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Hi and it’s been a while since I posted and that’s mainly because I’ve been pretty
tied up in the launch of the new book that I co-authored and a charitable project that’s
going on around that. By the way, in case you think that behind me there is a very long
Doberman, cause I can see his leg at the one side and head on the other, it’s actually
two Dobermans. We haven’t got a 9 foot long Doberman, so I just thought I’d save you
the concern of that. So yes, it’s been a while, and I’ve been doing other stuff,
but I wanted to share something with you today, something that cropped up last week. We’re
trying to give away a million copies of this and we are doing that by selling the book
on our website, ninety percent of all the money then goes into producing free books
that we then give away to good causes. And you wouldn’t believe this, or maybe you
would, maybe you would, but something that took me by surprise was a fact that it’s
actually bee easier to sell the book than as giving them away. When we’ve approached
charities we’ve got a lot of people just not interested, a lot of people not returning
phone calls, not returning e-mails, telling us it was a stupid idea and so on and so forth.
I think something or part of that may be the title: “How to be rich and happy” that
throws people, thinking it might be get-rich-quick scheme, probably get rich quick for us. Well
it’s not, it’s not about making money, it’s about understanding what makes you
personally feel rich, what’s the definition of success is to you and that’s gonna give
you happiness, you know, but that’s sad point. The point is we kept coming up after
road block, after road block, after road block and the fact is that if you have any huge
goals you’re gonna get road blocks. You know, success is rarely a smooth upward curve.
You take two steps forward, you take one step back. you take three steps forward you take
four steps back, whatever it is it doesn’t matter, it’s like that or whatever. I got
a little bit, sort of down on it. And then I don’t know what happened to snap me out
of this self-imposed misery. But I just thought, quite frankly, if you are under the age of
eighteen, you know, you may want to turn the volume down, I just thought: *** it. Basically
what I did was I hit the phones and I thought I’m gonna keep going until people say yes,
and a lot of people have said that yes. So really all I wanted to say today is this post
was triggered by watching a brilliant video by a lady by the name of Roz Savage who singlehandedly
rode across the Atlantic Ocean and she’s now in the process. I think she may have already
done it now, I’m not sure, but she was in a process rowing across the Pacific. And this
is not some super huge athlete this is a lady, a petite lady from the UK and she just decided
she wanted to do it. And I am very much encouraging you to go and watch her thought that she gave
at Ted.com. So if you search Roz Savage, Ted you’ll find the talk. Incredibly inspirational,
starts off a little bit slowly but well worth of the trouble of getting through the first
couple of minutes to the really good stuff. And really the point of this is just to say
if you’ve got any goals and they’re really worthwhile you’re gonna hit stumbling blocks.
And at that point think about what Churchill said sixty years ago, or whenever it was,
Never, never, never give up! Because if a goal is so important to you then it’s important
kicking through all that stuff because that’s the thing that’s gonna make you worthwhile
when you look back on this in five, ten, twenty, fifty years time, or whatever. Thanks a lot.