Wisdom of Rich Dad

Second part of Rick Sloboda’s “13 Reasons of Why Most Business Fail”

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4. Being afraid to lose

Failure inspires winners, and failure defeats losers, wrote Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki. He noted: “The greatest secret of winners is that failure inspires winning; thus, they’re not afraid of losing.” Kiyosaki explained there’s a big difference between hating losing and being afraid to lose. “The main reason over 90 per cent of the American public struggles financially is because they play not to lose,” he stated. “They don’t play to win.”

5. Fear of being judged

The fear of being judged, looking stupid, being wrong, failing or taking blame lurks just beneath the surface in the clever disguise of caution, claims marketing innovator Kay Allison, founder of Energy Infuser. And when you can’t put the full force of your enthusiasm and passion behind a new idea, she suggests that idea will be dead on arrival. “One thing I’ve learned is that whatever I focus on grows,” offered Kay. “So if I focus on the anxiety that gnaws in my belly, it gets so big that it’s paralyzing. On the other hand, if I focus on what my next appropriate action should be, it gets me into motion.”

6. Ignoring your gut instinct

Writer Malcolm Gladwell stated in his national best seller, Blink: “…if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.” He went on to say, “We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that — sometimes — we’re better off that way.”

7. “I can do it all” syndrome

If you don’t focus on your strengths and hire others to take care of the rest, you’re in trouble, says Mark Wardell, business author and Founder of Wardell Professional Development. “To be good at business does not mean you have to be good at everything,” he stated, suggesting business owners need to place more value on time. “When you invest your money, you expect it to return a profit,” explained Wardell. “Your time works the same way. When you invest rather than spend your time, its value increases dramatically.”

8. Pointing fingers

When you point a finger at someone, warns NFL coach Herm Edwards, three fingers always point back at you. “When you’re involved in something that fails or in something in which a mistake is made, more often than not, you’re to blame, too,” he wrote. “It’s just easier to blame the other guy, and this is a device that most people can see right through.” Before assigning blame, Edwards says it’s always best to ask yourself what you could have done differently yourself that might have avoided the error or mistake in the first place.

Rick Sloboda, Senior Web Copywriter at webcopyplus.com

For any business — online or not — the odds are stacked against success. In fact, sources indicate as many as nine out of 10 businesses fail within five years.

Having the fortune to work with a host of successful businesses — from independent designers to global service providers – you start to recognize winning characteristics.

But what are the treacherous traits that are responsible for the demise of most businesses? Based on an accumulation of notes over the years, following are answers by some of the most renowned business experts of our times.

1. Undefined values

Entrepreneurs need to define their values, which guide all decision making, insists iconic motivational speaker Tony Robbins. If you know what you value most and truly want out of life — be it love, health, success, freedom, power, or comfort – Robbins noted you’ll find you can make more effective and rapid decisions. He added: “Your beliefs determine whether or not you feel like you’re meeting your values – they can either limit or liberate you.” Where do you start? Ask yourself this question: “What’s most important to me in my life?”

2. Business plans don’t target a market

The biggest mistake most companies make when writing a business plan is not having a target audience in mind, suggests Michael Miller, author of 75 non-fiction books. Ultimately, he said these businesses end up creating something generic, without a purpose or defined goal. “Looking at it another way,” noted Miller, “if you don’t know who your audience is, you really don’t know why you’re creating a plan — and a plan with no purpose is a plan for failure.”

3. Just dabbling

Learn every detail of your core business because the market only pays excellent rewards for excellent performance, stresses motivational speaker and self-help author Brian Tracy. In contrast, below average performance pays below average rewards, failure and frustration. His advice: “Read all the magazines in your field. Read and study the latest books. Attend the courses and seminars given by experts in your field. Join your trade association, attend every meeting and get involved with the other top people in your field.”

REAL ESTATE guru and best-selling author Robert Kiyosaki who wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad came to Israel ostensibly to promote his new book We Want You to Be Rich, written with Donald Trump, another real estate maven, who is currently investing in Israel.

But what Kiyosaki was really here for was to promote the concept of educating school children towards financial independence. It was Kiyosaki’s first visit to Israel, and one that as a former US pilot who served in Vietnam, he had eagerly anticipated because, he said, “Israel has the best pilots.”

While in Israel, Kiyosaki sat down with local youngsters to play CASHFLOW, an educational board game he invented and developed to teach players the concept of investing.

Kiyosaki is very gung-ho on education, possibly because his father was head of the Education Department in Hawaii. But his father, despite his position and degrees from Stanford and Northwestern, was not a rich man – something that rankles Kiyosaki to this day. He sincerely believes that people would be much more affluent and financially independent if they were educated towards financial and investment savvy.

Kiyosaki proved his dedication to education by donating all his speaker’s fees in Israel to two educational projects – Hinuch LePsagot (Summit Education) and Kav Hazinuk (Starting Line). Both focus on youth with high potential from low socio-economic backgrounds and give them educational opportunities that they might otherwise be denied. Several young people in Israel will owe their future education to Kiyosaki.

~By Robert Kiyosaki 

In 1969, I graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and was offered two jobs. I took the job paying $47,000 a year and turned down one paying $75,000 a year because it required me to join a labor union.

I’m not against labor unions. I am against being obsolete due to obsolete ideas. As entrepreneurs, we need to stop looking at employees from an Industrial Age point of view.

In the Industrial Age, employees were rewarded for things like seniority. In the Information Age, seniority is death via obsolescence. In the Industrial Age, a senior employee had more experience. In the Information Age, experience can be a liability.

So the challenges facing today’s entrepreneurs are: How do you attract, retain and motivate technologically savvy, cutting-edge employees? How do you keep wages and benefits in line with shrinking profit margins? How do you inspire employees to develop new products or services? How do you keep good employees from moving to other companies?

I do it by working more collaboratively with younger employees. I ask them to challenge my ideas–as well as their own. For example, the other day I mentioned to a group of younger managers that e-mail was obsolete. They said I didn’t know what I was talking about. One called me an “old man.”

And what they said was true. The fact is, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m so obsolete that I don’t have an e-mail address. All I know is that e-mail will be obsolete, just as labor unions are obsolete and the idea of seniority is obsolete. I was challenging younger employees to predict their future by predicting their own obsolescence.

By taking the conversation into the future, it brings two generations together: old guys like me and the young leaders of tomorrow. By forecasting the future, I can share my experiences as they share theirs. When they tell me about using Skype to make long distance phone calls, I see the future for Industrial Age phone companies.

One of the things I’m doing is hiring younger, more tech-savvy team members and putting them on a quasi-board to advise my company about the future. This doesn’t mean I follow all their recommendations; it simply means that I need to listen to them and take appropriate action. I also listen with the intent of detecting core values and desires. On the flip side, I’m promoting older tech workers and asking them to be interpreters of the future.

Leadership is about vision. One way to see the future is to see today as the past. In the Information Age, nothing is more dangerous than a person who doesn’t know his ideas are obsolete.