Tag Archives: success

The Generation Gap and the Church

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That is a huge and growing Generation Gap in the United States.  They have been talking about this at church recently.  About how there is a “Missing” Generation in the churches of America.  How people from 19 years old until 35 are vastly underrepresented.  I am in that group, and I agree, we are vastly underrepresented.

A Quick Warning: This blog entry will be about averages and the groups as a whole, there will always be exceptions to every case but generally the following is true.  I deal with the general public all of the time and I have had friends of many different ages.  I will use the way a church operates during this entry to show the differences.   Watch this video to see facts about the world you may not know.  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8]

The older generation simply does a poor job of relating to our generation.  There are some fundamental ways that we think differently, and these differences get in the way often.

Interactive vs Broadcast

To me the most profound difference is the way that we interact with other people and with the world.  For most of those over the age of 35 the world was mostly a broadcast world.  People made TV Shows, made newspapers, books, and gave sermons, and you sat there and watched or listened.  You appreciated what was going on and that was it.

But the mindset of the people under the age of 35 is an interactive one.  We grew up with video games and soon after computers.  We decided what we would watch, what we would listen to, and when.  We want the world to work together.  In corporate America this has created the power of teams, almost every successful business puts people in my generation in teams, and empowers those teams to make some decisions.  This is why the most successful show on tv is American Idol, we want to vote to see who stays on.  We have YouTube and Video On Demand, so we can watch anything we want on out time table.

The successful church must realize that for people in this generation the Sermon is just the introduction to the conversation, and they must make ways for the conversation to go on and to get the input When they don’t we simply feel frustrated.  Our generation is very tech savvy so even if they brought the conversation online afterward it would much better than the way it is cut off now.   The older generation is done, and ready to move on.  The successful churches introduce the topic and start the discussion online days before the sermon on the pastors blog, and comments are posted and replied to, so when the sermon comes on sunday my generation is excited to go and see it to see if what we said made a difference, it makes us hunger for it and we are sure to attend. I am talking about much more than just saying Amen here and there.  Actually that looks kinda fake to us.  I often feel like a pastor is up there trying to answer all of the questions that he thinks that the audience may have but never bothers to ask them what their questions are.

Values

On Tuesday night on ABC they have a show called “What would you do”, it is basically a hidden camera show where they set up situations to test peoples ethics.  On the show they said that one of my generations main values is the Value of Tolerance.   Our generation is very diverse, and people often express their thoughts by how they dress.  I really don’t think that the older generations gets that we really don’t care that much on how you dress.  We will take how you look and make some preconceived notions but if your actions are different we quickly can change that.  Who cares how you look, it is about who you are.  I think that much of this comes from the fact that successful people in our generation come with all sorts of different looks and different backgrounds.  I basically will treat you the same if you wear a suit, or if you wear torn shorts and a old raged shirt as long as you act the same.  I think that much of this also comes from the fact that we carry on most of our relationships online or on the phone.  I have people I have talked to for hundreds of hours over a period of more than 5 years, who I have done business with, who I joke with and have tried to inspire and build a relationship, but whom I have NEVER met in person and never even seen a photo.  I think that concept is totally foreign to people in older generations.

Another main value of my generation is Truth.  Being real, being authentic.  I think that we are much harder to offend than people of older generations.  We want to get to the point, to get real.  The point where it starts to get good for us is well past the point where older people get offended.  One thing I find very lame in church is that pastors stop way too early, they stop before they get to the meat, or the truth because if they do keep going on someone may get offended and walk away, but in doing this they look weak to our generation, unwilling to be authentic for fear of what others may think.  Remember that our generation is the generation of tolerance, and because of that we are hard to offend, plus we have seen it all and heard it all on TV and on our computers.  For us it is about community, we know that no church is perfect, and no church leader is perfect, and that it is OK to have opinions that are different than the leaders.  Older people want to find the church leader that thinks exactly like them, and for this reason the leaders usually are reluctant to take a stand, this keeps the older generation from leaving but it looks completely fake to my generation and turns us off.

One huge value of older folks is that of Authority.  But to us we know that the world has become interactive, and that for many decades we have been betrayed by authority giving false information, and because of this we doubt everything.  For the boomers you just tell them that something is true and they run with it, but we research it, we have Goggle at our fingertips and we use it, 23 Billions times a month on average.   We know that big companies can have no web site at all and we know that a guy running a business in his underwear in his dining room can have an impressive and huge website.  We know that some crazy person can edit Wikipedia and change the information you are reading.  We also know that an unknown with a good idea can publish it and have a million readers in a few days.  For most of us there is no ultimate authority or truth, it is just millions of interpretations of truth.  This is the very reason that it so very hard for the church to reach us.  First there is only a broadcast, no conversation, and when they broadcast they tell us what is their truth, but their truth is different from what others have said and they do little to prove their truth.  They read something out of the bible to people who may not truly believe the bible is truth, they have heard so much that discredits it.  Again this is why a conversation works much better than a broadcast.

Another value of our generation is that of Equality and fairness.  Most of us believe that everyone should have an equal chance at success, that we should all have a say in things.  We all want a turn to share what we know, we want to be empowered.  In business school there were a lot of good lessons, and one that stuck with me the most is delegation.  First if you are a leader you need to delegate as much as you can, you cast the purpose and vision of the company and then delegate to smart people who have bought into that vision and give them the power and freedom to do what it takes to make you successful and the results will always be more than you ever thought it could be.  If we don’t know the WHY to a task, and how our efforts fit into the big picture than we feel like what we do is not so important so we just don’t do it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODQ4WiDsEBQ]  Another virtue of our generation, and one that has caused some of the largest generation conflicts is the Ubuntu concept.  People in my generation see the world as one huge mass of humanity.  We should be helpful to others, we should share with others, we should build a community of caring, trust and unselfishness.  An African word has been used for many decades to express this concept, that word is Ubuntu.  Recently a group of programmers took this concept and named their operating system after it, because they built their entire OS on this concept of community.   They call the OS Ubuntu, in a few short years it is already better than windows, and as more things work with it it is gaining market share, recently passing the Mac OS as the second most used OS, and I think that it will overtake Windows as the most popular OS in the world in the next decade.   People in my generation make stuff so that it can be useful to others, and we don’t care if they use those things, and for the same reason we don’t ask if we can use what you made, we download your music, and your movies and use them however we see fit.  An open society is in direct conflict with the current system of copyrights.  Some smart companies are releasing their content to the web, and letting people change it and build on it, making those companies totally hip and cool.  While other go after and sue people who do the exact same thing, GM recently after people liked one of their commercials so much that it was posted on youtube and 3 million people viewed it, then they sued to take it down, are they that dumb.  (Well I did see their stock price recently so I guess that is my answer.)

We are used to information on demand.  I can access more information from my desk in 20 minutes than what would take a whole day in the library of congress just 20 years ago.  We are a generation that is flooded with information and rich content, but at the same time we yearn for a real human connection.  We don’t just want to sit in a lecture but we want to be part of the conversation and push it forward.

Final Thoughts

There is a verse in the bible that goes “Teach a child in the way he should go and he will not depart.”  By the time someone turns 21 they have formed 95% of their habits, and generally decided where their life is going.  For 100’s of years church was the center of society, but in the 1960’s it started to fade, there was a leadership crisis and for the first time the population as a whole doubted if we would be involved in a war.  Until the 1950’s most expression was banned, and by the 1960’s it was unleashed, and there was a new culture that was raised up, one without God at the center.  The people who were teens during this time did not go to church much and did not make it important to their kids.  The concept of church lost critical mass, it was very uncool to go to church.  Almost everyone that I know under the age of 35 is in church because they grew up in church, very few found church later on.  Now we have millions of “Unchurched” in our generation, many have never been to church or when they did they felt like they went to a lecture, they made no connection, they felt like they had no say in anything so they just never went back, and they took that opinion with them.

To reach these people is a very hard task now, because they feel that they are doing fine now, and that they don’t need God.  Many churches express God like a Magic Gene who solves all of your problems.  My current church is not like this but many churches I have visited basically have the same theme over and over, “Life is hard, life is tough, the world is unfair and against you and you need to make God part of your life so he can fix it.”  I hate it when I hear people say this.  To my generation life is awesome and great, we have more at our finger tips now than even existed for our parents, we are generally happy with out lot in life.  The message that would work for us is this “God can be your best friend, he will help you when you need it and celebrate with you when you do good, he has great plans for your future, full of hope and success.  The better you follow His advice the closer you will get to His vision for you life.  Join us and you will have an entire community at your side working to make God will happen in your life.”  Too bad few churches today are preaching this.  I love how we say in our church “Success to you and Success to the kingdom of God”  Because that is really what it is all about, lining up our definition of success with that of what will create success in the kingdom and then going for it.

The church that successfully reaches my generation will be the one that speaks the truth holding nothing back, allows us to participate in the conversation, allows us to discover what is truth, and allows us to all work together to build a community, getting rid of the idea of leaders and followers.

The best MLM for me, and why

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I finally did it, after about 3 months of research, investigating, going to meetings and trying to figure out what I wanted I finally selected the BEST MLM that I could find.

I have been in many MLM / network marketing companies, I have been to hundreds of meetings over the last 15 years, I have built teams, I have sold products, I have marketed many things but this is the first time that I stood back, and researched the pros and cons of different MLM concepts. You may remember back in April I wrote a series of blogs about the idea of a MLM. You can read them HERE, HERE, and HERE. I never wrote the last two in the series because I was still doing my research. In the process I actually joined 4 other MLM companies even before I was sold on them and all of them did not pan out. But now I finally found the best MLM company I have ever seen, more on that later.

So what makes this company better than anything else I have ever seen. There are so many reasons why. Read these reasons and compair them to any MLM that you are looking at.

Well first it is a product that EVERYONE can use, it is easy to understand, and everyone has a need for it. It also is something that you can easily prove, too many MLM promote a product that you just have to have faith that it works. (Most nutritional companies.) But for me the MOST important reason I think that this is the best MLM is because it is a great value, cheaper than normal way of doing things, and the reward of using this product is measurable and instant. You can sign up and start making money the same day, and with only three sales you are already in the black, in MOST MLM companies it is very hard to become profitable, in this it is easy. There is no other company doing anything even close to what they are doing. They are old enough to have their act together but not too young to be saturated. They are in a multi-billion dollar industry and with a radical new way of doing things will take huge market share from the two companies that have over 80% of the market share. Another thing I really love, is that everyone who hears about this product says something like “Of course that is a better way to do it, sign me up.”

If you are in a MLM now, or are thinking of joining one read that list and objectively think about how the company you are with stands up to all of these things.

The name of the company is something you probably never heard before. It is Send Out Cards. What they do is print and mail physical greeting cards that you select, customize and order online. It is a great business tool, allowing you to follow up and keep in contact with all of your co-workers, customers and business contacts. It is also a great personal tool, helping you make the people around you feel good. If you would like to try it out right now I have set up a special offer for all of my blog readers, you can CLICK HERE and you will receive a free account where you can send out two cards to anyone you like, you can play with all the features and see how it works.

Even if you are already busy building your own business you need to look at Send Out Cards as a marketing tool for that business. What would happen if you were able to follow up with EVERY prospect 2-3 times? What would happen if you sent a thank you note to each of the top 20% of your customers, how much extra business would they bring in. Think about it, try out a demo now.

I hope this blog shows some light on your journey to success. If you are looking for the best network marketing company around this one may be for you, it may not.

The truth about the MLM business concept

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This is a business blog, and to million of Americans the face of business is a MLM. Over 100 million Americans have been in a MLM during some part of their life, and no business blog would be complete if it did not address this issue. So I will write a series on this subject.

I am sort of an expert in this area. I have been in many MLMs myself, I have had great success with some and failure with most. I have researched the MLM concept from every angle because at one time I was thinking of starting my own MLM. I have known the owners of different MLMs and I have seem many different ideas.

So what is my take on all of this. In short, my take is that the MLM idea is a way for average people to get into business and have the chance for success fairly quickly, but there are many pitfalls to avoid. A good MLM will provide training, have a good system, have a good product and pay well. This sounds easy but in reality MOST MLM companies that I have seen do not meet these four simply requirements.

The reason that the MLM idea is so powerful is because of a few different things. First most MLMs have a system in place, so it is easy to get involved and easy to get started, and you can do this part time. You put as little or as much effort into it as you like. Next the system is usually designed that anyone can do it, with even a little education you can be successful. The next strength of the MLM concept is that you can start it with very few resources. Most businesses that you start cost thousands to start but a MLM can cost under $100 to buy in and usually under $1000 to get everything set up. Next you usually have a team of people supporting you, trying to make you successful. Next you can bring on other people and duplicate your self and your income. They can be helping you make money at the same time that you are making money.

Now the MLM idea also has some weaknesses. One weakness is tied to the power, and that it the idea of being able to do it part time from home. With a job you must work the hours that you are told to work, but with a MLM you can choose, and most people (Honestly) are lazy and when they are their own boss they choose to do very little. The most successful people I know in MLM companies treat it like a job, they work 40+ hours a week at it and MOST of them rent an office so it feels like a real job. The idea of success from home is mostly a myth, it is much easier having a separate place and time to work, or else the work often does not happen. Another weakness is that many MLMs take most of the money that you earn and give it away to pay the whole system, so if you are a super star sales person you may not do as well. Another major weakness is that you really don’t control your business, the MLM company sets rules on what you can and can not do, and they have the right to make changes to the system they can change the prices of the products or even the rates in the pay plan. They also usually will set rules limiting your marketing, your website, and even your business cards. Also in many MLM companies you can get caught up focusing your time on many things very loosely related to making money, you will attend countless meetings, where you usually hear the same things over and over, leaving you little time to actually grow your business. This is helpful at first but later this can be very bad.

There are a few good MLMs out there please read the next articles on how to find them. In future articles in this series I will address the following topics, once the articles are posted these will become links:

Choose Your 5 Faves Wisely, it will change your life.

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I have heard for years, before T|Mobile even existed, that the 5 (Adult) people that you spend the most time with will shape your life.  You will become like them in most every way.  The amount of money that you earn will be near the average of these people, your ethics will be similar to the ones they have, your hobbies will start to match them and in many ways you will reflect these people in your life.

For me I have two people who I spend a lot of time with at this time, my wife and my business partner.  But beyond that the people are always changing.  And this is the key, when I decide who to spend time with I am REALLY deciding who I want to be.  Do I want to be like my friend who is a great speaker, a multi-millionaire, great to his family and a great all around guy….well of course I do.  Do I really want to be like the people who don’t care, who just do the minimum in life, and have bad things in their life……well no I don’t.   My problem in my life, I hate to admit, is that many times I spend time with the second type of person.  I don’t really know why I do this, it is not in line with my goals but yet I find myself in this position.  Maybe it is because when I am with them I am the one who knows everything, I am the one who is in charge.  When I am with successful people it often points out my flaws and challenges me, logically this is what I want but often emotionally it is hard to handle after a while.  For a few years there I strayed off course.  I seem to have done this a few times in my life.  I imagine where I would be if I did better, if I was bold enough to do everything that I imagine.

So how does this relate to business, well your personal development is the KEY to your success in life and therefore your success in business.  You choose who are your 5 Faves, and that choice determines you whole life.  Choose wisely.

The key to commercial success for Linux

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You use a computer, and read blogs so you probably know a bit about computer and you probably know about Linux. Linux is great, robust and free OS. It runs almost all web servers and websites. Including google, wordpress and billions of others. Linux is very secure, robust, fast and hack proof. It makes great servers because servers are ran by experts. Without Linux the web would not exist as we know it.

Well for over a decade now they have been trying to make it popular for your desktop computer that you use every day as well. One of the best parts about Linux is that anyone with knowledge is free to change and customize it exactly how they see fit, and they have. Almost everything in Linux has at least 3 different programs that do the same thing, but they do it in different ways. People then pick and choose the different parts of Linux and combine them into a complete Operating System. They call this a distribution or distro. There are now 100’s of up to date distros, all with different ways of doing things and different followings. This has helped Linux in the past but in the world of mass merchandising it also has hurt Linux.

The problem is that when a company writes software to work on Linux they must assume things about how the computer is set up. Because there are 100’s of different ways to do this, and only a few million Linux users, they simply don’t bother. Companies that make drivers and hardware also don’t bother. The Linux people thus have to do all of it themselves. And, if they do it for one distro of Linux it probably will not work on many others. So the game makers, and the people who make the huge programs we need to function usually don’t bother making a Linux version. There is no Photoshop, QuickBooks, MSN or Yahoo chat with webcam, or robust video editing software in Linux because these are very complex and would usually be distro specific, and the userbase does not justify the cost.

The strength of Microsoft Windows was the fact that it was closed and controlled. People could not change the OS, all the rules from computer to computer were exactly the same. Because of this people could code for just ONE OS, that they knew would be supported and work for at least a decade. This is exactly what they did, 1000’s of companies started writing. Hardware makers could design one driver to work with the OS and everything was easy, because it was a standard platform, that was predictable. Windows was not the coolest, and it sure was not the most secure or robust, and they charged a huge price for it, but all of this was worth it because it was STANDARD. Nothing is more important than something being standard when it comes to business, and all the geeks need to learn this. McDonalds does not made the best burgers, but I have ate them in 5 different nations and they are all the same. When it is the same it is predictable, and you need that to get investors and make money flow. This is the main reason the Linux world still has less than 1% of desktop computers.

So now what? Well in a dream world someone with great power and clout would take all the best parts of Linux, get a ton of people behind him and release the ultimate distro of Linux. He would promise to not change it for at least 6 months and also promise that anything written for it will work for years on the newer versions. By creating a standard and unifying the Linux world programmers would start making software work on Linux and soon it would gain marketshare. It will be better and be free than windows, and soon takeover the world from the grasp of Microsoft.

Someone else, a tech billionaire named Mark Shuttleworth thought EXACTLY the same way, and he used his power and clout to do it. He calls it Ubuntu. He only release every 6 months, and he has static versions that are supported for two years or more. He then went much farther, he made a community around it. They have great free tech support with forums and chat. As well has many other great features and designs.  My good friend Matthew Helmke is one of the leading Ubuntu experts and forum leaders and inspired me to try it out.

This OS has the chance to become huge. For over a year now Linux has been the top distro, and it growing faster than the rest of the Linux world put together. The standard it presents has already encouraged many companies to start writing software for Linux. Many large games are not tested on Ubuntu. If you use Linux, switch to Ubuntu, for the sake of the Linux world. Raising a unified standard is the only hope that Linux has at commercial success.

I hope this explanation of a very tech thing from a business perspective educated both the techs and the business people who usually don’t understand each other.

I will offer much more of this sort of knowledge in the future so be sure to subscribe to this blog!.

Jason Dragon.

Try Try and Try Again until you get success.

Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, , , , , ,

I am always reminded of people who failed many times in their life, they lost money, houses and much more so that they could follow their passion. They would come up with new ideas and each seemed good but people were just not ready, or the implementation would not be correct and idea after idea would fail.  But they would keep trying, and one day an idea would hit and overnight they would become millionaires.

Nemo SpinnerI heard the story of one such inventor/ entrepreneur last night. He did everything from crazy submarines, to hovercraft to kids toys.  Then all of a sudden one of his toys hit, and made him millions overnight, and the money still comes in.  He invented the toy that has strings with lights on the and it spins.

I know that it does not happen to everyone, but almost every person that I have talked to who never gave up finally hit success at some point.  They would learn from their mistakes, improve on their ideas and keep going.  Each time it would get better until they hit the breakthrough and are successful.  Most of the successful people I talk to have that same story.  The only people who REALLY fail are the ones who give up and stop trying.

What's the Big Idea

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There is a show that is on every weeknight on CNBC, it is called the Big Idea with Donny Deutsch.  If you have not seen this show and you are at all interested in being an Entrepreneur then you are really missing out.  This show is full of concepts and ideas about how to successful, how to start your business and how to make that business successful.  Look for it.

People with Millions

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Well I have been doing some reading and some of it mentioned stats about millionaires.  This has been something that I have been thinking a lot about, simply because I will soon be a millionaire, in fact it seems quite easy when you follow the steps.

There are only 9.5 million millionaires in the world. (In Dollars) To put that in perspective that is 3 millionaires for every 2000 people on this planet.  These millionaires are worth a total of $37.2 trillion dollars.  That is an average of    1.9 million of these folks are in the United States.  That means that in the US 2 people out of every 300 are millionaires.  Half of all millionaires in the US are retired.

Only 1% of millionaires are worth over $30 million, but of these super millionaires 65% of them are in the United States.  Millionaires are rare, but for the people who really want to be a millionaire it is something that can be done with ease.  You simply need a millionaire mindset, the drive and focus to achieve it then the idea that will make you your money.

95% of the people in the US do not have a millionaire mindset, and will never become one unless they win the lottery or something like that.  The other 5% know what to do, but most of them will never be able to do it because they can not harness the drive or focus because life gets in the way.

It seems that the easiest way to become a self made millionaire is to think of a system, that is easy to reproduce, and allows you to get small amounts of money from many people.  The most common way to do this is to sell a product or service, making a small amount of money from many people.  The same thing applies to people who sell books, or sports players who make their money from the team when they sell tickets and products. The system is your distribution system, you have to make the system in such a way that you can be removed from the system and it still works.  Once you have a system that works without you then you can grow it bigger, as long as you are part of the system, you will always hold the system back, because you have limited time and energy.

For me I have ideas for a few such systems, the only thing is the money required to launch these ideas, so until I have enough I work hard at making the systems not need money, or using my personal efforts to make money to fund these systems some day.

Many others become millionaires by being super executives at huge companies, or by investing the small sums they had in real estate or stocks.  These methods so account for many millionaires also but not everyone can be a high level executive, and many people don’t have the ability to save and invest, this is why making a system is the easiest way.

Because I have the millionaire mindset I am always aware when I meet millionaires, and for them being as rare as they are, they seem to be everywhere.  Many of my best customers are millionaires, many people I know and find interesting are millionaires.  Of the 100 people I have spent the most time with in the last 3 months at least 15 of them are millionaires.  When I am in Asia, I am often surrounded by the top .01% of society.

Any thoughts, then please reply.   Forward this on if you know someone else who may like it.