Don’t ask for less problems, ask for more solutions

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Don’t ask for less problems, ask for more solutions

In my twenties, and fresh out of school, I wanted nothing more than to become successful and have the accolade’s that comes with success. However, as I ventured into the business world, I encountered complex problems. They weren’t the same problems I experienced in my college years. These were real life problems that dealt with people and money. I found myself in a ditch. If I was stuck with a problem, no matter how hard I tried, the problem either got worse, or spilt into more problems. The problems were mainly on making money or finding the best ways to make extra money in my business.

Garth Brooks’ famous song, “Friends in Low Places.” Whenever I found myself in that low place, I found others right along side me in the ditch. When you’re surrounded with people in low places, they tend to focus on the same money problems. What you have is a group of people who tend to always focus on the wrong things. The people I associated with were dragging me down and not moving forward. I was buying into my problems and worst yet, I was buying into the problems others were having as well.

“Don’t ask for less problems, ask for more solutions”, said my business mentor. Wise words from a man who truly wanted to see me succeed in life. He taught me the valuable lesson of where to focus my energy. He said, “Most people spend 95% of their time on the problem and only 5% on the solution. What you need to do is spend 95% on the solution and 5% on the problem.” I never had anyone tell it to me like that!

Valuable Life Lessons Learned

I’ve been out of the ditch for over 25 years now. I have taught many others the lessons I learned from my business mentor all those years ago. However, there are still people today that are stuck in the ditch? Why? Many simply enjoy dwelling on the problems instead of finding the solutions. That’s okay, my business mentor taught me. He told me to focus on the people who deserve your attention, and not the people who need it. That little mindset change moved me towards living the lifestyle people long for. To this day, whenever someone comes to me with a problem, they better bring a few solutions with them.

Because of my willingness and desire to succeed and help people in business, I was able to find my business mentor in the network marketing industry. Networking marketing spends too much time talking about how much money you can make and not enough time developing the personal growth process. I’m sure I would have become successful in business, but I never would have known the person I would become as a husband, father, and business leader.

If you don’t take care of the customer, someone else will

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A valuable customer lesson I learned a few years into my first business as an entrepreneur.

I had worked hard on becoming an entrepreneur. The best decision I made to earn extra income was start a business . I began making so much extra money, that I forgot a most important rule. Allow me to share some small business advice that may save you a lot of time and money.

Everyone right now is getting his or her products or services from someone. Why would your target market, switch? Well, because of you. You may have a special product or service, but the reason they switched, is because of you. I had grown my business so fast and so quickly, that I failed to realize why they switched to me. I took my clients for granted. That’s how I got their business in the first place, because I cared. However, I became complacent. Over a period of time, I had lost a few of my large clients. I didn’t understand why that happened, until I met with my mentor.

During our consultation, I explained my frustration. He gave me the simplest explanation, which I will share with you. Have you ever noticed the word sales? It’s plural. Which means more than one. It’s not saleman, salewomen or saleperson. It’s sales, with an s. You have to continually sell your customer on the fact that you are the best person they can receive their products and services from.

The same principle can be applied to your everyday life with your friends, family, kids, and especially your spouse. He went on to say, “I hope you just didn’t make one big sale pitch, put a ring on her finger and think she’s just going to be happy with you for the rest of your life?” After that business advice, I went home to my wife and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

Today still, I continually sell her on the fact that I’m the best guy for her. These home based business ideas can also be applied to the part time income earners. I apply the same business ideas to my clients, and everyone whom I mentor in business. Uber & Lyft, didn’t reinvent the wheel, they just realized what others in their profession forgot. Which is, “If you don’t take care of the customer, someone else will.”

Recommended Reading

1. How to win friends & Influence people – Dale Carnegie

Tumbleweeds and Redwoods: Tumbleweed Mindset or Majestic Redwood Mindset?

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How your mindset determines your outcome

As a kid growing up in Central California, I was always fascinated with tumbleweeds. California and other dry, arid climates produce these large round plants. Like a scene right out of an old western movie, you knew there was trouble brewing when you saw tumbleweeds rolling down a deserted ghost town. Once mature, tumbleweeds dry out because of their shallow, one root system. When the first strong wind comes, the tumbleweed is lifted away, rolling and tumbling around wherever the wind happens to blow it. The Tumbleweed never knows where it will end up for it doesn’t have a strong root system to keep it in place.

Are you easily distracted?

Some people are like tumbleweeds. Without a sense of direction some people can wonder aimlessly throughout life without any sense or direction. A person with a tumbleweed mindset will always start in a one direction only to become distracted and head in another. Without a clear direction, a person can lead others to a graveyard of indecisiveness.  A team may lose sight of its purpose if it’s lead by a leader who lacks vision and direction. A tumbleweed mentality can destroy an entire team and leave behind a trail of destruction. The team begins to lose sight of all the directions it was headed into. Unfortunately today we can see a tumbleweed mentality in just about every area of a person’s life: marriage, family and business.

Do you let adversity get the best of you?

In sharp contrast is the majestic redwood. Redwoods are full of life, however they do not grow without adversity. They tower high into the sky and can grow to over 300 feet in height and live to over 1500 years. One would think that the redwood has a deep root system, however the root system grows less than 12 feet deep.  The roots grow sideways and for every foot the tree grows, it grows 3 feet of roots in a sideways direction. It’s not uncommon to have a 300-foot tall redwood with 900 feet of roots. Though redwoods cannot live alone. Other redwoods must accompany them and this happens when their roots intertwine with each other. This is how a redwood gets its strength. They grow in groves. These redwood groves with their large roots are so intertwined that you cannot tell which redwood’s root system is which.

Redwoods go through adversity; they have scars that have come over time. From wild fires to other natural causes, redwoods stand the test of time. The redwood grove is essential for its survival, so when the first strong wind comes the redwood grove stands strong together.

Strong people who lead organizations with solid leadership have the ability to connect and intertwine with their team members. They set out with a vision and adjust as the vision grows all awhile keeping their focus on the goal.  Highly successful people who have built highly successful organizations, on a solid foundation, leave a legacy long after they are gone.

There are five pillars that must be in place for this type of redwood leadership to be effective.

  • The first is world-class leadership. Leaders have the wisdom and ability to help and develop other leaders.

  • Second, the products and or services must be disruptive to the market place. Being first to market is key to a company’s longevity.

  • Third, a strong organization recognizes timing and uses it to their advantage.

  • Fourth, it is vital for a strong organization to offer generous rewards package, which allows the average team member the ability to earn and climb the ranks in their own organization.

  • Fifth, an organization with that can duplicate itself with a proven system is unstoppable. The finest leaders in the strongest organizations realize that they must have a system that goes from the top leader to the newest team member.

Once a person understands the difference between a tumbleweed mindset and a redwood mindset, it should be simple to begin navigating one’s life in a meaningful direction.

Some Recommended readings are:

  1. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey

  2. Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill

  3. Becoming your Best – Steven R. Shallenberger

Three Feet From Gold

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Napoleon Hill’s classic, Three Feet from Gold, is a lesson on not giving up, instead, adjusting your sails. You have so many like-minded people cheering you on. Never give up—winners don’t quit! We get two to three opportunities in our lifetime so never let anyone stop you from reaching your dreams. You have so much to do and so little time to do it.  Put the naysayers on notice to step aside. You’re going to climb your mountain, and no one will stop you. 

See you at the top. The view is absolutely spectacular!

Sieg Taylor

The most common cause of failure is the habit of quitting.  When one is overtaken by temporary defeat. Every person is guilty of this mistake at one time or another.

An uncle of R. U. Darby was caught up by the gold fever back in the gold-rush days, and went west to DIG AND GROW RICH. He had never heard that more gold has been mined from the brains of men than has ever been taken from the earth. He staked a claim and went to work with pick and shovel. The going was hard, but his lust for gold was definite.

After weeks of labor, he was rewarded by the discovery of the shining ore. He needed machinery to bring the ore to the surface. Quietly, he covered up the mine, retraced his footsteps to his home in Williamsburg, Maryland, told his relatives and a few neighbors of the “strike.” They got together money for the needed machinery, had it shipped. The uncle and Darby went back to work the mine.

The first car of ore was mined, and shipped to a smelter. The returns proved they had one of the richest mines in Colorado! A few more cars of that ore would clear the debts. Then would come the big killing in profits.

Down went the drills!  Up went the hopes of Darby and Uncle!  Then something happened!  The vein of gold ore disappeared!  They had come to the end of the rainbow, and the pot of gold was no longer there! They drilled on, desperately trying to pick up the vein again— all to no avail.

Finally, they decided to QUIT.

They sold the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars, and took the train back home. Some “junk” men are dumb, but not this one! He called in a mining engineer to look at the mine and do a little calculating. The engineer advised that the project had failed because the owners were not familiar with “fault lines.” His calculations showed that the vein would be found just three feet from where the Darbys had stopped drilling! That is exactly where it was found!

The “Junk” man took millions of dollars in ore from the mine, because he knew enough to seek expert counsel before giving up.

Most of the money which went into the machinery was procured through the efforts of R. U. Darby, who was then a very young man. The money came from his relatives and neighbors, because of their faith in him. He paid back every dollar of it, although he was years in doing so.

Long afterward, Mr. Darby recouped his loss many times over, when he made the discovery that desire can be transmuted into gold. The discovery came after he went into the business of selling life insurance.

Remembering that he lost a huge fortune, because he stopped three feet from gold, Darby profited by the experience in his chosen work, by the simple method of saying to himself, “I stopped three feet from gold, but I will never stop because men say ‘no’ when I ask them to buy insurance.”

Darby is one of a small group of fewer than fifty men who sell more than a million dollars in life insurance annually. He owes his stickability to the lesson he learned from his quit-ability in the gold mining business.

Before success comes in any man’s life, he is sure to meet with temporary defeat, and, perhaps some failure. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what the majority of men do. More than five hundred of the most successful men known in this country, told the author their greatest success came from just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them. Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one when success is almost within reach.

You Are What You Eat. Sort Of. Understanding Nutrient Bioavailability

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You Are What You Eat

You probably learned in grade school that good nutrition is best!  The nutrients from food is released and absorbed into the bloodstream.  They then make their way to the various organs and tissues that need them. Do you know that not every nutrient is absorbed by the body and totally used up? This is nutrient bioavailability. So while nutrient availability may be high in a specific food or vitamin supplement, it may not have bioavailability.

Why Does Bioavailability Matter?

Nutrient bioavailability is particularly important because of its significant impact on cellular metabolism, which is the process that takes place in a cell and is necessary for the maintenance of life. It’s how cells grow, repair damage, and adapt to changes in the environment. Bone cells, brain cells, and liver cells all have different functions, but they all have one thing in common: They need the right nutrients to perform efficiently.

Factors Affecting Bioavailability

There are a numbers of factors that effect nutrient bioavailability. Digestion is a complex series of actions, and small complications early in the process can snowball into bigger issues later on. It also can vary widely from person to person. Two people can consume the same nutrients in the same form, but their bodies will wind up absorbing and utilizing different amounts of it.

Your overall health, the particular ratio of enzymes present in your body, and even seemingly insignificant things like how thoroughly you chew your food can affect the efficiency of your digestive system. This, of course, impacts the bioavailability of nutrients in the food you eat, which can further affect things like organ function and enzyme production. This can alter your digestive system efficiency, which again influences nutrient bioavailability, and on and on in true cyclical fashion.

Other factors that impact nutrient bioavailability include:

  • Age — This is one of the primary factors, as a person’s nutritional needs can vary throughout their lifetime.

  • Digestive disorders — Conditions such as Crohn’s, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), chronic heartburn, and celiac disease can seriously undercut the body’s ability to absorb and use nutrients properly.

  • Interactive nutrients — Some nutrients are supportive nutrients, meaning that when they are consumed together, they support one another’s bioavailability. One such example is magnesium, calcium, and vitamin D. On the other hand, some nutrient combinations impede each other, and negatively affect the other’s absorption.

The Problem with Traditional Supplements

Some conventional supplements and multivitamins use binders, fillers, and various additives that make the nutrients difficult for the body to absorb them. They can also be degraded by saliva, stomach acid, and other digestive fluids, which results in only a small percentage of the nutrients getting where they’re supposed to go.

Vasayo utilizes naturally structured, non-GMO liposomes to combat the challenges of nutrient absorption. Liposomes are spheres of lipids, or fats, that Vasayo uses to encapsulate and help protect the nutrient, ensuring that it reaches its intended destination. Their composition helps them to pass through the harsh environment of the digestive tract intact. As a result, nutrient absorption and utilization rates are improved.*

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Vasayo products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

The content herein is provided for general information purposes only.  It should not be a substitute to any medical advice from a health professional. It should also not substitute any diagnosis or treatment. Persons with health concerns or who are taking medications should consult with their healthcare provider prior to using Vasayo products. Vasayo products are not intended for persons under 18, pregnant or nursing women.