Dying A Rich Man

Elon Musk says we don’t have to save for retirement because Artificial Intelligence will open up a whole new world of opportunities and only then can we plot our true pathway to riches and success. Elon Musk is full of it.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to die a rich man. Fortunately, it’s not in accumulated wealth or material things. Collecting assets has never been a goal of mine. I respect those folks who have, in a more stealth mode, built up their own little nest egg. My son calls it the “Millionaire Next Door” syndrome. I guess he might be on to something there. But when the time comes to count up one’s credits, accumulated wealth by itself can be a real distraction from the more important things in life.

Every wealthy person I’ve known was rich one moment and penniless after their last breath. The slate had been wiped clean and their assets counted for nothing in the greater scheme of things. At my age, death is slowly becoming a more common occurrence among friends, associates, casual acquaintances or names once remembered. It’s called The Circle of Life.

The greatest lesson I’ve learned from perusing the lives of wealthy folks is simply that there has to be more to life than collecting collectables to make the entire journey worthwhile. Despite those U-hauls I’ve seen in some funeral processions; you really can’t take it with you.

Unfortunately, for some folk’s counting up their net worth seems to be the ultimate goal. There’s just one problem with that supposition. The most valuable asset one can accumulate in life has nothing to do with any assets collected. Instead, it’s a common equalizer that shares its influence on all of us.

The ultimate asset in life is knowing that you’ve been able to influence the lives of others in a positive way and made a difference when you could. A worthwhile life is one well lived. It makes for a more fitting epitaph and no amount of money can guarantee that ultimate headstone.

Whether as a brother, a husband, a father, a grandfather or simply as a friend, it’s being there when that made a difference in someone else’s life. Simply stated, it’s trying to live a ‘good’ life.

My own life has been one heck of a ride thus far but to be honest it’s still a work in progress. There are no end-of-life regrets and I doubt there will be when the time comes. In the end, I can truly say that I did what I wanted to do. I loved whom I loved and still harbor many fond memories there. I did my best as a husband and father and friend. I was lucky with my kids. They’ve become solid respectable citizens of the world. I expect nothing less of my grandchildren and they seem to be well on their way to meeting those expectations of them.

I’ve traveled a lot and lived abroad. I’ve had a ton of experiences and saved them in blogs once my memory bank grows foggy. I’ve made up stories and bottled them in print and bytes for my grandkids and anyone else to read. With no foresight other than a desire to do something meaningful with my life, I worked hard, ran my own business, managed properties and made investments. Some panned out. Others didn’t.

The grandkids keep me young as if I need them as an excuse. Collecting friendships when I was growing up was a challenge for me but I’m a younger man now. Old friends, new friends, I’m not picky. Renewing friendships or garnering new ones is a coup. But realistically it’s still a work in progress.

My passion for writing over the last dozen or so years has surpassed my addiction to running for forty plus years. Living in those fictional worlds with my favorite characters has kept me moving into the twilight years. The heck with retirement. I don’t have the time or inclination for that distraction.

I’ve already succeeded in the great game of life. But I still want more winnings with the time I have left…and gold, silver and paper don’t count.

Real Secret of Success

What is the most honest and realistic definition of success? Don’t go to the library for the answer. Yes, it may be hidden there but impossible to find amid the volumes of good, great, crappy advice wedged between the paragraphs of wisdom. Each portends or pretends to have the secret formula, the ‘just right’ ingredients to find Valhalla while still here on earth. But you have to look among the granules to find the real golden nuggets hidden there.

Back in the early 80’s, when my business, Sharden Productions, was doing very well, I was constantly being hustled by the ‘Get Rich Quick’ folks with their audio tape series. Rock and rollers began packaging their songs in tape collections. Soon the shape shifters of success were quick to follow. It was hours and hours of sage advice for the true believers. Most two-hundred-dollar packages promised hours of enlightenment and the true path to success.

As a businessman producing video tape series myself, I lived on the fringes of that world as part of my day-to-day hustling. Not surprisingly, those purveyors of feel-good cheerleading either saw me as a potential client or a distributor. Either way, I was packaged as someone they could hustle. The length and breadth of their material was staggering. It was a period of the truly enlightened marketing mavens like Amway, Shaklee, Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy and other multi-level marketing gurus reshaping, resizing, and remodeling the truth about success. There was always enough reality to what they were preaching in their gospel of success to attracted large numbers of followers.

Now with the passage of time, one can find a discernable pattern among the relics and ruins of that period. Truisms were lost or overshadowed among the glitter and gloss and breath-taking happiness promised to all true believers. Yet, there are true signs of success and they have nothing to do with financial accumulation, status symbols, material possessions and ‘I have arrived’ monikers to hang one’s street address on.

I used to think that health was a given and that only in old age would one have to worry about getting ‘old.’ Fact is, I know a lot of folks younger than me who are a hell of a lot older. Age and health aren’t mutually exclusive.

Social capitol is another asset seldom talked about but priceless. When the need arises, we all need someone to talk to or a shoulder to cry on. Fulfillment of that desire deep within one’s heart is complete, sans anyone having to know about it. Being there for someone else is priceless…period.

At its core, just being able to do what you want to do, when you’d like to do it, is its own greatest reward. If I wrote just for that royalty check or my name on the marquee, I’d be a very empty person. I write because I have to write. A friend once told me she taught to feed her stomach but she acted to feed her soul. Got it! I do understand.

If I were foolish enough to give advice to some youngster, I’d tell them there are some very simple, easy to understand truisms about how to be successful.

1.     Work hard (you have to do more than just your typical 9-5 job alone, no matter the occupation,) Doing just enough to get by doesn’t cut it.

2.     Be thrifty-smart and not stupid-cheap.

3.     Have a budget.

4.     Stick to your budget.

5.     Save some money early on and invest it.

6.     Be realistic but have high expectations of yourself. Ignore anyone who says otherwise.

7.     Never give up, no matter what. The alternative is not an option.

Finding Your Authentic Self

Discovering your authentic self for the first time is like meeting a perfect stranger you’ve known all of your life. If one can get past their ego’s definition of who they are, it can be a truly enlightening experience.

But to get there, you have to push beyond those influences that up until now have defined who you think you are. Past life experiences, relationships, loves, losses, and a wide assortment of pivotal life-altering events that have all conspired to shape a personal vision of yourself in your head.

There have been a number of books that have influenced me in one way or another over the years. I’m sure the influence was heavily fortified by the lifestyle, angst, mood and my own psychic temperament at the time.

Most of us spend a lifetime painting our skin like a canvas of who we think we are. It’s a personal journey of ego, attitude, needs, desires, fears and wants. But in our quest for satisfaction in life we sometimes inadvertently let outside influences shape and define our true self.

Often times, there’s been collateral damage suffered and you didn’t even know it. It came from those youthful messages imparted on you by parents, teachers and friends. Everyone who thought they knew who you were, what you were and what you should become in life.

Writing for me has always been a journey to find my authentic voice and express it in my stories. Yet, I can’t unlock the shackles of past influences that color my many words. I’m not alone in this vernacular journey of detours, distractions and negative voices lurking in the back of my head. Recently, I’ve read two books that expanded the spectrum of that chasm in writing.

Larry McMurty (The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, Brokeback Mountain, etc.) and Micky Spillane (Kiss Me Deadly, I, the Jury, Vengeance is Mine) had two very different writing styles and yet each was true to their internal voice. They both had two distinctly different writing styles that, despite their stark differences, managed to connect very effectively with their respective audiences. Both authors found their voice and satisfaction in their own approach to story-telling. In short, they were honest to themselves and never wrote to a supposed audience or group of readers.

Finding our inner voice is different for each one of us. We all have it. We just need to find it. If one looks at creativity not just in terms of the arts, music, crafts, and all of its many manifestations but far beyond that, it is another world welcoming us to explore.

Creativity can be found in our ordinary, often times mundane acts of living. Albert Einstein said it best when speaking about creativity. “Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing it is stupid.”

It means creating a lifestyle that embraces all that is important to you, your soul, and your inner cravings for your purpose in being alive. It means living by those principles that define who you are as a person, a spouse, a lover, a parent, a guardian, and a member of the human race. Living creatively can and should be your motivation for personal evolution, growth, learning and therefore, thriving in a complicated world.

For me, part of that organic process of writing is a new demand for more self-examination and thoughtful-processing of the past lives I’ve lived, my present environment and level of personal satisfaction.

It demands a closer examination of past relationships and my reaction to life events. It forces me out of old reflections, memories and explanations and gradually wipes away the dust and dirt of past assumptions to revealed a truer self. My research and writing have taken me on a journey I am only now beginning to better understand and appreciate. It’s all about answering the question of who I was back then and how it made me who I am today.

Helping me along the way is a daily detour I take to check-in inside my head. This practice is a monastic exercise but one with benefits. It’s finally coming face to face with the true me. Mind you I can’t say I know me that well even though it’s been over eight-one years of living in this skin.

As with any responsible enterprise it is our duty to find what it is that interests us the most. We must listen to our inner voice and answer its calling. To do this we must learn how to support our creativity. That means to take the time to daydream, doodle, imagine, and ponder those many ‘what if’s’ that seem to hang around the edges of our consciousness. Life-changing habits come from thoughts and energies beyond that which we normally access during our daily lives.

Then we must take those thoughts, ideas, concepts, and ‘what if’s’ and put them into concrete form or action. The tragedy here is not to try and fail but to do nothing at all. Each of us has an intuitive nature. We must harness the energy of and the power of that intuitive self in order to become limitless in our inner exploration.

You must first accept where you are in life and never regret the journey you took to get there. You should slow down and smell the flowers. That means eliminating toxic people and situations that do nothing but harm your self-worth. Practice the art of mindful living and appreciating your good fortune when intuition comes into your life.

It means breaking away from centuries-old assumptions, questioning old habits that hold us back and honestly looking deep within ourselves for the truth there. Creativity is a whole body and mind experience. It is a way of life not just an idea or an ambitious goal. It is preparing ourselves mentally and physically for the journey deep within ourselves that reveal truths about us we never knew. It is a mind-set that in turn is a road map that in turn is a guide to eternal truths…our truths about who we are and what we can become if we so desire.

Welcome to your inner journey. It’s going to be a wonderful, at times confusing, and ultimately satisfying trip. It’s better to jump on that train now than to wait at the station for another-life to arrive. It’s a journey I intend to follow for the rest of my life. A trek backwards that might help propel me forward with clarity and vision of who I really am.

·      Credit must be given to the following authors who wrote articles in ‘The Edge’ Magazine, June, 2016 on this subject matter. Theresa Nutt, Alley Brook, Jeanne Henderson, Lisa Sellman and Nick Seneca Jankel.

Brian, Ziggy, and Me

In the 1980s, self-help and attaining individual success was in full bloom and a very viable business model. Its disciples included such luminaries as Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and a host of other straight, middle aged, white Christian men whose background seemed to come straight out of a turn-of-the-century Horatio Alger novel.

Horatio Alger, Jr. was an American writer of young adult novels about impoverished boys and their rise from humble backgrounds to leading lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage and honesty. Following up on this trend, Napoleon Hill, Orison Swett Marden and Samuel Smiles all had enormous success with their self-help books during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

About this same time, Dale Carnegie was teaching business education courses in New York City. Carnegie was convinced by a rep from Simon & Schuster to take his 14-week course and turn it into a book. ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ became one of the first self-help and personal development books ever written. Over 15 million copies have been sold and in 2011, it was ranked number 19 on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential books ever written.

Napoleon Hill with his classic ‘Think and Grow Rich’ has run a close second. Both these classics predated the Amway, Shaklee and Mary Kay era. Those companies stressed their own ‘build your own success formulas’ and, were in turn, a more refined and strategic multi-level marketing approach that began with the early Tupper Ware parties of the 1950s.

This return to the era of ‘yes, you can do it all!’ came to mind a while back as I was perusing through my Amazon tablet and its Prime Video folder. The Prime Video folder has literally hundreds of films to download and watch or purchase. It was there that I came across a documentary on Brian Tracy, one of the stalwart purveyors of the self-help movement. It brought back a plethora of memories of that time in my life.

Back in the day, I was following a different form of teaching and learning in my personal life. It was my pseudo-hippie way of thinking. It was a more deeply personal and analytical approach that resonated with me at the time. Three authors struck a chord with me.

Neither of these authors or poets offered an easy answer to the timeless questions pondered by many young men. There were no sure fire formulas or easy fixes. While on one hand, I would soon be peddling my own self-help materials, these books offered a different and more challenging approach to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In 1980, I had just started my own company Sharden Productions, with my first video series under my belt. It was an eight-part speed-reading course entitled ‘Flexible Reading,’

I was on the hunt for more video series to produce or lease. Flexible Reading had been a substantial investment of my own money plus a bank loan to get it started. By acquiring the rights to other video series, I could cut down on my production costs and focus on marketing those products without incurring more debt.

My next series to acquire and distribute was entitled Personal Time Management, a course developed by a professor from the University of Minnesota. That was followed up pretty quickly by Stress Management and more self-help series. As the business grew and prospered, I produced my own one-hour golf special on Bobby Jones, a twelve-part jazz series and an eclectic variety of other video programming. Nevertheless, always in the back of my mind was the prospect of acquiring more self-help material from the real professionals like Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar.

Nightingale Conant was the largest distributor of self-help material at the time. They were churning out seminars, audio tapes, books, and a wide array of material in that discipline. They were kings of the mountain and not about to relinquish their throne to a small time producer/distributor from the Midwest.

So I joined the Minnesota Speakers Association but found out very quickly that the organization was only interested in professional speakers who made a lot of money. The rest of us were just dues-paying members with no benefits from the organization. I expanded my portfolio of products but could never bust through that distribution wall that Brian and Ziggy had built up around themselves.

Eventually my self-help and personal development series ran their course and I branched out into other forms of risk-taking. Real estate had always hovered on the sidelines as a potentially lucrative side venture. Even there, the self-help gurus of land and buildings were plowing the fertile grounds with their ideas of ‘getting rich quickly’ with very little effort.

A poor cousin and flip side to the ‘Think and Grow Rich’ movement was/is the ‘Get Rich Quick’ approach to almost anything but especially real estate. Before the great recession in 2008, there were a plethora of real estate investment schemes being aired on television and in seminars around the country. Their message was always the same. A person could get rich by investing in real estate without any experience, money, knowledge, or clue as to what real estate really entailed. In fact, the only requirement from those purveyors of ‘great pastures of plenty’ for their lambs was the ability to breathe and have cash on-hand.

Much like the great truths of the self-help movement and personal development field, real estate investments call for a lot of hard work and a dollop of common sense. There are no short cuts to success in real estate and those heralded stories of success on infomercial television are cleverly packaged with good editing and a keen sense of ‘what sounds good.’ It is often far from reality and the truth.

In the end, Self-help is nothing more than common sense packaged with interesting stories, promises of great fortunes and eternal happiness. The key here is that for anyone willing to ‘do the work’; it’s a story that can come true.

The secret ingredient, seldom talked about, is for ‘anyone willing to do the work.’ And herein lies the reason so many folks love to read the books and watch the TV shows but seldom get off their couch at the end of the day. Like anything else in life, it takes work, a lot of hard work, to accomplish your goals.

Nothing much has changed since those street urchins plied the railroad yards for scattered pelts of coal to heat their tenement shacks. Hard work, sacrifice, determination, and overcoming failure are all the secret ingredients to ‘getting rich slowly.’ It’s what our grandparents have been telling us all along.

Life is kind of funny that way.