Making Your First Million.pdf - Association of Net Entrepreneurs and ...

Making Your First Million
meeting in Annerley I was to hear something I needed at that stage of my growth. A
heavily pregnant woman, Jane from Canberra spoke: "There's a lot of nonsense spoken
about life. If you cut to the chase, there's love and there's fear and one drives out the
other. Love is forgiveness, patience, acceptance, tolerance, compassion, having a sense of
humor, and not taking yourself too seriously. Fear is judgement, manipulation, blaming,
trying to control outcomes, resentment, hostility, self-pity and keeping score. You
choose. You let someone get up your nose they end up living rent-free in your head."
Now that's in your face, but it's what I needed to hear. It put the whole intangible side of
life, stuff that I'd avoided as soft and wussy, down into hard bite-size chunks. Simple.
Understandable. Relevant.
We need to focus on love because without it we shrivel and die. Not the Mills & Boon
kind or the Anne of Green Gables kind, but the tough kind, the real kind that says: "I'm
here for you. I'll go out of my way to help you get well, but you pick up a drink and you
pick up the consequences of the drink." The kind of love that sends Fred Hollows out into
the desert with a hostile department cutting his budget saying: "Stuff the glory. I'm doing
it for Lyle and Selma and Darcy and Shirl and the people at Goodooga and Toomelah."
The kind of love that puts a tiny peasant woman in harm's way in Calcutta saying:
"People die one at a time. We rescue them one at a time. Each one has a name."
Love gives us a name and fear a number. Fear categorizes. Love liberates. All of my life I
had viewed people through the abacus of "What's in it for me?" If they had no tangible
value to me I dismissed them. Today I am discovering that we get what we give. If I give
cynicism and superiority, the mirror of life returns it to me. If I give kindness and
compassion it comes back to me. Before my wall of self-preservation was broken these
ideas were alien. They were sissy, girly concepts, not fit for red-blooded carnivores. But I
was changing.
My drinking and hard-nosed, profit-driven, business style had alienated me from people.
My caustic marriage had driven people away and I was lonely. Sure, I was a financial
success, but that's all I had. I was desperately unhappy. Half-hearted attempts at a normal
social life were met with shocked surprise from those I approached. I had painted myself
into a corner and the only friend I had was my drinking buddy, Bernie. When I got sober
and surrendered, I discovered the world is full of people only too happy to be your friend.
The wall I had built around myself had simply driven them away.
I discovered the remarkable truth: You get what you give away. If you give out cynicism,
aloofness, conceit, superiority, bragging and trying to build yourself up by putting others
down, that comes back to you. Drive a Lamborghini and you send the message of
personal insecurity, driving others away, not as we may suspect from envy, but from an
unwillingness to engage with a person who is sending the clear message: "Keep away.
Injured stray." The shallower and lonelier our life, the more we advertise it through
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