Hello! Seiiti Arata. Today, I’m going to tell you a bit of a different story. Hopefully you’ll understand that you should never give up too soon. More specifically, don’t give up just before the RIGHT time. If you avoid doing this, you’ll find that you’re much more likely to achieve your financial enrichment goals.
To start off this story, we’re going to have to go back in time a little bit. The story happened in the US over a hundred years ago. Thousands of men dreamed of becoming rich there by finding gold. Out of all these men, one man in particular got lucky. After weeks of mining, he found some nuggets of gold. However, in order to get to more gold, he needed heavier machinery, which was a lot more expensive than what he already had.
He kept the gold that he’d found a secret, except for a few close friends and family. Along with the few people he had told, they got enough money together to buy the machinery that he needed to get the gold.
A few days later, he returned to the mine with his nephew Darby. After they did a bit of light mining, they came to realise that they had found the most abundant gold mine in all the state. They only had to do a little bit of extra mining to pay off any debts that they owed, and once they had done this they knew that they’d start to see a great profit.
However, they got a big shock: after extracting the first nuggets of gold, they realised that there wasn’t as much gold there as they’d first thought! They kept drilling in the hopes of finding something, but ended up giving up because they always came back empty-handed. Disappointed, they sold the machinery to the owner of a local junkyard.
When the owner of the junkyard saw all of the equipment that Darby and his uncle had sold to him, he asked a local miner why they hadn’t made any profits, seeing as though they definitely had the resources to find more gold. The miner went on to explain that the two men didn’t understand the concept of fault lines. He said that he had made some calculations and that the next gold lode was really close – Darby and his uncle had given up mining when they were only one metre away from the next gold reserve.
1. Don’t give up when it gets hard
In this story told by Napoleon Hill, the most obvious lesson is to not give up on your dreams. I’m sure you’ve heard this one a million times before.
Personally, I don’t like hearing that you should “never give up” – if you’re following an unsuitable path, staying on it will just waste your time. I believe you should persist, but in an intelligent way. You need to not give up at the RIGHT time. To know when the right time is, you need to know what you’re doing.
2. Having the knowledge you need is key to achieving your goals
In the story, Darby had no mining experience. He was just a young man that wanted to make a lot of money. His uncle didn’t have any particular knowledge to do with mining either. They did, however, both have initiative and willpower. They got their hands dirty and put a lot of effort into the work. They even had the financial support from close friends and family.
However, these features are useless without knowledge. The owner of the junkyard ended up winning in this situation, because he knew this. He got in touch with someone that had mining experience to advise him on what to do.
Anyway, back to the story. Years went by. Darby continued as an entrepreneur and dedicated his time to different projects in order to achieve financial independence. Eventually, he got there. He paid back all the debts he owed and gave back all the money that people had invested into him and his dream of mining that gold. With the rest of his money, he founded a large insurance company. We could say that he learned the lesson that I’m trying to share by telling you this story.
3. You become wealthy when you start thinking like a wealthy person
The journey to becoming wealthy has two important milestones: the first is when you start thinking like a wealthy person. You have to be determined. Keep your end goal in mind and devote yourself entirely to making the plan work, at all costs. The second milestone is when you start to see the profits from the actions you took. You’ll only see true results when you put the work in.
4. Don’t let small setbacks put you off
It’ll take a lot of work to get the ball rolling. You’ll come across a lot of obstacles and face a lot of frustration. Small setbacks are almost inevitable. Things aren’t always going to go to plan. If you’re putting a lot of work in, you’re eventually going to make a mistake. The only people that don’t make mistakes are those who don’t do anything at all. And doing nothing at all is already a mistake in itself.
Accept setbacks as a part of your journey. Move on. Unfortunately, most people let small setbacks put them off completely. These are the kind of people that’ll always give up when times get hard. Remember your goals when you feel like giving up. Think about your goals when times get tough: when you have an interview, or a test, or when you’re advertising your company to a potential customer.
Not getting the result you wanted doesn’t mean you’ve failed. This small setback means that your approach wasn’t quite right this time, or maybe the timing wasn’t right.
Don’t put yourself down with a defeatist mindset by telling yourself that you did the best you could and it wasn’t good enough. That’s the wrong kind of mindset to have – you need to look at things from a new perspective.
5. Use your knowledge
Knowledge is the factor that makes all the difference. Look at what needs improving in your plan. Stop making the same mistakes. Get the skills you’re missing. Learn what you don’t know. Find out how you can use what you’ve learnt and put it into practice. Don’t say “I already knew that”. If you already knew something, build on that knowledge. It doesn’t matter what you know, what matters is what you do with what you know.
Understand what others expect of you and exceed those expectations.
Let’s say, for example, that you keep getting bad grades in maths. To improve this, you could hire a private tutor, get new books, or join a study group.
Let’s take another example: you’re after getting promoted at work. However, the chances of you getting promoted are pretty slim because you don’t have a particular skill. In this case, you could invest your time by focusing on acquiring and sharpening that skill.
If you were an entrepreneur and your business was failing, what would you do? You might need to reassess what your customer’s expectations are. What features does your product have and which do you need to develop? How can you improve your service? How can you improve communication to show off the value of your product?
I’ll give you an example of how to put knowledge into practice. Not long ago, our Portuguese YouTube channel just reached almost 1 million subscribers – I was really happy that so many people like you had come together to meet a common interest.
Take a look at how there is a continued improvement process underlying the mindset of not giving up before the right time: When I started developing training surrounding financial enrichment, I thought my audience just wanted to have a technical, step-by-step guide to investing. I got in touch with different experts on this area and made very simple, basic tutorials based on the information they gave me.
However, I came to realise that a lot of the people who said they’d be interest in this kind of material didn’t enrol on the course. I only took this as a temporary setback though, and didn’t let it stop me from moving on. I knew that people wanted to get rich and I knew that they wanted to learn what they needed to do, so I set out to get information. Just like the junkyard owner in the story, I sought out information to help me.
With better and more accurate information, I discovered something: people let their emotions get in the way of their development. People often tell themselves that they’re not quite ready to learn how to invest because it’s all too technical and difficult for them. Deep down, they think “This investment business is too complicated, it’s too risky, it’s not for me.”
After talking to them, I realised that they needed a bit more background information, some help to become more financially responsible. That’s what this organisation aims to help with – financial discipline, and especially, the ability to learn to earn more.
I understood that in general, people had an interest in investing and learning how to make more money.
That is, I refused to give up just before the right time. When I faced setbacks, I dedicated my time to understanding my customers and their needs instead of just giving up. From there, I made changes to the services that I provide to better suit my customers’ needs. In this case, I realised that I needed to teach the changes in mentality that need to be made and what someone can do to make more money.
When I started to teach this, the enquiries I received about enrolment increased by more than 570%.
You can catch up on the new lesson at arata.se/moneytaboo
You can, and should, do the same as I did. Don’t give up when things go wrong. Firstly, identify what your goals are. Look at the current figures for your business and compare the current results to your expectations. If you’re not getting the results you were hoping for, look for new perspectives and try to understand how you can improve your business.