is my own fault for waiting. So, don’t make
the same mistake as me.
“Lost Time is Never
Found Again”
Have you ever had
someone ask you, “where do you find the time?” What a funny
question, right? How can someone find time? We all have 24 hours a
day. Yet, I still squandered my time.
When I started
working, I had to commute for 45 minutes. I would sit on the train
and either doze off or listen to music. After doing this for a few
months, I thought to myself, “90 minutes a day, 5 days a week, 25
days a month” and I realized I was wasting a full week every
month.
It was unbelievable.
I was tossing 30 hours of my life out the window every month. So, I
decided to start using it. In 2008 I read around 70 books by
reading on the train. To put this in perspective, most people read
less than 5 books a year.