How To Write A Good Advertisement: A Short Course In Copywriting

Call it advertising, call it promotion, call it marketing, but whatever you call it, every business and organization depends on words with impact. You need to grab the attention of potential customers, clients, or supporters and call them to action. Few among us are born talented copywriters, that rare combination of both facile wordsmiths and natural salespeople. Most of us need some help, and even naturals can improve by studying the best. Victor O. Schwab was one of the greats. Considered a marketing master during his 44-year career, he was the copywriter who propelled Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People into a mega-seller.

How to Write a Good Advertisement, Schwab’s classic guide, has stood the test of time. In just over 200 pages, this book clearly explains the core elements of an effective advertisement. Schwab shows us how to

• Get attention
• Build credibility
• Create winning layouts and choose the best ad size
• Test ad effectiveness
• Convert inquiries to sales
• Make special offers that dramatically increase response and sales

How to Write a Good Advertisement gets you quickly up to speed with examples of powerful profitable headlines (with explanations of why those headlines work so well), and quick lesson reviews that help you turn what you’ve read into skills you own. Schwab provides us shortcuts without sacrificing long-term understanding. Fifty years after publication this book is still the standard bearer, sought after by a new generation of copy-writers and businesspeople. Read it, apply it, and watch your sales soar.

My favorite of the “classics” of copywriting. Some of the other books that come up again and again in discussions of copywriting can sometimes feel a little too theoretical to be actionable. Not How to Write a Good Advertisement. It’s written in a really engaging style, it’s chock full of useful examples with great commentary by the author, and it lays out the process of writing an ad step-by-step.

Are you a copywriter? Then you’ve got to read this book. Like…mandatory. It’s basically a text book but it reads well. Trust me, you’ll get a lot from it. Only if you like being good at what you do.

One of the best books on copywriting and advertising mentality I’ve ever read. Straight advice, humor, and lessons learned in the trenches give you the skills to improve.

There is gold in the old!

You can get the book on Amazon!

A Guide To The Good Life Review

A Guide To The Good Life is a handbook, or primer on the ancient Greek and Roman practice of Stoicism. Its point is not to engage in some sort of scholarly debate about the theory or history of Stoicism; rather, Irvine offers his Guide, quite seriously, to “provide detailed guidelines for would-be Stoics.” (p.10) And why might someone have in interest in becoming a Stoic? The answer that Irvine suggests, and rather compellingly too, is that the Stoics developed some very powerful techniques for cultivating tranquility — a certain sort of tranquility, anyway.

Unabashedly proclaiming himself to be a practicing Stoic, Irvine addresses his discussion to ordinary people who are attracted to the idea of reducing the amount of “negative” emotion, (e.g. anger, frustration, and anxiety) they feel, while developing their capacities for appreciation of what life has to offer, whatever that may actually be. These are people who might have flirted with Buddhism, who are interested, perhaps, in “Mindfulness,” but who prefer to reason through principles rather than meditate on them. He writes in clear, almost jargon-free prose that is well suited to his target audience, and maintains a cheerful tone throughout the book (which could easily have been quite dry in parts) that perfectly expresses the sort of rationally grounded upbeat attitude that is one of the payoffs of becoming a practicing Stoic. Reading along, one cannot help but begin to suspect that there simply must be something to what he says. But leaving the infectious character of a sunny disposition to one side, it is relevant to remember that Irvine is first and foremost a philosopher. And Stoicism is first and foremost a philosophical practice. So it is crucial to the enterprise that it proceed through a fairly compelling and critically grounded account of what Stoicism actually holds and why we might think that it is beneficial to put its principles and methods into practice. This is a complex task and Irvine’s performance is excellent in many ways.

The book is divided into four parts: Part One sets the stage by laying out a brief history of the rise of Stoicism in Ancient Greece and introducing the reader to some of its major proponents (the most well known of whom are Seneca, Marcus Arelius and Cicero). In this part of the work, Irvine does a commendable job of explaining the sense in which philosophy was originally deeply concerned with the practical aspects of human well being, rather than being merely concerned with this idea as a topic of theoretical investigation. Parts Two and Three contain the discussion of Stoic methods for addressing specific emotional and practical issues; this material comprises both the nuts and bolts of the practice — what a person who is a practicing Stoic is actually doing — as well as the bulk of the book. Part Four rounds out the discussion by building a bridge from the ancient practice of Stoicism to its practice today. In these chapters, Irvine offers some thoughts about why Stoicism petered out after a stunning Roman career, considers some likely objections to the practice of Stoicism from the quarter of contemporary psychology, and gives the reader some useful advice about how to go about starting out as a practitioner of Stoicism. I understand why Irvine saved these elements of his Guide for the final sections, I would urge the reader not to omit them. Indeed, some of the most delightful, charming and affecting discussions in the book are to be found in the very last chapter, “Practicing Stoicism,” in which Irvine gives a frank account of some of his own experiences as a practitioner of Stoicism.

Parts Two and Three contain Irvine’s account of the actual stuff of Stoicism, as I’ve said, and it is to the proposals contained in these Parts that one should look, if one wants a sense of what would be involved in becoming a practicing Stoic. He divides the account into two: In Part Two, Irvine describes five techniques for training one’s mind to respond more calmly, more efficiently and more optimistically to the chances of life. These techniques include spending time thinking about worst case scenarios, engaging in strategic bouts of self denial and rethinking the character of one’s goals in such a way that one’s success is within one’s control. In Part Three, Irvine lays out Stoic advice about how to handle many of the enemies to tranquility in human life. Here the reader will find discussions of how to deal with being insulted without becoming angry or feeling hurt, whether fame and fortune are worthy goals for a Stoic, and how to think about old age and death.

I can firmly recommend Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life to anyone interested in exploring some of the ways philosophical work can be brought to bear on the ordinary problems of living. This is not to say that there aren’t some points at which I do not quite follow Irvine’s argument, or would have welcomed further clarification. It is to say that there is a great deal of useful thinking and excellent advice to be found in it, presented in a clear, straightforward and often charming manner.

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy Review

William B. Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life: the Ancient Art of Stoic Joy is not meant to be a scholarly work on Stoicism in the spirit of Brad Inwood or A. A. Long. The book is aimed at a popular audience–indeed, at an audience with no more acquaintance with the subject of stoicism than the ideas connoted by the adjective ‘stoical’ itself. Irvine does not concern himself with the many varied technical distinctions of Stoic ethical theory. Despite some talk of a ‘life lived in accordance with nature’, there is no mention of ‘indifferent things’, or the distinction between ‘perfect and intermediate duties’. The majority of this technical baggage is left aside as Irvine takes us on a journey of what he himself describes as a ‘resolutely practical’ approach to Stoicism. He takes us inside the soul of a Stoic, informing us not of what they thought, but how they thought: how they tackled grief, insults, anger, the desire for fame and luxury and other such everyday challenges to tranquility.

The book is divided into four parts, preceded by a short introduction. In the introduction Irvine puts forth his twin notions of a ‘philosophy of life’ and ‘a philosopher of life’. Not to be found in the Philosophy department of any university, a philosopher of life is one who concerns himself with the question: How does one live a good life? And likewise a philosophy of life is an eminently practical affair. This affair was taken up by the early Greek philosophers who followed Socrates: the Cynics, the Cyrenaics, the Epicureans, the Skeptics, and the Stoics. Following the latter, Irvine offers a manual to the Stoic way of living a good life.

The first part is entitled “The Rise of Stoicism”. Here Irvine offers a rudimentary overview of the history of philosophy highlighting the contribution of Socrates, who turned philosophy away from natural science and toward what is good and bad for human beings and the discovery of the human soul. He goes on to recount the appearance of the early Greek Stoics. In this section, by what may seem to some as a sleight of hand, Irvine substitutes tranquility for virtue as the aim of Stoic ethics. (Virtue he has earlier surmised to be the province of nuns!) This emphasis on tranquility Irvine hoists especially upon the Roman Stoics as he asserts that Musonius and Epictetus highlighted tranquility as a way of maximizing their “market share” of students. So too with tranquility rather than virtue installed as the end of Stoic ethics, Irvine imagines himself able to better appeal to his popular audience. Moving on to discuss the Roman Stoics–upon whom his own exposition will most stand–Irvine rehearses briefly what is known about the lives and careers of Seneca, Epictetus, Musonius, and Marcus Aurelius. In another effort to expand his own market share even more, Irvine assures us that one need not share Epictetus’ belief in God to employ Stoic strategies for attaining tranquility.

Part two is entitled “Stoic Psychological Techniques”; part three is entitled “Stoic Advice”. These two chapters constitute the heart of the book. Here Irvine recommends various techniques to insure tranquility in life. The foremost technique is what he calls ‘negative visualization’. Drawing from Seneca and Epictetus, Irvine recommends that we imagine the loss of good things in our lives (life, possessions, friends, family) as a way of insuring that we do not take them for granted. In short, he recommends that we count our blessings by imagining the loss of those things we most easily take for granted. Another technique is what he calls ‘the dichotomy of control’. This involves dividing life’s occurrences into those over which we do or do not have control. Those over which we do not have control are again divided into those over which we have absolutely no control (like the rising of the sun) and those over which we have some control (whether we win while playing tennis). Viewing things under this trichotomy of control enables us to enhance our tranquility if we do not worry about things over which we do not have any control and if regarding those things over which we have some control we seek internal rather than external goals. For instance in playing tennis our goal should be not to win, but to compete as hard as we can. By limiting goals in this way, Irvine suggests, one’s tranquility is preserved. Besides these techniques, Irvine recommends a brand of fatalism toward the past that frees one from concern for yesterday’s events. We should take life’s lessons seriously and move forward with a wisdom based on the past, but we should not bemoan the past. Likewise Irvine advises fatalism concerning the present. Irvine considers Stoic fatalism to be a reverse mirror image of negative visualization: “instead of thinking about how our situation could be worse, we refuse to think about how it could be better”. This exhortation to fatalism is followed by remarks concerning Stoic self-denial and Stoic meditation. By the former is meant inviting voluntary discomfort; by the latter is meant a type of review of one’s daily activity to see how one responds to life’s challenges.

Part three follows with ‘Stoic Advice’. Here Irvine offers tips for dealing with social relations, bearing with grief, insults, lust for fame and fortune, and even exile. (The latter, in fitting modern context, he deals with in terms of being exiled to a nursing home.) He completes this section with thoughts concerning old age and death. Regarding social relations, Irvine suggests that we be careful to avoid contamination from those who do not share our Stoic values; he advises a brand of social fatalism: “in our dealings with others, we should operate on the assumption that they are fated to behave in a certain way. It is therefore pointless to wish they could be less annoying”. Likewise, he advises that we view our daily annoyances in their cosmic context and thus render them insignificant. Finally, he explains how, though committed to marriage, the Stoics showed a wariness regarding sex. Regarding insults Irvine suggests that a Stoic respond with humor or with no response whatsoever. Regarding grief he suggests that we control excessive grief through reason and what he calls retrospective negative visualization: here we imagine never having the thing that we’ve lost and thus come to appreciate our limited exposure to it. Regarding anger Irvine quotes Seneca’s famous quip about anger being brief insanity. He then denies that anger can be a proper motivating factor, since it cannot be controlled–though he does assert that a Stoic may feign anger to motivate others. Here again he counsels us to consider the cosmic (in)significance of the thing that is causing us to be angry. But if in the end we cannot help expressing our anger, he counsels us to simply apologize for it. Regarding fame he advises that the Stoic attitude is to be indifferent to the opinions of others in order to concentrate one’s concern on things that are truly shameful. Concerning luxurious living he asserts that this can undermine our ability to enjoy simple pleasure. He likewise cautions that enjoyment of wealth should be thoughtful and not slavish. When he comes to consider exile he asserts the Stoic truism that it is one’s virtue and not their place that is responsible for one’s happiness. Concerning old age he remarks that it is the time of life when one’s youthful illusions of fame and fortune have passed and one is more likely willing to settle for the Stoic goal of tranquility. Finally, regarding death he discusses the Stoic preoccupation with suicide and asserts that it is a far different phenomenon than that of individuals who kill themselves “on a whim or out of boredom with life, the way a nihilist might.”

The final part is entitled “Stoicism for Modern Lives”. Here Irvine challenges modern psychotherapeutic dogma–specifically its advocacy of grief counseling. He argues that Stoics who swallowed their grief after a reasonable period of sorrow may well be better off than modern advocates of grief counseling who pick at the scab of sorrow and hence worsen it. In this final section Irvine as well employs the language of modern evolutionary theory to highlight how as followers of Stoicism we can by means of reason “misuse” our evolutionary training by flouting our normal reactions to sexual stimuli, abuse, and insults in order to attain tranquility. The book ends with Irvine’s personal testimony as to how Stoicism has bettered his life.

All in all Irvine does a fine job in offering his “resolutely practical” brand of Stoicism to a popular audience. His citation of the original sources is effective and stimulating of interest. His tone is just the right one for the popular audience he wishes to reach. But Irvine’s work has more to offer than that. I believe he has unwittingly done a service to the scholarly audience as well by reminding us that the Stoics (and other ancient schools) were indeed all concerned with ‘meaning of life’ questions, and that the Roman Stoics in particular did have a “resolutely practical” side which gets lost if we allow ourselves to get transfixed by their theoretical queries concerning physics, epistemology, and logic. Irvine’s work could well, and I hope will, inspire more detailed research into the hortatory side of Stoic ethics, providing a pathway of entrance into new readings of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca’s Letters, and the works of Epictetus.

You can get the book here on Amazon.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Robert Cialdini is a professor at Arizona State University and, at least once upon a time, a self-described sucker for buying things he doesn’t really want. Influence is a book arising out of his studies on the art and science of persuading people to do things.

Cialdini cites numerous psychological studies where various factors are tested for their ability to influence people to make decisions. Not only do the discussions of these studies make for interesting reading, they are highly instructive about the power of influence. Cialdini utilizes real-world experience in the realm of what he calls “compliance professionals”– people whose job it is to get others do to things. This includes marketers and salesmen, but also political, business and spiritual leaders.

Cialdini identifies six major tools of persuasion:

1. Reciprocation
2. Commitment and Consistency
3. Social Proof (i.e. what other people are doing)
4. Liking (i.e. attractiveness, similarity or familiarity with the seller)
5. Authority
6. Scarcity (i.e. sense of urgency; the law of supply and demand)

The core of Cialdini’s thesis is that each of these principles of persuasion work because most of the time they are reasonable. He says that often the world is complicated and rather than apply critical thinking to each and every thing we come across every day, we use these various rules (there are hundreds of variations on these basic themes) to make our lives simpler and guide our decision-making.

Compliance professionals may use these rules ethically or unethically, and Cialdini discusses the difference between these. For example, if an elected official comes out with a statement concerning the seriousness of some health or safety risk, we are likely to accept what is said at face value because of his or her position of authority. But unscrupulous people may manipulate this principle in various ways. Besides fraud or outright deception (e.g. impersonating a police officer), people may wear uniforms or nametags and utilize other trappings of those with authority, such as lame certifications or titles, printed materials or the like. Or, people with legitimate authority may overstep the bounds of that authority. Such compliance professionals know that once people accept the “authority” aspect, they are more likely to get what they want from people because people tend to comply with authority.

One of the many studies I got a kick out of reading about was his discussion of toy marketing around Christmas. People in the toy business like the Christmas spike in sales, but they’d also like to make it last more throughout the year. Cialdini cites an incident where he discovers that toy makers market a certain toy to create a demand, but then deliberately under-produce the toy prior to Christmas. Parents promise their kids this toy for Christmas but can’t find it in stores. So, they buy a bunch of other toys (that the kid doesn’t even really want!) to make up for it, and then (surprise!) in January or February the elusive, much desired toy is now available. People go off to finally buy this elusive toy out of a desire to be consistent with what they promised their kids– and toy companies sold a bunch of toys in December that nobody really wanted in addition to the much-coveted toy. Like many other techniques used by compliance professionals, this is a hybrid using both the consistency and scarcity principles to manipulate people.

In each chapter, Cialdini also discusses ways to say “no” to these forms of influence. The problem with saying “no” is that the rules usually work and are good for us, and we tend to follow them automatically. So we’ve got to be alert to when the rules are being manipulated or the stimulus is fake. In a nutshell, we are less likely to be duped by some technique if we separate the idea being pushed from all of the other trappings. For example, do we really want the afore-mentioned “second best toys” in the first place, or do we get duped into getting them because we’ve been manipulated?

So how does a this book matter to the Barnabas Ministry? What does it have to do with churches? Well, church leaders can be classified as “compliance professionals.” In some sense, they want people to do things. Like other forms of influence, this isn’t always bad.

But some church leaders are unscrupulous. These use the church for their own benefit or gain. They manipulate people to get what they want.  Less evil people may deeply desire some good end result but utilize any of these methods to achieve it. This book is highly useful for identifying strategies that unscrupulous church leaders may use to manipulate others.

In fact, I have seen each of Cialdini’s six keys to influence used unscrupulously and manipulatively in church settings:

1. Reciprocation: People give something in order to get something. Unscrupulous church leaders give or invest time or “vision” for others to get something else in return.
2. Commitment and Consistency: Unscrupulous church leaders may manipulate people’s desire for consistency to get them to do things. For example, they might say, “You said you really wanted to impact people. Well, doing xyz is how you do it.” Or, “You’ve persevered this long, we’re really changing, you should stay committed to the group.” Or, “You’re not a quitter, are you?”
3. Social Proof: People are told to do things because “everybody else in the group is doing it.” This is a manipulation of the Scriptural concept of unity, and it makes people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. The situation with Jim Jones in Guyana is discussed in the book as a tragic example of this principle in a church setting.
4. Liking: Some church leaders work very hard at being liked somehow (e.g. “being relatable”) so you will do what they say. In unhealthy churches, a significant part of the training that leaders receive is about how to be liked, and being likable is an important trait looked for in prospective leaders.
5. Authority: Church leaders may hand out all sorts of titles to people to give a sense of authority behind what people are told to do. Church leaders may twist and distort the Scriptural concept of “obeying authority” into obeying in all sorts of areas that are out of the realm of spiritual leadership for the purpose of controlling the people.
6. Scarcity: Unscrupulous leaders love to create a false sense of urgency with arbitrary goals and deadlines. They may make certain positions of leadership more desirable because there are a limited number of positions, serving to make those who hold them elite. They may make various leadership qualification processes arbitrarily rigorous to enhance their value to those who succeed.

In the discussion of “social proof” Cialdini discusses a phenomenon called “pluralistic ignorance” that I also recognized from my experiences in an unhealthy church. The idea is that if some people see something but don’t do anything about it, then this inaction creates a social proof for others to ignore the problem as well. Nobody does anything about the problem because “nobody else” is doing anything about the problem.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a readable, useful book in not only a social context but also in a spiritual context. I especially recommend it to those wanting to understand how people get them to do things that they end up wishing they hadn’t done.

The 10 Pillars of Wealth: Mind-Sets of the World’s Richest People

Today’s post is a review of The 10 Pillars of Wealth by Alex Becker.

He curses.

I like that.

It shows he is not trying to be politically correct.  Which means he doesn’t care what everyone thinks.

Which means he is either very successful, or just a douche bag.

It turns out Alex Becker is very successful.

In the introduction, Becker states “There is one belief that has been ground into the majority of our heads.  One belief that is so damaging it makes it virtually impossible for you to ever become rich and successful.  In fact, the first step to ever becoming successful is recognizing this belief and murdering it with a medieval battle-ax.”

So what is this belief Becker is talking about?

According to Alex Becker, “The belief that to become rich, something extraordinary, rare or lucky has to happen.  You have to cheat the system, trick people into giving you money, be a super genius with a loophole, be ‘lucky,’ or be a sleazebag to become a success.  Or at the very least, become a porn mogul!”

The rest of The 10 Pillars Of Wealth is about the beliefs multimillionaires have that others lack.  The beliefs that make the successful ultra wealthy, and those lacking the beliefs stuck in the rat race.  Becker refers to people in the rat race as “traffic fighters.”  By this he means those that are stuck in jobs and lifestyles they hate.

For the rest of this post will be a brief description of each of the 10 pillars of wealth.  Of course, no matter how deep I go on each pillar, I won’t be able to do for you what reading this book will do for you.  Because of this, I will just give an overview of each pillar.  You need to put the work in and read the book, then commit to the mindset.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar One: Rejecting Getting Rich Slow

Becker starts this pillar with a warning.  He states that if you are new to the idea that you can make as much money as you want, then he is probably going to piss you off.  He goes on to say that this is because everything everyone has ever taught you about becoming successful is completely wrong (unless you were taught by a self-made millionaire).

If you think about it, he is right.  Most of the people telling you how to be successful (parents, professors, co-workers, friends, family) live a middle class life at best.  There is nothing wrong with that, but our goal is to be wealthy, not average.

The premise of this pillar is that you can get rich slowly, following the advice of everyone around you, which is some form of get a good job and work your way up the corporate ladder.  However, it will take a lifetime to get anywhere.  Not to mention it is just not safe, because you are at the mercy of someone else.  You trade five days a week in order to get two days to yourself, if you’re lucky.

By being an entrepreneur you have the ability to get rich quickly.  Not only that, but it is actually lower risk than being a traffic fighter for the next 30-40 years because you have the ability to control everything.  What Becker doesn’t do is claim that it is easy to do this.  He flat-out tells you it is a steep learning curve, and you will most likely fail at first.  However, if you stick to it, you will eventually get good at it.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Two:  Separating Time From Money

Becker starts off this chapter by giving the example of Jordan Belfort in the movie, The Wolf Of Wall Street.  He notes that Belfort spent almost 90% of his time doing hard drugs, partying, and having sex with prostitutes.  Yet, he was able to generate tens of millions of dollars during this time (yes, he did so by scamming people, but that’s not the point here…stay focused).

Belfort did this by creating a SYSTEM that ran and generated wealth for him no matter what he was doing.  He first put in the time by creating a lethal sales pitch, then trained other brokers to act like Belfort on the phone.  By doing so he was able to leverage himself, and create a wealth machine in the process.  He separated his time from his income.

You have two choices.

Choice number one is increase the value of your time.  This is what many professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and accountants do.  The problem with this method is other people decide how much your time is worth.  What he means by this, is you will get to a point where people will decline to pay what you perceive your hourly worth to be because they will perceive it to be too expensive, no matter how good you are.  You will hit an income ceiling.

Choice number two is to completely separate your time from income.  You don’t want your income to be solely based on your time alone.

If you want to get rich quickly, you need to set up a business in which you can separate your time from your income.  You want to set up a machine that can work for you while you sleep, thus leveraging your time.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Three:  Accepting That You Must Be Better Than Everyone Else

This was a tough chapter to read.  The line that stuck out the most for me was “Building your business must be your number one priority in life for you to succeed.  If it’s not, that’s okay, but you have to accept the fact that it will be unlikely that you will become a multimillionaire.”

Damn.

Those are some harsh words.  But when you think about all the mega successful people, you realize that getting there was their number one priority.  They put that goal ahead of everything else.

So the question for me became just how successful do you want to be?

What am I willing to sacrifice today, to have an amazing life tomorrow?

Then I continued reading and came to the section of the chapter where Becker asks his questions:

1. Do you think you are great?
2. Do you advantages that others do not have?
3. If you were in a room with 99 other people, would you be the best, smartest, most capable, most competent person in the room?

Becker says, “If your answer is no, or even a hesitant yes, I am sorry but you are 100% screwed.

Oh shit.

That is a wake up call for me.  I have shining moments, but this belief is not 100% cemented into my being.  I need to work on that.

“The biggest thing holding people back is believing they are average or not good enough.”

I know this to be true, because I have experienced it myself.

The rest of the chapter is about overcoming the challenge of accepting you must be better than everyone else.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Four:  Knowing Every Little Thing Is 100% Your Fault

This is one of the hardest chapters to read, based on the story he opens with.

Fair warning, it is very dark.

And it drives home the point very clearly.

I am not going to write the example he uses, because I don’t want it to cloud your decision on whether or not you read this book.

I am going to keep the description to this pillar short and just conclude with the most important fact Becker makes early on in the chapter: Here is the problem with blaming other people or factors for things that happen in your life…by doing so, you release responsibility and control over your life.  You are letting bad things happen to you are deciding they are not under your control.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Five:  Adopting An Abundance Mind-Set

Becker states that contrary to popular belief, people’s views of you are actually based on how you act rather than what you say in social situations.  He also states that how you act (your actions) determines your success in becoming wealthy.

Since actions are controlled by mindset and beliefs, your success in anything in life from dating to entrepreneurship is based on your mind-set and core beliefs.

Becker says it is hard to have abundance without abundance.

He explains this by saying it is hard to have a belief without the actions attached to it, so it is hard to have an abundance mind-set without having abundance.  However, you need to have an abundance mind-set in order to attract abundance.  So this is a catch 22.

The way to change this is to go back to the core and actually change our beliefs so we can trick our brains into thinking we have abundance right now.

The rest of this chapter goes into how to achieve that at your current point in life.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Six:  Forgetting “What If” and Focusing on “What Is”

This chapter starts with a made up story of two salespeople who took two different paths to becoming successful.  One worried about all the things that could go wrong, and how he wanted to make sure he performed his job perfectly.  He focused on the “what if,” also known as perfection paralysis  Before taking any action, he broke down every potential problem and worked out a solution.  The other salesperson just jumped in, made mistakes and learned to fix them along the way.  He focused on the “what is.”

Which one do you think was the more successful salesperson?

Planning for every potential problem that can arise before you take action will not help you succeed.  Becker talks about working with thousands of people trying to build an online business over the years who never move forward because they can’t get it perfect, so they quit out of frustration.

Instead, if you focus on problems when they happen (not before, and not after), you will have more time, energy, and mental space to see the situation for what it really is, versus what could potentially happen.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Seven:  Mapping Out Actions That Achieve Goals

“The richer a person (or company) is, the better they are at creating and following through on their goals.  More importantly, the better they are at mapping out how to reach these goals and understanding what these goals mean for their future.”

“On the flip side, if you look at someone with low-income, they usually have extremely short-term goals, small goals, that they don’t make much effort to achieve (or make excuses for), or large goals without any mapped out way to reach them.”

This chapter talks about how multimillionaires plan their goals, and how you can also.

First, start with your big goal.  At a bare minimum, you must have an income goal, as well as a defined way to get there.  Becker states that the easiest way to get there is to start at the absolute base of why people want to make money: lifestyle.

The rest of the chapter breaks down how to turn this big goal into five smaller goals, and then break each of these goals down into five even smaller action steps.

By going through this exercise, you can create your own roadmap to your wealth journey.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Eight:  Focusing Solely On What Gets You Paid

This chapter starts off with a far-fetched, yet incredibly simple example of why it is important to solely focus on what gets you paid.  I won’t explain the whole example, but the concept is you get paid $1000 for every mile you run a day, but you have a limited number of hours you can run each day.  So much goes into the preparation to be able to run, that you actually cost yourself money by focusing on these things.

The main point of the chapter is that you need to delegate as much of the things that don’t generate income and profits for you, or increase your current ROI.

“No matter who you are, you are only one person and can only learn so many skills and can only put in so many hours of work each day.”

“But once you are controlling the machine, you can push over a skyscraper.”

The machine Becker refers to is the leveraged business you are building.

The rest of the chapter focuses on a system you can use, no matter your income level, to identify your highest ROI actions while removing your lowest ROI actions.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Nine:  People Give Money To People That Get People

“Money is power over other people.  More so, it is the exchange of power between people.”

This entire pillar is about people, and understanding the relationship between people and money.

“The sole factor of how successful you are is how good you are at influencing and controlling other people’s decisions.  How you react, judge, and influence people is going to be the most important factor of your success.”

One of the biggest mistakes of those who are unsuccessful is that they try to make money without understanding people.

Wealth is the exchange of money that is the result of a trade of perceived value.

The rest of this pillar describes the art of learning to understand people, among other things such as the importance of learning how to sell.

The 10 Pillars Of Wealth Pillar Ten:  Finding Competitive Friends And Suitable Mentors

This was one of my favorite pillars as it gave me clarity as to why I excel in certain situations, even if I have no desire to do the task at hand.

It is the fact that if you surround yourself with competitive friends, a community of like-minded people with the same goal, it will trigger an obsession to work hard, succeed and compete.

For whatever reason, I love competition.

Becker goes on to say that humans are like pack animals and every single person wants recognition from their pack.  When we find a group we want to be in, we also start acting like them so we can blend in and feel like we are part of that group.

I have never much cared about what other people thought of me.

Now I realize that is not completely true.  I very much care what the people I care about think of me.

There is a big difference there.

Having the right people around you will help you grow and help you want to succeed, and even start to enjoy what you are doing.

The second part of this pillar talks about finding a suitable mentor.

You really can’t reach massive success on your own without personal mentors.

If you think of getting rich is like a minefield, only a mentor can get you through the minefield ten times faster and with one-tenth the effort.

The rest of this pillar goes into where to look for, and what to look for in a mentor.

Conclusion

Guess what?

There is still another pillar!  It is the “secret pillar” and you will need to read the book on your own to find out what it’s all about.

Yeah, I know.

You just spent a fair amount of time reading this 2600 word post and I am not even going to tell you what the last pillar is!

Well, no, I am not.  I know you want to know what it says and you need to read the book to find out.  Not because I want to be a jerk, but because just reading a review and not reading the actual book will be doing a disservice for yourself.

So do yourself a favor and buy The 10 Pillars Of Wealth HERE.