My Father’s Method
My father wasn’t good with money. He was raised without a lot of it so when he ended up getting enough to go around than then some he didn’t spend it or invest it all that wisely. Honestly, early on I was the beneficiary of those decisions. For example, when my grandmother on my mother’s side died, he used the inheritance to by a boat. It was our first boat ever. But it was not a sensible little boat we could learn on. It was a 47′ houseboat. It was big. As a result we hung with the big dogs at the various marinas we docked at and I was able to use the boat as my own personal playground for many summers. But in the end the boat blew up on us. I mean that literally. It did actually blow up and I was burned on 75% of my body as a result. Buying that boat was temptation over opportunity.
He once invested in a company simply because it happened to be located in the same office building as his. Of course, it could have turned out great, if the company had been Apple. But it was an obscure little company that found hard to find needles for record players. I still have the stock certificates, worthless now for many decades. Why did he do that? Because he liked the guys who ran the company. He wanted to help them out and that was how he could do it. But it probably wasn’t a wise investment. It was temptation over opportunity.
Questions
I am not immune from this. I am easily tempted as well. I haven’t had much money to throw around but there are other ways to be tempted. Temptation has more to do with where your attention is focused than anything else.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Is your business attention focused on long term or short term goals?
- Are you planning for something in your business’ future by saving or organizing? Or do you just deal with things as they pop up?
- Are you able to keep your business focused in a certain direction even when the initial excitement of your choice has dwindled? Or do you change your direction based on your enthusiasm and excitement level?
- Do you rely only on what you see and hear in your immediate business environment to decide what to do with your time and money? Or do you investigate by purposely exploring areas and industries you aren’t familiar with?
- Are you able to imagine your business ideas being implemented by others? Or do you feel you need to do it all?
- Are you able to adapt to new circumstances? Or are you rigid and firm in your direction, no matter what?
It’s in the Building
I just finished reading a great book called ‘The Innovators – How a group of hackers, geniuses and geeks created the digital revolution’. It is an amazing book that I highly recommend. One of the major takeaways I have from the book is how completely obscure their business future was to each and every one of these entrepreneurs. We look back on this history and we see it as inevitable that IBM, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Google, the internet, all would exist. But not one of the people building those businesses had any idea what they would eventually become.
They started with an idea and they had a vision, but they didn’t know about the technology’s future. Some predicted what would happen, even as far back as the mid-1800s. But those people didn’t build the machines. Those who built the machines and the software, they didn’t have the luxury of just prognosticating. They had to build something. It was in the building that the future was created, not the philosophizing.
And building takes place when focus is good, when opportunities are taken advantage of and temptations are minimized.
Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Quote is from a fortune cookie