Is work still necessary?

I have a confession to make – several confessions in fact.

I have at times been stupid enough to believe that work is not necessary to make money or achieve success.

A few years ago I joined a network marketing company that promised to create a down line of buying customers for me without any work on my part. I would of course have to pay a monthly fee myself. I was happy to do this.

However, after more than a year, no down line had appeared and the company was not doing well. Nothing had happened as promised even though they seemed to be lovely people who meant well.

Reluctantly I ended my membership. I was not alone in losing all the money I had spent on this enterprise. I also paid for health products which ended up being poured down the plug hole.

In the last 5 years I have wasted at least £30,000 ($ 50,000) on companies that promised they could easily double any money invested in them. One of the companies turned out to be fraudulent.

I could have found this out if I had done enough work to check them out. They were already listed as suspicious by the financial authorities.

Later I found out that over 800 people in the UK had been conned in the same way as me. I was not alone in my laziness and gullibility.

I also lent £2000 to a retired stockbroker in England who promptly lost the lot investing in the website malls of an internet entrepreneur based in Jerusalem. This man promised much but did not deliver.

The man who borrowed the money from me and several others felt no obligation to pay me back.

I did not pursue the matter because he was old and a heavy smoker. Again I should have done the work necessary to check out the Jerusalem entrepreneur. So should the stockbroker and the others who trusted the stockbroker’s judgement

It is easier to trust people without doing the work necessary to find out the details. It is easier to listen to their big promises rather than read the small print.

How did I and they come to believe that we could make money without doing any work even the tiny amount of work necessary to check out the people we were trusting with our money?

Many humans, including me, are naturally lazy. We prefer to trust people rather than find out the facts for ourselves.

Being lazy we like to believe that money can be made easily by taking the advice of experts. We don’t realise that it takes work to find out who the experts are. We also need to realise that experts can be wrong especially when they are not personally involved.

How many expert doctors give the wrong diagnosis. A doctor once told me I was making a fuss when I complained about the pain in my foot.

I later discovered that I had gangrene in my foot. I nearly lost my leg and my life. He was an expert but he was not the one feeling the pain!

How many financial experts lose money for us. It is not their money which is at risk.

We might do much better by becoming an expert ourselves. This could well save us time and money in the long run. We are the ones who are really concerned about our interests.

It has been said that an hour’s work a day for six months can make a person of average intelligence into an expert at most things. In other words regular work or study can make us experts or can, at least, make us competent.

Many people give up before they become competent because they cannot face being incompetent in the early parts of their studies. But if they continue to work and do not give up they will gradually become competent and eventually expert.

Sometimes, in our quest for expertise, it might be useful to travel to hear an expert face to face. Travelling is work unless you love trains and planes and the lazy person will not make the effort to travel.

I have, surprisingly, made the effort to travel to several seminars to hear motivational and entrepreneurial experts like Tony Robbins, Randy Gage, Stuart Goldsmith, Jonathan Mizel, Corey Rudl, Marlon Sanders and Dave O’Connor.

I also have travelled to learn from several great Martial artists like Grandmaster Kwang Jo Choi, Danny Inosanto and Gary Spiers.

But I have not done the follow up work necessary to make the most of the entrepreneurial seminars.

Again, I am not alone in this. 95% of seminar attendees fail to follow up and apply what they learn at seminars. They think that attendance at the seminar is enough. It isn’t.

I have boxes full of seminar materials that I have not even opened let alone read. Again I am not alone in this. About 95% of people do the same as me.

One study has shown that only 14 out of a hundred people in a civilised Western country buy books and out of these 14 only 1 person reads beyond the first chapter.. Trovare clienti