Zack, Miri, the P-Word and the Laws of Success

The “p-word” is Porno and Zack and Miri, life long friends decided to make one. Busted and broke, Zack thinks it would be an easy to make a porno and make money. Miri thinks that if it were easy, everyone would do it. Zack raises the money, finds a studio, writes the script and together they select the cast. They are on a roll and ending their financial problems does seem easy, but before they shoot a scene, they lose their studio, props and investment. Miri was right…not so easy. This movie was not a tale of persistence or success, they never do make their porno and the best we can figure out is that they never do change their financial situation. Friends, Zack and Miri, do fall in love, but nothing else changes.

Their experience is true for so many who seek positive financial change in their lives, assume the change will be easy and rush, headlong, into disappointment.

Not everyone that I talk to about getting started in a home-based business gets started. In fact most don’t. I have learned over the years, that when a prospective business partner says no to me, what they are really saying is that there must be an easier way to make money. There must be an easier way to make money than sales, there must be an easier way to make money than marketing, there must be an easier way to make money than saving and investing, there must be an easier way to make money than taking classes at night to improve skills. There must be an easier way. Period.

As Zack and Miri found and most wealth seekers find: There isn’t. Faced with the harsh reality that there isn’t an easier way, wealth seekers either quit seeking wealth or they vow to acquire the necessary skill sets to gain and retain wealth. Few people choose the latter. The majority, never quite letting go of the misplaced belief that there must be an easier way, drift aimlessly from project to project, opportunity to opportunity becoming increasingly disillusioned with each failure.

Unfortunately few people ever make and complete the journey of wealth creation. According to the Tax Foundation’s July report of individual income tax data, ten percent of American households make over $100,000 per year. In their book, The Millionaire Next Door, Stanley and Danko indicate that the average household income of millionaires is $247,000.

When Stanley and Danko wrote their book, they focused on millionaires because they thought that many American households could attain that level of wealth within a single lifetime. “About 95 percent of millionaires in America have a net worth of between $1million and $10 million. Much of the discussion in this book centers on this segment of the population. Why focus on this group? Because this level of wealth can be attained in one generation. It can be attained by many Americans.”

Why do some succeed while others ultimately fail?

People who seek and ultimately gain wealth gain different skill sets from those who don’t. Napoleon Hill places Specialized Knowledge among the 15 required assets to create wealth in his book, Think and Grow Rich. How long does it take to acquire Specialized Knowledge or a new, useable, skill set? 1000 hours, according to Michael Masterson in his book, Automatic Wealth. That is roughly 2 years at 10 hours a week for the person who has a full-time job and is seeking to change his or her financial picture. So one must either gain Specialized Knowledge or align himself with one who has it. Every other success strategy or characteristic outlined in Napoleon Hill’s Books requires work to attain or practice. Desire, Self-Control, Autosuggestion, Faith and a Definite Aim, require daily practice. Forming a Mastermind group does not require daily practice, but it does require a commitment to that group, and it often does require rearrangements within social networks. That is changing the people you hang out with.

The Success Strategies are also known as Laws of Success. They are so called because they cannot be negotiated with, they simply are.

The irony is that without any knowledge of the Laws of Success, Zack and Miri employed them. They had a Definite Aim: to change their financial picture. Their living situation reinforced that aim daily. Their group of actors and camera-men became their Mastermind Group and their group became self-reinforcing facilitating Faith, Autosuggestion and Specialized Knowledge. Zack initially had Persistence and Imagination to overcome the setback of losing their equipment, set and props. But lost Self-Control and Persistence when he realized he loved Miri. Without knowing the Laws of Success, he used the Laws of Success. Without knowing the Laws of Success, he broke them. Breaking the Laws of Success will undo the plans of success as Zack discovered, because he never did achieve his Definite Aim: to change his financial picture.

The truth is that whether we acknowledge them or not, we live in a world governed by Laws, Rules and Regulations. Many of which we use without acknowledgement and many of which we break in ignorance. We take for granted that we can leave our home without floating away because gravity allows us to walk down the street. We understand that what goes up, must come down and that our best hope is to control the nature of the landing.

Such are the Laws of Success. They exist and they work no matter our state of awareness.