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Rich Leadership – Commentary

Hello and welcome to the commentary for this month’s lesson. Let’s get started.

First I’m going to read a section from the book Grow Rich with Peace of Mind by Napoleon Hill.

A boy finds a friend and finds himself… I too was nearly doomed by a false label of unworthiness. I was then 9 years old. My mother had died a year before and I lived with relatives. To them and to my own father, I was a problem child, who never would accomplish anything save perhaps, what a life of crime can accomplish.

I was doing my best to live up to my reputation as the successor of Jesse James. I even had a six shooter, which I had learned to handle like an expert. Then a certain woman came upon the scene and changed my life. That woman was my stepmother.

Long before she arrived I had been thoroughly conditioned by my relatives to hate her.

I found this very easy to do. She arrived, and my father brought her to our house where the relatives had gathered to meet her.

He introduced her all around. At length he found me where I stood in the corner doing my very best to look tough. And here, said my father, is your stepson Napoleon.

Beyond doubt, the meanest boy in Weiss County. We don’t expect much good from him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts throwing rocks at you by tomorrow morning.

At that moment, I believe my life hung in the balance. It was a wise and wonderful woman who placed her hand under my stubborn chin and raised my head so she could look me squarely in the eyes. She said only a few words, but they lifted me onto an entirely new level. Turning to my father, my stepmother said, you’re wrong about this boy. He’s not the meanest boy in the county or anywhere else. He’s a very alert, and intelligent boy and all he needs is some worthy objective towards which to direct his very good mind.

That was the first time in my life that anyone had said anything good about me. I straightened up, threw out my chest and grinned. Then and there, I sensed that that woman who had come to take my mother’s place, as my relatives referred to her, was one of those rare people who can help others find the best that is in them. That was the end of my six shooter days. Increasingly finding myself as I grew older, I discovered my talent for writing. My stepmother helped me master the typewriter and with the aid of the typewriter I became a writer for newspapers.

Through that experience I qualified to interview successful men and thus I came to sit down with Andrew Carnegie. Out of that interview, which ran on through the better part of three days and nights, came my commitment to search out the secret of successful achievement. Not merely as a matter of words, but as a pattern of definite action in the lives of men who have achieved great wealth.

Out of this grew the organization of the science of personal achievement, which has reverberated around the world, bringing prosperity and peace of mind to millions of men and women.

That’s an interesting story from Napoleon Hill.

Napoleon Hill wrote the very famous book Think and Grow Rich, which was a huge bestseller, but this story is powerful and shows that there was a point in his life where he could have become a criminal. He could have grown up to be a very unhappy, mean, unfriendly person.

But as he shows in this story, one person, his stepmother, completely changed his life. It was her leadership that changed his life completely, changed his destiny. That’s powerful. That is powerful and I like this story for a number of reasons.

1. Number one, it shows the power that one person can have.

How much you can affect other people’s lives.

1. I also like this story because it also shows that this can be a very simple thing, that leadership can be simple, powerful yet simple.

His stepmom as I said in the main video, his stepmom didn’t have any big position. She wasn’t CEO of a big company, nothing like that, just a regular woman, just his stepmom. Yet, she had a huge, powerful and positive affect on his life through her leadership. So it shows you can have leadership anywhere in your life, it doesn’t have to be just at work or at a job, it can be in your family, with friends or in small and large ways it doesn’t matter, there are always these opportunities and that’s huge.

To recap the main points, to summarize…

Number one, what did his stepmother do? He was on a path towards a bad life. Everybody around him was saying negative things, telling him he was going to become a bad person. So what changed, what did she do? First, she helped him find the best in himself. That’s what Napoleon Hill said, she had that talent, that ability and skill to find the best in him and then help him to see it too. So there are two parts to that. First she saw it and then she helped him to see it inside himself.

What does this involve? It means noticing strengths, noticing the strong points, the good points in other people. What are they good at? What skills are they good at? What about their personality is strong, interesting or good? What talents do they have? What do they naturally seem to be good at? All of these things… she looked and saw that in him. For Napoleon Hill she saw an alert mind, she said he has a very quick and alert mind and she saw that as one of his greatest strengths and she helped him to see and develop that in a positive direction.

In the second part of leadership from this story that we can see is actively encouraging and supporting and complimenting other people on their strengths, helping them to build upon their strengths, reinforcing their strengths, making their strengths even stronger and stronger, helping them believe in themselves, believe in their own strengths and encouraging them to develop and learn and grow.

Quite simply that’s all she did. That’s all we see from this story is that in the beginning of the story she saw what was good in him and then later in the story she encouraged him, in this case with writing and learning the typewriter, but she encouraged his strengths and complimented him. So she saw it and then encouraged it. She helped him to find that power within himself. In other words, she helped him find a worthy objective. So not only did she compliment his strengths, encourage his strong points, his alert mind, she also helped him to direct it. We need to direct our minds and energies towards a worthy goal.

The great thing about goals honestly is it’s not so much achieving them. I found and maybe you’ve found that when you actually achieve a goal whatever it is, that its fun, you can celebrate and it feels great, but then afterwards oftentimes you just feel like okay, it’s done, it’s over so it fades and becomes a memory. Even if your goal is to become super rich after you become super rich, being super rich doesn’t really motivate you so much anymore. It doesn’t make you always happy, so what’s the point of a goal, why should we have a goal then? Well, the whole point of goals, what they are great at is pushing us to learn, to grow, to develop ourselves and be better human beings, happier human beings, human beings who contribute more to helping others.

Living and experiencing a more rich and fulfilling life, that’s really what goals do. It’s the indirect effect of positive goals. I guess it’s kind of a secret, a lot of people don’t talk about this with goals that in fact, achieving the goal is not really the most important thing at all. In fact, you will probably find that achieving the goal is not as satisfying as you imagined. It’s not the achievement of the goal that’s the big important thing, that’s not what makes you happy. That’s not what makes you stronger or better or improves your life, not really. What it is, its actually the process of trying to achieve it. It’s really the part of trying to do it that’s the important part.

It’s in the trying that you learn, that you grow stronger and you get new skills, you develop your strengths and learn how to contribute more, you learn how to communicate better and you gain more life experience.

All of those things that’s what ends up making you happier and what gives you a better life. It’s what happens inside of you not the external goal.

So, let’s say you want to build a business and make $50 million dollars. Just making $50 million dollars and getting that in your bank account will not actually make your life better.

People who struggle with money don’t believe this yet it’s true, we can see this. How do we know? We can look at the studies of people who win money, they just win it like in a lottery or from gambling where they buy some lottery ticket from some government or something for a dollar or two and they win $50 million. Everyone imagines that winning the lottery would be this incredibly great thing that would make them so happy, but it’s just not true.

We know this because there have actually been lots of studies of lottery winners and you know what happens, most end up being miserable. Less happy than when they were poor and this seems crazy. Certainly getting $50 million should make you happy, but it doesn’t. Why not? Because they didn’t grow. They did nothing to earn that money. They didn’t have to learn anything. They didn’t have to overcome any challenges. They didn’t have to become smarter or stronger. They didn’t have to contribute anything. They didn’t have to create a business that actually helps people or solves problems. They didn’t have to do anything at all they just got lucky.

Because they just got lucky they also did not learn any financial skills. When you earn $50 million you have to learn financial skills. You have to know how to run a business. But if you just win it then you still have the same terrible financial skills you had before. What happens with these people? Mostly what they do is go out and buy a lot of stuff, cars, houses, etc. and then they end up losing a lot of their money. In many cases they lose all their money and end up right back at the beginning again. Even if they don’t lose their money they become quite unhappy because suddenly all their relatives, all their not real friends start wanting something from them. So everyone around them wants something for free. They want to take money from them.

Again, they didn’t learn how to do anything to make this so suddenly they’re surrounded by all these people and they feel like nobody is their real friend, everyone just wants to get money from them. And they find, of course, that just buying a bunch of stuff like cars, houses and things like that doesn’t actually make them happier at all. They thought it would but it doesn’t actually do that. So they achieved that goal but didn’t have to work for it. They didn’t have to develop themselves. They didn’t have to grow and learn and therefore, just getting that $50 million dollars doesn’t make them any happier. It does nothing to improve their life.

In most cases, more than half, they’re actually much less happy. In fact in the large number of cases they are less happy. So that’s quite different than someone who says I want to make $50 million dollars, I’m going to build a business to do it because then to get the $50 million they have to build a business and learn how to help other people. A successful business has to create something valuable, something that helps people in some way. Maybe it helps people in a small way and you sell it to lots of people or it helps in a big way and you sell it to a few people. Whatever you do you have to find a way to help people, which forces you to grow. You have to learn how to communicate better and persuade people, so you develop communication skills.

You have to develop leadership skills. So much is required and there are so many challenges to achieve that goal, building a business to make $50 million that you’ll become a completely different person when you finally achieve it. Then, if you lose it, you still have all the skills, everything you learned. You still are that new person and that’s why it’s more fulfilling and why it’s actually the process of reaching the goal that’s more important than actually the end of it.

So, a worthy objective, helping people find a worthy objective…

As a leader then it is important to help people find positive worthy goals and the story I just told you about, the lottery winners, this helps you to figure out what a worthy goal is, for yourself and when you’re leading other people. So a worthy goal isn’t the final point you need to look at to decide if it’s worthy or not. Like, is making $50 million dollars a worthy goal? It depends on how you do it. If you make $50 million by killing people and stealing their money that’s not very worthy that’s horrible. If your idea is to make $50 million dollars by winning a lottery or gambling and being lucky, we just talked about that. Again, it’s not going to make you happier at all, it’s not a worthy goal. But, if your goal is to make $50 million dollars by building a business that contributes to people, that helps people and solves people’s problems, than indeed it can be a worthy goal.

So, when you’re helping someone, when you’re in a leadership position, as a parent or in a job situation, any situation and you’re helping someone figure out worthy goals, look more carefully at the process of achieving it. Look very carefully at the why and the way of achieving it, because that’s far more important than whatever the actual final goal is. You have to make sure the goal will encourage and create learning and growth and contribution. That’s what makes the goal worthy. If it doesn’t contribute to those things than it’s not a worthy goal and you need to help them find something that is.

How do you do all this? Let’s talk about some actual action steps. When you’re in a leadership position what should you do?

1. First, you have to start by noticing people’s strengths. You have to observe them carefully.

It means shut up and listen and shut up and watch them. So in the beginning as a leader it’s not about talking it’s about observing carefully and listening, just as Napoleon’s stepmom looked deeply into his eyes and she observed him, she saw something in him. So if you’re in a leadership position with other people, watch them, listen to them, discover their strengths of their personality, their skills, find out what they’re great at. What are they potentially great at?

1. Second, is to talk to them, again, listening mostly and asking questions.

Ask them about their dreams, their passions, their desires and their existing goals. Most importantly, ask why they have those goals. Discover their motivations and then listen and observe. That’s the first part of leadership is understanding the other person, their strengths and their desires.

1. Third, once you discover these things encourage them.

This can be done in a general way and in a directed way. You should really do both. Generally, it means to just help them believe in themselves. Help them to see their own strengths. Help them to trust themselves, to trust their own strengths. You need to build their confidence through genuine praise, sincere compliments and such. Directed is where you help them discover better worthy goals. So first you help them believe and develop that confidence, develop their strengths but then they need to focus those strengths on something, that’s the advantage of a goal. Focus on something that’s challenging, a little difficult, something that will encourage them to improve those strengths and develop those strengths even more, to learn and grow.

That’s where you sit with them and you might give some suggestions. You know, I think you could do this. I think you could accomplish this. Then have a conversation with them, maybe they might agree or disagree, but together you’ll find powerful inspiring worthy goals that they will want to achieve and that will produce growth, learning and contribution. That’s how you help them direct themselves in a positive direction, to move towards something worthy, positive and great that will help them to grow.

So that’s the very simple yet super powerful leadership approach. What are you going to do this month? I have some assignments for you.

Choose one person in your life this month that you’re going to be a leader for.

Study this person, observe them, listen to them and find their strengths. Just one, a spouse, child, friend or co-worker, choose this person and study them for about a week, listening to them and asking questions, etc.

Ask them questions about their dreams, goals, passions and interests. Ask about what they want in life and what inspires and motivates them. Learn everything you can about them, what they’re good at.

Compliment their strengths. Give them one compliment a day. It has to be real don’t make something up that’s not real. It has to be real. You have to see it, something good in them and then just tell them. This is good, you’re really good at this or I like this about you… make it specific. The compliments need to be specific and real.

After a few weeks when their confidence is up, finally, encourage them to choose an inspiring goal, a worthy goal. Help them choose and go after an inspiring worthy goal, something that excites them, maybe scares them a little bit too, motivates them and something that will push them to become greater, to learn, grow and contribute.

These are your assignments for the month. I look forward to hearing about the success of your assignment, so get onto our VIP social site. Get onto my Twitter account and tell me about your experiences this month being a leader, using these techniques.

See you next time. Bye for now.