In the previous entry I quoted from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” in addressing the question of whether or not I am willing to work for the riches I desire.

Presently I am beginning a process that is intended to result, eventually, in the transformation of my self-diagnosed poverty consciousness into an enlightened state of money consciousness. To that end I go back to the same discussion about money from “Atlas Shrugged”.

In addressing the remark that money is the root of all evil, the character of Francisco d’Anconia explains that money is only a tool that will take you wherever you wish but will not replace you as the driver; that money will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but money will not provide you with desires.

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgement, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money…”

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth–the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue that was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it…”

On being poverty conscious
It is suggested by Napoleon Hill in “Think and Grow Rich”, that poverty is attracted to a mind that is favorable to it as money is attracted to the person whose mind has been deliberately prepared to attract wealth. Are you conscious of your need not to be poor, or conscious of your desire to make money? A consciousness of poverty is obviously rooted in negativity. In such a state something is undesirable, enervating, deflating, and depressing. Seeds planted in a poverty conscious mind can hardly be expected to grow.

I have always said that I do not want to win millions. The people to whom I have expressed this thought have always regarded me with a look that either suggests they think I’m kidding myself or that they think I’m trying to kid them. Who wouldn’t want to win millions?

Obviously, were I to win millions I wouldn’t refuse the windfall on the grounds that I believe there is nothing to take pride in when you acquire wealth without having to earn it. But I do not fantasize about winning money. That is not to say I have never fantasized about winning money. There was a time when I played the lottery almost obssessively. But desperation to escape poverty is quite a different desire from the desire to achieve financial success in business.

It seems to me that a person would value their money that much more knowing that they earned it.

If you’ve read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, there’s a discussion about money being the root of all evil. The comments made by the character of Francisco d’Anconia in challenging the statement are very interesting.

From Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d”Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you call evil?”

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor–your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is that what you consider evil?”

“…Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money–and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.”

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.”

The speech is quite lengthy. I’ve only quoted a few paragraphs.

Is that what separates men and women who own billion dollar corporations from the rest of us? We all love money. We all want money; but the majority of us are not willing to work as hard as it is necessary to work to make the kind of money we desire.

“Thought backed by strong desire has a tendency to transmute itself into it’s physical equivalent”. Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

For some of us though, there is that issue of not being able to maintain our focus long enough to turn our thought or idea into its physical equivalent before another thought hits us and we’ve off chasing that dream for the time it takes before yet another thought hits us and we’re off chasing that as well.

I am abandoning the self-analysis questionnaire for a bit as I find that the questions are not geared so much to inspiring as they are to, well, as they state, self-analysis for personal inventory. I believe it is important to address the points raised in the questionnaire, but I don’t think this is the best time for me to be focussing on what I’ve done or haven’t done and how it has affected where I am in business at present, mainly because I am at the beginning of starting over and there isn’t much to analyze by way of performance, interrelations and so on.

At this stage what I need is to get inspired and stay inspired, to work on the issues of my indecision, fears and all the other shortcomings and traits I possess that directly or indirectly affect my ability to achieve my goals of success.

The question I ask myself today is, do I even know what I want? As far as achieving success in business, do I have a concrete plan for how I expect to do that? In other words can I say that I want to acheive success in business doing X or is it more like, I want to acheive success in business but I don’t have anything specific planned for how I am going to do that.

Considering the number of different projects I have running simultaneously, it would seem to be the case that I don’t have anything specific planned, that I am just trying different things and divvying up my energy into each project so that I am not giving 100% of myself to anything.

I know what I want in terms of the fruits of labor; the ability to afford a better quality of life, the big house, the Bentley with a personal chauffeur to drive me around in it. But as far as having a firm idea of what seed to plant and tend in the hope of growing my miracle money tree, I can’t say that I really have a clue. I am just experimenting; and perhaps that is where the problem lies. There is no profit to be made from a business that is focussed entirely on experimenting with business ideas. Yes, some of my experiments have yielded a little bit of money; but for the most part I have been putting a great deal of time and energy into things out of which I have gotten nothing much to speak of. What I need is to make a decision about what I want as far as business goes. I need to firmly and concretely establish the nature of my business and from there plan a course of action for achieving my financial goals.

Question #2 on the Self-analysis Questionnnaire for Personal Inventory asks if I have delivered service of the best possible quality of which I was capable, or was there room for improvement.

Even when you work for yourself you work for others. In the work that I do from day to day, I work for clients in maintaining their websites, and I work for the people who use the websites I maintain; that includes the people who use the websites that are owned by me.

Even in this capacity, maintaing these blogs on ephosting.com, I work for the potential reader.

Almost everything a person does in life, even in the case of a mother preparing dinner for her loved ones, has the potential to either benefit or injure another person.

I manage and maintain approximately fourteen [14] websites, a number of which have an active membership base from 1000 - over 15000 members; and I would have to say, based on a number of factors, that by comparison to previous years, my quality of service provided in a number of areas was not excellent.

There have been more than a few occasions when depression surmounted my will to defeat it. On those occasions I either could not manage to get any work done, or worked without a degree of enthusiasm or interest in what I was doing. There were times when I felt tempted to be rude to difficult members of particular websites for which I provide the service of handling member support. While I have never succumbed to that temptation, to have felt strongly tempted is an indication that I was taking things personally; and it’s not good business ethic to respond to difficult customers by being insulting, condescending or otherwise rude.

Although my clients express satisfaction with my work, there were still times when clients had to send reminders to me to complete certain tasks. And there were business emails that went too long unanswered, a few not answered at all.

So over all I would have to say that I did not deliver service of the best possible quality, despite generally good feedback from clients and website users. There was without question room for improvement.

Not as a matter of self-defense, but when you are self-employed and you are your only employee it becomes more difficult to excel in every capacity in which you provide service. However, when you are self-employed, it becomes even more important that you provide the best possible quality of service in every area of your business, because the consequence of delivering shoddy service can be harsh, particularly where you do not have the protection of being a limited liability company.

The first question on the “Self-Analysis Questionnaire for Personal Inventory:

1. Have I attained the goal which I established as my objective for this year?

It is suggested in “Think And Grow Rich” that one should work with a definite yearly objective to be attained as part of one’s major life objective.

I imagine this is something most people are aware of one way or another, that you need to have goals in life. You need something you aim to achieve that motivates the tasks you undertake on a daily basis. But many people actually go through life without any consciousness of a definite goal. Everybody wants to be rich, but when most people make the statement that they’d like to have millions some day, the exclamation is usually uttered as wishful thinking rather than a statement of intention to strive to accumulate millions. People are usually just busy going through the motions of living, doing as needed to survive, working towards the common goal of having enough money to pay the bills.

But this is about self analysis; it’s about me and whether or not I have attained the goal which I established as my obhective for this year.

Although I had not set any concrete goal on paper, my mission throughout this year has been to chart a new course for my business. After dissolving a partnership, closing the phase of my business that has been the main source of income for 5+ years, I was left to figure out the direction in which I need to head in order to put myself in a position to better achieve my goals of financial freedom.

So my goal this year, essentially, has been to re-structure my business; and I have most certainly done that with a Limited Liability Corporation formed, and 4 new website projects underway.

What is interesting is that until I sat down to ponder the question this morning it had not occurred to me that I had achieved anything at all this year. In fact, before I began to think, I was in the process of stating that I had not achieved my objective for the year; but then it began to dawn on me that I was confusing my objective with my fantasy; that my objective for the year wasn’t to earn millions. Earning millions was my desire; and what I desired did not materialize. But my goal, my objective was indeed attained.