Quest for Excellence: KC See’s Blog

Who Taught Us about Money?

We all carry with us a certain understanding and certain beliefs in relation to money. Our money habits are basically extensions of all these beliefs. Likewise our financial results are a reflection of what we believe in and the money habits that manifest from them. You will realise that whatever financial results we have achieved right now such as our net asset worth, our annual earnings, our savings; all come from the financial decisions we made in the past and habits that we carry. Theses financial decisions and money habits we have come from one source…our money beliefs. So if you want to change your financial results you have to go to the source; you have to change your money beliefs.

Whom did we learn these money concepts and where does our money beliefs from? Our parents can also be the single most important influence on money. Although they don’t sit down and teach us, we absorb what they tell us, how they behave or think and this knowledge form the basis of our money beliefs and values.
What about our education? Well we all know that the only thing that school does for us is to prepare us to go out there and look for a JOB. But this is powerful enough to stick into the mind of a lot of people that carries with them what we refer to as the “job-mentality”,such as something is wrong with you if you don’t have a job.

The conversation over the family dinner actually has a great impact on a child’s subconscious mind. What your parents say to one another over dinner and how they say it can greatly influence you.

We all know such sayings as “Money is the root of all evils” and “Money does not grow on trees.” Where did we hear this? From our parents!

Of course they say this to us with good intention. Our parents always want the best for us! When our parents say, “Money does not grow on trees,” they mean we must take care of money and not waste it.

The flip side of this is that you believe you have to work very hard to get money. Our parents reinforce this belief by repeating that if we want to be very successful, we have to work very hard. Perhaps more importantly, we should work smart and effectively rather than just working hard to create wealth.

However, these beliefs picked up early on become ingrained into our minds, shaping our habits and action. While all of us do have the intention to improve our financial situation, we find that at times we are unable to do so. This can be due to our own beliefs. So we strongly suggest that you go back to your younger days, review and evaluate the source of your values and beliefs. Why do you think the way you think now or why do you do what you do today?

Is it because of your past? The environment that you grew up with could have influenced you and your current beliefs. Remember what you believe in, you become. This is what we call “self-manifestation”. If your values and beliefs are stopping you from achieving your dreams, then you may first need to do something about them. You may need to “undo” your current negative beliefs or values and reprogramme or recondition your mind .

Everything, whether you aim for the moon or dream of becoming financially free, the intention comes from your mind. Therefore some of the limitations can be from your inner constraints. When you have an intention and become emotional about it, this will lead to actions and results. But if your intentions are limited because of your conflicting emotional values and beliefs, you are not able to take necessary actions and achieve what you want to achieve.

It is said that you reap what you sow, therefore what you sow in the mind, you reap in your life. Your outer world always reflects your innermost beliefs and values. So understand your own money beliefs and values and do what you need to do to remove any inner constraints that are stopping your intentions from becoming actions and results.

Discarding Negative Money Beliefs

Therefore before anything else, you must first examine your beliefs about money and wealth. Just like you, we too thought that working hard is crucial to being successful. We were programmed to believe that our success relies on hard work.

However, as we progressed in life, and our network expanded and as we are more exposed to what is happening around us, our eyes opened, and our mindsets shifted, we realised that rich people don’t necessarily work hard or at least not for a prolonged period. Instead, they leverage on others working hard for them. In fact, a lot of them don’t work at all!

So we went back and reevaluated our beliefs. If one of them, such as “You must work hard to create wealth,” may not be entirely true, then what about the others?

You need to look back and reevaluate your own beliefs. If working hard alone to create wealth is not the best way, then what is the best way? What about the other negative beliefs that you had. Do you need to discard all those beliefs?

One of the most powerful thing I learnt from Robert Kiyosaki was when he says “The rich does not work hard for money; they make money work hard for them”. This impacts me significantly and makes me realize that most people only know how to make money using time. The same goes with me; up to the point when I was studying under Robert, all my businesses were time based…my time. I was literally traumatized to realize that I have been working hard but really not that smart ….to the point I wrote my first book based on what I learnt. I wrote a small book which become a best seller; “Leveraging Time to create Wealth”. In that book I talk about the various types of income and which types does not rely on time.

So we still have a lot of people who cannot see how they can be financially successful without having to work hard and use time. So their constant excuse especially if they hold a full time job is; “No time …so how to make more money?”. If this belief does not change it will be difficult to change your financial results.

The secret of creating wealth and ultimately becoming a millionaire is not exactly a secret. The information is already out there. If you go to any bookshops you will see tons of book written about this subject; each one having the own approach and their ‘secrets”. But then if reading a book can make you into a millionaire …the streets will be full of them. Don’t get me wrong I am not asking you not to read but it is obvious that it is just not enough.
If you go to any hotel you are bound to stumble across a money making seminar of some sorts; from forex trading to stock options to internet marketing. Yet people in general are not really getting richer. So what is the problem? Well it will not be inaccurate to say that as much as 70% of the attendees that went to all these three-day seminars go home and DO NOTHING. Well these events are not exactly cheap….but yet many are not putting into application what they learnt. Why is that the case?
It is not exactly the fault of these seminars. And I do not mean that you should not go to these events. I believe that most of these seminars teach you things that do work ……..if you put it into action. So what is the reason for non–action? The answer is obvious. It is easy to acquire the knowledge but if knowledge is all you need, then all the professors in the world will be very rich. It is only knowledge that we put into Action that determine the results. Unfortunately …changing the financial results require more than just a three day seminar and certainly more than just head knowledge. It simply requires ACTION….educated ACTION.
Unfortunately without follow through and support after attending these seminars the information remains as just knowledge….a nice manual, and lots of notes taken…but simply no ability or discipline to make real transformation…of beliefs, habits and hence results. Most of seminars lack follow through such as regular coaching (and not just some telephone calls from thousands of miles away) and support group such as masterminding.
Why won’t people take action to change their financial habits and therefore change their results? The reason is quite obvious…most of us are in comfort zones. Human being by nature has a strong resistance to change. We just could not get out of our comfort zone….our cosy job which we really have no passion for, or our familiar business that some of us go to everyday unenthusiastically and which is not giving the results that we want. This resistance are so strong that it sometimes defies logical reasoning and we give ourselves ‘reasons’ for not making the changes. We blame, we justify and we make excuses; no time, no money and don’t know how. Why won’t we get out of comfort zone and overcome our resistance to change? I believe it is because most have a fear of taking risk.
If we have something going on in our life that is Ok…not great but we have a reasonably good life; some would not want to rock that boat and take risk. In fact some people are so risk averse to a point of having no ability to take any risk of any kind. But if we think about it; we have only one life and if we decide to make our life meaningful and fulfilling; why would anyone compromise and not do the things that would get us out of the mundane, the meaningless and the mediocrity. Why won’t we take some risk? I would of course not ask you to take all kinds of risk. Any risk that we take must be calculated and educated risk. Learn before we jump in. And one more thing; don’t take more risk than you can afford to lose. But risk you must.
Every decision we make comes with some risk of some kind. Not taking any risk is like not making any decisions at all. So we procrastinate life’s decision. I like to add the biggest pain in life is the pain of regret; the regret of not making the decision to do something until it is too late. In my years of helping people to achieve a higher level financially; this challenge remains the biggest. As some says; “NO guts NO glory. “
Think about this “Is the rich a majority or minority? We all know the answer; the rich is a minority. So the question is if that is the case why people follow the majority? I learn a long time ago that “successful people are people who would do things that ordinary people would not do”. So it is really that simple….you cannot really be truly rich and successful doing what everyone else is doing. You have to do what most ordinary people won’t do; take action and take some risk.
The common responses to the question “why isn’t everyone a millionaire” is the “no opportunity” or simply “no Luck” It is an easy excuse and it is a SAD excuse.
Denzel Washington, the actor echoed an age-old wisdom when he said “Luck is when an opportunity comes along and you are prepared for it”. So if one is not prepared and when ‘luck” come either you cannot keep it and maximise it or you simply can’t secure it.
Indeed there are people who are’ Lucky” and either secure some opportunities or simply a windfall of some kind. But time and again, we hear of people who made the money fast through chance and will also lose the money equally fast .They cannot retain their “lucky” wealth. So even if opportunity falls on you but if one is not “prepared” it will not be yours.
I often say that opportunity is not seen with the eyes. It is seen with the mind. Half a glass empty is also seen as half a glass full. We can all see the same thing but we will interpret it differently. Some of us will chose to see it full. Some will see it as half empty. So if your mind is ‘not prepared” …it will always be seen as empty and barren of opportunity. It could be right in front our eyes and yet we won’t see.
Some choose to buy luck. Buy the numbers and sit there to wait for money to fall down from the sky. Good luck to you.
So why isn’t everyone a millionaire…well, most people don’t take action to get out of their comfort zone and they don’t take risk. And when the opportunity does come they are not ‘prepared’.

What exactly is the meaning of wealth? Robert Kiyosaki, author of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” define wealth as the number of days you can survive forward if you stop working tomorrow. This assumes you maintain the same lifestyle after you stop working.
This definition has a profound impact on me because unlike most people who tends to measure wealth in terms of possessions e.g. becoming a millionaire; Robert choose to define wealth from the perspective of capability. Thus, if you asked how many days you will last if you don’t go to work tomorrow and the answer you give is very small; then that would means that you are not very wealthy. But if your number is large then you can consider yourself…fairly wealthy. Obviously all of us wants to make the number BIGGER. However if you are extremely rich then your answer should no longer be a number it should be the word “FOREVER”; which means you should be able to survive forever without having to work anymore.
So this has an impact on our financial goals depending on whether we define wealth in this manner or in terms of the millions you want to accumulate. It will change our financial strategies. Some millionaires cannot last forever if they stop working tomorrow. This could be because their income will stop if they stop working and they have expensive life style. We have heard of successful rich celebrities who ran into financial problems when they are no longer working. I suggest to most people to adopt what I called, the Ultimate Financial Strategy; which is to reach Total Wealth (defined by the ability to say “forever” when asked how long you will last if you don’t work) within the shortest possible time.
The next logical question, of course, is, “How do we achieve this Ultimate Financial Strategy?” Someone once said to us that the key to being rich is spending less than you earn and investing the difference.
That, to a large extent, is true. However, where do we invest so that we can create more wealth? In our Money Mastery Community, we advocate building Money Making Machines.

The Money Making Machines (MMM)
There is a huge difference between making money and creating wealth. Many of us know how to make money but don’t know how to create wealth.
In general, if your objective is just to make money, it is not too difficult. As long as you are willing to work very hard, putting in time and effort, you will definitely make some money. However, creating wealth requires more than that. It requires you to have a different mindset; it requires you to work smart.
Creating wealth means creating Money Making Machines. So what exactly is a Money Making Machine? These so-called machines are the products, investments, services or businesses that will be your “sources” of income that will help you generate more wealth in the long run even as you stop working today. How?

First you probably need to develop and build the machine. Once the machine is built and if you build it well, it will then produce revenue for you without using your time. Initially you will probably have to put some time, effort and resources in order for it to start generating an income for you. After a while, the intensity of your efforts reduces but it continues to generate just as much or even more money for you…thus giving you residual and passive income.
Sounds too good? Let me give you a classic example of a Money Making Machine. Imagine you have written a book that is sold in all major bookstores. Each time a copy is sold, you receive royalty or profit from sales. Of course, you must first put in time, effort and resources to write, publish and market the book. But once that work is done, the money will keep flowing in from all future sales. This is called creating intellectual property.
Other examples of Money Making Machines include owning a car park, having a portfolio of blue-chip stocks and shares that pay regular dividends, owning a row of vending machines or having a piece of property that pays you a rental income. I am sure there are many more examples that you can think of.
Unfortunately, in real life, most people don’t focus on creating Money Making Machines. They focus on turning themselves into Money Making Machines! They put everything they have (time, effort, energy and even resources) into their jobs or business, which they may not even like!
Some of us who are in business think that we are creating wealth. But in fact, many of us are “married” to our businesses. We must be there to run our business every day. Without us, the business cannot function. So as business owners, what we have just done is we quit our previous jobs and “bought” ourselves a bigger job that eats up more of our time and energy. If we don’t truly love what we are doing but remain tied down, then we are no different from being employed. In other words their business is not the Money Making Machine.they are the one.
A job is only a short-term solution to a long-term problem. The real solution is to create Money Making Machines. With rising living expenses in most countries, it is almost impossible to live on the savings from your job after you retire! Many of us even have more than one job in order to survive.
While having Money Making Machines one of the indispensable components in the wealth creation process, it does take some initial effort to build them. Like all things in life, there are critical success factors. And getting the necessary training and networking within the right community of like-minded people, having the right resources and ability to turn creative ideas into actual products or services that meets the market needs will increase the possibility of success.
In the Money Mastery community, we work together to coach, guide and help build their Money Making Machines so that no single member is left alone on their own.

You can learn a management skill, how to close a sale and may be a new Microsoft application software program in three days but learning how to create wealth is a lot more sophisticated than that. And it is certainly going to take more than three days. But there are many three days seminars around; on how to make money on stock options, forex trading etc. and I am sure they are all very very good.

So how does learning to create wealth works?

In my case I did not learn these things, just from my sifu, Robert Kiyosaki’s seminar and certainly not in three days. It is the on-going dialogue with Robert over two years; the questions and answer sessions, the observations and his Mentorship that helps me make the ‘shift’; shifting from what I called the Making Money concept to the Wealth Creation concept. From becoming a Money Making Machine to building Money Making Machines.

Learning how to create wealth is more than just attending seminars. It is a good start but you need more than that. One of the most powerful platforms for my learning was the mastermind group that I formed back in 1995. Our mastermind group meets for three years every month without fail. We focus on one thing; how we can apply what we learned to help each other improve our business and income. Much of my personal ‘shifts’ comes from the sharing and learning with this group. The results that we get are substantial. However masterminding only works if the member understood and practise one principle; to receive you must be willing to give.

I call this whole arena of learning wealth creation; the Wealth Pot.

Learning how to create wealth is like learning how to pour more water into a pot and over time create a big Wealth Pot for yourself.

There is therefore two parts to it. You must first learn how to pour a lot of water. This means you must learn how to create Multiple Streams of income. The more income sources you have; the more water you can pour into your pot. BUT POURING MORE WATER INTO A SMALL POT OR A POT FULL OF HOLES WILL NOT CREATE THAT WEALTH POT FOR YOU IN THE LONG RUN.

So other than pouring lots of water, you need to learn how to build a bigger pot and make sure that your pot is not full of holes. Otherwise these would be fruitless efforts. I know; I spent ten year pouring water into a leaking small pot.

What is the Wealth Pot?
This is your foundation of Wealth. This is your money habits and your money beliefs. You need to ensure that you hold productive and good money beliefs and habits in order for all your efforts to bear fruits.

NOTE: IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW MUCH MONEY YOU MAKE, IF YOU HAVE POOR MONEY HABITS AND POOR MONEY BELIEFS YOU CAN STILL BE POOR.

And for most people money habits and beliefs cannot change in three days. Can you? What are some of the things you need to learn to create a BIG Wealth pot? You need to learn how to manage, multiply and protect your Wealth. So is there a place for all these money making seminars? Certainly but we need a lot of help, from learning some money-making ideas to making it work for us and ultimately making money and creating wealth. So what do we need?

We need the following tools:
1. A mentor or a process coach to challenge our old paradigms and to help us make the “shift”. A good process coach would kick us in the butts when we need a kick and pad our backs when we need a pad.
2. A pool of experts, advisors or what I call an expert coach to show us to get there faster and avoid all the possible pot holes. These are the content experts ; people who has done it , make all the mistakes and show us how not to do it.
3. A mastermind group to support us and help us make the journey together, rather than alone.
4. A community to whom you are a part of and from where you can attract the support you need.
5. A resource base where you can have access to systems and tools such as template, work sheets, processes and check lists.

Pouring Water is a question of choices
Making a decision on which income streams to put your efforts on is a critical decision. So many has went into all kinds of income opportunities only to find out that it is not what they really like to do or good at. Here is the key; if the income source is not passive; it is important that it must be a passion. The only exception is if it is only a short term venture to create cash flow. Unfortunately many people are not too clear what their passion is. This is an important first step. If you are making money doing what you don’t like to do……….well may be you should find better use of your most scarce resource…TIME.

Find your passion then find the money to do what you want to do, meanwhile build passive income sources.

The other issue is we need to have absolute clarity as to what kind of income that we need to build. If we use the metaphor of pouring water and borrowing the concept from another mentor of mine, Burke Hedges; you either build bucket income or pipeline income. In other words you can pour water using a bucket or you build a pipeline. Some people can’t differentiate them and as a result end up carrying a lot of buckets.

In the short run you may need some bucket incomes but ultimately we should ‘shift’ to pipeline income. Obvious reason is; we cannot carry too many buckets for the rest of our life. The only bucket income that you want to carry forever is your passion. Unfortunately many SME’s business model are bucket carrying.

KC See
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ENTREPRENEURS ARE A SPECIAL BREED – they are a brave lot who are willing to take risks and face an uncertain future, to start and manage their own companies. Perhaps they want out from the big corporation; perhaps they have ideals on how a company should be run and want to try their hands at it, or maybe they have a great business idea which they are sure will reap in the profits.

Opportunities are always knocking. The question is: “How does one recognize it, when it comes?”

Many entrepreneurs start a business when they are struck by a sudden bright idea – the miracle cure, the conceptual breakthrough. But this type of inspiration isn’t the source that entrepreneurs can generally rely on, or the sources that lend themselves to a process.

They are not repeatable on demand, cannot be taught and learned, and are seldom immediately applicable or even feasible. Leonard Da Vinci’s greatest works were mostly useless to him and his contemporaries because the technology wasn’t available to implement them and the society and economy weren’t prepared to accept them.

HOW TO POSITION YOURSELF FOR OPPORTUNITIES

If an opportunity does not drop on your lap, don’t fret. You can position yourself to be more susceptible to opportunities you are seeking. The following eight steps will put you where you want to be.

1. Decide what business area you want to be in.
2. Analyze the skills and knowledge required by that business.
3. Acquire them. LEARN at every opportunity.
4. Observe good examples of people in similar positions. Analyze their attitudes, your shortcomings and close the gap.
5. Test your knowledge and skills.
6. Become whatever it is you want to be and need to be.
7. Be around people in the business. Joint networks.
8. At the appropriate time, when you spot or sense the opportunity, go after it…

Opportunity search lies in looking for changes. Change is all around. More than that, we are facing change of unprecedented variety and intensity. And while some individuals and companies have prospered and grown in the midst of change, others have deteriorated and declined.

Why? Because successful individuals and companies recognize that things must change, and they position themselves to exploit these changes while others see change as only a threat and strive to protect themselves from it.

THE PROCESS

Great ideas shouldn’t be ignored when encountered, but neither should they be relied upon to assist in innovation. It’s like finding money in the street. You’re glad it was there and can certainly use it, but you wouldn’t leave your house hoping to find some to pay for the groceries that day!

There is an organized process to opportunity search. This removes the “hit or miss” danger, and reliance on that rare “flash of insight” or “breakthrough idea.” Decision Processes International, or DPI, an international management consulting firm which specializes in providing clients with processes to help them improve the quality of their strategic or operational decisions, gives ten areas of systematic search.

1. Unexpected Success, such as Ray Kroc’s pursuit of why he was selling so many milk shake machines to a place called McDonalds.
2. Unexpected Failure, such as Ford’s miss with the Edsel which should have alerted them to new objectives of the auto buyer, a change eventually exploited by the Mustang.
3. Unexpected External Events, such as the advent of AIDS which led to a boom in the rubber industry.
4. Process Weakness, such as the failure of the post office to provide a guaranteed system of next-day delivery, creating the phenomenal success story of federal Express.
5. Industry/Market Structure Changes, such as those undergone by the telephone industry, leading to the advent of CELCOM and other alternative carriers.
6. High Growth Areas, areas of the business growing faster than the population or user groups would otherwise justify, such as frozen foods dramatically increasing in sales, not because of new consumers, but because the two income family increases the need to have fast, easy-to-prepare dinners readily available.
7. Converging Technologies, such as the penetration of the video cassette recorder and the perfection of the technique to “color” classic black and white movies, creating new revenue opportunities for films gathering dust on the shelves
8. Demographic Change, in areas such as age, education, income, geography and buying mix, which has led to an entire industry catering to the recent phenomenon of the healthy, affluent retired.
9. Changes in Perception, which aren’t based on changing facts but rather changing interpretation of the facts, such as college students’ values changing from drop-out and protest to finding the best-paying job, leading to a growing industry in career planning for undergraduates.
10. New Knowledge, the rarest and most difficult source of innovation, such as Merck & Co, constantly researching new medical applications, having to achieve discovery, validation, government approval and distribution before parents expire, and thereby allowing generic drugs to compete at lower price.

PROCESS QUESTIONS

To seek opportunities in the various areas, we must first of all ask some process questions that will lead us to ferreting out the “hidden” opportunities. For example, some questions to ask in the area of Unexpected Success are:
* What unexpected product success have you had recently?
* In what geographic areas have you had unexpected success recently?
* In what market/industry segments have you experienced unexpected success recently?
* Which customer segments have provided unexpected success recently/
* What unexpected successes have your suppliers/competitors had recently?
* Which of your technologies have had unexpected success recently?
* Which unexpected customer/user groups have brought from you recently?
• Which unexpected sources have asked to sample/distribute/represent your product recently?

Another example is the following set of questions in the areas of Process Weakness:

* What self-contained processes exist in the organization?
* What weakness or “missing link” prevents better process performance?
* Why do some processes perform better at some times than at others?
* What bottlenecks does each of these processes have?

Then go on to ask the following questions:
* What opportunities and ideas can you develop from these unexpected successes/process weaknesses?
* What specific new product/service idea can you think of to satisfy this opportunity?
* What specific new customer/market segment could we serve?
* What specific new geographic markets could we seek?
* What specific new improvement programme could we develop?

INNOVATION

Innovation is the tool of entrepreneurs, and virtually anyone can be entrepreneurial. What differentiates the successful and the unsuccessful innovators is that the former have a system or follows certain principles. Here is a list of do’s and don’ts to remember when innovating. These are not rigid directives but rather a list of suggested guidelines that can help to improve the chances of success.

Do’s

1. Innovation needs strategic direction. There must be a “strategic fit” between any new opportunity and your current or intended business. Every business, over time, develops skills, expertise or a body of knowledge. Opportunities that exploit these strengths have a higher probability of succeeding. The further an opportunity strays form these, the less likely it will succeed.
2. Innovation is both conceptual and perceptual. Both the right (creative) and left (rational) brain are employed by the best innovators. Holistic thinking or the ability to see the “big picture” is a must.
3. The innovation must be perceived as bringing benefit to the person that counts most – the end user. Opportunity that brings value only to the provider is going to be short-lived. The innovation must provide win/win benefits for both parties.
4. Innovation, at first, must start small and be highly focused. It should do only one thing. Consumers can usually only swallow a little bit of innovation at a time. Rather than adding quantum leap features, you might do better by adding new features on an incremental basis over time. Continuous innovation is the key.
5. The best innovations start small. Do not start with grandiose expectations; aim at one specific target. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak certainly did not foresee a US$1 billion company when they assembled their first personal computer in their garage.
6. Innovation does, however, aim for leadership eventually. If the opportunity is innovative enough, not to aim for eventual leadership would be to rob it of its potential.

Don’ts

1. Don’t try to be clever. The patent office is full of clever ideas that never got off the paper they were written on. Evolution, not revolution, happens more frequently.
2. Don’t try to do too many things at once. The most successful innovators usually have singularity of purpose. Only geniuses like Da Vinci or Thomas Edison could innovate in a variety of different fields simultaneously.
3. Don’t wait until the innovation is 100 percent perfect. Launching an innovation in its “almost right” format is perfectly acceptable and highly recommendable. This is the only way to test it and find out what other improvements are required. The cost of making it “perfect” may not be justified and may, in fact, kill a good “almost right” opportunity.
4. Don’t innovate for the future. Innovate for the present! Immediate payback fuels continuous improvement and innovation.

So, recognize the role of innovation, learn the process and skills of innovating, and apply these innovative abilities on a regular disciplined basis. Don’t wait for opportunity – look for it and exploit it. It is untrue that opportunity knocks but once – it is constantly knocking. The problem is that most people simply ignore it, or open the door and don’t recognize it!

View a negative experience in your life like you’d look at a photo negative.
A single negative cancreate an unlimited number of positive prints.
- Gerhard Gschwandtner.

Anyone who would like to share their experience or give any feedback on this article, please do so…I would love to hear from you.

KC See