Knowing Better Versus Doing Better
Let's share a particularly special shortcut. It's not been written about
before, and this really is right up your alley, come to think of it. It’s from a man and wife who went from
being very average to very much above average. After 25 years of struggling, they heard about this shortcut
from a wealthy cousin of hers who was the LAST PERSON anyone expected to become
successful. There’s a second layer to the story, and it’s a
big fat one. This husband and wife were at a family dinner with
all the cousins and in-laws, about 35 people.
Eight tables pushed together and covered with tablecloths. Family is family, and people get personal,
don’t they? The rich cousin was asked
very directly, “Noah, you’re a nice guy, but let’s face it;
you have never been the brightest bulb in the ceiling. How in the world did a
guy like you get so rich
The very noisy table
went dead silent. You could’ve heard that pin drop. Half of them had enjoyed sufficient experience of his famed flareups and expected the worst.
Others bated their breath in expectation of low-key acidity. He surprised every member of his extended family by smiling and saying, "I’ll
tell you what. I’ll bet that rich men and women are asked that question more
than any other. Even when they tell the truth, few people believe them. Since
every person at this table is family, blood of my blood, I’m going to tell you
all exactly how a tire mechanic got rich. I’d love to see every one of you use
the same magic trick I did. We know
that strangers won’t believe it, but I’m thinking that…. well… since we’re
family, you have a much better chance of actually catching on to the power of
what I’m going to tell you, and it works for every person, no matter how small
or large their income is. Let’s see what you do with it.” For the first time in
years, these dozens of people remained as quiet as church mice. He went on to
tell them that he realized one day, as he cashed his paycheck with hands that
were black with tire dust, that there’s always SOMETHING niggling and jiggling
at his wallet; ALWAYS some bill that pops up, making it perfectly impossible to
save. I
realized,” he said, that since I didn’t have cash to spare for savings, I would
only save towards those necessary and constant financial interruptions in my
happiness. In other words, every time I
got a five-dollar tip, I actually took a dollar and put it in an envelope
marked “rent.” Of course I knew that a dollar here and a dollar there would not
pay the rent, but I decided to stick with it. I had an envelope for gasoline
and an envelope for the auto insurance coming due in four months, and before I
knew it I had more than a dozen envelopes, and then another dozen envelopes,
because life is always throwing unexpected expenses at us. So I stuck with
throwing loose change and dollars, sometimes a five or a ten, into one envelope
or another.
“If you want, I can bore
you to tears with how many envelopes I ended up with. Looking back, it was
pretty funny, but I was too busy working to pay attention.
“Well, when it came time
to pay the rent, I knew there were only a few dollars in the rent envelope, so
I didn’t bother with it. I just had to squeeze out the rent from my paychecks,
which were pretty low. I didn’t touch the car insurance envelope because there
was only $24 in it by the time the insurance came due. I ended up having a
garage sale and made enough to pay the car insurance and, funny thing, had nine
dollars left over… so I threw it into the auto insurance envelope.
After about a hundred weeks of stashing just sixty to eighty bucks a week, I was shocked in a single
moment when I realized how fat all my envelopes were getting. I used that money
to buy a not-very-nice house that you never knew about. I worked for three
weeks swinging a hammer, and sometimes, well,
once in a while I would actually hit the nail instead of my finger.
I made forty thousand dollars profit on that house, and I’ve never regretted those silly two years
when I couldn’t stop sticking dollars into all those envelopes. I met a woman
in California once who’d done exactly the same thing. I bought a piece of
property she owned free and clear. Since she told me herself that she’d come
from a poor background, she certainly did appreciate the five hundred thousand
I paid her for that property, which I sold two years ago for more than a
million. So, you want to know how an idiot like me got rich? Envelopes, my
family, envelopes and buying one property at a time.
Now comes the exciting part, with the “average”
husband and wife who heard those words.
What makes it all so fascinating is that this
husband and wife understood that he was just being nice, because only the wife
was truly family to the rich man; the husband is related only by being married
to the rich man’s cousin, right? The
fascinating part is that, of the thirty-five or forty people who were at that
family dinner, exactly three of those people decided, “What
the hell, he’s richer than I am, so why not?”
Three people, I tell you, just three: the husband and wife,
and another, younger cousin.
All three of them tried this
trick, willing to give it just a hundred weeks. A five-dollar bill here, a ten there, sometimes a larger bill. A
hundred weeks of scrimping a bill here, a bill there.
More than a dozen
years & more than a dozen family dinners have passed since then.
Are
you at all
surprised to learn that
three people, and only three people, and yes, you know which three people we’re
talking about, have fat piles of cash in their banks today? One of them already
donated generously to this project.
Talk about the
horse’s mouth!
Yes, yes, we actually DO understand that you know
better. No one’s arguing that you
don’t know better.
You’re simply
invited to duplicate the results of people who are doing better.
99% of us understand the words, while Mr Shortcuts is sure
you agree that eighty percent of us don’t get it.
How could the
Shortcuts Way of Living, or the Universe, fail to admire those who do?
Just like you, me, and the next-door neighbor's cousin's former music teacher,
these people prove that actions always speak louder than words,
that tiny little steps have enormous proportions when you line them up in a row.
This is true when building domino bridges and electrical power plants;
it's true when you wind up a spring and applies when you turn up the volume.
This is a universal law of life, which makes it a PowerGem.
PowerGems are perfectly universal,
or as close as human life allows in the arena of perfection.
Precisely because there are so few legitimate absolutes in life does the wise person grab at least one if not more than one of the few absolutes of life. If you're not sure what that means, "grabbing" a perfect truth, is there a better time and place? Literally just between you and I, here and now.
When you accept an absolute truth, it means more than nodding our heads.
It means taking it an and making use, obtaining benefit from it.
Knowing that something is absolutely certain to happen gives you a great advantage.
Someone who understands and accepts that the sun rises every day can make money on this certainty,
whether it's selling a light bulb, or a cute little photosensitive device that turns the light off in daytime.
Knowing something in advance gives any person in possession and acceptance of that information a distinct advantage,
because you can act upon the information in the certainty that a defined result will occur.
Think of Wally Amos. Broke, and with less than twenty-eight dollars to his name needed holiday gifts for many of his immediate and extended family. He knew for an absolute fact that a particular mix of simple ingredients, baked at so many degrees for so many minutes, would produce a fantastically rare cookie - pretty much every time, with only an occasional burned batch.
The cookies were so preciously delicious that his own friends and relatives, knowing he was a bum, who could not even read or write despite being in his forties, actually put tens and twenties together to get him a four hundred dollar oven to put into his shack. Yes, his shack. He lived in a shack on the beach. He ran ridiculously long electrical extension cords to steal electricity to run the oven. Using his advance knowledge, knowing for a fact that human beings could not resist these cookies, he baked a several hundred cookies, put them into a hundred small brown paper bags and went out. You have to love this, because it's all true; thens and thousands and ultimately hundreds of thousands of people got involved in this.
He would walk into each grocery store or supermarket, approach the manager and invite them to taste the cookies. Sure, some people were too suspicious, and doubly so because here'a middle-age man who hardly inspired an image of prosperity. Others may have turned him away just because he was black, and that's okay, because life evens things out nicely with the help of people who note such things.
Fact is, approximately one hundred percent of the people who tasted his cookies responded in ways so closer to perfectly identical to one another as to make you think this cookie has got to launch. Nearly every person who ate them looked at him as if he were from another planet. Not one of the hundreds and hundreds of managers he visited had ever tasted a chocolate chip cookie even related to this level of perfection.
We don't know if he ever got the chance to properly thank his grandma, whose chocolate chip cookie recipe was the origin of all this pleasure. We do assuredly know how grateful he was, and remained, as a human being and an actual living hero. Just to prove that nice guys do win once in awhile, imagine enjoying fantastic and rare wealth for a few years, and fame for a few more years, and genuine hero status for another twenty years beyond that not for his earlier exploits but for the magnificent services he continually performed year after year after year after year. So when people want to know how Mr Shortcuts became obsessive about living a life of service - albeit for selfish reasons in that effective service gives one greater and more frequent rushes of intense physical and emotional pleasure than anything else in the world -
one need only look at the lives of Wally Amos, of Paul Newman, or Dr. Michael Harris, that rare doctor who qualifies as human angel, and it's easy to see how any of us can be bright enough to let the light shine in.
Just as it is with stories and movies, fairy tales are based upon the imagination. So is every product and service created throughout Man's presence on earth.
Many of thse stories, movies, and fairly tales have ended with the words, "happily ever after."
Yes, Virginia, there IS a happily ever after, and you can get there faster than your critics will see. Once you arrive at "happily ever after," you'll still have challenges here and there, have no fear; they'll appear. The difference between where you're at now and the quality of "happily ever after," is that you will respond differently.
How and as you stand now, you take in information and, within seconds, form opinions, and then act upon them.
Good, bad or indifferent, you follow this patterns dozens and even hundreds of times per day, don't you?
When you move from here to "happily ever after," when you are actually in the zone of "happily ever after,"
your pattern of response will be almost diametrically changed, comprehensively keeping you IN "happily ever after."
Like a magic shield of lubricant that specifically prevents excessive abrasion in during high friction moments,
just as a helmet protects a head scraping on the concrete at speeds even faster than walking or running.
Do you fully grasp the difference? Two people falling off a motorcycle. We don't even want to visualize it,
no matter how true it is, no matter how often we hear bad news... unless we open up and make use of useful information.
The difference between useful information and the use of useful information is not small enough for us to focus on with something approaching intelligence. The better that the information is, the more likely that the information is correct, is how you get broad evidence that a shortcut is
which the Shortcuts Way of Living promises
put them inShh. Quiet your mind. We're going to share some great value, definably and quickly increasing your power.
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