Who Knew This Guy Was So Cool?

“I want to do good. I want the world to be better because I was here.”

…That’s my favorite quote from this compilation. I hope you enjoy this video as much as I have.

Ben

Subscribe

The Obamas Violate The First 3 Rules Of Selling

Here are two articles that every network marketer and entrepreneur should read and learn from.

Both articles examine last week’s speeches of Barack and Michelle Obama to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and explain why the Obamas failed to persuade the IOC to choose Chicago as the host city for the 2016 Olympic Games.

“OBAMAS VIOLATED THE FIRST THREE RULES OF SELLING” by C. Edmund Wright.

“MICHELLE OBAMA’S OLYMPIC ‘GIMME’ SPEECH” by Joe Gimenez.

LEARN FROM THE ABOVE TWO ARTICLES!
Whether you agree or disagree with the political philosophy of either writer is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that both Wright and Gimenez correctly identify the flaws and ineffectiveness in the Obamas’ speeches and strategy.

As you read these two articles, take notes as to what the two authors point out was wrong with the Obamas’ strategy, and ask yourself if anything pertains to your sales and marketing tools.

If nothing is pertinent, then that’s good!

But if something is pertinent, then make the necessary changes!

Enjoy the articles . . .  learn from them . . . and share them!

Ben

Subscribe

Napoleon Hill Discusses “Think & Grow Rich” – The Mastermind Principle

A Mastermind consists of two or more people who work in perfect harmony for a definite purpose.

It is the principle through which you can accomplish in one year, more than you could accomplish without it in a lifetime, if you depended entirely upon your own efforts for success.

Enjoy, Apply, Share,

Ben

Be sure to bookmark and subscribe now.

Napoleon Hill Talks About His Meeting With The Great Andrew Carnegie

This is very rare footage from the early 1960’s on “Think and Grow Rich”. This is the first of thirteen segments that I will be uploading as they become available.  Check back often for updates.

Be sure to bookmark and subscribe now.

Enjoy, Apply,  Share,

Ben

Napoleon Hill Discusses “The Secret” To “Think & Grow Rich” – Definiteness of Purpose

Be sure to bookmark and subscribe now.

‘The Secret” is based on Andrew Carnegie’s principles, as outlined here by Napoleon Hill in his world-renowned best-seller, “Think And Grow Rich”.

… This is “The Secret behind The Secret.”

Here is how to write your own price-tag on life and attain it:

The greatest power: The power to take possession of your own mind and direct it to whatever ends you may desire… The ONLY thing over which man has complete and unchallengeable right of control and direction.

Whatever your mind feeds upon constantly, it attracts to you consistently.

Be sure to bookmark and subscribe now.

Enjoy, Apply,  Share.

To Your Success,

Ben

Created & Updated My Personal Audio Blog

Hello All,

I hope you are all enjoying your weekend on this sunny Sunday afternoon we are having over here on the  east coast.

I’ll keep it short for today as to I want to get back outside and enjoy whats left of this beautiful day we’re having.

… So, just a quick update for now:

Over  the  past  few months, I’ve been testing several different blog platforms in an attempt to  find the most feature-rich, and user-friendly options available.   In doing so I’ve  ended up with several blog sites.  In an effort not to have  the  exact same content on each of  them,  I recently changed and updated one of them to an AUDIO ONLY blog site.

You can check it out and bookmark  it at: http://AudioBlog.BenjaminKee.com.

Take a listen and let me know what you think by leaving me a comment.

Also, please take the quick survey that I created on the right-hand column of the audio blog and tell me the topics that you would like to hear more about and I’ll do just that …. Create more audio posts discussing exactly what YOU want to learn on.

I hope you find it useful and informative.

Until next time,

Ben

PS.  Now get outside and have some fun! 😉

Starting Your First Garden

Starting my own garden is something that I have been wanting to do for awhile now so this year I “took the  plunge”.  These days it’s just so hard to know what you are really buying and eating when shopping for vegetables and produce at your “local” nation-wide grocery chains.

Our food is absolutely LOADED with tons of toxins, herbicides, pesticides, and steroids, just to name a few, all of which have been shown to lead to huge long-term negative side-affects, illness and disease on a mass scale, both in  animals and human-beings. Not to mention the fact that the majority of the produce available in stores today is genetically engineered, meaning it is void of the vitamins, nutrients and  minerals our body craves and is in desperate need of.

We wonder why America is the fattest and sickest nation in the world…  Of course, the reasons for that are many and I am barely scratching the surface here, but we have to start somewhere.

Research shows that between 1964 and the end of the 1990s, pesticide usage in agriculture doubled from 500 million pounds to over 1 billion.  Since WWII pesticide use has risen 10 fold and crop loss due to pests has doubled. US Agriculture uses 1.2 billion lbs of pesticides each year – that is the equivalent of roughly 5 lbs for every American (If you have children in the  public school system, you will definitely want to watch this short video http://twitclicks.com/2v4c).

Yes, you can buy organic but organics can get a bit expensive, I know. Luckily, there’s a way to grow your own delicious, fresh produce, while having fun, learning and “becoming more self-sufficient” all at the same time: starting  your own organic garden!

Don’t know where to start? It is possible to hire someone to install and maintain a garden for you. But most of us can roll up our sleeves with a surprisingly small amount of effort. Remember, you can start small, even with just a single plant or two. Don’t worry if things aren’t perfect right away.

Organic gardening means you won’t be using synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, but that doesn’t mean your plants are left to fend for themselves. There are an array of tools you can use to bolster plant health and ward off pests. Organic gardening also isn’t just about what you don’t do, it’s also about trying to foster a more holistic, natural ecosystem.

For those interested, here is a link to a great video series by Ed Bruske http://twitclicks.com/6gmg in which he shares all kinds of great tips for starting, maintaining, growing, and harvesting your first garden.

Here are a few pictures to “the beginnings” mine:

Disclosing New Worlds

Literature Review:  A very profound meta-physical perspective on entrepreneurship has been developed by Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus. In their book “Disclosing New Worlds” (1997), they analyse through what human forces our world develops and entrepreneurship is conceptualized as creating “disclosive spaces” and new practices leading to “new ways of life” and thereby allowing us to make sense of our lives.

They are focusing on the transformative force, the change-making agency of the entrepreneur. But they are less interested in analyzing the concrete rational practices but in understanding the force, the mindset, that drives the entrepreneur.

Their approach becomes more clear when we see how they set it in contrast with other approaches to entrepreneurship research for which they chose eminent representatives. First they review Peter Druckers understanding and teachings on entrepreneurship. They assess that he follows a traditional Cartesian model: Practice rests on theory. Hence an entrepreneur has to learn how to find and interpret the symptoms, so he can, just like a medical doctor, use his knowledge in order to implement the adequate practice. This is a very down-to-earth approach where entrepreneurship is understood to be a practice just like building a house. There are techniques one has to learn, e.g. to identify opportunities there are several methods Drucker describes, such as “seeing change and reacting to it”. With this method, fields of opportunity such as the growing market for elderly, or the consequences of rapidly increasing number of women in the work force, can be identified. Subsequently entrepreneurs can come up with businesses such as travel agencies for seniour citizens and designer brands for women business cloths. Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus do not think this comes close to understanding the essence of the transformative creative change caused by entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs don’t necessarily find or identify needs, but are intuitively convinced almost obsessed with the belief in a practice that changes the way of life. One example that they bring forward is music styles. How could anybody foresee the success of the Beatles, or any new music style for that matter, when nobody had ever heard that kind of music.

Next they review the approach of Karl Vesper, who does not attempt to develop a theory of entrepreneurship, but favors the approach of delivering a multitude of cases describing and analyzing the experience of entrepreneurs in order to transmit the entrepreneurial spirit and approach to his readers. Here Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus acknowledge the fact that Vesper identifies a mystery encompassing special circumstances and luck as components of successful entrepreneurship. Many entrepreneurs have a sort of a moment of epiphany when they encounter an opportunity worth their venture. In Spinosas assessment Vesper falls short in analyzing this aspect.

The third wide-spread approach to academic work on entrepreneurship is exemplified by George Gilder. His work describes three elemental virtues of an entrepreneur: giving, humility, and commitment. The first can be paraphrased and is illustrated in an “what you reap is what you sow” approach as described in Senges’ (2007) forth attractor for an entrepreneurial mindset (see below). Gilder’s second virtue – humility – is meant to describe how an entrepreneur is not a high flying megalomaniac who is up in the visionary clouds, but someone who is ready to do the hard work in trenches. Lastly an entrepreneur is 100% committed to his venture’s vision and has an intuitive believe in it. It is Gilder’s take on entrepreneurship Spinosa et al. favour the most.

The problem with all these approaches is that they are work post-hoc. They look at the practices and effects of successful entrepreneurs and then they deduce commonalities. For Spinosa et al. it is much more important to understand the philosophy, or the mindset behind the entrepreneur. It is the “making of history”, the push for a new way of life entrepreneurs are dedicated to, that interests them. They go on to describe how it is not knowledge, but a sensitivity for or to anomalies they find to be the distinct attribute of an entrepreneurial mindset. Entrepreneurs have a skill to reflect upon the world and develop an innovative perspective. And it is this innovative perspective that the entrepreneur pursues with dedication, aiming at the re-configuration of the way of life of his target constituency.

In conclusion they find that the composite entrepreneur they conceptualize has the following important skills: “(1) the entrepreneur innovates by holding on to some anomaly; (2) he brings the anomaly to bear on his task, (3) he is not clear about the relation of the anomaly to the rest of what he does, and once he has a sense of a world in which the anomaly is central, such as the world of work, he embodies, produces, and markets his new understanding; (4) to do this, he preserves and tests his new understanding – for instance, by leading workshops or other kinds of discussions – to see how it fits with the wider experience than his own; (5) […] he must take his new conception and embody it in a way that preserves its sensibleness and the strangeness of the change it produces, seeing to it that he is reconfiguring the way things happen in a particular domain; (6) finally, he focuses on all dimensions of entrepreneurial activity into a styled coordination with each other and brings them into tune with his embodied conception, so that the critical distinction involved in appreciating the product becomes manifest in the company’s way of life.” (Spinosa, et al. 1997, p. 50)

The Entrepreneurial Mindset

An entrepreneurial mindset is described by a conglomerate of meta-physical dispositions, also known as entrepreneurial spirit, meant to cause the innovative and energetic practice to identify or create an opportunity and take action aimed at realizing it. The philosophical themes – existentialism, axiology, pragmatism, ethics – are thereby understood to be strange attractors influencing the construction of the entity’s persona as well as the concrete practices of the entity (Figure 1).

Figure 1:Conceptual Model of Philosophical Components of an Entrepreneurial Mindset (Senges 2007)

Composite Mindset Philosophy

Important for entrepreneurship is the “creative mindset” (Faltin, 2007) that helps entrepreneurs to create new ideas and bring these to the market in a way appropriate to create value for an external audience. Psychological research highlights that true creativity comes not from the kind of area in which one is active but whether one can conceive of something that is both “new and appropriate” (Amabile, 1996). In this way, a entrepreneurial mindset is a philosophy by which individuals engage in creative acts regardless of the type of work they are engaged in. Thus, the entrepreneurial mindset might exist in cooking just as well as web-2 innovating, it is the philosophy and the action it generate that counts – not the context.

This can be contrasted to a “managerial mindset” which deals with creating order and efficiency through controlling, evaluating, and administrating practices (Sarasvathy, Simon and Lave, 1998). An entrepreneurial mindset is distinct from ‘entrepreneurial cognitions’ in that the former signify a philosophy of personal identity and values whereas the latter signify a group of heuristics or decision-making tools that entrepreneurs use to evaluate and exploit business opportunities. An entrepreneurial mindset is also distinct from Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) which is a collective identity in young entrepreneurial firms that fosters innovativeness, pro-activeness and risk-taking among participants in the firm (Lumpkin and Dess, 1996).

The philosophic codification of the mindset of an entrepreneur follows what Durkheim felt to be the achievement of modernity: “The possibility to dynamically differentiate and elaborate values” (Welsch, 1998). Thereby, as is customary in life-philosophy, the creative and initiative aspects meant to create meaning are given central stage in a holistic (or totalitarian) approach. Peter Sloterdijk elaborates on the role of philosophy : “Philosophy is stylizing the human being with the practice of terminological gene-technology (‘begrifflicher gentechnologie’), thereby developing new taxonomies of human existence” (Sloterdijk, 1999). He further explains that philosophy creates meta-physical concepts of human beings and their condition, which serve as archetypical development paradigms when perceived and internalized. One example given by Sloterdijk, is Freud’s creation, or the meta-physical engineering of the Oedipus complex. The proposed philosophical model of an entrepreneurial mindset is meant to contribute such a typology.

Here’s To The “Crazy” Ones

“Here’s to the Crazy Ones! The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas & see a work of art? Or, sit in silence & hear a song that’s never been written? Or, gaze at a red planet & see a laboratory on wheels? We make tools for these kinds of people. While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

– Apple Computers Inc.