Jim Rohn was known as ‘America’s Foremost Business Philospher’. Unfortunately he passed on in late 2009, but he has left one hell of a legacy for all to tap into.

I was about 19 years old when I started my first business. I sold my car and bought the biggest Transit van you could buy and started moving bands about to gigs and also moved tech equipment during the day. Little did I know though, when listening to a tape given to me by some sales guys that I had met, that Jim Rohn would have such a profound influence on my future.

The guy on the tape, which I was listening to in said van, said something that to this day I have not been able to shift out of the back of my mind.

“Be employed and earn a living, be the employer and earn a fortune”

I only found out about 8 months ago that that man was Jim Rohn…

Now to follow just that mantra is a little bit uncouth, but when you are 19 that is all that you care about.. Money, chicks and good times. It was that short term philosophy that ended up being the downfall of my original one man megacorporation.

A better philosophy to live by, or guideline should I say is something else that Jim said…

“You Don’t Get Paid for the Hour, You Get Paid for the Value You Bring to the Hour”

He had a knack of making things so simple! To increase your means, you can’t increase the amount of hours in a day or week, but you can increase/augment/improve the person that works those hours.

And here is my challenge to you, which goes against the average philosophy of the modern adult. Always be looking to increase your value. I mentioned yesterday about how Donald Trump rebuilt his property empire from scratch, he could only do that because he was valuable. He had cultivated the knowledge of how to do it, which you don’t get from watching 4 hours of TV a day.

Always be looking to move out of your comfort zone and stretch yourself too. The bigger a person you become, the bigger an income you can command, or as I prefer to see it, the more people you can help. If you think that your education stopped when you left school, you are stifling your true potential to achieve anything that you want. If you want to be a business owner you are going to need to change that.

So nicely put, by Mark Twain…

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”

What that illustrates to me is the disconnect from traditional schooling and the eternal quest for understanding; for betterment of one’s self.

Once you get past the ‘sales’ and ‘product’ speil in the business arena and really look into what entrepreneurship is all about, you soon find out that the real name of the game is becoming a better entrepreneur, which more-often-than-not means becoming a better person in general too. It is your respective community that will be the pool that will permit you to succeed, but in return you need to bring value to the table, something that is useful to them that they can use… And bring it time and time again. That’s how you succeed. You bring more value to the table and to the hours that you work.

So if you haven’t begun your quest yet… And a quest it is. Always aim to become a bigger and better version of you and focus on what it is that you can do to help others. There is no succeed or fail, there is only progress.