For those of you who are into sports, you all know that the NBA playoff’s are currently in progress. Things are heating up and getting intense as this season comes to an end, yet during the playoff’s, it seems things are finally getting started. Hopefully your team is one of the many that are still in the race for the championship. I know the Phoenix Suns made it and are doing well as they lead the series 2 – 1 over the Trail Blazers.

I absolutely love the playoff’s because of the pure intensity if it. Everybody comes to the court with all their hope and preparation, expecting to be the best. After 48 minutes of play, giving it all they have, knowing that they will be able to look up at the score board as the team who is victorious. A lifetime of practice and a season of competition comes to a head during a few series of games battling an opponent that has done the exact same thing.

It’s not so much the trophy at the end of the championship that matters the most or that they’ll remember for years after it’s over, it’s the victory. And the victory is the culmination of all that it took to get there…..composure, fortitude and determination are a few of the characteristics necessary. Every drop of sweat and blood was a test of willpower and strength along with all the drama and politics floating around the NBA. A victory, I could imagine, would be the season full of effort that paid off in the end.

I think at times we look at NBA athletes and think that they have it made. They’re making millions off of pure talent. They are set for life, just for being born. Sure, talent has a lot to do with it, just about as much as willpower and work does. They made it happen for themselves. They wanted it, so they went out and got it, and the team that shows the best composure and the most intensity during the playoff’s, is usually the one who is crowned champion.

So, we’ll see just how far the Suns go this year. Either way, I’m a die hard fan and with them ’til the end.

And you know what? We all deserve to live our lives as though we are in the playoff’s. The ones who show the most composure and intensity will usually be the ones who are victorious. A lifetime of preparation, sweat and vision has prepared us for today, right here, right now. We can chose to be effected and intimidated by the Kobe Bryants and the Lebron James’ of our future victory, or we can chose to be the Steve Nash, who takes control of the game and does it his way, not theirs.

Life is full of opponents and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Every time I defeat someone or something, I grow. I progress, just as I do when I lose to someone or something. Either way, I win, if I chose to learn from EVERY experience.

Victory is about being able to adjust on the fly and adapt as you go. It’s about seeing an opening and taking it. An opportunity that is missed will never present itself in that way again. It’s now or never and at times, we only have a split second to decide to be proactive, and to take that opportunity.

It’s playoff time for me! It’s time to get intense. It’s time to make things happen…..so watch closely. Things are coming in the near future that will take my team and I to the top.

I once heard a quote that said, “”The object of life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting, ‘Holy #@$*, What a Ride!!!'” — Mavis Leyrer

I intend on being worn the heck out and full of victory as well, and the end isn’t even close. So it’s game time!

Those of you who have visited this blog before will know of my conviction for entrepreneurship. It really is the only way to keep the soul alive and progressing. A life spent fulfilling and building someone’s dreams other than your own, no matter how passionate you are about them, is a life partially fulfilled. Think about it! How many people have you spoken to over the years who have at one point said the famous words, “You know what would be a good idea for a business?” I hear it over and over again, yet, there is no action to follow the idea. They remain in what I like to call, the Employee Rut!

Now in past posts here at CreateFinancialWealth I have really bagged on having a job as if it was the worst punishment anyone could have in this life….and I have to apologize for that. A job has its purpose, and there are some benefits to having one, versus being self employed. It’s a lifestyle choice. Without employees there would be no employers. It’s the circle of commerce and industry. There must be both and at times you might find yourself being one or the other, wishing you were the other, struggling day in and day out to find an opportunity to become such.

Yet, when you get home from work, it’s so easy to eat dinner and just sit down on that couch for a few hours as you plug away on the internet or watch TV. Between spending time with your wife and kids and visiting with friends and family, it’s extremely difficult to find the time your entrepreneurial ideas deserve. So you find yourself attempting to stay up late at night trying to figure things out to get things moving, but you tire yourself so quickly and nearly go into a coma the rest of the week when you attempt to stay up a few more hours.

At this point, the job starts to take priority in your life. It’s much easier just to wake up, go to work, come home and not have to worry about anything until the next day when you start that drill all over again. Life becomes very predictable….with a bi-weekly paycheck and your schedule mapped out, you get on a routine. This routine is so habitual that it becomes nearly impossible to fit anything else around it. You are now 12 inches deep in the mud and are spinning your wheels every time you attempt to get out of the rut you’re in.

This is what I mean by the Employee Rut. Not that it’s a bad thing. Some do prefer and enjoy being in this rut….but it rips the spirit out of others. At times in your life, you may find yourself in this rut, not because you want to be there, but because your past choices have landed you there. Don’t become content with your lot! Get out as soon as you have the opportunity to, or the entrepreneurial spirit within will begin to diminish. Plan to succeed. Act on those ideas you have or someone else will, I promise you that. How many times have your ideas been so called, “Stolen,” by someone who acted instead of speculated about “Good ideas for a business.”

The world is full of people who can fill the ruts on the road to success…..but lacking those who have the fortitude and the ambition to make their way around, through, in and out of these ruts until they reach their destination. If there is a single ounce of entrepreneur in you, join the minority and live a life fulfilling and building your dreams! If you don’t, enjoy what you are doing now…because you’ll probably be doing it for the rest of your life.

Have you ever met a person who worries about everything? No matter where they are or what they’re doing, they’re always worried, concerned, stressed or mad about something. Yet, there are also people who are just the opposite…people who never worry, get concerned, stress and rarely get mad no matter what the situation is. What is it about the people that stress that causes them to stress so often and so much? How can one person, surrounded by chaos, stay calm, content and optimistic while the another lose all control?

Do you all remember the last time you watched Zorro? The Zorro I am speaking of is “The Mask of Zorro” that came out in 1998 with Antonio Banderas, Antony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones. As the movie starts out, Alejandro Murrieta (Antonio Banderas) is an out of control, drunken convict who is consumed by his hatred towards his brothers killer, Captain Harrison Love. As the current Zorro (Anthony Hopkins) observes Alejandro, he shows him how obsessed and reckless he truly is. Even though his passion for revenge fueled him, he had not learned control and would never succeed unless he learned how to control his anger and his surroundings.

He was later introduced to the “Training Circle.” In the words of Anthony Hopkins, “This is called a training circle, a master’s wheel. This circle will be your world, your whole life. Until I tell you otherwise, there is nothing outside of it.” Alejandro’s progress depended directly on how well he could learn to master only the things within his circle. At first, it was a large circle with obstacles, ropes and at times, Zorro in it. “As your skill with the sword improves, you will progress to a smaller circle. With each new circle, your world contracts, bringing you ………..that much closer to retribution.”

As Alejandro improved in his skills, that circle began to shrink and one might begin to think, shouldn’t the circle get bigger as his skill increased. The more skill the more he would be able to handle, right? Wrong! If you are thinking that way, you are missing the entire point. The more skill, the smaller the circle. The more you learn to control only that which is in the circle, the more control you truly have. The less you have in your circle, the better, because you know you have absolute control of whatever enters your circle. The larger the circle, the less control you have as you have more in it.

Zorro’s Circle

So you wonder why so many people walk around stressed out, angry and constantly worried?! It’s because they try too much to control things that are outside their circle of control. All we can do is control our little training circle. For some, that circle is still very large because of lack of skill. As their skill increases, they will learn to stick to their circle of control, and thus, increase in control overall.

Can I control how you react to this article? Can I control whether or not you send me spam comments, talk bad about my site or give me complete praise? No. But what I can control is all that is within my circle. I can control if that spam comment is approved and whether it will upset me or not. I can control how I receive things and whether or not I will allow it to enter into my circle. If I allow it, my circle increases in size and as a result, I loose a bit of control.

As we increase in skill, in mindset, we stop worrying about all the things you have no control over. And as we do, we start dominating the things we do have control over and get really good at maintaining the Godly trait of temperance.

Pick your own battles…better yet, pick the ones you know you can control and win. And the ones you can win are the ones within your own Zorro’s circle. This is the entire secret to self-mastery. Can you control everything within a foot of your being. And yes, this includes the space in between your own ears. If you’re looking to lose weight, can you resist that doughnut or soda and can you discipline, instead of just motivate yourself to take that jog? When it all comes down to it, you allow that doughnut to enter or not enter your circle of control. You allow those thoughts of laziness to enter or not enter your mind, which is the center of the circle.

Self mastery! We are all very good about disallowing annoying or stinky people from entering our so called “bubble.” Yet we allow so much more to enter that is even more damaging and more harmful to our progress and happiness. As we learn to control what we know we can control, we master our circle, and in doing so will find the secret to a long, happy and fulfilling life!

Let’s take a look at the normal anatomy of human beings. We all have a head, arms, legs, feet, toes and the list could go on and on. Every part of the body has it’s own purpose and functionality. The legs carry the body from place to place, the hands grip and pick things up with the help of the arms but when it all comes down to it, the head is what controls the body. If something happens to the head, the other parts won’t function right, if at all.

So what happens if the arm wants to take control and do something different than what the head wants it to do? No matter how hard that arm tries to influence the head, it’s still the head operating the arm. Slap the head too many times and the head doesn’t work right, thus, neither does the arm. Beat the head to death and the arm kills itself in the process. Kill the head….the arm dies along with it. A body without the head, the mind, is nothing but a skin covered bag of bones!

What I mean by the analogy, is during certain periods of my Entrepreneur life I thought I was the head. I thought I was the one in control of the arms and legs of my business. The truth was, I was just the arm trying to turn the head the way I wanted it to go. It doesn’t work that way. An arm is just an arm and is controlled by the head.

My point…..is to always be the head of your enterprise. As long as there is a franchise, an owner, a co-owner or something with equal or more authority than you in your enterprise, you will never be the head. You will never have complete control of your financial future. Because…..say it with me….what effects the head, effects the entire body. We all know that a healthy mind equals a healthy body. It filters down…not up.

Make sure you are the one influencing the arms and the legs of your enterprise, not the one being influenced. If you are to ever achieve success and TRUE independence, you must be the head and only the head. Don’t settle for anything less. But that means that you must stop thinking like the arm or the leg, and start thinking like the head. Once you reach that point, you’ll know….and you be much, much happier and all of this will simply be a reminder.

One of the things that prevents individuals from seeing success in business are the road blocks they encounter right from the beginning, point A, to the end, point B. For those of you who have ever started a business or attempted to start a business, you know that in doing so, every step of the way isn’t sure. There is no detailed list of steps to take numbered 1 – 100. Even a detailed business plan doesn’t really give the action steps you’ll need to take to accomplish your goal. Based on your research, it’s just an educated guess at what the end result could be. From there, it’s up to the entrepreneur to create that detailed list, one step at a time.

The important thing to realize is that entrepreneurs don’t know all the steps to take. In order to make it to point B, all they know how to do is to simply take the NEXT step. As an entrepreneur, you don’t have to know all the steps, you just have to be willing to take the first step…and then continue taking steps from there, one at a time. By taking the steps we can see today, those steps then create new steps which we can take tomorrow. It’s like going up a staircase that turns at a 90 degree angle. At some point, you can’t really see the top of the staircase until turn that corner and start up the stairs. Same concept. By taking one simple step at a time, they’ll eventually add up, and you’ll soon reach the top.

You see, entrepreneurship is the ability to create something out of nothing, to take an idea and create a reality with it. Entrepreneurs are the most creative, action taking people on the planet. All growth depends on the mind of the Entrepreneur. They create jobs. They create opportunity for those who have no idea how to create it for themselves or are scared to do so. So their course is always an uncharted one. There’s no road maps or connect the dots. The only thing that exists is an internal GPS unit embedded in the heart of every Entrepreneur….constantly pointing in the right direction.

It’s not the end result that makes success so rewarding….it’s all it took to get there. It’s the journey. Would the celebration at the end of the race be a celebration if someone else had to carry you the entire way?

The reward is the knowledge that you did this. No one else did it, you did. And you did it your way…..and because you did, you deserve success, because you literally created it!

“Live today as if it’s already tomorrow!” Lately, this is a motto I have come to know well in my life. Basically, if it’s today, yesterday is already gone. You can’t change it, alter it or get it back. What’s done is done…or on the other hand, what’s not done is just a missed opportunity. It’s gone! So seriously, live today as though you will never have today again…and the crazy thing is, you won’t ever have it again. I know….deep right!?

My point is simple. Yesterday, I listened in on a conversation my wife was having, and it was the most motivating conversation I have ever heard. It brought tears to my eyes to sit there and listen to this man pour out a life of regret. He had spent his life striving to live the dream, business venture after business venture. He started out in the Glass Industry. Instead of running his business, his business ran him. His paperwork kept him at the office into the late hours of the night. He rarely saw his family. Then one day, he decided to build a shop behind his house and his daughter said, “Mommy, I’m so happy that Daddy is building his house so close to our house because we can go visit him now.”

He went on to say that the big house, the nice cars, the huge successful business, the glory and the fame just don’t matter. Looking back on his life now, he realizes that he was never there. The words “I wish I would have” rolled off his tongue as he spoke of his children. He wishes he would have been around more when they were little. That’s all that matters to him now, and now he is full of regret. He can never get that time back.

To me, to hear stories like this, is very, very depressing….yet at the same time, extremely motivating! I don’t ever want to say, “I wish I would have.” Ever! I don’t want to be the guy with 20/20 hindsight. I want to be the guy who lives today as if there is no tomorrow…..and so I do. If I have  and idea or a gumption, I act on it. I don’t wait. Waiting is a waste of time and besides, what are you waiting for? A better time? There will never be a better time in the history of YOU, to act on your dreams.

So just don’t. Don’t be the guy that says “I wish I had!” Don’t live a life of regrets. Don’t put off your dreams for anything. And yes, that includes the lack of knowledge on how to achieve your dreams. That’s no excuse. Live a full and fulfilling life. Every moment counts!