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January 1 - January 4, 2020
To really succeed in whatever is the business of your choice, you have to come to understand and utterly absorb into your being the fundamentally true idea that your activities in your business are virtuous and moral, provided of course that you conduct your business affairs honestly and honorably. Absorb this lesson into your heart and into your soul, and you will have overcome a major hurdle on your road to financial achievement.
Wealth creation is partially how people express their spirituality. Of course, it is an unnatural act—no animals in nature ever do it—but overcoming nature, all nature, especially human nature, is what Judaism sees people as obligated to do.
Never miss or ignore an opportunity to make new friends and to nurture existing ones. You can always make a point of accepting invitations to others’ happy events; and, yes, you can always make a point of attending others’ sad events, too. In other words, engage in ongoing community building activities.
If you really are to succeed in business, it won’t be because people think you are smart; it will be because people like you. There is an old adage, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Find joy in serving others.
Learning to view yourself as being in business rather than as merely an employee brings enormous benefits in its wake. You gain a tremendous sense of security. Also, you’re no longer subject to the capricious whims of your employer.
Wealth is produced by transactions. You need to drastically increase the number of transactions in which you get involved. Everyone needs to do so, which means that you need to make yourself as attractive as possible as a potential transaction partner.
The word shalem is often used in the context of human development, implying that people must constantly work on all four zones of their humanity in order to try to achieve a totality. Does anyone really want to be rich and lonely? Does anyone really want to be wise but unhealthy? Of course not.
Lions never appear to be petty, and neither should you. Nothing undermines your leadership more fatally than the appearance of pettiness.
Your money is a quantifiable analog for your life force—the aggregate of your time, skills, experience, persistence, and relationships.
Paradoxically, like love, money is best won by renouncing a need to totally possess. The more fixated people are upon both money and love, the more trouble they seem to have finding them. For money, at least, an easy remedy exists. Ceremonially release your grip on your money through regular acts of charity.
Through the mystical alchemy of money, giving charity jump starts wealth creation.
If retirement is your goal, your entire drive will be deeply flawed. You will never create all you could have. However, if you view your creative, professional life as an exciting, ongoing process with no defined expiration date, you avoid limiting your potential.
Life is business, and business is life. Learn one, and you will have also learned the other.
