Motivation

” The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who never know neither victory or defeat.”

Theodore Rosevelt

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By John David Mann

On January 24, 1848, a young carpenter named James Marshall discovered a bit of shiny yellow metal in Coloma, a sleepy little town in the center of what was about to become the state of California. Within a year some 300,000 men, women and children had poured into the territory in hopes of striking it rich. Only a tiny percentage did so (Marshall himself was forced off his land and died penniless), but the dream endured.

According to Texas A&M professor H.W. Brands, in his fascinating book The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream, the “California Dream” spread to the rest of the country and in time became the essence of the American Dream.

But that isn’t how things started. The original American Dream, says Brands, “was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s [Almanack] … of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year.”

While George Washington is revered as the “father of his country,” it’s Franklin who is most closely identified with the roots of the modern American character, a sober mix of practical values—thrift, hard work, self-discipline and a devotion to education—with an Enlightenment zeal for scientific innovation and categorical opposition to authoritarian rule.

All traits that have a mighty familiar ring to network marketers. And yet we too have our version of Gold Rush impulse.

This is the internal conflict bred into the American experience, and it is woven through the DNA of the network marketing dream. Franklin versus Marshall; hard work and a frugal appreciation of modest gains, versus the dream of instant wealth won by boldness, pluck and timing.

But wealth, as it turns out, is a highly malleable thing.

Read the full article here...

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We’ve talked a lot lately about expanding consciousness.  And a great deal about prosperity.  So let’s put the two together and explore expanding your prosperity consciousness.

If you want the perfect birthday present, maybe you should buy it for yourself.  What’s the most amount of money you would spend on yourself for something you “want,” but don’t “need”?

Read Randy's blog post here...

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