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Thank you very much. I appreciate the welcome and
it's nice to come by and have a chance to visit with you.
Claude and I do go back a few years.
It's nice to be invited back. I did 3 lectures here last year
and it says something to be invited back.
Maybe it doesn't say everything, but it says something.
Maybe it says let's give him one more chance, see if he can pull
it out this time. It's nice to see all of you.
How many of you? This is the first time you've
seen me? Can I see your hands?
OK? Most of you, some of you I
recognize, have been back a few times the last few years that
I've been coming to Phoenix. But I appreciate being invited
to come and spend some time with you.
I just got back from Australia, my 9th lecture tour of
Australia, and I got to see the America's Cup in Perth.
Unfortunately it's in Perth, but in 1987 we're going to go back
and get it right. But life's been good to me and
after being single ten years, last year at the Crystal
Cathedral in Garden Grove, CA, I got married, got somebody now to
share the rest of my life with. So what a fascinating journey
for me and now to have the opportunity to be invited to
come by and share some of my thoughts with you and see if I
can't invest some of my ideas in in your better future.
And then if I meet you a year from now, 10 years from now, you
might say the day you came by and talked to us was a, a good
day for me. It gave me some ideas to try.
And so that's what I'd like to do in the next few minutes.
And the time we've got is to give you what I think are some
major things that can help in putting your life together, some
things at least to consider. I don't have all the answers on
how to do well, but I've got some I'm using and I'm
practicing and it's working well for me.
So let me just share with you my experience and then you can
decide if it's valid for you. Give it a try.
If it doesn't make sense, just throw it out, right?
You don't have to buy everything any one person says.
Here's the key. Be a student, not a follower.
Somebody says I read this book,
should I follow? And the answer is no.
Read at least two books and make up your own mind, right?
Don't be a follower, be a student.
Be independent. Take advice, but not orders.
Only give yourself orders. Make sure what you finally do is
the product of your own conclusion.
That's what universities for, to debate all the ideas, not just
to buy them all. Debate them all and then decide
what's best for you. Where to go from there.
But university is a great place to hear an exchange of ideas on
a wide variety of major life topics, and that's what it's all
about. Taking the time to go through
it. Now, what I'd like to give you
is what I think are the five major pieces to the life puzzle,
Five major pieces to the life puzzle.
If we can study each of the pieces and then put it all
together, the chances of it running well are just a lot
better. Mr. Schoof gave me a simple
formula when I first met him and let me give it to you.
He said there's usually about a half dozen things makes 80% of
the difference. I thought that was a good
formula. I've applied that to a lot of
things. There's usually about a half
dozen things makes 80% of the difference.
There's about a half dozen wealth things, about a half
dozen health things that can give you the 80% solution to the
problem. Then Mr. Schuff said, be a
student of those half dozen basic things.
Pretty good advice. Success is not doing
extraordinary things. Success is doing ordinary things
extraordinarily well. So if you just learn to do it
well, key things well, learn to speak well.
Poor people can talk and rich people can talk.
Looks like rich people talk better.
It's just learning a skill with a high degree of of precision.
Learning to speak is called survival.
Learning to speak well is called success.
So we can speak well enough to survive, or we can speak the
extra well enough to succeed. So let me give you what I think
are fundamental pieces to life and we'll take it from there.
Here's the first one, philosophy.
Pretty well known word on the university campus philosophy.
Philosophy in very simple terms is simply what you know and what
you know greatly effects how your life works out.
We might also add what you don't know greatly effects how your
life works out. The idea you miss could be the
missing number in trying to put the numbers in the lock.
So what you don't know will hurt you to correct an old cliche and
to correct another one. Ignorance is not bliss, right?
It's important to know. It's important to get the
information. Now we do something very
important with what we know. We weigh it.
That's another good word we weigh.
In our leadership series, we teach aspiring entrepreneurs.
Weigh everything before you do it, before you buy it, before
you try it, make sure you weigh it.
Everything you get ready to do, you get to decide whether it's a
major or a minor. And you don't want to give minor
things major time. You don't want to give something
insignificant significant amounts of your energy.
So we simply use the phrase way before you pay.
Sophisticated people learn to weigh everything.
And what we all need is a good set of mental scales to weigh
everything. What if you got information and
your mental scales were off and insignificant things to you were
significant? Wouldn't that be a major
handicap the rest of your life when you weighed something
important, things weighed unimportant.
We would call that a great handicap.
So it's very important to weigh everything properly.
And that's the reason for sermons and songs and lyrics and
lectures and seminars and, and conversations and professors and
teachers. It's one of the reasons why we
converse. We converse with each other and
we debate and we think about and we ponder and we perceive and we
we weigh and, and we try to find out where the values are because
you don't want to proceed and give big chunks of your life to
something that's insignificant. OK, so we get information, we
weigh it, then we come to conclusions.
These are just some keywords, conclusions about values.
Big question in forming your life, where are the values?
What is important, what should weigh heavy on my mind and I
should give it significant time and significant energy and
significant money. OK, so all of this stuff, this
is our thinking process, Chuff said To me, poor thinking habits
keeps most people poor, not poor working habits.
Most people work hard, but they don't think hard.
They don't use their mind to really try to perceive where the
values are so that they don't waste any time.
It's easy to spend big chunks of your life on insignificant
things unless you can weigh it better.
Our mind. So all of this stuff is called
major. It's one of the major pieces of
the life puzzle. What you think about knowledge,
how you weigh it, the conclusions you come to, the
values you've perceived thinking.
If you really want to help somebody change their life, you
have to start changing their mind, change their philosophy,
change how they think. Somebody said, well, just
motivation. That'll do it.
And the answer's no, motivation won't do it.
If a guy's an idiot, then you motivate him.
You've got a motivated idiot. Say no, that that's not what it
takes. Now, it's very easy to make
errors in judgement. Errors in judgement.
I'm now the teaching people even out, even after they're out of
school, university, college, they should read at least one or
two books a week. It's easy when you get out of
school, right and get a job to just sort of let that all slide,
not keep up the learning process.
But if you don't keep up the learning process, a lot of
values become fuzzy. If you don't keep trying to
perceive what's important, what's not important, and then
start spending major effort on minor things.
So we have to keep learning. What if a guy spent his book
money on doughnuts, right? We would call him greatly
deprived mentally. In 10 years, the guy's bought 2
tons of doughnuts and only two books, right?
Mostly with pictures, right? And he wonders why his life
isn't working well, reason. After he got out of school, he
didn't keep up the flow of ideas that can help to refine your
business and help to refine your decisions and help you come to
better conclusions. You've got to keep up the
learning curve even after you're out of school to make sure that
you're not making errors in judgement.
The reason why most people wind up average at age 40 instead of
rich is simply an error in judgement about what to do with
your money. What would you suggest a 15 year
old start as a plan to do with their money so that by 40
they're rich instead of average? You've got to have a good plan,
right? If you start making errors early
with your money, those errors can can make your life mediocre
instead of rich. You wind up with pennies instead
of fortune and you want you wind up with crumbs instead of a
feast simply because early you made errors on what to do with
your money. The guy says well it's only
$10.00 So what does it matter what I do with it?
And the answer is it it that's when it really matters, is when
you don't have much. The guy says, oh, if I had a
fortune, I'd really take good care of it.
But I've only got a paycheck, so I don't know where it goes.
We call those great errors in judgement.
It's so important to make sure you've got a good plan when the
amounts are small. But it's easy to make errors.
It's easy not to know. It's easy to miscalculate.
And if you miscalculate some things, keep adding and adding
and adding. I got a good phrase for you.
Life is accumulative. Good phrase to know life is
accumulative. Our errors either accumulate
into what we don't get, or our wise decisions accumulate into
what we do get. Now the key is to correct the
errors as early as possible. Fortunately, Mr. Shoff caught me
at age 25, started asking me major questions at age 25, he
said, Mr. Owen, how long have you been working?
And I said I've been working six years.
I started working when I was 19, right, Full time job, he said.
Well, six years. How much money have you saved
and invested in the last six years?
I said not any, he said. Who sold you on that plan?
Wow. Six years is is enough time now
to check and see if you've got a good financial philosophy.
And the time to catch the airs is early.
Early. So Mr. Schoof started asking me
those tough questions at age 25. How about your money?
How about your resources? How about your investments?
And you say, well, I I've got plenty of time to worry about
that. I'd be concerned about that
later. And the answer is probably not.
Now's the time to fix it. Wherever you hear the good
information, that's the time to start fixing it.
So we're teaching kids now. A good wealth philosophy
starting at age 5015 will make you wealthy by age 4045 at the
latest. If you're a little slow, start
doing wise things with your resources.
When? When would you suggest people
should do wise things with their resources?
Answer as soon as they get the better information.
Now, you can't do what you don't know, but the key is to keep
learning so that good ideas keep occurring to you.
Now you can do more wise things. OK, but philosophy is where it
all begins. What you know now to know wise
things, you simply have to study as you're doing.
Keep up the reading, keep up the conversations, keep up the
listening to lectures. Keep going through the
information, keep stashing it away, taking the notes, right?
There's no better way to adjust your philosophy than to have a
continual flow of ideas. But that's the first piece of
the life puzzle. Philosophy.
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