Acres of Diamonds January 29, 2007
Posted by The Probabilist in : [Books], Entrepreneurship, Financial Literacy, Commodities, Vision, Wealth, Assets, History , 1 comment so far
Dr. Russell Conwell’s Acres of Diamonds is actually a lecture that he is recorded to have held over 6,000 times. Summing up at 40 pages, this book can also be found as a free e-book at various personal development internet sources.
It starts off with several stories where the main character is ignited with a spark of trying their luck to find wealthy lands filled with resources like gold, diamonds, oil or silver. In every single case, no matter from where this person starts out or where he ends up seeking treasures, he fails miserably. However, the successor who takes over the farm or homestead of the person that sold it all in order to leave and strike it rich, finds loads of the very same form of riches in that particular area of land that was left behind. The moral of these stories is that one should first take a look at what one has, because the acres of diamonds might be there right under our noses.
Continuing on, Conwell expresses his thoughts and responses to the common questions, objections and misconceptions about wealth. Among them he points out that:
While every word in the book is that of wisdom, I discovered something of a minor flaw in the introduced stories. Whenever a person went to seek a fortune and left behind a piece of land that turned out to be filled with riches, the successor that discovered the riches actually did the very same thing! They didn’t stay where they were, they were in the lookout for something better as well. They just happened to strike it rich just as the main characters envisioned for themselves. I don’t believe in hiding facts and exploiting opportunities by scheming, but there were nothing of the sorts involved in these stories. Nevertheless, I say wealth can be created anywhere, but there’s a great deal of experience to be gained if one travels the world a bit as well. AoD is a good read, although I suggest you try find this copy someplace for free.
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Opportunity November 21, 2006
Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Financial Literacy, Goals, Commodities, Vision, Wealth, Assets, Investing , add a comment
How do you find great opportunities? And how is it that some people seem to constantly make great deals while others struggle in a financial swamp to make their ends meet? These are some important questions, but like all big questions there just isn’t one single, eloquent answer that magically makes the red carpet roll in front of your feet for you to walk on. So with this fact in mind I’ll be writing a good amount of articles to help you get closer to answering these great questions.
The reason I started with opportunity is because that’s where it basically always starts. You see an opportunity, analyze and research how much there’s to it, make the decision to try it out, stick to it and make sure it works out as you planned and finally end the process when you see fit and take your gains or losses. Very easy and simple to apply? Not likely.
I’ll give you an example of how I went through this five-step process that started with an opportunity and let you know how much time each step took. But to start it off I want you to look at a picture. This picture shows an opportunity and will require you the effort of looking at it for one whole minute. That’s exactly what I did when I saw it and it ignited me to execute the five-step plan according to what it told me. Click on the following link and soak up all the information you can in 60 seconds.
As you probably noticed, the picture is a bit over two years old as of today, but it doesn’t change the story it tells. To me the picture told to start analyzing and researching if it could hold any merit and what the odds are of it coming true. As a result I spent approximately 50 hours and read about 900,000 words to make myself reach a decision if I wanted to be part of the offer that was presented to me.
The result was that I took my savings and pumped them into this opportunity. I did this in January of 2006 and everything has gone according to plan ever since. However, with an opportunity like this you can see that there’s still 3-5 years left to go and that takes patience. But the good thing about it is that it doesn’t take any effort on my part so I can still use 24 hours of my day to pursue other issues like running this website. In other words, my money is working on this particular opportunity, while my mind is working on other issues that doesn’t take money to bring more money.
So in this case, the opportunity took 60 seconds, the analysis took 50 hours, the choice and technicalities to participate in it took about 60 minutes, following through the plan will take 4-6 years and ending it will again take 60 seconds. That’s quite an impressive diversification of time within the different phases. However, the effort it takes to take part of something like this doesn’t have to be parallell with time allocation in any way, just like in this particular case.
The object of this article is not to convince you to invest in gold. It’s object is to guide you how to make sound decisions when opportunities present themselves. I anticipate the price of gold to go from today’s 626 $/oz to around 1,000 $/oz by Spring of 2007 and I don’t see why it shouldn’t. If you still want to take the same step as I did, then check out the source I’m using to stay in touch with the markets.
As I mentioned earlier, this article is just a fraction of an answer that explains why and how some people behave differently when it comes to the subject of wealth and money. For more information on what kind of articles to expect when it comes to building a sound financial foundation for your future check out the terms I used in the third paragraph of setting goals. On top of those, my index of topics regarding wealth creation currently also involves leverage, procrastination, the correct way to measure wealth, cashflow 101 and several books waiting for reviews. So bookmark this site and the links I provide to constantly improve your awareness of living frugally. 
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