Читать книгу You Need a Rocket! - Martin B Ayles - Страница 6

Throughout this book you may find parts of it a little blunt. I guess you could call it brutally honest! Some of what I have written may offend. If it does, it may be because I am simply describing things that may have happened or be happening in your life; things that you may not have faced up to yet.

Please, do not take offence if something does hit a nerve or two, just take action and change instead!

You can choose not to read on if you do get offended, but it is not meant intentionally to upset you, so don’t take it personally. Just take personal responsibility!

If this still scares you, then put this book down and quit reading. Just remember though, the challenge with society today is that quitting is the easy option and keep in mind no matter what you do in life, you can always quit! So don’t quit. Step up and take the challenge! You owe it to yourself and maybe to others as well. By taking action from reading this book, it may help you to positively change and influence someone else’s life for the better – and all from the knowledge you gained, simply because you chose to read this book to the end!

Although far from an easy challenge to solve, a change to the education system would be a great milestone in the future of generations to come. As to what these changes would have to be? Well that would be a very long chapter and depending on who has the input as to how many suggestions for changes to the education system there would need to be.

Our style of teaching is out dated and fairly mundane. I am sure that there is some passionate teachers out there but they now have to spend half their days worrying about running the metal detectors or abiding by the strict regulations of being able to apply disciplinary action to students.

Teaching out of text books is more or less a parrot fashion method of teaching and although needed in some areas, every person has a different method of absorbing information and the way in that they learn and perceive information.

Children are often not interested in some of the subjects that schools teach. If the teaching method were fun and lively, the students would retain more knowledge and enjoy attending school a lot more. Unfortunately, we teach through the memorization of textbooks, instead of learning through lessons. For example, if they used the concept of a board game, such as Monopoly as a teaching methodology for teaching life and investing skills, then I am certain that they would be pleasantly surprised at the results.

The first reason for this is that life and investing is a game. The second reason is that it is fun. It involves basic math, buying property, taking mortgages, obeying the law and avoiding jail, paying bills and fines, using leverage and collecting or paying rent. But most of all, the lesson is that four houses equals one hotel! You see, the lesson behind Monopoly is more than a game just about money. It is about starting off small with one house and collecting a little rent, then mortgaging for your second house and collecting more rent and so on, until once you have four houses that you can trade up to buy a hotel, because a hotel provides a lot more income than a house.

The lesson you get from monopoly is that the knowledge required to do the small property deal is the same as the big hotel deal, but if you didn’t start with the small deal first then you cannot do the bigger hotel deals. Monopoly also teaches patience and the value of time.

I guess the sad part about society today is that computer games have taken over games like Monopoly, and these days a lot of kids are often playing violent games rather than real life games. You see, games allow you to be creative without any real risk. They allow the imagination to run free, and today when negative games with poor or no lessons are being drummed into kids, one must assume that these games will have some influence on the child as they grow up.

So I hope that my influence will help to educate and assist children and their parents as well. I promise to donate a lot of my time to fun useful education for the future and one day I may even be able to convince someone to make positive changes to the education system.

At the age of 27, I consider myself young. I have had nearly ten years of full-time work experience, as well as various attempts at my own businesses and studying as well. In that time, I have also been unemployed and in a lot of consumer debt. I’ve had everything from credit cards to store accounts and when the banks started chasing me I was continually borrowing money from anyone or anything to pay that money back. It was a vicious cycle.

I was fortunate to be introduced to network marketing at just 17 years old. One of the greatest benefits I had from being involved in this business was a program for the business builders that involved a book of the month and an audiotape of the week. I always read the books and listened to the tapes over and over, and found myself enjoying them and looking forward to all the new ones. I know to this day that if it wasn’t for the books and tapes I would most probably be in some undesirable situation somewhere.

The education process offered was interesting. They had seminars with great guest speakers like Laurie Lawrence and Peter Daniels. I learned great lessons from being involved with network marketing.

A friend from the network marketing business realized I had a genuine interest in improving my financial position. He invited me to a 3-hour seminar. I was so intrigued by the presentation that I went back the next night! On offer was a one-day workshop on real estate investing with expert Dolf de Roos. I had to put the $1,000 registration fee on my credit card, but for some reason I knew I needed to be there. That was in 1998 and I spent the next two years getting out of debt. At the time getting a job was the only way I knew how to get out of debt, so after 2 years of hard scrimping and saving, I was able to purchase my very first investment property in July of 2000!

And the rest as they say is history. In less than 2-years I have purchased over $5-million in holding property and made a lot of cash along the way. I have been able to generate more cash flow using the stock market and my real estate investments. My family and friends noticed a change as I went from unemployed to a wealth of information on investing and money. I even started assisting a lot of others to do the same as I was doing.

Friends began requesting help to change their financial position and their friends also came to me to find out what it was I had done to become wealthy at such a young age. It was then that I had to begin charging, as demand increased for my time and it got to a point where I was charging people a few thousand dollars to hang out with me, hear their challenges and help them deal with their financial issues. Usually when we got to the bottom of it there was a stack of emotional stuff jamming their brain, so they couldn’t fill it with good data or the information they needed to make a stack of cash.

Their financial position when they came to me for help was often a very empty wallet with a full credit card or two hanging out of it with a 20% per annum interest charge attached. You see, it’s often not simply bad money management (although that’s a good starting point) it’s the life management and your own mind management that makes a difference to the size of your wallet and bank account, not the cash! Cash is just the physical result of doing enough of the right things for yourself and others. There is more detail coming on this so hang in there.

After I put together some ideas on what I wanted to write about I came to the realisation that this book could assist anyone who is prepared to get off their butt and push themselves along.

The challenge I had was that I did not know what direction to take with my life after leaving school. I kept going to seminars and workshops, read books and listened to tapes. I was trying to find answers. The simple fact is that the answer begins with you. Education begins when you leave school – it doesn’t end.

Accept that you and I can always be better, and realize that success is whatever you choose it to be. The word success is a generalization and you should relate the meaning of it to the achievement of your own goals and desires, not someone else’s.

Although some of my achievements were based around investment goals, it’s not so much the money that drove me to go out and invest to become wealthy, but more so the pain of doing what I was doing, as a mundane employee day-in, day-out. I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel by selling my labour for $10-15/hour while knowing that there were only so many hours in a day. I realized that my earning potential was limited by how much of my time I could sell, so something had to change. I needed to invest and free up my time so I could follow my vision and become the best I could.

It is about becoming the person it takes to achieve what you set out to do, and the lessons you get along the way.

Success is a personal thing and should be based on what you want to do, not based on your friends or family’s choices for you. They often have a different view of what you will or should become. Besides, is what they’re doing what you want to become? If not, why take their advice? Sure, listen to their opinion but remember, it’s exactly that – an opinion! It’s your ship so take control and steer it yourself before they try and take over and ram it up the backend of someone else. Remember, I am just the compass giving you direction. Chances are you’ll be off course more often than not, but you will end up at your destination eventually.

Having not completed school or tertiary education I have this attitude that anyone can achieve what they want. I couldn’t care less if you don’t have a PhD or degree, or even if you didn’t make it past the 9th grade. Personally, I cannot even do basic maths. I know how to add, subtract and divide using a calculator and it usually takes me a couple of goes to work out a percentage.

Another major influence on this book was that I had been working full-time for 10-years, and was heading in the same direction that a lot of society had chosen. I knew if I continued down the same path then life was not going to change until I chose to make the changes happen. Once I made those changes I found I had achieved more than most people twice my age! I realized then that we all have a choice – keep doing the same old thing year-in, year-out – or change!

I have found that if the mere thought of, or talking about goals and dreams were painful to anyone, they were probably the people whose car was rejected by a scrap metal yard, or whose communication was via an argument or who demonstrated a lack of ability to use their ears instead of their gob, or the ones who couldn’t remember what state of the country their children lived in. It’s pretty sad and no wonder they found goals hard to achieve. Remember, self-belief is the first thing any goal requires.

I don’t care if you’re single and young, middle-aged and married or divorced, widowed, or older and wiser. It really doesn’t matter! By simply taking a few steps first in your mind, then in your physical life, things will change so rapidly that you’ll be blown away.

Remember this message:

Don’t Quit!

If it’s not working, change what you are doing!

There is a big difference between simply changing actions to get to where you are trying to go, and quitting. Don’t quit!

One thing I can promise you is that you will come across a time in your life when it is all going to blow up in your face. You will want to run - but don’t be a handbag and run. Turn around and run head on into your challenge. We will work on this together later in this book, but I want you to step-up and accept the fact that you are going to face fears both physically and mentally. I identify when fear is controlling my state of mind by understanding that fear can subconsciously drive you in the direction of quitting. So, to me that is a simple way of identifying when fear is controlling my state of mind. I become aware of that fear and I tackle it straight away.

I have found that other people’s words can create unnecessary fear to a large degree. I may discuss with them a big real estate deal I am about to do and they say things like, “What if interest rates go up?” or “What if the market has a down turn?” and I have just signed the contracts and I start to wonder that maybe I made the wrong decision! The simple way around this is not talk to them about it and only seek advice from someone who has done it! Keep in mind that ‘FEAR’ stands for: ‘False Expectations Appearing Real.’

So let’s get on with it and I ask you to keep your sense of humour throughout this book and life. There is no monetary value on a good laugh and it’s also good for you. What might seem bad in your life at the moment may be something you will be able to laugh about in years to come! We are all under the pressure of ‘modern day’ life, and seem to be busy doing more and more while achieving less and less. Peak hour traffic is getting worse and the work hours are getting longer. Holidays seem less frequent and shorter and we all feel like we are getting old too quickly.

This is not the way it’s supposed to feel! Often times the only reason we are unhappy in life, I find, is because we are missing out on enjoying the pleasure of the important things that money doesn’t buy. Things such as laughter, family involvement, giving and receiving love, and helping someone become something. But the reality is we live in a society that is dominated by money in the physical aspects of life. Simply put, if you have CASH it’s a lot easier to live your life, fulfil your goals, and assist someone else to experience the things that money can’t buy.

The point being, it is impossible to make it through the physical plane of life without CASH, and what you want will determine how much of it (cash) you need. So how much do you really need?

Making money is easy. It’s about doing whatever it takes to become the person who is wealthy – that’s what counts. I see it as being no different from a successful sports person. They work hard for a long time and often get no money, but they have a cabinet full of trophies instead. They have fans and they have critics. They train, practice and prepare harder every day. And they make sacrifices most people could never contemplate. Then one day a young Adelaide boy called Lleyton Hewitt wins the US open tennis tournament and Wimbledon, and takes home $1-2 million in prize money. Pretty cool yeah, but I promise you one thing, he’s underpaid! If you had to go through the pain of what he did to get to where he’s got, then you would also know that the money doesn’t justify the sacrifices made. Besides, I’m sure Lleyton wouldn’t have been doing it for the money in the first place. He just wanted it bad enough and understood that, ‘winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is’.

I don’t really need a lot of stuff in my life. Love, health and freedom of time are good enough for me. But hey, if you have to drive to your beach house in your Ferrari, then that can be fun too.

Now I know that I’m far from perfect. However, I feel that if I can change someone’s life for the better by sharing the experiences that I’ve had in an easy-to-read format, with a bit of humour and reality, then it was worth my time to write this book. I’ve met so many great people in my life, because I’ve made it a priority to get around the best people in any area or field of life I’m interested in. I believe everybody has the ability to be and do something special with their life, but every now and then we just need someone else to believe in us.

It is difficult to keep on swimming against the current in life, trying to continually improve yourself and achieve the tasks or goals you set. There will always be setbacks and interruptions along the way that will slow you down, but as long as you keep your destination in mind and get back on track as soon as possible, then you will keep heading in the right direction.

This book is designed to give you a set of values and opinions to consider throughout your daily life. It will also make you aware of your daily actions and help you to take note of what you are doing with your time. As you come across situations, you may need to make a decision on the spot either way. This book will help you to assess your position in life and view your decision from all available points of view.

Whether it helps you make a positive change to your life financially, physically or emotionally, as long as it makes a difference, then I know I have made a contribution to the world, and I’ll know it was worthwhile writing this book!