Most people are taught to define success by what you HAVE. You HAVE a great job, or a beautiful wife or a lot of money, etc. People who base success on the HAVE often find that they can lose their success just by losing the things by which they define their success.

What you HAVE can always be taken away, lost or stolen, so if you base your sense of success on the external HAVE then you are setting yourself up for a huge crash sooner or later. That's why people commit suicide after a stock market crash and why most lottery winners fall back into the same economic niche when the money runs out.

We've also been indoctrinated to believe that what we DO is who we are. How many people in this culture define themselves by their job? I'm a cop, I'm a teacher, I'm a writer, etc. Once again this is an external reference and not who we really are, and once again all the externals can simply go away, leaving you feeling bereft and out of place.

I think it's also amusing that we ask kids what they want to BE when they grow up and then reference it to what their choices are for the DO category. Then again, maybe it's not so amusing at all.

When we talk about BEing successful, or BEing a good person or BEing intelligent then we are not referencing any external aspect of ourselves, but rather our internal core. When you learn to BE a successful person then it means that you have expanded your context and actually grown into that successful person. It's not something that you get hired into or that you put on and take off like a jacket.

Learning to BE

I remember as a child, watching my parents trying to be involved in Amway and Raleigh and other MLM's. Now these were what I would consider to be good companies with great products, but the problem was that my parents were trying to go from being farmers to being businesspeople without any way to expand their context and cover the steps in between. Like many people who try to buy into MLM's and become instantly successful they failed and then blamed the system and said that MLM is a scam.

Managing a business is like learning to ride a bike. No one ever learned to ride a bike by taking a class, and they never learned to ride a bike without falling off a few times.

The Rules Are Different

One of the problems that we have is that people in Western Culture have been taught that 'you get what you pay for'.

This is just one of the paradigms that you'll find are different for business people. Business people make a POINT of not paying for things in the same way that the average person does, and some of these concepts (you get what you pay for) have been specifically fostered in our consumer society. It's completely subconscious.

I discovered when I first started teaching meditation classes that people took it more seriously when I charged them for it, simply because they subconsciously placed more value on the class if they spent their money on it.

Shifting the Paradigms

To a businessperson it would be unthinkable to PAY for a product and then to try to resell it. Businesspeople set up a NET 30 or (preferably) a NET 90 account (they don't have to pay for the products for 30 days, or 90 days) and then they sell the products first and then pay for them. This is just one of the ways that the business world is exactly opposite from the consumer world.

The ultimate goal is to BE the person who can DO the things that let you HAVE success.