Money follows value

I love business. I love the impact a great business can have on its customers, its staff, the wider community, and for the owner.

Business done well is like alchemy; you can create value where there once was nothing, you can create value from an idea, you can turn ‘lead’ into ‘gold’.

Business owners who do it well can get very rich, if that’s what they want. But in my experience those whose sole purpose for getting into business is to get rich tend to struggle.

Money follows value as I shared in last week’s blog.

Give to get.

As Zig Zigglar famously said, 'You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.'

Bigger or better

Keith Cunningham describes the unfettered drive to get big as ‘business pornography’, that a total focus on being the biggest is likely to cause the opposite. In a bumper sticker: to get bigger we must get better.

There will be those who say that in fact by getting bigger you compromise ‘better’ as you have to dumb everything down to appeal to more.

But I disagree, I think that’s defeatist.

The great business owners focus on getting better to grow their businesses, then as they can scale they refocus their efforts and double down to ensure that quality is maintained as they grow.

Get better, get bigger, and always remember that money follows value, not the other way round.a

Short term long term

The best way to change the long term is in the short term. What you do today matters.

Because what you do today is probably a reflection of what you do everyday.

When I workout I have the mindset that this workout is magically how every workout in my life will be, and magically every workout is like that, my best.

So invest today as if this is how you’ll invest everyday, do that every day, and the long term will take care of itself.

Don’t follow your dreams, follow your efforts

“Dream big” we are all told. “Follow your dreams”.

I agree, to an extent.

But the reality is that we don’t get what we dream about, we get what we work towards.

So if you are going to dream big, and there’s no reason not to, then make sure its aligned with what you are prepared to ‘work big’ for.

Or you’ll find yourself dreaming big in the ad breaks for Breaking Bad.

Be grateful that life doesn't hand it over too easily

If you weren’t the most popular kid at school, or the best looking, or the most gifted, or the richest, you should probably be really grateful. As humans we do things either to avoid pain, or to gain pleasure. When we are younger it is generally more about avoiding pain.

I think that often the people who change the world start by trying to escape something; they work like demons to prove themselves, to get themselves out of poverty, to ‘be someone’.

As they mature they shift gears from running from something to running to something, but it often starts with running from something.

So if you are running from something, or were, then perhaps it’s time to realise that this is the gift you got to make you everything you can be.